What Programming Languages Should You Know? - <AUTHOR> http://www.informit.com/articles/printerfriendly.aspx?p=704316 <comment><USER2> These lists always seem a bit silly to me. It seems to be an attempt at being hip rather than a practical list. I thoroughly enjoy Haskell and Erlang, but I'm not sure they are languages anyone "should know". My list would be more like (pick one from each):

1\. C

2\. Python, perl, or ruby

3\. Matlab or R

4\. Common Lisp or Scheme

5\. A fifth sufficiently different language, but with worthy concepts: Erlang, Haskell, O'caml, Prolog, Lua, Javascript, etc...

The choices in the first 4 don't matter too terribly much and the selection of a single language from #5 would largely be based on your own personal interests.

<comment><USER3> Your list seems just as "hip" as his list.

<comment><USER2> Why do you say that? Which part is hip? If my #5 were my list I could understand the comment, but my list is much more reasonable than the post. I use c, python, and matlab on a near daily basis for work so they are all quite practical. I think Scheme/Lisp are important to learn even if you'll never explicitly use them. The pl in 5 are useful depending on your domain, but I certainly wouldn't list these items as all being important to learn.

<comment><USER3> I didn't think either list was "hip", I just meant that your list wasn't very different than his, except seemingly arbitrary substitutions based on what _you_ happen to use.

He explicitly states: _Note that I'm not necessarily advocating using any of these languages for a real project, but I believe that learning them will make you a better programmer in whatever language you do use._

I do think the original list was better, since Erlang, Haskell, and Prolog shouldn't be lumped together in the "different" category, Javascript could be considered part of the Python/Ruby/Perl class, and I question the usefulness of learning MATLAB unless you actually need it.

<comment><USER2> It isn't arbitrary at all. I think people should know a compiled language (procedural), a scripting language, a numerical computing language (w/ vectorized notation), and a functional language.

I think its completely excessive for the average programmer to know Haskell AND Erlang AND Prolog AND Smalltalk. Do you think people should know all of those? I see advantages to learning each, but I think my list would take the average person a bit further.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Agree with baha about the title. Just to clarify "Should you know" ... if you're pursuing an MS in Computer Science? Sure. If you're building a web startup? Not so much.

</comment><comment><USER5> Practical lists of languages to know:

List 1: Java, Python, Lua, and C, or C++

List 2: Java, Perl, Ruby, C or C++.

If you know well 3 out of 5 of those languages from each list, it will be easy to find employment anywhere.

Other languages to know for fun: Ada, Lisp, Haskell, Smalltalk....

</comment><comment><USER6> 'English has no elegant way of expressing the difference between libre and gratis in Spanish' - 'Free as in beer' versus 'free as in speech' works for me. Also, shouldn't it be 'Which programming languages should you know?' if you're concerned with linguistic elegance? (To be fair, the title may have been written by an editor rather than the author, the rest of the piece is well-written and hard to disagree with.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Did anyone actually read the article? He flat out says:

 _Note that I'm not necessarily advocating using any of these languages for a real project, but I believe that learning them will make you a better programmer in whatever language you do use._

This is not meant to be a list of practical languages everyone should be writing applications in, or pad their resumes with.

</comment><comment><USER7> No programmers toolbox is complete without good knowledge of a simple, fast and dirty scripting language. In the past it would have been perl, nowadays it's more likely to be python or ruby.

That said, I really appreciate the benetfits of knowing at least how to read C, lisp, erlang and haskell. :P

</comment><comment><USER8> Am I the only one that doesn't know a single one of those?

And frankly I don't care to learn any of them. I have _never_ been turned down for a job because I didn't have Lisp skills.

In fact, I think I can count on my fingers the number of jobs that have required any of them...

</comment><comment><USER9> I wish we could save links like we can on reddit. I want to use his list (and other suggestions from this thread) as future reference (I am currently learning Ansi Common Lisp)

<comment><USER10> Click in the upper right corner of this page where it says "Novash" and then look for the "saved" link. Everything you upvote is there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm glad someone finally wrote a post on this topic.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm still laughing about the idea that there is secret shit going on that the assembler programmer doesn't know about!

<comment><USER13> There was a time where a sequence of assembly language instructions mapped directly to the processor's actions. But these days, assembly language instructions are cut up, reordered, and maybe interleaved with instructions from another thread; a conditional jump instruction that once had a constant cycle cost now depends on where that jump went the last dozen times and what is currently in cache.

What happened was that all the programs were being written in C, so the chip makers optimized their chips for C-generated assembly language. So now if you want to write fast assembly language, you need to write it more like a C compiler does -- which means in many cases that you might as well write it in C.</comment></comment>


Germany Calls for European Firewall Against U.S. Sanctions - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/germany-calls-for-european-firewall-against-u-s-sanctions-11577459502 <comment><USER2> This is all about German politicians who've been bought out by Russian interests trying to protect their pet project(s). Speaking as a German, the fact that Germany would rather deal with and be reliant on a country like Russia is, frankly, insane and incredibly shameful. It's as if Ukraine didn't happen, nor Russian interference of elections across the Western world. For all the bad that the US does, at least they don't invade and annex European countries, and try to undermine European politics.

<comment><USER3> > For all the bad that the US does, at least they don't invade and annex > European countries, and try to undermine European politics.

Another German here. I find Putin and Russia absolutely revolting, but that last part is utter propaganda. The US has meddled in European politics for decades - just take Trump's stupid whining against BMW or Bush/Obama's complaints about NATO budget or us Germans not joining the fun in Iraq.

<comment><USER4> >>just take Trump's stupid whining against BMW

I can not find anything current but if you are talking about his statements on the MX plant, he does that to every Manufacturer that sell items in the US but does not manufacturer them here (at least in part).

Trump is a nationalist and loves protectionism, he believes that Products sold in the US should be made in the US. Thus BMW building a plant in Mexico to sell cars to the US goes against what he wants which is a US Factory employing US Workers. He has done the same to other Auto companies including both Ford and GM

>> Bush/Obama's complaints about NATO budget

Umm a large number of Presidents have complained about the other nations not paying their fair share into NATO as part of the agreements all nations signed, Germany does not spend enough of thier GDP on NATO, instead the US has to disproportionately fund world defense...

Then we get to be lectured by the EU about why we do not have Universal Healthcare which in part because we need to spend soo much on world defense because the other nations refuse to

<comment><USER5> > he believes that Products sold in the US should be made in the US.

Let's ensure that software and media sold in Europe are made in Europe. (not that Trump minds: both hit California for the most part and he doesn't care about CA)

> Germany does not spend enough of their GDP on NATO, instead the US has to > disproportionately fund world defense

And now that the EU is planning a defense fund (which will help on that particular front, and also improve EU's capabilities so that there's less real-or-perceived reliance on the US) the US complains again because they don't get to sell their crap overseas.

Hypocrites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is beyond me for the German state to call for "EU unity" because of a project that is essentially a huge "fuck you" to Eastern Europe. If anything the EU should back the US sanctions to protect unity, as weird as it sounds.

</comment><comment><USER7> This particular case is pretty bad for getting EU to unite.

Nordstream is contentious within EU too - it's basically a way for Russia to threaten Poland with the gas cutoff without endangering their business with Germany.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Full article at Reddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/egorb9/comment/fc82...](https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/egorb9/comment/fc82ydj)

</comment><comment><USER8> Openly calling for cooperation with Russia and China, of all places, should be political suicide. But it seems like the message of 'let's protect ourselves from /insert boogeyman/' still works well enough to muddy public opinion.

The sanctions are there for a reason and saying that you need protection against them is like saying 'well, they did a bad thing and got a slap on the wrist, the obvious conclusion is to keep doing bad things but fend off the slaps'.

</comment><comment><USER9> Since US is starting to be a supplier of gas to Central European counties such as Poland via the gas carrying vessels and some countries trying to gain energy independence from Russia it becomes an interest of US not to lose the newly acquired buyers of their gas. Then it is problematic for countries like Germany that they can't boost the import because of US interference

</comment><comment><USER10> The disrespect that Germany is showing the US is mind boggling. The US being part of NATO is the greatest deal the other countries have ever signed/received. The US spends nearly $700 Billion per year compared to Germany's nearly $56 Billion per year on its military.

The US needs to start sending ultimatums - you are either part of NATO and therefore don't enrich Russia by buying their resources and pay your fair share (2%) at the very least or we're going to pull out of NATO and have a treaty with just Estonia, Greece, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Britain who all meet the treaty conditions of 2% and don't whine.

If NATO ended and Germany had to build up and army capable of defending itself against Russia it would cost way more than 2% per year.

