Electricity deters antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections - <AUTHOR> https://newatlas.com/electricity-wound-dressing-bacterial-biofilms/59754/ <comment><USER2> I wonder how similar this is to a Rife machine. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Rife](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Rife)</comment>


Berkeley Protesters Built a Human Wall to Violently Stop White Students - <AUTHOR> http://reason.com/blog/2016/10/26/video-uc-berkeley-protesters-built-a-hum <comment><USER2> Pick a handful and let them know that there presence isn't desired at the university anymore if they can't respect their fellow students. They have every right to peacefully assemble less so to bar other students from freely moving around the campus.

</comment><comment> angry-hacker Seriously Americans, you are all crazy. On one side you have people who think Earth is 6000 years old and on another this. Unbelievable.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow. Do they really not see the irony of a sign like "Spaces of Color?" The country had those at one point.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's one thing if a handful of students go overboard and start doing silly things. But ultimately it's a reflection on the administration if they allow flagrantly abusive antics like these to carry on for much longer.

</comment><comment><USER5> Beyond un-acceptable!! I'm a person of color, and this behavior from some of the smartest students to walk the earth is disappointing to say the least.

Where's the police when you need them?

<comment><USER6> What makes you say these students are intelligent?

<comment><USER5> The assumption that Berkeley students are smart makes me say that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This sort of nonsense should get you summarily expelled.

</comment><comment><USER8> So would a white LGBT student be allowed to cross?

</comment><comment><USER9> reason.com isn't necessarily the kind of source I'd trust.</comment>


Saving lives for seven cents each (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://www.jefftk.com/p/saving-lives-for-seven-cents-each <comment><USER2> > _But if we really could save children 's lives for 7¢ then why would we > consider anything else on Unicef's list?_

In general, diminishing returns. As an intervention is being funded and makes an impact, eventually getting additional impact on the margin is more and more expensive. As a general rule, you should always fund the most cost-effective intervention - which means funding each intervention up to the point it stops being the most cost-effective one, and then switching to new-best thing.

</comment><comment><USER3> > _The "a little money goes a ridiculously long way" meme needs to stop._

I think people tend to jump straight to debating _whether_ we should pursue charity by cost-effectiveness. That seems unproductive to me unless people have some idea what those costs _actually are_. Advertising like this seriously undermines any hope of that.

We could imagine, and UNICEF might argue, that these ads just motivate people to give money and don't set their expectations long-term. But when this is actually surveyed[1], we find that the median person thinks you can save a life for <$50. That's concerning on two levels. First, it means any charity that honestly advertises how much it spends to help people will look _terrible_. Second, the worrying question of what people would do if they knew the real number. Would people slash their donations if they thought the money would go 1% as far? Increase them to do equal good? Or is the amount we give to charity just not meaningfully correlated with how much it helps?

I wish charities in general would stop doing this sort of advertising. But I _especially_ wish the most reputable charities would stop. UNICEF and the Red Cross are highly trusted sources for journalists and the public alike, so it's particularly alarming when they publicize claims like 7¢ to "save" a child, or "up to" 3 lives saved per blood donation[2].

[1] [https://80000hours.org/2017/05/most-people-report- believing-...](https://80000hours.org/2017/05/most-people-report-believing- its-incredibly-cheap-to-save-lives-in-the-developing-world/)

[2] This stat is common, but extremely dubious. Beyond the obvious "up to" trick, the best case number still appears to be <1\. [https://medicalsciences.stackexchange.com/questions/1289/how...](https://medicalsciences.stackexchange.com/questions/1289/how- many-lives-are-saved-from-one-donation-of-blood)

</comment><comment> J-dawg > _But if we really could save children 's lives for 7¢ then why would we > consider anything else on Unicef's list?_

I've always taken issue with this type of campaigning, and it makes me want to actively avoid any charity that uses it.

In addition to the author's comment quoted above, it implies there's a long line of children, and they're just waiting for another 7 cent donation so they can vaccinate the next kid.

This is clearly not true, and if it were true, it would make many of the other activities of large charities morally repugnant. How could anyone justify renting offices in major cities, and employing executives on 6-figure salaries, when that money could pay for millions of 7 cent vaccinations?

Obviously, it's a lot more complicated than that. But the fact that the charity is willing to lie to me so easily makes me wonder what else they are lying about.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think we can save lives if we stop spending them

</comment><comment><USER5> > But if we really could save children's lives for 7¢ then why would we > consider anything else on Unicef's list? Spending $17 to for a vaccination > to "keep a kid safe from 6 killer diseases" would mean letting over two > hundred other children die!

This seems like silly thinking. I don't think anyone would reasonably believe they put all the money they receive into powder packets. Every $1 you give them will immediately save 14 lives!

They're just saying that's one thing they do with the money, a part of their budget. You should be more concerned with what a given charity's administrative overhead is. How much of that $1 goes towards the $0.07 packets, and how much pays the administrators.

<comment><USER6> > You should be more concerned with what a given charity's administrative > overhead is.

If charity1 has a 20% overhead and then spends the rest on saving the life of a child for every 1000$, while charity2 has a 40% overhead but saves a child for every remaining 500$ spent, which one is better? Overhead is just one factor of a charity's efficiency.

Of course in this case the cost of the powder is just a small factor, and you also need to consider the cost of distribution and other overheads. And the fact that the effectiveness probably drops off at some point. Obviously just spending 1B$ is not going to save 20 billion children, there aren't that many children that need these ORS packets.</comment></comment>


Here's What We Know About Russia and the DNC Hack - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2016/07/heres-know-russia-dnc-hack/ <comment><USER2> > accusations of Russian hacking continue to cloud the proceedings

I'm fairly sure the information that was revealed after they were released is the real item doing the "clouding".

</comment><comment><USER3> Assange hints that the leaks may be from the DNC itself.

Recall that a DNC insider, Seth Rich, who worked on exposing election fraud during the Democratic party's primaries was murdered several days ago. There are undoubtedly others inside the DNC who are actually upright folks who _may_ be the source of the leaks.

Here is where Julian Assange hints that the DNC itself may be the source of the leaks -- the "egg on their face" bit:

"Perhaps one day the source or sources will step forward and that might be an interesting moment some people may have egg on their faces. But to exclude certain actors is to make it easier to find out who our sources are," Assange told CNN, speaking from the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

He basically says "if you knew the source of the leak, you'd be shocked because the people complaining the loudest about the leaks -- the DNC -- are the source. And I'm not going to say "Russia didn't do it" because it would help you narrow the list of potential sources of the hacked DNC info."

"Russia didn't do the hack but 'to exclude certain actors is to make it easier to find out who our sources are'."

"And the people making a big fuss about 'the Russians did it!' will have "egg on their face" when they find out the DNC hack was an INSIDE JOB."

Link to the article: [http://www.businessinsider.com/julian-assange-wikileaks- dnc-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/julian-assange-wikileaks-dnc-2016-7)</comment>


Sigrid Johnson Was Black. A DNA Test Said She Wasn't - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/19/magazine/dna-test-black-family.html <comment><USER2> This is an interesting piece from the angle of wondering how we construct our identities and what happens when those constructed identities turn out to be based on "facts" that aren't actually true. Such lines of inquiry have potential to break down barriers by proving the degree to which they are psychological fabrications.

This is an uncomfortable idea for most people. They want to think things like race are objective facts. Learning that racial identity can be a construct based on social messaging that is largely or wholly unrelated to actual DNA evidence calls into question the very basis for much of the racism in the US today.

<comment><USER3> You are mistaken if you think those DNA percentages are "facts" exactly either, though.

I would say that the "fact" that she has lived her whole life as a Black person is more of a "fact" than the "facts" that one DNA test said "5% African" and another said "23% African" and another said "0-54% African". Those percentages are the output of algorithms with unclear validity and meaning, devised in order to put something on a report to sell tests, they aren't exactly "facts".

But yes, I agree that race is, of course, socially constructed and not a biological "fact" at all... and for that matter so are "ethnic" categories like "Greek" or "Irish"... which is just part of why these DNA tests can't do what people want them to do.

<comment><USER2> _You are mistaken if you think those DNA percentages are "facts" exactly either, though._

If that is the impression I gave, then my wording probably was sloppy. I've reread it and can't figure out what I "should" have done differently to make it clearer that I am aware that the tests themselves are of questionable merit (at this point in time, when it comes to racial identity), given the issues you pointed out.

I have personally read of cases with devastating personal consequences based on things that are on more solid ground, such as paternity. There was an incident where someone got a DNA test and I think gifted their parents DNA tests and the parents ended up divorced because it revealed that the husband had fathered a child out of wedlock prior to getting married.

I found that especially shocking and bizarre. When I saw the title of the piece, I assumed that it had revealed an illicit affair during the marriage.

Anyway, this article is about someone who was adopted. Adopted children often don't know they were adopted. Even if they do know, it leaves a huge hole in their knowledge about their heritage.

So I think it is inevitable that at some point we will have more reliable tests and someone like this individual will learn that their genetic heritage conflicts with their self image in some important way.

Perhaps we will even see some Neo Nazi members learn that they are not entirely Caucasian either and then what? Do you rethink your racist ideology? Do you kill yourself? Do you live in denial and try to hide the truth from your Neo Nazi brethren?

<comment><USER3> Sorry, I didn't mean to accuse you of anything or suggest you "should" have said something different. Just trying to engage in the conversation.

