Why XMPP Will Be Huge Very Soon - <AUTHOR> http://intridea.com/2009/2/16/why-xmpp-will-be-huge-very-soon?blog=company

<comment><USER2> This guy obviously hasn't actually used xmpp in real life. eJabberd does really weird things to us when we throw 300-400k messages at it a day.

And this: "XMPP servers, which are essentially make or break an XMPP application, are rapidly maturing beyond instant messaging."

Have he ever tried to actually debug ejabberd? Cause it's very painful and time consuming.

Now, I'm not bashing xmpp, it's pretty cool, but it's not exactly "the next big thing", IMO.

We're actually abandoning it for AMPQ.

<comment><USER3> "eJabberd does really weird things to us".

Describe the weird things, please. I'm about to deploy ejabberd for a production site, and I'm interested in your experience.

<comment><USER4> XMPP is XML based and need heavy processing power (for e.g. not suitable for mobile platform) whereas AMPQ is a binary protocol.

<http://www.deepdarc.com/2008/02/14/mobile-xmpp/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When I need to do something realtime, I connect users to my IRC server. Writing a client for IRC in Flash is very easy, I haven't tried with Javascript, I imagine you would use a keepalive connection somehow. Am I missing something by not using XMPP?

<comment><USER6> >> "Am I missing something by not using XMPP?"

You're missing hours of headaches working through over-engineered ridiculously overly complicated horrible XML protocol. Stick with IRC ;)

<comment><USER7> FWIW, I've had a different experience with XMPP. Take for example XMPP Multi- User Chat (<http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html>) - which outlines a rich set of interactions between occupants of a room - something I'm really glad someone else engineered for me. Plus, take a look at the XML stanzas (in the examples here: <http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html>) you are sending to the server, they're really not that big or complicated. Lastly, with BOSH (<http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0124.html>) and incredible XMPP Javascript client libs like Strophe (<http://code.stanziq.com/strophe/>), the possibilities are pretty exciting for web apps.

<comment><USER6> A quick skim of the Multi-User Chat though... Firstly, it's 9 years old :/ why is everyone still not using it? Secondly, you can immediately tell it's ridiculously over-engineered.

      <field var='muc#roominfo_occupants' label='Number of occupants'>
        <value>3</value>
      </field>

Sorry, but you can't really look at that protocol and say it's not ugly and verbose beyond reason. The number of occupants in a room is surely used enough to deserve an encoding of less than 75 characters to specify a _number_.

<comment><USER8> Isn't that the whole problem with XML

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Funny, I heard the same argument years ago.

</comment><comment><USER9> He's missing the main reasons why my company is going forward with a Jabber server: privacy and reliability.

We are a geographically distributed company that uses ICQ for a whole lot of communication, so when it goes down for any reason, work just about halts. Also, we routinely discuss very sensitive things (but we call each other if we need to discuss root passwords), so a dedicated eavesdropper could learn more than we'd like him or her to.

<comment><USER10> Pidgin + OTR FTW

<comment><USER11> Solves the encryption problem, but doesn't solve the reliability problem.

Also, if your company needs to be able to log the IMs for compliance reasons, that doesn't solve that either.

(Disclaimer: I work for a company that builds IM servers for companies. But... the above isn't exactly controversial.)

<comment><USER10> You can still log with OTR, and if you use AOL/ICQ/MSN/Gtalk etc. there will always be at least one network still kicking.

<comment><USER12> unless your corporate network's internet connection is down...

<comment><USER10> Then you have bigger problems. I'd start with a reliable net connection if you want to do business online.

<comment><USER12> shit happens. being able to contact someone when it does is important.

i used to work for an isp and we had a private irc server that was very valuable in the case of outages when we needed to broadcast information to other departments. if i had to deploy it again now i'd choose an xmpp server, but either way, relying on an off-network communication server is not a good idea for a variety of reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think thats missing a big reason, google adopted it.

I have seen a resurgence of applications built on xmpp and instant messaging in general, I dont think a lot of people will know they are using xmpp, but it will be lurking in the back

</comment><comment><USER14> So, I do think that XMPP will become a much bigger force given the (anecdotal) rate that post-college students replace their college email with Gmail (and get Google Talk with it). However, XMPP can't just rest. It really needs to get Jingle (their VoIP/video protocol) finished and approved and adopted. With more people looking to use voice and video online, they can't be left behind because of lack of features.

With Google driving some adoption and (hopefully) smaller IM networks seeing that XMPP would be in their interests (since it would help them overcome a lack of users), XMPP could see decent enough growth. However, if other networks have desired features that XMPP doesn't offer, the interoperability argument is countered by the lacking of things users want.

</comment><comment><USER15> Once I get it working, I love it, but there's two problems I've always had with getting XMPP working from a programming/developing standpoint, both of which kept it from going mainstream sooner:

1) there were very few docs that explain the terms (roster, what a conference server is and why that is different from your regular connect server) in the context of other messaging protocols (AIM, for example). Yeah, I know now that "roster" is the equivalent of the buddy list, except it's not because there are operations that can happen on the roster and it's not complete clear which component maintains the roster and a lot of roster operations can happen asynchronously (due do its distributed nature) even when you're disconnected. None of this was obvious.

2) The docs that did exist, even for abstraction libraries, talked about creating XML stanzas and the XML stream and all the different XML namespaces (none of which were explained well enough to know when you would use 'em) and XML this and XML that. I don't want to write XML, I want to connect to a server and send and receive messages. That it is XML stream based is beside the point--and this was always touted as the reason that XMPP was so awesome, but we all know that it got caught up in the XML hype of the period in which it was conceived.

Eventually, libraries started being written that provided the correct level of abstraction for developers rather than protocol designers. Last one I used was Net::Jabber::Bot (cpan), which was okay, but there's still a lot of data extraction from partially cooked XML structures.

</comment><comment><USER16> Anyone know of any good XMPP implementations that lend well to implementing gateways? Preferably in C/C++?

<comment><USER11> Your question is somewhat vague and muddled. Could you clarify what exactly you are asking for? How are you using the term "gateway"?

<comment><USER16> Gateway is as is defined in RFC 3920 Section 2.1

"G1 = A gateway that translates between XMPP and the protocol(s) used on a foreign (non-XMPP) messaging network"

I don't think my question was not vague at all. It just might be out of the ordinary. Most people are interested in XMPP client implementations. I want a pre-existing open-source project that would be a good first step towards building an XMPP gateway.

<comment><USER11> OK, I wanted to make sure that you were indeed asking for that. While you are correct that "gateway" is well-defined, _most_ of the time I see it, it is misused or used vaguely.

So, I can help you out. The only library that I know of that is designed specifically for the purpose of implementing gateways is Thrasher Bird: <http://developer.berlios.de/projects/thrasher/> (git at <http://repo.or.cz/w/thrasher.git> ). I am the lead developer of that library. While the "sales pitch" is that it wraps libpurple, it is actually designed so that the "gateway" part of the library is separate from the "protocol" part of the library, unlike every other gateway I've seen.

It's in Perl, and it's still a bit alpha-ish, but it is also _exactly_ what you are looking for and in active development, so you'll have to decide whether that meets your needs.

If you're interested in more information or need help, contact me at email@example.com . Compiling may be a bit of a chore, but I've managed it on a couple of different Linux systems now.

<comment><USER11> Actually, now that I think about it, the only thing the C code is there for is libpurple support; it's all Perl and there's no compilation you'd need to do at all if you don't want to use libpurple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Unless I'm missing something totally obvious, many of these reasons might as well be said for SIP.</comment>


What "The New iPad" and "Basecamp" Have in Common? Angry SEO "Experts" - <AUTHOR> http://www.domain.me/blog/the-new-ipad-basecamp-seo-4077

<comment><USER2> Unbelievable bad article. If anything according to the theory in this article, SEO's would be happy with the chance of getting traffic on two separate keyword high demand bumps. The first bump, high expectations on the iPad 3 launch... getting traffic for the keyword ipad 3. After the announcement, a new opportunity to gain even more traffic on "the new ipad" keywords, with an even larger demand!

This article is so much "linkbait" bashing SEO for the sake of it, to gain traffic from HN.</comment>


Random tweet – see one random tweet at a time - <AUTHOR> http://tweet.onerandom.com/ <comment><USER3> A language filter option would be nice.

Edit: In addition, "emoji-only" tweets seem not that interesting to me - <USER2> maybe i am too picky.

</comment><comment><USER4> Out of six times, I got the same tweet twice. Considering that each tweet has an equal probability of appearing, this is an extremely unlikely event.

</comment><comment><USER5> Clicked seven times. Saw two separate tweets twice. Either this is not very random, or I should get some scratch tickets on the way home from work.

</comment><comment><USER6> I got a NSFW image. Be careful everyone.

<comment><USER7> I saw me some boobs at a dining table at a restaurant. They were nice, but I doubt my boss appreciates them.

<comment><USER8> Saw the same...

Reloaded the page and began to get randomized tweets, some in foreign languages...

MAC being tracked...?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If nothing else, it makes me realize how many tweets aren't in English.</comment>


Explaining the "New" TCP Resource Exhaustion Denial of Service (DoS) Attack - <AUTHOR> http://insecure.org/stf/tcp-dos-attack-explained.html <comment><USER2> The people you're really worried about --- the people who are set up to carry out extortion operations against your site, who know how to safely deliver their demands and safely collect your money --- already have the ability to take you down with the push of a button. Some of them herd massive botnets, some of them have relays set up in various countries and on various networks. Some of them are even set up to inject prefixes into BGP4.