All Europeans need to understand the financial burden US tax payers meet to keep us safe. I think the Brits realise how important it is and the Poles and the Baltic's do because they know what it's like to live under Russian military fear.

<comment><USER11> > The US spends nearly $700 Billion per year compared to Germany's nearly $56 > Billion per year on its military.

The US spends that much by choice, not necessity.

> All Europeans need to understand the financial burden US tax payers meet to > keep us safe.

Safe from what? The US military hasn't fought to protect anybody since WWII and there's frankly no realistic threat that Europe needs to be protected from. The EU already spends three times as much on its military as Russia and two (soon to be one) EU members are nuclear states.

<comment><USER12> And the US's recent meddling in the Middle East arguably made things "worse" in Europe, if the large number of refugees is to be considered a problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The politics on this issue seem quite confusing. It might point to a lot of internal infighting within the politics of both Europe and the US.

<comment><USER14> While Nord Stream 2 is obviously beneficial to Germany (cheaper gas than from the US), there are two totally different interests working against the project:

* The Eastern European states (and especially Ukraine) want Germany to rely on pipelines going through their countries, so that Germany – as a big player – can be relied on to be working with those states when there is a conflict with Russia. (I find that interest well-founded and a debatable reason to refrain from building the pipeline)

* The United States want Germany to buy more (liquefied) gas from them. Quite a few gas terminals have been built in recent years, and America is keen on selling its oil to Europe, because with all that fracking they aim to be a primary supplier of gas in the world. (I do not consider that a valid reason, and if it were the only one, Nord Stream 2 would be a no-brainer, in my opinion).

It's all been complicated even further by Germany rushing this along without consulting (or at least not diplomatically working with) other EU member states, including France, which likes to put its foot down, since Germany is the big rival (and now that the UK is gone, the only real rival on the European stage).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It turns out that Germany has been adversarial toward the US throughout its history. This"German call for European unity against the US" is almost identical to their opposition in the Spanish-American War.

</comment><comment><USER16> When tariffs are used as a mechanism to create unfair advantages for US entities over foreign states' instead of even pretending it's under the veil of US freedom policy not even your old pals will put up with it.

</comment><comment><USER17> sorry, I'm new in this social

</comment><comment><USER17> I wanna know more about

</comment><comment><USER18> Sometimes I wonder if the US and the EU are really friendly to each other.

<comment><USER19> Probably path dependence as much as anything else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Germany's influence over the EU is one of the reasons Brexit Happened, and will likely lead to more nations leaving the EU

</comment><comment><USER20> We need the US to step in for Eastern Europe. We need a reliable partner that is at least very direct and honest about its interests unlike Germany that is all about german interests while preaching european unity and values. Seriously Germany has been destroying my part of Europe for way too long! No more!

I would rather deal with the american way of life than being forced to live the german way.

</comment><comment><USER21> Germany sounds like corrupted shithole digging deep into Russians ass</comment>


Using Vim as a JavaScript IDE - <AUTHOR> http://www.dotnetsurfers.com/blog/2016/02/08/using-vim-as-a-javascript-ide/ <comment><USER2> Step one: install dozen of plugins, because you can't do sh*% with an editor and command line alone.</comment>


IgNobel Prize in Neuroscience: The dead salmon study (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/ignobel-prize-in-neuroscience-the-dead-salmon-study/ <comment><USER2> I am the first author of the salmon poster/paper. If you all have any questions I am happy to answer!

<comment><USER3> What happened to the salmon after the experiment? Did the fMRI scan seem to have had any effect on the taste?

<comment><USER2> I cooked it for dinner. We kept it cold in the snow outside the building all day while we worked. Tasted like regular salmon when we ate it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> cirrus-clouds This is still one of my favourite IgNobel winners for Physics from 1999: _The optimal way to dunk a biscuit in a cup of tea_ *

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/462987.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/462987.stm)

* _biscuit = cookie in the UK_

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> TLDR; researchers at UC Santa Barbara, intending to show how statistics can be used misleadingly, received statistically significant results when scanning a salmon with fMRI to show that it's brain responded differently to photos of different social situations. The salmon was dead.

(sauce: [https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/9t3bc4](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/9t3bc4))

</comment><comment><USER4> This belongs to "pure gold dust" category of my neurofeedback-related readings. Makes a good point about the prevalence of data dredging in scientific (and esp. medical) communities.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm glad to read that they ate the salmon.

</comment><comment><USER6> As we're talking about serious (though not entirely un-ludicrous) experiments concerning dead fish, I'm not going to miss an opportunity to post this video of a dead fish placed in "fast flowing water" (it's actually a tank with a jet and an outlet, but the effect is much the same).

Which way do you think the dead fish will move, upstream or downstream? Place your bets now.

[https://vimeo.com/44887922](https://vimeo.com/44887922)

</comment><comment><USER7> Very interesting article, even if from 2012.

<comment><USER8> Do you mean that it was even more interesting at the time, in 2012?

<comment><USER9> The dead salmon has aged like fine wine.</comment></comment></comment>


One Man's Quest to Hack His Own Genes - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603217/one-mans-quest-to-hack-his-own-genes/ <comment><USER2> I find it almost offensive when they entertain that it is the public's business to dictate what one man does to a small section of his bodily tissue.

Human life is not precious anymore. If somebody wants to risk their life for scientific progress, I feel that we should support them instead of discouraging them.

Just as we did when life was more precious.

</comment><comment><USER3> As I've been saying for the past couple of years, gene therapies are straightforward enough and cheap enough to carry out that people are doing it, usually quietly, but it is happening. You only have to be connected enough to know a biotechnologist or two with the right skills, as the example here shows. The stage of the adventurous and the self-experimenters is an important part of the development of any new medical technology, helping to overcome institutional reluctance while gathering initial data on how best to approach such treatments in practice. The next part of the process, something that does requires much greater funding and participation from the research and development community, will happen over the next few years; it involves making the therapies more robust, the outcomes more reliable, and assembling the suite of tools and clinics needed for those tasks. That is certainly the goal of BioViva, and as they move forward, others will join them.

There is more than enough evidence for the potential utility of enhancement gene therapies based on producing greater muscle growth and improved metabolism via increased follistatin or myostatin knockout, ranging from numerous animal studies to existing natural human and animal mutants to myostatin antibody trials. There is also considerable interest in telomerase gene therapies, though I'd like to wait for more data on that front before diving in myself, given the potential cancer risk. Once these initial approaches are out there, available, and the methodologies of gene therapy have progressed to the point at which there is reliably comprehensive cell coverage - especially in stem cells, as that will determine how lasting the effect is - then a score of other genes bear further investigation and consideration as targets for enhancement therapies.

While I applaud those who set out to undergo gene therapy today, as their work is necessary to move matters along in this age of overabundant caution and oppressive regulation of every activity, I can't say as I think the fellow here made a good choice of gene. This has the look of a more sophisticated form of the hormone therapies practiced over the past few decades, approaches that really don't have a good impact on aging, and outside of correcting deficiencies are not something that should benefit or is expected to benefit someone in normal health for their age. Increased growth hormone, if anything, is exactly the opposite of what animal and human studies suggest is good for longevity.

</comment><comment><USER4> He's not 'hacking his own genes' though, is he? There's no modification of his germ cells, nor is there stable incorporation of the exogenous material into the genome of the affected cells - more just transient expression of the protein he's interested in.

Giving the extraordinary complexity of the ageing process, with the interplay between multiple genes, each with multiple splice variants and post- translation modifications, and whose expression is modulated by both genetic and epigenetic factors, the chance of success with this approach is minimal.

<comment><USER5> It's an interesting first step to hacking one's own genes, though. It makes me wonder if it would be possible to transfect human skin cells in situ with a plasmid containing a gene for a fluorescent protein. If possible, it would be the nerdiest of nerd tattoos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Am I the only one to foresee that such changes can do way more harm than good?

As comments went on a previous post on a similar topic: Genetic changes are a lot like assembler software changes.

The best part? In living things there's very little documentation, based on "poor" reverse engineering (as we know little about it).

<comment><USER7> Realistically, what harm can the experiments described in the article do to the general population?

It's so hard to do anything, even design diagnostic tests, that requires FDA approval that personally I'd avoid any startup that had that on their route to revenue.

It's kind of a shame, and countries where it's easier to develop new treatments and tests are likely to take the lead.

<comment><USER6> First of all, I'm not a biologist but a software consultant and have worked in several software companies as level 3 support.

My personal experience on tiny and sometimes unrelated changes having a catastrophic impact: software configuration changes, new hardware, other softwares bug, antivirus rules and updates, etc.