But the point I'm trying to make is that I'm _not_ sure that "it is inevitable that at some point we will have more reliable tests". The problem is not test reliabilily, it's that there is in fact no actual reliable way to map from DNA to "not entirely Caucasian", because there's a basic mismatch there. "Caucasian" is (really!) not a genetic category, there is actually no way to _reliably_ determine someone is "Caucasian" (or "Black", or anything else like that) from a DNA test. It just doesn't work like that. (Even though these DNA ancestry companies make money off people thinking it does).

It's true that at some point some neo-nazi, like anyone else, might have results that seem to tell them something that surprises them or that they didn't want to hear. But the problem is in fact with their ideology in the first place that thinks there is such a thing as "Caucasian" encoded in their genes, when there isn't.

This is interesting though, in the case where someone who thought they were Black thinks a DNA test told them they weren't -- my inclination is to say "Ignore the test, it can not tell you that you aren't Black, because the test just can't say that, don't let it make you insecure in your identity" In the case of a neo-nazi who has a similar experience, I'd _want_ it to make them insecure in their identity, because their identity is based on entirely scientifically unsound ideas about what race means.

That might be a contradiction in my OWN ideology. But it's not a contradiction in the science. Either way, the problem is not just that "the test isn't reliable enough yet", the problem is that "Caucasian" or "Black" can NOT be "reliably" determined by a DNA test, because these categories are simply not sound as biologically/genetically determined categories.

<comment><USER2> This is a bit too deep for me at the moment. I don't know that much about the science. What little I know about DNA is in service to understanding my genetic disorder.

Have a happy Sunday.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is an utterly absurd situation that someone like Kamala Harris, who is half-Tamil and partly English, is considered "black". Our present notions of race continue to maintain the repugnant fiction that the hereditary material of some populations is "marked" and those who have even a few such ancestors are "contaminated". Of course, this is very far from accurate. It may reflect present social realities, but there is no rule that says present social realities must not be absurd.

> One said that any percentage not marked "low confidence" was 100 percent > certain. Another said each percentage was 99 percent certain. When I asked > that representative to check with a supervisor, she did, then returned to > tell me that the company's certainty was 99.7 percent.

Obviously this is a confidence interval covering three standard deviations assuming a normal distribution. If the last assumption can be considered accurate, the correct interpretation of the results' precision is "pretty good", but non-normal distributions occasionally show up and cause the 2007 mortgage collapse.

</comment><comment><USER5> How could you publish an article like this without any actual pictures? What she looks like is 90% of what I'm curious about.

<comment><USER6> Then you're singularly incurious. And besides, the article begins with a massive portrait of her (colour changed but otherwise clearly representative).

<comment><USER7> Much of this article is about appearance because our ancestry defines it. I bet most readers would have found a picture extremely relevant to the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> A DNA test can say no such thing.

One test said "2.978 percent African", and she thought she wasn't Black. (2.978%? Three decimal places, really?). Another test said 23% and she thought she was. (23%? So that means like one grandparent? Not really, it's unclear what the "percentage" means or if it even means the same thing from one company's test to another. It means something like "23% of your DNA, the parts we look at, matches some reference sample, that we got from somewhere." What does THAT mean though? What does "matching a reference sample" _mean_ in terms of where your ancestors were from? How has that been validated? And many companies don't even reveal their statistical methods.)

Or maybe it was "0 to 58%".

These "ancestry results", despite being expressed with five significant digits, are scandalously unscientific and of unclear meaning. It is not even clear what "percentage of your ancestry from Africa" _means_. You think people didn't move around and have children with people from all over until the 20th century? Cause they did.

If your great-great-something grandparent lived in what is present day Greece, but THEIR parent was born in what is present-day Egypt (or vice versa; either would be fairly unremarkable)... and you want to know what "percent Greek" your "ancestry" is, like that even means something? Like your DNA could somehow even reveal that great-great-something was born in what is now Egypt but their parent was born in what is now Greece? It can not. All of this is based on a weird fantasy/mythology of being able to separate people into historically continuous categories which remain stable over generations, that just isn't any kind of scientifically or historically justified.

<comment><USER8> Yeah it is an attempt to correlate genes to geography with far more precision than actually existed and assumptions that populations were hermetically sealed when they weren't. Regional classifications are often even worse in GIGO associations from what I heard with trying to distinguish between say Dutch, Polish, German, and Swiss. It brings to mind sarcastically asking questions about connections to long gone civilizations that nobody really identifies as. How many people globally are Scythian? Babylonian? Carthaginian? Sumerian? Minioan?

It brings to mind the 'smartass genie' technically most accurate way of classifying blackness by just including a count of melanin producing genes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > They said she was 45.306 percent Hispanic, 32.321 percent Middle Eastern, > 13.714 percent European and 8.659 percent "other," which included a mere > 2.978 percent African.

Decimals aside, since when is "Hispanic" a race? What could that even mean?

 _That too_ aside, 3% African _is_ black according to the still predominant "one drop" doctrine of blackness in this country.

<comment><USER8> Technically it is an ethnicity but the South American population does have a larger percent of assimilated natives than continental Spain and a long history of a caste system which put born natives lower in the hierarchy than those born in Spain which could arguably make them a more divergent set of genetic traits being messily correlated. One can argue about the name but "Hispanic" is a workable proxy for the broad brush of 'everything below the continental born caste'.

Of course if you want to talk genetics instead of silly human labels you look at the actual contents of their genome.

<comment><USER10>
      Technically it is an ethnicity

No, it's defined by geography only. Someone of pure Spanish blood and another of purely Mayan blood can both be "Hispanic".

"African" is similarly vague. A pure Bantu, an Egyptian, and an Amazight from Morocco are all African.

<comment><USER8> I realized afterwards that I had meant nationality but that wouldn't be quite accurate either - unless you count former ones like "was once a part of the USSR". And even that would probably be pushing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This post vaulted to the HN front-page shortly after I posted it, but now is nowhere to be found.

<comment><USER11> Users flagged it. That's common. Also common is to see it rise again as the tug-of-war between upvotes and flags plays out, or occasionally as moderators turn off flags.

<comment><AUTHOR> What would you imagine the various reasons for users flagging it would be? Genuinely curious.

<comment><USER12> It's about race. A lot of people may think it's flame-war bait and HN guidelines tell us to avoid such topics.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Employers: how many devs have left your company to do their own thing? - <AUTHOR>

The line between developer culture and entrepreneurial culture has been getting increasingly blurry over the past decade. It's rare that I hear of a developer that's happy just working for a company.
While I of course understand the want/need for one to do their own thing, it seems like it's becoming the definition of success for a developer -- building a product that takes off, rather than making great contributions to something they don't necessarily own.
My window into this world is pretty one-sided, which is why I'm posting this here; I'd love to hear stories about devs that are on the other side of the coin, [government contractor], Google, Microsoft and Apple excepted.
I tried finding statistics on the backgrounds of tech entrepreneurs but couldn't find anything definitive. It'd be interesting to see how many are developers breaking out.
It's saddening to think a company can have the best culture, team fit, benefits and salary, but it's just a holding pattern in the eyes of some.
I say all this fully aware of the irony that I'm puzzled by my own actions. I guess that's how it's supposed to work? :) <comment><USER2> None, but we try super hard to encourage open source contribution whenever possible.</comment>


Four new DNA letters double life's alphabet - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00650-8 <comment><USER2> Tangentially related story - Steve benner was the researcher whose work inspired me to go to grad school; during the 2017 eclipse I travelled with a friend to a remote mountain in the path if totality to observe it; on the way down I ran into Steve benner (there were about 6-8 people on the mountain that day), and was left wondering if sometimes serendipitous meetings are instead the result of similar deductive processes in activity selection and not serendipity at all.

<comment><USER3> Probably moreso now than ever with the synchronized ideation from Internet news and social media.

<comment><USER4> I liked this comment

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This reminds me a bit of how mystics often claim to have seen colors not seen in nature. Crazy, weird, sure, but when you actually look at the rod and cone structure that gives rise to color, there's no reason to think that more of these might not exist, and indeed some animals have different receptors, famously, the mantis shrimp has 12. Color occupies that weird junction between the subjective and objective, so we don't really have a way of working out what the subjective experience of new colors would actually be.

Why this reminds me of color isn't so much the weird part, but the fact that color is a continuous surface. What would adding new colors do to the color space? Does the space remain two-dimensional or do new colors start blending a third dimension into the topology? I wish those mystics had access to spectrometers in Heaven.

<comment><USER6> More critically, the mantis shrimp doesn't have opponency.

In humans—-and most other animals—-the visual system represents color[0] using a relative system: is something redder than it is green? Bluer than it is yellow? To create this, neurons receive excitatory input from (e.g.) a red cone and inhibitory input from nearby green cones. This representation makes sense, given the cones' spectral sensitivity, but it also makes some colors "impossible". Since each color is essentially a point along these two axes, something can't be blue and yellow at the same time, reddish green, or even some shades of "hyper-green"[1,2].

The mantis shrimp, near as we can tell, doesn't have this sort of representation. The anatomical pathways don't seem to be there, and some behavioral work with trained(!) mantis shrimp also suggests that they have independent color channels, and, as a result, their color sensitivity is actually not amazing. Interestingly, they may do something to "fake" color opponency: different receptor types are in different parts of the eye, and the shrimp 'drags' its eye across the scene to produce a sort of temporal context.