From 2001-2005, I worked in various roles at Arbor Networks, now basically the dominant DDoS defense company, deployed at every major ISP in the world. I was, among other things, the lead developer on Peakflow DoS, their DDoS tracking and remediation product. The thing I learned there that sticks most: ISPs deal with tens or hundreds of DDoS attacks (real, honest to god attacks) _per day_.

I can't see how any new DDoS research is going to change the game at this point.

</comment><comment><USER3> Last time we were under serious ddos, the attack vector shifted several times in response to our countermeasures. One of those shifts was looking quite similar to what fyodor describes. An attacking machine opened 1000+ connections, sent the request, then shrank the receive window to 1 byte. The botnet segment doing that was maybe ~500 zombies or so.

Of course, it's trivially mitigated on linux with iptables connlimit match (fyodor mentioned that, too).

The punchline: our colo provider insisted on having a PIX firewall in front of our box, with stateful packet inspection and all that. And, of course, that was way too much state for it to keep. So the PIX has gone down and we've got our 24 hours of downtime.

</comment><comment><USER4> Put up or shut up (until patch is ready.)

Simple. Else, it's egomania.

<comment><USER5> There's no patch.

TCP is a stateful protocol. Per-connection state uses memory, so creating more connections will exhaust memory OR it will cause no more connections to be created - both cases are a form of DoS.

A naive approach is to initiate a lot of connections, but never complete the setup. That's a SYN flood. Another approach is to actually complete the handshake, then initiate a tear down and never complete it. The OS at the server end gets stuck with a lot of half-closed connections that may take many minutes to timeout and there's no application control over this. There's no control over this 'stuck' connections at the OS level either, the only option is to wait for them to die off as per TCP spec.

There are other variations, but you get the idea. I do agree though that these two guys are simply whoring for attention.

<comment><USER6> Don't forget to stuff the kernel buffers with a few (or many) megabytes of data before getting those connections 'stuck'.

The amount of time it will take for them to die off (as per the TCP spec) is 'infinity' since there is no provision in the protocol itself for detecting unresponsive peers. If your operating system implements a hack called 'tcp keepalive' then those connections will die in a couple of hours in a typical configuration.</comment></comment></comment>


Google announces 50 search changes implemented in March - <AUTHOR> http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/04/search-quality-highlights-50-changes.html <comment><USER2> Any chances of getting rid of the redirects in search results? It's so annoying that I can't simply copy the result link URL and paste without getting some crazy Google tracking URL instead. It's such an obvious fail that I can't see how it's possible to not have it fixed yesterday, it made me switch to a different search engine.

<comment><USER3> There is an interesting discussion about this on stackexchange.com.

"Turning off Google search results indirection": [http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/22291/turning- off...](http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/22291/turning-off-google- search-results-indirection)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A very brief test indicates that search strings containing "Cocoa Webview" no longer return a bunch of useless crap* about Android webviews with the word "Cocoa" nowhere to be seen on the page. If that's the case: it's about time.

*"Useless crap" is context-sensitive, of course -- no disrespect toward Android intended, but I go to the trouble of including "Cocoa" in my search Google shouldn't be giving me pages that don't even contain that word. It might be different if it were smart enough to just give you Objective C or iOS-focused pages that included "Webview", but not Cocoa, since there's at least some probability that those pages would be of interest. However, it wasn't that smart.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Less aggressive synonyms"

Fantastic! That's one of the things that has been bothering me on Google lately.

<comment><USER6> The one that's been driving me crazy lately: 4 as a synonym for "for." I understand some percent of the population "rites lik dis 4 serch" -- but I certainly don't! When 4 = for, and "for" is on every page on the internet, it almost had me pulling my hair out.

Here's an example (but not my exact query). "iPhone 4" will match pages with "iPhone" and "for."

<http://i.imgur.com/vN1oh.png>

<comment><USER7> While incredibly annoying putting the 4 in quotes like this: "4" will eliminate "for" from your results.

<comment><USER8> Someone should write a browser extension or Greasemonkey script to automatically quote your Google search terms.

<comment><USER9> I discovered the "verbatim" option under the "More search tools" link on the left hand side recently.

[http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...](http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&p=g_verb&answer=1734130)

It's not as convenient as an extension or a script, of course.

<comment><USER10> It should be easy enough to write an extension or even a bookmarklet for this. You just have to add &tbs=li:1 to the end of the URL to enable "verbatim" mode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > _Improvements to freshness. [launch codename "Abacus", project codename > "Freshness"] We launched an improvement to freshness late last year that was > very helpful, but it cost significant machine resources. At the time we > decided to roll out the change only for news-related traffic. This month we > rolled it out for all queries._

> _More precise detection of old pages. [launch codename "oldn23", project > codename "Freshness"] This change improves detection of stale pages in our > index by relying on more relevant signals. As a result, fewer stale pages > are shown to users._

Hopefully this means fewer instances of searching for code help and seeing prominent results from 2005.

<comment><USER12> left side, 'show search tools' -> 'past year'.

<comment><USER13> You often still get results dated last week for pages that clearly state a byline years in the past.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >Improvements to handling of symbols for indexing. ...we've now started to index the following heavily used symbols: "%", "$", "\", ".", "@", "#", and "+". We'll continue to index more symbols as usage warrants.

That, and the new "Verbatim' option, are really good news. There are also some five (10% of the entire list) timely tweaks to synonyms.

All in all, it seems Google listens and tries to improve its service, which has become rather paternalistic lately ("you wrote X, but actually mean Y", no I don't!). Well done.

<comment><USER15> I found relevant results for $_, $argv, @memoize, useful completion but no results for $@ and $#, nothing at all for $!. Python programmers rejoice, Perl programmers still mourn code search.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> With all the bashing around them stagnating in search, it's nice to see that they are continuously improving even if it's more incremental than revolutionnary.

I particularily like the indexing of symbols, it will make searching for C# results easier.

<comment><USER17> Huh, DDG seems to index C# correctly but not C++.

Maybe it has something to do with its search results coming from Microsoft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > "dog" may be incorrectly introduced as a synonym for > "cat". We've been > working for some time to appropriately > ferret out these

brilliant.

Also funny that they launched two Synonym features that appear to be be the same feature described in different words.

<comment><USER15> This is a really cool part, those siblings and synonyms are making them build the rudiments of some kind of Watson-like concept net.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Click through to the video of their search meeting. It seems really strange to me that something like that would be made public. I mean, it is pretty content free, but why spend so much effort to show the world deliberations on how to change search?

<comment><USER19> I find it amazing that there are 30-something people in the room & 9+ more by video.

Some are almost certainly checking their email or doing other things – despite the small text insert that tries to suggest they're all looking at advanced analytics about the proposed changes.

Very few speak or seem to be in a physical (or status) position where they _could_ speak, though maybe as the topic changes, some of the giant peanut gallery gets engaged.

Altogether, it fits a lot of meeting antipatterns. When I see perplexing things like this about Google, I have to wonder: is this a counterintuitive part of the secret sauce, or an indulgence whose cost is covered up by their gusher of quasi-monopolistic profits?

<comment><USER20> That's a weekly meeting where proposed changes are discussed. Most of the people not speaking are there because they have a launch to present. Each one gets a lightning round of deliberation somewhat like the one in the video, a decision is made, and they move on to the next.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The new additions of UEFA, KHL, and tennis scores would seem to indicate that each snippet type is manually built and added by Google.

I would have expected something a little bit broader; an algorithm that attempts to automatically parse score results for all major sports based on the pages they pull results from, or something to that effect. The former is way easier, and probably a whole lot more accurate, that the later, but it removes a little bit of the sex from the whole process. It also highlights how much work must be involved in building the snippet generators for a site like google.

<comment><USER22> Well they do have snippets for certain facts: e.g. [http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...](http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=tom+cruise+age)

which is almost certainly a broader algorithm that tries to semantically parse out factual information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> News from the boiler room in March:

\- Spinners hit hard \- Text link sellers hit hard

:)

<comment><USER24> What are spinners?

<comment><USER25> Tools and systems that take a corpus of root text and create large number of variations of that content, to avoid duplicate content penalties when trying to stuff sites to catch Google's attention.

<comment><USER26> Or, as a a "spinning" script might reword it:

> Implements and setups that take a corpus of tuber text and create meaty > number of changes of that tranquil, to avoid duplicate content sanctions > when trying to stuff localities to catch Google's contemplation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > More relevant image search results. [launch codename "Lice"]

Really? Who picks these codenames?

</comment><comment><USER28> Autocomplete math... looking forward ;)</comment>


Garmin announces the first Autoland system for general aviation aircraft - <AUTHOR> https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20191030005354/en/ <comment><USER2> This is huge. The system will find an airport with suitable instrument approach, fly to it (avoiding terrain and weather enroute), configure the plane for landing (flaps, gear, descent rate, etc.), make a landing, stop on the runway and shut down the engine so passengers can exit. Plus it's transmitting to ATC the whole time. Incredible.</comment>


Tip of the Iceberg - <AUTHOR> https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4373 <comment><USER2> One could make an analogy to the use of dihedrals in aircraft for stability that seems useful to me.</comment>


Taxation: And now, a moment of populism - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2010/06/taxation <comment><USER2> "With a fortune of that size, additional wealth is about little more than score-keeping."