These points can be roughly related to a living being: psychological/environmental/habit changes, transplant/implant, organ failure/traumatism, immune system false positive (e.g. alergies?), ...

I'm not against the idea gene manipulation, just saying that his doings are very marginal and must not be praised.

If labs have been relying on white mice and drosophilae it's for some good reasons:

Common sense (how many people died because of charlatanism?), ethics and Human Rights.

What is at stakes here can lead either to a nobel price (I sincerely hope for him) or a darwin award (thanks to the ignorance of such red flags).

<comment><USER8> > What is at stakes here can lead either to a nobel price (I sincerely hope > for him) or a darwin award (thanks to the ignorance of such red flags).

We need something like this [https://iotdarwinaward.com/](https://iotdarwinaward.com/) but for genetic engineering :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 7 Billion People on Planet Earth

3 Billionish Genetic Base Pairs

15,000 disease modalities-ish(and many that are obfuscated or clustered as one disease)

60,000 genetic marker tests on the market.

8-10 new ones each day.

Knowing what they actually do? --- Costs Billions.

<comment><USER10> add in phenotype, microbiota, mitochrondrial DNA, behaviour , environmental and societal factors, we have some way to go....

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> >Hanley says he did not secure the approval of the FDA before carrying out his experiment either. The agency requires companies to seek an authorization called an investigational new drug application, or IND, before administering any novel drug or gene therapy to people. "They said 'You need an IND' and I said, 'No, I don't,'" recalls Hanley, who traded e-mails with officials at the federal agency. He argued that self-experiments should be exempt, in part because they don't pose any risk to the public.

Until you start modifying the germ line, of course.

<comment><USER12> Posing a risk to your _potential_ immediate descendants hardly counts as "the public", and you probably don't want to start down the road of enforcing that people don't have the right to do things to themselves which have the risk of possibly being teratogenic as if it's a public health threat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a bold step on the path towards comic book super-villains existing in the real world.

</comment><comment><USER14> Reminds me a lot of the TDCS people.

<comment><USER15> Just wait until they combine their efforts.</comment></comment>


How much do you cost? - <AUTHOR> http://www.yegor256.com/2014/10/29/how-much-do-you-cost.html

<comment><USER2> Another one:

 _" This is the first and the most important characteristic of a software developer. Do you contribute to open source projects?"_

A wonderful new kind of bigotry.

 _" Thus, if your Github account is empty..."_

...than your BitBucket might be not.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Apparently if you aren't part of the in-crowd then you are a no-one.

And if it isn't on the web then doesn't exist.

Some other things that made me go "wha-?" were:

"StackOverflow is not just an indicator of how smart you are and how many upvotes you got for the "best programming joke"" \- StackOverflow is a lousy judge at how smart one is. Alan Kay is on SO, with a reputation of 3,000. Mine is over twice that. Alex Martelli is over 300x that. How is this a measure of "smartness"? (Oh, and most of my comments on S.O. were from an era when it was okay to ask about programming jokes, or the most significant inventions in CS since 1980.)

"I often hear something like "my company doesn't pay me for open source contribution and at home I want to spend time with my family". ... By paying your salary your employer does already invest in open source products, because you're an active user of them. The problem is that you are not interested in becoming more active in that contribution. I see this as a lack of passion and self-motivation. Will you be an effective developer in our projects? Not at all, because our entire management model relies on self-motivation."

I am also a user of patented products, and a user of public domain products, and a user of Apple products. There's no explanation of why open source is special; why is it okay to not be passionate about developing new patents, or developing new software for Apple?

I am also self-employed for 15 years. That should surely be better evidence of self-motivation than contributions to an open source project or SO.

And finally, I actually do develop open source products. It costs about $30,000 to acquire a copy of my MIT-licensed code. The only way the above makes sense is to assume that open source software shouldn't cost anything.</comment></comment>


Why Your Next App Should be Open Sourced - <AUTHOR> http://java.dzone.com/articles/why-your-next-app-should-be

<comment><USER2> Did not like. About half the things on that list will cause releasing something to take longer. Every day you delay trying to make your code "pretty" for other _potential_ developers is a day your competitors gain on you.

Also the open source benefits are claimed as a fact, i.e. you open source and this is what you get. But that's not how it works. Have a look at freshmeat, sourceforge, etc. at all the abandoned projects. If you open source your code you wont automatically get coders dreaming of making your code better. You might if you become popular on your own but if you can become popular on your own do you really need open source?

Is the _potential_ that if you do everything right someone might write Instapaper integration for you worth the potential that competitors might harvest the best part of your app and create a product from it that takes all your sales?

Open source has its place to be sure and I contribute when I can. I just don't think it's place is "everywhere".

<comment><USER3> > About half the things on that list will cause releasing something to take > longer. Every day you delay trying to make your code "pretty" for other > potential developers is a day your competitors gain on you.

Excuse me? Shouldn't you normally make your code pretty enough for _you_ and other developers inhouse to support?

<comment><USER4> You don't have to make your code pretty to be a successful company, think about Microsoft and other huge code factories for instance.

<comment><USER3> Error ratio per KLOC is actually quite low in Microsoft.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've done the open source app thing before. It can be fulfilling on some sort of karmic level, but unless you happen to crank out the next Apache or Linux, it is almost certainly not going to be a way for you to make any sort of living. At best, you'll get to claim it for credit on your résumé.

<comment><USER6> Who says your app has to be the next Apache or Linux for it to be worth your time of open sourcing it?

<comment><USER5> It depends on what your time is worth. Like I said, you my find it emotionally gratifying to release your application's source code as open source. In which case it very well may be "worth it" to you.

However, I'll stand by my point that it is very, very difficult to extract significant income from the average open source project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the "open source everything" movement is misguided. Open source generally doesn't work well for anything except for very large "community projects". I've seen it countless times -- one highly skilled coder can often out-code an entire community by several fold. "Build by committee" results in a large, slow-evolving codebase that never gets finished. Whereas a web app or iPhone game need to be built fast, and with a clear vision. In general, open sourcing it will just slow the project down, and now you have a human resource problem on your hands, and you need to deal with poorly written code being patched into your project. It's an overhead that's not worth it when the project owner can usually code the bug fixes, and features faster than any outsider can.

</comment><comment><USER8> An article from the the heart of the java community promoting writing open source iPhone apps. Interesting.</comment>


How we run our bug bounty program - <AUTHOR> https://segment.com/blog/bug-bounty-at-segment/ <comment><USER2> _" All of our most critical submissions have come from researchers that were originally rewarded for a well-written duplicate."_

I think that's a key line that should have been added to the top tips.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for reading my blog. I tried to keep the "top tips" short and thought this was partially captured via

\- Pay for anything that brings value \- Pay extra for well-written reports, even if they're dupes

with the hopes that if someone saw this and wanted to read more they'd skim through the blog :)

<comment><USER3> I have question to your bug bounty program. What's the best way to reach you?

<comment><AUTHOR> @leifdreizler on twitter! LinkedIn is also fine but I don't check it as regularly

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not a segment specific question, but if I discover a bug while working on a task for my employer, will that bounty be discounted off the bill or will it go to me directly? what's typical?

<comment><USER5> It's best-practice to get permission from your employer to submit bugs you discover on their time to bounty services, and then for you to collect the entire bounty. It's common for people just to quietly submit bounties; I wouldn't, but then I work in a field where it's a big deal to disclose on-the- job findings. You might not.</comment></comment>


MIT claims to have found a "language universal" that ties all languages together - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2015/08/mit-claims-to-have-found-a-language-universal-that-ties-all-languages-together/ <comment><USER2> A minor feature likely based on human constraints -- hardly any implications of a universal grammar. Even Japanese breaks this easily, which instantly kills universal in a Chomsky sense (it has to be absolute to be something our brains have innately). 37 languages aren't much when there are so many out there, particularly minor ones of isolated populations with entirely different features.

Not super exciting just yet.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I also think dependency length minimization is just a cognitive constraint. (Lead author here.) The idea of calling this a universal in the Chomsky sense is all from the press. The cool thing about it is that (previous work has shown) you can use this constraint in principle to derive a lot of the more substantive "universals" (really, overwhelming tendencies) of language, such as that natural language expressions are usually well-nested, and that in languages where the verb follows the object, the noun also follows the adjective, and the preposition follows the noun, etc.

As for isolated languages, I just finished performing some dependency length preference experiments on indigenous people in Bolivia, but haven't analyzed the data yet, so we'll see :)

<comment><USER4> What have you learned about how to talk to the press?

