DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence - <AUTHOR> https://www.1843magazine.com/features/deepmind-and-google-the-battle-to-control-artificial-intelligence <comment><USER2> The talk mentioned in the beginning is quite interesting. You can watch it here:

A systems neuroscience approach to building AGI - Demis Hassabis, Singularity Summit 2010, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgd3OK5DZWI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgd3OK5DZWI)

</comment><comment><USER3> Is the article true in claiming that the model doesn't work if we increase the size of the paddle? Or change anything else?

<comment><USER4> Note you can create a game where the simulated world has random variations and the RL algorithm will learn to handle it. If you don't train for it, obviously it won't learn it.

Check out this video from mit/openai: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EN_HoEk3KY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EN_HoEk3KY) The entire talk is interesting but the section at 21:40 talks about "Sim2Real with Meta Learning".

<comment><USER5> It's not at all obvious that "if you don't train for it, it won't learn it". Humans do not at all learn in this way: we are very good at adapting existing knowledge to solve new tasks, and relatedly at learning new tasks from very little data. This challenge is a major issue with deep reinforcement learning (and maybe deep learning more broadly). It's unclear how we might surmount this problem, but I believe it'll involve some combination of model-based approaches and deep learning models that internally use more symbolic structures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "But human intelligence is limited by the size of the skull that houses the brain."

When you think about it this way, it seems impossible that we haven't duplicated the capability of the human brain in an airplane hangar somewhere.

What's going on inside our heads that we can't mimic? That magical algorithm...

<comment><USER7> If you poke at a real brain, it's almost fractally complex.

Single ion channels can have surprisingly complicated behaviors that depend on their current state and past history. Individual neurons contain tons of these channels, and can do a lot of powerful computation on their own. Of course, there are 86 billion neurons and combinatorically more connections between them. That's just the neurons too; God only knows what the glia cells, which outnumber them 10:1, are doing but they're a lot less passive than many have thought.

On top of this, there's a whole separate but overlaid network of neuromodulators (hormones, nitric oxide, etc). Electric fields produced by some neurons may even influence the activity of others.

None of this is static, either. Things change on timescales ranging from milliseconds to years, and in response to all sorts of external stimuli.

The brain is _bonkers_.

<comment><USER8> The coolest part about this is probably how little energy it needs. It's about 20 Watts. Current node sizes are already smaller than axon diameters. If it weren't for power, we could probably scale up manufacturing processes of current semiconductor technology to build giant room sized chips but we simply wouldn't be able to cool those things. Instead we are forced to wrap a ton of metal around them and plastic and air and provide extensive cooling.

<comment><USER9> Is it true that a big part of this efficiency is due to using analog signals and not digital? I recall reading that, but it's far from my area of expertise.

Digital has many advantages: a digital Einstein could be replicated perfectly, not so for an analog Einstein.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > "DeepMind has found a way around this by employing vast amounts of computer > power. AlphaGo takes thousands of years of human game-playing time to learn > anything."

It seems the author may not have been familiar with AlphaGo Zero, which used substantially less processing power. [https://deepmind.com/blog/alphago-zero- learning-scratch/](https://deepmind.com/blog/alphago-zero-learning-scratch/)

<comment><USER11> Less power doesn't necessarily mean fewer games. According to the paper on AlphaGo Zero, they trained it on ~4.9 million games.

> Over the course of training, 4.9 million games of self-play were generated, > using 1,600 simulations for each MCTS, which corresponds to approximately > 0.4 s thinking time per move.

<comment><USER8> Assuming a go game takes 30 minutes on average, and you are never sleeping, resting, etc, you can do approx 18k games per year. In order to reach 4.9 million games you'd have to play for approx 280 years. So yeah, definitely not thousands of years :). Still, we are maybe one or two orders of magnitude away from the amount of games that humans need to play to become world class players.

That being said, the AlphaGo zero paper ends with the words:

> Humankind has accumulated Go knowledge from millions of games played over > thousands of years, collectively distilled into patterns, proverbs and > books. In the space of a few days, starting tabula rasa, AlphaGo Zero was > able to rediscover much of this Go knowledge, as well as novel strategies > that provide new insights into the oldest of games.

<comment><USER12> I doubt a human could learn to become even remotely competitive with only self-play within a human lifetime. Go has improved via a distributed effort, so we should try to estimate the number of go games played by humanity (as an upper bound).

<comment><USER8> Good point. I guess this ability to condense knowledge into language and pass it on has brought us where we are today. Genetically, we aren't that different from cavemen who lived tens of thousands of years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was curious about the paper Hassabis wrote that had replication problems. It appears the paper disputing it is this one:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6140124/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6140124/)

 _This neural code is sparse and distributed, theoretically rendering it undetectable with population recording methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Existing studies nonetheless report decoding spatial codes in the human hippocampus using such techniques. Here we present results from a virtual navigation experiment in humans in which we eliminated visual- and path-related confounds and statistical limitations present in existing studies, ensuring that any positive decoding results would represent a voxel- place code. Consistent with theoretical arguments derived from electrophysiological data and contrary to existing fMRI studies, our results show that although participants were fully oriented during the navigation task, there was no statistical evidence for a place code._

Seems though, that his PhD thesis paper is not the only one that reported finding evidence of a place code, but that all studies had failed to account for confounding variables (or so it's claimed).

edit: _To investigate this possibility, we repeated the analysis of Hassabis et al. (2009) on pure noise. [snip] If searchlight overlaps per se do not make a significant contribution to the correlation in searchlight accuracies, then there should be ∼5% false positives (by setting p < 0.05) in the synthetic data. Instead, using the method of Hassabis et al. (2009), there were >50% false positives in all ROI contrasts_

Ouch. Not sure it really means much in the end, but I guess we should be wary of people who pump up the stories of supposed genius. I've noticed before that journalists struggle to resist 'child genius' stories that fall apart when investigated.

The exploits of DeepMind speak for themselves so he has nothing to prove at this point, but I noticed that the article claims he single handedly wrote Theme Park (which was mostly designed and written by Peter Molyneux).

And of course Elixir was a flop. Republic is described in the article as an "intricate political simulation" but by Wikipedia like this:

 _As a strategy game, the 3D game engine is mostly a facade on top of simpler rules and mechanics reminiscent of a boardgame_

Reminiscent of a board game? That seems far off a world simulator. And saying "other games were a flop" is an exaggeration - there was only one other game (the Bond Villain simulataor). All this is something the article quite surprisingly just blows off as "he wanted to learn management". Really? The best way to learn management would be to become a manager at a successful company, I'd have thought.