No. I hate this sentiment. Having more wealth is it's about expanding one's ability to act, increasing one's economic influence, and, most generally, being able to shape the world how one likes. This is true regardless of income level. Wealth is never about "keeping score."

<comment><USER3> Indeed, but I don't get the impression that this is a U.K. attitude.

Also, I've recently noted that in Western Europe it would appear that "populism" is a word as loaded as "communism" is to those of us in the US (and maybe more so, to the extent that the memory of WWII is more acute to those who had it happen in the front yards).</comment></comment>


State of the art Server-side JavaScript (slides) - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/commonjs/Rv5uDyOwhe4/THYQ2NeLt_gJ

<comment><AUTHOR> Direct link to slides:

[http://www.slideshare.net/alexandre_morgaut/state-of-the- art...](http://www.slideshare.net/alexandre_morgaut/state-of-the-art- serverside-javascript-parisjs)

<comment><USER2> I would hardly call that direct. It requires Adobe Flash to work (which I don't have enabled) and I need to register if I want to download them, or log in with Facebook, something I will never ever do. I really wish people wouldn't use slideshare.</comment></comment>


To HN: Looking for people to talk to... - <AUTHOR>

I'm often fascinated by the people in the HN community. I feel a connection with many of them.
I recently wrote a letter to my local television station about my experiences in college (I'm graduating in June). In it I talk about my lack of friendships, among other things. I have realized that I really enjoy talking to people about almost anything. Learning about others brings a lot of enjoyment to my life. It's also therapeutic ;)
Unfortunately, I haven't met many people in college to do that with. So anyway, I am wondering if any of you would be interested in talking to me? Maybe you've had similar experiences?
Well anyway,
my AIM screename is: stevenbe123
Link to my facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=32403303
Link to the letter I wrote: http://www.stevenbe.com/
My e-mail: stevenboudreau123 [at] gmail.com
*If you want, you can e-mail me your sn, and/or other contact info. Or just leave it as a comment? Well, thanks for reading this :) <comment><USER2> There is a strangely sad yet intensely kind message inside this post. . . so unlike anything I've ever seen in a forum like this. Not sure why it compelled me to write this comment, but it did.

I'm very happy to see the community rise around you here. HN has got to be one of the best communities out there.

Be sure to reach out to your fellow human beings in person, if you can. Massive colleges/universities can seem cold and distant for many. If feasible, I would recommend transferring to a good smaller college, esp. a Liberal Arts college. You can make friends for life at the smaller institutions. That being said, I have no idea what your interests are so take my advice with a massive boulder of salt.

Take care, Steven.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ironically, I go to a small Liberal Arts college. I think my experiences can happen anywhere. It's tough being a kid these days, making friends, and more importantly, keeping friends.

I appreciate your comments, as well as everyone else's, very much! Thank you.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, especially if you don't drink alcohol. I've heard that around 24/25 is when people get over the novelty of it and start not caring about it as much. Maybe you can move to a country where nobody drinks. I can't think of one that isn't islamic although :( It's sad that people need alcohol to be 'drunk' (stupid, goofy and social), it's such a crutch.

What I do is talk to random people on the street/mall/coffee shop with complete honesty that look interesting to you. Maybe even a few girls ;) Some will get nowhere, some will putter, others you'll click. People from more social cultures (latin,etc) are a lot less uptight. There's millions of people out there in your city today, a few of them have GOT to be interesting :P Or create user groups or meetup groups or whatever your interested in and advertise! And organize, and initiate. And keep on going and going an going. When your the one who starts it, your the one with the ultimate choice.

And to be honest, programming doesn't have to be an anti-social job. There's a lot of ranting and raving with your fellow co-workers ;) It's like saying film-making is anti-social because you have to sit infront of a terminal editing video, thinking up scripts and creating sets.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think it is or has to be either. But when I was "learning to become a programmer," I just found myself becoming increasingly disconnected from the world. It was as if I was constantly thinking about programming, etc. and I didn't want to be bothered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's also the Hacker News Chatterous chatroom, which has 119 members, including a number of founders from the Y Combinator Winter '08 cycle.

You can hook your Jabber/GTalk, Email, Phone contacts into it as well.

One-click invite link: <http://www.chatterous.com/landing/hnyc/hcker/>

by phone: text CHTR JOIN hnyc hcker to 41411

by email: @join hcker in body to email@example.com

by jabber/google talk: add firstname.lastname@example.com and send @join hcker

</comment><comment><USER5> You should come into the IRC room. There are a lot of cool people. #startups on irc.freenode.net.

My AIM is hybridxaos. Also, Kyro Beshay in Orange County, UCI, and UCSD on Facebook / kyro on #startups. I also do webcam shows every Thursday night, but that'll cost you.

<comment><USER6> The #startups channel is booming. Lots of great discussions and once the good articles on HN have been read its a great place to go talk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is the first comment I ever written on YC News, your story was strangely compelling. You are a very talented writer, you can really capture the emotion though your words..

I go to college too and there have been some times where I felt the same way.. The best thing to do is to get involved with something you are interested in and meet people through there. Use events or activities as a medium to get closer to interesting people, its one thing that has really worked for me.

People are naturally social creatures, its probably hard but force yourself to go out and meet people. The best way to start a conversation is just to say hi. Yea you will probably get rejected by 90% of the people you meet but keep at it and the 10% will more than make up for all of those failures.

Also if you want to talk feel free to email me at chris.r.mccann [at] gmail.com I'd be happy to talk

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the compliment and advice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> AIM - marktbao, email in profile. Mark Bao on Facebook, Boston, MA network. MarkBao on the #startups chatroom.

Join HN on Ning: <http://newsyc.ning.com/>

</comment><comment><USER9> It really sounds like you need to loosen up a bit. A drink or two is probably not going to kill you, you don't need to get drunk but it's good social lubrication as well as a sociable thing to do with others.

I hope this works out for you, I'm sure you'll make contact with some interesting people through here. I can't help but think that what you really need is real life contact though.

Good luck

</comment><comment> mark-t There's a #news.yc channel on freenode, but it's been just me and one other guy for the past few months.

<comment><USER8> You should try #startups, about 30 members on average.

<comment> mark-t I realize this is a somewhat unpopular thing to say here, but I don't care about startups. I have little interest in being in a channel where that's the only thing people talk about. I'm here for the general tech news.

<comment><USER10> The conversations on #startups are not always about startups at all, its just a bunch of people interested in startups hanging around, talking about all kinds of random stuff of interest to hackers in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I had to upmod this, although it is quite an unusual submission. I too have enjoyed the kind of discussion here over the past year or so.

</comment><comment><USER12> It becomes much more likely that this kind of human interaction will have a big payoff for you if it includes a face-to-face meeting early in the interaction or friendship. Consequently, it would help people like me considering whether to take you up on your offer if you would say where you live.

Particularly, I live in the northern part of San Francisco Bay area and almost never travel out of the Bay area, so I would be interested if you lived somewhere in the Bay area (north or south) or were planning a trip out here soon.

firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I live in Seattle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think you're too hard on people. Not every conversation has to be some deep and meaningful meeting of minds. There's lots to be said for a night of crude jokes and chasing women. I'd argue that it's a lot more human experience than deep conversation. It really sounds like you need to relax.

Meeting people on the internet is no substitute for honest-to-goodness human interaction. Also, it's a good idea to have lots of friends that you have nothing in common with. The perspective you get is invaluable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi frederiksen. I think I do probably need to relax a bit. I'm trying to take life less serious :)

I am looking forward to getting out in the real world and engaging in human interaction once I graduate. But I think the Internet is a useful way to meet others as well, and possibly make friendships.

I also agree that having friends of multiple backgrounds, personalities, and interests provides great value. But to me it seems like doing this is much more difficult. People seem less willing to let people into their circles or lives if you have different interests or perspectives. Listening seems to be a highly undervalued characteristic these days. These are just my observations, though.

Thanks for the comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is sort of off topic, but...

I'm a teenager and I'm trying to figure out what to do for a living. Programming seems good, but I've read two independent sources that say it's lonely. Does it have to be this way, or is it a question of what kind of person you are? Is working in industry X always lonely while industry Y is much more social? Etc.

You can reply to this comment, or aim johnmaxwelliv / email john.maxwelliv@gmail. I would love to make some internet friends =)

<comment><USER15> I think it is what you make of it (or, as you say, it is largely dependent on the kind of person you are, and your actions).

I don't doubt that there are lonely programmers. I think that you'd probably find lonely people for any X that people choose as a major pursuit in their life, though. I think that many (certainly most of the folks I know) programmers are programmers because of the fascination/cool factor/feeling of relative omnipotence/etc that comes along with creating and controlling processes that do cool things (whether for you or for millions of your friends). Within that, there's still a lot of diversity.

Also, you don't need to have a homogenous social circle if you don't want to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Thanks for sharing. I just graduated last August, and experienced these same persistent feelings all throughout my college career. I'm often the type of person who can be surrounded by a huge group of people and still feel incredibly alone.