That's more than you probably wanted to know but...shrimp are neat.

[0] To a first approximation, anyway.

[1] There is a place called Reddish Green, which I assume is not invisible, but I've never been to Stockport, England.

[2] More seriously, there are some tricks you can play to (briefly) perceive some of these impossible colors. The general approach is that you stare at something of one color, then quickly switch to looking at something of the opponent color. This "fatigues" (adapts) cells that signal the first color, so they provide less inhibitory input in response to the second color.

<comment><USER7> Here is a blog post which covers some impossible colors and provides a few techniques to "see" them. [0] Of course reddish green and blueish yellow don't have any easy visualization techniques.

My personal favorite impossible color is Stygian Blue. Something is so energizing about seeing a color you know shouldn't exist.

[0] [http://www.luniere.com/2014/03/01/hyperbolic-orange-and- the-...](http://www.luniere.com/2014/03/01/hyperbolic-orange-and-the-river-to- hell/)

<comment><USER8> I think you forgot your link.

<comment><USER7> Hasn't been a great start to the day. Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Greg Egan wrote a good short story with a related premise: a pathologist investigating evidence discovers the DNA is formed of novel bases. It's called 'The Moat' and is published in the collection 'Axiomatic'.

The whole collection deserves a content warning, but if you enjoy Black Mirror then you'll enjoy these.

<comment><USER10> >The whole collection deserves a content warning

I'm not sure what you mean by that. Who needs to be warned and of what?

Thank you for the recommendation though, there's never too much sci-fi to read as far as I'm concerned.

<comment><USER11> ETA: Seems this was meant to be a different kind of content warning. Whatever.

\---

I don't know that specific series, but Greg Egan thinks ideas further than usual in entertainment, usually ends on a note that's neither down nor up, but nondescript and even nihilistic toward normal-human values, like setting yourself into an endless loop of trivial emotional experience of no more than a few seconds content in re. The author often plays with minds like that. Depending on your make-up, you could interpret the described personas as tortured people, or free, or ... whatever. Somewhat Camus-like. Just with hard sci-fi.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Really really interesting work. I have so many questions. I wonder if the new letters change the molecular structure overall. Do these molecules bend and twist like vanilla DNA does? Will they wrap around histones? Can any of the new letters be methylated?

I'm also glad the article stressed the importance of polymerase. For the uninitiated, if this molecule cannot be replicated with polymerase, then it severely constrains its applicability. Most research labs do not synthesize their own DNA - they replicate it in cells or with PCR.

<comment><USER13> > I wonder if the new letters change the molecular structure overall. Do these > molecules bend and twist like vanilla DNA does?

 _Expanded genetic systems are most likely to work with natural enzymes if the added nucleotides pair with geometries that are similar to those displayed by standard duplex DNA. Here, we present crystal structures of 16-mer duplexes showing this to be the case with two nonstandard nucleobases (Z and P)_

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25961938](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25961938)

> Can any of the new letters be methylated?

Z has an amine group where the methylation would go on cytosine, and P has a ketone group instead of the amine group where the methylation would go on adenine, so presumably not, or at least not in the same way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Before I knew much about transistors etc, I used to wonder why only 2 logic levels (0 and 1) are generally used in computers. I know there are some exceptions but it turns out binary works best with the hardware we have available. I'm guessing that four logic levels works best with ribosomes and all the other cellular machinery. Or maybe it's hard to have codons longer than 3, so the number of DNA bases is set by the number of required amino acids to sustain life?

<comment><USER15> IIRC, optimal information density is achieved by an alphabet the size of Euler's number [1]. So trinary might actually be theoretically optimal since we have to be discrete.

But there are pragmatic considerations to consider that make trinary difficult. Since most of computation currently happens with voltage, that's a one-dimensional quantity that we would have to divide into 3 levels to discriminate "bits". This requires more sensitivity and precision than merely two levels. (Edit: although maybe not, some historical computers were trinaryband reportedly more efficient; time will tell I suppose).

It would be easier to achieve trinary if we had _two_ axes with which to encode, but that intrinsically yields quaternary; maybe that's how DNA operates.

[1] It is via radix economy: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_economy#Radix_economy_of...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_economy#Radix_economy_of_different_bases)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is a perennially recurring article. Seems like every few years someone is adding base pairs to DNA. The first one I can recall used the Greek letters kappa and chi for the novel base pair. I thought it was cool and exciting at the time, which was probably around 1992. They keep coming up with new ones, and reviving the "6 letter DNA alphabet" articles.

2-amino-8-(2-thienyl)purine and pyridine-2-one

7-(2-thienyl)imidazo[4,5-b]pyridine and pyrrole-2-carbaldehyde

7-(2-thienyl)imidazo[4,5-b]pyridine and 4-[3-(6-aminohexanamido)-1-propynyl]-2-nitropyrrole

2-(2-Deoxy-β-D-erythro-pentofuranosyl)-6-methyl-1(2H)-isoquinolinethione and (1R)-1,4-Anhydro-2-deoxy-1-(3-methoxy-2-naphthyl)-D-erythro-pentitol

These all work fine when copying DNA sequences using existing cellular mechanisms and PCR. As far as I know, it remains to be seen whether they can encode for proteins.

RNA transcription is complicated by "wobble pairs" with uracil, inosine, and uridine variants, occurring in RNA, with the four bases present in DNA, and with each other. There isn't a 1-to-1 correspondence from DNA base to RNA base. It may be that our DNA uses only the four specific bases guanine, cytosine, adenine, and thymine because wobble pairings provided additional mutation resistance, or offered additional structural options for transcribed proteins.

</comment><comment><USER17> Are there new proteins this lets them make? How does this translate to rna? The cell's messenger molecule.

<comment><USER18> To make new proteins, you have to create new ribosomes, as it's they who interpret the RNA codons to stitch amino acids together. Bootstrapping a new ribosome is several magnitudes harder than constructing a synthetic DNA/RNA.

Actually, you don't even need new DNA letter to do that. DNA codons can encode 64 different amino acids (63, as one codon must encode the end of sequence), but only 20 amino acids are actually used.

Adding another amino acid is theoretically possible, but this would require rewriting the whole DNA to reencode, say leucine from CTG to another codon to assign CTG to some other acid.

<comment><USER19> Someone could also replace the carbon with silicon.

<comment><USER20> Silicon/Bismuth biochemistry is way more limited than Carbon/Hydrogen Oxide biochemistry in terms of temperature range and stable compounds. Silicon/Hydrogen Sulfide biochemistry does not work at all because hydrogen sulfide does not have the point of least volume.

 _biochemistries listed here are denoted as bonding atom /solvent pairs._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Maybe 4 is a trade-off between stability and information density.

<comment><USER22> DNA does more than code for proteins, but in terms of proteins, 3-letter DNA codons already provide for 64 possibilities, and there are only 20 amino acids.

<comment><USER21> So you mean, it did not evolve differently for lack of need?

<comment><USER23> Genetic evolution is path dependent. Starting point of evolution severely limits where evolution can go.

In other words, evolution never does whole system redesign. It's all legacy code from the beginning with incremental optimization steps in response to selection pressure at the moment.

Genes and amino acids are very close to the starting point, it's unlikely that they are optimal outside the starting environment. 4 amino acids was enough to get things going, inserting new amino asides later would require redesigning all the machinery starting from scratch. Evolution can't do that, but humans might be able to insert news stuff.

<comment><USER24> That's assuming that life originated only once. If there were multiple independent origins of life, then why couldn't they have had different base pairs and compete with each other in the evolutionary manner?

<comment><USER25> They could, but if they originated in the same environment then the likelihood of that goes way down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> "[..] there is nothing particularly "magic" or special about those four chemicals that evolved on Earth[..]"

An interesting corollary would be that, if we find them outside Earth, then, probably, they didn't evolve on Earth

<comment><USER27> "In March 2015, NASA scientists reported that, for the first time, complex organic compounds found in DNA and RNA, including uracil, cytosine and thymine, have been formed in the laboratory under outer space conditions, using starting chemicals, such as pyrimidine, found in meteorites. Pyrimidine and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) may have been formed in red giants or in interstellar dust and gas clouds, according to the scientists."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteorite#Meteorite_chemistry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteorite#Meteorite_chemistry), which cites [https://www.nasa.gov/content/nasa-ames-reproduces-the- buildi...](https://www.nasa.gov/content/nasa-ames-reproduces-the-building- blocks-of-life-in-laboratory)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Pretty interesting. I wonder if bio-hackers from the future will tinker for fun and exchange very large steganographic 'files' that, if read in a certain order, produced the complementary DNA (cDNA) [0] of a patented organism.

[0] [http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2015/the-patent- landscape-...](http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2015/the-patent-landscape-of- genetically-modified-organisms/)

</comment><comment><USER29> That opens the door to a genetic signature for man made and modified creatures in a not much far away future. Would be important to clear biological invasions or "tainted" species if you can check for it.

</comment><comment> duncan-donuts This is pretty cool! I wonder if there is so some limit in how many pairs can be added. I'd imagine as we try to store more information in a system like this we'll keep adding synthetic pairs.

</comment><comment><USER30> There's a startup in this space called Synthorx which recently did an IPO: [https://synthorx.com/](https://synthorx.com/)

</comment><comment><USER31> Aren't just a set of complementary two letters / acids enough to double it?

6P3 vs 4P3;

</comment><comment><USER32> I want genetically modified children with 12-"letter" DNA!

