How My School and District Failed its Students - <AUTHOR> http://www.anurbanteacherseducation.com/2011/02/tfa-alumnus-describes-barriers-to.html <comment><USER2> My solution? Make attendance voluntary by abolishing truancy laws. Disruptive students don't want to be there, and forcing them to go doesn't teach them anything.

Human beings can't be forced to think. This runs absolutely counter to all kinds of notions and traditions, but it's how nature is. Wishing, legislating and expecting that facts be otherwise won't work any better here than it would in the physical sciences (imagine how you might react to such a stance against thermodynamics or the inverse square law).

Edit: if you disagree, say _why_ instead of just voting me down.

<comment><USER3> _Make attendance voluntary by abolishing truancy laws_

I didn't downvote you, but I strongly disagree. I personally don't want to live in a society full of kids (did you see his percentages - up to 25%!!) that are considered unmanageable at age 12. If they are unmanageable at age 12, what do you think they are going to be at age 25? Angry, illiterate, jobless oh and yeah, still unmanageable. Or, in jail and unmanageable. Can you build enough jails for 25% of the population?

There are no easy answers to the problems of universal education, but let's not forget why it is there in the first place.

<comment><USER4> The purpose of universal education is to educate, not to provide free day care, much less to serve as a corrective institution for young people with behavior problems. Our education system is a failure because it is overburdened with non-educational mandates. In my very biased opinion, it is the most motivated students who are harmed the most by this. The difficult challenge of improving the behavior and attitude of angry and undisciplined individuals is not a goal the public schools should be given.

<comment><USER5> It very much is part of the purpose of our public education system to "serve as a corrective institution" for the behavioral problems of young people. A key reason we provide education is to ensure that children grow up to be contributors to society. It's folly to think that students that can't contribute despite public education would contribute without it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't agree with the notion that classroom discipline is the teacher's responsibility. If a child needs discipline, the child should be sent away to receive it. A teacher should be responsible for teaching, period.

Also, if a child commits a crime in school (vandalism, verbal assault, physical assault, disturbing the peace) and is found to be a threat to the learning environment then they should be suspended. It's simply a matter of giving some power back to the authorities. Right now the children know that the teachers are their bitches. Until that changes the fight can't be won. Especially in children who have a gang member mentality.

<comment><USER7> I agree about the first part; a teacher should be responsible for teaching, and other administrative staff for disciplinary issues. However, this requires (naturally) that there be funding in place for the necessary staff positions. As long as school funding is tied to local property taxes, there are going to be huge variations in the amount of spending per pupil, and staffing follows suit.

As for your second point, I think it is a gross simplification to say "It's simply a matter of giving some power back to the authorities." We _do_ need to give some power back to the authorities, but there's nothing simple about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you want a more visceral account, "The Corner" by David Simon is a non- fiction chronicle of the Baltimore drug culture's effect on the people who live in it. Simon spent about year (~1993) following and interviewing the people who lived on a specific drug corner in Baltimore; one of those he followed was a high-school-age kid whose description is much like this teacher's description of M.W.

There's also an HBO miniseries based on it (which I haven't watched, so I can't vouch), and Season 4 of The Wire is partially about a Baltimore inner- city school (The Wire is fantastic). Simon also spent a year embedded with the Baltimore police homicide division, which became a book, a TV serial (called Homicide), and informed much of The Wire.

Some people are commenting that the solution to the problems at these schools is to completely give up on the troublemakers; I don't think it would be that clear-cut for you after you read or watch these. The kids you give up on are the ones lost to the hardcore drug culture forever. Those same kids are the ones that perpetuate the problem- there's a terrible feedback loop going on.

</comment><comment><USER9> HN seems to have decided I've commented too much in this discussion, and that's probably true, but I want to make one more post to clarify my views before I leave this debate for others to carry forward.

In response to jmm, who suggests that by allowing kids to decide freely whether to go to school I am advocating, as he says, throwing some of them overboard: I really don't feel that that's an accurate description of my feelings about this topic. I think that kids are people, not slaves of the state or of their parents. I am not advocating simply abandoning kids who are not interested in attending school; instead, I'd like to see a variety of educational, vocational, and artistic services available for them, free of charge, which they can take advantage of whenever THEY come to the conclusion that they want to do so. I'd like those services to be easy to access, with no red tape involved, and I'd like them to be well publicized and well known within the community.

I simply don't understand how allowing kids the freedom to make their own decisions about what they want to learn and when they want to learn it can be anything but a good thing. Must everyone be subject to coercion and force from the earliest ages? Do we have to crush the genuine love of learning most children are born with under the boot of an oppressive school environment they have no choice but to be a part of?

My views on this topic are derived in part from my own experience, but they have also been shaped a great deal by the writings of John Holt. For those who are interested, I'd recommend How Children Fail as a great book to start with; it has really been influential in my thinking about education and the nature of school.

</comment><comment><USER10> What I don't understand about all this is why there isn't a way to use these _clearly failing_ schools for experiments in alternative styles of education. Say what you will about things like voluntary attendance, but when your school is descending into anarchy, it just seems like there's too little to lose not to go out on a limb.

The school my mom used to work at was rampant with corruption and ineptitude. It was taken over by the state BOE and three years later, nothing has changed. When the school falls into dire straits, why not offer it up as a test case for passionate researchers?

<comment><USER11> > _What I don't understand about all this is why there isn't a way to use > these clearly failing schools for experiments in alternative styles of > education._

As a resident New Yorker, I can answer this one: entrenched interests. There are a lot of people who have bought a lot of influence to achieve the status quo, and they don't really see what the problem is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sounds to me like the result of a lack of accountability. I see the same thing in many areas of the public sector in my country where responsibility is deferred in an infinite loop.

It's as frustrating to the those who use the system as to those who work in it.

</comment><comment><USER13> I come from a family of educators & private school owners, and if a teacher cannot handle a disruptive class, then we change the teacher. Children are ALWAYS disruptive. It's the natural state of things. Some teachers can solve the problem, and some can't. If a teacher cannot solve the problem, it's not the fault of the Government, or the Community, or the Principal or the Students. It's the fault of the teacher. It's her job to learn the techniques to handle such situations.

In our private schools, we simply swap out the teachers. In such schools where the teacher cannot be changed, one can ask an assistant to sit in, or send the teacher on more training courses.

A teacher is to train students, and part of that is making the students respect education enough to sit down and listen. If the teacher can't do that, then sorry, but that's not a good teacher. If the teacher realises that a particular class constellation does not work, then he or she should do something about it, not blame an invisible 'system'.

<comment><USER14> Your disruptive is most likely different from this teacher's disruptive. Unless your private school has the same requirements and policies of the public school system I find it difficult to see how your comparison and opinion holds any water whatsoever.

Most private schools that I have visited don't admit or will expel any student that is disruptive on a regular basis which would mean the teacher has a way to enforce policy and rules which is different from what the author of the post has to deal with. On top of that most kids that go to private schools have a much different home life than urban schools. It's just not a valid comparison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'll bet that one of the reasons that children in honors courses (AP, IB, etc.) do better and learn more than children in regular courses has nothing to do with the curriculum or the teachers of those courses, but is just due to the fact that they're surrounded by other motivated students and there aren't any disruptive students.

</comment><comment><USER16> PARENTING.

The root cause in all of these issues is parenting. If the parents don't bother to care about their kid's education, it's already lost. The education and school system is part of the problem, but you can trace the child's inability to learn back to the parents.

1) Parents dont care about the child's learning

2) The child realizes the parents dont care and so they mess around in class

3) Teacher and school has no authority to really enforce learning. Meaning, you can assign homework, you can punish them for not doing them, but beyond that, you can't force them to sit down to read and learn.

4) Student fails.

5) Parent is up set at the school system so they complain to the principle, and the school district

6) School district pressures principle, principle pressures teacher to water down the curriculum

7) FAILURE of the entire system

<comment><USER17> While I'm sure your premise is entirely correct, blaming parenting is essentially punting on the issue. It might be entirely accurate, but it doesn't help any, because it is one thing that can't be changed by the teacher or school administrator.

<comment><USER18> OK, but if teachers and administrators can't do more than write nasty notes in files and make kids sit in the corner, and we can't expect parents to discipline their kids, then any sort of educational reform targeted at those kids is basically trying to push a string.

This idea that a teacher can stand up in front of the class and say something so inspiring that it magically makes the goof-offs and the slackers want to be A+ students is great for a Hollywood movie, but completely unrealistic. On a 1-on-1 basis, sure that's probably possible if you're really good, and really can take the time. But if teachers had the power to inspire and move those troublemakers en masse with the power of their words without taking half their class time, then they wouldn't be teachers, they'd be world-class salespeople or winning politicians.