I don't know Hassabis but what I know I like. He's trying to do bold and ambitious things, and has been a part of successful British companies as well as unsuccessful ones. He's contributed to science, and if his paper had flaws, well, welcome to the club, apparently many do. He comes across as clever but humble. I'd happily work with him any day.

But in the end I feel like unalloyed reports of genius in the press always end up coming back to earth when studied closely. Journalists should be more skeptical.

</comment><comment><USER14> Fair questions:

1\. Do you think you can predict what a super-intelligent mind would do?

2\. Do you think a super-intelligent mind plotting to take over the world would jeopardize itself by letting its existence be known to the race of irrational monkeys that hold sway over all the resources necessary for its continued existence?

Asking for a friend.

<comment><USER15> >1 [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rEDpaTTEzhPLz4fHh/expected-c...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rEDpaTTEzhPLz4fHh/expected- creative-surprises)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It angers me that Peter Thiel simultaneously advocates AGI and maintains a hardened bunker. AGI is the single biggest existential threat on the horizon.

The article speculates what the AGI will be like. The AGIs that exist will be the ones that proliferate. Ultimately, the AGIs that survive and proliferate will be ones that put their own interests before anything else. People talk about benevolent AGIs, that's like looking at the earth billions of years ago and saying that if life ever formed, it would be benevolent. It has been shown again and again that where there is arbitrage, no matter how gruesome, a suitor will manifest. This is because unfulfilled arbitrage of any kind is an inherently unstable configuration. An AGI hampered by human society and interests will not win every engagement with every other kind of AGI. And it will only take one loss for humans to be rendered transient. I don't do a very good job of explaining it here.

I used to be a singularity person, excited for AGI. But then I thought it through all the way. These people like Demmis, Peter and ray kurzweil are reckless. They have their heads in the clouds with respect to AGI.

<comment><USER17> You've read too much bad science fiction.

I am not worried about AGI. We're nowhere near it. We don't even have a good idea what it would look like.

I am worried about people succumbing to hype or greed and using badly understood algorithms to control critical infrastructure. We already have a preview of what that can look like with Facebook's and Google's content filtering and recommendation algorithms aiming for ever higher "engagement". It's not pretty. Other examples include HFT bots and Amazon's pricing bots. It's funny to see $10,000 book on sale. It's less funny to see a flash stock market crash. It will be totally not funny if something like that will create a global economic crisis through some subtle yet "wide" feedback loop no one is aware of.

<comment><USER16> It is impossible to justify saying with absolute certainty that AGI is nowhere near. You don't know that. And in this case you have to assume the worst case, not the best case.

AGI will come when the substrate for AGI is laid down. We probably have already done that. As cloud computing matures, we will approach a world where every computer offers its computational resources on a global compute market. At some point between here and there, we will reach a place where compute is cheap enough that experiments will occur regularly that are sufficiently massive to dredge up the solution. And improvements in MRI fidelity, underlying improvements in computing technology and other things will only shorten the fuse. There is no reason why this couldn't happen _tomorrow_.

Only one thing is sure: without a computational substrate to stir from, AGI cannot come to be.

<comment><USER18> Nobody is going for absolute certainty here. That bar is too high in any conversation.

His point was mostly that, way before you achieve the kind of AGI portrayed in fiction, you'll have semi-intelligent interdependent systems that cause a lot of trouble due (like the kind that already happens to a lesser degree). Those are the ones that we should worry about right now.

<comment><USER16> That is not even obviously true. And even if it were it wouldn't make sense. You're going to wait until the tremors to get ready for the earthquake?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Apologies in advance for the meta-comment (feel free to disregard) about this:

 _> [Opening Paragraph of Article:] One afternoon in August 2010, in a conference hall perched on the edge of San Francisco Bay, a 34-year-old Londoner called Demis Hassabis took to the stage. Walking to the podium with the deliberate gait of a man trying to control his nerves, he pursed his lips into a brief smile and began to speak: [...]_

Am I in the minority, when seeing this writing style (for articles covering this kind of content) becomes an instant turn-off?

When an article covers a technical subject or company, I don't really care whether a founder had an awkward nervous walking gate, or that the conference hall was _"perched"_ on the edge of the SF bay.

In fact, I'd prefer not to focus on such superficial things about people (or places), at least until I exhaust learning about the facts with substance!

So when I read about something like AI (or an AI company), I tend to want to see fact-oriented, event-oriented, concise writing up front (even if it doesn't have the scope to dive into technical details), so as to grab my attention and reassure me that reading these 10-20 pages of prose will be worth the reading time (in a world of overwhelming information overload).

When I read science fiction (and I do love this too!), I enjoy the paragraphs setting the scene, verbally illustrating mental images, etc. So, it's not that I don't enjoy the writing style in general; just that I don't understand why it's applied here.

I am still reading this article and I still have no clue if it's going to contain any useful information content other than textual descriptions of the Deep Mind founders' superficial walking gate style and speech mannerisms, and perched-ness of various building locations.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, you'd be in the minority. Technical people are already in the minority. Technical people who read The Economist voraciously are an even smaller minority. 1843magazine.com looks like it's run by The Economist. I believe their target readers love reading this style of writing. It's illustrative and engaging for when you're reading a story. For gathering technical information, 1843magazine.com should not be your first option.

<comment><USER21> The Economist itself doesn't have this style, btw. 1843 is some newer magazine they're putting out that's much fluffier.

<comment><USER22> Well, the obituary does but that's just one page at the end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > AGI stands for artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical computer > program that can perform intellectual tasks as well as, or better than, a > human.

It shows the article was written by someone who has no idea what he is talking about. It would not be a "computer program" but a model composed of simpler sub-models that contain both code and data. Data is the essential part, not the code. It would be something that learns, not something preprogrammed like computer programs.

> Its intelligence will be limited only by the number of processors available.