Bad coverage like this reflects back negatively on the research and the institution, sadly.

Uni PR offices are famously bad at twisting and over-selling research results.

<comment><USER3> I think I've learned there's not much you can do.

My advisor and I talked to two reporters: one from MIT News ([https://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/how-language-gives-your- brai...](https://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/how-language-gives-your-brain- break-0803)) and one from Science Magazine ([http://news.sciencemag.org/social-sciences/2015/08/all- langu...](http://news.sciencemag.org/social-sciences/2015/08/all-languages- have-evolved-have-common)). They both communicated with us about all kinds of details in the articles, and let us comment on the drafts. We clearly stated what we did and didn't want to claim, and they did a good job conveying what we wanted while adding extra connections we hadn't thought of for popular appeal.

On the other hand, we had no contact with anyone about the Ars Technica article. I've also seen some other articles cropping up that are copying the original articles, and making claims I wouldn't stand by. I don't think there's anything we can do about that.

<comment><USER5> Have you considered demanding a correction?

They are putting words in your mouth. Somebody should keep journalist accountable.

A few days ago I tried to follow the source of an article in an online newspaper. The source was another online newspaper , in a different language, and the source for this one another one. Along the way things were added and removed, just like in a crazy telephone game.

It makes you think about the news we read and take for granted.

<comment><USER2> "Scientists notice small trend that may or may not be of importance to language" just isn't a very catchy headline.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Since they only investigated 37 languages, isn't this only really evidence that they found a feature that ties 98% (~= (38/39) of languages together? Languages are known for having a few outliers with completely crazy rules.

Also, if two sentences are considered together, the average DLM would be significantly lower for those sentences than for one random sentence of the same length. So I'm not sure what this theory implies other than "the definition of a sentence can be vague".

<comment><USER7> Does anyone have a list of the 37 languages used?

<comment><USER8> It's on the page 3 in the paper:

Ancient Greek, Arabic, Basque, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Modern Greek, Persian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Turkish

<comment><USER9> 70% (26/37) of those are Indo-European (I think). No Amerindian, Polynesian, or Austronesian languages represented.

<comment><USER3> I'd love to have more interesting languages in the sample. If you speak such a language, and you are willing to parse ~2000 sentences for me, get in touch :)

<comment><USER7> Did you approach any of the Native Americans tribes? The Navajo in particular are very up on promoting their language (they even translated Star Wars).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Working with word co-occurence clustering based on Kolmogorov complexity I have become convinced that there is a computational complexity element to every language.

Words like "circumvent" and "environment" are close in regards to complexity. Words like "us" and "me" are close in regards to complexity.

The counting argument tells us that most strings are not compressible. It is then a wonderful feature of sensor data, natural language, DNA and computer code that it can be compressed quite a bit. This means there is a certain order in the language that compressors can use to keep the file size smaller.

There is a cognitive economy trade-off between the energy needed to keep a system running and increased complexity. Less complex language helps us save energy. We use short words for concepts that we use often. Very complex concepts and words like "disambiguation" may be described with shorter simpler words to someone who has not stored that word and general accepted meaning yet.

In this complexity view languages evolve to use as little energy/computational complexity to convey as much information as possible. The results found in this article can also be explained using this view. Parsing a sentence like "Throw the trash out" requires you to store in working memory the word "throw" 'till you get to the word "out" for the full concept "to throw out". Until you get to the word "out", the "throw" remains in a superstate (could become "throw in", "throw on" etc.). You need both words to form a mental picture of someone throwing out the trash. This requires more computational energy to the listener, and is hence ineffective. If you want your message to be heard, you have to communicate in clear simple-energy sentences. So using simpler less computationally intensive sentences benefits both the speaker and the listener.

This would readily explain why natural languages beat the random benchmark. Randomness has far less structure to use for compression by an intelligent agent. Randomness is not optimized communication, since it is more unpredictable.

In short: Simplicity and conveying information with little energy is a fitness factor that natural selection optimizes for. This is universal to all natural language speaking agents with a limited energy budget.

<comment><USER11> It's probably more memetics (constrained by cognitive load) than genetics that select the features of languages, and there are likely many other factors that determine the complexity of languages and grammatical structures: For example, there is a sweet spot between minimal symbol count and minimal lengths of the words. In the extremes you have either short words but many symbols, or few symbols but long words. At the same time the number of distinguishable phonemes and therefore symbols are, of course, restricted by the sounds that are producible by the average vocal tract.

Secondly, the communication channels thought→vocalization→hearing→thought or even thought→typing→reading→thought are inherently very noisy, so you end up with a lot of redundancy, like particles, introduction and transition phrases.

And lastly, I think that there are always some words and phases that are not shaped by efficiency/cognitive load, but rather by whether it is fun or fashionable to talk in a certain way. There is certainly some cultural variance that can be orthogonal to efficiency.

<comment><USER10> Very thought provoking answer! Thanks.

As memes house in agents with an energy budget, I think that shorter simpler memes have more chance to take hold and reproduce ("Make something people want").

Words in a sentence are like models in an ensemble. Simple words are more general and have a high bias and low variance ("Make stuff users want"). Highly complex words and sentences have a lower bias, but a higher variance. You need to average a lot of them to get a clear picture. That's why the sentences in scientific papers are usually so long, they need to gradually cancel out the noise.

> There is certainly some cultural variance that can be orthogonal to > efficiency.

Yes, agreed! Though same with memes, certain words or symbols without any redundancy may have cultural value. You may gain energy by speaking a certain language to a certain degree of sophistication. You may have to invest energy to gain access to the information contained in symbols (or have agents "unzip" these for themselves).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> DLM minimization doesn't seem to be a generative feature of language, just a constraint. Languages have to be understood and used by humans, and all this paper seems to show is that humans have limitations on working memory. Anything, language or otherwise, that expects to be used by humans would minimize the load on working memory.

<comment><USER13> Especially because they admit themselves that two of the languages in their set don't even minimize.

Even with short sentences, German and Japanese often have large DLM values.

With more complex, nested sentences (which are really common in Germany), this becomes more of an issue, because between two connected words you can have 7 subclauses.

(Seriously, read Karl Marx' Das Kapital, or Günther Grass' Der Krebsgang, or read any other German author.)

<comment><USER3> All of the languages are "minimized" in that dependency length is below the random baseline.

German, Japanese, etc. are just much less minimized than other languages like English and Indonesian. Working out why is the next step for us. I don't think it's because these languages are inherently harder to understand. They just represent different solutions to the communication problem.

<comment><USER10> Thank you! Very interesting research all around.

I think these old German and Japanese languages may have been hard to understand for outsiders, but were used with high sophistication (you have to invest energy to access this information) among insiders. For instance the Japanese pillow words / Makurakotoba or German words for hard to translate concepts like "Weltschmerz", "Kummerspeck" and "Torschlusspanik". All short, useful words for communicating complex rich concepts, provided the agent knows the meaning of these words.

<comment><USER14> weltschmerz - pity, sorrow

Torschusspanik (sic!) - fear of quick commitment

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's not really possible to discuss this article if we can't access it.

      This item requires a subscription to Proceedings of the
      National Academy of Sciences.

This is really not good!

[http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/07/28/1502134112.full...](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/07/28/1502134112.full.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Here you go: [http://web.mit.edu/futrell/www/papers/futrell2015largescale....](http://web.mit.edu/futrell/www/papers/futrell2015largescale.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Cool. What is the measure of word dependency? I.e., I'll agree that in

John threw the trash out

"threw" and "out" are dependent on one another. But is that an either/or, or are there degrees? It seems like "threw" and "trash" are also "dependent" in that they don't make independent sense.

<comment><USER3> Specifically, we used hand-parsed corpora developed by Google and a whole bunch of computational linguists over the last 15 years.

The dependency representation is of course an incomplete picture of how words hang together in a sentence. But it's the only format that's flexible enough that you could dream of parsing 37 languages to (approximately) the same standard.

<comment><USER17> All your replies in this thread are more clear/interesting than the original linked article.

Very cool stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Some combination of Enochian and LISP, no doubt. No, I didn't read the article.

<comment><USER19> I read it hoping to make a Lisp/Esperanto joke but alas, they only found one universal aspect of all languages, they did not find a universal language. The universal tendency is to bundle words together:

> You can see this effect by deciding which of these two sentences is easier > to understand: "John threw out the old trash sitting in the kitchen," or > "John threw the old trash sitting in the kitchen out."

<comment><USER20> If it's John doing the sitting, I would expect an extra comma before sitting, but for me, the first is a bit ambiguous: is the trash doing the sitting, or John?