Here is an excerpt from an essay I wrote after returning from a year abroad in China:

"The concept of 'foreignerism' is not unfamiliar to me. Though I have spent the majority of my life as a citizen and resident of the United States of America, I am, in many ways, suspended between two worlds. Long before I moved to China, I felt like a stranger in a strange land and I often yearned to find a place that I could truly feel at home. Then shortly after I had adjusted to life in Beijing, I found myself completely at ease. Looking back now, I have to wonder if I did actually find somewhere that I "fit in" or if rather, I finally became comfortable with the fact that I might never quite fit in anywhere."

I can send you (or anybody else) the rest of the essay if you would like. Just email me at m[at]gee.ky. However, all of my experiences in China leading up to this realization are chronicled on: <http://www.middlefusion.com/>

</comment><comment><USER17> I was just thinking the other day how great it would be to have a Hacker News meetup. I'd certainly be interested in meeting other like-minded people.

That said.. are there any people from Melbourne (Australia) that hang out here?

</comment><comment><USER18> Finding friends is such an odd thing. In college I had a million freshman year, but it seemed that every year the number dwindled, but those remaining were that much better. Now I'm in grad school and I only have like 3 friends, and I'm totally unsure as to how I would make more? I don't understand how people moving to new places make any at all.

I'm also going to a school now that is more of a commuter school, so nobody lives close by. I honestly think that if people lived close to school, then everybody would have more friends.

<comment><USER19> This is true. When you're a freshman you don't know anyone yet, but _no one else_ knows anybody else either. So people are much more compelled to make friends. After a couple years your circle of friends kind of crystallizes, and those whom you don't know aren't that eager to stretch out of their little circles either.

I went through the "moving to a new place" experience a few months ago when I moved to Germany for 3 months. It was really odd, as it was the first time in my life when I really had to objectively think about how to make new friends.

And the best advice I can give about that is: DON'T go live on your own. At least not for the first few months. Go live with other people, particularly with people who value having a good vibe in the house, and not just living together to share expenses but never looking each other in the face (if you're going to Germany, look for "kein zweck WG" ;). You'll end up becoming friends with them, and meeting their friends that come over from time to time.

<comment><USER18> I actually lived in germany for a year too. Weird... I made all my friends through international student clubs, so I had almost no trouble there. Its coming back to grad school when I find myself with very few friends and noticeably fewer outlets through which to meet friends.

Our circle wasn't that we didn't let new people in, it was that people started graduating or whatever, and the circle got smaller without anyone to fill in the gaps. I guess that is because we didn't know anyone new, so we didn't have any "applicants" to join our circle of friends. I'm still convinced that all my problems here is because nobody walks here where I live. As soon as I can walk to other houses and cafes and bars, everything will get better.

It'd be an interesting sociological experiment to track the correlation between # of friends to distance walked per day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is why I want to make software that helps people meet each other in real life, other than for dating purposes.

</comment><comment><USER21> Check out <http://www.the1secondfilm.com/> : There are people there who you will probably click well with.

</comment><comment><USER22> firstname.lastname@example.com: email, msn, gtalk; xenterracide: yahoo,aim,freenode;

feel free to give me a shout. I may or may not be responsive over the next week. I've been in the middle of moving and it's finals week. After wednesday I'll hopefully be in the free and clear. Then it's pound out my startup time.

</comment><comment><USER23> Dropped you a line via Gmail -- feel free to get back to me. Brian Lash (University of Pittsburgh) on Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER24> asvora on AIM, email@example.com on MSN, firstname.lastname@example.com for Yahoo IM, <http://twitter.com/avinashv>, <http://avinashv.net>, or, just email me. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER25> Good to hear from you. :) kashif(dot)razzaqui(at)gmail

</comment><comment><USER26> jnthnlane on AIM

or e-mail in my profile.

Jonathan Lane on Facebook (University of Lethbridge network)

</comment><comment><USER27> My gtalk info is in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER28> rottled on aim, up for whatever :)

out of the ordinary submission, but upmodding.

</comment><comment><USER29> jlbxk8 on aim

</comment><comment><USER30> curi42 on AIM

edit: wow, this comment is already the top google hit for 'curi42'</comment>


Experts said Arctic sea ice would melt entirely – they were wrong - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/10/07/experts-said-arctic-sea-ice-would-melt-entirely-by-september-201/ <comment><USER2> Something seems a bit off in this reporting. From this 2016 article at The Telegraph:

> Dire predictions that the Arctic would be devoid of sea ice by September > this year have proven to be unfounded after latest satellite images showed > there is far more now than in 2012.

> Scientists such as Prof Peter Wadhams, of Cambridge University, and Prof > Wieslaw Maslowski, of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, > have regularly forecast the loss of ice by 2016, which has been widely > reported by the BBC and other media outlets.

Yet from a 2009 article at The Telegraph, at [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/copenhagen-climate- cha...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/copenhagen-climate-change- confe/6815470/Copenhagen-climate-summit-Al-Gore-condemned-over-Arctic-ice- melting-prediction.html) :

> Speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, Mr Gore said new computer > modelling suggests there is a 75 per cent chance of the entire polar ice cap > melting during the summertime by 2014.

> However, he faced embarrassment last night after Dr Wieslav Maslowski, the > climatologist whose work the prediction was based on, refuted his claims.

> Dr Maslowski, of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, told > The Times: "It's unclear to me how this figure was arrived at.

> "I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this." ...

> Dr Maslowki said that his latest results give a six-year projection for the > melting of 80 per cent of the ice, but he said he expects some ice to remain > beyond 2020.

> He added: "I was very explicit that we were talking about near-ice-free > conditions and not completely ice-free conditions in the northern ocean."

Of course, that was is 2009. Going back to this 2016 article:

> The view was supported by Prof Maslowski, who in 2013 published a paper in > the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences also claiming that the > Arctic would be ice-free by 2016, plus or minus three years.

Yet the 2012 Maslowski paper - yes, 2012, not 2013 - doi:10.1146/annurev- earth-042711-105345 says (emphasis mine):

> Given the estimated trend and the volume estimate for October–November of > 2007 at less than 9,000 km^3 (Kwok et al. 2009), one can project that at > this rate it would take only 9 more years or until 2016 ± 3 years to reach a > nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean in summer. Regardless of high uncertainty > associated with such an estimate, it does provide _a lower bound of the time > range for projections of seasonal sea ice cover_

This isn't quite a prediction that the "Arctic would be ice-free by 2016, plus or minus three years", though I think the difference is more a quibble than anything else.

In a BBC article from 2011 ( [http://www.bbc.com/news/science- environment-13002706](http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-13002706) ), it sounds like Maslowski's prediction for ice loss is the one of the earliest in the Arctic ice modelling field, and notable for being so early:

> The original prediction, made in 2007, gained Wieslaw Maslowski's team a > deal of criticism from some of their peers. ...

> "[Maslowski's] is quite a good model, one thing it has is really high > resolution, it can capture details that are lost in global climate models," > he said.

> "But 2019 is only eight years away; there's been modelling showing that > [likely dates are around] 2040/50, and I'd still lean towards that.

> "I'd be very surprised if it's 2013 - I wouldn't be totally surprised if > it's 2019."

So while "experts said" is true, it wasn't "most of the experts". Even this Telegraph piece quotes an expert who says there are experts ""who have the summer sea ice remaining until late this century, which is quite impossible."" It's as if there was a wide range of uncertainty.

I was also thrown by the comment:

> It is the latest example of experts making alarming predictions which do not > come to pass. Earlier this week environmentalists were accused of misleading > the public about the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" after aerial shots proved > there was no "island of rubbish" in the middle of the ocean. Likewise, > warnings that the hole in the ozone layer would never close were debunked in > June.

Who said there was an 'island of rubbish'? The popular articles I've read have all used phrases like Wikipedia article from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch) :

> The patch is characterized by exceptionally high relative concentrations of > pelagic plastics, chemical sludge and other debris that have been trapped by > the currents of the North Pacific Gyre.[2] Because of its large area, it is > of very low density (4 particles per cubic meter), and therefore not visible > from satellite photography, nor even necessarily to casual boaters or divers > in the area. It consists primarily of a small increase in suspended, often > microscopic, particles in the upper water column.

It feels like saying the Sargasso Sea is actually not a floating ship graveyard of ships caught in the seaweed, when that's never been the case.

Similarly, there wasn't a general belief that the hole in the ozone layer would never close. Quoting now from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion) :

> The 2010 report found, "Over the past decade, global ozone and ozone in the > Arctic and Antarctic regions is no longer decreasing but is not yet > increasing. The ozone layer outside the Polar regions is projected to > recover to its pre-1980 levels some time before the middle of this century. > In contrast, the springtime ozone hole over the Antarctic is expected to > recover much later."

Who was warning in 2016 that the hole would never close?</comment>


Microsoft paying Nokia more than $1B to promote and develop WindowsPhone devices - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekwire.com/2011/report-microsoft-paying-nokia-1b

<comment><USER2> MS last decade did something similar with Corel. Look it up.</comment>


Journey to Self Hosting - <AUTHOR> http://blog.binarymist.net/2014/11/29/journey-to-self-hosting/

<comment><USER2> I just took a journey down a horrible article by a person that wasn't very knowledgeable.</comment>


Microsoft bets on WebRTC for Skype's browser future - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2012/06/26/skype-webrtc-web-client/

<comment><USER2> The article misses out that Skype also provided Opus codec: <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-codec-opus>. But apart from that WebRTC is supposed to be an open standard and Mozilla and Google are already implementing it. So Microsoft not doing it would be quite risky for them. It is perhaps the reason why they bought Skype in the first place. Also since being acquired (as stated in the article) Skype has been providing the backend for Facebook video.