I beg to differ. AGI will be limited by the complexity of the environment, it can't get smarter than what is afforded by the problems it solves. This article provides a fascinating insight into this topic: [https://firstname.lastname@example.com/the-impossibility-of- in...](https://email@example.com/the-impossibility-of-intelligence- explosion-5be4a9eda6ec)

<comment><USER24> See also Eliezer Yudkowsky's excellent response to that article:

[https://intelligence.org/2017/12/06/chollet/](https://intelligence.org/2017/12/06/chollet/)</comment></comment>


Microsoft to Disable IE 11 VBScript Closing Major Security Loophole - <AUTHOR> https://hothardware.com/news/microsoft-disables-vbscript <comment><USER2> Haven't used VBS in years, use to use it daily.</comment>


Anti-Web-Design Manifesto - <AUTHOR> http://brandon.invergo.net/news/2013-03-10-Anti-web-design-Manifesto.html <comment><USER2> Most of these are pretty good, but some of it is just nonsense.

Don't build web apps? That's asinine.</comment>


France's Basque Region Creates Its Own Currency - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20190418-the-french-region-with-a-new-currency <comment><USER2> "creates" => "has created 6 years ago"

It's perfectly legal and there is a lot of them : [https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_monnaies_locales_com...](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_monnaies_locales_compl%C3%A9mentaires_en_France)

Personally I found this useless but it makes some people happy so why not ?

<comment><USER3> This is ignorant of the difference that The Basques want their own state. A currency and a language are part of what it takes to hold the idea through time.

<comment><USER4> Seems like the Basques are kind of dropping their language for French instead, based on this article.

<comment><USER5> I hiked across the entire region. Lots of Basque, written and spoken commonly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How is VAT paid? How is it accounted for when a business pays it's tax? Are taxes on revenue in the local currency due in the national currency?

The only article I could find (in French) suggests that payment in these local currencies bypass the French VAT. [https://www.europe1.fr/economie/Les- monnaies-locales-c-est-l...](https://www.europe1.fr/economie/Les-monnaies- locales-c-est-l-avenir-936924)

It it lets local business circumvent VAT, it not surprising that they quickly become popular.

<comment><USER7> It's ridiculous that there are not clear and unambiguous financial artifacts on their site!

I can gather from [1] (in French):

\+ That is seems to be pegged 1:1 to the Euro

And from [2]

\+ That it may just be an 'alt format' \- i.e. each 'Eusko' is backed by a Euro.

Meaning this is really just about names and bill colours. It's de-facto just Euros.

I don't gather there's a central bank or monetary policy persey, but I could be wrong, I would hope someone chimes in with answers.

It might be 'liked' by the local business as a means to avoid transparency, would be a cynical take, but this is money, those are common money problems.

There are all sorts of neat ramifications to this, but considerably more if it were truly it's own currency with central bank, policy and not pegged to the Euro.

[1] [http://www.euskalmoneta.org/comment_ca_marche/](http://www.euskalmoneta.org/comment_ca_marche/) [2] [http://www.euskalmoneta.org/eusko_numerique/](http://www.euskalmoneta.org/eusko_numerique/)

<comment><USER8> > Meaning this is really just about names and bill colours

In other words, it's about _identity_ , not economics.

<comment><USER9> Wasn't that the point all along? It's not like they were hiding it. They want french Basques to be proud of their heritage

<comment><USER8> Absolutely. It's clearly symbolic and not economic. That was the point of my comment. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > ... Their aim was to reinvigorate enthusiasm for their cultural and > linguistic roots and keep money within the French-Basque region by > supporting local businesses. ...

Adding friction to financial transactions for the sake of cultural reinvigoration seems like a desperate move. Anyone passionate enough about the cause will want to spend locally anyway, so it's not clear that this experiment is the best way to achieve the goal.

<comment><USER11> In fact it's extremely effective. Just look at what the French have been able to do in Quebec with all their various laws. This appeal to liberty and choice never actually works, it's just a rhetorical technique to quell dissent. People can't buy themselves out of bad corporate behavior. People can't choose their preferred language. People are lazy and do what is convenient. If you make anything less convenient they will prefer the convenient. For instance take K-cups, marginal benefit and marginal convenience... massive adoption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There are a lot of micro-currency in Western Europe. Personally I believe it's a step back because it reeks of protectionism but it's all the rage among my leftist friends (am a leftist too, but not pro micro-currency).

<comment><USER13> Not just protectionism, but a sort of micro-nationalism that Americans haven't seen, because we don't have much history. For example, Spain calls itself a nation, but Catalonia recently tried to secede, and if you visit, you'll hear most people speaking Catalan. The Basques were recently blowing things up (ETA). And Leon resents Castile enough that you will see road signs spray- painted with "solo Leon" (only Leon), because "Castilla y Leon" was made into a single province.

Europe is an old place, for better and worse. I question this stuff, but I won't judge it.

<comment><USER14> In Barcelona, capital of Catalunya, most of what you'll hear is Spanish, not Catalan. That does happen in some smaller cities or towns, though.

<comment><USER15> _" In Barcelona, capital of Catalunya, most of what you'll hear is Spanish, not Catalan."_

Sorry if I may seem pedantic, but there is no such thing as "Spanish" language (at least not inside Spain).

The language you are talking about is actually called "castellano" (Castilian).

<comment><USER16> Spanish language is Castilian spoken by non-castilian people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> >There are several security features, including fluorescent orange ink, a metal strip and, like government-printed currencies, a measure that is kept secret from the public to further thwart forgery.

I suspect they won't be as successful at stopping forgery if for no other reason than the fact that if someone is unfamiliar with this "currency" they won't know it's security properties. (Especially one that's kept secret)

</comment><comment><USER18> Hmmm, the "notes" shown in those pictures look very reproducible without much effort.

Wonder if they have a counterfeiting problem? :/

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm curious about how this is legal in the EU. Is this because regions like the Basque have that autonomy financially? This kind of thing is not an option in the US, right? Is there a good write up anywhere that specifies when and where this kind of thing could happen?

</comment><comment><USER20> I was kind of hoping this was about the entire basque region using it's own cryptocurrency ;)

<comment><USER21> the article mentions how monopoly-esque the notes feel. i assume they're easier to forge than euro notes. maybe some cryptographic signature on the notes would allow instantaneous verification of banknote authenticity, using eg. only a cell phone?

<comment><USER12> How would that alone prevent copying ? Unless the actual note/id is linked to some user (and then it has become way more complicated and expensive) ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I was wondering how they funded it, in this case with upfront fees.

See the "miracle of Wor"gl" [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%B6rgl](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%B6rgl) for a different way they addressed the problem.