<comment><USER16> I completely agree with you. When I talk to people about the education system, little or no mention is made towards the parents. When it is in fact the parents that can actually do something. Meaning checking to see if your child is learning, how is he learning, where does he have dificulties, and why.

When a parent can understand at what level their child is at in their educational path, then they can make an impact. Meaning, if my child has problems just sitting down and absorbing information, they can go out and find answers.

One large part of why the educational system is so bad right now, is that parents are not taking responsibility for their child's education. They blame it on others.

<comment><USER17> Again, I think I am in total agreement with you and ZachPruckowski... I just don't see how we could make parent involvement part of the system as a whole.

I mean, maybe that really is it -- we have truancy laws where a parent can get in actual legal trouble if their kid doesn't go to school, perhaps there should be laws where a parent can actually get into trouble if their kid is a disruptive student. I have a hard time seeing such a system actually working, "can't legislate morality" and other platitudes, but it's a thought, I suppose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As someone from Kansas City, the alleged ineptitude of the school district in KCMO is widely-known. In fact, I would say the problems with the school district impacted the decision of my wife and I more than any other to buy a house across the state line in Kansas. We both continued to work in KCMO, we just knew we couldn't live there once we have children.

</comment><comment><USER19> The solution is simple - increase teacher salaries and have more computers in schools. It's worked for the last 30years

<comment><USER20> Sadly, no.

See, eg, [1] for a chart of teacher salaries vs inflation over time. Quoting the article: "[...] we also find dramatic erosion in relative teacher earnings since 1960." See also figure C, "Real weekly wage trends for teachers and others, 1979 - 2006". In short, teacher's have been taking a hit in the wallet for the privilege of teaching for 30-40 years. In fact, if you're familiar with employment in America, you'll know the quality of teachers has fallen as women have been able to find alternate careers; we used to have a surplus of talented, skilled women who entered teaching because they were unable to pursue alternate careers.

A big part of this is no doubt due to Baumol's cost disease [2], but the trend in wages is real nonetheless.

I'm not sure why people on HN in particular, with an IMO more entrepreneurial mindset than most, are surprised that quality tends to follow wages. In this case, away from education.

[1] <http://www.procon.org/sourcefiles/epi-teacher-pay.pdf>

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumols_cost_disease>

<comment><USER21> That wikipedia link should be <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease> .

When I was in school and played cards on the bus, sometimes we played capitalisim, a fun game if you were on the top of the heap. Invariably the lowest status role was named teacher. Next up was garbageman.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think the most immediately obvious solution to the problem of disruptive students is to separate them from the other students, and put them into a separate class. However, someone who enters that class at age 10 isn't going to learn anything, as the entire class is full of disruptive students, and they'll be stuck in the disruptive class for the rest of their schooling, after which they'll be released into society with few useful skills and a lot of problems. Also, very few good teachers will voluntarily work with the disruptive class.

One solution is to create a separate school with an educational model tailored to the problem, such as a military academy. This only works if there is a high enough population density to fill that school, the educational model actually works, and parents are willing to admit the problem and send their kids to that school.

There are a lot of disruptive students who are best served by going through the normal school system with a moderate amount of discipline when they act up. Many of these kids don't want to be in school, and would prefer to be at home playing video games, or barring that, in an easy, low-effort class. Allowing these kids to skip school, take easy classes, or putting them in a separate system risks allowing them to jeopardize their own future because of the impatience and short-term thinking common to almost all teenagers.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think this is where all the zero tolerance policies come from. If there is any disciplinary decision that is made where there is discretion by an administrator, there is an opportunity for a lawsuit. With zero tolerance, you remove discretion so you avoid lawsuits at the expense of unnecessarily disciplining students.

<comment><USER24> I am not a lawyer, but I do no think having the policy would in any way protect against a lawsuit. If anything, I would suspect it could make it easier for one to succeed because you could show that no due process was provided when a state actor delivered a non-judicial punishment to a minor.

<comment><USER19> You throw kid A out of the class for behaviour, but you don't throw kid B out because he is usually OK.

But then kid A's parents get mad - or think they can make some money - and it turns out that kid A is belgian/green skinned/three eyed/an FSM worshipper and you have a lawsuit. Or at least the threat of a lawsuit which can go away with a large enough payment.

Throw out all kids that break any rule and you have been perfectly fair

<comment><USER23> So the poorest parents in the whole school have a huge incentive to get their kid kicked out of the school for disciplinary problems, especially if they are a minority and can sue for a big settlement. Some people perceive that their most valuable commodity is to be damaged, such that they can sue for it.

In a poorer minority neighborhood near where I used to live I remember reading a report about a super market closing down a few years back -- when times were relatively good. They cited shoplifting and numerous slip and fall lawsuits against them as reasons for shutting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Honestly, looking back at myself in highschool, I was a little shithead. I became rebellious at a pretty early age due to my school district having incredibly strict policies, mostly because it was run by fundamentalists. The class where I believed I was the biggest cunt was my chemistry class, where my teacher would often push his evangelical beliefs into the curriculum : Earth is 6000 years old, evolution is a myth, stars are only there to corrupt people into evil, etc. The list goes on.

I'd often interrupt class and get into arguments with him because I called him out on this bullshit pretty regularly and frankly I just couldn't take him seriously even at that age. This was in a public school system in a small city in Texas, so I suppose it's kind of expected.

</comment><comment><USER26> I agree with the author. The problem that's unstated here is that schools have become state run low security prisons for children and adolescents. The idea that academic acheivements are the current focus of public schools is false. It's compliance training.

</comment><comment><USER27> I was talking to an Indian friend in grad school when he explained why schools in India were better than those in the U.S. He said it had to do with how our kids learned the alphabet with a song. He learned it by memory forward and backward. He later mentioned how a teacher in India might cane a child who didn't pay attention. That's when I became enlightened.

</comment><comment><USER28> The elephant in the room was race. I'd bet 90% of the problems were caused by kids of a particular race. Unfortunately many public discussions involving it devolve into demonization of the messenger or blame gaming.

My second point was that I suspect the easiest fix would be to adopt a zero tolerance policy or three-strikes-then-expelled. The harder solution, though it is better in the long term, is to do something that ensures that the parents take more responsibility and make better life choices and set a better example both for their own kids and their neighborhoods. Ultimately, solving this is not rocket science. Folks are just choosing, explicitly or implicitly, to not implement them. They then reap what they sow.

My third point is that it may be that some percentage of kids can never be made to behave properly (short of brain surgery or cognitive drug therapy, for example) and so we may have to adjust our system to accomodate. Arguably, we already have. If a child misbehaves enough they tend to end up dead or in prison.

<comment><USER29> "The elephant in the room was race. I'd bet 90% of the problems were caused by kids of a particular race. Unfortunately many public discussions involving it devolve into demonization of the messenger or blame gaming."

When 90% of a specific race statistically have a broken family with no father figure around, it's no wonder that the kids turn out the way they do. It's a vicious cycle.

Another problem is that because the kids are getting nothing at home, they would need tons extra attention in school. How can a teacher possibly fill the role of parent when she has many other students that also need the same kind of attention?

Until we can come to terms with things like this, the problems will never go away.

"The harder solution, though it is better in the long term, is to do something that ensures that the parents take more responsibility and make better life choices and set a better example both for their own kids and their neighborhoods."

This is the problem right here. It's the parents at home, but you can't force parents to do anything...and you probably won't ever be able to, unless we were under some sort of totalitarian dictatorship.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: App recommendations to draw software architecture - <AUTHOR>

This is a problem I've been looking for an optimal solution for a while. When I want to draw out a technical schema of a design (typically for a webapp example, controllers talking to views talking to databases), I don't have a very efficient clean program to do so.<p>What do you use? <comment><USER2> Omnigraffle is very nice but a bit costly.</comment>


Lyft looking to raise $500M in new funding at valuation of about $4B - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/18/business/dealbook/lyft-said-to-seek-dollar500-million-in-funding.html <comment><USER2> "At the Robin Hood Investors Conference in New York on Tuesday, Lyft said it expected to generate about $1 billion in annualized gross revenue next year, a figure that does not account for the cut of money the drivers take from each transaction."

Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't the driver's "cut" like 80%+? This seems pretty misleading

<comment><USER3> It doesn't sound particularly misleading to me. That's just what "gross" means. Gross is always way, way higher than net. You wouldn't subtract the wholesale cost from the gross income of a retail chain, you wouldn't subtract employee wages from the gross income of a software firm, and you wouldn't subtract contractor payments from Lyft.