Moreover, Matthew Kaufman (<http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/10mar/slides/tsvarea-1.pdf>) works with Skype, as does Jonathan Rosenberg (of SIP fame: <http://www.jdrosen.net/>). So apart from the original inventors of Skype they have people who have built other Video and Voice products.</comment>


Opinion: is it safe to invest in Bitcoin? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/blockchain-media/on-qoura-and-personally-during-a-casual-talk-about-blockchain-and-bitcoin-i-am-often-asked-whether-654792aaedd5 <comment><AUTHOR> What is your opinion?

<comment><USER2> I would consider Bitcoin more of a speculation as opposed to an investment at this time since the currency and blockchain technology elements are in the early adopter stage. Much like the internet in the late 1980's when many viewed it as a fad until acceptance and utilization grew. At this point I would say it is safe to speculate in Bitcoin.</comment></comment>


Answers to Exercises - "The C Programming Language", 2nd edition - <AUTHOR> http://users.powernet.co.uk/eton/kandr2/

<comment><USER2> When I was using these answers to work through the book myself, I was very annoyed when the answer would use pointers BEFORE they had been introduced in the text.

<comment><USER3> They have tried to get answers that avoid concepts that have not yet been introduced in the book at the point of the excercise, and to categorize answers based on how well they do that. See <http://users.powernet.co.uk/eton/kandr2/name.html> for details.

After over a decade, there's still excercises there that have no answers. That's a shame. (On me, I only provided a couple of them.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Write a program to determine the ranges of char , short , int , and long variables, both signed and unsigned , by printing appropriate values from standard headers and by direct computation. - 1st on Chapter 2.

I'm actually reading that book right now. I didn't find the answer on the site very satisfying.

</comment><comment><USER5> Cool.. it'll be interesting to see how different their answers are from my own =).

</comment><comment><USER6> There is also "The C Answer Book" by Tondo and Gimpel.</comment>


Consciousness Is A State Of Matter, Like a Solid, A Liquid Or A Gas - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/5e7ed624986d

<comment><USER2> Really? At what temperature and pressure does consciousness change state? What is its density? What are consciousness's component particles? Does it fill a container, or have a fixed volume? What's the index of refraction of consciousness? How do we transition elements like copper or iron into consciousness, or is it only reachable by certain particles like bosons?

I'm curious about the answers, because it sounds like none of those questions actually make any sense, but they would have to be answerable of any proposed new phase of matter.

You can't just call something a state of matter without understanding what that actually means.

"...physicists have been reluctant to discuss consciousness, considering it a topic for quacks and charlatans."

Maybe they were on to something.

<comment><USER3> well, it IS soluble in alcohol...</comment></comment>


Show HN: Odondoo a social network to help each other out - <AUTHOR> Hey everyone, My partner and I recently quit our jobs in the video game industry to build something new : Odondoo. We built what we like to call a "social network to help each others out" : https://www.odondoo.com Think of it as a bastard children between twitter , facebook marketplace, and a true marketplace (handling transactions and ratings).
You post what you need (small description, time and date when you need it) and if you're willing to pay, you can set it up to go through our platform. You can check a timeline of what others are posting so you can comment, mention friends, etc.
Any open request shows on a map (so you can see how to help others around you). That's it.
If you have some time to spare, please try it out! It's live.
We're still missing a couple features (like notifications and a PWA) but it should be coming soon.
Let me know what you think about the design, the idea, any missing feature, and so on !
I'll be more than happy to get some feedback and sort our todo list based on it! <comment><USER2> Many of the posts are from Montreal and very local (like mow my lawn). Can I filter by location?

Are the prizes in US$ or in Can$?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're from Montreal , that's why most posts are from there. You can filter by price and location once logged in ( gear icon > notification filters).

The other option is to use the map to check open jobs by location.

Your comment makes me realise : 1/ it could be interesting to allow unregistered users to filter 2/ we have to say $cad :)

Thanks a LOT for checking it out !</comment></comment>


When Telcos Customize Crypto - <AUTHOR> https://realm.io/news/when-telcos-customize-crypto/ <comment><USER3> I've run into similar issues and one such always seems to stick in my head - <USER2> few years back some Samsung and HTC devices shipped with a very buggy version of GSON causing deserialization errors on these devices. You can see the actual gson issue here: [https://github.com/google/gson/issues/255](https://github.com/google/gson/issues/255)

The solution was to rename the package name using a tool called jarjar ([https://code.google.com/p/jarjar/](https://code.google.com/p/jarjar/)) and then things would work just fine. Was kind of a pain to maintain this library in sync with the updates of GSON, but eventually we were able to abandon support for these devices once the company felt the impact was low based upon the stats in the Android Platform Versions - [http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html](http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html)

Android, always keeping us on our toes. :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Native code on Android is tricky. We also ran into this issue where the Chrome WebView didn't resend signals properly: [https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=483399](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=483399). Trying to debug errors that 1) is in 3rd party dependencies and 2) depends on the order you load them is is really not fun.</comment>


Hardware after Snowden revelations? - <AUTHOR>

Hi, community!<p>I think everybody reading HN watched Jacob Applebaum's talk at CCC. I'm a little bit confused with that information. I'm asking you: which hardware parts you would trust? <comment><USER2> Apart pen and paper you cannot trust anything you didn't build yourself from scratch.

And then you have no clue about the vulnerabilities of your creation.

At one point you have to balance paranoia vs practicality.

I think you need 2 systems : one that is connected and where you control carefully the data that it might leak about you and a non connected one _, heavily encrypted where you have private data.

_ no wifi card, Ethernet port glued etc</comment>


Facebook: Why Applications Suck - <AUTHOR> http://www.alexkates.com/2007/10/facebook-why-applications-suck.html My take.  Let's hear what you guys think. <comment><USER2> The article seems kind of bitter.

Obviously some people find value and fun in facebook applications plus they generate pageviews and ad dollars so everyones happy.

My main complaint is that profiles with tens of applications on them take forever to load on my connection and make certain friend's profiles unusable to me.

<comment><USER3> "Obviously some people find value and fun in facebook applications plus they generate pageviews and ad dollars so everyones happy."

They generate externalities, which make some people unhappy. When you see Facebook Vampires, think of Facebook AIDS ([http://www.byrneseyeview.com/byrnes_eye_view/a_little_more_o...](http://www.byrneseyeview.com/byrnes_eye_view/a_little_more_on_why_applicati.html)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice analysis</comment>


Canadian Sentenced for Selling Encrypted Phones to Criminals - <AUTHOR> https://www.apnews.com/ef3c658b08314817a77f7f0e9c2fb490 <comment><AUTHOR> This company is super fascinating to me - I understand you can't sell these phones to cartels and killers, but I do think there's a market for very security conscious people who want everything they do to remain private. I'm thinking about Global 2k CEO's, hedge fund founders, etc. who deal with huge amounts of money and whose info could generate huge returns if you had an inside look and who want to protect it at a high cost.</comment>


Power Up Your Authentication with Open LDAP and Puppet - <AUTHOR> http://datacentred.co.uk/power-up-your-authentication-with-open-ldap-and-puppet/

<comment><USER2> With this sort of authentication scheme what happens when the network connection goes down or the LDAP server crashes? Can you no longer login? Or can you only login to local accounts? Ideally I would like to have centralized authentication management, but if the central server goes down to still have a local read-only copy of the authentication data. Is something like this possible? Or would it be easier to just sync passwd files?

<comment><USER3> For OS level auth, you'd want to use sssd, which will handle most failure conditions:

[https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/](https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/) [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Enterprise/Authentication/sssd](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Enterprise/Authentication/sssd)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not such a big problem on a Linux host - it's more of a problem on network hardware.

<comment><USER4> ldap & tacacs+ solves that issue

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cached version since the site is returning a 508

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:gyIeexA...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:gyIeexA_vRkJ:datacentred.co.uk/power- up-your-authentication-with-open-ldap-and-puppet/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this - our company blog's currently hosted by a third party.</comment></comment>


Kinect is dead. Long live the Leap Motion - <AUTHOR> http://live.leapmotion.com

<comment><USER2> The title "Kinect is dead. Long live the Leap Motion" is obviously a linkbait, however I found the linked video promising. Controlling a computer simply by waving your hand without even touching the screen can, potentially, be used in a large set of applications.

</comment><comment><USER3> Kinect is not dead and Leap Motion will live whenever it will be available.

</comment><comment><USER4> I really want to see a demo of typing or some precise gestures.

<comment><USER5> Why would you use this for typing? This seems more like a mouse replacement than a keyboard replacement. Still, if you watch the demo closely, they show 1 cm level precision, which is damn good for "in the air" gesture recognition.

You can design an interface for just about any reasonable level of precision, but this appears to be a good match for the type of touch interfaces we're already seeing in iOS, Android, and Metro. Metro with a mouse kind of sucks, if I'm being honest. Metro with something like this would feel a lot more like direct manipulation, which is what touch UI delivers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> different use cases. Leap motion is for (extreme) short distance manipulation, which probably gives it the higher resolution, while Kinect is for mid- distance manipulation, which works well for games. I wonder though why would one opt for Leap motion and not buy a real touch screen if he needs to be that close to the screen anyway.

