Swedish Army Personality Test - <AUTHOR> http://rekryt.mil.se/recruitment2009/

<comment><USER2> The Swedish Army has not actually fought a war since 1809, so they've had two hundred years to hone their Flash design skills to perfection...

A very solid game-like web experience. Despite all the talk, it's going to be a while until HTML 5's <video> and <canvas> can deliver something like this.

<comment><USER3> "The Swedish Army has not actually fought a war since 1809"

Well, they're doing something right, then.

<comment><USER2> Sweden unwittingly executed a great strategic manoeuvre by surrendering all of Finland to Russia in that last war of theirs. That reduced Sweden's land border with Russia to a fraction of what it used to be. Later Finland became independent, which eliminated Sweden's Russian exposure completely. It's easier to maintain peace when you don't share a border with a chronically unstable aggressive empire.

<comment><USER4> It actually reduced the border with Russia to zero.

<comment><USER5> No, it didn't. It still had a considarable length of common border with the russian province Finland in Lappland. (To be honest, that was my first reaction too, but as the GP wrote, Sweden stopped to have a border with russia only after Finland became independent in WW1).

<comment><USER6> I think it's more to the point to say "during WW1". Finland wasn't directly involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Seems like the perfect screening test for the military. The objective is apparently to see who is willing to submit to an order to perform an endless series of seemingly pointless tasks using cool looking but over-engineered and awkward technology.

<comment><USER8> I guess you didn't try it out. Spoiler: the first test requires you to disobey an order to pass.

<comment><USER9> Nevertheless they seek techno-drones.

<comment><USER3> Politically correct ones, at that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't think it's a good personality test (the instructions are often unclear), but it is a fantastic production.

</comment><comment><USER4> Apparently Swedish is no longer a required skill in the Swedish military...

</comment><comment><USER11> I've taken the online US Military test and got 99/100 percentile on the English/verbal section and 100/100 on the math/logic portion. Output: Primary assignment: intelligence operative/analyst Secondary assignment: Combat engineer. I've also been scouted by my home country's intelligence forces (which I rejected).

Things that bug me about this test: Q 10 - not enough time to evaluate each group so you auto fail, but upon redoing it and only choosing one without checking every group out I'm told I failed because I didn't check out every group. Autofail, unless you have reflexes like a cat.

Q 8 I purposely got 2/3 both times I took the test. Once the test was over, I rated the first time as under average and the second time as over average. Both times I was told that I misjudged my abilities. Which is it?

Q 4 The first time I did this test I thought she asked to look at the tape, as in the background color, so I got 0 out of 16 which put me in the bottom 10 percent (I'm not alone!) The second time I did it I got 16 / 16 with little time elapsed and only received top 22 percent. Ya right. Something fishy is going on here.

Q 2 the physics were ridiculous (too much energy lost to wind resistance, not enough energy lost due to elastic deformation) and the aligning of the paddles was annoying.

Q 1 stupid question. "save two people, also here is some useless information" ... "HAHA, you only saved 2, you could have saved 4"

After redoing the test and getting every question except for the ball one, the telephone one, and the group one right I still get "below average" Hahahahaha. Right. I'd like to hire a Swedish PhD to sit down and do this test, he would get 1 or 2 out of 9 (the racial ethnicity question doesn't count). The accent of the woman giving the test is unbearable and the little clues like "Memorize" written on the wall are no help at all due to all the visual noise.

<comment><USER12> "I'd like to hire a Swedish PhD to sit down and do this test, he would get 1 or 2 out of 9"

Wouldn't that be the expected result? A PhD is probably not the best suited person for a career in military.

<comment><USER13> There are plenty of PhDs in a uniform and they do just fine. I've worked with a few of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Style versus substance. Slick but crap. To echo psyklic, I felt the production was great, but the instructions, implementation and interaction were shockingly poor.

<comment><USER3> Which may have been intentional.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was below average.

Hope it was because so many people do the test many times, not because I<am stupid.

</comment><comment><USER16> I guess I'm not going to become an officer in the Swedish army. I only passed one part of the test.

<comment><USER17> Come to Norway! You're already well above the average for officers in the Norwegian Royal Guard. To quote one of my brighter commanding officers: _"The time is now 4 o'clock, we meet back here in 3 hours. That means ... <counts on fingers> ... 6 o'clock. Get moving!"_

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This test is cinematic, but badly implemented: couldn't understand the instructions clearly (accent, echo, background noise - even on 2nd pass through the game, I didn't understand the voice), the flow of interaction was awkward, didn't understand what the hell was going on.

One thought occurred to me: maybe gamers used to dark video game environments do better here (I don't play video games).

Usually I'm o.k. in testing environments (not a total loser). Here I didn't get anything right, or at least that was my impression. I didn't agree with the evaluation, the points pressed seemed contrived and artificial. I don't understand this test at all.

</comment><comment><USER19> Here's an officers test: <http://aspirant.nu/>

It's only in Swedish but most of it is self-explanatory. It's much more fun. Found this on their miltary website.

</comment><comment><USER20> Guess the Swedish Army doesn't want colorblind people.

<comment><USER21> I've read that the ability to discriminate between "vivid red" and "vivid green" is actually very important for parts of the US military... I'm not really sure why though. Maybe for airborne jump signals?

<comment><USER22> And reading maps at night using red flashlights...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Government marketing sites tend to be well done. The information and business critical sites are lowest bidder wastelands.

</comment><comment><USER24> Am I the only one that's really confused by the beginning, where it's just an exclamation point in a triangle, and some dimly-lit wires/pipes? Previously, I got to where the triangle was replaced by a few numbers, but got stuck there. I refreshed, and am still not sure what's going on.

</comment><comment><USER25> I quit after i failed to hit the red circle. Too slow of a process to complete at work.

</comment><comment><USER26> I knew I was going to fail the color test. It's a test that's commonly used to diagnose ADHD.

</comment><comment> onreact-com The military is NEVER "amazing", only peace is.

<comment><USER27> The military is amazing in a way that nuclear weapons are: Interesting science, but the application – for the lack of a better word – sucks.

<comment><USER28> The alternative of not having a military sucks a lot worse.

<comment><USER29> Not necessarily. I doubt we need a military in modern day Germany to defend us against our neighbours. Just make sure to have enough cash on hand to hire mercenaries in case of attack.

<comment><USER28> Modern-day Germany has a military:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundeswehr>

Call it a defense force, or a militia, or whatever you will, it's still the German military.

<comment><USER29> Yes, I am quite aware that modern-day German has an army. And a draft.

I just doubt the Bundeswehr is necessary. (Disclaimer: I was drafted, but refused to serve.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How does Honey extension capture data? - <AUTHOR> I am using Honey and going through their FAQ and in below link it is mentioned that they collect some data from shopping website and if user made a purchase or not. I want to know if if Honey is capturing cart data and how do they do it? Through data scraping on checkout/payment page? and how does it know that is purchase happen or not? FAQ Link:  https://help.joinhoney.com/article/29-what-information-does-honey-collect <comment><USER2> I use honey, but I only enable it on the page before I'm about to check out, then disable it after it's found a discount.

Granted, during the time it is activated they could do whatever they want with my data (including hijacking my session), but at least this way they don't track everything.

<comment><AUTHOR> But during the time you activated the extension, it can access what items are in your cart, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Being a browser extension, they can access the URLs, and HTML data of the web pages their users visit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Then checkout HTML page will have cart items information also, so basically it is scraping the that data from page?</comment></comment>


The problem with SaaS metrics - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2012/08/04/the-problem-with-saas-metrics/ <comment><USER2> I may be wrong, but it sounds like this article is saying "focus on the metrics that potential acquirers would care about even if they're completely at odds with the metrics that would help you accurately measure and grow the business."

What a load of crap.</comment>


Learning Ruby on Rails: Month 1 - <AUTHOR> http://waterstreetgm.org/2012/02/01/learning-ruby-on-rails/

<comment><USER2> I'm going through a similar process, and reading your experiences is encouraging. Keep it up!

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems like a long road! The Ruby part I find manageable, but the Rails part really feels like a lot to get your head around.

Good luck to you!</comment></comment>


Securing a BitTorrent Sync EC2 Instance - <AUTHOR> http://ashfurrow.com/blog/bittorrent-sync/ <comment><USER2> I've tried BitTorrent Sync and the fact that it's closed source (as well as being "commercial") is a major drawback.

Have a look at Syncthing which is open source and has a nice feature set: [https://www.syncthing.net](https://www.syncthing.net)</comment>


Why you would want to program at fifty (or any other age) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/34386970746/why-you-would-want-to-program-at-fifty-or-any-other

<comment><USER2> My big complaint is that I have to compete with so many people who seem not really much interested in, or knowledgeable about, programming, who can't wait to "advance" out of it, while I /love/ it and can't think of much else I want to do.</comment>


Google no longer lets you change domains to search different countries - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/27/16561848/google-search-always-local-results-ignores-domain <comment><USER2> original source: [https://www.blog.google/products/search/making-search- result...](https://www.blog.google/products/search/making-search-results-more- local-and-relevant/)

One thing Google has traditionally been poor at is supporting people who speak two or more languages. I'm a German living in London, and I already had a hard time getting results in German if I wanted them (often, I go to Wikipedia directly).

Changing my location in Google's settings, as described in the article, did not make a difference. Adding &hl=## (e.g. &hl=de ) to a search results ULR still works though.

Not ideal...

<comment><USER3> This is a real pain point for me as a programmer in Prague. I want all programming language questions to return English results, because the Czech language has no stack-exchange ;), but I want all commercial queries to give Czech results, because I cannot even buy something in the US, even if I wanted to, they just won't ship here. This doesn't end up working very well unfortunately, and I don't know how to get the behavior that I want.