<comment><USER4> Under generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), and their European equivalent, IFRS, a company generally cannot include in income payments it receives on behalf of others.

Lyft, and Uber, rely on the fiction that they are merely booking apps for drivers, so the fares belong to the driver, and Lyft and Uber are merely entitled to a portion of the fare for providing the booking service. At no time are they/were they entitled to the entire fare, so booking the entire fare as income flies in the face of good accounting--and, for publicly traded companies, the law.

The only reason startups do this is to artificially inflate their valuations. It's really not much different from cooking the books.

<comment><USER5> Do Lyft/Uber get to float the money before paying it to drivers? If they get a week of float then it's maybe(?) gross income that they can make quite a lot of money off of before paying out drivers.

<comment><USER6> From what I remember from an Uber driver, they get paid every Thursday. So I guess the money could float around for a bit before finally reaching the driver.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You're a supermarket, you sell stuff from vendors you buy from. You have gross income minus cost of goods sold.

You're a mall, you lease space to vendors. You have gross income minus expenses.

You're not a logistics provider but merely a platform that connects third party service providers to the customer. You tell everyone how much money you hold on to for the third party service providers as... gross income?

Lyft and Uber et all are more like PayPal, also playing the game of claiming to not be a bank and for awhile not wanting to be a licensed money transmitter.

Last PayPal quarterly earning report they reported $69.74B in payment volume, $2.26B net revenue, $377MM net profit.

That makes sense.

Here Lyft is saying their gross revenue is $2B. Kind of like how Groupon count all the eggs in their basket before paying out their merchant partners.

Maybe a better way to put it is total booking volume $2B, net revenue $400MM, then whatever net profit after expenses.

Valuing the business at 10x on $400MM can make sense. The bet is that Lyft can make more money within ten years by sustaining and increasing the dispatch volume or by increasing efficiency and decreasing costs.

</comment><comment><USER8> And here in India Ola has raised $500 M!

[http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small- biz/startups/ola-r...](http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small- biz/startups/ola-raises-500-million-from-tiger-global-softbank-group-and- others/articleshow/49826137.cms)

Seems like this are days for taxi startups.

</comment><comment><USER9> $1 billion next year. Assume 60% YoY growth -> doing about $600mm this year? Say average $12 a ride...that's 50m rides this year -> 137k rides a day/65 cities served -> 2100 rides/city/day.

That's definitely lower than I expected.

<comment><USER10> In san francisco, there are about 200-400 or so drivers and each takes about 20 rides a day, and this is of course the sity with the biggest volume.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Maybe they'll finally come to New Haven where they blanket MTA trains with ads but leave Yale students with only Uber!

</comment><comment><USER12> Ah, Uber took money from Google Ventures, that's why Uber is listed as an option in my Google Maps app.

<comment><USER13> Uber started showing up in Google Maps on my phone when I installed the Uber app on my phone. I just assumed there was an interface whereby apps could tell Google Maps "I can get people places".

<comment><USER12> I don't have any ride-sharing apps installed. Uber just showed up as an option in the directions section below car, walking and public transport, along with an estimated fare cost and 'first ride is free' offer.</comment></comment></comment>


Why the Oatmeal is wrong about Net Neutrality (and probably you too) - <AUTHOR> http://tenscores.com/daily/business/net-neutrality-oatmeal-wrong-201411140700/

<comment><USER2> This is the most obscene FUD I've seen in a long time.

Whoever wrote this should be proud of themselves. It's a work of art.</comment>


I just finished implementing an image processing service with a URL-based API - <AUTHOR> http://urlimg.com

<comment><USER2> I wrote a PHP script along a similar line.

Example:

[http://fritzw.com/resizer.php?w=80&h=30&c=0&f=ht...](http://fritzw.com/resizer.php?w=80&h=30&c=0&f=http://ycombinator.com/images/yc500.gif)

Code:

<http://fritzw.com/Programming/do/resize>

Doesn't have as many options but great for developers who don't want to open PS every time a client hands you a new photo to throw on the site.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting idea for a service. I wrote an Apache module that is very similar.

<http://code.google.com/p/moddims/></comment>


SEO Fail: Figuring out why I can't get my content into Google - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@devNoise/seo-fail-figuring-out-why-i-cant-get-my-content-into-google-6ca6c7a64b51

<comment><USER2> Great detective work hunting down the culprit!</comment>


Ask HN: Adblocker usb wi-fi adapater/hotspot - <AUTHOR>

A product idea for ad-blocker : create a teeny tiny USB Wi-Fi adapter, which also acts as a WiFi hotspot that filters all ads. How tough is to create one such device? <comment><USER2> Privoxy HTTP proxy (though it is HTTP only) will help</comment>


SpaceX launch footage was taken down thanks to bogus copyright claim - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/false-natgeo-copyright-claim-took-nasas-launch-video-down-this-weekend/ <comment><AUTHOR> > National Geographic also covered the launch, and its footage incorporated > some of the NASA content. Then things got stupid.

> By Sunday, the archival NASA video was no longer available to view, Twitter > users spotted, because of a copyright claim from National Geographic.</comment>


Adventures in WhatsApp DB – extracting messages from backups - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@1522933668924/extracting-whatsapp-messages-from-backups-with-code-examples-49186de94ab4 <comment><USER2> Don't they get encrypted on iOS? The last few times I tried to extract stuff from my Android phones, it turned out the SQLite databases were encrypted (AES-something IIRC) and getting them decrypted was a pain in the ass (trying to cobble together Python code and keys from the interwebs).

<comment><USER3> If you just need the messages, without being interested in the crypto, you can export it via email.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> From a quick glance I'd guess ZPHASH is literally a [https://www.phash.org/](https://www.phash.org/) for fast comparison and lookup.</comment>


Ask HN: Cloud Based App like Yammer for collaboration with different domains - <AUTHOR>

Is there an application like Yammer that can be used for users from different domains? We want to use it for our hobby group. but we all work at different companies. <comment><USER2> I noticed yesterday an "External Networks" link inside Yammer. I don't know how long it's been there, but it's similar to what you are describing.

As described on Yammer: "External Networks are separate Yammer networks used to communicate with external groups, like customers, partners, contractors, and fans of [company]."

The drawback is that an existing Yammer domain would "own" or have control of that network. I know it's probably not exactly what you were looking for, but it might be one way to get to use Yammer istelf.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just register a domain and hand out email addresses at this domain. Using google apps you can get away with just the domain reg. fee.

<comment><AUTHOR> unfortunatly we have more then 15 users working on non for profit projects, and wanted better features then the basic google groups

<comment><USER3> My 9.99 $ hosting provides infinite email accounts/redirects. Maybe...?</comment></comment></comment>


Fukushima's Reactor #2 is far more radioactive than previously realized - <AUTHOR> https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/243904-fukushimas-reactor-2-far-radioactive-previously-realized-no-sign-containment-breach <comment><USER2> This is _bogus_. The new, higher readings are from areas _never measured before_ [0]; levels are falling consistently.

[0] [http://blog.safecast.org/2017/02/no-radiation-levels-at- fuku...](http://blog.safecast.org/2017/02/no-radiation-levels-at-fukushima- daiichi-are-not-rising/)

<comment><AUTHOR> If you fully read the article:

>One thing I want to note at this point is these findings are being misreported across the internet as evidence Fukushima's radiation output is "spiking" or "soaring." This is not the case.

>The radiation levels within Reactor #2's containment vessel have been largely unknown for years, due to the difficulty of getting proper readings from remote equipment in the first place</comment></comment>


Who Are the Top Influencers in Social Media? - Forbes - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/haydnshaughnessy/2011/12/02/who-are-the-top-10-influencers-in-social-media/ <comment><USER2> Forbes might be the worst publication on earth. -just saying.</comment>


Bayesian Informal Logic and Fallacy (2003) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/2003-korb.pdf

<comment><USER2> The actual discussion of fallacies starts on pdf page 11 / paper page 51.

I found the discussion of Bayesianism before that to be confusing and long- winded, and I am a Bayesian.

</comment><comment><USER3> Better PDF: [http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~korb/pubs/fallacy.pdf](http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~korb/pubs/fallacy.pdf)</comment>


What's New in Unicode 10.0 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.emojipedia.org/whats-new-in-unicode-10/ <comment><USER2> > the code points required for new emoji support are now considered final, and > stable to be included in updates from major vendors such as Apple, Google, > Microsoft or Samsung.

Didn't see any Japanese brands in that list.

<comment><USER3> Japan moved on to elaborate kaomoji and LINE stickers a while ago. Unicode emoji are downright uncool (dassai) by today's standards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ah, the UK gets separate flags for England, Scotland, and Wales... maybe the Unicode Consortium know something about the state of the union that we don't... :)

<comment><USER5> > Flags for England, Scotland and Wales are part of Emoji 5.0 and not shown > here as they don't require new code points.

