Ask HN: Is it safe to send credit card details via email (as WireX does)? - <AUTHOR> I recently signed up to WireX, a digital wallet/banking platform, based in London, that offers debit cards (virtual and plastic). They sent me the complete credit card details for my virtual VISA card (name, number, expiry, CCV) via normal unencrypted email (at my domain, not gmail to gmail or so), which I would still think to be somewhat of a no-no.
I understand that password resets often go to your email. But is it really considered best practice (or even just defensible) to send credit card details by email?
Edit to add: Website: https://wirexapp.com <comment><USER2> An email is like a postcard and every server which traffics it can read the full contents. The CC details are static and will not change once you receive them, so it is in effect sending the CC details to all MX servers that traffic the email and anyone that reads it can use your CC for anything they want. I would consider it an enormous glaring security issue.

</comment><comment><USER3> If I was personally in charge of the app, I wouldn't deem it safe at all. I would have written an area to either be copied once, or a password-protected area, so it can be retrieved it via the website. I had a client.. I asked her for her Paypal email address so I could link her website and Paypal together so she can start making money on her products. She sent me all of her bank information. I warned her that she should not do that. Should my email or hers ever be hacked, or if I was someone who happened to be a scammer, she could have been out her entire savings. I have since deleted the email. There are just some things you don't do. And the last thing I want is her bank account information in my email. I've never had issues with my email being hacked, but I wouldn't want to be responsible IF anything ever did happen.

It reminds me of those websites that send you your password directly without encryption or anything. I also make it a point to send a user, who forgot their password, an actual link to reset their password through the website. If they forgot their old password, they must have not wanted to remember it, and it is technically not our responsibility to remember their exact password. Of course, I could probably get the system to send them their unencrypted password, but I think it is unsafe practice. Instead, I just send a link that takes them to a page where they can change it completely.

As far as personal information, that stays within my https website, either in invoices stored on the website or a single printable page that shows the transaction occurred. A person can easily save it or email it to themselves [at a later time], but that is an option I provide in which they are responsible for the information in their email now, because they personally had to click a button to have it sent there, rather than me automating important personal information to their email.

My responsibility is to provide the product and make sure it works for my clients. As far as payments go, I put that on a payment processor and I never save that information, so in essence, the most information I have is: account information and the fact that a transaction took place. That is the best way to increase your security is by keeping minimal information and simply not having to be the one fully responsible for it at all.

</comment><comment><USER4> Password resets are not as bad because the reset code is only useful very briefly, and then becomes useless.

Don't use this startup's products, not now, not ever. They've already revealed their true colors as obviously not just not caring, but not even really having the capacity thinking about security, which is even worse. And they're a financial/banking startup! Geez.

<comment><USER5> In itself it's probably not that catastrophic because the likelihood of that mail actually falling in the wrong hands may still be small enough to fit inside the risk model of credit cards which regularly puts convenience over security. Though it's easy to do it better without trading much convenience so I agree this is a sign that they probably don't do much better where it absolutely matters, stay away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The card is issued by a "licensed electronic money institution" in Gibraltar:

>© 2016 Wirex Limited (CRN 09334596) 25 Old Broad Street, London, EC2N 1HN, UK.

The card is issued by Wave Crest Holdings Limited, a licensed electronic money institution by the Financial Services Commission, Gibraltar.

Site:

[http://www.wavecrest.gi/](http://www.wavecrest.gi/)

More info here:

[http://www.wavecrest.gi/about-2/](http://www.wavecrest.gi/about-2/)

[http://www.wavecrest.gi/platform/fraudrisk- management/](http://www.wavecrest.gi/platform/fraudrisk-management/)

Maybe the mail was pass-through?

<comment><USER7> [https://help.wirexapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/211943665-Is- Wir...](https://help.wirexapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/211943665-Is-Wirex-card- Visa-or-MasterCard-)

Wirex card is Visa.

Please mind that:

\- All cards ordered prior Dec 22, 2015 are Visa (both virtual and plastic).

\- All cards ordered in the period from Dec 22, 2015 to Feb 10, 2016 are MasterCard (both virtual and plastic).

\- Cards ordered between Feb 10, 2016 and Apr 15, 2017 are Visa for virtual and MasterCard for plastic.

\- All cards ordered after Apr 15, 2017 are Visa (both virtual and plastic).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Same old story. I worked on a project last year for a company with a startup client that aggregated buying from name-brand retailers for consumers.

The personal shoppers were sending customer purchase data--credit card, name and address details--through email, and those emails were being stored (somewhat unconventionally) in a major customer support platform.

</comment><comment><USER9> Does this fall afowl of any regulations from the UK's Financial Conduct Authority? [https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/financial-crime/data- security](https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/financial-crime/data-security)

</comment><comment><USER10> No.

</comment><comment><USER11> They are not supposed to even store the ccv and certainly can't send it anywhere without encryption. Report them to your issuer.

<comment><USER12> I believe they _are_ the issuer in this situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Cancel that card.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think you know the answer :)</comment>


A 21st-century version of OS/2 Warp may be released soon - <AUTHOR> https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/03/25/0529201/a-21st-century-version-of-os2-warp-may-be-released-soon <comment><USER2> (emphasis mine):

> Blue Lion, which appears to be in closed beta with March 31st 2017 cited as > the target release date, will come with up to date Firefox browser and > Thunderbird mail client, _Apache OpenOffice_ , other productivity tools, a > new package manager, and software update and support subscription to ensure > system stability.

How is OpenOffice still being used in so many different places? Hasn't it be basically dead and superseded by LibreOffice for years?

<comment><USER3> My guess is: some of the users still attached to OS/2 are big corporates. And they really, really like official things. Having the Oracle name associated with Openoffice, and even the Apache name, makes it much more saleable.

<comment><USER4> At this point its borderline ridiculous that Apache hasn't turned Apache OpenOffice into a branded distribution of LibreOffice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Kudos for having this be a slashdot link. A blast-from-the-past reporting on a blast-from-the-past.

<comment><USER6> Yeah I was almost more surprised by the Slashdot bit than the OS/2 bit.

<comment><USER7> Slashdot and OS/2 date from the same era, and ironically cater to the same sort of crowd.

<comment><USER8> The entire OS/2 2.0 fiasco dates back to the early 1990s, before Slashdot even existed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> OS/2 was pretty advanced back in the day. Something like System Object Model is still nowhere to be seen on modern desktops. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_Object_Model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_Object_Model)

Instead we are now at distributing whole browser engines with a few kilobytes of HTML and JS to 'integrate' into the desktop and call those applications.

</comment><comment><USER10> I recall using OS/2 as my development platform while at Netscape. Win16, Win32 andOS/2 builds on one platform. Plus it had a much better networking stack.

Continued to run Warp for a few years and recently set up a VM with Ecomstation so I could play the original Galactic Civilizations again.

This should be j retesting to check out.

</comment><comment><USER11> In its day, OS/2 was great for developers, supporting multiple DOS versions, Windows 3, and native OS/2.

I would expect some companies to still support software on these platforms, so Blue Lion does make sense.

<comment><USER8> The entire OS/2 2.0 fiasco is one of my favorite topics. Of course, I know that it is too late now.

<comment><USER12> I'd love to read about this, any pointers ? (although I've read a few articles, but probably not the whole story)

<comment><USER8> Look up the old MS OS/2 2.0 SDKs from 1990, as well as the term "NT OS/2". There are a lot of anti-trust exhibits you can read, including PX00307. If you don't know the terms "Microsoft Munchkins" and "Steve Barkto" already, look them up.

<comment><USER12> I knew none of these, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I hope it ships with drivers for my 3dfx Voodoo 5!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voodoo_5](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voodoo_5)

<comment><USER14> The 5500 used to be my dream graphics adapter at some point, for a long time. Dual chip design? They even had SLI capability in the Voodoo 2 iirc. Was so cool at the time :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How will this be different from eComStation with $300 business and $20 personal licenses, [http://ecomstation.com](http://ecomstation.com)?

Hopefully this updated OS/2 will run as an AWS/Xen virtual machine.

Edit: mirror at [https://archive.is/U1eTf](https://archive.is/U1eTf) says Arca Noae's Blue Lion will support upgrades from both OS/2 & eComStation, will include VM images for "select hypervisors" and can run ported Linux apps.

<comment><USER16> I was wondering how this was related to ecomstation as well. It looks like this company was founded by ex-ecomstation employees: [https://web- beta.archive.org/web/20160324222948/https://www....](https://web- beta.archive.org/web/20160324222948/https://www.arcanoae.com/about/) >Arca Noae was founded in July, 2014 when several of the developers who previously worked on the eComStation project felt that the future for the platform looked bleak, a feeling which came about due to lack of progress (or any work being done at all), therefor demonstrating a distinct lack of commitment on the part of the projects new owner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> How about linking to [https://www.arcanoae.com/blue- lion/](https://www.arcanoae.com/blue-lion/) instead of a Slashdot submission?