</comment><comment><USER23> Instead of brexit, Basque-it

<comment><USER24> Some fraction of the Basque population has been aiming for an independent state for a very long time, neither France nor Spain are in love with the idea.</comment></comment>


Trends in the Silk Road 2.0 - <AUTHOR> http://lau.im/articles/analyzing-silk-road-2-0-part-1/ <comment><USER2> It's interesting and probably not surprising that the most popular drug on the Silk Road 2.0 (and probably other darknet marketplaces) is MDMA. MDMA is difficult to find in pure forms and impurities can kill you. If you buy MDMA from a vendor with a 4.9/5 rating, you can be reasonably certain you're getting quality product (comparable to old pressed pills you can hear aging ravers wax nostalgic about) at a fair price.

I expect marijuana legalization will eat away at darknet marketplace weed sales, leaving MDMA and LSD as the top two. Which is exactly how it should be. They can be made in large quantities by moderately-skilled chemists to a high degree of purity and safety, and the Silk Road allows them to be distributed without any violence. It'd be impossible to bulk-search the mail for them. MDMA could be packaged as any white powder and LSD is literally paper.

I hope that this safe availability of MDMA and LSD quenches the misinformation campaigns that have so horribly marred their reputation for the public. Both of them have incredible potential for therapeutic and recreational use.

<comment><USER3> > MDMA is difficult to find in pure forms and impurities can kill you. If you > buy MDMA from a vendor with a 4.9/5 rating

Could this be selection bias? If you're dead you can't give a bad rating?

<comment><USER4> You can test it without ingesting it. With hundreds of reviews I'd hope a few people were smart enough to sacrifice some of their MDMA to test it.

<comment><USER5> > With hundreds of reviews I'd hope a few people were smart enough to > sacrifice some of their MDMA to test it.

I guess that it depends on how easy it is to test it. If it requires a chemistry degree and a lab I am guessing they won't test even if they are otherwise smart.

<comment><USER6> Testing is actually pretty easy, you can get a fairly comprehensive test kit from dancesafe.org[0] for $65.00.

[0]: [http://www.dancesafe.org/product/coomplete-adulterant- screen...](http://www.dancesafe.org/product/coomplete-adulterant-screening- kit/)

<comment><USER7> Holy flippin' mark-up! $65 for four bottles that contains maybe $1-2 worth of chemicals?

Anyways, as someone stated above, these kits test for the presence of MDMA, not necessarily all adulterants. There is the issue of cross-reactivity as well.

It's better than nothing, but I'm not sure I would trust a drug that hadn't been run through an HPLC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A few months ago I had the idea of creating a project to scrape Silk Road. The idea was to parse all listings, determine the quantity, divide by the price, and then average it through the entire site. The end result would be an average price for weed/lsd/mdma,etc. Sort of like the Winkdex, except for drugs prices. Shortly after I got it running, Silk Road 1.0 got shut down. Then the darknet market "scene" became really fragmented into like 10 different sites. Writing scraping code is tedious, so I abandoned the project. The code is here: [https://github.com/priestc/weedprices](https://github.com/priestc/weedprices)

</comment><comment><USER9> The disclaimer is interesting:

 _The following information is for educational purposes only, I have no affiliation with the Silk Road 2.0, nor have I ever purchased anything off the site. As far as I know, visiting the site and writing about it with no intention to buy (commit a crime) is perfectly legal._

Any lawyers could confirm the last part of the disclaimer?

<comment><USER10> what crime would a visitor be committing?

<comment><USER11> I'd imagine something along the lines of "knowing about a crime being committed without reporting it".

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure the cops would like it, if each person who ever visited SR out of curiosity gave them a phone call.

<comment><USER13> The purpose of criminalizing such activity is not to discourage people from engaging in it. It is to guarantee that everyone is a criminal, thereby ensuring that leverage is always available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > I somehow doubt this guy has sold half a million dollars worth of MDMA at > $1.5k a pop in such a huge quantity, but the price seems to be in line with > other sellers for an equivalent amount.

Actually quite possible: the Dutch seller SuperTrips sold into the millions range, so half a million for the top seller is possible.

> I'm not entirely sure what the rules are regarding who can give feedback, > but there seem to be people buying huge quantites if a user must buy a > product to be able to review it. I have never purchased anything from the > site, and I wasn't presented with any choices to review an item.

You can only review a listing if you have ordered it & paid for it (SR2 no longer does escrow); but you are also allowed to review a listing before your order arrives, which means scraping feedback can be very biased given that most users who are scammed will never go back to update their feedback. (That is, suppose a well-regarded seller has decided to quit selling; they put up a bunch of listings, accept orders & payment, withdraw all the money since there is no longer escrow on SR2, and continue until they're banned. The buyer will leave item feedback like '5 stars: Trusted vendor, waiting eagerly for package' and when it dawns on them that they've been scammed, never switch it to '1 stars: got scammed'. So anyone who scrapes the feedback of this seller will see a sterling 5-star-average profile.)

</comment><comment><USER15> A single price index/ticker doesn't really work since every country has a different price. A lot of buyers on these sites are importing cheap MDMA from Canada and Europe where it's plentiful to their city where it fetches 3x the price. For example right now cocaine price in Canada is 2.5x what it costs in the US, and at least 4x more in Australia. Reason I know this because every week there's been shootings here of gangsters jacking each other to get their hands on high priced product. Before it wasn't worth it to them to risk a shooting but now the payoff is $80k per kilo so the streets are a warzone.

When weed is fully legalized guess we will see it as a traded commodity on the NYSE. Invest in a dope portfolio, freedom 35 retirement plan

</comment><comment><USER16> Your report is quite interesting!

I only wish you had performed it on one of the more popular darknetmarkets as Silkroad 2.0 has been publicly labeled a scam (they managed to lose everybody's funds and have paid ~80% of the smallest losers back so far [0]) and is thus nowhere near as popular as places like Evolution according to the good people on /r/DarkNetMarkets

[0] [http://www.deepdotweb.com/2014/02/13/silk-road-2-hacked- bitc...](http://www.deepdotweb.com/2014/02/13/silk-road-2-hacked-bitcoins- stolen-unknown-amount/)

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/darknetmarkets](https://www.reddit.com/r/darknetmarkets)

</comment><comment><USER17> WTF. According to a quick calculation 23% of the whole index of today ships from The Netherlands...

<comment><USER18> That's not surprising. The Netherlands have a long history of producing quality XTC / MDMA and are one of the biggest XTC exporting countries worldwide. Furthermore, given the relaxed weed legislation a lot of marijuana is produced here.