<comment><USER4> I use one browser with a geographically based proxy and another one straight trough. Also, commercial VPNs are cheap and pretty reliable these days (the vendor I use has pops in majority of countries). Just a silly game to play with the content providers who are isolating users into specific market regions.

<comment><USER3> So now I need a VPN to buy cat food online ;) !

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Obligatory plug: DuckDuckGo lets you pick any locale you want via a drop-down.

<comment><USER6> DDG maker also has a history of selling users' info to the highest bidder

Obligatory plug: startpage

<comment><USER7> Source?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What's so bad about this is it I'm using someone else's computer in a different country I can rarely stay on the English version. For example, in incognito, even after changing to the English Google, if I go to any other Google site (ex. trends) not only do I get the local language version, but on mobile there is no way to change the language.

</comment><comment><USER9> As a European who frequently visits other European countries on business, I can say that Google behaviour has always been painful. I would like to get search results in a handful of languages of my choice but Google makes it a struggle.

</comment><comment><USER10> 'Google said that it'll now deliver search results relevant to your current location no matter which domain you visit.'

Strange, since this morning my searches suddenly show a google.ae domain. That is something right to left Arabic I think, because I cannot make sense of it... I live in Portugal BTW and only speak North-European languages...

These kind of things happen sometimes (location and language mixups). It makes me wonder what kind of profiles Google has on me and probably a lot of other people. Its more worrying what this kind of major errors possible means to governmental institutes which are probably keen on small details...

<comment><USER11> With default settings, the location of google search is based on IP address only.

The location is pretty reliable, unless you share your IP address (and the few hundred addresses either side of yours) with people from another place.

<comment><USER12> It isn't. I am using VPN server located in Netherlands but the provider is affiliated in UAE. Guess which Google page I am getting?

<comment><USER13> Yes. I have to use a VPN for all Google services and it's a complete mess. Youtube shows me Japanese and some European language ads depending on where my VPN server happens to be at the time even though everything I actually do on Youtube and Gmail is in English, and even though I'm logged in. They seem to have no idea what language their users use. Search is just as bad, so is Bing.

Isn't there an old browser language setting standard that never really got used? Seems better than a special search setting for Google and another for every other site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Title makes it sounds like you're stuck with Google-of-whatever-country- you're-in. You're not: you just have to select the country you want from settings instead of typing in its TLD now.

From the article:

>If for some reason you don't see the right country when you're browsing, you can still go into settings and select the correct country service you want to receive. Typing the relevant ccTLD in your browser will no longer bring you to the various country services—this preference should be managed directly in settings.

<comment><USER12> It is acctually change for good as long as you are staying logged in.

<comment><USER15> How is it a change for good? Just seems like Google Search is becoming even clumsier for bilingual people.

Sometimes I want results in my mother-tongue, sometimes I want results in English. And I expect my search engine to have a way to quickly specify that without going into the settings each time.

<comment><USER14> It's definitely a change for good for me. There might have been a way to set the locale in my settings before I didn't know about, but I've moved to a new country every month for over a year now and I never want to be redirected to the local Google (for a bunch of reasons). It's nice that I can just set American/Google.com apparently now, instead of manually flipping back every time I use google/maps.

<comment><USER16> Alright, but it really doesn't seem to me like fixing this issue for you would require breaking the search for bilingual people. There's gotta be so many better ways to resolve that.

<comment><USER14> Just so I understand the problem, is search now broken for bilingual people because they sometimes prefer search results in one locale/language and sometimes prefer other search results in a different one? I also speak Spanish (and some Dutch), but I can't think of any time I'd actively want to use their local-Google, even while I lived in the Netherlands.

<comment><USER16> As I understand it, English is your mother tongue. If so, that's probably why you don't have this issue.

For me, French is my mother tongue and I live in France. So, there's lots of things that I'd want to research that are specific to France (laws, culture, geography etc.) and then obviously, if you speak French fluidly, you get much more precise and detailed information for these in French texts.

If you're lucky, the English text is just a bad translation, but more often than not, the English text assumes that you must be some guy from a foreign country that really doesn't care about specifics and instead just wants an overview.

On the other hand, if I need to look up technical information or most international science, then English is the lingua franca, what gives you the best results in most cases.

In some cases, I'll even try both languages, just to make sure I'm not missing any useful information or to gauge which language gives better results (for example when a globally usable technology happens to be exceptionally popular in France).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "In an email to The Verge, Google clarified that users will see results removed appropriate for whichever location their search is set to; however, if the country they're physically in requires results to be removed no matter what, then results will get stripped out regardless of which location they choose."

Are searches originating from other countries undisturbed? Or does the right to be forgotten also police what non-European citizens can see in their own countries?

<comment><USER12> So as an European living in Thailand I can search for lectures on Greek democracy and watch Chaplin's Dictator on YouTube but a Thai person sitting right next to me cannot.

That makes the world such a diverse place again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wish Google would respect your accept language header instead of stupidly returning results based on IP address.

<comment><USER19> Sadly, many users have accept language headers which don't correspond to what they actually want.

<comment><USER18> It's too bad browsers never made a prominent button to choose language and instead buried this option deep down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Yes, censoring comes step by step. Haha, with silky excuses as usual

</comment><comment><USER21> There's always TOR.</comment>


Top mathematical achievements of the last 5ish years, maybe - <AUTHOR> http://richardelwes.co.uk/2015/06/18/the-top-10-mathematical-achievements-of-the-last-5ish-years-maybe/

<comment><USER2> The result of Ono and Bruinier is significant, but I don't know if it really belongs on this list.

Euler's pentagonal number theorem already gives a simple algebraic description of the partition numbers. The so-called "finite algebraic formula" of Ono and Bruinier is only more "finite", "algebraic" or "formula" in a very artificial, press-release-exaggerated sense.

Sort of like claiming that any of the contorted "prime formulas" that various people have come up with ([http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PrimeFormulas.html](http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PrimeFormulas.html)) provide a better finite description of the primes than the good old sieve of Eratosthenes.

Now, this comparison is not quite fair. Unlike those prime formulas, the Ono- Bruinier result is actually mathematically significant in that it does give you more information about the partition numbers. It's a nice result, but is it more interesting than hundreds of other interesting results in mathematics in the last 5ish years? Even if we just look at the extremely narrow field of mathematics that is the study of partition numbers, there are other nice recent achivements such as Radu's proof of Subbarao's conjecture.

Ono is certainly an excellent mathematician, but he might be even more excellent at getting extreme amounts of publicity for his results. I don't want to give the impression that I'm sour about this. On the contrary, I think it's awesome that mathematics can get this kind of publicity, and Ono earned it (other mathematicians should learn from his example!), but it's something to keep in mind.

Likewise, about HOTT. It's very promising, but is it really an "achivement" yet? Who knows, the hype could turn out to be justified. I guess if you want to assess scientific progress as recent as in the last five years, you have to try to predict the future as well.

<comment><USER3> Yes: HOTT is an acchievement. It differs from the other items on the list, though, as it belongs to the "theory building" branch of mathematics and not to the "problem solving" branch.

In the end, the current implementation of HoTT might not be the one standing the test of time; But the central idea behind the programme is here to stay: A refactoring of mathematics. (Higher) category theory is currently the best tool to uncover deep connections between different areas of mathematics. But doing higher category theory using set theory can be compared to writing a webapp directly in machine code: Possible, but cumbersome. A top level language providing suitable abstractions is needed and HoTT is one proposal.

It can be compared to the ongoing shift from imperative to functional languages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm somewhat surprised that Gentry's fully homomorphic encryption wasn't mentioned. It's definitely more applied math than anything else, but if you're going to mention RSA and factoring you might as well mention the biggest crypto breakthrough in the last 5-6 years.

</comment><comment><USER5> The list at the bottom regarding computational achievements is possibly slightly more relatable and also contains this nice gem:

        The most impressive feat of integer-factorisation using a quantum
        computer is that of 56,153=233 × 241. The previous record was 15.

</comment><comment><USER6> Mochizuki's work is interesting. I wonder how long that will take to verify.

</comment><comment><USER7> worst website background ever...

</comment><comment><USER8> Four extra lines in a nice IMRaD format would have been a nice addition to start the discussion. It looks like the reader still has a lot of work to do.

<comment><USER9> I can't imagine what four extra lines would have made things much easier for the reader. These results are from a variety of fields of mathematics; understanding the context for any one of them is a substantial piece of work. They aren't part of some single scientific experiment that could be presented "in a nice IMRaD format".

What sort of four extra lines did you have in mind?

(Note that each of Elwes's top 10 comes with a link to further information, generally in reasonably accessible form.)

<comment><USER8> 1\. What the question is and why it is important.

2\. Broadly, what area of mathematics was used - how did they go about solving it.

3\. Do we have a concrete proof? For a general case?

4\. Where are we now and what is next?

<comment><USER9> So, four extra lines _for each item_? That would (much more than) double the length of the piece. Except that for several of them, much of that information is already there.

Still, let's have a go.