Apparently Unicode Inc. isn't concerned with flag emoji at all. This 'Emoji 5.0' is a completely independent standard.

Personally, I prefer reading about Unicode updates from [http://babelstone.blogspot.com/](http://babelstone.blogspot.com/) ; it doesn't mix up details like those, and covers additions beyond sensationalist fluff like emoji.

<comment><USER6> Isn't concerned? Unicode has had "regional indicators" since Unicode 6.0, and those typically get shown as flags ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Indicator_Symbol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Indicator_Symbol))

Also note that [http://www.unicode.org/emoji/charts/emoji- released.html](http://www.unicode.org/emoji/charts/emoji-released.html) lists the flags for England, Scotland, and Wales under "Flags/subdivision-flag".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Shouldn't that be "Unicode \u0031\u0030\u002E\u0030" ?

</comment><comment><USER8> I've considered unicode not fit for purpose for a long time now. Things like "emoji" do not belong in it.

<comment><USER9> Emoji are incredible.

Up until now, the written word has been primarily used to convey mental state from one person to another. Emoji (and cruder emoticons before them) are the first time that text has been widely used to convey _emotional state_. Yes, they have issues — they can be ambiguous and they can differ subtly between intended and understood meaning, especially between different platforms. But early forms of the written word were just as bad (some might argue they still are).

In a short time we've evolved these new concepts from crude repurposing of punctuation to ambiguous yellow faces to skin-tone selectable faces, and now others are able to be formed with bigrams. All within a decade or two. The rate of adoption, experimentation, and advancement of what amounts to effectively an entirely new form of human communication is incredible.

Groan all you want, but 10 years from now, emoji (or their derivatives) will be as fundamental a form of communication as alphabetic text. Twenty years from now, and proper use for formal and informal contexts will be taught in school.

Plain text will seem outdated as telegram stop I for one can't wait stop

<comment><USER10> It's simply not true that "emoji are the first time that text has been widely used to convey emotional state". It's just done it with words rather than cartoonish face icons. Almost from the beginning text has conveyed emotional state. Read any of the biblical psalms ("Have mercy on me, O God!") or other emotion-conveying passages in the Bible ("Jesus wept"). And other texts, ancient and modern, convey emotional state too -- all the time: most poems, most fiction, and a lot of non-fiction.

As for your other claim that emoji "will be as fundamental a form of communication as alphabetic text" in 10 years, I'm pretty skeptical about that, but I guess time will tell. I for one very much appreciate the written word, and hope that my books aren't filled with yellow faces anytime soon.

<comment><USER9> Key to my point was "widely". I should have also clarified that it's the _author 's_ emotional state, and that it's the emotional state as it pertains to the text.

Many people send emoji with nearly every cluster of related sentences. Both the frequency we communicate our emotions and the granularity of doing so have skyrocketed in the past five years alone.

Edit: You may appreciate the written word as-is, but consider that emoji have dramatically increased the expressiveness of written text. Historically, written text has often been misinterpreted due to lack of contextual information. Was the person joking? Were they serious but it's not really a big deal? Was something said in anger, sorrow, or joy? Emoji are still a crude tool, but they're a marked improvement over the previous situation where people left these context clues out of their messages entirely.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Predictive Policing Startup Publishes Code Online, Seeks to Address Bias - <AUTHOR> https://www-govtech-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/www.govtech.com/civic/Predictive-Policing-Startup-Publishes-Code-Online-Seeks-to-Address-Bias.html?AMP <comment><USER2> I believe their because problem would be the data rather than the algorithms.</comment>


Confessions of a Xinjiang Camp Teacher - abc-xyz https://thediplomat.com/2020/08/confessions-of-a-xinjiang-camp-teacher/ <comment><AUTHOR> More people should read this article</comment>


Hello, and welcome to libh2o - <AUTHOR> https://powerdns.org/libh2o/ <comment><USER2> I want to find the guy who wrote this documentation :

"H2O is a powerful web server used and developed by Fastly" \- Ok.

"H2O is a new generation HTTP server that provides quicker response to users with less CPU utilization when compared to older generation of web servers" \- Great

This is where it becomes cringy : "H2O as a web server is very impressive and is seeing more and more use"

more

"I have used more web server frameworks than is reasonable. libh2o is by far the most impressive effort "

"The H2O maintainers are incredibly friendly and helpful."

I scrolled half the page and still doesn't provide any useful information.

If you happen to write or own any documentation. Please don't use filler use marketing language. Please.

<comment><USER3> Hi Rajesh, thank you for your thoughtful critique of my documentation efforts! I took a look at the sentences that are hurting you. The first part is from H2O's mission statement, which is clearly quoted. H2O is very impressive and is seeing more and more use. The h2o maintainers are indeed very friendly and helpful. But perhaps that is because I approached them with respect and did not hate them for their mission statement? We may never know. If you have anything useful to add, the document can be edited through [https://github.com/ahupowerdns/hello- libh2o](https://github.com/ahupowerdns/hello-libh2o)

<comment><USER2> Thank you very much for replying. I will take a look at the docs & github repo more closely and provide suggestions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> h2o certainly delivers on its promise of performance. In terms of request routing and HTTP fundamentals, it's among the fastest [1]. Check out the h2o implementation of the TechEmpower Fortunes test [2] to get a feel for something slightly more complex.

[1] [https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r17&hw=...](https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r17&hw=ph&test=plaintext)

[2] [https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/blob/mast...](https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/blob/master/frameworks/C/h2o/src/fortune.c)

<comment><USER5> I'm a little surprised to see it performing worse than some Go, Java, and C# webservers. I wonder why that is (presumably less optimized)? Not that it matters since the HTTP server is not going to be the bottleneck of any real application. Still, a curiosity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How does h2o compare to Caddy? I like the ease of use of caddy.

</comment><comment><USER7> Well, now I'm confused. I've been using this h2o server for a year now: [https://h2o.examp1e.net/](https://h2o.examp1e.net/)

Methinks there may be a naming issue here.

EDIT: So I clicked around and it looks like the same thing. Perhaps a collaboration. I need to further investigate.

<comment><USER8> libh2o is a library, h2o is a full fledged webserver using libh2o. They are both made by the same people and released together.

Having all the core features in a library allow any developer to use libh2o to easily add a webserver to their program.

note: this is explained in the first part of the link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is literally just a text document.

Why do I see a blank page unless I enable JavaScript? :(

<comment><USER10> Answer is in the footer: [http://casual-effects.com/markdeep/](http://casual- effects.com/markdeep/)

Those who want the text can just View Source I guess.

<comment><USER11> > Markdeep is a technology for writing plain text documents that will look > good in any web browser, whether local or remote.

Funny thing is that it doesn't look good at all on my Android phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Anyone using h2o in production and can give some insight?

<comment><USER7> I've been using h2o for about a year for several clients in my web dev business. It's fast, build for H/2, built-in security that's optional in other servers, lightweight and so on.

I was taken by surprise by this as shown in my other comment so I need to read more to see what happened here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "libh2o is written in C"... Somewhat sad to see that in this day and age.

<comment><USER14> What is sad about using C? I'm using plenty of C programs/applicactions/tools each day which work great!

<comment><USER13> It works, there's no question about that. But it is also a language that's obviously very hard to write correct code in, considering the myriads of CVEs out there. Since we've got languages like Rust now, you don't really need to sacrifice performance for security anymore, which is why it's sad to see a project that could have "gone with the times" instead going with the old-but- tried approach.</comment></comment></comment>


Major Global Retailers Begin Accepting Bitcoin. Is This Why the Price Is Rising? - <AUTHOR> https://www.toks.tech/major-global-retailers-begin-accepting-bitcoin-is-this-why-the-price-is-rising/ <comment><USER2> This title is misleading. Big retailers including Whole Foods and Caribou Coffee now accept Flexa payments, which uses Flexacoin. Flexa itself accepts Bitcoin, Ether, Bitcoin Cash, and Gemini(?).

I was confused as to how retailers would be supporting Bitcoin with it's very slow confirmation times.

As far as I know, I thought the bitcoin price rise was due to Tether initially, and now more hype from itself rising.

[0]: [https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/13/18617554/flexa- cryptocurr...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/13/18617554/flexa- cryptocurrency-bitcoin-etherium-whole-foods-gamestop-nordstrom-flexacoin)

[1]: [https://medium.com/flexa/introducing- flexacoin-b4c8099e3a91](https://medium.com/flexa/introducing- flexacoin-b4c8099e3a91)</comment>


Building a Completely Reversible Computer - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.08715 <comment><USER2> OT: when I click on this, researchgate claims "People who read this publication also read 'Is minimal hepatic encephalopathy completely reversible following liver transplantation?'

