Bitumen balls could be a pipeline-free way to transport Alberta oil - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/bitumen-balls-pellets-pipelines-rail-train-transport-energy-alberta-technology-1.4277320 <comment><USER3> People are missing a couple of details in this: the Canadian "oil" in question is not a liquid from a well to start with, it's tar sands that have been dug up. The first step of processing is melting it to filter out the sand. This leaves you with viscous bitumen that cannot be pumped efficiently down a pipeline. So normally it's processed again to make "dilbit", diluted bitumen, in order to ship it to an oil refinery for cracking to produce actually useful petrol.

<comment><USER4> Dilbit is diluted with chemicals that need to be imported from the US or Middle East. These liquids also need to be transported and can result in their own spills. This looks like an important development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a rule, it is far easier* to transport/handle liquids in large quantity than solids. Even ignoring the effort to convert/deconvert the oil at each end, I'm not seeing this as a step forward that will improve the bulk of crude-oil transport -- baring a more detailed analysis than what reads to me as 'pipelines bad.'

*Cheaper, safer, more efficient, requiring less maintenance, etc...

<comment><USER6> > _As a rule, it is far easier_ to transport/handle liquids in large quantity > than solids.*

Is it?

For liquids, at all times you need a sealed container that doesn't leak. For solids, it's enough for the holes to be no larger than the individual solid object. This makes containers cheaper _and_ requiring much less maintenance.

As for this specific case, the article makes at least two points:

\- transporting solids can reuse existing infrastructure (rail + coal wagons), giving you flexibility - as opposed to requiring you to ship from only where the pipeline ends (or to build new pipelines);

\- with "one weird trick" (injecting some extra gas into the bubble) they can make each pellet buoyant, and it seems they also don't dissolve easily - <USER2> result is something that's potentially _much_ easier to collect if you happened to spill it into an ocean.

<comment><USER7> They wouldn't build pipelines in the first place if it didn't make business sense to do so. These pipes will be in place for a very long time (relatively speaking). I would also think that railroad or road for transporting a solid liquid is also less environmentally friendly than sending via pipelines. Of course, if you are assuming that the pipeline will burst, then it may not be, but one has to ensure that the pipeline is a safe option. Government oversight is needed in those cases.

<comment><USER6> I understand the argument from the article is about flexibility - a pipeline will be in place for a very long time, but it's not easy to move it around as the economical landscape changes. Meanwhile, rail will let you move the stuff to wherever it's currently better to have it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is weird. Pipelines are the cheapest, most efficient, and safest way to move large amounts of oil. How is something which renders oil impossible to transport via pipeline a step forward?

<comment> Joe-Z The article mentions that it's more environmentally friendly. The balls float on water and apparently can't be poaked easily. That's a plus in my book.

<comment><USER9> I think we are in lipstick on a pig territory here. Tar sands are horrific in environmental terms, one of the most carbon intensive fossil fuels in their production and the cause of devastation of huge areas of wilderness. By the time the stuff is made into balls or whatever the vast majority of possible damage has already been done.

<comment><USER10> You should be aware that there are a number of oil sources that are far more carbon-intensive than the Canadian Oil Sands.

Many of which ship direct to the United States. One is even produced __IN __the United States (Bakersfield, CA).

On a wells-to-wheels basis, Canadian oil sands are only 6-8% more carbon- intensive than typical light crude (e.g. Saudi), and it comes from a politically-friendly country that supports female rights, human rights in general, and is not bombing their neighbours.

What you say regarding disruption of large areas of wilderness is true when it comes to tailings ponds, but you should also be aware that the vast majority of recent development (and probably most go-forward) is via in-situ extraction that does not require those tailings ponds.

Source: I am a chemical engineer and work directly in this industry.

<comment><USER9> Alternative opinion:

'Strip-mining the boreal to extract the tar sands and processing the oil makes the sands much more damaging to the climate than conventional oil.

"I believe the carbon intensity of extraction and processing for the oil sands is about double that of conventional oil," Homer-Dixon said.'

[http://grist.org/article/this-could-be-the-end-of- canadian-t...](http://grist.org/article/this-could-be-the-end-of-canadian-tar- sands/amp/)

I guess this is an inconvenient truth based on the downvoting.

<comment><USER11> Thankfully, neither petroleum extraction nor climate science need be faith- based, so Homer-Dixon's personal beliefs aren't all that relevant. There are multiple studies (not funded by petroleum companies) that document why he's wrong ([http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/4/1/0140...](http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/4/1/014005/meta) is a good metastudy). Grist.org is hardly a neutral source on the issue.

By all means, advocate for wide-scale reduction and elimination of the use of petroleum products. Demand that your representatives fight for carbon-neutral energy production. But pretending that boycotting Canadian products and instead consuming more coal, fracked shale oil and tanker-shipped crude from corrupt autocratic regimes is somehow an important part of solving the problem just makes you look like you're not paying attention. As does supporting corrupt officials and corporate misbehavior in places like Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Venezuela over supporting an allied liberal democracy with a strong (at least in comparison) record of environmental stewardship and oversight on corporate activity.

<comment><USER9> Again the straw man, second time in this thread. And ask native Canadians about their experience in tar sands areas.

<comment><USER11> I don't have to. They're pretty vocal about it, and it is widely reported in the media (because liberal democracy with free press). Not all 'natives' necessarily agree (quite a few work in the industry). There are also a wide variety other Canadians who live and work in the area who have strong opinions, on multiple sides of the argument. This is hardly surprising, as it is a controversial issue, and it certainly won't stop being one.

I bet that if I asked people (native or otherwise) about local fracking operations, coal mines, tailing ponds, power plants, refineries, offload and storage facilities, etc, etc, in any country I will find a bunch who would really rather they were somewhere else. I'm not sure why that's important to the discussion.

As for the reported "straw man", you seem to be under the impression that I argued that tar sands were wonderful and that Canadians truly enjoy living near them. Which is, of course, a straw man. I made three points: (1) The assertion that Alberta bitumen mining has twice the C02 impact of other sources of petroleum is provably false and (2) If you do not change the demand for petroleum products and do not want to source them in Canada, you have to source them somewhere else. (3) Other sources aren't necessarily much more palatable, especially if you include factors like support of the economy of the country of origin and the source producer.

Where's the straw man?

<comment><USER9> Here: 'But pretending that boycotting Canadian products and instead consuming more coal, fracked shale oil and tanker-shipped crude from corrupt autocratic regimes is somehow an important part of solving the problem just makes you look like you're not paying attention. As does supporting corrupt officials and corporate misbehavior in places like Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Venezuela'

I never said any of what you refute above. Also you set up a false dichotomy by implying that we either choose to use tar sands or are forced to support corrupt regimes - there are of course other alternatives scenarios - I note you avoid mention of LNG.

Bottom line though: tar sands are generally accepted by those that do not have a stake of some kind as being environmentally disastrous, far worse than the alternatives, but I'm guessing that's not in your corporate refutation manual.

<comment><USER11> (1) The top 10 oil exporters: Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, UAE, Canada, Nigeria, Kuwait, Angola, Venezuela, Kazakhstan. I don't think my assertion that replacing Canada with another source might involve some political issues runs contrary to the facts. You didn't say that was required, but it was implied by what you did say.

(2) I did mention LNG. I just spelled it 'fracking'. Currently, two thirds of US-produced natural gas is retrieved by hydraulic formation fracturing, and that fraction has been steadily growing.

(3) Arguing that "tar sands are generally accepted by those that do not have a stake of some kind..." is inaccurate and sloppy goal-post moving. I'm also not claiming that petroleum production isn't a serious and global environmental problem, I'm arguing that a belief that Canadian bitumen is the heart of the problem is dangerously misinformed. I'd much rather we shut it down and invested heavily in molten salt reactors, but until that happens the problem isn't tar sands: it's global demand and dependence on burning petroleum.

(4) I don't even know why I'm writing this---when you implied I'm a corporate shill and claimed that the only people who disagree with you are those who have a stake of some kind in tar sands, you conceded the argument. Have a good day.

<comment><USER9> Ever heard of Prelude? That'll be the world's largest floating structure, soon to be parked off Australia producing LNG, and with no fracking involved.

Also I'm prepared to put up with some despotic regimes if it means we don't boil the oceans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice, although I'm wondering which company will trade efficiency (using spheres to transport a liquid means you have lots of "wasted" space) for environmental safety... without a law imposing it, at least.

Maybe the economic incentive of balls just "rolling away" (thus remaining recoverable) in the event of a pipeline/tanker/carriage leak could balance this?

<comment> Joe-Z They are not only trading it for environmental saftey. As mentioned in another comment, using these balls you don't have to rely on specialized rail waggons anymore. So, while you may lose some space due to inefficient packing, you could easily make that up by using lots more of (assumedly) cheaper general- purpose/coal waggons.

<comment><USER13> Specialized rail wagons aren't expensive compared to other parts of the transportation costs - if you have the option of 5 specialized wagons or 6 "cheap" wagons, then using 5 wagons is cheaper.

<comment><USER14> Less true if you need 4000 specialised ones but have 48,000 idle standard ones.

[http://cs.trains.com/trn/f/111/t/148771.aspx?PageIndex=3](http://cs.trains.com/trn/f/111/t/148771.aspx?PageIndex=3)

<comment><USER15> This page is from 2009. Anything newer?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> We can now make huge rube goldberg machines to transport those balls.

<comment><USER6> It's called "rail".

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

<comment><USER17> So less this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYzuXJ0E4cA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYzuXJ0E4cA)

And more this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEekXRNztVI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEekXRNztVI)

?

<comment><USER6> Yup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is funny reversal in history: Rockefeller first built pipelines to cut out the rail industry from distribution.