<comment><USER15> There are many commments in the Slashdot discussion. The vendor's site is being Slashdotted, currently slow to respond.

mirror: [https://archive.is/U1eTf](https://archive.is/U1eTf)

<comment><USER18> Slashdot doesn't have enough users to take down sites any more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I remember setting up a small BBS back in the '80s using OS/2 Warp - it was about the only OS at the time which could support multiple modems reliably. Total footprint probably smaller than most web pages I visit these days.

Still got a boxed set of IBM OS/2 Warp complete with 3.5" disks sitting around here somewhere...

<comment><USER20> OS/2 Warp is from 1994.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> "Finishing touches can often take longer than expected. Because we want ArcaOS 5.0 to be the best that it can be, Arca Noae has made the difficult decision to delay release two weeks, with a new projected delivery date of April 15, 2017."[1]

[1][https://www.arcanoae.com/arcaos-5-0-launch-on-hold-for-a- few...](https://www.arcanoae.com/arcaos-5-0-launch-on-hold-for-a-few-more- days/)

</comment><comment><USER22> What's the market for something like this? It seems every few years somebody is releasing a new OS/2\. Who is buying it and why?

<comment><USER15> Some customers are listed at [http://ecomstation.com](http://ecomstation.com), probably they have complex enterprise apps that work reliably and are cheaper to maintain than rewriting code and retraining users:

      Alstom, Germany
      AustriaCard, Austria
      Belgacom, Belgium
      Bilfinger Mauell GmbH, Germany
      Boeing, USA
      Bowe, Bell + Howell, USA
      Canadian Coast Guard, Canada
      Caterpillar, Singapore
      Colgate Palmolive, USA
      Fujitsu, Japan
      Johnson & Johnson, USA
      MIT, USA
      Max Planck Institut, Germany
      Michelin, France
      Norwich Union, UK
      OCE BV, The Netherlands
      Pittsburgh Embossing Services, USA
      Qatar Petroleum, Qatar
      Siemens AG, Germany
      Standard Bank, South Africa
      Trustco Bank, USA
      US Postal Services, USA
      Universal Instruments Corp, USA

<comment><USER23> Trustco Bank made me chuckle. I had a mortgage with them as they didn't require PMI or escrow (probably because they couldn't calculate it)

They are a regional bank near me whose former CEO's core objective with respect to technology is to stay as backwards as possible to make it overly costly and difficult to acquire them.

They literally as recently as 2013 had no computers in the branches. Only some amber terminals. They were buying TV ads a year ago announcing mobile banking. Their statements were still printed on impact paper, and transactions took 3 days to post.

I think they got fined by the Feds and were forced to modernize. In any case, a bizarre place and not surprising that they remain OS/2 users.

<comment><USER24> I wished my banks were that reliable. I'm not sure whether 'open all the time except when DDOS'd' is a real improvement over a predictable paper based bank that simply always works.

The only time I missed salary payments (and I still feel bad about that) is when my banks systems were inaccessible on the day we normally pay salaries. In the past when it took 3 days to process the transactions we never missed because we calculated that consistent delay into the date we'd send in the transactions.

So now I do it 'on the day' and if the bank doesn't perform on that day everybody is screwed.

Tricky equation: 3 days, 100% reliable vs instant, 99% reliable.

<comment><USER25> "I wished my banks were that reliable. I'm not sure whether 'open all the time except when DDOS'd' is a real improvement over a predictable paper based bank that simply always works."

High-assurance engineer, Clive Robinson, and I both recommend paper over computers wherever possible for high-risk stuff. It's unhackable. The leaks require riskier action. They usually only take what they can carry. Destruction is expensive but straight-forward with cross-cut shredders. People know how to protect the stuff because it's same skills they're used to at home.

And so on. Next thing to do is avoid Internet in favor of leased lines over VPN's if you can afford them. Boring-ass transactional processing on boring, well-maintained servers. Straight-up delete code you don't need out of the OS. App memory-safe using simple protocols.

There's ways we can make it better on computers. Paper is still safer, though. Especially after decades of mitigations developed in response to people like Frank Abignale.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: I suck at remembering names, so I built an app to help - <AUTHOR> http://wehighfive.com

<comment><USER4> The best way to remember people's names doesn't require an app or any technology to speak of. When you meet someone, key in on their most unique, memorable physical feature or personality quirk. Come up with a quick story or catch phrase that revolves around that feature. The weirder the feature and the story, the more likely you are to remember their name.

For instance, you meet John. John's eyes seem like their closer together than most people's eyes are. So you could say to yourself "John, John, stared at his nose for too long". Every time you see John and his funny close-together eyes, you'll remember the story you made up and thus remember his name.

Once you get good at this you'll never forget another person's name. It works like a charm. I find it helps to make the stories especially strange or even offensive. The more of a caricature you can create in your mind about them the better. Just don't accidentally say what you're thinking out loud :)

<comment><USER5> > For instance, you meet John. John's eyes seem like

By the start of the second sentence I've already forgotten the name.

<comment><USER6> This is my problem too. When someone introduces themselves to me, I can feel their name slipping out of my brain seemingly before they've even finished saying it.

An app would not help me. "Hello, I'm..." "Wait! Hang on! Let me launch this app... ok, go ahead!"

<comment><USER7> I know just what you mean. Often, when meeting people for the first time, there is so much else going on to take in and remember (their company/job/what I'm going to ask them/what they're asking me/the name of the person next to them) that the name just drops out of my head instantly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good idea. Do make an Android version! Also consider letting the user add photos and _custom fields_ to contacts (those could range from "research interests" to "hair color" to "college class" to "favorite drink" and so on), not just an unstructured, unsearchable mess called "notes". If you do decide to support custom fields do not force every contact to have every kind of field.

\--

However, (and I think I speak for a lot of people when I say this) what I'm really waiting for is the obvious "ultimate" solution to this problem: an augmented reality device and app combo that would show people's names hovering above their heads. Making the names "glanceable" would make a huge difference and there would be potential for a lot for extensions. Add research/technological interests in highly visible large letters and conferences suddenly get a lot more interesting; add "going to <city name>" and it's a hitchhiking app; add "single" and it's a dating app (use at your own peril); add selectable multilingual subtitles (e.g., at an official speech) and it's a live translation app, etc.

I wonder if this could somehow be made viable without advanced augmented reality glasses.

<comment><USER9> _an augmented reality device and app combo that would show people 's names hovering above their heads._

Being able to tag people with whatever phrase you wanted would be hilarious.

<comment><USER8> For a darker turn add a friend or foe identification system to that and it could become very useful for all sorts of gang activities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had an idea for a similar app, perhaps you can incorporate my idea into yours. My idea was when you write down their name, it also saves the available wifi mac addresses it sees in the vicinity. Then when you see someone again somewhere else you can look at the app for names that might be them (based on the visibility of wifi mac addresses).

The theory is that people carry a phone on them that is unique and is often in wifi mode trying to make a connection which broadcasts the mac. So when you record a contact, one of the visible mac address might be them. In a new place it sees what mac addresses are around and loads up your contact list based on what addresses were visible at the time.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure I follow - what information would the wifi signals nearby where you met them give you? Or would it be that hopefully they have their phone again when you see them, and it will know who they are that way?

<comment><USER10> Most people will have their phone with them. So the app will use the id's it can currently see vs the one it saw when it recorded the contacts it will cross reference and show you possible contacts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Rapportive is another app that people might find useful if they have this sort of problem. It is a plugin for gmail that pulls in social media profiles to attach a name to a face when emailing with someone.

[http://rapportive.com/](http://rapportive.com/)

</comment><comment><USER12> How about a text field that allows you to write something about them. "Dude with weird hair, works for Widgets Inc. Said he was divorced but had a daughter in college." Then make that info available when he calls me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Love it. Almost put that in there for the first version, but we were intent on making this MVP

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nice work.

My first reaction was, "Huh? Why not just use your phone's built-in Contacts?"

But then thinking about it for a minute and watching the very helpful video demo on the homepage...

I like how you can open the app and start entering info. Much better than fiddling through Phone or Contacts app. Really nice touch on including the location.

Seriously -- good job, Tommy!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thanks! I'm sure a lot of people will have the same initial reaction - it's a very simple app that does, what I thin are, some very powerful things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wait? These are TheCitySwig guys? Just to let you know your last website was so horribly insecure. It was like a whois who of Owasp Top 10 issues. Just letting you know in case you build something like that again...

On topic of WeHighFive, I think it is a stupid idea. Takes one more step away from the paradigm of 'face-to-face' communication.

At the very best, you're saving 30 seconds of time writing the text message, and wasting 3 minutes looking through all the texts you have to remember the person's name.

Either ask the person their name again or say it a couple times in your head when you first meet them. With your app, when I re-meet someone, I have to look at my phone and figure out who they are again.

<comment><USER15> Downvoted for the unnecessary negativity x2. Fine, you think it's a stupid idea - just move on and close the tab then. Your opinion is just that: one person's opinion. If you want to offer the guy feedback on his app, go for it. But there's just no need to comment on HN on every app/idea you don't like/hate/think-is-stupid with "I think it is a stupid idea." Surely you have better ways to spend your time (as do I).