That may be because keeping 'threw' and 'out' together in that way in Dutch feels wrong, or at least really, really awkward.

<comment><USER21> "John threw out the old trash sitting in the kitchen" is a bit of an idiomatic sentence in that understanding its intended meaning depends on knowing that throwing out the trash while sitting down doesn't make a lot of physical sense.

Writing somewhat more formally the sentence would be something like "John threw out the old trash _that was_ sitting in the kitchen." (Although "threw out" itself is somewhat informal language. "John disposed of" or something along those lines would probably be used in a more formal context.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> paper: [http://web.mit.edu/futrell/www/papers/futrell2015largescale....](http://web.mit.edu/futrell/www/papers/futrell2015largescale.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER23> The title is significantly overstated. DLM isn't a language, it is a rule that many languages seem to follow and says nothing about Chompsky.

<comment><USER24> It's "Chomsky" of course, but I _really_ like "Chompsky"!

<comment><USER25> Well there's also this easter egg:

[http://left4dead.wikia.com/wiki/Gnome_Chompski](http://left4dead.wikia.com/wiki/Gnome_Chompski)

<comment><USER20> That may be inspired by [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_Chimpsky](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_Chimpsky)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> From 2012: Daniel Everett: "There is no such thing as universal grammar" [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/mar/25/daniel- eve...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/mar/25/daniel-everett- human-language-piraha)

</comment><comment><USER27> > Languages like German and Japanese have markings on nouns that convey the > role each noun plays within the sentence, allowing them to have freer word > order than English.

Since when has German a freer word order than English?

German has precise and strict rules about the placement of

1\. normal verbs 2\. verbs used in conjunction with modal verbs 3\. conjunctions 4\. particles in separable verbs 5\. stressed parts of the sentence

And we are not talking about rules followed only by prescriptivist grammarians, but very common rules used in everyday conversations.

The article (the PR article, not the academic paper that I haven't read) looks like a poorly researched piece.

</comment><comment><USER28> Delving in the specifics of individual human languages would be a colossal waste of productive time to otherwise pursue "harder" science and technology.

The only possible "language universal" will be machine language when humans merge with machines.

The physical makeup of the biological brain which is subject to random biochemical reactions just can't maintain something as consistent as how a "language universal" should be.

</comment><comment><USER29> Related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10002595](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10002595)

</comment><comment><USER30> This seems to agree quite nicely with Jeff Hawkins theories. Mainly that our brains are primarily doing temporal pattern recognition and language is no exception according to Hawkins. By minimizing the temporal gap between related items, you minimize the size of the patterns needed to convey an idea.

</comment><comment><USER4> Can mods change the poorly written misinformation-plagued blog article link to the source paper:

[http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/07/28/1502134112](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/07/28/1502134112)

</comment><comment><USER31> Isn't the interesting part of "language universal" some kind of commonality that is directly the byproduct of common human biology?

Closeness of concepts in words would seem to be a natural commonality because of efficiency of communications between any two entities in general.

</comment><comment><USER32> Language wants to be a picture, even in the case of Japanese and German, grammar aside. 'Threw out' forms a nicer picture-action. There might be some baseline for cognition for which languages serves as _cough_ 'higher level' interpreter.

</comment><comment><USER19> By the way if you ever want a great set of tools to play with language check out Python's Natural Language Toolkit: [http://www.nltk.org/](http://www.nltk.org/)

<comment><USER33> NLTK is nice but if you want to work with nontrivial amounts of data it's better to turn to Stanford's NLP tools, or Spacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Isn't the universal language love?

</comment><comment><USER35> yeah yeah, wake me up when they find something that ties all JavaScript implementations together :P

</comment><comment><USER36> really surprised this isn't getting more action on HN. the implications for CS are immense.

<comment><USER37> No, the implications are actually quite small. This article is a very bad pop- science summary of relatively banal linguistic research.

Linguists have studied _linguistic universals_ for a long time, which are properties that all human languages have. For example, one could try to imagine (in the style of Borges) a language which had no nouns, and in which all sentences are formed of relationships between verbs—but no natural language has this feature: _all_ natural languages have nouns and verbs.

There are also _implicational universals_ , which are of the form, _if [some language] has property X, then it will also have property Y_ , and _tendencies_ , which are broad driving trends that might have individual exceptions. An example of the latter is that languages that place the verb at the end of the sentence _usually_ have postpositions rather than prepositions, but this has exceptions (e.g., Latin.)

What's being studied here is a tendency in sentence structure: languages _usually_ structure their syntax such that they can minimize the _dependency length_ , or the distance between syntactically releated words in a sentence. This has long been hypothesized, but this paper gives evidence for it in the form of a large cross-language survey. Which is cool! But by no means does it have major implications for CS in any way. (At least, no more than any of the copious previous research on linguistic universals.)

EDIT: I should also add that this area of research is _not new_. In fact, linguist Joseph Greenberg published an article called 'Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements' in 1963. This is continuing research and, while good research, not particularly groundbreaking or pioneering.

<comment><USER38> I think it has implications for language design. Some syntaxes are going to be better than others, based on this.

It also means that, for a function that takes several parameters, some parameter orders are better than others.

<comment><USER3> Yes, specifically you should order arguments so the order will be on average from short to long.

I try to write my code this way. map, filter, and reduce are terrible from this perspective. Unless you have do blocks like in Ruby or Julia!

Also, dplyr's %>% pipe operator is a great way to reduce dependency length in R code.

<comment><USER39> Thanks for all your answers here! Could you elaborate on the above? Why does it imply short to long orderings are better? Also, I don't follow your comment about map/filter/reduce being bad except unless you have ruby-esque do blocks. Are you referring to something like map(<big function>, array)?

<comment><USER3> Yeah, map(<big function>, array) creates a dependency that exists from when you read "map" to when you read the name of the array, potentially spanning a very long function. But if you have map(array) do <big function>, then you only have a dependency from "map" to the beginning of the function.

In general, if you have a function call f(a, ..., y, z), when you parse that (mentally, or in a shift-reduce parser) you have to keep the function name f in memory all the way to z. So you want to make a, ..., y as short as possible.

Similarly, dependency length minimization predicts that in English people will want to order expressions from short to long after a verb or preposition. There is a lot of evidence for this preference; it's been documented since the 1930s.

If there were a programming language where the function name came after the arguments, like (a, b)f, then the best order would be long-to-short.

Similarly, the DLM prediction for verb-final languages like Japanese is that people will prefer long-to-short orders. It appears that this preference does exist, but it is much weaker than the short-to-long preference among speakers of English-like languages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> The day... has finally come.

</comment><comment><USER41> Lisp?

</comment><comment><USER42> But it uses loads and loads of parenthesis, so no one will ever use it...</comment>


Tower purifies a million cubic feet of air per hour - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/09/tower-purifies-million-cubic-feet-air-hour/?mbid=social_fb <comment><USER2> > "We've gotten a lot of requests from property developers who want to place > it in a few filthy rich neighborhoods of course, and I tend to say no to > these right now," he says. "I think that it should be in a public space."

I love the idea if it's really as healthy and good as the article makes it appear. But it immediately saddens me to see such a short-sighted attitude.

Why not sell it to the 'filthy rich' and then with that money build some more in public spaces? In the end you have more air purifying towers than if you only built them in public parks. Not to mention that, obviously, air moves around. So it doesn't much matter where you put the things.

<comment><USER3> This. Hell, you'd probably sell a _lot_ more by jacking up the price to 10x the cost of production/distribution instead of 3x and donating several purifiers to deserving communities for each one sold to the filthy rich.

On the other hand, this looks less like a common appliance purchase and more like a $10-20 thousand piece of capital equipment, so all bets are off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's an electrostatic precipitator, which will pull solids out of the air. Those have been around for a long time; Honeywell sells them as furnace filters, they were a staple of Sharper Image catalogs, and every decent coal plant has a huge one pulling fly ash out of flue gases.[1]

Any large precipitator needs a way to get the solids off the plates and into a collection bin. Home precipitators typically lacked that; the user had to take out some component and wash it off regularly. Industrial-sized ones have "rappers" which bang on the collector plates to knock the dirt off. How does this thing do that?

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdRk3op2zpE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdRk3op2zpE)

<comment><USER5> Seems to imply that it's a manual process:

> She adds that there are concerns around efficacy and logistics like how > often something like this would need to be cleaned. But Ursem himself has > used the same technique in hospital purification systems, parking garages, > and along roadsides.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's a promotional video from the building opening that I saw before this article: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IWaSHJCE80](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IWaSHJCE80)

I got curious what sort of airflow would result around this building with the numbers stated, and the possible ramifications of it.