10\. _Mochizuki and the abc conjecture_. The abc conjecture says, roughly, that you rarely have a+b=c where a,b,c are all products of large powers of prime numbers. You can think of this as saying that the additive and multiplicative structures of the integers are kinda-independent. The abc conjecture, if true, would imply lots and lots of other conjectures that number theorists have made. (In particular, it "almost implies" Fermat's Last Theorem.) Mochizuki claims to have proved it using a very complicated thing he's created called "inter-universal Teichmueller theory". Teichmueller theory is all about spaces whose structure is based on the complex numbers, which you can think of as being obtained as follows: start with the integers; allow yourself to form fractions (giving the rational numbers); "fill in the gaps" (forming the real numbers); "add roots of algebraic equations" (forming the complex numbers). But there are some not-so-obvious ways to "fill in the gaps" where instead of the usual limiting process where you do things with smaller and smaller errors (sqrt(41) ~= 6, 6.4, 6.40, 6.403, 6.4031, etc.) you try to do things that are right "modulo large powers of p" for some prime p; e.g., sqrt(41) = 1, 21, 821, 3821, 03821, 203821, etc.; but you should really think of this as exhibiting one thing mod powers of 2 and another mod powers of 5. Doing something comparable to Teichmueller theory using these gives you "p-adic Teichmueller theory", and then "inter-universal Teichmueller theory" is a further generalization that I don't understand. No one is quite sure whether Mochizuki's proof is correct; it's based on a huge amount of abstruse stuff he's invented that no one was very interested in before he claimed to have used it to prove the abc conjecture, and getting one's head around all that takes time. The next step is for the mathematical community (or at least some small bit of it) to understand IUTT well enough to check Mochizuki's proof. I believe that's happening, but it won't be quick.

Hmm, that's pretty long (despite not managing to do more than gesticulate vaguely in the direction of the relevant mathematics). I'll do the others, but I think it'll be one per comment rather than a single monstrously long comment.

<comment><USER10> Thank you for doing all of these, that's a terrific contribution.

<comment><USER8> Isn't it? I haven't enjoyed somebody being disliking a comment of mine so much :). I've been reading these all day.

<comment><USER9> You're welcome. By the way, I like your username.

<comment><USER8> A fellow reader :)

(I just ego-surfed my hn name. The twitter guy is somebody else.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Koch Brothers Bankroll Move to Rewrite the Constitution - <AUTHOR> http://billmoyers.com/story/kochs-to-rewrite-constitution/ <comment><USER2> I would imagine that if such measures passed, states would pick up the slack with tons of new taxes, each with very different rules and laws. Many many more people to lobby, who are also forced to care far more since people who actually vote in state level elections actually watch politicians more often.

Basically their pursuit of the short term will weaken their grip long term.

<comment><USER3> This is the best possible situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Blogspam of

[http://www.exposedbycmd.org/2017/03/23/kochs-bankroll- moveme...](http://www.exposedbycmd.org/2017/03/23/kochs-bankroll-movement- rewrite-constitution/)

Moyers is not its author.</comment>


Be Afraid of Economic 'Bigness' - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/10/opinion/sunday/fascism-economy-monopoly.html <comment><USER2> The sheer size and power of today's monopolies is mind-boggling to me. To think that the US has laws on the books to prevent this state of affairs but isn't enforcing them angers me.

<comment><USER3> What exactly do you want the government to do about, say, Facebook? Split it up? Which half of your social network goes to which part?

This idea of "government should do something!" just stokes outrage. It's not constructive. Propose something, and you'll find that the devil is in those details. Laws? Which laws? Apply them how? Those laws are not as clear or useful as you seem to think.

<comment><USER4> We need to blow the gates open and mandate that

1) a person has the right to export their data and receive it in a usable format 2) a person has the right to use this exported data and give it to a competitor

There is no reason why switching between, say, Spotify, Google Play Music, Apple Music, and Amazon Music should be any harder than switching a cell phone carrier. Imagine how much faster Myspace or Digg would've imploded if you could just export to a competitor with a click of a button.

<comment><USER5> You can switch today by just cancelling one service and signing up for another. If, however, you are suggesting that somehow your internal "profile" of likes can be easily moved, then you should first learn a little bit about how these services work.

Each uses internal IP, unique to them, that won't work with a competitors technology even if they could get access to it. And of course that ignores all the issues of trade secrets and patents that your suggestion would bring up.

You can switch cell phone carriers because of a few very simple standards. But when you do you are not taking the majority of data about you. You are only taking your number.

I also challenge that all of this data is "your data." Let's take hacker news as an example. What is "your data"? Your username, passwords, comments, those all seem pretty clear. But what about your upvotes and reports? Is that your data? An upvote involves you, but also someone else's comment or story, so it's hard to argue that it's yours alone to do with as you please. Also, what about website log data? Is that your data? Logs about web requests that you make are definitely trigger by an action of yours, but the log message itself is produced by ycombinator software, so why should you get to "own" it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Despite Tim Wu's article fundamentally supporting the Anti-Merger Act of 1950, he fails to acknowledge that 'populist, nationalist' thinking is often precisely about supporting local communities and nation states over globalization and giant platform companies.

<comment><USER7> "populist" is just a word people use when they don't understand why people care about something and don't bother trying to find out. "popular" = "what people I like want", "populist" = "what people I don't like want"

<comment><USER8> Populism does not mean popular.

It's unfortunate that populism has a name that leads to this misconception. People see the word and jump into discussion assuming that they know what is all about.

Populism is the claim that the people have a 'will'. There is no real disagreement of what the real people want or need for compromise. There are people who disagree but they are not the 'real people'. They are somehow compromised, the corrupt elite, misled or 'the others'. What 'people want' is already known, now you just need to vote populist into power to implement the will of the people. Laws and norms often make it difficult to implement this 'will' and they should be changed.

By contrast liberal[1] democracies are based on idea that the complex democratic process gradually produces something that people can live with. It's not exactly what anyone wants. There is no common agreement of what people want when people go and vote. The end result of working democracy is negotiated compromise. Laws and norms should be followed when this game of democracy is played.

\---

[1]: liberal is another word that have different meanings in different contexts. Liberal does not mean leftist in this context.

<comment><USER9> That's all fine and good if the democracy actually works. If it has been subverted by a corrupt elite then a desire for a real functioning liberal democracy by a vast majority of the populace can be handily written off as populism using that same definition. It's quite a convenient to define the term in a way that makes it vaguely pejorative, in that case. The fact that you set it up as a contrast to liberal democracy is a good illustration of that. Populism, like elitism, can be right or wrong for a given situation depending on context and policy details.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't think there's any good excuse that we don't enforce existing laws. But we seem not to be.

If we can actually start to break into a new paradigm, personally I think that technology actually can help with these types of societal problems.

For example, decentralized autonomous organizations via Ethereum could have some benefits over more traditional political structures.

Banking concentration can potentially be mitigated by things like cryptocurrency.

In terms of replacing the technology monopolies, decentralized technologies could provide common public platforms instead. For example take things like Mastodon instead of Facebook (which is federation, I believe P2P social could gain wider deployment).

</comment><comment><USER11> I couldn't find good market-share data for New York newspapers since 1950, but the New York Times sure doesn't fear its own "bigness" at the expense of past competitors:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_City_newspape...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_City_newspapers_and_magazines#Defunct_newspapers)

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't think this is something that will be addressed anytime soon, no matter how important of a problem someone considers this to be. With large Chinese corporations in the competition, breaking companies into smaller companies isn't in the best interest of US (or so I believe).

</comment><comment><USER13> It's horrible how crippled and dysfunctional current anti-trust is. It lets through such monstrous consolidations that it can be considered almost non existent. And the worst are politicians who sell it as "free market deregulation".

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm quite tired of the news telling me to be afraid of things.

Could they try to sell papers (or attract eyeballs, or whatever) by actually providing relevant, factual, useful information instead of emotional manipulation?

<comment><USER15> Agree, it seems that people have their pet issues, around here, Facebook is bad, Google is evil, etc.

Once we have these memes established we can blame things like extremism on them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I feel like the author started in his mind with "Problem: Business Too Big", and then came up with "Reason Why: Big Business Created Hitler". Business certainly was a tool used by Hitler, as was religion, the media, the train system, youth groups, and basically all institutions of society that as a totalitarian dictator he was able to control.

Wu, as an antitrust legal scholar, certainly has an agenda. This article is fear mongering and playing to the NYT base.

</comment><comment><USER17> Being afraid would seem to serve the New York Times' interests, so I think I will go read Reuters instead. :)

</comment><comment><USER18> I am thinking deeper than that. I dislike the current debt-based economy for a reason. Google is a good example in which housing prices and other expenses increases every time the revenue increases.

<comment><USER19> Isn't this more an effect of supply and demand rather than access to credit?

<comment><USER18> I am thinking of things like the ad bubble, for example when Google bought DoubleClick. Housing is a good example as it is a finite resourse.

<comment><USER20> > Housing is a good example as it is a finite resourse.

as opposed to...?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It seems like he's come up with a very dubious dumbing down of why Germany went to war and appropriated it for his own reasons.

As an aside, it's interesting to watch how people on both sides of the aisle are jumping to find the rise of fascism in every nook and cranny of society. Sometimes, like here, it doesn't even seem to be an attempt at a political cudgel, which is the usual case. While I think most can agree FAANG is out of control, I'm not sure the fascism alarmism is a great approach.</comment>


A new Russian city of Innopolis - <AUTHOR> http://www.innopolis.com/ <comment><USER2> I don't read Russian and Google translator is confused by the page ... How is this city different from a normal city? Is this some kind of university/accelerator or it's just a city?