I don't believe them.

<comment><USER3> Maybe someone was searching for "completely reversible" and got intrigued? But I guess a recommender system is the more likely explanation.

<comment><USER4> Not a recommender system or anything that intelligent. This is basically a keyword search of the paper titles. Even something as simple as term-frequence analysis would place the two papers far apart.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A couple questions:

1\. How does "reversible" here apply to encryption algorithms? In a sense the encryption key is forgotten, but with enough computing power it can be derived from the output (at least for certain encryption methods). So, in a sense no information is lost.

2\. If two separate computers perform the same reversible operation, but one in reverse, are the two computers (if considered as one system) consuming no energy? Or must the operations be performed on the same computer sequentially?

If the system of two computers is valid, then does that mean that somehow certain operations / calculations _produce_ energy and others _consume_ it?

I realize both these questions are somewhat nonsensical, so I clearly am missing something fundamental about this theory.

<comment><USER6> Reversible (in the paper's sense) is more about the paths information takes than whether it's recoverable in principle. Lossless compression is reversible, but a reversible computer performing it would still need to have storage equal to the size of the entire original data.

It's also important to note that the fact that you are doing calculations isn't the _direct_ cause of energy consumption. Landhauer's principle is a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, which mandates certain heat losses in certain situations but doesn't tell you anything about how they happen. The question of what actually causes the second law of thermodynamics to hold at the level of fundamental interactions is called Loschmidt's paradox, and there's not really a consensus as to whether we have an answer.

<comment><USER7> " it would still need to have storage equal to the size of the entire original data."

I think it's worse than this. You need the intermediate steps as well. So, for every and/or type calculation which looks like multiple inputs one output, you need to keep all the input bits.

Feynman has an interesting chapter on this in his lectures on computation, including a cool billiard ball computer (a la Ed Fredkin I think).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> See also a type system and programming language for reversible computations: [http://gradworks.umi.com/35/87/3587675.html](http://gradworks.umi.com/35/87/3587675.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> What kind of applications would this actually be useful for? I don't think I really understand the benefit(s) here.

<comment><USER10> The benefit of a reversible computer is that there is no minimum amount of energy it must dissipate as heat in order to perform its computations.

Every time a bit of information is erased, a certain amount of energy must be dissipated as heat. A reversible computer doesn't (have to) erase information.

Reversible computing is energy-aware computing taken to its logical extreme.

<comment><USER9> I get that. The concept of saving energy is what I do understand.

What I don't understand is what kind of applications this could actually be used for. Given the (by-design) limitations of such a system, how would it be actually usable? What real-world scenarios would want this and be able to utilize it?

<comment><USER11> Physics simulations. I work in drug design, and my field would be enormously benefited by this. Quantum mechanics calculations are naturally reversible.

<comment><USER6> The interior of the computation is reversible, but the measurement performed at the end most definitely is not. If it were, quantum computers would be able to solve NP-complete problems trivially, and complexity theorists would get pissed that physicists were holding out on them for decades.

<comment><USER12> Can you expand on this?

<comment><USER6> Sure. I'll use the quantum circuit model of quantum computation since it removes a lot of non-essential details.

A quantum circuit is analogous to an idealized digital one, in that it is composed of gates with (possibly multiple) inputs and outputs, hooked together by "wires" that "carry" quantum states. However the gates aren't able to perform arbitrary operations; they can only multiply the inputs by unitary matrices to produce the outputs. These kind of matrices are always invertible, so none of the gates can "lose" any information the way some digital gates do. You also can't hook one output to multiple inputs, though you can ignore an output if you want.

However if you want to do some sort of computation whose output makes it into your brain (or a classical computer) you need to measure one or more of the output states. With digital circuits this is trivial; with quantum circuits you have to decide how you want to make the measurement (essentially along what "axis" between zero and one), and the output is in general probabilistic based on the angle between the measurement axis and the actual value. You also only get to do one measurement per output per instance of computation; the original output state will be replaced by the measured value which will usually not be the original output state, and all the intermediate states will already be consumed by the computation itself.

This is why most quantum algorithms are probabilistic. Shor's algorithm (the RSA breaking one) can actually fail even with an ideal quantum computer. However the likelihood of failure is small enough that running the computation a few times is enough to get the right answer with high probability (and it's easy to check if the output is right).

You could take any computable function that takes in N bits, apply it to a superposition of all 2^N possible inputs (encoded as N qubits) with about the same level of effort it takes to apply it to only one classical input. However there's no measurement which can recover the 2^N different outputs in one shot, or find the input associated with a specific output value. Most of the ingenuity in designing quantum algorithms comes in smuggling data out of quantum states by cleverly causing interference to push the possible output values into alignment with your measurement axis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So reversible computing requires less energy not more right? Last I heard it is damn hard to forget information.

<comment><USER14> In theory yes, the catch is that you're not allowed to forget information. For instance, you cannot use an "AND" gate, because a result of 0 would be ambiguous, but you can use the Toffoli gate [1] which takes three inputs and produces three outputs, mapping (a,b,c) to (a,b,c^(a&b)).

But what happens to the outputs you don't need? They do need to go somehere. A reversible circuit ends up having a lot of unused outputs which need to be erased if the circuit is to be reused. In essence, we have traded a heatsink for a bitsink, but they are essentially the same thing.

I don't see reversible computing as categorically different from regular computing. It's regular computing, with careful and detailed heat management.

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

<comment><USER15> I wonder if the "bitsink instead of heatsink" problem might be somewhat mitigable.

So, we are just pushing our 0s and 1s around, instead of permanently destroying and re-creating them. As reversible logic is as universal as, say, NAND logic - wouldn't it be possible to sort the unused output bits of any gates into two pools for 0s and 1s [1] and use these pools for any constant inputs that are needed in the logic? So that we would only have to "create" any new 0s and 1s when one of these two pools runs dry?

[1] E.g. a sorting buffer with 0s at one end and 1s at the other. Or does sorting necessarily mean we are sorting unknown bits at the cost of mixing known bits (constant gate inputs)?

<comment><USER16> Sorting is not reversible, at least if your output is no larger than your input. [0,1] and [1,0] both sort to [0,1], so you'd already need 1 extra bit to unsort 2 bits.

I don't see how it would help anyway, but maybe I'm misunderstanding your suggestion. The state of these unwanted outputs needs to be kept around, if you know they will be 0 or 1 then the state is already implicit in the machine and the output isn't actually necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Are there limitations for a reversible computer? Could this run Firefox someday?

<comment><USER18> It is only capable of reversible operations. A completely reversible computer could not interact with you.

This paper goes long about how you can irreversibly initialize such a computer, run it, and then irreversibly read its results, and how much power you can save doing that.

In practice the computers people could build were always slow and inefficient, nothing comparable to the computers we are used to have (not even to the usual microcontrollers).

<comment><USER6> It's also worth noting that even low-power chip designers would laugh at worrying about nkT losses from throwing bits away. Our technology is very far away from the thermodynamic limit for irreversible computers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Here [https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.08715](https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.08715) is a link to the same article that might be a little easier to use.

</comment><comment><USER20> what is meant by reversible?

<comment><USER21> Logically (and therefore thermodynamically) reversible. By Landauer's principle, the only reason a computer _must_ emit heat (and therefore use energy) is to perform irreversible operations. Therefore, if you want a computer that (potentially) uses the minimum energy, it needs to be reversible in this sense.

An irreversible operation is anything that maps many (possible) states to the same state. Setting a bit to zero is irreversible (because it destroys the information about what bit was there previously). An AND gate is irreversible (because both TF and FT map to F). A NOT gate is reversible (because you can infer the input from the output.)

There are universal reversible gates (Toffoli and Fredkin gates are examples, but there are many others), so you can (theoretically) build a (usable) computer whose logical operations are completely reversible.

<comment><USER22> Does this imply that physical entropy and informational entropy are the same?

Does it imply the computer would not give off heat? Or that a significant amount of the heat generated by a computer is due to information loss?

<comment><USER21> >Does this imply that physical entropy and informational entropy are the same?

It does, and there is a very strong (but not universally accepted) case that they are the same thing: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_in_thermodynamics_and_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_in_thermodynamics_and_information_theory)

Great lay article about it: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/o5/the_second_law_of_thermodynamics_...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/o5/the_second_law_of_thermodynamics_and_engines_of/)

(Side note: I've long thought you can derive Carnot efficiency based on information-theoretic arguments about the information contained in knowing only the temperature difference between a heat source and a sink.)