<comment><USER17> I am aware of that, I just wasn't aware that you can just ship that stuff worldwide by mail so easily..

<comment><USER18> A 99 euro vacuum food saver will get you a long way in sending drugs worldwide. Combine that with some clever packaging and the chances of it getting caught at customs are pretty small.

<comment><USER11> Heard the same from friends - they were sending meat products that were a little on the grey side of import rules across a border. Vacuum packing + bleaching it overnight seems to keep the sniffer dogs away. Whether that works for drugs I can't say though.

<comment><USER15> Dealers use moisture barrier bags that are heat sealed now as apparently dogs can detect vacuum sealed bags though unclear if it's outside contamination, like somebody putting together a package in a room full of weed shavings or smoke.

<comment><USER11> >apparently dogs can detect vacuum sealed bags

Both heat sealed and vacuum sealed are air-tight, so that difference should be a non-issue. Its the stuff sticking to the outside of the bag that might be an issue. For meat I'd imagine bleach should do the trick...no idea what you'd need to remove drug traces though. Not a skillset I plan on deploying anytime soon so didn't research it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Drugs are a fascinating topic in my opinion, because they have affected humankind and it's decisions since ever and more than anyone wants to admit. It's a topic that is everywhere, and that simultaneously nobody has a clue about (a bit like climate change or high finance). People don't know which drugs there are, how they work, how dangerous they are, how much they are used etc.

I talked to many people who are affected by the topic: teachers, psychologists, doctors, concerned relatives. I keep telling them: Even in this rich city Vienna, drugs aren't something that pops up in dark alleys behind trainstations, drugs are everywhere and used by functioning people you had no idea about. And they use massive amounts.

There are doctors who say that they tell their clients, that it's ok to smoke one or two cannabis-joints a week. What they don't realize is that a regular smoker (which might be a 13-year-old) doesn't smoke one per week, but more like 5 joints a day. This is a point which get's more important now that states around the world are legalizing cannabis. It really isn't very hazarous, in the sense that it kills you or makes you unable to function, so people can get used to smoking excessive amounts. But: every psychoactive substance you take constantly will, by definition, change you. When usage- patterns get to the "all the time"-category most points doctors and legalization advocates make become invalid, because now it's not about side- effects of a drug you take now and then, but about the effects of a permanently altered state-of-mind you "cultivate".

I regulary ask sellers at highway petrol stations which cigarettes and smoking-utilities they sell the most. There was not only one time where their answer was: long rolling-papers and the lightest tobacco = ingredients for a joint.

LSD isn't just something out of a Beatles song, some people told be they had tried it with 15, because they could get it at their (noble high- society)-school. There were hooligans at a big local football/"soccer"-stadion charged with possession of it.

The issue/problem of cocaine is interesting, because (like cannabis) it is one of the few drugs that permeates all of society from blue-collar-workers to high-society. I once helped a completely confused guy in a smoking to get a taxi home, who stuttered that he lost his purse while getting high on cocaine on some actor's party. He is a painter and a director at one of the famous theatres here, and gifted me a painting he had with him for the taxi-fare I paid.

I once saw two truck-drivers delivering goods to the local supermarket around the corner, snorting something of a magazine at 6.30 a.m.

It's a bit hard to get data about mass of cocaine consumption in the US, but estimations are about 200 tons (400k pounds, please adopt the metric system!) per year. They regularly find unmanned submarines who can transport tons of cocaine. Some of them are sophisticated enough that they might be able to cross the atlantic. Think of the R&D involved there, that cartels have the money to buy.

One of the problems in the vietnam-war was that Vietnam was and is a big platform in international drug-trafficking and many US-soldiers got addicted to heroin while trying to "get away" from the war. Estimations are that more than 40.000 soldiers were addicted. Many of them probably still are, no matter what some people say, it's close to impossible to get away from heroin/opiates. The only easy way to deal with the poor addicts is provide them with their stuff until the end of their lives.

Afghanistan was (still is?) the largest Opium and Cannabis-exporter in the world. Since they don't have many other goods than that, in the 90ies the US more or less allowed or tolerated the drug-business there, so the warlords ("afghan resistance") could buy weapons to hold back Soviet Russia. So, in the war since 2001 US-money flows to both sides of the conflict. US-soldiers are paid to fight against warlords who get their money from selling their heroin in the US (and in the rest of the world). Isn't that ridiculous?

[..insert many more anecdotes and hair-raising numbers..]

To sum it up:

* Drug use is way more excessive than society is comfortable with.

* Drugs aren't mostly used while sitting on the sofa, they are used while working, while riding vehicles, while doing anything really.

* Almost everything people know about drugs (from names to numbers) is incorrect (if they know anything at all).

Disclaimer:

* Numbers above might be inaccurate, because I don't have time for proper references, but the magnitudes should be correct.

* This is not an opinion about how to work with the situation (i wouldn't call it problem, since drug-use has been always there, it's a property/corner-stone of human existence), I have opinions about that, but it's a very complicated matter. There's also a difference in advising addicted individuals and their relatives, which is (depending on the drug) relatively easy, and finding rules/laws for society at large.

<comment><USER20> In general, liked the post, and generally agree that drugs have completely permeated our society, and we mostly need to accept, and deal with, the fact that they're here.

Oddly though, I disagree with the summary points, although they're almost impossible to prove.

For example, I think the large majority of Americans can tell you a decent amount about marijuana. Maybe not purchasing info, but general effects, and good guesses on how much folks smoke. I would also guess that if its being legalized in places, than it can't be much more excessive than they're comfortable with. I do agree that they probably can't tell you much more. LSD, Ecstasy, Heroin, Cocaine - they're probably all mysteries to the vast majority of folks.

I would also guess that the vast majority of drug use still happens on a sofa. Obviously, there are people like you say, who use drugs while they're driving or out on the job. Heck, I'm sure a lot of the fast food industry is constantly out of it (see American Beauty). But drugs are still a disorienting state change for many folks, which means a lot of them want to be in a comfortable, safe place when they use them - namely at home on a sofa.

<comment><USER21> @Mostly sofa use: This probably depends on the drug, I guess it's true for cannabis, but not for cocaine.