<comment><USER14> Ha. Thanks.

Isn't the point of this to save time or remember someone's name. Actually think about how your interaction with another person would go and how this app fits into that....It makes the interaction awkward and you probably won't even find their text message in time (your messages screen is a most recently used list...the message will be buried).

Where is the plus side? I think the idea is stupid. If they like they are free to prove me wrong and show me it is a good idea.

edit: I think sugar coating opinions so they have to be positive is pointless. Maybe me saying the app is stupid helps them realize some problem with their app that helps them improve it and make it much better (and then prove me wrong).

If we were to Sugar coat all feedback then the feedback of horrible products will be indistinguishable from good products which makes it pointless.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really don't mind the feedback. If you don't get the use-case, you don't get the use case. No offense taken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Tommy - creator here. I'd love any ideas about how the app can help you exchange and remember names better - but to start, it indexes by Time and by Location, so you if you remember where and/or when you met somebody, this can help you remember them!

I built it for myself, but some friends helped me make it into something anyone can use. Looking forward to the feedback!

ANDROID USERS - if you like the concept id love to hear from you, if it seems people want it I'd love to make an Android version

<comment><USER16> I just switched to an Android phone so apologies if this is old news, but as i make a call to people it pops up their last Facebook status on the dialer screen.

I can appreciate this may sound like a total waste of time but i've been grateful of it so many times now!

The effect is almost like my phone could read my mind and it's saying something like "ohh, you're going to talk to so-and-so? Well here's something current to talk about!"

<comment><USER17> For a long time my friend's last Facebook status was that his dog had died. Really depressing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I used to be bad at names. Now I've become somewhat better. What's helped is: when I hear their name, I say it back to them: once loud (as in, "Hi John! Nice to meet you."), and several times after that in my mind ("that's John, I just met him"). I'll revisit his name a few times with increasing delays in between, and after a couple of iterations, it's baked in.

Another thing that helps: if you notice something weird, latch on to it immediately. It could be anything: something he's wearing or about his voice or his looks (a guy I met recently had a Facebook style t-shirt with a thumbs down and "meh" instead of the 'like'; I made a note of it, and now, even a couple of weeks later, associate him with that t-shirt). These techniques have helped me remember names of up to 20-25 new people in a night of socializing.

<comment><USER19> Spaced repetition at work. Works great for me too, whenever I actually remember to do that, but sometimes I'm just caught off guard and instantly forget their names, but I'm not too embarrassed to ask again if I think I'll run into this person again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> My current system is a plain text file that I can open with one tap on my phone's home screen. I started keeping track of the people I met after reading How to Win Friends and Influence People.

This might be a step up, thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hope it helps you out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Damn. I was thinking of building something like this! (More specifically, I imagined the UI flow would involve getting the person to take a photo of themselves.)

Seriously, this is a great idea.

<comment><USER22> It may all be moot when(if) Google glass get popular.

I expect an info-bubble will appear when you see someone through the glasses and tilt your head in an inquiring manner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think Speedyrev2 hit it on the head. A notes section makes too much sense. "Cute girl, bitchy freind, etc etc". That functionality makes it even more interesting than it already is.

</comment><comment><USER21> Hey, this doesn't work in the UK, despite being on the UK iTunes Store - <USER2> won't accept a UK phone number (it's too many digits).

<comment><AUTHOR> OH hey I did absolutely not think of that. International numbers are 11 digits is that right? Or what is it?

<comment><USER24> Depends on the country. But really, why do you need to know? Just set a high limit, like 20 or 30 digits.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a UX thing that is really nice right now that is limiting the number of characters, it does a button animation when and drops the keyboard when you're done filling out the contact. I'd like to find a way to keep it, but maybe I'll just do an international version that doesn't have that and set the limit to whatever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've got the same problem, the app I built [http://Big.first.name/](http://Big.first.name/)

<comment><AUTHOR> A different side of the same problem!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Other good apps doing somewhat similar stuffs;

* [http://evernote.com/hello/](http://evernote.com/hello/)

* [http://www.refresh.io/](http://www.refresh.io/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Evernote Hello was my inspiration for this actually! I really, really disliked it very, very much and I'm a big Evernote fan. It needs to be simpler, IMO - <USER3> want to drive user input toward 0 if I can, let the app do the work.

Thanks for sharing! I haven't seen refresh.io

<comment><USER27> Just want to back up your statement. Evernote Hello is one of those "Wow, that's awesome to look at" but was painful to use. To much work and effort for what needs to be a fast and simple thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Hope you like High Five better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I like the simplicity of the app, just the right number of field. I couldn't find a suitable name for the location I was. Can I edit the location name? Where is the app getting the location names? (Maps, Google Maps, foursquare?)

<comment><AUTHOR> Foursquare. I'm going to add a field where you can just make a new location on the spot so you can call it anything you want - "Joe's Party" for instance. Whatever would be helpful for you. That'll be at least one of and possibly the only thing in the next update.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I love the screencast on the site. Is there a tool you used to get that going?

<comment><AUTHOR> Is there ever! I used Reflector to mirror onto my screen, Quicktime to screen record my laptop, then MPEG Streamclip to crop it, then an online converter to convert to OGV for Firefox!

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> How does it work? I'm reluctant to click to try it out because the mobile page didn't explain enough about it / don't know what I would be getting.

<comment><AUTHOR> You add contacts to your phone and it adds them based on where you met them and when you met them. You can also send a really easy text back to them with your information auto-populated.

Then, if you remember where or when you met somebody, you can more efficiently remember their names! Check out the non-mobile site, it has a really quick video that shows it.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Did this just get UN-flagged? It's back on the front page now. Anyone ever see this happen before? That's pretty weird in my experience.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey whoa - did this get flagged and booted from the front page? Any reason?</comment>


Exposing the Cost of Health Care - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/39174/?p1=A2

<comment><USER2> Why is there not s freemium model to this? Is the entry cost just too high? I am sure that if you are able to somehow get providers to connect directly then one can simply take a cut of the service which was bought.

Or

Crowdsource the data. For those which care to enter their info into the system they get something back in return

</comment><comment><USER3> Duplicate of <http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/39174/?ref=rss></comment>


How do you go about contributing to open source projects? - <AUTHOR>

I'm interested in contributing to open source projects. How do I get started on this? <comment><USER2> Just do it; the project will be grateful to receive your contribution. Find something that needs to be done, fork the project, do it, test it, and submit a pull request. Many medium to large projects will have lists of things that need to be done, and will usually have many more tasks than they have manpower to complete in a timely manner, so pick one that matches your skillset and have at it. You can also take a look at their issue tracker for ideas. It's probably worth coordinating with the other developers to make sure you're not duplicating effort, but feel free to just jump in there and start contributing.

</comment><comment><USER3> I maintain the carrierwave, minimagick & memcached-manager ruby gems. If you are interested in any and has a decent knowledge of ruby I can help you to get you going(or anyone interested from HN).

I got started by writing PR's, reading the codebase of the projects and making myself helpful whenever I could.

</comment><comment><USER4> [http://codefirefox.com/](http://codefirefox.com/)</comment>


The Characteristics of a Good Chinese Factory - <AUTHOR> http://grishinrobotics.com/1943

<comment><USER2> Would you be able to elaborate the different characteristics of a good factory in China versus say Indonesia, Vietnam or India?</comment>


The Road to CouchDB 2.0 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.couchdb.org/2016/07/25/the-road-to-couchdb-2-0/ <comment><USER2> CouchDB is awesome. We evaluated it some time ago¹ and we all thought that the way it worked, the performance, the management are light years ahead of everything else in this space. We ended up not using it because it looked like it was dead. I am so happy that it is not, and I hope this 2.0 release will bring in some more community love. It absolutely deserves it!

¹[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11757015](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11757015)

(couchbase sales people came answering, even if couchbase is a completely different product that covers different usecases)

<comment><USER3> Seems like you're confusing Couchbase Mobile and Couchbase Server. And that wasn't a sales person that responded. It was the head of Couchbase Mobile engineering.

<comment><USER2> > Seems like you're confusing Couchbase Mobile and Couchbase Server.

Probably. But is that really my fault?

There is CouchDB, CouchIO, CouchOne, Couchbase, Couchbase Server, Couchbase Mobile, Couchbase Lite, CouchApps, BigCouch, Touchbase, Membase, Memcached, MemcacheDB... all different and yet related in a way not at all obvious from the names alone.

First there was CouchDB, a database created by Damien Katz, a former IBM developer. Its official name was changed to Apache CouchDB after it became an Apache project.

A company named CouchIO was founded to work on Apache CouchDB and later changed its name to CouchOne (by "its name" I mean the company name - not the database name).

CouchOne (formerly CouchIO) merged with Membase (formerly NorthScale) to form a new company called Couchbase. Membase (the company) developed Membase (a product of the same name). Membase was created by several leaders of the Memcached project and it used the Memcached protocol. After the merger of CouchOne and Membase, Couchbase continued the development of the Membase software and later changed its name to Couchbase Server.