>Does it imply the computer would not give off heat? Or that a significant amount of the heat generated by a computer is due to information loss?

Basically, yes. You can't avoid the heat emission from setting a 0 to a 1 on that computer's storage medium, but you would avoid the loss from any of the intermediate computations that typically make CPUs so hot.

<comment><USER23> I'm not the person who was asking, but thanks for the insightful comments. Makes sense.

Wouldn't a reversible computer that executes need to take up an exponentially large amount of physical space as it executes?

That might work for small problems but it doesn't seem like it would scale. Or rather, it would scale to fill the known universe.

Sorry I haven't really dug into the attached articles yet, but I will.

<comment><USER21> See the thread about the asymptotic penalties: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14151390](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14151390)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What are the limitations to a completely reversible computer? I'm guessing it's still Turing complete, but do you pay a cost in terms of asymptotic complexity? I'm guessing you can make a program reversible trivially by doing something like making everything immutable and only ever appending new data, but of course that's extremely inefficient in terms of memory. Of course, I might be missing the core concept here.

<comment><USER21> AIUI, it's just a linear penalty because, at worst, you have to run each computation backwards to "uncompute it".

That's under the (necessary) assumption that you don't even try to avoid erasure operations that need for their own sake rather than as an intermediate step.

<comment><USER25> It is a bit more complicated then that. The only penalty to time is a constant factor if you are willing to use space proportional to the computation time. I did a bit of work on how to do time-space trade-offs in reversible circuits in my masters thesis [http://hdl.handle.net/10012/10949](http://hdl.handle.net/10012/10949).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> So does this mean you can move the entropy cost around? For stack or 3D computing moving the heat cost to directly heatsinked surfaces would be useful.

</comment><comment><USER27> Direct link to paper at arXiv, [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.08715.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.08715.pdf)

<comment><USER28> Link to the abstract: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.08715](https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.08715)

Generally, it is better to link to the abstract than to the PDF. If the paper gets revised the abstract page page's PDF link will point to the latest version of the paper (with links available to prior revisions). The direct PDF link will remain stuck with the old version.

<comment><USER27> Because I the find abstracts of readable, clear, and interesting papers are often indistinguishable from unreadable and dull papers, I prefer the paper itself to its abstract...at least in terms of Hacker News...I am long since reading scholarly papers for academic purposes. If someone wants to read the abstract, it's right there at the beginning of the paper anyway.

<comment><USER29> Abstracts are short enough that they can be inlined into a hackernews comment directly:

> A critical analysis of the feasibility of reversible computing is performed. > The key question is: Is it possible to build a completely reversible > computer? A closer look into the internal aspects of the reversible > computing as well as the external constraints such as the second law of > thermodynamics has demonstrated that several difficulties would have to be > solved before reversible computer is being built. It is shown that a > conventional reversible computer would require energy for setting up the > reversible inputs from irreversible signals, for the reading out of the > reversible outputs, for the transport of the information between logic > elements and finally for the control signals that will require more energy > dissipating into the environment. A loose bound on the minimum amount of > energy required to be dissipated during the physical implementation of a > reversible computer is obtained and a generalization of the principles for > reversible computing is provided.

It can save readers a click in deciding if they want to go for the whole paper or not. Think of the abstract as an upper bound on whether the paper is interesting or not. A paper could possibly be less interesting than its abstract, it is much less likely that it is more interesting than its abstract unless the author really messed up.

<comment><USER27> Personally, I usually click on links based on the title more often than based on the comments. But I know other people have different habits. With a direct link to the PDF, the abstract is at the top of the PDF for anyone who wants to read it.

For me personally, if I have the paper, I skip the abstract and read the introduction because it is more interesting and I don't feel a duty to bore myself reading the abstract. Here, I thought the title was interesting enough to click on the link and the paper interesting enough to provide a link to the less noisy original.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Map of All Undersea Internet Cables - <AUTHOR> http://world-secure-channel.com/uploads/map_cables(1).jpg

<comment><USER2> whats that island on top of Australia that has no cables going to it?

<comment><USER3> This island?: <http://images.google.com/images?q=papua+new+guinea+australia></comment></comment>


What's So Evil About Mono? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.linuxtoday.com/blog/2008/10/whats-so-evil-a.html

<comment><USER3> My problem with mono is that few apps are really compatible with it unless they were designed specifically for mono. Yet the existance of mono in any state allows microsoft to advertise .NET as cross platform. Look at what happened this some with nbcolympics.com as a warning of the danger.

Besides Sun really has a cross platform ecosystem with 1st party support of Linux and it is not that embraced, why bring another stack in that is inferior? Mono provides little that Java doesn't and there Linux support doesn't make you feel like a 2nd class citizen.

<comment><USER4> > Besides Sun really has a cross platform ecosystem with 1st party support of > Linux

You may think so now, but for a long time, Sun didn't allow distributors to include Java in their repositories. If you wanted Java, you had to go download it yourself. And all your users did, too, whether from Sun or from the JRE you bundled with your app. In other words, if you chose Java, you also chose bloat and a tiny userbase. Not to mention, Java is a second-class citizen on the Mac. You never know what's going to happen between Apple and Sun.

Another obvious candidate, Python, was already on everyone's machines. But to be cross-platform, you have to code carefully and ask your users to find/install GTK2 and dependencies on Windows. With Python, the bloat (from a user's POV) is only confined to Windows.

Perl is widely available, but not really cross-platform. They're still struggling with Neopolitan Perl to support Windows without relying on the goodness of ActiveState.

So Java becoming useful has been about 5-8 years too late, and it's still beholden to Apple on one platform. Other alternatives also suck, so the FOSS world has continued using C/C++. Without a clear winner, what's the point of switching languages?

And as far as cross-platform goes, even if something was perfectly cross- platform, I wonder if FOSS developers would support it. Projects like Inkscape are torn between the increased userbase from Windows, and the increased tech support for windows that those users would require, when the developers often don't have Windows machines to develop and test on.

<comment><USER5> > _They're still struggling with Neopolitan Perl to support Windows without > relying on the goodness of ActiveState._

I think Strawberry Perl has solved the pain of installing Perl on Windows. `cpan` actually works out of the box since the installation includes `gcc` and `make`. (I just wish it wouldn't automatically install to `c:\strawberry`.)

<comment><USER4> Interesting. I see it's finally out of beta. I would even try it if I were still stuck in win32.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _"... The Samba project, like Mono, provides a cross-platform alternative to closed Microsoft technologies. It is equally vulnerable to the (increasingly toothless) Microsoft patent threats and arbitrary changes in the protocols. Yet Samba is admired ..."_

It's not evil, just !C. Part of the reason I have problems with Mono is the choice of language the libs are written. The applications are first rate but I hate the fact I have to download a bucket load of extras ( _"in the past - <USER2> comes standard with Ubuntu"_ ) to run say great bits of software like Tomboy. It rubs against the grain of gnu's C bias ( _"are there mono-bindings for c-based apps?"_ ) Now Gnome desktop and it's libraries created by the same team thats another story.

<comment><USER7> You might find it interesting that Tomboy was written in mono with the goal to force a discussion on how viable it was as a platform

 _I also had a political agenda. I wanted the question of Mono or Not to be brought forward and answered seriously, instead of foundering in the grey waters of FUD. I didn't honestly care about the outcome, just that there was one. I thought a killer Mono-based app would push the issue._ [1]

[1]: <http://www.beatniksoftware.com/blog/?p=84>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I tried mono myself this summer for quite a complex web front end/back end application written in .Net on Windows. What I found was:

1) the core mono libraries are extremely good, I was able to drop the binaries on Linux and get to work immediately 2) projects on top of the core libraries and requiring integrating with other services (web servers like Apache, nginx) can turn out a nightmare. While I managed to setup everything on Cent OS and Ubuntu, nothing was really working as it should

So, personally I'm a big fan of mono and already looking for trying some winforms stuff there, but ... mono needs more resources I guess to get polished

</comment><comment><USER9> If you're an end-user or a vendor with .Net portability or coexistence requirements, then nothing. You simply want Mono to work, and to work right. Or you're porting code out of .Net.

If you're not using .Net, then most folks don't care about Mono.

Or you're a partisan of some flavor, and of which we seem to have a surfeit.

Nothing to see. Move along.</comment>


Truck driver invents new tires that let you drive sideways - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/30/truck-driver-invents-new-tires-that-let-you-drive-sideways.html <comment><USER2> As interesting as this might be, what problem exactly is it trying to solve?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, it would be really useful to me for my truck I use to deliver portable buildings. As my truck and trailer are 40 feet long, it sometimes takes some jockeying to line the trailer up to the building to load. If I could have either the trailer wheels shift sideways or the truck shift sideways, it would be much easier.