1M cubic feet per hour sounds much more impressive than ~278 cubic feet per second, particularly across the entire surface area of the building.

Let's say it's 5.75ft to a side and square-ish, since it yields a building that's got a perimeter of 23 feet, and ignore the roof, since that's intake - you're pushing ~278 cubic feet per second through 529 square feet of surface area, so you're displacing about half a foot of air per second over the entire surface, or a gentle breeze when you're right up against the building surface, let alone any distance away.

(I'm aware the building is finned, not flat, and that this is just sketchy math. I just thought I'd share it because it gives interesting insight into what this could feel like right next to it.)

</comment><comment><USER7> > a radial ventilation system at the top of the tower (powered by wind energy) > draws in dirty air

> "We've gotten a lot of requests from property developers who want to place > it in a few filthy rich neighborhoods of course, and I tend to say no to > these right now," he says. "I think that it should be in a public space."

So there's enough wind available to power this device, but not enough to make cleaning the air a public benefit unless the device is located in a public square or park. That seems like a contradiction. Then there are the other benefits of getting a new product into the hands of early adopters: getting feedback, process and volume improvements that cut costs (and price), market awareness, and that little thing called staying in business long enough to matter. This guy's cutting off his pollution-cutting nose to spite his oh-so- socially-conscious face. Not too bright.

<comment><USER8> It's quite shortsighted to refuse to work with the developers.

Take their money and use it to build more for the public.

<comment><USER9> At first, I thought that. Why wouldn't they just take their money and use it to subsidize more for the public?

But then, I thought that maybe, they are thinking something like this: If smog is not a problem anymore for the rich, because of these devices, there would be less incentive to stop producing it, and go green.

I thinks that it's something similar to public school or public health. If the rich have access to private alternatives, their concerns about the quality of the public offering is reduced. In this case, if they are not the ones breathing smoggy air, their concern about air pollution (in poorer zones) is significantly reduced.

<comment><USER10> Or the increased demand will make them cheaper to produce and the consumption will justify further investment into making them better.

No, seems pretty shortsighted to me not to work with developers. That kind of attitude tends to be reflective of being dogmatic (screw the rich), rather than taking a rational approach designed to maximize public value (willing to admit that it could be the case that the rich will be early adopters whose consumption benefits everyone).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This really doesn't seem like a lot. 1m cubic feet is a 30x30x30m cube. In one day it processes 24 of those. Even if there was no such thing as wind or diffusion and you only needed to treat the 30m of air next to the ground, this "neighbourhood" would only be 150m long and 150m wide for it to be cleaned in a day (as they claim).

TBH I don't rally like Wired's reporting on this kind of stuff. To get an overall view of whether this is useful or not, we need to know:

\- lifetime of the pollutant

\- air changes per day

\- whether this type of pollutant is an important one to tackle

...without that we can't know whether this is just an art project or something practically useful.

<comment><USER3> Even 100 x 100 meters is a decently sized city block and that's pretty good depending on how much they cost. Considering it took California decades to clean up Los Angeles air using new technology and regulations, Im pretty sure Beijing residents wouldn't have a problem seeing a pretty, oversized Porta potty every 50 meters if it meant clean air.

Taking into account the long term strain on healthcare of polluted air (it makes almost everything worse), this might be an economically viable solution

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> When this kind of device is being used outside, does it actually have a noticeable impact on the air quality? Purifying enough air to fill Madison Square Garden sounds impressive, but it's nothing compared to the volume of air that cycles through the atmosphere.

<comment><USER13> Not only that, but will the net effect be positive if this device is powered by, say, a coal-burning electrical plant?

<comment><USER14> Not sure why you're being downvoted; this seems like a totally legitimate concern. Depending on the efficiency, you might end up just moving the pollution to a different location.

<comment><USER2> >you might end up just moving the pollution to a different location.

Still if one is convinced that, for whatever reasons, pollution cannot be helped. This could be a good thing.

<comment><USER15> Taking this one step further, can these clean the exhaust air from coal plants?

<comment><USER16> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghouse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghouse)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As a rule of thumb, whenever a "big" number is used in a headline, it is usually a much smaller than amount than it sounds.

I don't have domain experience in this field, so I can't say in this case if it's significant.

<comment><USER18> So true! Give us some comparisons as to what these large numbers actually mean. Otherwise it's just jabbering.

Well, a good PC case fan does 160 CFM. A $200 Honeywell air purifier can do 300CFM. So a million cubic feet/hour (16,666CFM) is 55 of these little purifiers.

Furthermore, it's recommended that air be changed a few times per hour, even for residential use[1]. MSG is 10,800,000 cubic feet, so you'd want over 30 of these towers to keep the air lightly clean in there.

Amazon has an eletrostatic purifier that does 1000CFM, so 1/16th of this tower, for $330.[2] 30-1/4 by 24 by 12 inches, so probably still doable in the same volume as the tower.

But this tower looks a lot cooler, making it worth an article I guess.

1: [http://www.berriman- usa.com/sizing_table_air_cleaners.htm](http://www.berriman- usa.com/sizing_table_air_cleaners.htm) 2: [http://www.amazon.com/708620B-AFS-1000B-Filtration- Electrost...](http://www.amazon.com/708620B-AFS-1000B-Filtration- Electrostatic-Pre-Filter/dp/B00004R9LO)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This type of devices can be potentially used in the areas with poor ventilation, like in between the mountains. Poor ventilation (lack of the winds) leads to the situation when all smog stays there, and just smog from the cars is enough to create breathing problems. Years before, at some European resorts, buses were forbidden due to this reason, only electrical trolleys allowed.

</comment><comment><USER20> Build your own!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5YFK8mmeRQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5YFK8mmeRQ)

[http://rimstar.org/science_electronics_projects/electrostati...](http://rimstar.org/science_electronics_projects/electrostatic_precipitator_smoke_precipitator_simple.htm)

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder if Chinese people are watching this. I could see China produce and install thousands of these all over the place in probably less than a year.

<comment><USER22> It looks like Daan is already on it.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcH0TAdR8FE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcH0TAdR8FE)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Like it's said in the article, it's not a solution but something that "hide" the real issue.

You can be against nuclear power, it has huge drawback in the long term, but it has a lot of effect in the short/mid term. Hopefully we'll find a way to recycle nuclear waste or a more cleaner energy.

But in the meantime I don't see any advantage to search for a way to clean air while we still producing lot of pollution...

</comment><comment><USER24> Hypothetically, when pollution removal becomes a logistical issue, how will it affect technological progress?

Forget present biases, how does society change when waste pollution becomes merely a business cost?

What technological achievements are presently limited by the morality of environmental destruction?

<comment><USER25> Putting morality into solutions doesn't work.

Source: any political issue with morality stuck to it

<comment><USER24> What a ridiculously useless and distracting comment stemming from ignorance on the origins of morality. Even secular morality originates from some manner of cultural common good.

In this case, I'm obviously alluding to the morality associated with environmentalism, which acts as an umbrella for why anyone cares about the destruction of an external resource: self-interest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I thought ionizers were bad because they make ozone.

</comment><comment><USER27> So what happens to the particulates after they're collected? Is this a matter of "let's take these molecules and use them somewhere", or is it like we have a shit-ton of solid waste full of sulfur and hydrogen and we have to bury it?

<comment><USER3> We're talking about air pollutants which are mostly industrial waste and exhaust so they're practically useless and have to be stored.

Since this pollution is already in our air regardless, it doesn't really matter how we store it as long as it's not in our lungs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've got a better solution. All engine exhaust pipes should end in the cabine of vehicle. That will make car-owners spend money on filters, instead of letting the environment take the burden.</comment>


Thoughts on Objective-C and how it might/should evolve - <AUTHOR> http://cocoawithlove.com/2010/07/is-virtual-machine-for-cocoa.html

<comment><USER2> How about Obj-C that eliminates all of the memory alloc/dealloc and runs in the JVM? ;) Ok, that sounds just awful as I doubt much would port well. But, it doesn't seem to make any sense to reinvent the wheel. Recent JVMs handle garbage collection fairly well.

How about ditching all of the Obj-C and rewriting Cocoa (for OS X and iOS) in Java? Easier said than done.

I say just embrace the fact that everything in OS X/iOS today is using a somewhat fast but somewhat archaic language, and just make XCode better able to spot memory leaks in code.