</comment><comment><USER19> Canadian tar sands should not be turned into oil at all -- there's no clean way to do so and the whole endeavor is based on continued government subsidies for it to be cost effective. Canada has a rep for being progressive and environmentally friendly but this is anything but.

</comment><comment><USER6> Two questions I'm wondering about:

\- How solid are those pebbles? I assume they're not like soft blobs that can easily split and merge together? But then how much abuse they can take? E.g. if they crack easily, you can't really stack them together very high.

\- The obvious one - are the pebbles flammable?

<comment><USER20> _\- The obvious one - are the pebbles flammable?_

As much as coal, if not more.

<comment><USER21> I wonder if they burn better or worse than wood pellets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The article mentions using rail cars to transport the bitumen balls -- but given the nature of the material, would they not stick together into clumps / semi-solid layers at the bottoms of rail cars? Coal is solid / brittle, almost slippery. These things seem to be the opposite.

</comment><comment><USER23> so, you make pellets. Then you have to mix them with some "light" oil produced during the production of pellets. So you still have to transport them together.

I cannot really understand how this is better than carrying oil directly.

<comment><USER24> It's in the article. Easier to clean up a spill if it happens.

<comment><USER23> not really, the bit where it mentions that you also need the oil byproduct to reconstitute the heavy oil is at the end of the article, while the mention of "easy to clean" is at the beginning, and (seems to?) only pertains to the pellets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Could the oil not be put in containers and transported by rail in its original form anyway? I'm not sure if converting to pellets really makes the problem easier to solve...

</comment><comment><USER26> Slurries (mixture of particles and liquids) are reasonably easy to pump. Australia pumps a coal/water slurry over its north-south axis.

</comment><comment><USER27> >could be a pipeline-free way to transport oil

Oh, interesting title...

>I don't think it will replace pipelines

Ah, nevermind.

</comment><comment><USER9> Anything that facilitates increased use of tar sands hydrocarbons is terrible news for the environment. We should ban this miserable trade.

<comment><USER28> You're right, we also need to ban, cars, milk, beef, beer, clothes, plastics, .. oh crap we've now banned everything that underpins our modern technological age.

<comment><USER29> What makes you think that any of those things, including plastics, must by made from fossil oil? So tired of being told that the only way to do things, is the way we are currently doing them. Heck, we don't even have to make so much stuff out of plastic at all, and considering where that plastic is turning up in the food chain, it might be worth the expense to start finding replacements. Aluminum recycles nicely, hemp makes some excellent fabrics, cows will do just fine on a diet of grass.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Does anyone see the irony in this? "We admit this is utterly dangerous for the environment so instead of sending it out in liquid form we're now going to send it out in small pellets so they can then be transformed and it can pollute the world exactly where we want it to pollute."

<comment><USER31> What's ironic about that? It sounds perfectly reasonable to me. It's dangerous, so we should take steps to minimize the danger.</comment></comment>


The Death, and Life, of Reading Have Been Greatly Exaggerated (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://lj.libraryjournal.com/blogs/annoyedlibrarian/2016/08/18/the-death-and-life-of-reading-have-been-greatly-exaggerated/ <comment><USER3> The author seems to miss that there are people like me -- internet addicts who don't read much anymore. I was born in the mid-80s and throughout most of my youth the only options were really vapid TV like reruns of Friends, very limited use internet, or books. For the most part, I chose books.

I would read _constantly_. Fiction, nonfiction, books on science, books on history, books on literature, you name it. I read my older brother's honors English books sitting around.

These days the internet is far more attractive and interesting than anything else going on, and I can scratch my itch to read by skimming articles on news aggregators without really retaining anything.

Articles about the "death of reading" are about people like me who have trouble unplugging to read. There are still some people who do read books, so it's not completely dead. But it is kind of sad for people like me who miss reading.

(I'm actually doing much better these days, though, and at least right now I'm getting some good reading done as I'm hooked on a series.)

<comment><USER4> That's a certain death too. I'm in the same boat. Reading a book has gone from guilty pleasure to the " _I really need to do more reading "_ chore.

People still like Shakespeare. But, it's not a guilty pleasure anymore. Its something you do to "better yourself." You might call it a bourgeoisie pursuit.

A lot of art looks like this when it retires. It moves up the class ladder where it is maintained for posterity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand why the number of books people read a year mean anything.

If someone read one book a year, but they were part of the "Art of Computer Programming" (including some exercises), it would be much more impressive than someone who read 50 books from Goosebumps series.

Reading is important, but contemplation and penetration of a subject should be the goal (e.g. doing exercises in back of a book, summarizing a book, critiquing a book). People who are trying to finish a book every week is missing the point, and will never read anything that is difficult or dense.

<comment><USER6> I agree. In particular, I don't think reading _fiction_ is in any way better than watching TV. Either way, you're doing it for entertainment, and getting nothing more out of it. Not even shared cultural context, as these days the shared culture is mostly TV-oriented.

<comment><USER7> Even within fiction, there's wiggle room. Hell, I'd even say not all TV is _just_ entertainment. There's a big difference between reading "Pachinko" and "50 Shades Freed".

But yeah, I notice a lot of people like to brag about quantity of books read and claim that makes them learned. It would be like going to McDonald's every day and saying you have a refined palate.

<comment><USER8> > not all TV is just entertainment

Certainly, not all television is entertainment but in my experience the whole medium itself tends to get looked down upon and there's a lot of ridiculous virtue-signaling involved.

Compared to the people I interact with I read a fair bit, I'd say higher than average. However, I also watch the occasional documentary / tv show. In social settings I usually don't bring up what I'm reading as I find it's not a socially wise thing to do unless I'm certain the other party has similar reading habits to mine. In general I usually bring up what I've watched recently. What I find amusing are the subtle jabs I get for 'wasting my time watching tv' from people who I'm sure don't read as much as I do.

To me television is just another medium, nothing more, nothing less. It has its advantages and disadvantages, sure, but I've learned just as much if not more from extremely well done lectures / documentaries as I have from books. Even from watching regular 'tv shows' for entertainment purposes I've learned quite a bit as a lot of shows these days are extremely detailed (e.g. Mr. Robot) and there's quite a lot to learn or think about if you pay enough attention.

I don't play video games as much these days, but I also find the amount of disdain people hold for the entire medium is unwarranted IMHO.

For what I'm watching right now - I'm enjoying James Burke's Connections which was recommended here on HN a while back. I highly recommend others to watch it if they haven't!

<comment><USER7> > not all television is entertainment

This made me chuckle. I was trying to imply that things can be more than entertainment. Even things that are billed as straight up documentaries can hold some entertainment value.

And I agree with you, people like to look down on television even though it's just another medium. I've recently watched The Good Place, which is pretty much a sitcom, but they do introduce you to various philosophical concepts. Both directly and indirectly.

Penn Jillette said Mickey Dolenz has the best quote about video games he's ever heard: Video games are the new rock and roll. It's the thing the parents don't get. So Penn watches his kids play Minecraft and he doesn't get it, but he _knows_ he doesn't get it so he just lets them discover their own world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The author is incorrect, at least according to polls. It looks like the majority of Americans read a book in 2015, with many of them reading more than one.

[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/27-percent- america...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/27-percent-american- adults-didnt-read-single-book-last-year-180957029/)

<comment><USER10> The median is apparently something like "4 or 5 books" a year.

A YEAR.

In a virtue-signalling survey that will illicit higher responses than we might otherwise expect (self reported rates of untested things seen as "good" tend to be over-report on such surveys, while rates of things seen as "bad" then to be under-reported), i think that actually supports the authors point.

Especially when he/she mentions people with a stack of books on their bedstand or whom pack their kindles with multiple books at a time for holidaying.

<comment><USER11> I'm confused. Do you think 4 or 5 books a year is a lot, or a little?

<comment><USER10> I think its appreciably close to nothing (including both the number of books many people will be made to read while at compulsory schooling and education, and I also think its close the kind of number of books a non-reader would respond to such a survey when making up an number given that they really don't read in any practical amount).

<comment><USER12> I think the real number is close to 0-1 books read a year for most people. 5-6 books read a year would be much more then the average person in my estimation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I mostly just wish more people would read so that it'd be more likely that the 5 people I hang out the most were avid readers, so I could get some spillover wisdom.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think this article would be better if it abstracts "deep reading" to longform content. The sort of reading the article is focusing on (novels, fiction) is only a small subset of the total amount of "dense" content available. The article calls itself a "frivolous" blog post, but many blogs are very insightful and intellectually stimulating. If in any given year you read zero books, but you read several articles from The Economist and Foreign Affairs each week, you're still reading a substantial amount of longform content.

Even in that (more generous) context, I think it's pretty difficult to say anything meaningful about how much reading the average person does. The best we can do is probably trade anecdotes because self-reported survey responses could be unreliable. That being said, in my opinion a lot of people (especially on websites such as this one) don't have a good awareness of how many people are either inadvertently or _willfully_ uneducated because they simply don't want to read. It's very difficult to replace the information density of longform content when you're using a video medium, but videos are clearly far more popular. Consider how often you search for reviews or instructions and can find only videos on YouTube that say in 5 - 10 minutes what could have been written in a few paragraphs and read in maybe 2 minutes. Sometimes instead of videos it's weird infographics filled with gifs.

Note that I'm not talking about informational entertainment videos or visual walkthroughs - I'm talking about strictly inefficient videos designed to be a learning utility, like all those oddball ones where someone (poorly) narrates how to do something on their compute by _recording themselves doing it and typing instructions._ Likewise, if you read through the comment threads about a new movie in /r/movies, you'll come away with far more actionable insights about the film than if you watched any given video review about it online. The videos that _do_ have a lot of information density are notable as exceptions that prove the rule: they're generally very long, by YouTube standards, and not (intentionally) funny. Consider 3Blue1Brown or AltShiftX, for example. The antithesis of this is local news or quick video snippets taking the place of longer articles in the NYT, WSJ or FT.