<comment><USER33> Start by getting one with a 12-"letter" name and see how that works !!

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> How does it get transcribed if not using polymerases?

</comment><comment><USER35> More possible states, more possible errors.

</comment><comment><USER36> What does this mean for DNA based evidence?

</comment><comment><USER37> I predict this will become the basis for many sci-fi/horror books and movies coming up in the future.

</comment><comment><USER38> This earlier work discovering nucleotides X and Y might be interesting too (warning paywall): [https://www.economist.com/science-and- technology/2019/01/19/...](https://www.economist.com/science-and- technology/2019/01/19/adding-new-dna-letters-make-novel-proteins-possible)

</comment><comment><USER39> hasnt S been around for a while? what about M?

</comment><comment><USER40> Seriously what is the point of this other than novelty? Why would you throw out billions of years of biochemistry and evolution? Is the expressive power evidenced in all of life not good enough?

<comment><USER41> No one is talking about "throwing out billions of years of biochemistry". Rather, by changing a small part of biochemistry we will be better able to understand it. Not all research is about making something better.

Artificial bases might help us understand why live evolved the way it did. Maybe there is an interaction between the bases and the way DNA folds? Or were ACTG just an accident?

Artificial bases might be useful as part of other techniques, perhaps for tagging DNA sequences. Maybe they can one day be used to disrupt or alter certain biological processes.

I am not a biologists, so I have no idea if that makes any sense, but the research is interesting.

<comment><USER40> I am a biologist. We already know many of the things you asked. For example, the stacking energy between bases: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1360284/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1360284/) All this can be studied with some chemistry. These people are engineering new organisms with a new genetic code and new amino acids. It goes far beyond mere study. It's as if someone suddenly said, "Yes, but imagine if pianos had 99 keys!"

<comment><USER42> This seems analogous to:

"No one will ever need a 100 megabyte drive!" "No one could ever use a 1 megabit network connection!" "No one will ever use more than 256 megabytes of RAM!"

But I don't know enough biology to understand if that's the case.

<comment><USER43> This is more like: "no one will need gold audio cables!" "No one could ever tell the display refresh rate was 1kHz!" "No one will ever use a mineral oil bath to cool their PC!"

<comment><USER44> Gold audio cables are useless, yes? I assume the other two are just as such then, if that is the analogy you are shooting for.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Great Corporate Female Freeze-Out - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-05-31/offices-don-t-have-to-freeze-women-with-air-conditioning <comment><USER2> Why does the AC need to be cranked up so high anyway? At my work, it gets so cold that my hands freeze up and I can no longer type comfortably.</comment>


At Last, Facing Down Bullies (and Their Enablers) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/09/health/09klas.html <comment><USER2> I'm not sure what this would actually accomplish. I've been seeing articles lately where bullies are just ignored by schools even when repeatedly reported by parents. It seems like universal advice on this topic is unreasonable to begin with. I recall in high school where the school would only get involved when something too big to ignore came up like some kid getting thrown through a window or something (this happened twice). I think the only advice I could give a child going through this is to fight back and fight back hard even if that means more short term pain. I don't think this is necessarily good advice but it might be the only option when the schools ignore these problems as a matter of de facto policy. Of course you could always home school and avoid this problem entirely :)

<comment><USER3> What's the value in teaching children how to respond physically to low-grade physical violence? It's not valuable in adult life. Corner a coworker at your office, shove them, stick a finger too close to their face while raising your voice: you're fired. Is your boss dumb enough to let it go, or worse, participate? Guess what: when employees sue, you lose, _no matter what_.

Why should my kids waste a moment's time trying to handle violence and physical intimidation on their own? That's teaching them to handle problems with both hands tied behind their back. I want my kids handling problems smart, and "fighting back" and standing up to bullies on their own terms is playing to lose.

There is all sorts of low-grade kids-stuff nonsense that doesn't need to be escalated. But we're not talking about that here. We're talking about kids who are so persistently targeted and oppressed by this juvenile bullshit that they're considering withdrawing from academic programs.

Fuck that shit. If my son tells me he's quitting band because he's getting pushed around over it, I am going fucking ballistic.

(For whatever it's worth, both my kids spend a good chunk of their discretionary time in martial arts. But they're doing that on its own merits, not as a tool to deal with behavior that would be _overtly criminal_ if it occurred between adults.)

<comment><USER4> > What's the value in teaching children how to respond physically to low-grade > physical violence? It's not valuable in adult life.

It's very valuable in playground life, though. The value is that they prevent future low-grade violence by engaging in a bit of low-grade violence themselves.

> I want my kids handling problems smart, and "fighting back" and standing up > to bullies on their own terms is playing to lose.

Nonsense. It works really well, in my experience. The playground is not like an office, so your extrapolation to adult behaviour doesn't apply. Teenagers are nearly adult physically, but still unformed mentally and ethically/morally.

> Fuck that shit. If my son tells me he's quitting band because he's getting > pushed around over it, I am going fucking ballistic.

How's that going to help him? If he knows that you'll react that way, he likely won't even tell you, and the bullying will continue, in secret.

Here's what I'm going to tell my daughter:

1) No one has the right to attack you. If you are attacked, and you can fight back, do it! If the odds are not in your favour, try to flee to a safe area / allies. Don't worry about suspension / expulsion, etc. I will back you up.

Try to keep the violence proportional, unless it's a do or die situation. I.e. shoving vs. shoving, punching vs. punching, don't use improvised weapons unless they do. OTOH err on the side of survival.

2) If anyone ever threatens serious violence, like rape or death threats, tell me. These are not joking matters. It doesn't mean we'll go ape-shit and over- react, but we need to know it's happening in order to figure out whether it's a real threat.

3) If you're being bullied electronically, then tell us, but never ever react to the bully. Don't feed the troll. If the person can't actually reach out and physically hurt you, don't give them anything to work with.

If you teach your kids to never respond to violence with violence, you're setting them up to be bullied, which will affect them throughout their lives. Authority figures can't always (and often won't) save you. Sometimes you need to fight first and ask questions later.

<comment><USER3> Proportional violence is a great way to get your kids in the same kind of trouble a bully is bound to get into. It also perpetuates the problem for kids who unavoidably cannot respond in kind to these situations, so that's an outcome I'm happy with.

I'm happy your kids can handle themselves in a physical confrontation. My son's big for his age, and my daughter has really taken to her martial arts classes, so I have high hopes for them too. But if I found out that my kids were responding to low-grade violence by engaging in it themselves, they'd get punished.

<comment><USER5> The "trouble" that schools can dish out is nothing to the "trouble" life will dish out.

The law doesn't punish you for defending yourself, why the hell would you expect your kids to live to a standard that nobody else is subjected to?

<comment><USER3> For two reasons:

(1) Because regardless of whether the standard is fair, in real life, off the playground, violence is as likely as not going to break against my kids as it is to break for them. This "standing up and fighting the bully" mythology is exactly that. The outcomes are simply better if you avoid violence and use the other tools at your disposal.

(2) Because some standards are intrinsically correct, regardless of what the law allows.

<comment><USER5> Well, I think it's evident that we fundamentally disagree on the action of physical violence. Simply, I believe your views, while commendable are impractical. I know that you perhaps feel mind are barbaric.

Are you Buddhist by any chance? Just curious.

<comment><USER3> Nope. Catholic. Also, at times an unrepentant vicious asshole. I just think violence is usually not the most pragmatic response.

<comment><USER5> Well, we'd agree on that then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was bullied a lot when I was little, and when my parents complained to the school, it only got worse because the school handled it very publicly.

As much as I hated it, the bullying turned me into a stronger person, and made me more aware of how I came off to others. I'm now very successful in what I do, and it's partly because I focused on excelling in my field, but also because I focused on improving my social skills. Although being a bully is a sign you have a social problem, being the victim made me aware of my own shortcomings, and I worked to correct them.

<comment><USER3> Getting shoved and pushed around by drunk assholes outside your apartment building every evening when you get home from work would probably also teach you to be a stronger person who could keep a level head under physical threat. But that situation, which parallels your school experience, unquestionably involves repeated criminal assault and battery.

The mere fact that it is possible to draw life lessons from bullying does not mitigate it.

<comment><USER6> Oh not at all - I didn't mean that it should be left alone. What I mean is that there should be more emphasis on helping the victims grow from and overcome the experience, instead of just trying to prevent it altogether. The author of the article does touch on that, but I think it's generally absent from the minds of most people.

"He's getting bullied at school". "Oh - have you called the school?"

I'm not saying people should be complacent, I'm just saying that helping the victims is probably more important than other solutions. In my case, I always reacted the wrong way to bullying. I think that if I hadn't reacted the way I did, bullying would've stopped.

<comment><USER3> Why should we teach people how to expend effort to overcome problems they shouldn't be confronted with in the first place? If somebody assaults you, you should press charges.

<comment><USER5> One would hope that most people understand that life is slightly more complex than that.

Negative situations are a part of life. They make us who we are. Even if we could eliminate bullying entirely, we would also eliminate all of the valuable lessons that a child learns from the experience. This is not to suggest I support bullying at all; you don't learn how to ride a bike without falling, and you don't learn confidence and action without being challenged.

<comment><USER3> You _can't_ learn to ride a bike if you're afraid of falling. You _can_ and _must_ be able to attend school, even if you're afraid of physical violence.