<comment><USER3> It's (mostly) already been done — Apple called it the Cocoa-Java bridge: <http://cocoadevcentral.com/articles/000024.php>

It became officially deprecated about five years ago, but quite a few important apps used it, Cyberduck (<http://cyberduck.ch/>) being one of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Apple won't abandon objective-C any time soon - the ongoing evolution of the language (properties, blocks) and platform (garbage collection) imply that they're in it for the long haul. The switch to LLVM also suggests... something. A switch to a new (virtualized?) platform with the same API / language is more likely.</comment>


Readability and the Golden Ratio - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bloc.io/readability-and-the-golden-ratio

<comment><USER2> The changes are good.

On another note, don't buy into golden ratio hype. The supposed "beauty" of this ratio and its appearance "over and over again" in nature is one of those myths that just can't be killed. Every human should be made to read

<http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/pseudo/fibonacc.htm>

or something equivalent.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's interesting that this follows the golden ratio, because as soon as I started reading the article I noticed that the line height seemed too big. It felt just a bit awkward.</comment>


Is the Network the Limit? Dealing with Weave, CoreOS and Azure - <AUTHOR> https://arjanschaaf.github.io/is-the-network-the-limit/ <comment><USER2> I suggest you also look at GCE for network performance. It is something that the Google networking team has been working hard on and, because of the unique network fabric at Google, should scale to lots of VMs.

Also, you can get equivalent "IP per container" using advanced routing with GCE. Flannel has a GCE specific back end where it inserts routes for each subnet assigned to each range. That will eliminate the extra level of encap.

(Disclaimer: I started GCE but am no longer at Google.)

<comment><USER3> +1 to @jbeda, but let me offer some comments for the avoidance of possible confusion among potential Weave users.

Weave aims to deliver a completely _portable_ network. In other words if you create an application using Docker container and a Weave network, that should be able to run anywhere. And all this should be 'magically simple'. Once you have decided where to run your app, you may wish to trade portability for performance gains. For example by using GCE networking (or Azure, or ...).

To date Weave achieved portability by sending some packets (inter host) through user space. This has big benefits in terms of ease of use eg. dealing with wide area networks, multicast and firewalls. But under load it performs worse than kernel-only models.

We now have Weave "fast data path" \- [http://blog.weave.works/2015/06/12/weave-fast- datapath/](http://blog.weave.works/2015/06/12/weave-fast-datapath/) ... This aims to deliver close to line performance with portability and extreme ease of use.

There may of course be yet more optimisations that end users wish to investigate. If you are willing to sacrifice some portability you could certainly make use of fast networks provided by a specific public cloud. We haven't yet seen a strong need to support this, but it is certainly a reasonable thing.

(Disclaimer: I work at Weaveworks)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is the poor performance of Weave really surprising? Userland networking will always be lesser performing than that of native kernel networking (the show is somewhat better with technologies such netmap/PF_RING/DPDK). Weave itself would probably improve in performance if it utilised a TUN/TAP device + static routes as opposed to its current mangling of packets with pcap and BPF.

<comment><USER5> We did try TUN/TAP. It seemed to be slower than pcap.

Our answer to weave performance concerns is on its way: [http://blog.weave.works/2015/06/12/weave-fast- datapath/](http://blog.weave.works/2015/06/12/weave-fast-datapath/)

We're really interested to hear how weave fast datapath works out in all kinds of environments, which is why we put the preview out. It's a shame that Arjan's post did not include numbers for FDP, but maybe he'll be able to include them in an update.

<comment><USER6> Indeed tun/tap performance is terrible, it seems to take about a whole CPU at gigabit.

<comment><USER7> That, in general, is not the behavior I've observed on native hardware. Without getting into hard numbers, I routinely see multiple gigabits/second/core.

<comment><USER6> With which options? Standard tap (or tun?), or macvtap? The last test I did (macvtap to an external interface but none of the offload options), a gigabit used a lot of CPU, like around a whole CPU just copying data.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The subtle, multi-layered relationship between ego and failure - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@visakanv/the-subtle-multi-layered-relationship-between-ego-and-failure-4a4a3c45cc91#.sybw4siec <comment><USER2> My mother solved my homework problem for me early in life. "You can't go play until your homework is finished." Since I knew better than to lie to her, I finished my homework before I would go out to play.

I remember the very first time that happened. I had a list of words, and I had to copy the definition for each word to a piece of paper. That was it. That was the entire homework. I thought it was such a stupid task. I can read the definition and remember it. Why do I need to copy definitions until my hand hurts?

But I knew I couldn't go play until it was finished. So I set my mind to finish as quickly as humanly possible. I turned off the TV. I tuned out all distractions and scribbled the definitions down as fast as I could. I was done with all my homework in a half hour and I could play the rest of the afternoon.

Not only did it not take me a long time to do it, but I didn't need to dread having homework to do after playing with friends. I became really good at tuning out the distractions around me.

But still I wanted to be outside playing and some days I would have longer assignments. So I would start doing my homework in class. As soon as I found out the assignment, frequently printed as questions at the end of a chapter, I would begin working on them. I wouldn't even pay attention to the teachers. I would tune them out too. I would read the material, teach it to myself, and finish my homework while the other kids sat bored and barely listening.

As a result of this, I became really good at focusing and self learning. The only thing I really hated were long papers with far away deadlines. I would always wait until the last day or two and end up having to power through them with all my focus.

<comment><AUTHOR> > "You can't go play until your homework is finished."

Reminds me of Munger's description of the Grandma Rule [1]: you have to eat the carrots before you get the dessert.

I'm very envious of your skillset, and hope to develop it for myself too. I find it interesting though that you'd put off long papers– why not do those early too?

___

[1] [http://old.ycombinator.com/munger.html](http://old.ycombinator.com/munger.html)

<comment><USER2> >I find it interesting though that you'd put off long papers– why not do those early too?

The expectation on those was that you would write a long paper about what you learned from the course. Therefore, there was no clearly defined starting line.

I also hated writing. Grading always seemed subjective to me. If the teacher liked you, you got high grades. If the teacher didn't like you, you got low grades. It wasn't like math or science. With those subjects, there's a single, provably right answer. The opposite of those 'creative' courses like literature.</comment></comment></comment>


Copernicium Is a Strange Element Indeed - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/10/11/copernicium-is-a-strange-element-indeed <comment><USER2> Today's burying the lede award:

" _But the bigger effect is relativistic. That's actually a notable example of Paul Dirac being completely wrong about something in physics – he had stated back in 1929 (PDF here if you're up for it!) that relativistic corrections to quantum mechanics were of "no importance" because they would apply only to very high-speed particles (that is, those moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light). But as it turns out, the inner electrons of the heavier elements are moving at such speeds (they get faster as the positively charged nucleus gets bigger and more charged), and this has effects out to the chemically important outer electrons as well. For one thing, relativistic particles are heavier, and this actually shrinks the atomic radius of the heavier elements still more and has complex effects on the various orbitals._ "

<comment><USER3> Good grab!

So basically they both seem to act like their larger scale selves, but in this case affecting physical characteristics of atoms. Special relativity is going to make the electrons more heavy and thus change their ionization energies and interactions with other atoms and energy. Gravity is going to affect their physical geometries? Idk.

But this reminds me of muonic atoms. I wonder if there's some sort of point where the periodic table of electrons and protons/neutrons starts to mirror its lower energy self with heavier muon atoms.

Just thinking in a text box here, don't kill me please...

Edit: The muon to electron mass ratio is about 206 for a square root of about 14.4.

I found an equation that says the energy of that electron is on the order of 1/L^2 so to get muonic effects for the electron the box size of the bound electron, L, needs to decrease by about 1.5 magnitude.

Electron equation: [https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/19212/why- does...](https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/19212/why-does- electron-velocity-increase-with-the-increase-of-atomic-number)

<comment><USER4> Kind of sounds like the island of stability to me: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability)

I can't even begin to imagine what sort of fun and whacky materials could possibly exist out there, should the island exist.

<comment><USER3> It'd be crazy. Just the electrons would weigh 200x normal

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > When it comes to gravity, the two theories [quantum theory and classical > theory] are completely incompatible, and there is no way to escape the > conclusion that one or both of them must be seriously incomplete or even > flat-out wrong about something important. ...

Part of the problem lies with the lack of tools for studying gravity through the perspective of quantum mechanics due to the scale involved:

> One of the difficulties of formulating a quantum gravity theory is that > quantum gravitational effects only appear at length scales near the Planck > scale, around 10−35 meter, a scale far smaller, and equivalently far larger > in energy, than those currently accessible by high energy particle > accelerators. Therefore, physicists lack experimental data which could > distinguish between the competing theories which have been proposed[7][8] > and thus thought experiment approaches are suggested as a testing tool for > these theories.