Today I think most people believe that Couchbase Server is a new version of CouchDB but it is in fact a new version of Membase. It still uses the Memcached protocol and not the RESTful API of CouchDB. Meanwhile CouchDB is still CouchDB, actively maintained and enhanced as an Apache project.

[http://stackoverflow.com/a/15184612/512324](http://stackoverflow.com/a/15184612/512324)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't think any discussion of CouchDB is complete without mentioning PouchDB. And now that CouchDB will have clustering out of the box, there's all the more reason to support offline versions of your database in your webapps.

[https://pouchdb.com/](https://pouchdb.com/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks like a very solid release. CouchDB has always had that niche as an ultra reliable and steady NoSQL DB while being the best of breed option for offline syncing / healing separated nodes.

It fell behind in terms of perception while Mongo was chasing benchmarks early on but has seemingly continued to just keep chugging along with it's design decisions.

General community, "You sure about that? I mean...benchmarks."

Couch, "Yep...we're sure."

* few years later *

General community, "Have you seen CouchDB? This thing is really solid. Did you ever read that Hacker News thread about how terribly unreliable Mongo is?"

<comment><USER6> MongoDB is written in C++, C and Javascript. CouchDB is written in Erlang. It's not weird that it ended up like this.

<comment><USER7> The language, especially the languages you enumerated, rarely have anything to do with the actual final product's qualities (including it performance, reliability and ease of use). Mongo is unreliable because too much effort was spent making it easy to install and use it immediately (it works!) and little to no care apparently went into anything else. Nothing to do with the choice of C++ for Mongo, or the choice of Erlang for Couch.

<comment><USER8> I wouldn't be too sure of that. Each language's ecosystem fosters certain ways of approaching and solving problems.

For example, Erlang/OTP brings a lot to the table. Being functional, it would protect you against certain types of errors leaving you free to solve more complex problems. You pay for it with run time performance. String operations are slow etc.

C++ is very fast and very sharp. Not easy to get everything right. (Some sort Greenspun's rule would apply here I think. Substitute Erlang for Common Lisp).

<comment><USER7> I understand it is about tradeoffs, and that the benefits and limitations of every language(in terms of syntax and semantics, and its associated runtime/VM -- if any) definitely define to a large extent the final product's characteristics.

I am only saying that Mongo is not unreliable because C++ was selected; it's unreliable because of architectural choices and lack of care which may or may not have been intentional.

<comment><USER6> Crudely put, my point was that the people who freely choose C, C++ and Javascript (and PHP etc.) are the kind of people who don't care much for quality. I understand if there are availability or historic (or even sometimes performance) reasons why someone chose a bad language, but if not I'm a bit prejudiced towards them. Erlang, in contrast to the aforementioned languages, is a language for people who plan to do things _properly_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Summary:

CouchDB 2.0 is a unification of the CouchDB 1.x line (a single-node DB) with BigCouch (which was a fork by Cloudant that added proper out-of-the-box clustering).

</comment><comment><USER10> You have no idea how long I've been waiting for this. I seriously thought couchdb was dead. Looking forward to more frequent releases in the future.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've had great experiences with Cloudant's service and features, this will be a huge boon to the open-source community. I've tried the other Couch flavors and cloud hosts and there is no comparison on features, responsiveness and stability.

</comment><comment><USER12> what are the new changes of 2.0 version?

<comment><USER13> Primarily merging the changes that Cloudant (now an IBM product) made to Couch to turn a fairly simple implementation of NoSQL / MapReduce into a first-class datastore.

Things like:

* Native Lucene search, which you had to build as a weird add-on for Couch. Now it's full-featured out of the box.

* Geospatial queries, also a weird add-on which only _kind of_ worked in Couch, is also cooked in and is pretty strong now.

* True node clustering and data sharding; Couch has always had really really easy replication between nodes, and getting master-master replication is essentially creating a document on each node. However, you had to store your entire data set on every node, which would grow out of control in a hurry.

* A better auto-compactor. Couch 1.6 does fairly well but it's still a weird cron-based thing that can still fail horribly. The auto-compactor in Cloudant/Couch 2.0 is pretty solid and you don't have to worry about massive spikes in disk space consumption.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for this list. One of the pain points of CouchDB was management of users: there is only database-level granularity, which is not enough for many applications (and one-database-per-user may not be practical). I know that Couchbase Sync Gateway uses channels ([http://developer.couchbase.com/documentation/mobile/current/...](http://developer.couchbase.com/documentation/mobile/current/develop/guides/sync- gateway/channels/developing/index.html)) that look interesting.

Do you know if there has been changes on this side for CouchDB 2.0 ?

<comment><USER2> Managing rights for users on document level granularity was pretty easy in 1.6. A simple js function (it's called a "design document") to handle the logic and you are done. Just an example:

        function(newDoc, oldDoc, userCtx) {
            if (userCtx.roles.indexOf('can-write-sessions') !== -1 || userCtx.roles.indexOf('admin') !== -1) {
                return;
            } else {
                throw ({
                    forbidden: 'can-write-sessions role missing'
                });
            }
        }

Why do you think that the Couchbase Sync Gateway is better?

<comment><USER14> Validation functions give you control on writing, but there is no control on reading: everybody can read everything. That's more or less by design, couchdb would encourage you to create another db for another set of permissions.

Couchbase's channels allow you to segregate docs with different read (or write) rights inside the same db.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> CouchDB has not let me down once in over seven years of production usage.

I'm not sure what other software I could say that about.

<comment><USER16> Same here. The core of our chat application is centred around CouchDB and RabbitMQ. Neither of which have ever let us down.

It can't be a coincidence that both of them are written in Erlang.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm pretty confused about where the couchdb repo lives. Can anyone point me to it?

Oddly: [https://github.com/couchbase/couchdb?files=1](https://github.com/couchbase/couchdb?files=1) seems to be more like the code than any of the Apache stuff

<comment><USER18> CouchDB != Couchbase

[https://github.com/apache?query=couchdb](https://github.com/apache?query=couchdb)

<comment><USER17> No shit. Now explain to me why the Apache version is split into like 20 different rebar git repos but has had some core parts untouched for 1-2 years? [https://github.com/apache/couchdb- couch/tree/master/src](https://github.com/apache/couchdb- couch/tree/master/src)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I am going to give CouchDB another look. I used to use it a lot, and experimented with BigCouch, but I didn't used to like JavaScript, so doing views, etc. was a pain. Now, I don't dislike JavaScript so much and CouchDB fits some use cases I have.

<comment><USER16> CouchDB supports writing views in Erlang, if you prefer that. It's also faster than Javascript, although it changes some of the ordering semantics of the resulting views.

I decided to write my views[1] in Parenscript[2]. Might not be for everybody, but it makes them fit a lot better in the rest of the application.

[1] [https://github.com/cicakhq/potato/blob/72e162a95332e8979d865...](https://github.com/cicakhq/potato/blob/72e162a95332e8979d8659e7dc0f2e9d0da0c23c/src/potato/views.lisp#L296)

[2] [https://common-lisp.net/project/parenscript/](https://common- lisp.net/project/parenscript/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> We've been using a self-hosted CouchDB 1.6.x instance on AWS, and actually a few days ago decided to try hosting the pre-RC version of 2.0. What are the benefits of using a hosted service like Cloudant over self-hosting?

</comment><comment><USER21> Exciting news, I just started using CouchDB in a new project and it works really well.

Is the new Fauxton interface included? The old GUI feels more like a proof of concept than an actual user interface. Fauxton would be appreciated.

<comment><USER20> yeah, Fauxton comes included in 2.0 (and it's really good!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> If I recall correctly, built-in clustering and the new Mango query language are the big new features. Are there others?

</comment><comment><USER23> I thought CouchDB was abandoned years ago?

<comment><USER24> it's been alive and kicking all the time with various interesting implementations that can sync back to couch, for example pouchdb for browsers and/or mobile websites: [https://pouchdb.com/](https://pouchdb.com/)

<comment><USER25> Thanks for the link. PouchDB seems to be a great example of an app that inherently works better with CouchDB/Cloudant than it would with MongoDB.

<comment><USER24> absolutely. I know some projects that implemented a mobile app with offline/sync capability using the couch/pouch combination. I haven't participated personally but from what the colleagues tell me it's working pretty well. (for all values of well that you can have when it comes to offline/sync. it's a tough problem.)

<comment><USER3> You can take a look at Couchbase Mobile for native client offline+sync capabilities, too. PouchDB integrates with Couchbase Sync Gateway, so the combo is versatile.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


3 Rules for Rulers - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs <comment><USER2> It seems that the key lesson is that to minimize the horrible nature of human politics: have less government and more poles of power within it.

This is the design goal of the US Constitution, from the federal nature of the system to the gridlock-by-design of the central government.

<comment><USER3> > more poles of power

Yet two-party system is opposite of that.

<comment><USER2> I meant between the actual institutions of government, but you raise a good point.