<comment><USER3> [http://www.innopolis.com/en/](http://www.innopolis.com/en/) is the english version. Special economic zone with own university and technology park. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innopolis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innopolis) reads about 100 people live there.</comment></comment>


A customizable, scalable font made entirely of CSS and HTML - <AUTHOR> http://diana-adrianne.com/PureCSS-Font/ <comment><USER2> This is both cool and awful</comment>


Ask HN: Who wants some free ideas to advertise their startup? - <AUTHOR>

I work in advertising for a living (see my work at ilovechrisbaker.com ) and wanted to get a little more involved in the startup community. Many of the ideas I've done have required no money and little effort and have generated some decent press, and at the very least, a lot of traffic. I'm offering my conceptual services free of charge to a few people who would actually take an idea and make it happen.
So, who needs some awesome ideas?
edit:
1. I'm not a programmer. I'm a useless idea guy. Please see ilovechrisbaker.com for examples. 2. I'd love to help everyone, but even at my day job, I don't nail every single brief. It's kind of hard.
3. Please send links and info in the email. I'll respond later today/tomorrow. Thanks!
4. Also, I'll probably just give you ideas, not like a finished banner ad or poster or anything like that. When I pitch initial ideas at work, they're in paragraph form, just talking about them very loosely. Then we can dive in. JUST SO YOU KNOW! <comment><USER2> OK, I'll give it a go. Site is <http://servermonitoringhq.com> email is ian @ server....hq.com

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey Chris, I sent you an email. Thanks, you're doing us a good service.

</comment><comment><USER4> I am always interested, I will shoot you an email.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm game. What do I have to do?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sweet. Just shoot me an email: firstname.lastname@example.com and let me know what you're working on, and what kind of ideas of you're capable of executing, i.e., Can I come up with some crazy use of the Twitter API or is that too much?

<comment><USER5> The mail is from a yandex.com address.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> this is a cool idea Chris! I just sent you an email.</comment>


Eric Schmidt's 6 proposals for the US to beat China in critical technologies - <AUTHOR> https://sociable.co/technology/eric-schmidt-proposals-us-china-critical-technologies/ <comment><USER2> Here are the proposals (ultra-summarized):

\- Double R&D funding

\- Invest in nationwide "foundational infrastructure"

\- Implement federal multi-year flexible grants for individuals

\- Increase "Government–Industry–Academia Collaborations"

\- Improve talent retention and get more tech talent into government

\- Build public confidence in the benefits of new technologies

Here's the problem I see with all of these: all but the last one mean spending significantly more tax dollars on tech, and to date I have seen zero appetite for that from either mainstream politicians _or_ the non-valley public. What we seem to have is a situation where US technology development has effectively been outsourced to private corporations, which are often quite happy to outsource it again to other countries if it means better profit margins. Meanwhile, the general public wants their tax dollars to fund things they actually feel every day, like basic infrastructure, education, and healthcare. It's not at all clear where the push to get Schmidt's proposals moving would come from.

<comment><AUTHOR> The funding is already being proposed in the same House Committee with the "Securing American Leadership in Science and Technology Act" \-- which proposes doubling basic research funding over the next decade at the Energy Department, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Science and Technology, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Perhaps if Schmidt's last point about building public confidence is successful, maybe public opinion would be in favor of it.

At the same time, the irony isn't lost on me that the former CEO of Google is warning about authoritarian tech.

<comment><USER2> I could be mistaken, but I believe these sorts of funding proposals happen routinely in House committees and very rarely get approved.

<comment><AUTHOR> You may very well be correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > My concern is that China tries to fulfill a vision of high-tech > authoritarianism

Is he afraid that china implements their own version of captcha(tm). Leaving Google and the private sector out of the loop of monetizing censorship?</comment>


Let There Be Light Bulbs: How Incandescents Became the Icons of Innovation - <AUTHOR> http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/let-there-be-light-bulbs/

<comment><USER2> Interesting.

What is it, though, about being interviewed that makes someone say something like "Without the invention of the light bulb, there would be no modern computer as we know it today." as if we could've easily just happened never to think of electric light.</comment>


Ask HN: Side projects: How do you find people to work with? - <AUTHOR>

How do you go about finding new people to work with?
I'm interested in finally playing out some ideas that I have been working on myself, but don't really have the contacts to fully and successfully work them out.
I'm wondering how you went about starting to make connections and establish a group of collaborators online. <comment><USER2> Who says you need collaborators just to start a side project? Start the project yourself, drum up some interest in it, and see who comes to you.

</comment><comment><USER3> Might interest you: <http://collabfinder.com/>

</comment><comment><USER4> If you're in the Bay Area, come to iamelgringo's Hackers and Founders meetup (<http://www.meetup.com/Hackers-and-Founders/>)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am also obviously looking to collaborate. So feel free to contact me at my username @ gmail dot com

</comment><comment><USER5> contribute on forums or communities like HN, you'll notice good hackers that have free time, you can then ask them</comment>


Give Bitcoins to homeless people and see what happens - <AUTHOR> https://handup.us/blog/announcing-bitcoin-support

<comment><USER2> "Today we're announcing that you can donate Bitcoins to homeless people" is the worst sentence I've read on the Internet today.

</comment><comment><USER3> One cool thing that the block chain enables is the possibility of publicly transparent accounting. This should enable charities to show that they are honest and give some guaranteed percentage of their funds to those that they are helping. I think that more people are willing to donate when they can directly see their money making a difference as opposed to it just falling into some giant funding bucket.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ha - we're now really living in some kind of cyberpunk future where crypto- currency can help the homeless through the internet!</comment>


Historical figures have moved to cities in the same way for centuries - <AUTHOR> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/big-cities-beckoned-the-brainy-across-history/ <comment><USER2> About a month ago, a study came to the same conclusion about modern Americans. That is, Americans born in rural areas who move to urban centers have higher cognitive ability on average than their counterparts who stay put.

Overview Article: [http://www.citylab.com/work/2014/07/the-smartest-people- move...](http://www.citylab.com/work/2014/07/the-smartest-people-move-into- and-out-of-cities/373760/)

Paper (paid gateway, can't find free): [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289614...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289614000750)

Anecdotally, from my own experience this isn't surprising at all. I grew up in a small town, and wanted to move to a big city since I was about ten years old. I just got _bored_ in that small town. Seeing the same < 100 people every day, going to the same places... It's simply not as stimulating. When I went to boarding school, I found that many of my peers from similar backgrounds felt the same. Eight years later, almost all of us are living in a big city. Maybe this will change as we begin to have families, but it does seem that we all had an instinctive desire toward the draw of big cities.

<comment><USER3> It seems more likely that they have to leave to go to college, or that they are more likely to take occupations that require them to move.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For a moment after reading "a study of 150,000 historical figures that shows cities have long acted as cultural magnets" I was wondering if 'historical figures' referred to people or the actual data. In this case, it's both!

</comment><comment><USER5> The headline (not the hn title which is the subtitle of the article) is really over the top.

The conclusion that "the brainy" have moved to cities at any different rate then the general populous is in no way supported by the source paper. In fact it states explicitly that historical figures are just the only people we have good data for and implies they represent patterns in the population as a whole.

</comment><comment><USER6> Of interest to me is if this trend will or even is still continuing now that we don't rely on the slow communication and transportation methods of the past. I'm currently working for a company slightly past "startup stage" with a bunch of smart people in as rural a location as you can get in the North East and we constantly fly out and teleconference with big partners and clients in San Francisco without much or any net price/hassle if you factor in all the cost/time/stress savings of our location.

<comment><USER7> I'm no historical figure, but I can't feel productive in a location where I can't just randomly decide one night that I've had it with work, want to throw my laptop out hte window, and should just go out for a pint. So you get up, walk outside, and voila, full bars on any random night of the week.

Sometimes you run into people from your field, sometimes from other fields, sometimes nobody at all. But it's a good way to recharge your brain, increase productivity, and merge disparate ideas.

Your mileage may vary, but I really _really_ need that.

<comment><USER8> > I'm no historical figure, but I can't feel productive in a location where I > can't just randomly decide one night that I've had it with work, want to > throw my laptop out hte window, and should just go out for a pint. So you > get up, walk outside, and voila, full bars on any random night of the week.

That doesn't seem to be a really high bar. For example, the county I live in has approximately 140k people and a population density of 128 / square mile. I think that most people would regard it as pretty rural, and it is in flyover country.

Yet I can still go out any day of the week to any one of a sizable number of bars and expect them to be decently full. I've run into all kinds of interesting people...though I don't expect to ever run into anybody famous.

I've traveled a lot and I don't _mind_ big cities, but I've never really understood what they have to offer that I don't already have, barring certain kinds of professional network effects (e.g. Silicon Valley for startups, LA for the movie industry.)

<comment><USER7> > Yet I can still go out any day of the week to any one of a sizable number of > bars and expect them to be decently full. I've run into all kinds of > interesting people...though I don't expect to ever run into anybody famous.

In my experience there is a _big_ difference between "sizable number of bars ... decently full" and "a lot of bars/clubs/places ... full".

In my home town (300k people) you get many of bars that are pretty full a lot of the time, some bars that are full-ish some of the time, and _a lot_ of bars that are mostly empty most of the time. And nightclubs, god help you if your taste in music is not mainstream. You will go to a club on a super duper full night and there will be 20 people there.

Compare that to SF. More bars than I could visit in my lifetime. Most of them decently full most of the time. Most of them _packed_ on party nights. No matter what music I decide to listen to, the club will be packed. As obscure as I can bear, club will still be packed.

And SF is not even a giant city. It's got less than 3x the population of my home town.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The paper:

[http://yongyeol.com/papers/schich- history-2014.pdf](http://yongyeol.com/papers/schich-history-2014.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER10> really a lot of pro-city living propoganda on HN. I've just accepted its not the mountainsteader demographic.