<comment><USER5> > I wonder though why would one opt for Leap motion and not buy a real touch > screen if he needs to be that close to the screen anyway.

A couple of reasons that came to mind:

1) Smudges! I tolerate them on my touch devices, but they really annoy me. Gesture-based manipulation takes you three-quarters of the way to touch UI without the actual touching.

2) Gestures detection can occur in a plane that is different than the screen surface. A big reason we don't all use touch screens on our desks is because of the "gorilla arms" problem. Any interface that requires you to extend your arms to shoulder height must be limited to infrequent use because of fatigue. With a remote sensor like this, you wouldn't have to reach all the way to your screen.

You can see the benefits of this with a simple exercise. Reach forward at chest height to the point that your hand just barely passes the front edge of your keyboard and hold it for a 10 count. Now do the same exercise, but reach all the way to your screen. Hold that for a 10 count and the difference will become clear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So many negative comments, I thought the video was amazing.</comment>


Building a deeper understanding of images - <AUTHOR> http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2014/09/building-deeper-understanding-of-images.html <comment><USER2> I am one of the people who helped analyze the results of the mentioned ILSVRC challenge. In particular, I performed an experiment comparing Google's performance to that of a human a week ago and wrote up the results in this blog post:

[http://karpathy.github.io/2014/09/02/what-i-learned-from- com...](http://karpathy.github.io/2014/09/02/what-i-learned-from-competing- against-a-convnet-on-imagenet/)

TLDR is that it's very exciting that the models are starting to perform on par with humans (on ILSVRC classification at least), and doing so on orders of milliseconds. The included page also has a link to our annotation interface where you can try to compete against their model yourself, and see its predictions and mistakes.

<comment><USER3> I hope I'm not too late to your thread to ask questions. I find your field absolutely fascinating, though I've never taken my interest further than basic undergrad image processing or simple machine learning. I wish I had more time to follow all of my interests.

Anyway, this one particular gray area has been bugging me, and I've been hoping to run into a researcher or someone that has the appropriate context to clarify it for me. It's not technical question, per se.--it's a set of questions that build up to an uncertainty related to model training, reuse, and sharing. (I hope I'm asking the relevant questions...) I don't expect answers to all of this as it would take way too much of anyone's time, but maybe you can pick a few key points and discuss. I'm also really dying to get feedback on the last part as to its feasibility.

1\. Do computer vision / modeling researchers typically share common training and evaluation data sets, or is it mostly kept proprietary? If good data sets do exist out in the open, do they undergo continual improvement, or are they frozen? Are these training sets typically amenable to only one type of training--ie., black box, offline vs online, etc.? Does it take a lot of practice/skill to know how much to hold back for post-training evaluation? Do you have an estimate for how much time and effort is involved in manually annotating and curating these data sets?

2\. Once an algorithm is developed, does a model get trained under different parameters? Does tweaking those parameters lead to vastly different results? Are there typically distinct optima for a given classification task, or can it vary? Does the training set have a big impact on the performance of the algorithm? Which is more important, the training data or the algorithm?

3\. Once models undergo offline training, are they fast to run? Is there a typical runtime complexity, or do different types of models operate significantly differently under the hood (by principle or by computational complexity)? Can you run an extremely complicated and robust model with a ton of classification outputs in sub-millisecond time on commodity hardware?

4\. Can trained models be packaged and redistributed as a kind of "open source"? Are there any obvious barriers preventing this, such as the existence (or proliferation) of patents in your field? Do computer vision researchers like to share their code / results? If it's not a common practice to share code, would a large number of researchers be downright opposed to having their (patentable) algorithms and (copyrightable?) models made available to others?

5\. Are trained models too complicated for the layman to use and produce good, consistent results? (For our purposes, I would consider a layman to be someone with at least some understanding of basic computer science, including exposure to data structures, algorithms, and a little bit of mathematical ability. Perhaps none of this too deep.)

6\. Highly related to the last question, would there be a lot of specialized knowledge required to tweak model input parameters? Would these parameters correlate to mathematical operations? Would there be any arcane and seemingly arbitrary weights to adjust that are deeply encoded into the model itself? (Not sure if I'm far left field here or not.)

I think what I'm ultimately hitting at is that it would be _freaking awesome_ if there were a good set of robust pre-trained classifier models available for the layman programmer. Models that continually undergo development as improvements are made to training sets, algorithms, the literature--what have you. Please tell me if this kind of thing already exists.

Anyway, I feel like I'm about to go on a long-winded talk about a technology I've been imagining. It's something along the lines of a specification that allows for the broad spectrum sharing of reusable, generic, containerized ML and classifier training results with others. In the world I envision, you would share trained models and import them just as you would code libraries.

Let me reiterate: if this sort of thing happens to exist in the wild already, _please point me to it!_ I can think of tons of uses. :)

 _Note: replied to my own comment because original text was too long._

<comment><USER3> _(Note: Posted as self-reply because original comment was too long)_

I picture a website kind of like Github, or perhaps a language package index like npm's. Except this website is concerned with classification instead of code. You would see the following kinds of downloads:

      * Highly optimized, performant, pre-trained classifier models.
        Perhaps numbering in the thousands if the site were popular.
        You'd see a wide variety of classifiers: general ones,
        specific things like "dog breeds" and "celebrities" and "car types".

      * Common library code capable of running the models against user data.
        Available in a variety of languages. The model classifier format would
        have to be generic enough that it can run under libraries in any
        environment.

There might also be downloads directed at supporting researchers. Stuff like:

      * Well put-together training data sets

      * Human-curated annotations, categorizations, ontologies, etc.
        available as metadata that can be paired with the training sets in any
        way desired. Not all of it may be useful for any given classifier.

Do you know if there is already an existing "standard format" for encoding or serializing pre-trained models for the purpose of sharing and exchanging them? There are likely a few algorithm-specific serialization formats for persisting internal graphs and weights and so forth. But some of these results are left trapped entirety within the confines of the internal data structures of a particular implementation...

In any case, I'm not aware of the existence of one universal format encoding all the things. Because why would there be? What would be "standard" about it? The algorithm space is rather wide and different algorithms encode different things, so there wouldn't even be cross-cutting similarities to take advantage of. It would be like inventing a file format for "text files and PNG images and fonts together!". Arbitrary, pointless. An absurd idea.

Assume it's not pointless, though; start forming a picture of a universal data format or scheme for encoding and sharing all the possible training results irrespective of the source algorithm that produced them or the one that is required to produce the results. We can't just encode the "training result" because we've already demonstrated the complete and utter uselessness. Instead, the universal scheme would have to encode at least three things: a " _language descriptor_ " written as an abstract machine language whose task is creating a bridge between the computer-generated " _training result_ " and the predetermined " _classification result_ " when a user input is provided.

        descriptor(input, perception encoding) => classification result

Apart from the user input, everything else is encoded into our data serialization format. The "descriptor" would ordinarily have been some C or MatLab (or whatever) code. It's the part that would have told us "this picture is of a KITTEN" or "this text was written by STEPHEN KING" given all the other inputs. Now it is an encoding of an abstract circuit, state machine, or some other language grammar. Notice also how this has become entirely self-hosting.

If there other other arguments, then,

        descriptor(input, A, B, C..., perception encoding) => classification result

Where metadata concerning the purpose, names, types, ranges, and defaults for `A, B, C...` are also encoded in the data format. Classification types, ranges, etc. must also be encoded,

        classification result ∈ (class P, Q, R...)

Instead of being compiled to a reduced representation and inlined into the body of the " _descriptor_ ", they could be provided as a parameter, adding a further degree of indirection. I won't show any further notation.

To quickly summarize again: The language descriptor performs the task of parsing the model, then accepting an arbitrary input (a classification set, possible parameters, and the subject material), and ultimately yielding production of an output.

By now you've likely noticed that all of this mess isn't technically different than stuffing the executable of the classifier program itself into the serialization of the training results. You'd be correct, of course. It might seem arbitrary here, but I think I'll demonstrate a few nifty results later on. Besides, I'm not really suggesting they be contained in the same file.

To make use of these abstractions, there would need to be some _client libraries_ (C++, Java, Python, etc.) provided that make it trivially easy to load and evaluate any of the classifiers from your own code. Since we went to the trouble of encoding the aforementioned " _language descriptor_ " as an abstract grammar, the whole classifier (training and all) can be hosted and run from anywhere there is a client library provided, essentially making the classifier available from any language. What's more is the client libraries would not require constant updates to support new algorithm variations--it's baked into the data format, so we get the capability for free simply by swapping files.

               import pyclassifier

               #include <classification>

               etc...

               classifier = classifiers.standardSvm()

               classifier = classifiers.load("my_novel_algorithm")

               classifier = classifiers.load("clustering_doe_et_al_09")

Another cool thing we could do is define shared sets of "classification results". Instead of defining classes and categories and whatnot on a situation-to-situation basis, perhaps we could draw from a global pool of concepts and ideas pulled from the world. We can impart stable names to as many different things and concepts as possible: classes like "CAR", "PERSON", "BOY", "DOG", "TANK", etc. -- all designed to be globally unique and robust identifiers that can continue to evolve over time without breaking our classifier algorithms. A side benefit is that all classifiers would begin to speak the same shared language. (Granted, not all classification outputs would be amenable to this. Some would. Photo seem like a great use case.)

Now, If we were to build that category database as an ontology database instead... Perhaps you could begin to semantically infer things?