If you're reading this comment, you are probably a person who likes to read. You might not read fiction much, but you're spending your time on a forum specifically devoted to discussing thought provoking content. That means you might be in a professional and personal bubble where all or most of the people you talk to enjoy reading "interesting" things, for some definition of interesting. But most people are not scientists, entrepreneurs or software engineers debating the finer points of e.g. driving automation on Hacker News. Many people (especially below the poverty line) simply don't have the time to read anything nontrivial between taking care of their family and working one or more jobs. Worse still, many people have become so used to video content that they won't read anything. One friend of mine only keeps up with the news by having CNN on in the background at his computer. When I sent him an article about something I thought he'd find interesting (the article on here recently about Riot's anti-cheating systems), he simply said he wouldn't read it - <USER2> because he wasn't interested, but because, "meh, too long."

And this circles back to my original point - whether you consider only fiction or any intellectually stimulating longform content, it's clear that the vast amount of actionable information people consume is presented to them via a medium that is not designed for clarity and density. If all you consider is fiction you might miss this point, because entertainment-driven media can be substantially thought provoking whether it's read or watches. But non-fiction suffers dramatically when it leaves the written medium.</comment>


Emotiv EPOC - Consumer EEG Headset Devkit - <AUTHOR> http://emotiv.com/apps/sdk/179/

<comment><AUTHOR> This was recently demoed at TED [1], and I was impressed how much this field is being commercialized. $US500 for a headset and SDK, shipped worldwide. I admit ever since I was a little geek, I dreamed one day I would have neural access to a computer, and now it looks like it's coming along far enough to play with. I was wondering what the community might think.

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVhggGSjXVg></comment>


The Beauty of Inefficient Code - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/07/the-beauty-of-inefficient-code/60613/

<comment><USER2> While I agree with the premise of this article, the fact remains poor design is poor design.

I'm recoding a web query tool write now that was written horribly. It actually worked, but the efficiency problems it had would have made the site choke when exposed to real users. Prototyping is one thing, but if you're application / site / whatever is going to be hit by lots of people, there's a minimum level of efficiency that has to be in the code or else the thing's gonna tank.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's so much wrong with this article I don't even know where to start.</comment>


Show HN: Cohortt – Find people whom a Twitter user frequently tweets to - <AUTHOR> https://cohortt.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello Hacker News! Creator here, happy to answer any questions! :)

I decided to build Cohortt to find accounts similar to a particular twitter account. Usually we tweet or interact with people who share similar interests. For example here is Paul Graham's Cohortt [https://cohortt.com/user/@paulg](https://cohortt.com/user/@paulg).

To find cohortt of any other person, say Naval Ravikants (@naval), just replace the screen name / twitter handle in the url.

[https://cohortt.com/user/@naval](https://cohortt.com/user/@naval)

</comment><comment><USER2> Within or without Twitter's TOC?</comment>


Ask HN: Best place to learn front-end coding/design - <AUTHOR>

I know HTML/CSS from back in the day.  I gotta catch up with the latest stuff, like responsive design, frameworks, javascript.  Where is the best place to learn about this stuff?  I like video learning <comment><USER2> [http://www.codecademy.com](http://www.codecademy.com) <\-- Pretty decent resource for learning HTML/CSS/Javascript/PHP etc.

I've not seen any lessons on frameworks or responsive design though, but still a good resource in my opinion.

It's also not video learning, but the interactive courses are pretty nice. Learn by doing philosophy.

<comment><USER3> I thought this was very basic. +PHP = not my cup of tea. Python would be nicer.</comment></comment>


BlackBerry move to embrace Android may bring unexpected reward - <AUTHOR> http://in.reuters.com/article/2015/06/13/us-blackberry-google-android-idINKBN0OS2G820150613

<comment><AUTHOR> The phrase "unexpected reward" sounds sarcastic and the move of Blackberry seems the final nail in its coffin. Why does the world need yet another digital touch slab maker? Wouldn't they dedicate their full potential of hardware design and real-time OS making (QNX) in something more future proof and innovative, like IoT?

</comment><comment><USER2> I expect Blackberry will spin off QNX, which should be an IVI/IoT play. Trying to make yet another first-rate mobile UX if you have not got hundreds of millions to spend on R&D and developer relations ain't gonna happen.

Security and device management are still a relatively open field. If you don't want Samsung's bloatware but you do want manageable, secure devices, your choices are thin. There is room for a vendor with focus to do well in this potentially large niche.

And the above + BBM is the right thing to do to retain existing customers.

But here is the wild-ass possibility: What if Blackberry's idea of "Android" is the Android middleware and UX on QNX? They already have that mostly implemented in the form of Android compatibility for their QNX devices. What if this move just flips the UX to be Android-first, with Blackberry compatibility?</comment>


Ask HN: What are some cool cdn subdomain names? - <AUTHOR> It's pretty obvious I have too much time on my hands.
I'm wondering what subomain names others have used when naming a cdn for their websites.
The twist is that I'm reserving cdn.domain.com for other uses.
This is for serving assets for a tech related marketing site.
My initial thoughts:

  cdnx.domain.com
  web.cdn.domain.com
  cdn.web.domain.com
  cdn-web.domain.com
 I should just get on with it, but, hey, why not give it a cool name. <comment><USER2> I always enjoyed Google owning 1e100.net thought that was a clever name for some of their networking

</comment><comment><USER3> The amount of cleverness you could achieve kind of depends on what "domain.com" part is.</comment>


Does growing up poor harm brain development? - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21741586-team-scientists-undertakes-ambitious-experiment-which-could-change-thinking-about <comment><USER2> Half my childhood I grew up in poor conditions. The stress of everything just drenches you. People traumatizing each other, young and old, in their stress and grief. The poor dull each other. Dulled minds are handed down. Poverty is not just economic fact, it is a state of mind.

<comment><USER3> Did you escape? If yes, how?

<comment><USER4> The typical answers are: education, military, sports, entertainment. You either need to work hard in education or go join the military and survive or be naturally gifted in sports/music.

<comment><USER5> All the people I know who have been successful in music worked their asses off at it. It takes a special kind of personality to practice by yourself for hours and hours in search for perfection while still having he ability to connect with other people emotionally.

<comment><USER6> That's interesting, I had never considered the contradiction in that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> An interesting question I've had recently, which isn't necessarily directly related to the subject of the article is, "how does access to technology affect brain development?"

When I was a kid, my family was dirt poor, in a fairly literal sense. That was the early to mid 80's and while I was reasonably bright as a student, access to technology really did hold me back.

I didn't get my hands on a computer until high school (in '90), and that was a broken C-64 that I had to fix myself. I didn't have a TV to connect it to. I had to earn enough to buy an old black and white TV at a garage sale before I could even get it working.

My whole life I felt that this is what held me back, and so when the time came, I endeavored to make sure my kids had access to technology if they were interested.

But now I see where tech has headed. They've had computers, but mostly pads and phones their entire lives. It seems almost like these platforms have DULLED their imagination to some extent.

I wonder in the coming generations, if we will see some sort of correlation with access to tech in one's formative years. Especially given the intentionally addictive nature of many of the apps that have become popular in recent years. Also as tech has become ubiquitous and cheap, access it not entirely defined by economics anymore either.

Success is far more than raw intelligence. I'll be interesting to see how all of that plays out in the next generation or two.

<comment><USER8> As a counter point, I've always felt that a main thing holding people back was desire & drive. You not having "it" lead to you cultivating a desire and a drive to acquire.

Self motivation > resources

<comment><USER9> Really? So, you have Child A and Child B.

Child A \- Wealthy upbringing \- Always full on nutritious food \- Elite, private schooling \- Live in a stable, loving home

Child B \- Poor upbringing \- Almost always hungry, only able to eat cheap calorie dense foods \- Public, underfunded inner city school \- Shuffled around between foster homes

You think that the deciding factor for these examples would be their desire and drive? I don't, and I think the science out there agrees with me when I say poverty has numerous adverse effects on how a human turns out.

[https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f16e/845b8222cb92541902c19b...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f16e/845b8222cb92541902c19bb1920ee8af5a04.pdf) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2528798/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2528798/) [https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1196/an...](https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1196/annals.1425.023) [https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/policy-brief/how-poverty-and- dep...](https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/policy-brief/how-poverty-and-depression- impact-childs-social-and-emotional-competence) [http://www.apa.org/pi/families/poverty.aspx](http://www.apa.org/pi/families/poverty.aspx)

<comment><USER10> I would say Child B would be a lot more successful if he had drive than if he didn't. Same with Child A. I've known a lot of rich kids that didn't amount to squat. (I went to one of those elite private schools, but my dad was a teacher there, so we got steep discounts).

<comment><USER11> Sure, but we're not comparing the child to themselves with and without motivation holding all other factors constant. The question is, if two otherwise equivalent children are placed in living situations of vastly different quality how likely are differences in drive going to influence success?