<comment><USER11> Until quite recently I lived at the foot of this: [http://www.valcanigou.net/IMG/jpg/canigou01.jpg](http://www.valcanigou.net/IMG/jpg/canigou01.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is it that brainy people moved to cities, or that cities made people brainy?

</comment><comment><USER13> Thus, NIMBYs and city haters are standing in the way of history.

Lobbying for height restrictions? Lobbying against the next Michelangelo.

<comment><USER14> Paris has height restrictions, which doesn't seem to have deterred artists.

<comment><USER13> _Paris has height restrictions, which doesn 't seem to have deterred artists._

On the contrary, [http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/a096d1d0-d2ec-11e2-aac2-00144...](http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/a096d1d0-d2ec-11e2-aac2-00144feab7de.html#axzz39MesazLE)

<comment><USER15> Your linked article does not support the case that height restrictions are what is making Paris, or other global capitals, expensive.

But thanks for the link, I found it an interesting read.

<comment><USER16> Other articles on HN _have_ supported the idea that height restrictions contribute to scarcity, and that scarcity contributes to high prices. The supply is not allowed to increase to meet demand.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why I Trained Myself Not to Be a 'Woman in Tech' - <AUTHOR> https://open.buffer.com/talking-about-diversity/ <comment><USER2> Being a woman in technology (late 80s-2012ish) was always incidental to the job, something others pointed out to me ("You know you're a role model for other women, right?" "Uhhhh..."), or something that occurred to me for ten minutes on a weekend once every few years. I don't share the author's belief that "gender blindness" is a bad thing -- IMO all genders need to realize and believe that gender is simply irrelevant to the work, neither a benefit nor a disadvantage.</comment>


Don't Mute, Get a Better Headset (Matt Mullenweg) - <AUTHOR> https://ma.tt/2020/03/dont-mute-get-a-better-headset/ <comment><USER2> That Arctis headset is great. The sound is quality is subpar for its price, the replacement band is hard to obtain, lateral pressure is sometimes slightly too low, but as a _headset_ it really is perfect.

The only two issues my older Arctis 7 is showing are that the mute button don't mute anymore, but just heavily chatters, and that ChatMix dial(a second volume dial to crossfade Headset audio and Headphone audio), which is actually just an analog pot, is starting to build up carbon as well.

I don't know why article states the wireless isn't ideal. Thing's maybe not YouTuber good but as good as an average mic.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would argue against the boom mic style headsets because then you have something in front of your face which you can hit (BOOM) or brush if you happen to have a beard (WOOOOSH) and annoy the living hell out of everyone else on the call.</comment>


The Origin of Most Coal on Earth (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2016/01/07/the-fantastically-strange-origin-of-most-coal-on-earth/ <comment><USER2> So the trees had evolved, but the bacteria had not caught on yet. "It's a curious mismatch. Food to eat but no eaters to eat it." In a few million years, they might be saying the same thing about plastic.

<comment><USER3> Sooner than you think: [https://www.sciencealert.com/new-plastic-munching- bacteria-c...](https://www.sciencealert.com/new-plastic-munching-bacteria- could-fuel-a-recycling-revolution)

<comment><USER4> Oooh I can't wait to have my blender rot!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe we could genetically engineer a new kind of tree with undigestible wood, to replicate this era to deliberately sequester carbon.

<comment><USER6> Plastic.

<comment><USER7> So by using biodegradable packaging I am contributing to global warming? Oh the irony.

<comment><USER8> No, biodegradable is carbon-neutral. Plastic itself is carbon-neutral although it's a byproduct of carbon-polluting oil. We'd have to make plastic out of atmospheric carbon for it to have any sequestering effect.

<comment><USER7> If biodegrade-able products are from carbon based life, and carbon based life contains carbon, and biology breaks down biodegrade-able products, wouldn't breaking down something that contains carbon be releasing carbon into the air? And wouldn't that be NOT carbon neutral.

<comment><USER8> Carbon neutral means the carbon that gets released at the end was initially taken out of the atmosphere, not the ground.

If you burn a piece of paper it's carbon neutral because the tree absorbed that carbon from the air. If you burn a piece of plastic you're adding carbon that used to be sequestered below the surface.

<comment><USER9> How long must an item be buried before burning it loses its carbon neutrality?

<comment><USER10> If you first ask why CO2 in the atmosphere is a problem, then you'll find the answer. It's the same time scale at which the change in atmospheric CO2 is a problem. It's only a problem because it's changing rapidly. It would be OK if it happened slowly enough for species to adapt or at least for human activity to adapt without too much disruption to our daily lives. Ultimately, it's rapid disruption to our daily lives we don't want. We don't want to have to move somewhere else, have less spending power of our wages, get a different job, or change our eating habits. But if it happens gradually generation by generation, so we hardly notice it, then it'll be OK.

<comment><USER6> This is very much not true. Look at Venus, which was (we believe) subject to a runaway greenhouse event. Also, the Permian period ("Snowball Earth"). Climate change can be catastrophic whether it occurs fast or slowly.

<comment><USER7> But he has a point. The real answer is more complicated. Slow change gives natural selection several generations to evolve a complex solution to the problem and our minds the time to come up with a technological solution.

Life exists within the boundaries of available sunlight and liquid water. Changes that occur slowly within these boundaries don't necessarily have to be catastrophic. However if the changes exceed these boundaries whether fast or slow then yes the change will indeed be catastrophic.

Venus possibly has no liquid water and snowball earth doesn't have much water either, hence the catastrophe.

<comment><USER6> Venus had oceans at the time. They boiled off. The Permian Earth had oceans too, just ice capped ones. Microbial life and the simplest algae-like life survived, but that's it.

I just don't think it's all that correct or useful to say the equivalent of "life will adapt" when life has never adapted to changes this fast, and we are hurtling towards changes so extreme as to wipe out complex life entirely.

<comment><USER7> As long as water and sunlight are available, we're good.

<comment><USER6> Venesians, if any existed, would disagree.

<comment><USER7> On earth there is life capable of existing in water far hotter than boiling. Not little bacterias either. Actual multicellular animals.

Catastrophic change will leave pockets of deviants in some dark corners of the earth that will remain protected somewhat. These deviants will go on to populate the world.

There was one such catastrophic change that happened before. A meteor. Wiped out an entire class of creatures called dinosaurs, now replaced with mammals. Mammals at this time lived as tiny rodents underground.

<comment><USER6> There is no life anywhere on Earth that is able to survive 90 atm and 500 deg C, like the surface of Venus. And fwiw, the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs is one of the milder mass extinction events in Earth's history. We are on trajectories in excess of those that predated the worst mass die-offs in Earth's history, and more resemble the lead-up to Venusian conditions.

<comment><USER7> You can't maintain liquid water at those temps. I don't think we are on trajectory for Venus like weather.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The point about the long thin trunks with almost no root system is interesting. Were they growing between the logs of previously fallen trees and being supported by them? Maybe they look so spindly today because they didn't have to provide most of their lateral stability?

And of course they only grow in hot climates because pulling all of that carbon out of the atmosphere would have caused the planet to cool down and nothing would survive the continually freezing conditions closer to the poles.

<comment><USER12> Wouldn't there be little-to-no soil? So their roots would be anchoring in rock AFAIK?

<comment><USER11> The soil would be peat I think. Leafy parts of plants would decay, just the woody parts would remain. Probably pretty thin soil though, hence the shallow roots.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So trees used to be non-biodegradable. This makes me wonder what would happen if you took a load of plastic bottles and subjected them to geological amounts of pressure, heat and time.

<comment><USER14> Considering that plastic is hydrocarbons already you'd probably just get different hydrocarbons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have heard this theory several years ago but at the time I thought it was considered a sort of fringe theory, has that changed? Is this pretty well accepted now?

<comment><USER16> Pretty sure this is the main theory and has been for a very long time.

There is an alternative (non-biological) theory for hydrocarbon production but not sure whether many take it seriously.

<comment><USER17> One of my classmates in high school Geography put forward the alternative theory that God put the coal there for us to use but the Devil added fake evidence so that the coal would appear to come from ancient plants and thus confuse us about how old the world is.

Our teacher asked for a show of hands and 5 out of our 25-30 student class agreed with this theory.

<comment><USER18> Why is there so much stock in specifically a very literal reading of the most modern translations of Genesis? Even as a religious person, I don't see where they're coming from. Arguments to be made about Genesis originally referring to "creation" (ex nihilo) vs "organization" are already pretty weak, what reason do we then have to assume that despite all the evidence of an ancient Earth that it was literal Earth-days, and that the idea it was literal Earth- days is somehow so important to God's plan that the Devil would fake evidence of fossils to try and get people to think it was NOT Earth-days?

<comment><USER7> As a religious person what is the justification for a non literal interpretation of the Bible? Was there a commandment that says God wanted you to interpret that way? Why does God want his messages to be non literal instead of literal?

Perhaps each person is given a choice. You have three. Interpret the Bible literally, interpret the Bible symbolically or not even play the game and realize that no interpretation of the Bible is correct because the book is just as fictive as the Koran or any other holy book from an ancient religion.

How would a human reconcile with their beliefs and how they were raised with reality as it exists around them. Science says that no one can turn water into wine, the Bible says that it can. Logically speaking the Bible is wrong. But when I've spent years reading the Bible and my entire identity is built around religion my only option is to say that the Bible is not to be interpreted literally. I must create a lie that validates reality and validates my identity.

Also how would I know that I'm lying to myself? If I or anyone I knew was doing this form of psychological self manipulation, how would I know?

You can't until you read this.

<comment><USER18> >> As a religious person what is the justification for a non literal interpretation of the Bible?