I think that proportional representation is worse. Let's say you have the following election split: 45% Conservative, 45% Socialist, 10% Green. In such a scenario, the Green Party becomes king-maker and wields enormous power nearly equal to whoever it chooses as coalition partner and highly disproportionate to its tiny share of the vote.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd point out that this video is basically "The Dictator's Handbook" in a nutshell video form. And that book is far from universally accepted, so while the video is presented in a very assertive tone you might want to take it with a grain of salt.

<comment><USER5> It's actually very widely accepted, and his methods are used in the intelligence community for political forecasting.

It threatens a lot of conventional beliefs, but they are conventional mainly because, as shown, people are sheep.

This is probably the most dangerous video ever produced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> AI and data are the new oil, so beware folks - when the peasant workers are no more needed, you may want to watch out for the dictators trying to take over the ship.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is brilliant.</comment>


Portland Wants New Private Buildings to Provide Space for Homeless Camping - <AUTHOR> https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2019/12/04/an-influential-city-panel-wants-new-private-buildings-to-provide-space-for-homeless-camping/ <comment><USER2> This seems like a terrible idea to me. It's not any kind of solution to homelessness and it's utterly ridiculous to force private buildings to have space for people to camp. The whole proposal is utterly stupid on so many levels. I'm not sure where to begin.

Sanitary issues come to mind first of all. Is building maintenance responsible for cleaning up after them. I've landscaped and done maintenance for apartment and commercial buildings and there's no way in hell I'd be going anywhere near to clean up after that. We wouldn't even touch people's dog shit, let alone the waste such a camp is likely to produce.

Then there's the people living in these spaces. They're still homeless, they're now spread throughout the city and this really changes nothing about their situation. Living in a tent outside a fancy highrise isn't much different than living in a tent in an alley somewhere. Their living conditions aren't going to change. This really does nothing to help them.

Honestly, I'm not even too sure what to say to this in a comment. I could probably rant about the stupidity of this for hours.

</comment><comment><USER3> As far as I can tell, the title is super editorialized. The actual proposal causing the ruckus states something different (from TFA):

> There are a dozen such guidelines, but the discussion ground to a halt at > No. 6, which said the exterior spaces of new buildings must "provide > opportunities to pause, sit and interact."

The end result of this proposal may be a little similar to what this editorialized title says, but IMO everyone in downtown Portland would benefit from more spaces to pause, site and interact, not just homeless campers.

<comment><USER4> That is the _original_ text which is unobjectionable. The "ruckus" was around a proposal to amend the text to include "resting" which could include pitching tents.

> _Magnera, who works as the director of climate and energy policy at Verde, a > Northeast Portland environmental justice nonprofit, stopped the conversation > and pushed to add the words "rest and be welcome" to that guideline. She > explained that public spaces around buildings often include "benches but not > a lot of place to pitch a tent."_

<comment><USER3> Exactly! They got you too! A reasonable bill that would marginally increase the cost of skyscraper developers and improve downtown is being represented as a bill that would let the homeless swarm because one person verbally made a suggested change.

<comment><USER5> Swarm? Between the last 30 years I have lived in Portland for 10, and Eugene for 20.

Is there a homeless problem in Portland, sure, in the sense that there are them. But it isn't a inconvenience to me. You see them but they aren't a swarm of bees trying to swallow your spare change.

I lived on 14th and Alder in Eugene when Jerry Garcia died. That was annoying. All the people that toured with the Dead decided to land in Eugene while they found Phish.

It is like when public transport is talked about here. It is garbage because it isn't the same or better than my car. No fucking shit. It isn't meant to be. But it gets me where I am going for 60 bucks a month.

Public transportation in Portland is great. The homeless problem is a problem if you are uncomfortable around homeless people. But I just keep on walking and loving Portland..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >Magnera, however, says she's more determined than ever to use city code to carve out space for people who have none. "I'm going to keep pushing," she says. "I feel it's my role to speak up for people who don't have a voice."

Funny how those people want to say the same things you do.

This is fucked in every which way.

If you want fewer homeless provide affordable housing at public expense.

If you don't have the spine for that stop making unenforceable laws which will drag developments into the courts and delay them further.

<comment><USER7> "If you want fewer homeless provide affordable housing at public expense."

When I worked in Manhattan and did not want to pay Manhattan rents, I lived in Jersey City or Brooklyn. America is a huge country. If you can't afford to live in an expensive city, you should move.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What sort of solution is this supposed to be? I mean, who thinks the reason homeless people are homeless is just because they don't have a roof over their heads? Spend money on mental health services! It's not rocket science!

<comment><USER9> This is classic NIMBYISM run rampant. Restrictive building restrictions that are aimed to maintain retail house prices at ever higher prices so the homeowners feel their purchase is making miney and riff-raff (poor, less rich and homeless) are unable to buy/rent a place to live. The only way to solve this is to add costs to people who rent. Rent seeking :- Tax rentals as commercial properties, and forbid tax pass-through to tenants. This extra cash extracted from the landlords would gradually make rentals non economic. Loosen home restrictions on size, cars etc,allow multi unit dwellings. 4 plxes, 8 plexes .....64 plexes, Allow tiny units with micro kitchen/washroom walled off a 1-2 room spot, with 200-300 square feet. When I was in residence my room was 10x12 feet with a narrow bed washup sink and toilet alcoved off with a 3x3 shower. I was content

<comment><USER10> > riff-raff (poor, less rich and homeless) are unable to buy/rent a place to > live. The only way to solve this is to add costs to people who rent.

Or as an alternative, live somewhere where you can afford living. Downtown Portland is expensive and that's ok.

<comment><USER9> My intention is to make rent seeking less attractive as an investment. Once residential units are bought it tends to become permanent, over time a higher and higher % of space is for rent. The other choice is to mandate equity via rent. Of some one buys a house and pays 10% down. Then rents it, the tenant pays the rent which pays the mortgage, but the tenant gets no equity. Grant equity as a % of mortgage paid during his tenure - if he moves the land lord owes him money. This will make people buy out right = more taxes etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> And this is why I will never move back to Oregon.</comment>


GQ Releases Hilariously Sweary Audio of Craig Wright Interview - <AUTHOR> https://news.bitcoin.com/gq-sweary-audio-craig-wright/ <comment><USER2> Craig Wright is such an obvious fraud, liar and attentionseeker, but puts this fake "I don't want to be public!" facade on. If he was actually Satoshi he would've already been able to show it. People giving him the light of day are doing everyone a disservice.

</comment><comment><USER3> Craig Wright is obviously a scam artist.

That said, I'd love it if someone could explain the argument by the other cryptographer. At the beginning (I couldn't make it to the end of the recording, the exchange was just painful to listen to) he's saying if you have the source code to a RNG, you can derive private keys just by looking at encrypted messages? As an absolute statement that is obviously nonsense, but I feel there's some important context missing to parse the critique.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure I have it, but I believe that with DSA, given the message, signature and message specific private value, you can derive the private key. Wright is calling that message specific value a nonce, but for DSA, it has to be secret and unpredictable ( [https://rdist.root.org/2010/11/19/dsa- requirements-for-rando...](https://rdist.root.org/2010/11/19/dsa-requirements- for-random-k-value/) ).

In the Playstation hack, a single private value was mistakenly used in multiple messages (so it could be recovered from just a couple signatures [https://www.imperialviolet.org/2013/06/15/suddendeathentropy...](https://www.imperialviolet.org/2013/06/15/suddendeathentropy.html) ), but it's also true that if you have information about how the private value was created and it was poorly done, you can just check all the remaining possibilities. So that's what the cryptographer is talking about, given information about sufficiently poor generation of the message specific secret, you can pull private keys out of a single signature.

<comment><USER3> But in the context of bitcoin, it seems likely that if the bitcoin client originally had such a problem, someone would have already exploited it to steal funds. All the old funds, mined with the original version of the bitcoin software, are still just waiting there at the original addresses.

Especially in light of the creative crypto attacks people have done on other implementations (like the one where attackers stole from android wallets based on a flaw in the system-wide android PRNG). Money is a powerful motivator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you haven't read the LRB article, it's hysterical.

[http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi- affai...](http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair)

EDIT: not as funny as this clip though. The man is a transparent fantasist/fraudster.

<comment><USER6> That's an amazing read!

It is like something out of Breaking Bad

<comment><USER5> If you liked that, there's a long article out there somewhere in New Yorker or some such mag about two kids who got in way over their heads with russian gangs bringing drugs into the automated container facility on rotterdam's docks.

<comment><USER7> Any chance you can find a link to that article? I did some searching and was unable to find anything. It sounds pretty interesting.

<comment><USER5> [http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-mob-technology- consul...](http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-mob-technology-consultants- help-drug-traffickers/)

It's not as long-form as I remember but still a fun read.

<comment><USER6> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> People in tech shouldn't accept that kind of bullying from asshats like Craig Wright. Courtois clearly outgunned him intellectually, but he still let himself be shouted at.

<comment><USER5> He starts openly giggling as Wright gets more irate, which I think is often a good way to deal with such people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Offtopic.

I have learned to love meetings like this one, when customers behave like Mr. Wright. Seeing them in such a ridiculous position is a joy. So much joy, that I find myself worried about my brain health.

Weird comment, I know.