The fact that some poor kids succeed and some rich kids fail isn't nearly as important as the what percentage of these groups succeed and fail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Some further reading on this subject for those that are interested:

Poverty linked to epigenetic changes and mental illness: [https://www.nature.com/news/poverty-linked-to-epigenetic- cha...](https://www.nature.com/news/poverty-linked-to-epigenetic-changes-and- mental-illness-1.19972)

Childhood poverty linked to brain changes related to depression: [https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/news/childhood-poverty- link...](https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/news/childhood-poverty-linked-brain- changes-depression-305208)

What Poverty Does to Your Brain: [https://www.attn.com/stories/2442/effects- poverty-brain-ment...](https://www.attn.com/stories/2442/effects-poverty- brain-mental-health)

What Poverty Does to the Young Brain: [https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/what-poverty-does- to...](https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/what-poverty-does-to-the-young- brain)

'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result: [http://www.philly.com/philly/health/20130721__Crack_baby__st...](http://www.philly.com/philly/health/20130721__Crack_baby__study_ends_with_unexpected_but_clear_result.html)

How Poverty Taxes the Brain: [https://www.citylab.com/life/2013/08/how- poverty-taxes-brain...](https://www.citylab.com/life/2013/08/how-poverty- taxes-brain/6716/)

Freeing Up Intelligence: [https://scholar.harvard.edu/sendhil/publications/freeing- int...](https://scholar.harvard.edu/sendhil/publications/freeing-intelligence)

Growing Up Poor Is Bad for Your Brain: [https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vvb4gy/growing- up...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vvb4gy/growing-up-poor-is- bad-for-your-brain)

These articles should be pretty good reads on the subject. Let me know if any of them are especially weak.

</comment><comment><USER13> I grew up poor or lower middle class. But later my parents' finances improved and my siblings grew up upper middle class.

I can tell you there is huge difference between my siblings especially youngest and I when it comes to finance and career.

1\. They barely save any money, live pretty lavish lifestyle for what they earn. I pretty much focus on saving. Sometimes, I will skip important events, dinners, etc because I haven't met my savings goal. Before I got married, I lived in 33% of after tax income.

(My friends split in two groups after college, those who upgraded their lifestyle as they earned more money, and those who either kept college lifestyle as long as possible or did not earn a lot after college to upgrade their life style. I remained friend with later group only.)

2\. My siblings don't take shit form their bosses, quit jobs without finding next one. I worry too much about my job, answer phone or emails after work etc.

3\. My siblings will quit jobs and travel or find themselves or whatever. I have never ever voluntarily quit job without finding next job.

4\. My siblings will risk significant amount of their savings in various ventures. I only invest in index funds.

5\. They buy stuff on impulse. I will research best deals.

I can go on and on about difference in our mentality but main point is that somehow even with 6 figure income, I fear poverty more than I should. And they pretty much live as if money is unlimited resource.

This also causes issues with my wife though she lived in poverty a bit too, so she understands my fears.

<comment><USER14> It is well know that first-born are more risk averse than not-first-born when adults (e.g., they buy more insurances).

See references here: [https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/5802/do- first-b...](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/5802/do-first-borns- buy-more-insurance)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Correlation is not causation, but most factors say yes. Moreover, the brain health of families is not generally a consideration in school systems. If kids are under toxic stress and not sleeping enough to recover, their brains won't develop to their full potential. That science is well-understood from animal models and glimpsed in human neuroimaging studies.

<comment><USER16> "Toxic stress" in childhood isn't a pre-ordained result of, nor should it even have to correlate with, being poor.

<comment><USER17> Poverty and limited financial resources aren't really the same thing. I get what you are saying, but it is something I have thought about a whole, whole lot. It's a distinction we don't make clear enough. We talk as if poverty is just about a low income. It's really not.

Let's posit two scenarios:

1\. There are people with low incomes whose lives work reasonably well.

2\. There are people whose lives don't work and one of the results of their lives not working is a low income.

I think poverty is really that second item, not that first. I think we conflate low income and poverty too much. There were lives that worked well and lives that lacked critical elements long before modern money made it convenient to assign a dollar value to our idea of what constituted poverty. In so assigning a dollar value, we risk boiling down a whole lot of qualities to a single number that doesn't necessary effectively capture what is going on.

<comment><USER16> _In so assigning a dollar value, we risk boiling down a whole lot of qualities to a single number that doesn 't necessary effectively capture what is going on._

I agree completely.

Obviously the evidence is compelling in cases where, for instance, the parents so destitute that they cannot afford proper nutrition for an infant during critical periods of neural development.

This article conflates things like that with kids who are stranded for a few hours at the bus depot because their mother couldn't leave work early to pick them up after taking the wrong bus home. That's ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There is a study often cited by Thomas Sowell, which is never, ever mentioned by those on the political left in the US and never mentioned by the far right in the US -- as it goes against the narrative of both those groups. The study found that the school aged children of African American servicemen in Germany had the same average IQ as their classmates.

Something we're doing to large numbers of urban children in the US is morally equivalent to putting lead in the water. It's largely been the political left in the US which has had control of large urban areas. The culture of the US in the 1st half of the 20th century wasn't harmful in this way. Poles and Italians were able to increase their average IQ's to parity with the US as a whole in that period. African Americans were also making progress in that period, but this stopped in the 1960's.

One of the historical patterns which comes across in Thomas Sowell's work is that of minority elites continuing the cultural isolation of their own group to maintain their own power. One of the chief tools of maintaining cultural isolation is identity politics.

<comment><USER19> I can see how such a story is against the 'right/racist' narrative as they think race has a major influence on intelligence, but why doesn't it fit the 'left' narrative which seems to categorize humans based on their social class?

<comment><USER20> Talking about IQ among ethinicities is verboten on the left.

It's also axiomatic on the left that all cultures are equally effective at raising successful, healthy children. The German study suggests that culture matters, which counters this axiom.

<comment><USER21> It is "verboten" (lol) on the left because it has nothing to do with your skin color, and it has everything to do with the enviroment you grow up in.

<comment><USER22> I don't get the joke. The truth is probably that genetics do play a role (perhaps small though) in intelligence, as it does with other measures like height or bone marrow donor compatibility.

<comment><USER21> Sure, but you can easily silence most whites who want to feel superior with this:

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

However, even the above can just be used to maintain the tinfoil conspiracy theory about jews running the world. So.... you cant get any useful conclusion with this data, even if you use the data as it is (i.e. to say "on average", and never use it to guess a certain person's intelligence based on ethnicity).

Also, the genes responsible for skin color,afaik, has nothing to do with the intelligence of that human. Otherwise, there would literally be a cap on iq for whiter or darker skinned humans. But there is not, any ethnicity can produce stupid individuals and geniuses as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The book "How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character" by Paul Tough is a nice primer on this topic. The book includes findings from the ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) study [1] that points at a link between adverse childhood experiences childhood trauma with health and social problems later in life.

Of course, growing up in poverty doesn't automatically mean you'll have a higher ACE level, nor does it mean you cannot change your outcomes, but it does tend to offer more traumatic experiences than children outside of poverty.

[1] [https://www.samhsa.gov/capt/practicing-effective- prevention/...](https://www.samhsa.gov/capt/practicing-effective- prevention/prevention-behavioral-health/adverse-childhood-experiences)

</comment><comment><USER24> Growing up poor I think I had more stress then my peers but there was also an element of street smartness which I realised my friends simply lacked. As poor was pretty shameless asserting my needs or optimising for my benefit at the expense of others where as my rich friends seemed to not understand my selfish behaviour.

For example when I was offered a job I negotiated 200% more salary upfront. The HR person was shocked but later we settled on 140% more. Where my other friend made much much less.

Poverty is a state of mind but it had other benefits too in my case.

</comment><comment><USER25> Not when it comes to pure improvisation and ingenuity to get by, solve or problem and make life easier.

It's astounding what people in that situation can come up with.

<comment><USER26> Wouldn't that be explained by survivorship bias?

<comment><USER27> It's possible but not typical to _literally die_ of poverty in the United States.

<comment><USER28> I think that is systematically untrue. Poverty is correlated with a shorter lifespan. More graphs in the second link...

[https://news.stanford.edu/2016/04/11/geography-income- play-r...](https://news.stanford.edu/2016/04/11/geography-income-play-roles- in-life-expectancy-new-stanford-research-shows/)

"Being richer was associated with living longer at every level of the income distribution. And the gap between the richest 1 percent and the bottom 1 percent in the nation was vast. At 40, the richest men could expect to live to 87 while the bottom 1 percent had a life expectancy of just above 72 – equal to the average in a developing country like Sudan"

[https://healthinequality.org/documents/paper/healthineq_summ...](https://healthinequality.org/documents/paper/healthineq_summary.pdf)

<comment><USER29> That's a deeply reductionist way of looking at it.

> _At the same time, the researchers are quick to point out that the findings > cannot immediately be reduced to simple cause-and-effect explanations. For > instance, as social scientists have long observed, it is very hard to say > whether having wealth leads to better health — or if health, on aggregate, > is a prerequisite for accumulating wealth. Most likely, the two interact in > complex ways, something the study cannot resolve._ \- > [https://news.mit.edu/2016/study-rich-poor-huge-mortality- > gap...](https://news.mit.edu/2016/study-rich-poor-huge-mortality-gap- > us-0411)

In other words, this is a chicken-and-egg problem.

<comment><USER28> If you parse that question carefully, it is not asking if existing wealth can help confer health. The question is if health is needed to accumulate (more) wealth. Word in () added. And that seems like a silly question - of course people are going to have more difficulty accumulating wealth with sufficiently bad health..

I think there is a definite policy question of how exactly is it that wealth helps grant better health, and can we effectively increase our society's health by knowing in more detail... but to me the fundamental link doesn't have much more to prove with that data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Could a contributing factor be the quality of food that easier to access when poor? I grew up in a slightly higher than poverty environment and had to cook when my mom was at work. I was probably an exception, all my friends would eat frozen prepared meals and fast food.

Calories certainly do not equal proper vitamins, enzymes and amino acids, required for a developing living being. Frozen meals and fast food have plenty of empty calories and can put the body in survival mode, storing more fat and leading to blood sugar issues, to say the least. Thoughts?