<comment><USER5> I think you missed my point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have pretty awful memories of bullying, fights, etc. from growing up and the tyranny of the schoolyard pack. I had visions of those scenarios when my own kids started public school but I've been very impressed with how the school has made creating a good environment a top priority. A couple of things that really impressed me:

1\. At the first meeting the principal said that he wanted to know if a kid was having trouble fitting in, making friends. Creating a good environment where kids enjoyed coming to school was obviously a priority at the top of the organization.

2\. In addition to all of the classic recess games like kickball and four square, the school put out some chess sets and got toys for the sandbox so that kids had alternatives. There was a playground rule, "can't say can't play" that instilled the notion that games were open to everyone.

3\. Counselors entered the classrooms early to talk about things like conflict resolution at a level that the kids could understand.

This approach seems light years ahead of what I remember as a kid. In short, I agree that schools can be very effective at eliminating bullying if it is a priority.

</comment><comment><USER8> My son could have been the subject of the article. In 4th grade, he was constantly harassed by a single bully on the bus and in class. Unsurprisingly, all the cliches held: the bully had been in fights with most of the boys on the bus; the school was completely unresponsive to requests for intervention; and the parents of the bully didn't care.

For the first time, I forced my son into an activity - martial arts. After a few months, it gave my son the confidence to stand his ground against his tormentor and fight back. Again, unsurprisingly, my son served his first, and the bully his fifth, suspension for violating the "zero tolerance" for throwing fists in school. It was a great life lesson about fairness. He has not had a problem since.

Most kids, esp boys, will be bullied at some time, but I shuddered at the thought of my son being the constant target every year.

<comment><USER5> _He has not had a problem since._

Key phrase in your comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I experienced a strong case of PTSD and low self-esteem as the result of an extended period of quite pernicious and malicious bullying. In my case, the principal bully -- the leader of a pack who all engaged in the bullying -- was the son of a higher level school official; some of the school staff saw it occurring but took no action, I speculate out of fear of retribution.

For my part, I was also confused and frustrated by the situation. I had no desire to fight the fellow, and I didn't understand where this aggression was coming from. I also literally didn't know how to fight. No one ever taught me even the basics.

The psychological impact was strong enough that I will live with it, to some extent, for the rest of my life.

My recommendations to a parent or mentor would include:

\+ Ensure the child is trained in self-defense. I will not allow any child of mine to be without such training. The purpose is not to become aggressive and controlling of others. It is to learn to remain centered and in control of oneself, and hopefully in control of the situation. At least in control of one's reaction to it.

\+ Understand that, per my limited reading, bullying _is_ an _effective_ social strategy. Perhaps that may change as society evolves, but it has and does serve the purpose of promoting the bully and gaining them certain rewards. Not that the bullying is necessarily a conscious, pre-meditated decision with such rewards as the known and expected outcome. However, it is not a purely pathological social aberration. As such, it is something that will appear and that will need to be addressed. Saying it is "wrong" and "unfair" does not help the victim in dealing with the situation. Creating a social structure that aids the victim while mediating the bullying does. However (again), the individual cannot count on others always fostering such a social structure. The individual needs to be able to take care of themself. From that standpoint, they may then also be in a position to help foster a social environment that mediates against bullying.

\+ Modern society seems to me to have created a bit of a "Lord of the Flies" situation. Many parents' daily lives are so separated from those of their children. Kids spend 8, 10 hours away from their parents in social environments that are strongly weighted towards their peer group, with limited participation by teachers, coaches and such as supervising adults. An entire subculture develops largely independent of broader society. Kids can end up very vulnerable within this. And the culture's message and influence is often to _not_ communicate problems to adults. This reinforces the isolation of the victim.

<comment><USER10> _I experienced a strong case of PTSD..._

Sounds like this guy was full out abusing you rather than just "bullying" you? I got occasionally pushed around in school and dished it out myself, but it was hardly bad enough to cause shell shock and extreme psychological trauma years later.

<comment><USER4> Don't dismiss him so lightly. There's a huge difference between infrequent bullying and sustained bullying. As you say, sustained bullying is abuse (in its modern sense), though we often use the words interchangeably.

Imagine that you're in a situation where you're thrown together with people who if they even see you will try to do something nasty to you. Now imagine that happening every day, for years.

I can see how it would change someone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A website about the actual prevention program: <http://www.clemson.edu/olweus/>

<comment><USER11> perhaps better: <http://www.olweus.org/public/index.page>

As you can see, the program is for sale.

<comment><USER3> That doesn't call the original work into question, if that's what you're implying.

<comment><USER11> +1 for alerting me to a possible misinterpretation of my comment.

I was curious why there wasn't a real description of the solution to the bullying problem in the article, so I followed the trail back to the originator. Turns out he's a bit entrepreneurial in using the model of business to bring his solution to the masses, and probably (I hope) allow him to better refine the solution as he goes. I'm trying to do the exact same thing.

What struck me is that it seems plausible to me --and I'm fantasizing here-- that this story was suggested/planted/encouraged by his company as a PR move. This is what we should all be doing, and if he did it then he did it very well.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apps iTunes Should be Split Into - <AUTHOR> http://www.okedition.org/home/itunes-7-10-split.html

<comment><USER2> The one thing I hate about iTunes (besides the sluggishness of the app) is that it's a massive pain to keep a single iTunes library shared with all other computers in a network, especially with OSX and Windows.

I propose an 'iTunes Server' - a central music database which allows iTunes clients to connect to it and browse the music library with full access and the ability to add songs to the central library.

It'd have to be cross-platform too.

</comment><comment><USER3> the problem with this idea is that some items overlap — a multimedia book could be a book but it can also be an app. someone shopping for a song may be very interested in the music video. also the idea of sync isn't something that apple wants you to even know about...

actually there are a few things i'd like to see:

\- i wish i could read a book on the mac desktop

\- i wish Pages had a draft mode

\- i wish apple would do an adobe CS killer

\- at this stage i wish they'd kill ping

\- i wish the book store went deeper

\- time capsule as hardware should be killed

<comment><USER4> I agree with overlap and splitting up the stores, it can get tricky having to go multiple places to buy things. I guess I also didn't realize people still downloaded and watched music videos that way.</comment></comment>


Helping people find good Perl tutorials - <AUTHOR> http://szabgab.com/blog/2011/11/helping-people-find-good-perl-tutorials.html

<comment><USER2> Perl used to be cool. It used to bring a lot of functionality and flexibility that you just couldn't get anywhere else.

But it's not unique anymore. And it no longer brings anything truly amazing to the table that you can't find in a competitor language.

I think perl will never really go away though it has clearly reached a long- halflife twilight phase [1]. Unless a miracle happens, it will never return to dominance in anything other than niche domains (like quick-n-dirty commandline scripts).

[1] <http://www.google.com/trends?q=perl>

* But what about perl 6, Larry Wall's ambitious project to basically rewrite perl from scratch?

For sure what he's doing is interesting. But he's unlikely to create anything so compelling that it will make people want to switch from the other languages taking over perl market share. It's the Netscape re-write all over again. Except perl 6 will have to compete with a number of other fabulous open source languages not a single corporate one.

Perl 6 seems more like an academic research project than a real language.

* But perl 5.x is incorporating all the best stuff from perl 6. And we even have simple OO now!

Anything really worth having from perl6 is also going to get pulled into python, ruby, and hell, even lua ... and all of those languages have better traction and forward momentum than perl 5.

* But people use perl for important stuff!

I'm sure they do and they will continue to do so. Hell, iirc, perl's even used by some cool websites like duckduckgo... but that doesn't mean that perl isn't in decline. It doesn't mean that it's popular. It doesn't mean that a lot of people are going to start using it.

\--

I feel sad. Perl's been a big part of my career for over 10 years. It's been my go-to language for over 15. I wish I didn't feel like it's slowly dying.

<comment><USER3> "But it's not unique anymore. And it no longer brings anything truly amazing to the table that you can't find in a competitor language."

Name another multi-paradigm language with as broad, deep and well-tested library as CPAN.

"Unless a miracle happens, it will never return to dominance in anything other than niche domains (like quick-n-dirty commandline scripts)."

When has "dominance" (whatever that means) or popularity ever been the goal or desirable? I can't think of any language or system that is universally "dominant"; all have niches to work.

You don't get into programming because you want to do what all the cool kids are doing. Paul Graham (you might have heard of him, you're using his site) argued very well on the advantages of choosing above-average tools for above- average results. (<http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html>)

<comment><USER4> Having dealt with CPAN, I'll take python and pip _any day_. CPAN is practically the definition of dependency hell. For developers it may be good (I don't write Perl, so I dunno), but for end users it's a real clusterfrak.

<comment><USER5> The only dependency hell I've had installing modules in my 14 years of programming with dynamic languages was trying to get 2 different Rails apps to work out of the same gems...

Ruby, my other favorite language besides Perl, is just as vulnerable to dependency problems as... every other language!

Ruby, Python, Perl, Java, they all have lots of packages and modules that depend on each other. So do many Linux distributions. Dependency hell is not language nor domain specific.

After all these years, one of the reasons I stick with Perl and CPAN is precisely because I can monitor and anticipate dependency problems with CPAN Testers. MetaCPAN has nice impact analysis tools too. I'm yet to find something comparable in any other language ecosystem. Hell, you can't even specify a minimum version of a module to import in Python, like in Perl's "use Module 2.3".