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

Edit: there's an interesting complement to the linked article which talks in more detail about the relativistic basis for why mercury is liquid and gold is yellow:

[https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious- wavefunctio...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious- wavefunction/what-does-mercury-being-liquid-at-room-temperature-have-to-do- with-einsteins-theory-of-relativity/)

<comment><USER6> I think he's speculating that Copernicum and other super heavy elements might offer some angle. Oddly enough I recall reading about a large amount of interest in studying mercury back in the 30s and 40s that tapered off. Maybe there is something there.

Also I would definitely buy "Quantum Physics: A Hand-Wavey Approach" and suspect you could do a whole series of those books.

<comment><USER2> _Computer Science: A Hand-Wavey Approach_ would probably flap around the room under its own power.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pre dece comment explaining some deets why quantum mechanics and general relativity seem incompatible:

[https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/10/11/co...](https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/10/11/copernicium- is-a-strange-element-indeed#comment-309333)

<comment><USER8> I keep this in one of my public social profiles. It has concrete math: [https://arxiv.org/abs/0907.4238v1](https://arxiv.org/abs/0907.4238v1)

"How Far Are We from the Quantum Theory of Gravity?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This column is by Derek Lowe, best known for the incomparably hilarious "Things I Won't Work With": [https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/th...](https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_wont_work_with_dioxygen_difluoride)

</comment><comment><USER10> So if we've got 29 seconds to study copernicium atoms' properties before half of them have decayed into something else, is that sufficient time to create and cluster enough of them to know anything?

There must be some way of defining "liquid" and "melting/freezing point" that's quite different from me putting an ice-cube tray of water into the freezer.

As fascinating as the theoretical relativity/quantum thread here is -- I'd also be interested in knowing more about the plain old observation techniques that let us know anything about predicted liquid properties during this very short observation interval.

<comment><USER11> IIUC from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernicium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernicium) all most of the macroscopic properties are just predicted in computer simulations.

If we could produce enough Copernicium and magically disable the radioactive decay, the bounds between atoms is predicted to be so low that is predicted to be a liquid in the article, or a gas in Wikipedia.

If we can't disable the radioactive decay, you could look while it disappear in front of your eyes (halving every 30 seconds, I hope you bought a lot of it). But also the radioactive decay will create a lot of heat, so it will get hot, glow and evaporate (and probably destroy the lab). So it's would be difficult to see if it is a liquid at room temperature experimentally.

In Wikipedia there are the description of a few experiments with two or three Copernicium atoms. They get adsorbed over a gold surface for a short time until they decay. To get something like a glass of liquid selenium, you need something like 10^24 atoms, that is much more than the few atoms that is posible to get simultaneously.

<comment><USER10> Thanks! That's very helpful, and shame on me for not visiting Wikipedia first. That said, the error bounds listed on Wikipedia for a model-generated guess at melting temperature, etc. are gigantic.

At room temperature, copernicium might be a liquid, unless it's a gas or a solid.

I appreciate the audacity of researchers in trying to work up some guesses about physical properties even though the available samples are far too tiny and short-lived to get any lab confirmations. But articles like OP make it seem as if we've got well-tested insights. We don't. We're not nearly there yet. It's very loosely anchored guesswork.</comment></comment></comment>


When the Boss Says, 'Don't Tell Your Coworkers How Much You Get Paid' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/07/when-the-boss-says-dont-tell-your-coworkers-how-much-you-get-paid/374467/ <comment><USER2> In the last few years I've been surprised to learn just how many legal protections we have in the workplace. Neither I nor most of my friends, for example, know much about Title VII anti-discrimination protections, and many thought they had far fewer protections than they actually do.

When are we, as workers, supposed to learn about these workplace laws? In high school, my law and government classes never talked about them. In college, the CS program had a semester on ethics which included copyright and patents, but not on workplace law. My wife's business courses, OTOH, did cover them.

Some organizations have HR training for employees, but the usual primary goal of HR seems to be to keep the company from being sued for breaking the law, which is different than educating people about their legal rights.

Unions would be one possible sort of education, but there isn't much unionization in software development in the US. Trade schools might be another, but the US leans strongly towards university-style academic training than trade schools.

The best I've come up with is a talk, workshop, booth, open space, etc. as part of tech conferences. But I don't know enough to do that, nor do I know anyone who can.

<comment><USER3> The problem isn't that people don't know about them, but even if people knew about them, most wouldn't use their right. Legal protections really only matter _after_ you have been fired. If you exercise your protections while you are still employed, in most states the employer can just wait a month or two and then fire you for something unrelated. Even if they don't fire you and grudgingly put in place the changes, chances are it will simply create a work environment of distrust. Not to mention your vertical mobility in the company is now ruined, since who wants to promote someone who rocks the boat.

In most cases, if you are lucky enough to have the freedom to do so, it is better to simply quit your job and find someplace that follows the rules and respects you from the get-go.

<comment><USER2> Your last comment got me to wondering - how does one tell if workplace follows the rules, etc. from the get-go? Perhaps a Joel-like list of questions to ask? If most of the employees during the interview can explain the difference between 'quid pro quo' and 'hostile environment' harassment, then they probably have a good understanding of EEOC guidelines.

As to your first paragraph, I think you're right, except that it's also a numbers issue. For example, Title VII case law and EEOC guidelines are very clear that complaints about illegal discrimination are not required to go through formal/predefined channels. But in my discussions with people, many believe that it's okay for management to ignore complaints made outside of channels. (Some even think it's okay for management to punish those who didn't go through formal channels.)

My optimistic belief is that if 95% of the people knew the law, instead of 5%, then it would be harder for management to carry out those illegal actions. Not impossible of course, just harder.

I think your comment "create a work environment of distrust" is interesting. I would think that breaking workplace law also creates a work environment of distrust. Why is it often that the employee who complains is accused of distrust, rather than the lawbreaker? I recognize that it's common, but I don't know why.

I can't see it as simply an aversion to rocking the boat, as the employer started the rocking, not the employee. My first thought was that it's simply a power asymmetry, but I think there's also a dark side even in egalitarian teams where people don't want to face up to the dirty laundry and prefer denial ("no one talks about Uncle XYZ's 'problem' with little children").

It's essentially the same with those who report fraud, waste, mismanagement, illegal activities, etc. Many have written about reasons why whistle blowers are often reviled - something I also don't really understand. ... I'm therefore somewhat relieved to know that no one really can explain why. The 2011 paper at [http://www.vu.nl/nl/Images/Artikel%20Paul%20van%20Lange_tcm9...](http://www.vu.nl/nl/Images/Artikel%20Paul%20van%20Lange_tcm9-259358.pdf) says "We have no evidence based answers" to the question of why some people blow the whistle instead of obeying.

Thanks for your comments - coming up with a response helped me understand my own thoughts better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> To me this thing where employers tell you not to discuss your pay always seemed like a strategy to keep wages low. I think if anything should be discussed freely between employees it's wages. I could see this being something that contributes to employees that stay with companies making less than those that move around. Those that stay around don't talk about wages and don't see how much they're getting screwed by their employers.

</comment><comment><USER5> Unless we all make the same amount, I truly don't want to know what my co- workers in the same pay grade make, and vice versa. I'm human and subject to jealousy, which can bring out all sorts of bad behavior. Knowing that someone else makes significantly more than I do for the same work - or as I would be all too quick to judge, for less than the same work - would be corrosive. My co-workers are human, too. I can accept with only a little residual bitterness that people in higher pay grades (executives!!) are often paid outlandishly more, but I don't want to know about my peers.

<comment><USER6> I _do_ want to know what my colleagues make.

I want to know that the intern sitting across from me didn't get an unfair deal from HR when they started, like I did at a previous employer. Not everyone knows to check GlassDoor, and not everyone is good at negotiating, but that doesn't mean they don't deserve a fair (market) rate.

I want to know that the guy in the senior role in the corner who gets a lot done is paid appropriately for his work, because if he isn't then he's liable to find a company that will, and that would be a bigger loss for us than losing a few dollars to his pay check. This has happened at every tech job I've ever had -- so maybe I'm just thinking totally wrong about this, but I'd like to know why if I am.

I want to know that my female colleague is not falling victim to sexism in the paycheck.

I want to know if I'm working for a company that abuses colleagues, and this is one of the ways of spotting that.

I understand that jealousy can be an issue for some people (myself included), but in my opinion your effort should be put into analyzing why your feeling that jealousy. There are times when I notice jealousy in myself, but when I stop and look at what I'm jealous at almost every time the other person is deserving of what they got. I take it as a learning experience, a sign that there is room for improvement in yourself.</comment></comment>