<comment><USER31> Nutrition is definitely a factor, but probably not the major one.

I think the number one factor is probably access to parental attention.

It's shocking how much better an elementary age student can do when there is a parent to remind them about a homework project that is due. Or be available to answer a question on basic math or the meaning of a word.

Even in two equally driven students, self learning gets stuck at home in ways parents can unblock if they have the time and energy to do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Being poor is not something you can tell someone, you need to live it to experience the horror, you are despised and disrespected for something you had no control over

<comment><USER33> >something you had no control over

A significant contingent of the population does not believe that to be true.

<comment><USER34> Well, when it comes to children at least, they are wrong.

<comment><USER33> Aye, I do not agree with that idea

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> There's a researcher at the Center for Neuroscience & Society at the University of Pennsylvania who researches this topic:

[https://neuroethics.upenn.edu/portfolio-items/childhood- pove...](https://neuroethics.upenn.edu/portfolio-items/childhood-poverty-and- brain-development-from-science-to-policy-martha-j-farah/)

</comment><comment><USER36> I don't know about brain development but I think that it tends to encourage narrowmindedess.

When you only have a few options and choosing the wrong one is potentially devastating, you tend to zero in on the safe and sure choice. Iterate on this a million times and you have a person who will tend to stick to the status quo and dismiss other options.

</comment><comment><USER37> Scientists have discovered that being poor actually impairs our cognitive abilities; [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/28/the-lasting- impacts...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/28/the-lasting-impacts-of- po_n_4170124.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> The work by Greenough is a classic on experiences and brain development. e.g. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3038480](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3038480)

</comment><comment><USER38> Growing up poor > More likely to experience lead paint/lead in water > Harmed brain development.

</comment><comment><USER39> In my experience, I have recognized cycles of trauma. My mom grew up in poverty with food insecurity and her dad was an abusive alcoholic- so much that when he passed away it was like good riddance. He was so abusive my grandmother refused to remarry.

I didn't grow up with food insecurity but I remember that a $1 ice cream sandwich or slice of pizza was a luxury until I got my first job.

My first relationship was with an abusive person. He tried to control what I eat, separate me from my friends and family, and almost destroyed me. It was only when a friend recommended me a book Why Does He Do That? that I recognized in horror that not only was he abusive, I saw the same red flags in another relationship, my parents...

Environment is so important, sometimes I see this cycle in others. I'm afraid when you come from an abusive environment sometimes you don't know any better. You don't know how you should or deserve to be treated.

I saw a documentary about two young girls that were the first in their families to graduate high school and go to college in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the USA [1]. It was a feel good documentary and then I looked up the students on Facebook. One student was now a teen mom and the other had dropped out of college and was working at McDonald's. She was publicly crying for help on her Facebook personal page on why her life was so miserable. I understand that feeling to feel cursed just for being alive.

I believe she may have been bullied by her wealthier classmates... Separated from her support network, bullied, and struggling to learn as well as go to school, I feel like her odds were heavily stacked against her to begin with. (And that's what Shanti Bhavan discovered too. You can't help them go to college and leave them hanging, you have to support them through college).

However, I've also seen incredible stories of strength from some of the poorest places on earth. Shanti Bhavan [2], Barefoot College [3], and SECMOL [4] have done and are doing incredible work!

My uneducated belief is that what all three of those places have in common is their deep love and unwavering belief for their students whether they are children or an illiterate grandmother training to be a solar engineer- as well as arming them with skills to work and provide for their families (probably the major key- that's how they gain their confidence).

Maybe that's one way to tackle poverty as a mental health issue. Help traumatized communities that might be in a cycle of trauma to break abusive mindsets. Teach needed skills, confidence, and financial literacy, so they can believe that they can be more than a teen mom or like my mom, locked in an abusive marriage or relationship from financial dependence.

I sincerely hope that poor American children today are not being treated worse than children from families who live with less than $1/day. In that sense, I believe instead of tackling poverty as neurological/biological, we should also investigate the environmental and behavioral.

As another movement says, violent communities don't need more police officers but mental health counselors.

As for anyone who says that the poor are lazy, please read about the salt farmers of India in Gujarat [5]. Watch My Name is Salt [6] to see how they farm salt for 8 months for almost nothing. You will never be able to call the poor lazy after seeing that.

[1] Oyler documentary: [https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B06ZY7Z66X](https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B06ZY7Z66X)

[2] Daughters of Destiny Netflix documentary: [http://www.shantibhavanchildren.org/netflix/](http://www.shantibhavanchildren.org/netflix/)

[3] Bunker Roy, founder of Barefoot College TED talk: [https://www.ted.com/talks/bunker_roy](https://www.ted.com/talks/bunker_roy)

[4] Sonam Wangchuk, founder of SECMOL TED talk: [https://youtu.be/t5-Dea7rpRg](https://youtu.be/t5-Dea7rpRg)

[4] Jungwa, The Broken Balance is a documentary by a SECMOL grad on how climate change is affecting his home in Ladakh, India: [https://vimeo.com/ondemand/jungwathebrokenbalance](https://vimeo.com/ondemand/jungwathebrokenbalance)

[5] [https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/inpictures/2016/08/salt- fa...](https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/inpictures/2016/08/salt-farmers- india-rann-kutch-marshes-160823114732598.html)

[6] [https://www.amazon.com/My-Name-Salt-Farida- Pacha/dp/B01MDK9N...](https://www.amazon.com/My-Name-Salt-Farida- Pacha/dp/B01MDK9N8E)

More resources on poverty:

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

</comment><comment><USER40> everything is about the environment. If you have an under stimulating environment then even your health is affected.

Read about the WWII pregnant survivors of holocaust where their lack of food evolved into the fetus being stingy with proteins and sugars and now they are experiencing health problems because now their body stores more than it needs and weight gain and other health factors arose.

So yes, environment can be detrimental to not only brain, but full physiological development

</comment><comment><USER41> Nutrition.

</comment><comment><USER42> I guess thats why im dumb

</comment><comment><USER43> The consensus amongst intelligence researchers is that adult intelligence is ~70-80% based on genetic factors. I refer you to The Neuroscience of Intelligence - Cambridge Fundamentals of Neuroscience in Psychology by Richard Haier and the many studies sited therein.

We should help poor and less intelligent people for moral reasons, but it is unlikely to improve intelligence in the poorer population and, if the aid is structured dysgenically, it will serve only to compound the problem.

<comment><USER44> As you are saying, 20–30 per cent of the variability of intelligence is _not_ heritable. In other words, it's acquired. This contradicts your claim that "[helping them] is unlikely to improve intelligence in the poorer population". If done correctly, it will improve intelligence.

<comment><USER43> I am saying that the evidence suggests that 70-80% of adult[1] intelligence is based on genetic factors (that is distinct from heritability, which is lower, ~60% iirc) leaving the remaining 20-30% as unknown environmental factors. Wealth intuitively does play a role in that, although I believe (with as strong of evidence any anyone else does in the matter of environmental outcomes) that a strong parental bond matters more than wealth.

Again, my concern is that if unstructured wealth transfer is treated as a panacea, it will end up having compounding dysgenic effects that outweigh whatever short term individual benefits come of it. This will, in the not very long run, make poverty worse.

It isn't saving me any karma since people can't be rational about this topic, but I'll stress again that I think we should help the poor for moral reasons.

[1] - It is important to specify adult intelligence, because interventions do appear to help childhood IQ, but this effect fades into adulthood and eventual life outcomes. This is why there was a lot of excitement around Head Start initially, but it has failed to produce the large changes in society that was hoped for.

<comment><USER45> The remaining 20-30% is related to childhood nutrition, education, opportunities to play, learning from peer groups... all of which are heavily impacted by wealth/poverty. And 20-30% is A LOT. Luck plays as much of a role in wealth as intelligence, so to assume that wealthy are more intelligent from genetic reasons and therefore poor families will remain poor is myopic.

Unstructured wealth transfer will never happen (except in cryptocurrencies) so I don't think you need to worry about that. The current effort is to get hardheaded free-marketers to recognize that equal opportunity is a myth.

<comment><USER44> > Unstructured wealth transfer will never happen

Basic income is arguably that, and there's some hope that it will happen in the not so far future (or rather, there's a reasonable fear that without it, and with the structural changes to the job market due to advanced automation, we'd be f#cked).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: A measurable way to decide between names for a startup? - <AUTHOR>

I have narrowed it down to 4 names that are all available and all are a play on loosely the same two words... I've vetted the names amongst friends and no one has pointed out negative connotations or potential pitfalls to any of them.  In my eyes i like all the names and don't really favor any one of the names ahead of the others (since they're all basically different forms and synonyms of the same play on words)
How then do I get a bigger data set to make my decision?  Google adwords testing?  Asking  a question on mechanical turk?
What method will yield better results, are there others?...
Essentially I'd like to use the internet to mimic a market test, what's the best way? what's been successful for you guys? <comment><AUTHOR> Pick the name you like the best and upvote it, in general terms its a shopping site... they're under here so they dont get mixed with other comments and move up or down...

<comment><AUTHOR> funboxed.com

<comment><USER2> This one has the fewest characters and syllables. It sounds better, probably because it has fewer syllables. Go with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Go simple, shorter words are better for a huge amount of reasons; easier to remember, can be said quicker (name with lowest amount of syllables), a short word-logo can have larger font than a long-word logo of the same size (perception). Anything that's long isn't sensible.

funboxed.com was my vote, because it's the shortest and the sound rolled off my tongue.

</comment><comment><USER4> you could just post them here as comments and we can vote them up... I assume you own all 4 options at this point.