<comment><AUTHOR> Honestly, i'm fairly sure he just plain doesn't know that "dependency hell" means "can't install stuff because of conflicting or circular dependencies"; but thinks that the term means "well them sure are a lof of deps, yup".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I always wondered why it is so difficult to find the best tutorials that are all over the net. A good directory of tutorials would be incredibly useful, is it possible that nobody is trying to fill that space?

<comment><AUTHOR> Read to the end of the article. I'm working on it: <http://perl-tutorial.org> :)

<comment><USER6> Good luck with it then :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think there's a joke somewhere in this headline, but I just can't put my finger on it.

<comment><USER8> It's a joke that Perl has no good tutorials? I think that's what the article is trying to fix!</comment></comment>


Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty Zapus released - <AUTHOR> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZestyZapus/ReleaseNotes <comment><USER2> > For new installs, a swap file will be used > instead of a swap partition."

But why??

<comment><AUTHOR> The need of swap partition (typically 2x ram_size) makes little sense for systems with adequate Memory as it is rarely used. Also, the size of the swap file will be no more than 5% of free disk space (or, 2 GB RAM) for ubuntu 17.04 which is much lower than a swap partition could be another reason.</comment></comment>


Implementing a programming language in C, part 1 - <AUTHOR> http://bread-man.github.io/blog/2015/05/11/implementing-a-programming-language-in-c-part-1/

<comment><USER2> "Interpreted languages need a virtual machine to run..."

What? This doesn't seem right. I think this is only true if your interpreter does something like compile down to byte code a la Python. In a language like BASIC or certain implementations of Forth there should not be such an intermediary step.

"On Linux, considering apt is your package manager, run sudo apt-get install clang to get the Clang compiler installed."

I really like Debian, but I think there's a large portion of the Linux community (Red Hat, SUSE, Arch, etc) guys that will feel shafted at that statement, and probably will mutter something about Ubuntu destroying the Linux community.

I'm sure this will be an interesting series, I just think given how hard language design is, that I'm not yet filled with warm fuzzies about this write-up. I think the author is doing a good thing, and going out on a limb that most wouldn't but I think it might be good to emphasize that all best practices may not be present.

<comment><USER3> To be fair, the author (who I believe is a teenager) has included a bolded disclaimer at the top that says as much and acknowledges the likelihood of mistakes.

<comment><USER4> Is it somehow unfair for the OP to point out such mistakes? Incorrect is incorrect.

There are many ways to implement interpreters besides VMs, including "threaded" interpreters and tree-walking evaluators.

I don't fault anyone for not knowing something, but that calls for asking questions, not making incorrect assertions.

<comment><USER3> No, it is completely fair to point out mistakes. I believe the OP's comment is valuable and was mainly responding to the final sentence of that comment. Sorry for poor wording and any confusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> fwiw, Python and Ruby are compiled to bytecode prior to execution as well, just not with a separate command as with Java. Trying to explain the distinction between compiled and interpreted gets messy fast nowadays.

<comment><USER5> I think its helpful to define concepts like interpretation and compilation. Interpreters take a program and produce a value. Compilation takes a program and returns another program that hopefully when interpreted gives the same value.

In some sense, python and ruby compile into bytecode, and then the bytecode is executed using an interpreter. There are also concepts such as partial evaluation (where you do a little interpreting while you compile) and JITing (where you do a little compiling while you interpret) which also seem to mix compilation and interpretation, but can be clearly specified as a particular combination of them.</comment></comment>


Tesla Motors Tumbles in Key Trust Measure - green-eclipse https://www.forbes.com/sites/jacknerad2/2019/07/12/tesla-motors-tumbles-in-key-trust-measure/#a29a4e219f3c <comment><AUTHOR> How is this trust measure measured? Survey of owners?

<comment><USER2> "How" I can't speak to, but the press release in May 2019 that this article sources indicated 2500 owners in the United States, spanning 34 brands.</comment></comment>


Anti-Disassembly techniques used by malware - <AUTHOR> http://malwinator.com/anti-disassembly-used-in-malware-a-primer/ <comment><USER2> Many of these techniques were pioneered by games programmers. The idea was that games should be played, not cheated and the same reverse assembly tricks apply and so the same counter-measures apply as well. One game that I'm familiar with had a never ending Matroshka like structure where each pass through a decryption routine would yield just another pile of gibberish _and_ another chunk of code.

The game took a couple of seconds to start up due to this and it needed tremendous patience to get to the end. I gave up after the 50th or so level of trash, never figured out how many there were, for all I know it would have been the next one, or there may have been a few hundred more. One particularly depressing thing was that at level 40+ or so a message appeared at the beginning of the hexdump: "Does your mother know you're doing this?"...

<comment><USER3> I love cruel easter eggs like that. It worked didn't it.

<comment><USER2> Yep :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder what is it about overlapping instructions that seems to confound even well-established (and expensive!) disassemblers like IDA Pro, since it's basically a solved problem; a _long_ time ago, I wrote a disassembler that would just attempt to disassemble all the paths, and if instructions overlapped then it presented the alternate "streams" side-by-side until they merged together again. The first example would come out looking like this:

        40100E  jz 401011
        401010  call 8B4C55A0      | 401011  mov eax, [ebp+0C]
                                   | 401014  mov ecx, [eax+4]
        401015  dec eax
        401016  add al, 0F         | 401017  movsx edx, byte ptr [ecx]
        401018  mov esi, 70FA8311  | 40101A
        40101C

This was in the early PC/XT days, so it handled 8088 and .COM files only, and only needed ~128KB of RAM to run (I remember it also swapped to disk(ette) when needed.) I probably still have the source (in Asm, naturally) and binary somewhere amongst all my 5.25" floppies...

<comment><USER5> Eh, I have a feeling the reason why your stream analysis was so easy back then was because you were working with such small binaries. As I'm sure you know having a variable length instruction set like x86 makes it really really really (really) hard to even heuristically analyze the right "stream" to take. Each potential fake branch can potentially double* the analysis IDA is forced to do. Even with 6.8, analysis for reasonably complex binary can run into the minutes. Even with great heuristics, it's not as trivial as just 'render alt- streams' in column 2. Seriously, look at the call-graphs of any modern binary in IDA. It's insanity. That being said, there are plugins for PyIDA Pro that do what you're saying to a certain extent. IDA Pro in my mind is sort of like emacs -- a decent platform, but the strength really comes from the die-hard community of engineers who make things like org-mode and ELPA.

It is a fun arms race to watch though. Microsoft released their SAT solver Z3 on Github which they used to sell only to the enterprise (think: an oil provisioning company needs a bare minimum of various quantities of different types of refined oil as each source will have different distillation properties. Crude from Venezuela refines entirely differently than from the Gulf or from Russia. They need quantity Foo of gasoline to sell to a set of customers X with forecasted demands of Y, from various vendors who sell crude oil with variable pricing, quantity Bar of jet fuel, and quantity Baaz for plastics manufacturing. You then have production limits that each vendor can supply, etc). Anyways, tangent aside - Z3 is the best constraint solver out there (AFAIK, someone in academia please correct me), and it has the distinct ability to be useful in decompilation. Within 2 weeks of MS opening it up, I was seeing plugins for IDA that were integrating Z3 in a very, very useful manner. (Also IDA Pro even with Hex-Rays is not that expensive at all! Think about how much an average company spends on developer licenses for other tools, and it's not quite cheap but definitely in line with what one would expect to pay for a tool you spend 6 hours a day as its fundamental to your job!

* Yeah I know this only applies up until the end of the 'stream' remains valid, so in theory your complexity is only linear, not polynomial, but if you nest valid byte-streams, you get 2^(number_of_valid_streams_while_op_codes_remain_concurrently_valid_to_analyze).

Edit: Ha yeah my verbose post can effectively be dwindled down to what un:legulere said.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Overlapping instructions were used in some 8 bit microcomputers to fit code into a small memory. For instance, Apple II cards have a 256 byte window for a tiny I/O driver (the address of that window being slot-position-dependent, so the code has to be relocatable: plug the hardware into a different slot and the code moves.) Some cards use overlapping instructions in order to fit this constraint. (Cards can also provide a 2048 byte ROM. However, that was mapped to a fixed memory location shared by all the slots. Before anything jumps there, it has to ensure that the correct slot's code is currently selected for visibility.)

Interestingly, in nature there are some viruses which similarly have overlapping sequences in their DNA. That is to say, one entry point codes for a protein and then another entry point codes for another, and the sequences overlap.

</comment><comment><USER7> An interesting thing worth mentioning here is that many of these techniques work because x86 is a variable length instruction set. A fixed length instruction set (ie, ARM) specifies jump targets as instruction offsets, not byte/word, so you can't jump into the middle of an instruction.

<comment><USER8> Ah, but Thumb code can use two 16bit values (T32). But If I remember correctly, the first and second such sequence will have disjoint values, so you can't misinterpret the second 16-bit value as the beginning of an instruction. This is, btw, also true for utf-8.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Similar (I think) techniques were once used by Skype[1]. I wonder how much they've changed in the past few years.

1\. [https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-europe-06/bh- eu-06...](https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-europe-06/bh- eu-06-biondi/bh-eu-06-biondi-up.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER8> I guess that's why QEMU translates small linear segments of machine code, i.e. code up to the next branch or jump.