The fact that there are parts that are explicitly given as being symbolic. This is actually addressed in the New Testament when Christ explains that he teaches in parables because he's speaking directly to a specific level of understanding.

>> Science says that no one can turn water into wine

No, science does not know how to turn water into wine. There was once a point where science did not know how to turn one element into another element, but it would have been incorrect to say that science had said no one could do it - that's confusing science with what people think. If there's a being that created the universe, I'd imagine that can pretty much do what they want with molecules.

>> If I or anyone I knew was doing this form of psychological self manipulation, how would I know?

How do you ever know that about anything? You trust your senses, but you have no more justification for doing so than people who have had intense spiritual experiences do for following up on those experiences. I view the intense spiritual experiences I've had as being a sense - it's no more rational for people to expect me to ignore what I've felt than it is for me to expect you to do the same things if you haven't felt that.

<comment><USER7> >>>The fact that there are parts that are explicitly given as being symbolic. This is actually addressed in the New Testament when Christ explains that he teaches in parables because he's speaking directly to a specific level of understanding.

You missed the symbolism here. What you thought he meant was actually symbolism for an entirely different meaning. There's about 4 layers of indirection here meaning that each symbolic representation is in itself a symbolic representation of something else. This happens on four distinct levels. Reinterpreting this statement the correct way can change the entire interpretation of the bible.

<comment><USER18> I don't follow what you're saying. Are you facetiously parodying your impression of religion? If so, let's just be clear that of the two of us, you're the one preventing a rational conversation and stereotyping me based on what you've seen other say, something most people hate when religions do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> your-nanny I hadn't known about the microbe end of the story. I'm kinda disappointed. I had long imagined that the inevitable process of fossil fuel generation and accumulation would eventually turn the earth into a flaming tarball, and it was those crazy humans who finally figured out how to tar -xvf the sucker to the anthropocene.

</comment><comment><USER19> I can't see much discussion of the nature of these plants and seems to miss some interesting stuff (unless I missed it), so here's my recollection from reading around.

The 'trees' were club mosses, not trees. Moss as in moss in the usual sense, except got big. One common sort was lepidodendron ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lepidodendron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lepidodendron)). Note the distinct scale pattern on the trunks.

Absolutely fascinatingly to me, the descendents of these may still exist as quillwort ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoetes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoetes)).

<comment><USER20> "Tree" is a paraphyletic taxon; today you have conifer trees, angiosperm trees, cycad trees, and so on, all of which are more closely related to non- tree plants than to each other. Even among angiosperms, you have lots of different trees that are more closely related to non-trees than to each other — a black locust tree is more closely related to a soybean plant than it is to an apple tree. So there's no reason to claim that a club-moss tree isn't a tree. Bamboo, maybe you would have a point, but not club-moss trees.

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

<comment><USER19> Very good points, thanks. I know that legumes fall into their own group so if a locust bean is a legume then naturally it must be more closely related to soybean vines than an apple - but I just never thought of it that way. A rather new perspective.

Personally I wouldn't class a cycad as a tree, nor a date palm, and I wouldn't call a lepidodendron one either, but after a bit of reflection I've no good reason to take that view, so thanks for all this!

<comment><USER20> Note that "dendron" is usually translated to English as "tree" but of course that's a pretty weak argument—there's no requirement that words in different languages denote precisely coextensive categories.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The author is Robert Krulwich, co-host of "Radiolab". Try not to imagine his voice while reading it. Here's a related piece: [https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/from-tree-to-shining- tree](https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/from-tree-to-shining-tree)

<comment><USER22> I knew I knew that name from somewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Could this also be why a lot of the dinosaurs died out? There was no bacteria's, so the food was abundant until we got the bacteria. Not only abundant, but it never got bad. So the biggest 'eater' was the winner.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've heard that the arrival of fungi on the scene was what ended this ancient coal formation process. But this article says it was bacteria living in insect guts. I wonder which -- the fungi or these bacteria -- is responsible for more wood decomposition.

</comment><comment> La-ang Imagine having Trichonympha as pets? Of course you cant see them, but if you set up the video camera right with the proper lens and display the view on a 16 inch screen in the living room :D Wait, that's a great idea!</comment>


Ask HN: How do you separate art from the racist artist? - <AUTHOR> I've recently gotten into self-learning philosophy, economics, science, and mathematics and it's been eye-opening to read about how the most revered people felt about those like me (african american)
ie. Plato, Aristotle, Darwin, Marx<p>I understand it was a different time and I'm not naive enough to disregard all of their work due to some personal beliefs, but do any of you have any tips on disassociating the bad and keeping the good? <comment><USER2> They did not know you. To them you were "the stranger". Imagine them as blacks, saying the same things about "those strange white people". Racism is kin-preference , kind of ingrained in people, and it takes a sophisticated society like ours to rise above it because we, truly, don't need it anymore, it's a relic. Do you think that their view of strange people has a bearing on the other things that they said, or do you think their teachings express truths that are universal among people? There has been very intense research in the "racialization" and "genderization" of science and philosophy in the past decades, but maybe ask yourself if we learned useful things from it, things that are actually actionable.

Also, realize that american attitudes towards race are somewhat different from the rest of the world. Race in modern america is politicized, while for most of history around the world, races generally mixed with little political component, especially under great empires.

</comment><comment><USER3> Have you read up on Alan Turing? He was a member of a minority like you that faced similar prejudice of his time.</comment>


Portal 2 trailer - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tax4e4hBBZc

<comment><USER2> What made Portal compelling was the learning. And the pacing was slow, frankly, because it was teaching you to learn a new mechanic and think in a new way. I'm not saying it has _no_ replay value, but playing through a second time is so much easier that the jokes are most of the interest - the gameplay itself is no longer compelling. So the sequel will have to step up the pace and the difficulty, or introduce some new mechanics, or maybe both.

I hope the rumors of Chell being a fleshed-out character aren't true. I liked how, in the first game, she was more of an avatar than a character. It wasn't like I was playing a _character_ in a game, it felt _I_ was playing the game. The character's goals aligned perfectly with mine - just get to the end of the level. I don't want to lose that feeling in Portal 2.

<comment><USER3> Below are some new gameplay videos, which showcase a wide variety of new game mechanics. Particularly the second two show a lot of new tricks they're going to be bringing to the sequel:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5THiN8szSKM> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bq2mZoKkqMw> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGlyQmmvj0w>

Also, I'm really looking forward to the coop campaign.

<comment><USER4> Awesome vids, thanks for the links. And it looks like they're using more DigiPen student ideas again. The gels seemed to be straight out of Tag: <https://www.digipen.edu/studentprojects/tag/>

(Disclaimer: I'm a CE student there.)

Edit: ah, looks like someone already caught that hours ago!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was wondering how they were going to improve on the first game, but the clearly up'd the ante. The longer gameplay video had some very amazing looking puzzles with the different liquids (propulsion and repulsion)

<comment><USER6> Do you have a link to said video?

<comment><USER7> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfAl48VREsA>

It seems to take some cues from another game, the name of which I forget, where you could shoot different colored paint on surfaces to make them behave differently.

[edit: fixed with correct link ]

<comment><USER2> Tag: The Power of Paint. <https://www.digipen.edu/studentprojects/tag/> It's from DigiPen, the same place that the original Narbacular Drop team was hired out of to do Portal!

Edit: The Tag team has also been hired by Valve. <http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/62689>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I heard a rumor that there's going to be cake in Portal 2.

<comment><USER9> That is a lie.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I admit I didn't like parts of the first game as much as I'd hoped, but after playing the commentary and enjoying the "escape sequence," I'm looking forward to the sequel. I just hope that the developers' lessons learned designing that last level will carry through to the new game. The last couple of test chambers sucked due to not separating complex puzzles from the timed ones.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you're using Youtube's html5 beta(and are on a supporting browser) the video uses webm. That's the first I've seen it out in the wild.

</comment><comment><USER12> Definitely will play that one. It seems it is hard to capture on video what made the game so great, though.

Also, am I the only one who finds sequels depressing? There rarely is a point in beating the enemy in a game anymore, because they will ALWAYS be back.

</comment><comment><USER13> Apropos of Portal, but unrelated to the release of Portal 2, this Youtube clip is one of my favorites: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L-rrkyvApU>

<comment><USER14> What happened to terminal velocity?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What made Portal such a great game is that it actually forces you to think. Most blockbuster games seem to follow a formula much like the formulas you might find in Hollywood blockbusters...they are still entertaining, but you really don't get that sense of "accomplishment" you get from playing something like Portal or Braid (an equally great game!!).

</comment><comment><USER16> I hope it's longer than the first one.

</comment><comment><USER17> I approve of linking to this, but the URL is wrong. It should be <http://youtube.com/watch?v=U5iM9YSs0Q8>

<comment><USER18> I think that linking to the Valve posted video makes a little more sense to me. Either way it's the same video.

<comment><USER17> The link was non-functional when I tried it, at least on my iPad. It works fine now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Since portal does a lot of mental stretching on spatial aptitude sandbox environment, this game could be a breakthrough test for school exams / exercises.

<comment><USER20> ...if it weren't already a popular game where some people will have prior exposure and therefore a big advantage.

<comment><USER19> Good point. Definitely an iteration or a version of an educational platform geared towards students.</comment></comment></comment>


Focus Music Playlists for Working and Studying - <AUTHOR> http://lifebyexperimentation.com/resources/focus-music-playlists/

<comment><USER2> Check out Focus@Will...

www.focusatwill.com</comment>


AWS Lambda – Best practices - <AUTHOR> https://cloudncode.blog/2017/03/02/best-practices-aws-lambda-function/ <comment><USER2> As someone who uses Lambda heavily I find this post somewhat disappointing from a "best practices" standpoint.