<comment><AUTHOR> buying them as I speak just found the discount codes...

<comment><USER4> haha... when it comes to domain names I would feel uncomfortable telling it to even my friends with out owning it first.

<comment><AUTHOR> made sure to keep most of them in the dark and to not ask my developer friends

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just pick one and worry about the product instead. No one's going to care that much about what it's called.

<comment><AUTHOR> i agree thats good advice but it would be wrong of me not to do a quick check for unforseen remarkability (not a word, i know) of one of the names especially since the value added would likely be far greater than the 45 minutes or whatever it takes to set up the test.... It took me 15 minutes to come up with the names its not like its holding up the product

sure a great product overcomes a terrible name but it'd be easier just to not have to leap that hurdle from the start

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How will you decide about possible combo of characters? Do you pick one or just buy everything ... just in case?

for example: 'reddit" can be redit, readit, red-it, read-it, red.it, read.it, redd.it "funbox" can be funboxes, funboks, funboss, fun-box, funnybox, funnyboxes, etc

</comment><comment> puzzle-out Keep it to two or three syllables, then work on the product - this process can turn into a huge time waster.

</comment><comment><USER7> choose something that sounds vaguely familiar to an existing term. And make sure there are very few Google search results for the name. A name with too many Google results means you have to really work on SEO to get decent ranking.

</comment><comment><USER8> i'd do a google adwords test

<comment><AUTHOR> i don't quite understand what it will tell me though, people arent buying my site necessarily its not a book i suppose, and wont the decision to click on a specific name depend more on what they were looking for than what the name actually is?

<comment><USER9> It will tell you which site name gets more clickthroughs, which is a proxy for interest. Keep everything in both ads the same, except the name.

The name that makes people click, out of curiosity or whatever motive, will likely be the better name. If you ever do advertise your site, you will have one factor in your favor already. It is ok if you don't have a "product," just put a "site coming soon" message up.</comment></comment></comment>


Handwriting Programs in J - <AUTHOR> https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/handwriting-j/ <comment><USER2> The article went in a different direction from what I was expecting, but leaving aside J, the original motivation — the topic of writing programs by hand (I mean with pen/pencil on paper) is interesting to me.

The only person I know to regularly write even large programs by hand is Donald Knuth. This includes the early heroics of his college days ([1][2][3][4]). It includes TeX and METAFONT which he wrote in the 1980s over several months, before typing them in. (Corroborated right here on HN [5] by David Fuchs [6] who worked very closely with Knuth on TeX.) I'm pretty sure from looking at some his recent programs [7] that he still writes by hand.

Of course as a programmer Knuth is _sui generis_ and has developed his own idiosyncratic style of programming over the decades, different from the rest of the world (consider his idea of Literate Programming). He thinks differently, tends towards monolithic rather than modular, and is always in book-author mode even when writing programs. He has some abilities and disciplines that more than make up for what some others would consider defects. What works for him may not work for others. Still, it would be interesting to hear of more people's experiences writing by hand.

A couple of months ago I wrote a small program in an assembly-like language for fun, and I felt that writing out the first couple of drafts by hand was quite helpful, and prevented me from jumping to an implementation too quickly.

[1]: [http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html#7](http://ed- thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html#7)

[2]: [http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Knuth_Don_...](http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Knuth_Don_X4100/PDF_index/k-8-pdf/k-8-u2779-B5000-People.pdf#page=8) (Note "half-true" on the cover page is penciled by Knuth!)

[3]: [http://www.metafilter.com/122701/STORIES-ABOUT- THE-B5000-AND...](http://www.metafilter.com/122701/STORIES-ABOUT- THE-B5000-AND-PEOPLE-WHO-WERE-THERE-By-Richard-Waychoff)

[4]: [http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Knuth_Don_...](http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Knuth_Don_X4100/PDF_index/k-2-pdf/k-2-c1039-ALGOL-B205.pdf)

[5]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10172924](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10172924)

[6]: [https://www.tug.org/interviews/fuchs.html](https://www.tug.org/interviews/fuchs.html)

[7]: [http://www.cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html](http://www.cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html) (I've generated PDF versions: [https://github.com/shreevatsa/knuth-literate- programs/tree/1...](https://github.com/shreevatsa/knuth-literate- programs/tree/1b86fdc/programs))

<comment><USER3> Knuth is from a time when professors had secretaries who would type their handwritten manuscripts (maybe he still has one). That's why he thinks it is OK to handwrite all his papers and even code. Normal people (us) may even think that handwriting is easier than typing, but very few of us are willing to spend the time it takes to both handwrite and later type the same document. So, in my opinion, the reason for the choice is pragmatic, given the way we need to prepare software.

<comment><USER4> Ideally, you should be able to scan in what you wrote using your phone, then have it OCR'ed. With the recent advances in deep neural nets, this should be close to possible.

<comment><USER3> Maybe this will be easier in the future, but nowadays there is still the issue of scanning, running OCR, and fixing the many errors that the OCR process generates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I spent some time about 10 years back learning J, it was (next to Forth and kin) a great way to learn about tacit programming. However, I found the programs being discussed in the J discussion lists completely impenetrable. I liked it for what I could express, but I hated it because I couldn't understand what others had done (making sharing work very challenging). However, it is, due to its brevity, rather useful for hand notated code.

I actually thought this was going in a different direction:

[http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm](http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm)

This is Iverson discussing APL (predecessor language of J) and its utility/advantages as a notational tool. In particular, something that I find interesting to see here since I just reread (most of) it, is a mention of ad hoc notations introduced as needed by the user. What today we would call domain specific languages.

<comment><USER6> _However, I found the programs being discussed in the J discussion lists completely impenetrable._

I would argue that (a big) part of the issue is that proponents often overstate the readability of such code. My usual experience from the J mailing list is that people "read" code by looking at the prose description of what it does, puzzling through how they would do that themselves, and then looking for common structure between the original code and their own reimplementation. It's a good learning experience as far as solving that particular problem is concerned (as there's often more than one way to do it), though it definitely runs counter to the meme that comments and meaningful names are superfluous. The other usual excuse that "the alphabet just isn't the one you're familiar with" isn't really true of mailing list regulars.

<comment><USER7> That's one of the major reasons I think handwriting J is more interesting and understandable than typing it. You can more clearly mark which pieces are conjunctions and what they operate on, you can present the explicit expansion tree as a reference, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Comments don't look well planned. First they double down on brevity, then the go with 'NB.' for a comment heading instead of a quote or something.

<comment><USER9> It makes perfect sense. A symbol is way too valuable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been a bit surprised that array based languages like APL and J haven't taken off with GPU programming. It feels like it would be a natural fit for the domain, but I'm probably missing something.

<comment><USER11> The Futhark language is the closest thing to "APL for the GPU" I'm aware of.

[https://futhark-lang.org/](https://futhark-lang.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I posted this on here yesterday...wonder y it didn't go through. Neat article and beautiful language. I just wish it was easier to train my brain to use it and easier to get data in.

</comment><comment><USER12> "Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?"—Brian Kernighan.

<comment><USER13> The APL lineage is generally extremely clever in the micro but completely normal levels of clever in the macro.

and at the individual line level it's as easy as any dynamic language to work your way through a head-scratcher by testing progressively larger chunks/stepping through with a debugger until you find where it starts breaking from your expectaions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Next, train a neural network to read your handwriting and spit out the code.

<comment><USER15> Please don't post drive-by dismissals to HN. We're hoping for better than that here.

Unorthodox creative approaches are particularly vulnerable to this kind of thing and deserve much better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There is a third freely available ASCII character APL in addition to K and J.

I have not seen it mentioned on HN before.

Have I missed the discussion?

It is called ELI.

I find it very sad that bloggers and commenters who are presumably employed as software engineers are continuing to discount the value of these languages simply because someone finds them incomprehensible. Failure of someone to comprehend is not the fault of the language. Persons having no prior knowledge of programming do not make complaints about APL versus more verbose languages. It is all the same to them, all incomprehensible in the beginning. To learn, work is required. And generally, more volume means more to learn. More work.

<comment><USER7> > The proper way to critique these languages IMO is to do benchmarks. For > example, the author of the blog post could state specifcially the problem he > is trying to solve and then perform the solution in two languages or more > languages, including an APL, including both the code size and the timings.

Here's the hobby thing I'm doing with this. I have an initial investment in Vanguard and contribute X additional per year. I'm at 90/10 stocks/bonds ratio and plan to, between now and retirement, gradually shift to a more conservative ratio. I have a rough distribution of RoR for both stocks and bonds. With all of these constraints in mind, I want run a few thousand simulations of expected savings at retirement. I want to easily compare these simulations to more pessimistic RoRs.

(No real reason, just seems fun.)

I'm pretty far along with the J. I've also written a bit of this of python as comparison, and from what I can tell so far it's an order-of-magnitude difference. I don't know numpy, though, which probably makes a big difference.

In the end, though, the benchmarks don't matter as much to me as the sheer delight in snapping my brain in two.

<comment><USER17> I don't program in J, but I breathe numpy. I can tell you that numpy broadcasted operations are probably an order of magnitude faster than _explicit for loops in python_...simply because numpy is of course written in C.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > 6 - 1 = 5 > 6

Stopped right after the author explained that line. What benefits does this offer over LtR programming languages? I would consider debugging this as a form of punishment.

<comment><USER7> Most languages aren't LtR, either! For example, what's this in python?

        2 + 2 * 4 / 1 + 1

In J, that's very obviously 6: as it's 2 + (2 * (4 / (1 + 1))). In Python, it's 11, as there's order of operations to think about: 2 + (2 * 4 / 1) + 1. Strict LtR is not always preferable, but when you're pipelining a lot of tricky array operations it makes it a lot easier to understand the code.