<comment><USER10> Yes - they're called 'basic blocks'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Look at the Obfuscator from PELock

[https://www.pelock.com/products/obfuscator/screenshots](https://www.pelock.com/products/obfuscator/screenshots)

it does even more anti-re damage and it's been on the market for about 5 years?

</comment><comment><USER12> what a terrible website, minified obfuscated js keeps auto scrolling to the top, menu is broken, looks like js was tested on 'one true browser' only, reminds me of the good old IE or nothing days :(. Do NOT touch my document.documentElement.scrollTop :(</comment>


Apple hands €14.3bn in back taxes to reluctant Ireland - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/09/19/apple_alleged_state_aid_ireland/ <comment><USER2> Good. Hopefully this will be executed and set a precedent to other tax dodging megacorps too.

</comment><comment><USER3> Again, this is paid into escrow, while both Apple and Ireland appeal the ruling. Taxes not paid yet.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder what it feels like to click send on a 13B + transaction.

</comment><comment><USER5> That's $14B less $200+B in Apple's oversea stash.</comment>


NASA's 1975 Graphics Standards Manual - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2015/09/03/nasa_s_1975_graphics_standards_manual_is_reissued_via_kickstarter_by_jesse.html

<comment><USER2> Jason Scott has some interesting things to say in the comments section for this Kickstarter.

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thestandardsmanual/reis...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thestandardsmanual/reissue- of-the-1975-nasa-graphics-standards-manual/comments)

<comment><USER3> When I stumbled upon this project earlier today I was already looking for my credit card when I opened the kickstarter page. But then I was disappointed, that the project wasn't to come in the original format but in a simple print of the scanned pages, even with the binder holes showing. Jason Scott's client's project would have been way cooler. (Sorry, I'm a sucker for such stuff)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Online browsable manual: [https://archive.org/details/NASAgraphics](https://archive.org/details/NASAgraphics)

Direct PDF download: [https://ia801501.us.archive.org/16/items/NASAgraphics/tmp_26...](https://ia801501.us.archive.org/16/items/NASAgraphics/tmp_2694-3281221279545219.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> $549,480 on Kickstarter? For taking a PDF from the Internet Archive and running it through a print shop?

Someone else should just upload the thing to a print on demand service.

<comment><USER6> In this very thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10172990](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10172990)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm almost tempted, as a kid growing up in England in the 80's and a complete science and technology nerd a large part of why I'm into computers is because I realised I was never going to be an astronaut but technology was just so fascinating.

I had that logo on everything, a family member who visited the states even brought me back some astronaut food with it on :).

NASA was worth every penny they spent just in PR for America.

</comment><comment><USER8> Meh. I'd like to see the complete engineering documents for some of the older missions.

That means hundreds or thousands of sheets of drawings, and thousands of pages of specifications.

In case you haven't worked on a large engineering project, every part gets a detail drawing; if it's off the shelf, it usually gets a source control drawing; every assembly gets an assembly drawing.

There might also be wiring diagrams, harness drawings, airline diagrams, and system block diagrams.

It can't all be classified, can it?

</comment><comment><USER9> Wait a second. Nasa is the US government. This manual is therefore not protected by copyright, at least not within the US. And they are charging 79$? They can do so, but 79 seems a little high given that once anyone gets their hands on it they can in turn sell their own copies again. How much for the pdf?

<comment><USER10> "A work of the United States government, as defined by the United States copyright law, is "a work prepared by an officer or employee" of the federal government "as part of that person's official duties."[1] In general, under section 105 of the Copyright Act,[2] such works are not entitled to domestic copyright protection under U.S. law.

This act only applies to U.S. domestic copyright as that is the extent of U.S. federal law. The U.S. government asserts that it can still hold the copyright to those works in other countries.

Publication of an otherwise protected work by the U.S. government does not put that work in the public domain. For example, government publications may include works copyrighted by a contractor or grantee; copyrighted material assigned to the U.S. Government; or copyrighted information from other sources."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_the_U.S._government)

Things might be a bit different for this since this falls under the 1976 revision of the law [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_the_U.S._government#The_Copyright_Act_of_1976) but I'm pretty sure these guys sorted it out.

Anyhow 79$ is a bit steep considering you need to cough up about 30$ more for shipping to EU even more to Asia...

Would've paid 2-3 times that price to get a replica of the original tho the reprint doesn't look that impressive to me...</comment></comment>


Going to the World Cup? Leave Your Laptop at Home - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/world-cup-2018-travel-russia-secure-devices <comment><USER2> This is silly anti-Russian propaganda:

\- Finland did not qualify to the World Cup

\- bringing a laptop to the US is risky, too; is Wired going to write articles about that at the drop of a hat?

Is it motivated by the non-qualification of the USA team? envy?</comment>


Can Etsy Scale? - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110401/can-rob-kalin-scale-etsy.html

<comment><USER2> Etsy has a huge UI challenge right now: as the volume of listings increase, it becomes harder to find things that I'm interested in. Even text search is quickly overwhelming, because it's hard to describe new and quirky objects that are Etsy's biggest draw (for me).

If Etsy could create a good "we see you've bought quirky post-industrial greeting cards, maybe you'd be interested in ____" function (much like Netflix, Amazon, etc) then it would be greatly improved. It's a much harder problem to sovle than Netflix and Amazon because many items are one-of-a-kind (nobody else bought exactly what you bought), but comparisons of trends across sellers, across keywords, and across image features might work.

Etsy has an experimental "pick the object you like most" feature that leads to some results, but it doesn't allow narrow enough focusing yet: <http://tastetest.etsy.com/>

Same for the "explorer" view: <http://www.etsy.com/explorer>

<comment><USER3> I've taken a shot at this very problem - curious what you think about it. <http://brainsy.net>

<comment><USER4> Was just about to post this. Great work!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can a business ever just reach a natural size and say to themselves, "this is as large as we're going to get, we're profitable, having a good time, and everyone is happy."

I realize they have funding and thus a responsibility to maximize their investments, but I'd love to build a company that feels like it has a natural size.

<comment><USER6> There's a fantastic hamburger place down the street from my house. They make a fixed number of patties every day and when they run out, they close for the day. The owners are constantly asked why they don't buy more patties or expand to more locations around town. They've repeatedly stated that they're doing just fine with where they are and have no desire to push things further. There's a certain beauty here that's hard to quantify.

<comment><USER5> That is an awesome way to run a company. Of course, the nice thing about a software company online is there's never any closing time, but it would be nice to see a software company for once say, "this is big enough, I think we're good here."

Unless, of course, you start to earn a bad reputation for slow support times or bad customer service because your product is so popular, but I guess that is a good problem to have.

Thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I learned last week that one of the founders of Etsy is Jared Tarbell, the excellent computational artist (<http://complexification.net/gallery/>, <http://www.levitated.net/>). He wasn't mentioned in the article though, I wonder why.

<comment><USER8> Jared is here at Etsy right now. So, for no nefarious reasons that I can think of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The best part of this article may be the reference to Regretsy. <http://www.regretsy.com/>

<comment><USER10> I haven't laughed so hard in months. The clay portraits and taxidermy rat simply amazing.

That said, I bought a poster on etsy of the 500 most common passwords, it's not all creepy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Printer-friendly version: [http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110401/can-rob-kalin- scale-ets...](http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110401/can-rob-kalin-scale- etsy_Printer_Friendly.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> I guess the answer is maybe. One person non-software businesses run into all kinds of scaling problems that sellers ran into trying the quit your day job thing. I'm not sure the quit your day job is the right approach for most sellers. After reading the book E-Myth I realized that every Etsy seller should read it immediately if only to realize that they'd be better off doing something else. It seems like it's a good way to make some extra money if you make something nice. There's nothing wrong with that approach but it's less exciting than quiting your job to make cool things to sell on the internet. The people I've met who sell their crafts on Etsy typically have no money to do anything fun and no time to do it anyway.

I think the basic problem is that by taking all that money the expectations are far different. If they had bootstrapped then they'd be looking at a great business that could grow organically without the pressure to big a billion dollar business. It seems like (to put it in Joel Spolsky's framework) they are a Ben & Jerry's business playing with an Amazon model.

</comment><comment><USER13> Etsy really has the potential to become a major player in the micro-vendor market if it can take design considerations seriously - it may be at the vanguard of the industry at the moment but without actual design consideration for the future may be exactly the problem. I sometimes frequent the site and get the craigslist-this-will-probably-stay-the-same-forever feeling.

</comment><comment><USER14> I love etsy but this article brings up many good points. I wonder if etsy needs to look at related but new businesses in order to truly scale. Perhaps they need to look more at the physical side of their business, e.g. running custom manufacturing for their clients, supply chain mgmt for their more successful clients who have outgrown the etsy marketplace, etc.

</comment><comment><USER15> Wait, what? Why the hell would anyone WANT Etsy to scale? Their brand is synonymous with the worst sort of tasteless kitsch known to man. What really needs to happen is someone needs to reboot the concept but include istockphoto.com's vetting process for potential vendors.

<comment><USER9> One man's treasure is another man's knitted kitten bowtie. It's difficult to do a "curated" etsy when their core offering is basically "things not mainstream enough to be mass produced."

<comment><USER15> I'm not so sure about that. Istockphoto's model for keeping crap out of their stock photo offerings seems to work pretty solidly, and at minimum some form of curation would scrape off the resellers and the kind of crap that's so popular over on regretsy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ughhh, after the second pop-over ad I quit reading.