No mention of Lambda best practices like:

\- Using CloudFormation

\- IAM policies

\- Managing config

\- How to handle databases and connection pools

Instead we get a logging suggestion that while interesting (I too prefer ElasticSearch to CloudWatch logs) is definitely not Lambda best practice.

And suggestion about choosing the right timeout (which is not necessarily helpful since the default timeout is 3 seconds so the best practice could be... "Leave the default alone unless you have a really good reason to raise it")

As far as the logging piece goes, if you are to use ElasticSearch I would strongly recommend putting the logs in CloudWatch logs first then using something like Logstash with a CloudWatch logs source to populate it into Elasticsearch as to not add another network dependency to your Lambda function.

<comment><USER3> I like in [https://serverless.com/](https://serverless.com/) 's serverless.yml how it provisions the CloudFormation stuff and gives you a way to manage IAM permissions.

<comment><USER4> AWS has its own Serverless Application Model (SAM) [https://github.com/awslabs/serverless-application- model](https://github.com/awslabs/serverless-application-model) released last Oct. Rather than learning another framework, you'd use the same CloudFormation yaml syntax to define your stack and apps. It simplifies calling Lambda functions by providing a higher level abstraction triggers called Events. This makes it simpler to create Lambda functions for Rest API, Cron schedule, IoT devices, create Alexa skills, response to S3 events etc. Then its just "aws cloudformation package" and "aws cloudformation deploy" to create and update your app. It appears AWS team is learning the best from Serverless Framework. If you not mind the vendor lockin, SAM is the way to go. Serverless Framework has the promise of using the same tool against AWS Lambda, Google/Azure Functions and IBM OpenWhisk.

<comment><USER2> Personally I use the Serverless framework which supports other cloud providers and is generally more on the cutting edge than SAM (and pre-dates SAM).

But SAM is certainly a valid option if you are OK with vendor lock in. (which many people are)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm amused by the off-hand note about maybe using DynamoDB instead of a relational database, because the biggest issue with connecting your Lambda functions to MySQL is that using Lambdas within a VPC is absolutely terrible right now.

Sure, you can make lambda IP subnets in your VPC, assign your lambda to a subnet, give it a security group, and then you can easily setup your security group rules for your lambdas to connect. It's quite snazzy! Until you realize that cold startup times for your lambda normally are around a second, and when you have it running in your VPC, it takes 5 more seconds for it to make the VPC network interface. If you're using lambdas to make a REST API, this turns an occasional slight slowdown to a complete show stopper for your users.

There doesn't appear to be any good solution to this right now. You can host your Lambda outside the VPC, but then you essentially need to open your MySQL security group to the world (or every AWS Subnet, which is about the same thing). You can make a request to your Lambda function every 15 minutes, which is a terrible hack but works, except when you start approaching 50+ lambda functions you have to make heartbeat requests to every 15 minutes.

The issue is somewhat mitigated if, instead of leaning towards the natural inclination to make a separate Lambda function for each possible API request, you group API requests together, or use one Lambda function for your entire need. If your service is small in scope anyway, it won't particularly affect performance, and there will be less likelihood the lambda will go dormant/less functions you need to make heartbeat requests to. Serverless Framework has a good overview of the coding pattern options: [https://serverless.com/blog/serverless-architecture-code- pat...](https://serverless.com/blog/serverless-architecture-code-patterns/)

And yes, if you just jump straight from traditional server architectures straight to Lambda functions and Dynamodb NoSQL, you don't need VPC connections to connect to Database servers. But some of us change architecture paradigms one step at a time, Amazon!

<comment><USER6> I am curious about the type of workloads that you do that will require serverless architecture yet are backed by a MySQL database. It was only 5 or so years ago that we were told that relational databases didn't scale so we all needed NoSQL.

<comment><USER5> Is Lambda only for workloads that _require_ serverless architecture, or is it also for workloads for folks that would like to be running serverless?

I have a variety of web application APIs running on webservers in a VPC, with an RDS MySQL instance for backing. I'm interested in writing our new development using Lambda, but I'm still using MySQL as the database backend for now, and I still need to interact with existing APIs in the VPC. Perhaps someday I will have moved all those other applications to Lambda as well, and perhaps someday I will port all of our database functionality to DynamoDB, but I don't think that should be required in order to just get started with Lambda.

If I was writing everything from scratch, maybe I'd go full serverless. But I'm not in that case, and I'm also not in a case where MySQL won't "scale" for me at all (I wish I had that problem). If Lambda's not for me, any Amazon engineer can feel free to tell me so, but given their marketing, I did not think this was the case. They offered Lambda VPC for a reason, even though it doesn't work very well currently.

<comment><USER6> OK, but serverless without good reason sounds like resume driven development to me. And more hassle than what its worth. I prefer to have sound decisions behind my architectural choices. Tried and tested is a good reason to go with "normal" architecture for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Every time I look at Lambda+API Gateway for a web api, there's always been one little thing that makes things way harder than they should be.

A while ago (pre proxy), it was nearly impossible to send back 302 redirects cleanly.

With LAMBDA_PROXY, it's not clear that you can actually return binary data through the Api Gateway. There's the undocumented isBase64Encoded parameter, but as far as I can tell, it's ignored. It doesn't trigger an error, but it doesn't decode base64 either.

Just this week I'm working on moving a static html site + a couple of dynamic urls over. I can work around the binary issue, but serving images is a solved problem in the rest of the world.

<comment><USER2> Binary data is tricky with Lambda proxy (and by tricky I mean... I haven't gotten it to work). But I also haven't tried much. Typically best practice for me has been:

\- When dealing with uploads have an API call to get a pre-signed S3 upload URL

\- When dealing with downloads using HATEOAS and/or the Location header to send the client to S3 to grab the actual file.

It requires some client-side designing around eventual consistency but it works well and is very scalable.

<comment><USER8> You need to specify your MIME type (most commonly, application/json) to be treated as binary (from console: API -> Binary Support). In your Lambda function: `callback(null, { body: base64EncodedBody, status: 200, headers: {}, isBase64Encoded: true })`

<comment><USER7> The mimetype of the response from lambda? Or the mimetype in the headers?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We've had a lot of success deploying python web apps with Zappa: [https://github.com/Miserlou/Zappa](https://github.com/Miserlou/Zappa)

The value is that it does deploy, the route-mapping, config management, and also allows you to 'keep-warm' if you want to keep the backend responsive even after zero/low traffic.

My hope is that best practices are going to continue being distilled into these deployment/wrapper frameworks.

</comment><comment><USER10> After using lambda for a while, the opinion I've landed on is that the concept of serverless is a powerful one in specific domains, but (1) being the zeitgeist it is encouraged for use in domains where it doesn't belong, and (2) AWS Lambda itself isn't very good, for reasons that are specific to Lambda, not to the concept of serverless.

<comment><USER11> I'm curious if you could expand on:

> AWS Lambda itself isn't very good, for reasons that are specific to Lambda

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I run a fairly high scale pipeline on lambda. The post touched briefly on logging but wanted to chime in with a few helpful points:

\- Format all logs in json. This allows you to use the json path filtering option on CW.

\- Add function version & tag to the log lines. CW doesn't allow you to filter based on version.

\- Don't expect CW log querying to work all the time.

\- Output runtime stats to CW metrics.

edit: formatting

</comment><comment><USER13> > My opinion, when going serverless, I wouldn't think of using RDBMS's > (although you can) and instead use databases like Elasticsearch, DynamoDB, > Mongo etc.

This is a vague statement that's not really based on evidence, and I'm not sure why using Postgres, for example, is going to be so much worse for most use cases than these NoSQL solutions.

<comment><USER5> As I explain over here ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13774041](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13774041)), trying to use Lambdas with your existing servers, like Postgres, can cause some serious complications.

<comment><USER14> If that's the case, seems like a great argument against using lambda ;)

Side note, is that just startup time for a single lambda `node`? Won't you be running >>1 node and not really care about startup time for any single node?

<comment><USER5> It's every time you have to start up a lambda instance.

So if you're low, continuous traffic, it'll happen once and you won't really care. If you're high traffic, occasionally different instances will get started up, will also need their node network interface, and also take 6+ seconds. And if you're low traffic but not continuous, if there's a pause for more than around 15 minutes (entirely depends on how much demand there is for lambda and how rapidly they clean up old containers), for the next request you get you'll have to cold start again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Unfortunately, there's absolutely nothing here regarding things like git, or CI/CD, or how-to-use-it-when-a-medium-to-large-team-is-involved

If anyone has any research, thoughts, or comments on this side of Lambda, I'd love to learn more

<comment><USER16> Hey Daniel,

We've been experimenting with a lot of best practices around serverless development with StdLib [1]. Everything from versioning, project and team management, to authentication and billing. Basically --- we acknowledged that a lot of these aspects were surprisingly difficult and created a "git-esque" workflow for serverless function management ("lib up" to deploy, "lib get" to retrieve a current version of a function, etc.) - would love your feedback if you have time.

(Disclaimer: Founder.)

[1] [https://stdlib.com/](https://stdlib.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is there any easy way to tell what kind of things are infeasible/inappropriate for Lambda? I went looking for limitations and found code size/fd counts/etc [1] but I want to know more general things like "can I include native code? (a DSO to be used by python code, e.g.) -- if so, what arch?", "what AWS services can I/should I access?", etc.