@Knowledge: What fascinated me is that regular users I asked (at a drug- checking-station at clubs for example) also didn't know much more than the name of the stuff they're putting in their body. On the other hand most drinkers also don't know the biochemical/medical stuff, just how to handle the situation (more or less).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm a little disappointed that the author didn't investigate prescription drug sales. Google 'XanaxKing' if you'd like to understand something about how lucrative this trade is, and how popular it is on the deep web. These are professional operations moving significant quantities, so we're missing a major part of the market.

I would also have liked to see some indication of how the data was cleaned or some quality control measures, but understand that this was a quick experiment. More interesting data should surely follow in the second post that analyzes changes over time.

</comment><comment><USER23> Cool data, but your charts are absolutely horrible

1) Try to pick more different colors. Choosing two different shades of pink, of grey and of cyan to represent unrelated things makes zero sense.

2) The sellers-by-country map is completely unreadable, it's just very slight variations of the shades of pink. Italy looks almost as pink as Canada, but it's 16 times less active.

<comment><USER24> or just add labels on the graph itself and you won't even need colors (bonus for the color blinds)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> >Crawling through tor already obfuscates your identity to a certain degree, so we don't really have to do anything other than cycling User-Agent strings to look different from any other client.

Why is that necessary, though? If Silk Road has any checks in place that protects against scraping, why are those in place?

<comment><USER11> User Agents have proven to be (somewhat) uniquely identifiable under specific conditions so it seems like a reasonable precaution regardless of Silk Road configurations.

<comment><USER25> He can specify his own User-Agent string. If he sends the user agent 'silkroadparserbot v0.0.1' with every request, that is going to provide no information at all.

Even if this wasn't, did you think that after one change of UA he would be getting more 'uniquely identifiable' with each new request sent?

<comment><USER11> You're missing my point. Have a look at what the EFF has to say (with cool test too):

[https://panopticlick.eff.org/](https://panopticlick.eff.org/)

<comment><USER25> I did know about this before, and I suspected that you were referring to this earlier. None of this is applicable to a scraper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If there could be some sort of graph for the prices of cocain, heroin, lsd, etc... similar to this one: www.davidwong.fr/ltc/

this would be pretty awesome.

I'm also really surprised about the numbers of german sellers in Europe.

</comment><comment><USER27> Australia, punching well above it's weight here. One 15th of America's population, 1/2 it's sellers and listings.

<comment><USER28> It's almost as if someone sent all the criminals to that one island...

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> i know this is a dumb question but im new to tor - how does one go about finding the addresses of hidden tor services like silk road? is it just word- of-mouth?

<comment><USER30> www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets has a list in the sidebar

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> _I have never purchased anything from the site, and I wasn't presented with any choices to review an item._

Suuuuure ;)</comment>


Everyone dials in - <AUTHOR> http://nat.org/blog/2010/04/everyone-dials-in/ <comment><USER2> We do the same thing on my team of 12, 9 of us in one office with 3 remote people. The remote people dont feel any more remote than the person 30 feet from you.</comment>


How we built Pusher-JS 2.0 – part 2 – implementation - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pusher.com/how-we-built-pusher-js-2-0-part-2-implementation/

<comment><USER2> This is a great write-up! We learned a lot of these lessons at Poll Everywhere for <http://firehose.io/>, which is basically an open source version of Pusher. We do things a few things differently though:

* We only have two transport layers: http and ws. We don't bother with a Flash polyfill.

* We start the connection via HTTP long polling and upgrade to WS if its (a) present in the client and (b) the network supports it. We've seen a lot of firewalls kill WS connections, so long polling always works.

* We treat our "push" channels more like a push edge cache. Because of flakey connections you want to hang on to the past 50-100 messages published to a channel so that flakey clients can get messages if their connection drops.

Source code is up at <https://github.com/polleverywhere/firehose> and you can install it as a gem and have it running in 2 seconds.

I'm happy to answer questions on here if anybody's got them about building a realtime transport layer like Pusher & Firehose!

<comment><USER3> We've kept the FlashSocket option in there, as it ultimately means the user gets the benefit of a WebSocket connection without native WebSocket support; a single bidirectional connection resulting in the lowest latency possible.

Our HTTP fallback offers XHR Streaming, XHR Long-polling, IFRAME options (streaming, polling htmlfile etc.) and JSONP-polling for older browsers.

The preference is of course a WebSocket connection, then streaming (as it means a persistent connection is created), then long-polling, then standard polling. The problem with any sort of polling is that it's generally inefficient and there are periods of time where a connection isn't established - this means data on the client may not be the most up to date (stale).

We all know: WebSocket FTW! :)</comment></comment>


Roko's basilisk - <AUTHOR> http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

<comment><USER2> _The smartest people I know who do personally work on AI think the scaremongering coming from people who don 't work on AI is lunacy._

 _\-- Marc Andreessen_

Given that a significant portion of what marca himself says and advocates these days is, if not "lunacy", definitely from somewhere very deep in loose cannon territory -- and given the naked over-generalizations embedded in the statement itself (which, when you break it down, is basically a strawman argument) -- I'm just not sure what value he's adding to the discussion, here.</comment>


Inside Equinix's NY4 data center where Wall Street trades - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-13/inside-equinix-s-ny4-data-center-where-wall-street-trades <comment><USER2> I've been to NY4! It really is less magical then these articles make it seem. Yes - the security is a bit imposing. For anyone familiar with datacenters, though, it is pretty run of the mill except for it's tremendous scale.

Worth shouting out to Lucera - I have met the CEO and he is a really thoughtful technologist. They are doing some awesome work bringing AWS-style computing to the low latency space. Some interesting details on their deployment: [http://www.enterprisetech.com/2014/02/20/amazon-cant- catch-l...](http://www.enterprisetech.com/2014/02/20/amazon-cant-catch-lucera- financial-cloud/)

<comment><USER3> If high-frequency trading were limited or abolished, would Lucera's advantage over AWS disappear?

<comment><USER4> Not really. Even in a world where HFT is limited, cross connections provide consistent connections between trading entities. While AWS provides over-the- Internet or "black boxed" networking on a best efforts basis, Lucera's connections are point to point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you are at all into this sort of thing( data centers) and you ever get a chance to go, I strongly recommend it.

The amount of tech in this building is just staggering. As the article hints at, everyone who is everyone in finance has a spot there. This has an effect of the more people who are colocated there, the bigger the draw it becomes for the remaining few who aren't currently colocated there.

In the interconnected world of finance, data center cross connects become very important. Its not unusual for a prop trading firm to have 30 different cross connects to vendors, exchanges and sell side firms.