<comment><USER17> The second one didn't even have a close link.

<comment><USER18> Sorry about the popovers!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Etsy has John Allspaw, the guy who scaled Flickr. The man breathes scaling. He wrote the book on it! I realize he's an ops guy, but when you've got someone like him working for you, I'd say you've got a good chance of success.

[http://www.etsy.com/storque/etsy-news/john-allspaw-joins- the...](http://www.etsy.com/storque/etsy-news/john-allspaw-joins-the-etsy- team-6183/)

<comment><USER20> Did you even read the post? It's about scaling the business not scaling the technology.

<comment><USER19> Yes. My point isn't that Allspaw can add servers and whatnot, but that he's a VP at the company. At some point, you stop thinking about computers and start thinking about how the business grows, and I think that he can help in that regard.

<comment><USER21> The article's thesis seems to be that you can't actually -- or it's very difficult -- to run a successful business on etsy, particularly given etsy's requirement that everything be handmade. This in turn is bad for etsy, since sellers will eventually give up once they realize how little they're earning. I'm at a complete loss to see how your comments have anything to do with the article...?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> As someone who's spent time scaling sites, the problem isn't going to be if they can scale, its going to be will the management make it happen. Developers rarely do it right, and they'll need good management and oversight to pull it off. The ETSY devs I've met were pretty sharp, so I get the feeling they'll do better than most, but everyone needs a shove in the right direction.</comment>


Ask HN: Backordering a domain name - <AUTHOR>

I am looking to buy a domain name that's set to expire next week. I am scared to use a backordering service only to see them steal the domain name under my nose.<p>Has anyone ever successfully back ordered a name? Which service should I use or avoid? Or maybe there's a better way to do it? Thanks. <comment><USER2> I don't know if they get a jump on the registration vs. you doing it yourself.

Just figure out the exact moment it will expire and try to register it then.

(Likely it's set to auto-renew though and the existing owner's registrar will push that through before it expires.)

<comment><USER3> It's not quite that easy. Most registrars put the domains through a 30 day grace period, then there's still an additional delay before it's on the open market. Hard to find that "exact moment"

I don't know if they work, but I would definitely try to use a backordering service. I have a couple loaded up on GoDaddy but never had any get triggered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Backorder the name at the current registrar is my advice. I have bought names that way at Network Solutions and GoDaddy. They both have their own backordersystem (auction model).</comment>


Beinecke Library Digitized Gutenberg Bible - <AUTHOR> https://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3439073 <comment><AUTHOR> Should this get a (1454)? (Challenging Tomte, here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16444471](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16444471))</comment>


Ask HN: What was the verdict on PG's "Pending Comments"? - <AUTHOR>

Ask HN: What was the verdict on PG's "Pending Comments" feature?  I see over 800 comments in the thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761), but it doesn't seem like the feature is presently active on the site and I'm curious where things landed. <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7449857](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7449857)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks!</comment></comment>


Get to know Firebird in 2 minutes - <AUTHOR> http://www.firebirdnews.org/docs/fb2min.html

<comment><USER2> We had Interbase (which is Firedbirds predecessor) as our customer information and warehouse system. It's incredibly robust and (at least on Linux) quite fast. We chose it because it already supported triggers when Mysql did not, allowing us to put the complete business logic into the db rather than into desktop applications. Today I'd prefer Mysql (now that it also supports triggers) because it's faster, you get better support and it's default for most frameworks.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've always been intrigued by Firebird, but I've always wondered... who uses it? Does anybody know any medium to enterprise sized users of Firebird? The feature list is pretty impressive, but I'm still not sure why you'd choose it over MySQL or PostgreSQL, even after reading this list.

I guess licensing and footprint aren't that big of a deal to me. Perhaps that's enough for some niche of users?

<comment><AUTHOR> Who is using FB? <http://www.firebirdnews.org/?cat=9>

<comment><USER3> I appreciate the effort, honestly I do, but even though that page is entitled "Who is using FB?" it appears to be a list of firebird enhancements and how-to blogs. I'd kinda like to see "company foo.com chooses firebird as its portal's RDBMS," or "company XYZ uses firebird as its embedded database engine," and I can't say that I've ever seen anything like that. Although, in all honesty, I've never tried very hard to find that information. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Firebird: The Name Eternally Re-Used

<comment><USER5> What do you mean? There's the Pontiac car. And Mozilla temporarily used the name for the Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox project but changed because the database was already using the name.

<comment><USER4> Just joking! :)

<comment><USER5> Guess I need to turn up the sarcasm sensors!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Getting Past the Pie Chart - <AUTHOR> http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/getting_past_the_pie_chart/ <comment><USER2> 1000+ words about design without a single graph/chart?

<comment><USER3> Here you go:

[http://interface.fh- potsdam.de/infodesignpatterns/patterns.p...](http://interface.fh- potsdam.de/infodesignpatterns/patterns.php)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like Pie, so I like Pie Charts. Sometimes I Pie Chart things that aren't parts of a whole just to see them as Pie.

Tufte would understand... if he were a fat man.</comment>


How do I prevent people from cloning my Numbrosia puzzle? - <AUTHOR>

Are there any IP protections that might apply?<p>http://apps.facebook.com/numbrosia/ <comment><USER2> Nice thinly veiled attempt at spam, though I admit I like the game:

1) Why is it a Facebook app? I feel like people are making things into Facebook apps for the sake of making Facebook apps, even when there's really no good reason to.

2) You _really_ need to make it ajaxy, there's no reason to force a reload of the page every move.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1) because I think I will get more users that way

2) yes I agree</comment></comment>


Ask HN: An engineer's perspective on healthcare - <AUTHOR> Hi all,
I'm a long-time HN lurker, and I need some advice. I've just finished my undergrad in Electrical Engineering, with specializations in CS and Biomedical engineering. I want to spend two or so years in the industry, and then probably do a PhD or an MBA.
I've always been passionate about poverty alleviation and as a core component of that, healthcare. The problem is, I'm not sure how to go about applying my broad educational background in an effective manner: I can potentially work in biomedical devices, or I can do things more Computer Science/machine learning related in healthcare, or perhaps even in some other softer/less technical manner. I'm not sure what I should pivot myself towards, and I'm trying to solve that question.
Before I can figure out where I want to go (any advice on this is welcome as well!), I need to update my knowledge of the healthcare system. I was wondering if people have any recommendations on:
    1) Books with a general overview of the healthcare system, focusing on US but perhaps with some excursions into global healthcare.
    2) Books from an engineer's perspective on the healthcare industry, or something that covers predictions on the future of healthcare, including avenues of technical/healthcare innovation and legal/structural changes.
I know there are a lot of books out there about healthcare, but a lot of them seem to be about certain very specific issues, and not a general introduction. This book (http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118971086.html), for example, seems to be a type of book I'm looking for, but I can't find any review of this one anywhere online. I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations?
Thanks a bunch. <comment><USER2> Healthcare is corrupted by the influence of industry. There is a very good article on [http://www.mises.org](http://www.mises.org) called "100 years of medical robbery" that covers how the status quo of medical thought was established. There are some follow ups by the same author; also check his references. Mr. Griffin (iirc) has a video on YouTube about the industrialists' strategy for influencing medical schools' curriculum.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm sorry that I don't have any good advice for you but I do hope that someone here can help you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you by any chance involved in the medical/healthcare field at all? I'd guess not, but thanks for the concern!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you think of our DRY approach to job hunting? - <AUTHOR>

http://techresidents.com
Our goal is to make finding a new development job less painful by applying the Don't Repeat Yourself principle to job hunting.
Philosophy
* Developers should have the opportunity to present the best version of themselves.
Too often developers aren't given a fair shake in the early stages of the hiring process. Developers shouldn't be written off because they haven't attended a top school, worked for a prestigious company, or don't excel at technical trivia. We believe employers should form their initial impression of you, without bias, by listening to you discuss real-world topics of your own choosing.
* Developers should be able to explore new opportunities anonymously.
It's stressful enough finding a new job without having to worry about the backlash from your current employer discovering that you're looking elsewhere. Additionally, remaining anonymous during early stages will protect you from biases and allow you to be judged more objectively on what you have to say.
* We're getting paid, so should you.
We're beyond frustrated with state of hiring, and our mission remains to remove the pain from exploring new development jobs. But since we can't operate without revenue, we charge employers a recruitment fee when you land a job. We think it's only fair that you get a cut, so we'll pay you 20% of our recruitment fee as a signing bonus. <comment><USER2> Co-founder here. In case you're curious how exactly it works:

How it Works

1) Create an anonymous profile to let employers know about your skills and what you're looking for in your next opportunity.

2) Choose a chat topic from our library that truly allows you to showcase your talent.

Topics are based on real world software development and won't be found on any interview checklists.

3) Record audio chats (no video) alone or invite a fellow developer to join the conversation.

Record as many takes as needed until you're confident you nailed your answer.

4) Compose a highlight reel of your best chats to showcase yourself to employers.

5) Review interview offers from employers that like what they've heard.

There's no obligation to accept an offer

</comment><comment><USER3> So you do transcripts of these audio reels?

<comment><USER2> Currently we make the recorded audio from the chats available to employers for listening. Additionally, we allow you to associate talking points with your chat to help guide you while you record your chat, and to serve as a high level outline to employers listening back to your chat.

We have talked about making transcripts of the chats available in the future, but it's not on our immediate road map.</comment></comment>