</comment><comment><USER10> It is also surprising he continues using and being addressed as Dr, when there is no evidence he has a doctorate.

</comment><comment><USER11> Direct link to the 8 min clip

[https://vimeo.com/177403785](https://vimeo.com/177403785)

<comment><USER12> Maybe we could change the link to point @ the Vimeo link, or is there a better one directly from GQ instead (I keep getting taken to the German GQ and can't figure out how to get the English version, so can't find it myself)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What I wonder is why do people continue to give attention to cretins such as this? Just creating clickbait?

</comment><comment><USER14> Is there still any belief in serious circles that Wright is SN? Whatever happened to those credible thought leaders who initially supported his claim? I lost track of this after the initial splash announcement and immediately ensuing controversy.

</comment><comment><USER15> When losing your argument just shout and swear louder and louder.

Craig Wright is a fantasist and conman.</comment>


CSS Grids Fractional Units Tutorial – The Easy Way - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@josjaviasilis/understanding-css-grids-fractional-units-fr-the-easy-way-5f43ee008f29 <comment><AUTHOR> Here it goes. I made this tutorial because I was confused on how to see the Fractional Units (FR) with CSS Grid. Hope this helps!</comment>


What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (1974) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/activities/modules/ugmodules/humananimalstudies/lectures/32/nagel_bat.pdf <comment><USER3> Not sure why this ended up on HN today, but this is a classic text read in many introductory courses focused on philosophy of mind and consciousness.

I quite like the paper. I once wrote a follow-up paper about how one might interpret it now that we know about neuroplasticity. That was fun to ponder.

I looked at a specific experiment where researchers managed to map visual impulses from a camera to an electrode "pixel grid" physically placed on the tongue, such that the visual inputs were "mapped" to corresponding locations on your tongue. It was shown, in the research, that people could catch balls thrown at them blindfolded using this setup, and after a relatively short period of sensory adjustment. They would actually "see with their tongue".

You can read about that research in this 2003 article from Discover Magazine:

[http://discovermagazine.com/2003/jun/feattongue](http://discovermagazine.com/2003/jun/feattongue)

The Nagel question then, is the fact that I experience vision a certain way really an essential aspect of "what it's like to be me?" Or is my consciousness a "further fact"... something running in the background of all my senses, no matter how they are wired (or rewired) over time? This is sometimes referred to as the "hard problem" of consciousness, summarized nicely in Wikipedia here:

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

<comment><USER4> I think that's an interesting offshoot of the discussion, but I'm not sure that it really affects the argument that much.

Let's say you undergo a process to slowly use your brain's plasticity to get closer and closer to perceiving as a bat. Well, does that help _me_? Am I able to imagine what it is like to be a bat? Of course not. Well, what if you could talk to me and describe it, then would I have a true understanding of the experience of being a bat? Still no!

Nagel's point isn't about whether we could do anything to make ourselves into bats, it's rather that, when we _don 't_ have that qualitative experience, we cannot truly understand what it is like to have that experience.

If anything, the argument works even better now that you've gone and given yourself sonar: you can talk to me, unlike that dumb bat, so you can describe your experiences to me, _and yet_ I will still have no true understanding of the experience itself.

That is (a part of) the Hard Problem of consciousness: that my studying and examining and learning about your conscious experience still does not allow me to understand it.

<comment><USER5> _If anything, the argument works even better now that you 've gone and given yourself sonar: you can talk to me, unlike that dumb bat, so you can describe your experiences to me, and yet I will still have no true understanding of the experience itself._

This underlines the suggestion at the very end, we are lacking tools to properly talk about experiences and maybe we could actually develop them. My inability to describe to you, or probably even better to a blind person, what it is like to see a red object may after all not be fundamental. Maybe there is a way to communicate and in turn truly understand what using the tongue device is like, we just have not yet discovered it.

<comment><USER6> What it will be like? Series of sounds, which reprogram brain structure to develop image processing networks?

I can't say it sounds plausible.

<comment><USER5> Think about explaining general relativity, quantum chromodynamics, or just the way a second level cache works to a random human from the early stone age. Probably not an easy task. I am not sure if this is actually a fair analogy, describing what seeing red is like is in some sense very different from explaining the theory of general relativity. But on the other hand the situations are also somewhat similar, the stone age guy just does not posses the required language, probably to a large extend math, and knowledge and is unable to look back on several thousand years of human history and innovation that shaped us. Sure, it looks like a stretch to us that we will ever be able to meaningfully convey the experience of seeing a red object, but I am not convinced that this is a given. Intuitively I certainly agree with you, not going to happen, but maybe that is just a lack of imagination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have a suspicion that future generations of philosophers will be taught Nagel's _is like-be_ problem in the fashion that Hume's _is-ought_ problem [1] is now taught. Although they concern completely different subjects, the similarities between the two are striking:

1\. On what grounds can we make statements about what _ought_ to be based on what _is_?

2\. On what grounds can we make statements about what it is to _be_ something based on what it _is like_ to think about the experiences of that thing?

Edit: In case there's any confusion, I called it the _is like-be_ problem to draw a similarity to Hume, not because anybody else calls it that.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem)

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I think this is probably true. Hume was trying to argue that normative statements can't be reduced to or derived from natural statements about how the world is; Nagel's fighting the reduction of consciousness to positive, objective statements about consciousness, because of the existence of phenomenal character. There's a certain way to be a bat that's wrapped up in the very fact of its being a conscious being with a specific biology and neurology, but which is still irreducible to those features.

If you wanna link this up to an older philosopher, this is basically what Kant's on about in his Critique of Pure Reason. Our special human brain stuff is responsible for providing us with the faculties (e.g. understanding of things like causation) we have for understanding the world. We are always trapped in our experience of the world, and though that shouldn't preclude us from experiencing the world, you can't separate how we experience objective reality from the fact that we experience it as humans, with human brains and faculties.

<comment><USER7> Absolutely, and you've said it better than I did.

As a nit, wasn't Kant's Critique of Pure Reason written in part as a response to Hume?

<comment><USER8> ooooh totally was. He was deeply affected by Hume's attack on causation, so tried to come up with a coherent response. Ended up positing a whole bunch of wacky and (I think) true things about our embedded cognition, so I think it's probably fair to say that Critique of Pure Reason is the result of his beef with Hume.

<comment><AUTHOR> In the CPR, Kant proposes a synthesis of both rationalism and empiricism: although some knowledge comes from sensory experience, there are some things that we just know -- e.g., pure mathematics. So I'd say it's the result of his beef with everyone!

<comment><USER9> Doesn't this all go back to Plato, where Plato thought knowledge depended on the forms, because the flux of particulars cannot provide knowledge?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The following two sentences, from the second page of the paper, are where he really nails it:

"We may call this the subjective character of experience. It is not captured by any of the familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of the mental, for all of them are logically compatible with its absence."

All of today's science is logically compatible with the absence of subjective experience, because science cannot even define what subjective experience is.

Every "definition" of subjective experience (SE, in what follows), is actually an ostension: the reader's attention is directed to his own SE. For example:

      - Perhaps nothing actually exists -- except SE.  That's the one thing that MUST exist. [Descartes]

      - "There is such a thing, as what it's like to be..." [Nagel, in the posted paper]

      - There's such a thing, as what seeing red is like: a quale.

      - Science can't rule out that a behaviorally perfect duplicate of you, could lack SE (i.e. be a zombie).
        Science can't rule it out, but maybe SE does: why would a zombie vociferously assert the existence of SE?
        Those who claim SE is an illusion, i.e. that you actually are a zombie but don't know it,
        have the burden of explaining why zombies claim to have SE.

All of these "definitions" require an audience that has SE and is able to recognize it. A scientific definition would not.

<comment><USER11> >All of today's science is logically compatible with the absence of subjective experience, because science cannot even define what subjective experience is.

That just means science is incomplete and we are ignorant, not that subjective experience is metaphysically different from all other observed phenomena.

<comment><USER12> It's compatible with both propositions. At the moment we literally have good grounds for making either conclusion, although we have plenty of weak grounds in both directions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What I like about Thomas Nagel is that he is one of the few atheists who steps up against darwinism and materialism as an explanation for almost everything.

Quoting from The Last Word (1997):

"[...] I don't want here to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports in the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind."

Of course his book Mind & Cosmos is the best example of this

<comment><USER14> I agree that darwinism is overused to explain everything but materialism seems inescapable -- especially for atheists. I think even Nagel agrees with "Inference to the Best Explanation" and so far I've never seen a single case of anything better explained than the materialist explanation.

<comment><USER9> Materialism is not inescapable for atheists in philosophy at all. You can be anti-realist or an idealist sans God. You can also be a platonist. Or you could be a dualist like Chalmers. There's plenty of room for different views than materialism without committing to a belief in the supernatural.

<comment><USER14> I guess I meant physicalism then. Or maybe naturalism? I didn't mean to make a claim on the philosophy of mind just that the world is simply the physical world.

On the other hand dualism refitted for the physicalist world seems like a hack at best. Panpsychism fails the inference to the best explanation or Occam's razor etc.