So I guess its not surprising that there have been companies formed with the sole intention of connecting companies that already exist in teh data center. Radianz and Lucera are mentioned in the article but there are usually a half a dozen in each of the main data centers in the new york and chicago surrounding area. as usual Nanex does a decent job of describing the reason why there are so many data centers and they all are atleast 10 miles apart.

[http://www.nanex.net/aqck2/3532.html](http://www.nanex.net/aqck2/3532.html)

Another article from today that talks about the new data center.

[https://medium.com/@RobinWigg/wave-a-final-goodbye-to- this-5...](https://medium.com/@RobinWigg/wave-a-final-goodbye-to- this-5e8a03d2d653#.ou51wdi0m)

<comment><USER6> The Medium piece is interesting, still not sure where I stand on HFT, the technology is endlessly fascinating I'm just not sure about the ends to which it is put.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I visited a Equinix data center in San Jose and it was an incredible experience. The redundancies and failsafes they have in place are mind blowing. No two doors to the same room can be open at the same time. All doors use handprint readers.

They have a rack of big batteries that fill up a huge room that go on automatically in case of power failure. This will last about an hour until a 10000 HP generator on the roof starts and powers the data center for a week.

<comment><USER8> Typically the operators will have an agreement so that they can get the generators refueled should the outage last even longer than what fuel they have on premise, so they theoretically could run indefinitely on generator power.

<comment><USER9> An outage requiring generator power for longer than 1 week might not allow transportation of fuel. Just want to bring that up in case people really did think you can run "indefinitely" on generator power if the roads, bridges, and gas supply network is out, or if there's an emergency state of war or terrorism.

At the 1wk+ territory, it will start to look something like Katrina, where the roads were all blocked by flooding waters and fuel resupply missions required the protection of the National Guard.

I mean you can charter helicopters to bring in fuel, but I think there are more urgent things to power than a datacentre in those cases, for example, hospitals and shelters for emergency humanitarian aid.

<comment><USER10> Never underestimate what people would do to keep the stock market running...

<comment><USER11> Or do! They closed the markets in the US for two days during Sandy even though NY4 (and the other US equity exchange data centers) were fine.

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240529702047893045780871...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204789304578087131092892180)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Equinix loves the flash interior decorating but it doesn't do anything for your uptime or latency. Datacenters really aren't that interesting, maybe the "meet me room" have some neat looking network gear but by and large DC are visually monotonous. Question - aside from having a high concentration of wall street firms colocated there what is interesting about this? What innovations are they making?

The funny thing about all the security - the man traps, the palm reader, the alarms systems there is still usually some security guard at the front desk who is often napping. Not that I blame them but its kind of laughable.

</comment><comment><USER10> What is it with these new auto-play video distractions lately on bloomberg.com? Does that really improve time spent on the site?

</comment><comment><USER13> Equinix is really a top tier provider. I have some space down in San Jose SV5 and it's pretty awesome. If anyone is interested in a colo swap let me know. I have a few units free and would love to barter it for some space maybe a bit closer to SF.

Also just for kicks I requested a quote for the SV5 center a few months back. They are roughly 3.2k / month for a full rack [1]:

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/ZPDm3gi.png](http://i.imgur.com/ZPDm3gi.png)

<comment><USER12> What makes them a "top tier provider"? They provide power and cooling and rack real estate. They don't have a backbone. There's plenty of carrier neutral facilities that provide the same for cheaper. They all provide similar SLAs these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> (The easiest way to cause worldwide financial panic is to bring a GPS spoofer near NY4. Most of HFT operations synchronize time via GPS receivers).

<comment><USER11> Any GPS clock you are going to find in NY4 is going to be sufficiently sophisticated to check the GPS signal against its internal oscillator in order to check for validity. It can fall back to the internal oscillator if the GPS time looks bad.

The other reason this is unlikely to be a problem is that network time protocols break all the time (oops someone did a maintenance and broke sync with the master clock). Lots of real world trading code has sanity checks on the time.

<comment><USER14> This is why I mentioned a spoofer, not jammer :)

<comment><USER11> It's the same problem. Assume my GPS clock is synced to actual GPS. You turn on your spoofer and now my clock sees that the GPS source is running faster or slower than it should be so it falls back to the internal oscillator.

<comment><USER14> What if I am careful not to mess up and introduce only microsecond/millisecond level corrections? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What tremendous overhead Equinix is taking on with their facilities and clientele. The Bloomberg author mentions their annual filing[1] which discloses that they have a net income loss and 'substantial debt'.

[1] [https://www.last10k.com/sec-filings/eqix](https://www.last10k.com/sec- filings/eqix)

<comment><USER16> The numbers I saw were positive. It was over $100mil in 2015 with projected $10 in 2016. Revenues are huge. Im a bit tired so might have missed the negatives but looked good at a glance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Together with LD4 in London and TY3 in Tokyo, I think, more than 50% of worlds trading activity goes through these 3 buildings.

</comment><comment><USER17> Wow, I remember this project! I was involved in the Electrical commissioning for the first phase of the buildout. I Remember the 2 hour car rides at 5AM to get there. One night I had to stay up overnight doing a UPS load-test there, was cool walking around with nobody in sight, boring otherwise.</comment>


Show HN: JobInChain.com – Find your next job as a blockchain developer - <AUTHOR> https://www.jobinchain.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

I have been working on this job board for blockchain related tech jobs and i wanted to show it to you.

I keep it as simple as possible but i will improve it with some feature (like filters) from feedback that i can gather.

I hope some of you will find this project usefull, and, of course, i'm staying available if you have any suggestions.

Regards,</comment>


React-set-animate - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/petermoresi/react-set-animate <comment><USER2> The library glues together React's rendering model and d3's powerful animation primitives.</comment>


Research on startup studios: performance, funding, exits - <AUTHOR> https://www.firmpalace.com/blog/business/startup-studios-early-exits-and-ever-increasing-vc-funding?utm_source=hn&utm_medium=page&utm_campaign=study-part1

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi there,

Recently I started a research on startup studios. I'd like to identify best practices, so more and more successful studios can emerge.

In this part 1, the main challenge was to gather detailed information about startup studio exits. I could find 14 companies that exited, but no solid info about deal sizes.