<comment><USER18> For simple arithmetic I find that extremely confusing. I also would have guessed that the equals was an assertion for the addition.</comment></comment></comment>


Route 128 / Wanted: A new identity - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2009/02/19/wanted_a_new_identity/

<comment><USER2> I live and work in the route 128 tech sector or the "Route 128 Technomafia" as we like to call it.

The biggest problem is it's image - it's full of large stuffy software / tech companies that cater to business and not the end consumer. These types of businesses are not likely to attract young hackers that will truly innovate. I get the feeling that (for the most part) route 128 is where good hackers go to settle down and live a "normal" life.

Another reason 128 doesn't attract the hacker crowd is the availability of public transportation. Its a pain in the ass to get to any of the major office parks / buildings out there without catching multiple busses or trains. Most young innovators don't have the desire or the money to pay for a car in Boston which is necessary to make it to the area.

So - fix public transportation first, and maybe some startups will decide to make a home out there. Hopefully that can slowly build the hacker brand east coast style :)

<comment><USER3> The problem isn't image, it's the actual location. Building a technology center along a ring road leads to a sterile and depressing office park wasteland. (I lived there for 5 years.) Cambridge or Somerville or even downtown Boston are good places to have tech companies, because you're part of an intellectual community. In a Route 128 office park there's nowhere you can walk to, so you never interact with people except in your building.

@robg: reconsider? Your life and work would be better if you were within walking distance of a university and other startups. Yes, it's cheaper in Lincoln, but you would be happier and more connected with half as much space in Central Square.

<comment><USER4> > Building a technology center along a ring road leads to a sterile and > depressing office park wasteland.

You mean like the Shoreline/Charleston/Rengstorff loop in Mountain View?

Silicon Valley has its share of sterile office parks. Actually, Silicon Valley seems more like a suburban wasteland than the Route 128 belt - at least the streets are crooked in Massachusetts, and most of the towns have walkable town centers, and housing tends to follow old cowpaths instead of tract subdivisions.

BTW, I think the Sun/MITRE/Middlesex Turnpike/Burlington Mall area has a lot more going for it than the Google/Mozilla/Microsoft/Charleston area in Mountain View, except for the companies themselves. You've got like 5 restaurants just across the creek from Sun in Burlington, and the mall is a half mile away. The Mountain View office park has nothing but offices, movies, and marsh trails.

<comment><USER3> I like the Shoreline/Charleston/Rengstorff loop. I live and work there so I often walk in to work. I pass 3 coffee shops on the way all of which are popular with startuppy people. I frequently bump into people I know. It's not as good as Cambridge for intellectual stimulation, but I do end having a lot of spontaneous meetings with relevant people.

Route 128 architecture reflects the Mercantilist view of companies. They all build big self-contained campuses to try to discourage their employees from fraternizing with other companies, lest information be exchanged. I think it's far more productive to have companies interact & share.

I'll take marsh trails over malls any day. A ride on the trail makes a wonderful mental break in the mid-afternoon. IMHO. YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I worked for a couple startups in the Boston area, then moved out to Google in Silicon Valley.

In my experience, the difference is culture. In Boston startups, the message is "Pay your dues." In Google, the message - from the start - is "Change the world." Which one is more appealing to a hacker fresh out of college?

It also doesn't help that Boston startups tend to focus on B2B areas with predictable revenue streams. There's no brand consciousness about Boston startups, because they generally don't sell to the public. So when you're out with friends and they ask what you do, you have to answer "I work at some startup you've probably never heard of" instead of "I work at Google."

<comment><USER5> Rarely a month goes by that someone I know moves to a startup I've never previously heard of.

I'm very surprised to hear that culture difference... are you sure it's not just a per company thing?

<comment><USER4> It's possible, but I've heard it from several other people too. Several YC founders I knew said that it's much harder to get VCs in Boston to take you seriously if you don't have 15-20 years experience. And my former boss also remarked on the cultural difference (his son goes to Stanford), but for him that was a positive thing about Boston.

I think it's also telling that nearly all the company founders I know in Boston are _at least_ in their 40s, sometimes up to their 70s, while most of the company founders I know in the Bay Area are in their 20s. (Actually, most of the latter group started out as Boston founders in their 20s and then moved.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From the article: "Some doubt the effectiveness of a marketing slogan, as opposed to a name arising organically, the way Route 128 or Silicon Valley seemed to do. And they question whether a campaign to come up with a catch phrase that captures today's amorphous industry will distract from the more important work of building new technology businesses."

Anyone remember "Silicon Gulch", or "Silicon Forest"?

Anyone really interested in why Silicon Valley triumphed over Route 128 should read AnnaLee Saxenian's Regional Advantage. Hint: it was in great part due to the differences in personalities and business philosophies of William Hewlett- David Packard and Ken Olsen.

</comment><comment><USER7> The comments on the article (on boston.com) are absolutely ridiculous.

I think that Massachusetts could rival California as a startup hub; there just needs to be some better foreign corporation laws and less taxes.

<comment><USER3> Did any startup founders here consider Massachussett's foreign corporation laws and tax structure when deciding where to start their startup?

Or was it more about the intellectual community, weather, coffee, social scene, presence of other startups, availability of talent, venture or angel capital, customers, partners, and potential acquirers?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Tech needs to expand beyond Rte.128. Rte's 95, 90, 495, and 146 make working in tech more viable for those of us south of the pike. Having more tech clustered in Boston around Back Bay and South Stations would be a huge boon given the commuter lines.

128 has been where all the really good work is, relative to RI, but the 3 hour per day average commute is unbearable.

<comment><USER9> Perhaps the problem is that the mass transit and highways spread out in too many directions? In Silicon Valley, it's not one line, but it is mainly north- south and a bit east-west.

<comment><USER8> Spreading further down Rte. 95 is desirable from my perspective as it connects Providence, RI with Boston and 128.

The mass transit system is setup as a wagon wheel with everything south of Boston going into Back Bay and South Stations. (I believe every line north goes into North Station but I've never gone from that direction.) Frankly I can't see a better approach for mass transit. The problem I think is that the high tech jobs tend to be up in Cambridge or parts of Boston that require transfers from the major commuter line stations.

Rte. 128 is an old highway that wasn't intended for the traffic on it and I'm not sure if property lines and such prevent further expansion of it. From my perspective, I wouldn't put a company there unless I was prepared to give the employees 100% telecommuting. Having people lose 3 hours of their lives daily to breathing in fumes and looking at other cars' bumpers is an almost criminal waste of their time.

Sorry robg, I didn't mean to evade your question. I tried giving some background that makes the answer more obvious.</comment></comment></comment>


Five Strategies Microsoft Got Right…And What It Teaches - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/stevecla01/archive/2008/11/28/five-strategies-microsoft-got-right-and-what-it-teaches.aspx <comment><USER2> odd.. Although microsoft has been an innovative company at least during the 90's, it seems open source outplays microsoft on all five of these strategies. Would explain a lot.

<comment><USER3> The main thing Microsoft has never quite grasped is interoperability. Which is understandable, because (a) it's hard, and (b) it reduces potential sales by providing a level playing field. Traditionally, Microsoft has opted for vendor lock-in; Microsoft tools work best with other Microsoft tools, and poorly or not at all with competitors.

This strategy does tend to keep customers in the fold, and provide more short term revenue. However, in the long term a lack of competition causes stagnation, both in the product and the market; and when a competitor does arrive, Microsoft suddenly finds itself woefully unprepared to fight back.

Most open source software, on the other hand, exists in a world of broad interoperability and heavy competition. Is it any wonder that certain open source products are beginning to nip at Microsoft's heels? Microsoft is still the 400lb gorilla of the software world, but one that's overweight with a heart condition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Evangelical pap.</comment>


TLS 1.3 is going to save us all, and other why IoT is still insecure (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-iot-is-insecure/ <comment><USER2> This article is strange. Low power devices that need to conserve batteries are not ddos origins.

Cctv cameras are. They are not that underpowered (they need to be streaming servers), can run tls just fine and 1.3 optimizations don't make that much of a difference.

Cameras generaly run linaro and they absolutely can update themselves over the network. The problem is that their manufacturers (at least the chinese giants) care very little about this problem. To them running ssl and having an auto update mechanism is a risk and a cost with no return.

What we actually have is an influx of electronics engineers and programmers stepping into a networked world without knowing or caring about security. I've worked with them enough to see this attitude is pervasive. IT sevurity is far from their area of expertise.

<comment><USER3> Can we start blocking regular http yet?

<comment><USER4> Not quite. That'd still result in blocking ~20% of requests on Windows (~30% on Linux). [https://transparencyreport.google.com/https/overview](https://transparencyreport.google.com/https/overview)

Slowly making progress though. Apparently in the US 95% of users' browsing time is spent on HTTPS sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The word "reasons" appears to have gotten dropped from the submitted title. The article's title is,

> _TLS 1.3 is going to save us all, and other reasons why IoT is still > insecure_

…which is grammatically correct.

</comment><comment><USER6> Switching to TLS 1.3 will probably not really start in earnest until libssl 1.1.1 is installed by default on all major Linux distros.

I'm running on Debian 9 and getting nginx to run TLS 1.3 took some work, nothing difficult, but when you see that many (most?) admins don't even bother to change SSH settings from the default, adding extra source lists seems impossible.

Also, we're unable to kill off TLS 1.0/1.1 because of all these people running IE...

edit: fix libssl version number as mentioned in comment below.