<comment><USER9> It depends on whether physicalism can account for all aspects of mind along with abstract concepts and the laws of nature (or causation). To be a successful monism, one has to be able to explain everything in terms of that monism.

<comment><USER14> Yes, and many have done so. Marvin Minsky, Steven Pinker, and Daniel Dennet come to mind. In philosophy lingo I think it all ends up being functional physicalism.

<comment><USER9> There's no consensus that Minsky, Pinker, Dennett have succeeded. Plenty of philosophers and scientists have disagreed with their arguments. Dennett's attempt rests on the controversial claim that we're actually p-zombies, and consciousness can be understood in only functional terms. This is prima facie absurd to many people.

<comment><USER14> Dennet's argument is simply an inversion of the causal chain: i.e mind is not the causer but the cause. "P-zombies" is kind of a non-starter when you think about it. I think LessWrong's essays on it shows that, here is one passage:

"you can form a propositional belief that "Consciousness is without effect", and not see any contradiction at first, if you don't realize that talking about consciousness is an effect of being conscious. But once you see the connection from the general rule that consciousness has no effect, to the specific implication that consciousness has no effect on how philosophers write papers about consciousness, zombie-ism stops being intuitive and starts requiring you to postulate strange things."

[http://lesswrong.com/lw/p7/zombies_zombies/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/p7/zombies_zombies/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I went to grad school to study the neuroscientific basis of consciousness, and this paper is a classic. It inspired one of the weirder conference sessions I've ever been to at ASSC, called "Is a fish conscious?"

Imagine a room full of philosophers and scientists arguing vociferously to determine where (or even if) to draw the line between conscious/unconscious organisms. (E.g., fish=probably, bacteria, probably not?)

<comment><USER16> A large part of the problem is that people don't all agree on the definition of consciousness. It ranges anywhere from the property of having an internal experience (which I subscribe to) all the way to self awareness, and even to the ability for rational thought.

This - and arguments over the definition of "is" \- were the reason I stopped reading philosophy of mind papers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> TLDR: please read every word, because this work is that brilliant and that important.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is a great essay, and I would highly recommend this as a counterpoint to Nagel in terms of explaining consciousness ("qualia") if you want to get the most out of Nagel's argument: [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel- dennetts...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennetts- science-of-the-soul)

If Nagel things materialists can't explain consciousness Dennett thinks they can. E.g.

"The obvious answer to the question of whether animals have selves is that they sort of have them. [Dennett] loves the phrase 'sort of.' Picture the brain, he often says, as a collection of subsystems that 'sort of' know, think, decide, and feel. These layers build up, incrementally, to the real thing. Animals have fewer mental layers than people—in particular, they lack language, which Dennett believes endows human mental life with its complexity and texture—but this doesn't make them zombies. It just means that they 'sort of' have consciousness, as measured by human standards." Joshua Rothman, New Yorker, MARCH 27, 2017 - [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel- dennetts...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennetts- science-of-the-soul)

More detailed counterargument by Dennett: [https://www.amazon.com/DARWINS- DANGEROUS-IDEA-EVOLUTION-MEAN...](https://www.amazon.com/DARWINS-DANGEROUS- IDEA-EVOLUTION-MEANINGS/dp/068482471X)

<comment><USER5> _If Nagel things materialists can 't explain consciousness [...]_

I do not think he makes this statement. He seems perfectly open to the possibility of explaining subjective experiences in physical terms but he is convinced that we are at least very far away from being able to do it. In consequence he obviously considers all current attempts flawed and lacking.

<comment><USER18> I appreciate the pushback. Here is what Nagel says in his essay (emphasis mine). I wonder if you still disagree?

"It is _impossible_ to exclude the phenomenological features of experience from a reduction in the same way that one excludes the phenomenal features of an ordinary substance from a physical or chemical reduction of it--namely, by explaining them as effects on the minds of human observers. If physicalism is to be defended, the phenomenological features must themselves be given a physical account. But when we examine their subjective character it seems that such a result is _impossible_. The reason is that every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view."

<comment><USER5> Let me counter with this quote.

 _If we acknowledge that a physical theory of mind must account for the subjective character of experience, we must admit that no presently available conception gives us a clue how this could be done. The problem is unique. If mental processes are indeed physical processes, then there is something it is like, intrinsically, to undergo certain physical processes. What it is for such a thing to be the case remains a mystery._

I think the critical point in your quote is the last sentence.

 _The reason is that every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view._

Sure, my experience of looking at a red object is fundamentally my experience, but there seems to be no obvious reason why we could not abstract me away and talk about the experience of an arbitrary human seeing a red object. This is also in line with the suggestions at the very end, trying to develop the tools to talk about experiences in an objective manner.

<comment><USER18> I don't think I fully understand what Nagel means by developing objective tools to describe experiences, I should re-read the full article a few more times. I think, though, that you're exactly right: We _do_ have a shared understanding and experience of what its like to see a red ball, and we can talk about it in the abstract. My reading of that is that because we do have a shared human experience there can and indeed must be a physical account (Nagel's term) of it. Nagel's argument brings in a wedge of doubt about whether that shared experience itself is real by saying, at least partially, that because we can't explain what it is like to be a bat (bat point of view) in human terms we won't be able explain what consciousness is for humans _or_ bats with a physical account (at all or at least right now). Dennett, I think, says that that is more or less backward, and that all the means is there are different kinds of consciousness. In the article I mention he says,

 _" The big mistake we're making," [Dennett] said, "is taking our congenial, shared understanding of what it's like to be us, which we learn from novels and plays and talking to each other, and then applying it back down the animal kingdom. Wittgenstein"—he deepened his voice—"famously wrote, 'If a lion could talk, we couldn't understand him.' But no! If a lion could talk, we'd understand him just fine. He just wouldn't help us understand anything about lions."

"Because he wouldn't be a lion," another researcher said.

"Right," Dennett replied. "He would be so different from regular lions that he wouldn't tell us what it's like to be a lion. I think we should just get used to the fact that the human concepts we apply so comfortably in our everyday lives apply only sort of to animals." He concluded, "The notorious zombie problem is just a philosopher's fantasy. It's not anything that we have to take seriously."_

I found that convincing, I'm curious if you do as well?

<comment><USER5> I agree insofar as that being a lion or a bat is probably really different from being a human. It is a pity that I can not remember what it felt like when I was only one or two years old, that might provide a glimpse at the difference. In all the the time I can remember I was not fundamentally different from now, or at least that is how I remember it. I would really like to know how it was at a very young age, not speaking and understanding a language, not recognizing me in a mirror, maybe not even being aware of my existence.

Anyhow. I did not read the entire Dennett article when it was posted here a few days ago, maybe I should, but it was just not compelling to me [1], at least as far as I got. What I got from the part I read is that he seems to do exactly what Nagel warns of, dismissing the experience of being a human. I find the comparison with a computer much more interesting than the comparison with animals. What if we build an artificial neural network resembling a human brain? If that is not good enough, what if we perform a molecular simulation of a brain? Or even a quantum physical simulation of a brain if molecules are still not good enough, but personally I doubt that.

But what if? Does this artificial brain experience what it is like to be a human? As a pysicalist I think the answer is yes. But just as Nagel says, I have no idea how this could possibly work, how the transistors in my computer could go from controlling the flow of electrons by mindlessly following physical laws to being aware of their existence in a universe, seeing red, feeling joy and pain. What if I replaced the computer with a mechanical one made out of billions and billions of cogwheels? With stones on a beach simulating a Turing machine? With a gigantic printed look-up table mapping all possible inputs to their outputs?

I can not think of any good reason why the stones on the beach - together with someone or something moving them around to perform the computation - should be any less conscious than the human brain they are simulating. And this seems of course absurd. Thinking about this is what gets me the closest to becoming a dualist or something like that. There seems to be not even the tiniest bit of hope at the horizon to even be able to attack this problem from a physicalist perspective. So when Dennett says that there is no problem, assuming he actually says this, then I must disagree.

[1] I had prior exposure to Dennett and, as far as I remember, quite liked what he had to say but somehow not this time. Maybe the topic was a different one, maybe it is just the way the article is written, maybe I should just read the entire thing.

P.S. I just did some more reading on Nagel, it seems you are at least more correct than me. He seems not as open to a physicalist account of consciousness as I thought but the details are hard to tell without actually reading more of his works.

<comment><USER6> > I can not think of any good reason why the stones on the beach - <USER2> > with someone or something moving them around to perform the computation - > should be any less conscious than the human brain they are simulating. And > this seems of course absurd.

It will take around 3,000,000,000,000 years and enormous beach to simulate one second of brain activity. It is literally unimaginable. What do you imagine when you talk about absurdity? Is it some small scale model, which is laid bare before your mind's eye in all its simplicity, leaving no place for consciousness to hide?