              {Dexter's Lab} implies {Cartoon}

              Might we infer the person who uploaded it is a 90's kid?

Or for a more graph topology-based, semantic kind of result,

             {Velociraptor} implies {Dinosaur}
                            implies {Predator}
                            implies {Extinct Animals}
                            implies {Seen on film} {Jurassic Park}

             Coincident occurrence with

             {Person}, ->
             {Man}, ->
             {Sam Neill}

             {Sam Neill} was {Seen on film} {Jurassic Park}

             We can probably be sure that you're looking at a still from {Jurassic Park} at this point.

I'm not claiming searching the graph like that would be efficient, of course. But if you've got ontological overlap that is cheap to check, it might be fun...

The classifier ontology would be versioned, but probably very slow moving in terms of changes. It might be impractical to package the entire database with an app. With ontologies, you can plug in subsets and wire them to other ones later on,

              "AKC-STANDARD-DOG-BREEDS_CLASSES-1.0.1"

              "CARTOONS-OF-THE-90S-0.1.0"

The pre-trained classifier data can be versioned. Say that someone else did all the work of training it to recognize Bob Ross paintings or whatever.

              classifier = new Classifier("algorithm").forModel("BOB-ROSS-PAINTINGS-0.1")

              classifier.classify(new Image("http://i.imgur.com..."));

Oops, someone forgot to include happy little trees. But we can fix that,

              // Happy Little Trees edition.

              classifier = new Classifier("algorithm").forModel("BOB-ROSS-PAINTINGS-1.0")

              classifier.classify(new Image("http://i.imgur.com..."));

              Produces results:

                 95% Bob Ross
                 100% Happy Little Trees
                 75% Happy Little Clouds

If this kind of tooling and ecosystem existed, _do you even know how much fun I could have on Reddit?_

But in all seriousness, think of the practicality of reusability. Downloading and running classifiers other people trained, from the language of your choice? That's powerful and empowering. It takes the tech out of the realm of "Google playtoy" and puts it in our collective hands.

Think of the kinds of novel apps that the Average Joe programmer could develop. And if this type of thing truly got the support of the image processing crowd, I can't fathom how much improvement we'd witness on a year- to-year basis.

Does anything like this exist in your field for researchers now? If so, could it be made to be usable by laymen? (Or does it already exist for general audiences? Am I living under a rock?)

If this kind of thing doesn't exist or isn't shared, what steps could be made toward making something like this a reality? Are there critical gating pieces that need to come together first in order to make all of it work? Or conversely, do you feel strongly that something like this just isn't feasible?

Possible complications on building an "open source" set of classifiers is the deep knowledge required to contribute. And what about patents? It's my understanding that universities like to patent research (eg. SIFT), and AFAIK there must be broad coverage of of this space by the universities. That would be a major setback.

Anyway, I've rambled on far too much. If anyone managed to read all of that, please forgive me for inundating you with such a crazy, ill-informed, and long-winded diatribe. I hope I made sense.

<comment><USER4> The neural architectures change so a set of parameters for one network won't run on another. Image size changes too which changes the nn behind it. There is not much work on mapping one set of parameters onto another. Transfer learning might have a little applicability. But unlikely at the needing edge of vision research.

Worth noting a neural network IS a general purpose function encoding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Now if only Google could develop a way to serve static text content without using JavaScript!

(All I get is a B with twirling gears in it...)

<comment><USER6> This is a longstanding Blogger bug that happens when cookies are blocked. They haven't fixed it because you and I are the only people on the planet who whitelist cookies.

<comment><USER7> It's also incompatible with the Readability plugin. :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "typical incarnations of which consist of over 100 layers with a maximum depth of over 20 parameter layers)" Anyone know exactly what that means? I'm guessing that that there are 100 layers total, 20 of which have tunable parameters, and the other 80 of which don't--e.g., max pooling and normalization.

</comment><comment><USER9> That's pretty amazing. It seems like we're at a point where we could build really practical robots with this?

Robots to do dishes, weed crops, pick fruit? Why isn't this being applied to more tasks?

<comment><USER10> I would eat a "hat with a wide brim" if Google isn't going to release a robot that can do basic household chores (laundry, dishes, dusting) within the next 3 years.

Google has been gobbling up robotics startups, and given how Google also loves gobbling up personal data, having robot "boots on the ground" in every home must be extremely appealing to them.

<comment><USER11> I doubt it. The easy parts of laundry and dishes are already done by simple robots sold in every white goods department. The remaining parts are very demanding indeed.

Research labs are not robustly demonstrating these capabilities yet, even with very expensive robots.

<comment><USER12> I had this thought the other day - not robots washing the laundry, but folding it. Folding is actually not that simple after thinking about it.

<comment><USER11> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy5g33S0Gzo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy5g33S0Gzo)

Work is progressing. That's a $300K robot.

(edit: no affiliation. Video shows PR2 robot at Berkeley folding towels competently but very slowly in 2010)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder whether some of the intermediate layers in these models might correspond to something like "living room" or other locations that provide additional information about the objects that might be in the scene. For example, I suspect it was much easier for me to identify the preamp and the wii in one of the pictures because I knew it was a living room/den instead of an office or study.

<comment><USER14> In this case, no they didn't have pre-labeled location/setting available. You can see one of the datasets they used here: [http://image- net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2013/#data](http://image- net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2013/#data).

Generally speaking, Neural Networks are black boxes. The layers interact with each other but not in a defined categorical manner like that. Layer size/depth are parameters you provide when setting up that have tradeoffs in result accuracy, space, time spent, etc like jpeg quality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wish this was available as a translation app. You point your phone at a fruit stand and it names every single item, and you can then ask the vendor for the item by name.

It isn't that crazy, in fact that's exactly what they have right now but just in English only.

<comment><USER16> Not exactly what your'e talking about but you should take a look at Word Lens(which google just bought).

Basically you hold your phone up and position it over a piece of text using the camera. It then OCRs the text, translates it, and replaces it in realtime in the camera feed. It's pretty remarkable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> These classifications are amazing but the fact that the first image in the article is classified as "a dog wearing a wide-brimmed hat" and not as "a chihuahua wearing a sombrero" is telling of how far we are from true understanding of images.

Only a human possessed with the relevant cultural stereotypes (chihuahua implies Mexican, ergo, the hat must be a sombrero) could make that conclusion.

Even so, I firmly believe that at this rate of improvement, we're not far from that kind of deep understanding.

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure how your example is more true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> How big is the model? Training these kinds of networks is expert work and requires enormous infrastructure; but if they released the model, I'm sure people like us could come up with all sorts of very useful applications.

<comment><USER20> If you're interested, Caffe [http://caffe.berkeleyvision.org/](http://caffe.berkeleyvision.org/) comes with some pre-trained models for ImageNet, which was close to state-of-the-art a year or two ago.</comment></comment>


W3C wants WHATWG to stop their separate HTML 5 Spec. Who should maintain spec? - <AUTHOR> http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2010-June/026855.html A similar post with more information was sent to the W3C public-html mailing list: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2010Jun/0619.html <comment><AUTHOR> A similar post with some more information was sent to the W3C public-html mailing list: [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public- html/2010Jun/0619...](http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public- html/2010Jun/0619.html)</comment>


Why The NFL is a Pile of Boring. - <AUTHOR> http://designbygravity.wordpress.com/2009/08/14/the-nfl-is-a-pile-of-boring/

<comment><USER2> Yes but for some reason millions of people, myself included, are obsessed by it.

It is a very interesting triumph of hype.</comment>


Show HN: Convert Text to Image - <AUTHOR> https://textimagecyborg.com/ <comment><USER2> Try [https://gif.com.ai](https://gif.com.ai) if you want to turn text into an animation.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is unfortunately only available as an extension for chrome. Also let me state one big difference, [https://textimagecyborg.com](https://textimagecyborg.com) put user privacy as the most important thing so : no tracking, no ad, no logging, no knowledge whatsoever on who does what.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Simple js does that for you [https://jsfiddle.net/8ypxW/3/](https://jsfiddle.net/8ypxW/3/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Complicated prolog does that too. Spaghetti C++ does that too. This tool is way easier compared to the method you have suggested. Just copy/past your text with/without image and it is done.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which tech companies have offices in New York City? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> There are tens of thousands of software developers employed in the New York metro area. This is not a reasonable approach to identify tech companies.

</comment><comment><USER3> Artsy, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Etsy, Kickstarter, Meetup.com

Full list: [http://wearemadeinny.com/made-in-ny- list/](http://wearemadeinny.com/made-in-ny-list/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Full stack academy , Trello , Codeacademy ... These are the 3 start ups that come to mind .... I'll keep adding as I remneber more

</comment><comment><USER5> DigitalOcean is based here. And like others have said, many companies are either started here or have a satellite office.

</comment><comment><USER6> Google has a very large NYC office.

</comment><comment><USER7> StackExchange.

</comment><comment><USER8> Bond Street

</comment><comment><USER9> Foursquare was originally hacked together at the Think Coffee near NYU. They are still based in NYC.

OKCupid founded and based there as well.

</comment><comment><USER10> dropbox opened up recently

</comment><comment><USER11> MongoDB</comment>


Review: The Bit Player, an Homage to Claude Shannon - <AUTHOR> https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.3.20190719a/full/ <comment><AUTHOR> We were a small but seemingly delighted crowd when seeing this at the AAAS Convention, Seattle, on February 14.