<comment><USER7> I think you are referring to OpenSSL 1.1.1. OpenSSL 1.1.0 doesn't support TLS 1.3 (Debian Stretch ships with OpenSSL 1.1.0)

<comment><USER6> Yes, quite right, it's 1.1.1 that supports TLS 1.3

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is precisely the problem I'm having right now. I'm working on the server side of an IoT project and trying to figure out a tenable way to secure an MQTT connection on devices with somewhere between 4-32kb of RAM. If anyone has any suggestions I'd love to hear it.

<comment><USER9> The ace working group within the IETF has a fairly recent draft[1] standard on this.

[1]: [https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-ace-mqtt-tls- pro...](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-ace-mqtt-tls-profile/)

<comment><USER8> Thank you for this, I've just taken an initial look. I had understood that TLS would be a no-go in such a constrained environment, but perhaps I am mistaken.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This article exaggerates the deficiencies of TLS 1.2.

\- Because of the TCP handshake, the difference between plain HTTP and TLS 1.2 is 2 RTTs vs 4 RTTs, not 1 vs 3.

\- TLS 1.2 supports session resumption, which can bring it down from 4 RTTs to 3.

\- The article's "TLS 1.3 Session Resumption" diagram is actually describing "0-RTT" resumption, which is vulnerable to replay attacks and can't be used without carefully considering semantics of the HTTP POST request. ([https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-0-rtt/#whatsthecatch](https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-0-rtt/#whatsthecatch))

TLS 1.3 is still better in a bunch of ways, but there's no need to be misleading.

<comment><USER11> You're correct that people MUST NOT use 0-RTT without actually understanding its semantics and designing their systems accordingly (e.g. if you think "But HTTP defines GET as idempotent so that's enough" then you already lost)

But you can get rid of the extra RTT for a resumption on TCP in two ways. Firstly Systems can agree to do "Fast open". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_Fast_Open](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_Fast_Open)

Secondly you can get rid of TCP from your TLS stack, by integrating the TLS layer into your connection-oriented protocol, which is what the IETF QUIC does/ will do. Then your connection setup can (again pending DDOS mitigation if appropriate) be zero round trip.

So the end result is that in practice TLS 1.2 can be brought down to 1-RTT for second and subsequent connections (TCP Fast Open + TLS resumption + TLS False Start) and TLS 1.3 can match that for all connections, and beat it with 0-RTT for resumptions that meet extra security criteria.

TLS session resumption does have a bunch of privacy implications, which are worse in TLS 1.2 and earlier but still present in TLS 1.3, and so privacy- focused clients might choose either to sharply limit resumption (e.g. only use it for connections that happen in the 15 seconds after the original connection) or get rid of it altogether. If you don't do resumption for this reason, TLS 1.3 beats TLS 1.2 because the no-resumption case is less round trips.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> just in case anyone cares, the article sort of implies (by not mentioning it) that TLS and MQTT are incompatible.

this is not the case, at my last job i used the EMQ broker with paho MQTT c++ on the devices using TLS.

</comment><comment><USER13> This post was from 2017. The TLS landscape might have changed significantly. Can someone add a [2017] tag on this post's title?</comment>


Beginner's Guide to Attention Mechanisms and Memory Networks - <AUTHOR> https://skymind.ai/wiki/attention-mechanism-memory-network <comment><USER2> Some other nice intro to ML pieces on the same wiki:

Deep RL [https://skymind.ai/wiki/deep-reinforcement- learning](https://skymind.ai/wiki/deep-reinforcement-learning)

GANs [https://skymind.ai/wiki/generative-adversarial-network- gan](https://skymind.ai/wiki/generative-adversarial-network-gan)

Neural Networks and DL [https://skymind.ai/wiki/neural-network- tuning](https://skymind.ai/wiki/neural-network-tuning)

Word2vec/neural embeddings [https://skymind.ai/wiki/word2vec](https://skymind.ai/wiki/word2vec)</comment>


Ask HN: What is your best programming joke? - <AUTHOR> There are many software, technology and programming related jokes. What is  the best joke that you know? <comment><USER2> A newly married Microsoft software engineer is driving to visit his wife and her family somewhere in the mountains of Europe. He calls and says "I'm about 30 minutes away". Later he calls and says "I'm about 37 minutes away". A few minutes later he calls again and says "I'm about 5 minutes away". After about 30 minutes, he calls again and says "I'm about 2 hours away". His new wife's father grabs the phone and asks "you're the guy who designed the Windows progress bar widget, aren't you"?

\---

A mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer and a Microsoft software engineer are riding in a car going to a conference. They start down a hill and the brakes go out, and the car crashes into a tree. Luckily, no one is injured, and they all get out of the car and start trying to figure out what happened.

The electrical engineer looks at the car and says "Hmmm, must have been a short-circuit in the ABS electronics."

The mechanical engineer says "no, no, it must have been an over-pressure situation with a brake line, causing the line to burst and allowing the brake fluid to leak out."

They both look at the Microsoft guy who had been quiet so far and ask "what do you think"?

He looks at the car and say "I don't know - let's push the car back to the top of the hill and try it again".

<comment><AUTHOR> =D =D =D... your joke was really funny!!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3>
        function getTomorrowDate() {
            sleep(86400);
            return date("Y-m-d");
        }

</comment><comment><USER4> A wife asks her programmer husband "Honey, could you go to the store and get a loaf of bread? Oh, and if they have eggs, take half a dozen."

So the guy comes back with six loaves of bread.

</comment><comment><USER5> Three programmers come to a one-way street.

The computer scientist looks left, sees there's no cars coming, and crosses.

The professional programmer looks left, then looks right -- just in case! -- before crossing the street.

The distributed systems programmer looks left, then looks right, then looks up to make sure there aren't any planes falling out of the sky...

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd tell you a UDP joke; but you might not get it.

<comment><USER7> A. Would you like me to tell you a TCP joke?

B. Yes, I would like you to tell me a TCP joke.

A. OK, I will tell you a TCP joke.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How do you tell an introverted computer scientist from an extroverted computer scientist?

An extroverted computer scientist looks at YOUR shoes when he talks to you.

\---

Why do programmers always mix up Halloween and Christmas?

Because Oct 31 == Dec 25!

\---

How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?

None, that's a hardware problem

</comment><comment><USER9> Knock knock. Who's there? (wait a few minutes) Java

\----

A DBA walks into a bar, goes up to two tables, and says: "can I join you?".

\----

Many great jokes here: [http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/programming- jokes/](http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/programming-jokes/)

:)

<comment><USER7> > Knock knock. Who's there? (wait a few minutes) Java

Knock knock. Assembler

<comment><USER10> Knock knock. Race condition. Who's there?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A biologist, a statistician and a computer scientist are all riding a train together through Africa, when they notice a herd of zebra from their window.

The biologist notices that one of the zebra are entirely white, and exclaims, "Wow! Look at that – it's a completely white zebra! This is an incredible scientific discovery!"

The statistician then responds, "Well, it's only one zebra out of millions – it's statistically insignificant."

The computer scientist then sadly laments, "Oh no! A special case!"

</comment><comment><USER12> This one always feels familiar: [http://thecodinglove.com/post/143833542853/debugging-in- prod...](http://thecodinglove.com/post/143833542853/debugging-in-production)

This one is always making me laugh (especialy those fish eyes): [http://thecodinglove.com/post/72681300803/how-i-picture- our-...](http://thecodinglove.com/post/72681300803/how-i-picture-our-apps- users)

</comment><comment><USER13> Two C strings walk into a bar.

The first one says, "Hello, bartender. I would like a beer."

The second one says, "I would also like a beer.a9545hn1g!#$8uq34fg98^ZDs7tgSDSR("

The bartender asks the first string, "What's up with your friend?"

It replies, "Don't mind him, he's not null-terminated."

\---

And a variant on the above:

The first string says, "Hello, bartender. I would like a beer."

The second string says, "I would also like a beer.a9545hn1g!#$8uq34fg98^ZDs7tgSDSR("

The bartender replies "root@localhost #"

<comment><USER14> > The bartender replies "root@localhost #"

The buffer overflow exploit worked!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Xkcd has a lot of good ones but this is one of my favorites:

[https://xkcd.com/327/](https://xkcd.com/327/)

</comment><comment><USER16> In order to understand recursion you must first understand recursion.

</comment><comment><USER12> ++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-]>++.>+.+++++++..+++.>++.<<+++++++++++++++.>.+++.</comment><comment>.</comment><comment>--.>+.>.

</comment><comment><USER17> There are 10 people that understand binary Those that do, and those that do not.

<comment><USER18> Indeed a great joke and has become mainstream. Here's the latest version:

There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand Ternary, those who don't and those who mistake it for Binary

</comment></comment><comment><USER19>
          DO 10 I=1.10

* AIN'T IT FUNNY?

       10 F(I)

</comment><comment><USER20> What did the system administrator bring back from the beach?

A C (sea) shell!

</comment><comment><USER17> This is the best database in the world. There is NoSQL

<comment><USER21> Explain?

<comment><USER17> NoSQL is a new type of database "No sequel" means there is no further story. There is nothing after it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A system administrator has 2 problems:

\- dumb users

\- smart users

</comment><comment><USER23> My paycheck... :'(</comment>


How is this a best seller when it's not available? - <AUTHOR> https://www.amazon.com/Xbox-One-Project-Scorpio-1TB-Console/dp/B01GW8VG7O/ref=pd_sim_63_1?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B01GW8VG7O&pd_rd_r=6RGYGJ05MYMTQ7QNF5AG&pd_rd_w=JJuPk&pd_rd_wg=OuTb2&refRID=6RGYGJ05MYMTQ7QNF5AG&th=1 <comment><USER2> Has it _never_ been sold yet? If not, I'd guess probably lots of clicks on "Email me when available"... genuine or artificial.

400+ questions could factor in also.</comment>