[1] [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/limits.html](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/limits.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> I tried AWS Lambda early on. But I decided to go with the new Azure Logic Apps since I mostly code in C#. And then Lambda added C# support, so I need to find the time to play around with it some more.

</comment><comment><USER19> The biggest thing I have found about lambda is that if you plan to deploy with cloudformation backed by s3 you either need to do some hacks to ever update your function, manage versions in s3 or change the filename in s3 and cloudformation to trigger an update. It's a rather annoying issue.

I really wish that there was an always update flag on the cloudformation property to resolve this.

<comment><USER20> Have you tried adding a timestamp or git sha to your CF input params?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Maybe I am too late too this party but I have a question:

Is there any framework for handling routing and deployments?

What I mean is, is there ane xisting solution where I can make JS files to routes, and have those routes and js files be loaded into Lambda and configure the API end point; so that if I need to make an update to the lambda function i can just update the file (and re run the framework)

<comment><USER8> [https://github.com/awslabs/aws-serverless- express](https://github.com/awslabs/aws-serverless-express)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can a given Lambda container process ever be used for multiple concurrent function invocations? If not, then we're dealing with at least 128 MB of RAM per concurrent request. Multithreaded and event-driven servers can do much better than that.

<comment><USER23> Yes

See: [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/container-reuse-in- lamb...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/container-reuse-in-lambda/) [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37523128/how-aws- lambda-c...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37523128/how-aws-lambda- container-reuse-works)

<comment><USER24> Actually, the answer is "no".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I gave up on Lambda when I realized it was cheaper to use a $5/month VPS or EC2 which is cheaper and more responsive without cold startup boot time.

There will be niche use cases for Lambda but Serverless(TM) is just another passing buzzword. It won't see wide adoption unless the cold startup and costs are significantly lowered than current solutions.</comment>


Becoming an expert 30+ - celljunk-e

Has anyone here become an "Expert" in their field when learning a skill at an advanced age?  I'm not giving up on my passion, but I'm just wondering if any of you guys/gals have become a respected peer to developers who started much younger than you did? <comment><AUTHOR> Only the good ones will.

But this has _nothing_ to do with age. I believe it has to do more with drive. Or possibly intrigue.

Whatever the word you use, it is a problem of the mind.

The biggest thing I look in with my peers is their capability to push themselves, which also pushes the others around them. The former is a goal, the latter is a side-effect.

Reminds me so much of Hamming's You and Your Research: <http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html>

Oh, and yes, I'm in my early 30's and I suppose that makes me "Old", and I garner respect by the fact that I'm good at what I do and I tend to get shit right. But I also can act as a bridge between those who are younger and possibly less experienced (age != experience) and those who value age.

To be honest, I prefer to make a switch in "expertise" every five to seven years. This is a goal of mine to keep pushing myself otherwise I will get bored.

<comment> celljunk-e I don't get bored easily, but I really enjoy learning new things(this can be a blessing or a curse).

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Languages learned before 20: a little Fortran IV.

Languages learned between 30 and 40: Assembler, Pascal, C, C++, Perl, PL/SQL, T-SQL.

Languages learned between 40 and 50: Python

Languages learned since 50: PHP. (OK, I'm slowing down...)

Am I an expert in all of the above? No. Have I done very useful things with some of them? Yes.

<comment> celljunk-e That's cool. Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think it is possible if you don't do it by yourself at home. For example, I'm joining Ruby on Rails hacknights and the community welcomes you to come up with something you want to build or built in another language and spend the night building it with the team. My guess if after doing it for 1 year plus you will have a network of friends (some who will offer you the job since they know what you built in that year).

You can be quite advanced in that particular skill if you practice enough for a long time. I picked up guitar when I was 27 when I started taking classes. Then it is up to your level of interest and commitment to reach a certain level.

'Expert' is up to interpretation. I'm only as expert as the other person who know and have practised less. When you think you've arrived at Expert level, you will stop advancing as much.

<comment> celljunk-e How are you at guitar?

<comment><USER3> I discovered I could be really good at it, whereas I previously thought I was too old to learn musical instrument. Just have to find the correct way to learn that suits me. But time is so expensive that I'd rather spend my time on my biggest passion which is programming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Age has no bearing on expertise. The easiest way to become an expert is to practice. The best way to enjoy what you are practicing is to do it because you want to. Now, you just have to spend an obsessive amount of time. Someone will invariably ask you a question which, depending on where you are in your obsessive amount of time, you will be able to answer. Welcome to being an expert, level 1. Keep going, for as long as you like, answering questions as you go. The more good answers you give the more expertise you are displaying. Don't worry, you will get some questions wrong. Study, implement, read, learn, repeat. Like I said, Age has no bearing on expertise. Just dedication and passion(/facepalm) .

<comment> celljunk-e Thanks for the feedback/encouragement!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Age could mean broader experience. You may not be able to crack out code at the rate of a 20 year old, but you will see the architecture more clearly which is a different vision. It allows you to take decisions knowing what's about to come, meaning you can be one step ahead of others even if your fingers aren't quite as quick.

The trick is not to rely too much on experience and learn very quickly when the ground has shifted, and adjust your knowledge accordingly. I've seen many a peer fall over on the insistence that their experience is the only point of view when in fact technology or techniques have moved on.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think one advantage that you bring to the table in the expertise field is you have much more experience that you can leverage than a younger person. While you might not be a true expert in that one field, having a more exposure from years of experience gives you the ability to bring other knowledge to the table and apply it to your expert field.

<comment> celljunk-e I have seen this as I have a lot of work experience, but limited dev chops relatively speaking. I find myself being able to solve problems, but implementation is slower than I'd like it to be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "become a respected peer to developers"... Why not respected peer to a Project Manager or...? Why focus so narrowly?

</comment><comment><USER8> Fuck what they think.</comment>


The Palo Alto 24/7 Hacker House: You're Invited. - <AUTHOR>

An excerpt from Fortune about the early "office" of facebook:
"The house at 819 La Jennifer Way, with a resident population of seven guys, felt like a dorm. Some people — female and male — stopped by for days and just hung around. Stanford University was only a mile away, so the housemates would announce parties using a Facebook feature that enabled them to target specific schools. They were mobbed by Stanford students and townies."
After a month with 7 of us living in a 1 bedroom apartment in Palo Alto, we have decided to upgrade. We are recreating the atmosphere described above of high energy openness and are inviting brilliant hackers, designers, ideators… you name it… to drop by and work, hangout, and live with us (seriously, we are only using 2 of the 5 bedrooms in this place so let me know if you are looking for a sweet place to live).
The house is in Midtown Palo Alto (walking distance to anything you will ever need) and has a huge open working space for whomever wants to come. We work 18+ hours a day (somebody is always awake), have a constant supply of snacks and beverages, and invite hackers around the world to drop by anytime, 24/7 to work, live for a bit, hack with us, play a game of ping pong or just hangout. Email me anytime to get the address and drop by or say hello. evan dot reas at gmail <comment><USER2> I am very disappointed that I live all the way on the East Coast. I miss out on opportunities like these constantly.

You guys are really great to offer this; I would really like to visit at some point.

<comment><USER3> Anyone in Tennessee? The East Coast can make it's own opportunities. Currently I am meeting up with some people today to discuss forming a hackerspace/incubator here in town. ;p

<comment><USER4> I'm in Chattanooga. Email me sometime: ben at orangesoda net

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> +1 Sounds like what the beats used to do, except their poetry didn't compile.

<comment><USER6> fences['electric'].damn()

<comment><USER7> <http://perens.com/FreeSoftware/ElectricFence/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Any chance to know how much for a bedroom? (just out of curiosity really)

<comment><USER9> I'm thinking of quitting my job and staying for awhile. Is there parking space for a full-size car?

<comment><USER8> Maybe just for a half-size car.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really want to do something like this when I (hopefully) head over there for a few months later in the year. I'm stuck in the UK and desperate to get over to Silicon Valley to experience the optimistic and fail-fast attitude, since I've been acting like that here in the UK (with some success) and it's not easy to find like-minded people.

Hope you're still looking for people in a few months!

<comment><USER11> It's very easy if you're in London. Spend a couple of days in Techhub or White Bear Yard!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> +1 I like the idea, this seems like a pretty interesting way to build a relationship with tons of like minded people.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. You should definitely stop by if you are in the area.

<comment><USER12> I live in the Midwest but if and when i do come by the bay(Hopefully soon). I will contact you before hand, bring some bagels and stop by for a chat :).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> To clarify -- is your house the same as the former Facebook house 819 La Jennifer Way?

<comment><USER14> The new house is in Midtown, the Facebook house is not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hi,

Sounds like a great idea!

What's the address? Any photos?

</comment><comment><USER16> Wow, that is excellent. I plan to visit Palo Alto in a couple of months (I live in Poland), I hope this will still be around then! :)

</comment><comment><USER17> Like A Little goes big!

</comment><comment><USER18> I may just take you up on this in the summer...

</comment><comment><USER19> This is good, m coming to bay

</comment><comment><USER20> hacking house sounds AWESOME!

</comment><comment><USER21> Awesome! Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER22> sounds interesting! I'll drop by sometime.</comment>


3v-hosting – Dedicated, Virtual Servers, DDoS Protection - <AUTHOR> Lease of dedicated and virtual servers of any configuration, as well as Web-hosting and protection against DDoS-attacks. 24/7 technical support. Uptime - 99,8% Details - http://3v-host.com <comment><USER2> Am i blind or does the whole site mention nowhere where the servers are located? IMO this is pretty much one of the most relevant facts when renting servers these days.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey. The site really is no mention of this, but now we add this information to the site. Thank you for your comment!</comment></comment>