<comment><USER2> The design seems only suitable for low-speed operations. So for your use case, it might work.

But I see this as solving one problem and introducing three more, e.g. would this design be safe for cruising speed (>60km/h) or cornering, and how would the tyre wear out uniformly over time?

 _PS. Why the downvote? It was a genuine question._</comment></comment></comment>


Navy Reports Describe Encounters with Unexplained Flying Objects - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/us/politics/navy-ufo-reports.html <comment><USER2> There should be like a $2M fine for releasing a weather balloon which is later determined to have caused a UFO sighting. Then maybe we will stand a chance at finding out what's what. (The article is not a weather balloon article but it mentions them in part)

(Also a historical peeve; props if you know the reference--if you're a colonel in the Air Force, and you think the UFOs _you yourself saw_ are "beyond us" and we should "quit worrying about it," then IMO you should have to take a "you don't get to decide that" course on the potential scientific benefits of investigating freakishly weird phenomena)

</comment><comment><USER3> Reads to me as an organization complaining about someone else using their MOAs or Restricted areas without using proper channels.

The sum of terrestrial projects that need to test and don't want to advertise it internally or externally is probably greater than 0. Probability of losing some random F-18 is the cost of doing business.</comment>


What Hedge Funds Consider a Win Is a Disaster for Everyone Else - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/opinion/windstream-bankruptcy-cds.html <comment><USER2> The obvious question the article doesn't address is why insurers are willing to charge low prices for policies to hedge funds that could provoke a default. The insurers lost a huge amount of money in the example, and you'd think they'd try hard to avoid that.

<comment><USER3> This is clearly a case of insurance fraud, but it's very hard to prove the case legally. The hedge fund that bought the CDS on the corporate bonds went to court, and successfully argued that the company issuing the bonds was in default. The company went bankrupt, and the hedge fund was refunded 100% by the insurer. How could you prove that the hedge fund acted fraudulently? They won a case in court.

Evil, yes, but hard to prove.

But to answer your question directly, I think insurance works because most policy holders don't cheat. If this kind of cheating becomes more frequent, CDS premiums will definitely go up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> SOME hedge funds consider this a win. Others think it is an error in the legal system which should be fixed as a matter of good public policy.</comment>


Practical Image Recognition (prevents cat entering house when she carries a mouse)  - <AUTHOR> http://www.quantumpicture.com/Flo_Control/flo_control.htm

<comment><USER2> Now let's hope the kitteh doesn't try clever replay attacks and other such things that often foil the brilliant algorithms in computer vision-based security systems without actually finding a weakness in the core recognition/processing technology. :) (Many fingerprint recognition systems can be defeated with rubber stamps, gummy bears, human breath, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I saw this site (including the cat) last year. I don't think a lot has changed.</comment>


Show HN: Bowery sets up your  dev environment in  less than 30 seconds - <AUTHOR> http://bowery.io/#

<comment><USER2> The perfect use-case for this is freelance work on Elance/oDesk. Installing our application on the freelancers PC takes to much time, and using ssh/ftp is cumbersome.

Are there any other good file sync tools that work on Win/Linux/Mac? Something like rsync+inotify but with a permanent connection between client <=> Server?

FYI: A short readelf on bowery shows that it is written in Go.

<comment><USER3> Any good/bad experience using prebuilt VM images that contractors can just download and start working in ? (Struggling with kind of the same issue)

I also tried Amazon Workspaces the day it was released but it looks like the RDP connection from locations with low bandwidth internet connections (where most of my contractors are ) is not good enough to do actual development/coding work

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks like a really useful service if I can get Clojure running in it simply. In order to ever deploy this to production, I'd need a lot more detail on how it works. It would also be helpful to have a path for moving to standard services.

</comment><comment><USER5> Isn't it a better idea to manage your dev & prod environments using the same configuration management tools so that it's easier to synchronize them? Bowery doesn't seem to have great support for production environments.

<comment><USER6> You can configure your Bowery environment with whatever tool you use in production (chef, puppet, Ansible, etc) and then export the VMs to whatever production format you prefer.

The primary value add is that if your production system is too large to run on VMs on your computer now you can develop in your prod env

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Install on Mac, PC, or Linux...

Am I the only one feeling this is wrong? I know Apple wants their Macs not be called PC's. But a distinction between PC and Linux is something new to me.

<comment><USER8> If you feel insulted maybe it's because you are a fanboy yourself ?

I agree it could be clearer, but insulted, really ?

<comment><USER7> A fanboy of ..?

Due to so many downvotes I must have not expressed enough the absurd of "PC, or Linux". I know the reasons Apple is branding itself not as PC, I got used to it. But saying "PC, or Linux" is something completely new to me.</comment></comment></comment>


YouTube Bans Firearms Demo Videos, Entering the Gun Control Debate - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-21/youtube-bans-firearm-sales-and-how-to-videos-prompting-backlash <comment><AUTHOR> Related: [https://pjmedia.com/andrewklavan/mark-zuckerberg-new- cornfie...](https://pjmedia.com/andrewklavan/mark-zuckerberg-new-cornfield/)

I think the days of "But we're just a platform, not a publishing company" are over. Big Tech is now making big political decisions and using their platforms to do so.</comment>


No Cheating Allowed - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/no-cheating-allowed.htm

<comment><USER2> Or you don't do 'security' features client-side, and instead only send the hint data in response to the user's request for the hint.

Wouldn't that be the 'right' way of doing this?

<comment><USER3> Yes, that's the proper way.

It's not even that much of a cheat, really. I'm surprised they decided to make a full blog post on how they fight such a simple trick (incorrectly, even).

It won't work that much anyway, a simple chrome extension that injects code can overturn their whole thing.

How far can they fight cheating anyway? I remember making a javascript snippet in Chrome devtools that would bruteforce all the crypto questions (because they had predictable patterns, like all sentences involved "Anna" or some similar name). That seems way harder to fight.. will it deserve another blog post?

<comment><USER4> Alice, Bob and Eve the Eavesdropper?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Strange to see them trying to fix this with technology at all. Cheating is a social problem.

Universities survive just fine giving out take-home tests and trusting students not to cheat. Honor codes work, even when there is an actual useful reason to cheat.

But on a site like Khan Academy, where the end goal is to learn something useful, all the user is doing is cheating themself out of the thing they signed up to get. Let them go nuts. If they want to go through a course, but go out of their way to avoid actually learning anything, that shouldn't cause the site owner any grief whatsoever.

<comment><USER6>
         Honor codes work

As a working university teacher, I have to disagree with this somewhat. Cheating happens of a massive scale, I'd say at least 1/3 of all coursework I have graded involved some degree of cheating, and I've seen cases where clearly everybody in the course had copied from one person (who had an ingenious but false solution). Whenever I discuss this with former students, they think 1/3 is too low. When I give out coursework, it shows on sites like rent-acoder.com. One meets people who make a living out of writing dissertations for rich students.

The universities accept this tacitly for two reasons.

1\. They need the income from the students. If they'd fire every student caught cheating, they'd go bankrupt pretty quickly.

2\. It's an extreme amount of administrative work for the professors to deal with. In my experience, I need to invest a day's worth of work per cheating student, all things considered. I _really_ have better things to do in life.

To put it pithily: the students pretend not to cheat, and the universities pretend not to notice.

This is nothing new, students have been cheating since time immemorial, the world keeps on spinning ... there are lot's of stories about cheating in what may be the oldest exam system in the world, the Chinese Imperial examination. (As an aside, if you want an alround fascinating story that involves the Imperial examination, check out the history of the "Taiping Rebellion".)

<comment><USER7> I agree with you. Cheating was and probably still is very huge on my campus. Honor systems don't work and many of my professors didn't care.

Very few people talk about what it feels like not to cheat and why students do it. So here goes:

I made it through college without cheating. My university actually managed to scare me from doing so with freshmen orientation. I focused on studying and making sure I took advantage of walk-in hours and student teachers. For a while I thought everyone was doing this. Then, as weeks passed in each semester the students got more and more brazen. During my years of school I was outright asked to share my test (sometimes during a test), I was offered payment and I was made to feel ostracized when I didn't "help". It sucked.

The worst part came when I would meet other honors students and find out how they got their high scores. I was surprised at how many of them cheated, to what degree they would cheat and how little they knew about their course work. This is when I found that there was no incentive not to cheat. Honors students got scholarships and were often given some very good internship opportunities.