Since overshadowed by this simultaneous local reporting on the US's first Covid patient: [https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/what-it- was...](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/what-it-was-like-for- doctors-and-nurses-at-an-everett-hospital-to-treat-the-nations-first-novel- coronavirus-patient/)</comment>


Ask HN: What domain do you use for your docs site? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> [https://companyname.com/docs](https://companyname.com/docs)

Don't see why you need a subdomain for this, and it seems like something that may be worse on a SEO/marketing level (there's mixed evidence here, but some sources like Moz say that subdomains are treated like separate websites rather than part of the same one).

So you may not even need a subdomain for the docs site.

You certainly don't need a whole separate domain for it, especially if the only reason for it it a 'cute' domain hack without much in the way of practical value.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> most companies just use

[https://docs.companyname.com](https://docs.companyname.com)

But then you have companies like Slack, which picked a whole new top level domain.

[https://get.slack.help/](https://get.slack.help/)

What's the benefit of going with the .help domain?

<comment><USER3> Slack is using a domain hack to spell out Get Slack Help. It's cute but there aren't really any usability, security or performance benefits.

Go with a docs. sub domain: users will recognize the domain it belongs to and you will have one less certificate to worry about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> docs. for easy maintenance and scaling

<comment><USER5> I second that, it also allows moving and separation from different sites/publication systems (by DNS pointing). Also a valid concern: I seen main sites been redone/moved so many times while the docs stayed the same on its own subdomain...</comment></comment>


Reverse Engineering a Mysterious UDP Stream in My Hotel (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://gkbrk.com/2016/05/hotel-music/ <comment><USER2> _What the hell? I can't believe I spent time for this. It's just elevator music. It is played in the hotel corridors around the elevators. Oh well, at least I can listen to it from my room now._

One would have thought the next step would have been to arrange for better (i.e. more metal) elevator music? If it's multicast, it would be surprising if there were a lot of authentication on the speaker side.

<comment><USER3> My thought exactly. Make voice recordings and randomly broadcast ghostly screams into the elevators. Not something I would do, but definitely a DEFCON prank waiting to happen.

<comment><USER4> "Attention customers, due to signal delays, this elevator is now running on the express line. For local service, please transfer to the 1 train at the 168th street station."

<comment><USER5> ``Hello,'' said the elevator sweetly, ``I am to be your elevator for this trip to the floor of your choice. I have been designed by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation to take you, the visitor to the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, into these their offices. If you enjoy your ride, which will be swift and pleasurable, then you may care to experience some of the other elevators which have recently been installed in the offices of the Galactic tax department, Boobiloo Baby Foods and the Sirian State Mental Hospital, where many ex-Sirius Cybernetics Corporation executives will be delighted to welcome your visits, sympathy, and happy tales of the outside world.''

``Yeah,'' said Zaphod, stepping into it, ``what else do you do besides talk?''

``I go up,'' said the elevator, ``or down.''

``Good,'' said Zaphod, ``We're going up.''

``Or down,'' the elevator reminded him.

``Yeah, OK, up please.''

There was a moment of silence.

``Down's very nice,'' suggested the elevator hopefully.

``Oh yeah?''

``Super.''

``Good,'' said Zaphod, ``Now will you take us up?''

``May I ask you,'' inquired the elevator in its sweetest, most reasonable voice, ``if you've considered all the possibilities that down might offer you?''

<comment><USER6> Is there a reason you're using those god-awful ticks instead of normal quotation marks?

<comment><USER7> I guess you're supposed to render it as LaTeX in your head.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11744518](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11744518)

<comment><USER2> Haha, the best part was the multiple comments complaining about outdated magic files seeing Nintendo everywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> One wonders if selecting "decode as RTP" in Wirehshark might've saved some time figuring out the header situation. Though I thought that was 12 bytes, not 8, offhand.

</comment><comment><USER10> In the few times I've tried to follow a completely unknown protocol, I've often failed to make the kind of leaps that this person was able to. To that end, I often get stuck and unable to make progress. I really want to learn to reverse engineer, but I feel like I don't innately know enough of the patterns.

In the same vein, I often missed the patterns required to solve difficult integration and derivatives in calculus. I believe I need more practice in that regard. Anyone have recommendations for simple protocol reverse engineering practice?

</comment><comment><USER11> This same guy written has a lolcat in 64 bit assembly. [https://gkbrk.com/2016/07/lolcat-clone- in-x64-assembly/](https://gkbrk.com/2016/07/lolcat-clone-in-x64-assembly/)

</comment><comment><USER12> I love stories like these.</comment>


Amazon Halo, a fitness band and app that scans your body and voice - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/27/21402493/amazon-halo-band-health-fitness-body-scan-tone-emotion-activity-sleep <comment><USER2> Can't wait to see this being advertised near anything even remotely fitness related being sold on Amazon, like they spam Kindle and audible ads beside every book!

And who doesn't want to upload anonymous full body scans to Amazon servers, which they definitely won't use to improve this service for everyone by aggregating it?

<comment><USER3> AND, it tracks what you say ALL DAY LONG! No security/privacy problems with that, I'm sure! /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How can a visual scan have good accuracy if they're measuring body fat? The band is only a microphone that analyzes your voice? A smart weight scale may not be novel, but it works and works well.

This product makes just as much sense as the Alexa glasses... which I don't understand either. Why have a microphone & speaker embedded in eye glasses where everyone can hear the response, when you can do the same thing for ear buds. The bigger surprise was that the glasses didn't show you anything visual.

Amazon just needs to have another try at a smartphone again instead of strange experiments like this and the glasses.</comment>


First look inside the cloud from the most popular Lucid Dreaming app on Android - <AUTHOR> http://of-electric-sheep.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-art-of-lucid-dreaming-first-look.html

<comment><USER2> I'd like to see averages of time to lucid dreaming graphed against journal entries per day.

Interesting read, I'll give the app a go.</comment>


The Lord of the Flies: when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months <comment><USER2> > This story [school boys stranded on Island] never happened. An English > schoolmaster, William Golding, made up this story in 1951 – his novel Lord > of the Flies would sell tens of millions of copies, be translated into more > than 30 languages and hailed as one of the classics of the 20th century. In > hindsight, the secret to the book's success is clear. Golding had a > masterful ability to portray the darkest depths of mankind. Of course, he > had the zeitgeist of the 1960s on his side, when a new generation was > questioning its parents about the atrocities of the second world war. Had > Auschwitz been an anomaly, they wanted to know, or is there a Nazi hiding in > each of us?

> Media historians even credit [Golding] as being the unwitting originator of > one of the most popular entertainment genres on television today: reality > TV. "I read and reread Lord of the Flies ," divulged the creator of hit > series Survivor in an interview.

Fascinating insights. Basically it's just a projection of our fears, but the consequences of this are far-reaching to this day.

<comment><USER3> Apparently a projection of Golding's feelings:

>I first read Lord of the Flies as a teenager. I remember feeling disillusioned afterwards, but not for a second did I think to doubt Golding's view of human nature. That didn't happen until years later when I began delving into the author's life. I learned what an unhappy individual he had been: an alcoholic, prone to depression; a man who beat his kids. "I have always understood the Nazis," Golding confessed, "because I am of that sort by nature." And it was "partly out of that sad self-knowledge" that he wrote Lord of the Flies.

<comment><USER2> Yes, but books become well-known because they describe the general undercurrent of a cultural mood in a certain era, what Carl Jung called the 'collective unconscious'. Many people identify with the writing of an author because it helps them put words to their thoughts and feelings.

Golding didn't become an alcoholic or become depressed in a vacuum, he was embedded in a social context. I don't believe humans are islands.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My interpretation of "The Lord of the Flies" didn't have anything to do with islands or shipwrecks. The purpose of the novel was to demonstrate the raw cruelty that teenagers in a group, such as the ones you or I went to high school with. The author was trying to show up what a stupid, cruel system we'd set up for ourselves and how senselessly mean we were to one another.

<comment><USER5> But by setting it on a shipwreck, the implied explanation for the cruelty is "teenagers are innately evil", rather than "the social arrangement we create with high school is evil" or "those who don't work hard at social skills will come to regret it".

People in the '60s believed a lot of false blank-slate claims about regular people being capable of evil behavior in the right situations, from Stanley Milgram to Kitty Genovese to Arendt's "banality of evil". None of those claims were true, and "Lord of the Flies" doesn't describe normal human social behavior either.

[https://nypost.com/2014/02/16/book-reveals-real-story- behind...](https://nypost.com/2014/02/16/book-reveals-real-story-behind-the- kitty-genovese-murder/)

[https://digest.bps.org.uk/2015/10/13/social-psychology- textb...](https://digest.bps.org.uk/2015/10/13/social-psychology-textbooks- ignore-all-modern-criticisms-of-milgrams-obedience-experiments/)

[https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-21/edition-1/quest...](https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-21/edition-1/questioning- banality-evil?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter)

<comment><USER6> Confusing the fact that some experiments were exposed as unrepresentative with the idea that their conclusions were false.

<comment><USER5> Not many replication crisis results have come out with "Oh, the headline experiment turned out to be unreplicable, but fortunately all the other ones derived from it were rock solid and it was just a quirk." In many cases those experiments are the only underpinning for their conclusions, because ethics boards won't let us try them any more.</comment></comment></comment></comment>