<comment><USER5> I certainly see a beach with a few hundred or so stones when I close my eyes but I don't think that matters. It is simply the idea that stones on a beach - a lot of stones on a very long beach in a very specific arrangement relentless reordered by Tom Hanks for billions of billions of years according to a very long list of rules overseen by Wilson - could really feel joy and pain that seems absurd. I mean this is a common argument that it is just the sheer scale that would be required and that we are unable to imagine that leads us astray but in the end it just seems wrong that stones on a beach can feel pain, at least to me. But if you think about a computer simulating a brain at the level of neurons, something that is somewhat in reach, does this make it any easier? Does it sound so much less absurd that a data center packed with GPUs could really feel pain?

<comment><USER19> Stones don't communicate among themselves, and only change state under the entirely external effort of the entity that moves them. I would argue that the stones would need some mechanism for modifying their own state to even have a slim chance at consciousness. Seeing as stones are inatimate objects that can't possibly operate any mechanism, I think the idea is dead in the water.

Another way of looking at it: the significance of any particular arrangement (or sequence of arrangements) of the stones is only meaningful in the mind of the entity that is moving them around. Or perhaps any nearby viewers with the patience and far-fetched ability to make sense of the iterations of stone arrangements. The internal/external distinction between the stones themselves and the stone movers/viewers seems critical to me.

Software on the other hand... that is a bit harder to categorically dismiss. I think I can imagine software that produces an experience somewhat analogous to the human one.

<comment><USER5> You need of course something moving the stones and interpreting the arrangement but there is no need to bother Tom Hanks with that. Just throw in a Roomba pushing the stones around according to the state transition function. Make it a real quick one so that something meaningful can happen before the sun dies. And for good measure throw in a simple humanoid robot with sensors and actuators from wich the Roomba receives inputs to the computation and to which it sends control signals decoded from the arrangement of the stones.

Now that is not just a pile of stones, but nothing of the added things seems to add much complexity. A robot pushing stones according to predetermined rules can be very simple. Even simpler than a Roomba would be a gantry crane above the stones, it could essentially be just a few motors, a claw, and a switch to detect the presence or absence of a stone. I also just realized that the state transition function would not be an unimaginable monster with the possibility to hide something in there. You do not need much code to simulate a neural network regardless of its size and it would probably not grow that much when encoded for a Turing machine.

Now which part of the stones and the crane feels pain and anger if a loved one dies? And we are not looking for some stones signaling certain muscle activity or the production of tears, we are looking for the internal experience of pain. Based on my believes I seem to be forced to accept that those stones can somehow be conscious and feel emotions even if it seems hopeless to understand how this works. But this also has a possibly even more disturbing consequence. If piles of stones can be conscious, what prevents other objects from that? What about stars in galaxies? What does it feel like to be a galaxy?

 _Software on the other hand... that is a bit harder to categorically dismiss. I think I can imagine software that produces an experience somewhat analogous to the human one._

I can not, no matter how hard I try. I can imagine a software faking human experiences, to say it feels joy or pain, I can not imagine it to actually feel it. Not at last because I can not even really say what the difference is. It seems to me that once I could imagine this for a software it would only be a small step to imagine the same for a pile of stones. The difference between a human and some software seems enormously larger than the difference between some software and a pile of stones, at least to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Great paper that perfectly exemplifies what a "modern" philosopher does and thinks about on a daily basis. Unfortunately, it's also a paper that is often read only in lower-level philosophy courses. In my opinion, one needs to have a very deep understanding of the Philosophy of Mind corpus before being thrown into this paper because an uninitiated reader may be tempted to think that Nagel is obviously right on X or obviously wrong on Y, but his points are very nuanced.

Nagel is also making some pretty big claims, specifically about the "private" nature of experience. Anscombe (whom I also loved reading) makes similar arguments. Philosophy of Mind was never my forte (I'm a logic and ethics guy), but reading Nagel was always a breath of fresh air in what I think is a subfield marred by unnecessary technicality and equivocation.

</comment><comment><USER21> I just found out yesterday about how amazing the immune system of bats is they are practically immortal almost nothing makes them sick!

But then it's confusing that bats in my region are being killed off by white nose syndrome. Fungus on their nose wakes them from hibernation and causes them such stress it eventually kills them.

Which actually does make sense since the theory is bats do so well immunity- wise because of the large swing in their body temperature range. A bat's temperature drops very low when hibernating then when they fly it shoots up very high.

[http://www.popsci.com/bats-immune-systems-are-totally- unique](http://www.popsci.com/bats-immune-systems-are-totally-unique)

</comment><comment><USER9> It really comes down to objectivity vs subjectivity. What properties are objective features of the world, if any, and which ones are either individual or creature specific?

And if science is our best attempt at creating an objective account of the world, how do we include the subjectivity of creatures different than us in that account?

If we can't, then science is incomplete, because the world isn't entirely objective. Also, if the objective (shape, extension, number, etc) is created by abstracting away from the subjective (color, smell, feel, etc), then you can't use the objective to explain the subjective, although you can correlate the two (certain brain processes result in certain subjective experiences).

<comment><USER22> In our days we learned how to do seemingly "subjective" feats with objective means (neural nets). It's not such a big, insurmountable divide any more.

<comment><USER9> You mean the neural nets reported being puzzled by consciousness? Otherwise, I think you're conflating subjectivity with cognitive abilities, which need not be subjective at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> An interesting development for anyone who wants to take Nagel seriously is Mary and the colorblind room. Short version, a girl grows up in a black and white room (which is impossible in a lot of ways but just imagine) and that she is fed a database that lets her learn everything there is to know about the physical world of color (which is impossible but follow along) and then one day she exits the room and she sees a red rose. Nagel argued there's something about Mary's experience of color that she had in that moment, that she did not learn in the room.

Dennett is another strong opponent here. He says Mary would retort, aha but you have a limited imagination. I know everything about color, so nothing about that experience was new to me in any non trivial way whatsoever. Because Mary knows EVERYTHING about color. It's may be impossible for us to imagine someone being omniscient about color, and that spoils the whole argument.

Similarly, what if we knew every physical fact about bats. Dennett only needs to say, we have small imaginations. We have trouble imagining that what it is like to be a bat would be the sum of all physical facts about a bat. But we can't be sure of that. There is no logical certainty. Hence Nagel proved nothing.

Yes you end up saying "we're all robots/zombies/unconscious animals" this way, and there's actually nothing special about being human it's just a myth we tell ourselves. But aside from some people not finding that conclusion tasteful, there's nothing wrong with it.

</comment><comment><USER24> Humans can actually get pretty good at echolocation

[http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/Echo.pdf](http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/Echo.pdf)

[https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kish_how_i_use_sonar_to_nav...](https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kish_how_i_use_sonar_to_navigate_the_world)

<comment><USER25> Nagel acknowledges this in the article, for what it's worth:

Footnote 8, page 9:

> 8 It may be easier than I suppose to transcend inter-species barriers with > the aid of the imagination. For example, blind people are able to detect > objects near them by a form of sonar, using vocal clicks or taps of a cane. > Perhaps if one knew what that was like, one could by extension imagine > roughly what it was like to possess the much more refined sonar of a bat. > The distance between oneself and other persons and other species can fall > anywhere on a continuum. Even for other persons the understanding of what it > is like to be them is only partial, and when one moves to species very > different from oneself, a lesser degree of partial understanding may still > be available. The imagination is remarkably flexible. My point, however, is > not that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat. I am not raising that > epistemological problem. My point is rather that even to form a conception > of what it is like to be a bat (and a fortiori to know what it is like to be > a bat) one must take up the bat's point of view. If one can take it up > roughly, or partially, then one's conception will also be rough or partial. > Or so it seems in our present state of understanding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> To be a bat, or a woman, or man, means to be an agent that exists as part of an environment, learning to select the best actions that maximize rewards.

Of course for a bat the list of possible sensations, actions and rewards is different than for men or women. But what doesn't change is that they are all agents acting by reinforcement learning, trying to survive.

I'm wondering why philosophy doesn't take this stance. Is it because it sounds too similar to behaviorism? Does it seem reductionist? Instead of using the parsimonious concept of reinforcement learning agent, they use hard to define words such as consciousness and self. Instead of looking at what matters - reward maximization, survival - they analyze qualia and Chinese Rooms.

Philosophers, why are you ignoring recent AI research? Isn't it a waste of time to use such intuitive concepts as consciousness, free will and self? If only you could have come to a definition of consciousness you agree upon, but you can't, because it's a reification, a suitcase concept.

<comment><USER11> Lots of cognitive science literature models human beings as reinforcement learners, with plenty of good evidence for the hypothesis. The interesting question is: what _kind_ of reinforcement learning?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Whoa, time warp to a previous life...

Whatever you decide about his beliefs, Nagel is a wonderful writer. Pick up a copy of _Mortal Questions_ if you get a chance.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's interesting that we're getting fairly close (a decade or three?) to being able simulate brains and the we could combine human and bat simulations to be able to check out what it's like.

</comment><comment><USER28> Thomas Nagel teaches at NYU, right?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> No need to read the paper. Just ask Batman.

Always be yourself, unless you can be Batman. Then always be Batman!

... just kidding. Interesting read anyways.

</comment><comment><USER30> somebody show this to Nolan, about time we got another Dark Knight movie.</comment>