Why would anyone not cheat? No one cares if you do. You'll have an easier time. It doesn't hurt your career. It also does wonders for your social life. My final two years I pretended to have low scores on tests so as not to be asked to help cheat. I kept my grades a secret and would often not look at graded papers in class. I stopped talking about any of my classes with anyone that was in my major.

<comment><USER8> I technically cheated a lot in college and HS, but not in my weak subjects. It was an economy of time. Person A would do some parts of the assignments and I would do other parts. Combine the work and you've got twice as much done with 3/4 of the effort (I would still spend a little time deriving the work instead of wholesale copying). By the rules, I should've been thrown out of most of my courses (except CS and EE where I loved the work too much to let someone else take it from me) but I wound up with marks that put me at the top of the class. I learned enough doing just enough of the assignments to show up and get good marks on the tests without cheating.

I honestly don't think what I did should've been considered cheating, and I would do it that way again today- in fact, don't our jobs work just about the same way? But I'm all in favor of strict rules around cheating on testing or final projects. Those are where you demonstrate what you personally have learned, I don't think it should matter how you got to that knowledge, but you should have it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This solution seems to overlook the fact that once you've served something, you lose control of it. If the hint's been served, there's probably another way to find it - even just watching the bytes come over the wire.

I may be missing the point - but why not serve up the hint on a separate request? That way if you're offline, you don't get the hint, and if you're online, they can log that you requested it on the server side.

<comment><USER10> I think you ARE missing the point. Watching the bytes come over the wire isn't something that they are trying to protect. Just easy cheating in the classroom. They probably received some complains from teachers.

They wanted to keep it working offline, and hints should still be available for students in areas with spotty internet.

It's not Khan Academy responsibility to ensure students don't cheat after all. I mean for all they know the students could have other browsers/computers open.

<comment><USER11> The post title is a bit misleading, then. The way I see it, it's more like a bug they fixed (since people could legitimately lose their connection and have their hint count wrong) rather than a real no-cheat policy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Probably a dumb question but why not just let people cheat? I'm pretty sure we all heard in grade school that "cheating only harms yourself." Those who actually want to learn the material will stick it out and do the work.

<comment><USER13> KA is used by schools. Some of those schools want to prevent cheating. They'll have honour codes, but they'll also want to use technical means.

KA implementing these technical means makes the product more useful to those schools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's kinda funny that this blog post, essentially describing how to cheat on Khan Academy, soon is going to be one of the top results on Google when students search for "Khan Academy cheat".

</comment><comment><USER15> Wouldn't it be an option to basically chain the "events" in the local storage queue with crytographic hashes (kind a like a block chain). You can then fairly easily verify modifications somewhere in the list of events.

It wouldn't make it entirely impossible, but much more complicated.

<comment><USER16> No, because if you have the ability to create the hash on the machine then you have the ability to create a hash for a manipulated version.

The blockchain gets round this with consensus.

<comment><USER17> A hacker does yes, but can a kid recreate the hash quickly without the teacher noticing? If some script appear on the net to automate that, Khan academy could react by changing their hash frequently.

<comment><USER18> I think you give the teachers far too much credit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Deleting your localstorage is way too easy to do. I feel like this isn't much of a solution at all

<comment><USER20> Especially because it doesn't have to be visually obvious like they suggest. It could be a bookmarklet.

<comment><USER21> I'd love to see one created, just to light a fire under khan academy so they fix it properly. If going offline is so uncommon in their eyes, why not store the hint on the server?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm a professional and I search the web, look in books, and ask other people ... I also learn new stuff every day by doing so. It's pretty stupid that it's considering cheating in school.

Do you want schools to turn our kids into encyclopedias!? I think it's more important that we learn them to share, work together, communicate, find information (source criticism), explore and learn new stuff.

<comment><USER17> The problem they were having wasn't Googling for the answer, it was pressing the "Hint" button right next to the question. That doesn't require any of the skills you mentioned, so it's probably not very helpful for assessment. It may well be helpful to teach the concept though, which is probably why it's there in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The problem is that localStorage never gets cleared on its own. So you could have a situation where a hint persists from the last user using the computer (or last session in general), effectively sabotaging the current user's answer(s). An edge case, but possible. SessionStorage would be more suited here.

<comment><USER24> To my understanding they do not store the hints. They maintain a request log to enable retransmission of requests made during a offline period.

So the hint-thing should not be a thing. On the other hand: The request log requires a user identification method as part of the requests to avoid crediting a "hint-taken" request to the next user in your scenario.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Perhaps this blog post is a decoy, and they implemented a better prevention mechanism. I don't feel like "giving away" this possibility harms their efforts, as it will only make those intent on cheating more paranoid. >:]

</comment><comment><USER26> Some other online testing websites try detect cheating by using `onblur`. As soon as your browser lose focus, you are considered cheating.

It's quite effective in its regard, unless you search for answer with a phone or something.

<comment><USER27> Or you accidentaly hit the Windows button. Or Windows updates pops up. Or any other of the million things like these...

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I thought offline data sync was a solved problem even at the levels of PouchDB. I don't see how this post was of any concern.

</comment><comment><USER29> What happens if you reconnect and submit the answer before the hint request goes? Seems like a classic race condition.

</comment><comment><USER30> one could create a bookmarklet that actively deletes the 'hints'</comment>


It's Not Worth Camping Out in Front of Stores on Black Friday - <AUTHOR> https://thewirecutter.com/blog/camping-out-black-friday/ <comment><USER2> The same goes for auctions, a few years ago I woke up early drove for two hours to go to a heavy machinery auction. There was no parking for buyers onsite but instead had to park in a lot 5 miles away then take a shuttle to the auction. After spending half a day waiting for the dozer I wanted to hit the block, basically trapped there, buying overpriced coffee and vending machine snacks. I was out bid by an online purchaser from a different country, the next time the auction came around I stayed home, bid online and got my machine.</comment>


Pure (functional) random generator lib for JavaScript/TypeScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dubzzz/pure-rand/blob/master/README.md <comment><AUTHOR> Just to add a bit of context and describe a subject where such generator can be useful.

Let's say we are building a turn by turn game in JavaScript or TypeScript (2048 for instance). Each time the player plays a round the IA uses an internal random generator to guess its next move (adding a 2 or 4 in the grid). If we want to add some kind of cancel operation, then replaying the user input might lead to a completely different situation given we use unpure random generator. Using a pure one we just have to ask the generator again for its value.

Such problem can easily be encountered in implementations of 2048 allowing the back operation.</comment>


Coinbase not transferring bitcoins - <AUTHOR>

More than 24 hours ago I tried to transfer bitcoins from my coinbase wallet to another. The transaction is still pending when it should have taken no more than 60 min.<p>This seems to be a known issue that is being worked on [https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/314167537501868032, https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/314173853028986881, http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1anvaz/warning_avoid_coinbase/], but is troubling how there is no indication when this problem will be solved. A disconcerting reminder that unless your bitcoins are in your wallet, they aren't yours! <comment><USER2> My understanding is that coinbase uses a "hot wallet." This means that your actual bitcoin wallet doesn't contain any coins. Rather, when you want to move coins, they are taken out of a centralized wallet and then sent where needed. Maybe coinbase is playing hedging games with your coins...

</comment><comment><USER3> The problems are worse than that. My account got reset yesterday. I now show 0 transactions and 0 Bitcoin. I had an outgoing transfer that was pending for almost 36 hours. Now, nothing.

</comment><comment><USER4> It take exactly 2 seconds from pushing button at MtGox to arriving my coins at my blockchain.info wallet.

1 hour? Do they hand-deliver bitcoins?

<comment><USER5> The standard six confirmations takes an hour. Accepting zero-confirmation transactions from trusted peers is a nonstandard optimization.

<comment><USER4> blockchain.info shows confirmations as they happens in realtimes as well...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you want to find other providers (or leave a review for coinbase) check out <http://howdoyoubuybitcoins.com/> \- it's a free site full of guides and reviews for buying bitcoin.</comment>


Aviation Experts Urge Caution on Releasing Self-Driving Cars - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/aviation-experts-suggest-caution-releasing-self-driving-cars-1469611801 <comment><USER2> The software for avionics undergoes very detailed software engineering practices and testing. Critical systems are duplicated. The computers are ruggedly built and multiple power sources are available.

Yet - planes crash. For example, the auto-pilot disengages when the plane is no longer in the pre-defined "flight envelope" and the pilots scramble and in their confusion cause further problems, e.g. Air France 447 - but there are many others.

By comparison self-driving software is hacked together and the drivers do not have the many hours of simulator based training before being even allowed into a cockpit.

For self-driving cars to be safe, we need far better software engineering practices, computer systems design and driver training. In other words, not likely!</comment>