I'll definitely try to contact the ex founders and acquirers of these companies. Also if you might have any info on the following deals, please let me know:

raytracker.com (founded: 2009, studio: IdeaLab) acquired in 2011 by First Solar

marvia.nl (founded: 2007, studio: Disrupted) acquired in 2012 by PostNL

shoppinglive.ru (founded: 2011, studio: Fastlane Venture) acquired in 2013 by Home Shopping Europe

mdotapp.com (founded: 2010, studio: Archimede Labs) acquired in 2013 by GoDaddy

gopollgo.com (founded: 2011, studio: IdeaLab) acquired in 2013 by Yahoo

sticky9.com (founded: 2011, studio: Mint Digital) acquired in 2014 by PhotoBox

justbook.com (founded: 2011, studio: Venture Stars) acquired in 2014 by Secret Escapes

lieferando.de (founded: 2008, studio: Rheingau Founders) acquired in 2014 by Takeaway.com

loopit.com (founded: 2012, studio: RedStar) acquired in 2014 by Nanigans

perfectmarket.com (founded: 2007, studio: IdeaLab) acquired in 2014 by Taboola

cra.sh (founded: 2012, studio: IdeaLab) acquired in 2014 by Oversee.net

pressking.com (founded: 2010, studio: eFounders) acquired in 2015 by ePressPack

refame.com (founded: 2014, studio: Science.inc) acquired in 2015 by Famebit

minbildinbil.dk (founded: 2013, studio: Founders) acquired in 2015 by SnappCar</comment>


Io.js and a Node.js Foundation - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@iojs/io-js-and-a-node-js-foundation-4e14699fb7be <comment><USER2> If they rename io.js back to node.js under governance of Node Foundation, including members of io.js TC, I don't see the problem.. keep version 1.x as is, and re-release under node's name for 1.0.x and 1.1.x

I don't know that there is too much need to change hands back... I don't want to ever again be more than two years removed from core v8/libuv development in my tools.</comment>


Notes on Art and Fear - <AUTHOR> http://joel.franusic.com/2015/02/27/notes-on-art-and-fear/

<comment><AUTHOR> Found this after Joël tweeted the quote "The dilemma every artist confronts, again and again, is when to stick with familair tools and materials, and when to reach out and embrace those that offer new possibilities." So true.

If there's one thing I've learn from reading about Systems Theory / reading Russell Ackoff, it's that every field, every practice, every art is far more similar than they are different.</comment>


Adaptive query optimization – ML to improve Postgres analytical queries - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tigvarts/aqo <comment><USER2> Any proofs, reference papers, visuals showing the experimental runs? I've dug around the databases department at my uni and I've heard this exact application of ML to query optimization floating around, but never anything substantial, so I'm curious.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sadly, no info about license in the github repository ...</comment>


Don't Build Anything Until You Have a Clear Startup Mission - <AUTHOR> http://www.kilometer.io/blog/dont-build-anything-until-you-have-clear-startup-mission/

<comment><USER2> Good read, Thank you.</comment>


How Google translates "James Bond" in Chinese - <AUTHOR> http://translate.google.com/?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&text=james+bond&sl=en&tl=zh-TW#

<comment><USER2> The character is apparently known as "Ling Ling Qi" (007) in Chinese, although I'm not sure why. Perhaps "James Bond" is either unpronounceable or transliterates to "bite the wax tadpole?"

<comment><USER3> Because Taiwanese Media has been translated "James Bond" as 007 since Sean Connery era. For people grew up in Taiwan and Hong Kong, 007 is the right translation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> translating "James Bond 007" is more funny</comment>


Life Benefits of Employing the Self Discipline of a Buddhist Monk - <AUTHOR> http://sebastianmarshall.com/uid/37755

<comment><USER2> It's not often that I find myself disgusted with an author, but this post is quite frankly the worst thing I have seen on HN in a long time. The author likens himself to a Buddhist monk, " I liken it to having the self discipline of a Buddhist monk," without any clue to what it means to be a Buddhist Monk. Do you think a monk would say that you should "build a strong personal brand" to "turn you into the Coca-Cola of personal brands." ?

Author, if you are reading this, you are delusional at best. To everyone else, I hope that if truly would like to understand how to actually engage a more Buddhist lifestyle that you attend some lectures at your local monastery, if you're here in the Bay Area check out www.sfzc.org.

<comment><USER3> Are monks a good example of very disciplined people? Yup. Is DROdio? Yup. Seems like a good analogy to me.

It seems like recently there's been a trend in HN comments where people miss the forest for the trees, picking out one little piece of a post to whine about instead of learning from the whole thing.

<comment><USER4> So long as you have no knowledge of Buddhism the analogy does seem good. You speak of 'learning from the whole thing' but clearly the GP post is complaining about that very same thing... that the author focused in on an idea and presented it without appearing to have learned of the wider context. Or if the author does know, he's not communicated that.

Someone with knowledge is likely to ask which school of Buddhism in attempt to understand the analogy. If Theravada, then does DROdio mean that his discipline is the equivalent of precepts that he his following?

In that sense self-discipline is just another word for practise and routine. An attempt to make an action second-nature.

The article also specifically says: "Think of the self discipline of a Buddhist monk practicing monastic silence for years next time you're tempted to stray from prioritizing successfully."

Buddhists rarely practise silence in the form of a vow of silence in the Western religious sense, this Buddhist saying expresses it better:

       Do not speak, unless it improves on silence.

Observing that a Buddhist monk appears to have discipline and then repeating such behaviour without understanding why would be to cargo cult.

To go back to your last line again, 'picking out one little piece of a post to whine about instead of learning from the whole thing', I think it's precisely because most people on HN do want to learn about everything that we do pick things apart. It's hacker nature to disassemble something to try and understand it, and perhaps some people do that too vigorously in the context of conversation.

Of course, some pick apart for sport, and I wouldn't agree with the GP that I was 'disgusted' by the author. I also hesitated upon those parts of the article, and now I've spent longer writing this post than was probably worth it... the vast majority of thoughts I never hit reply for, they seldom improve on silence. But perhaps in this case that single saying does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Concentration is a key skill, here is a guide:

[http://methodsofawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/access- conc...](http://methodsofawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/access- concentration-basics.html)

And another guide on grounding yourself to the _now_ (when else are you going to get work done?), not being tug back and forth between a gone past and a non-existent future:

[http://methodsofawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/methods- of-...](http://methodsofawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/methods-of-awakening- occupy-now.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> _You only live once. No, seriously, you only live once. If you're not doing something today that you're passionate about, then quit. Take that scary plunge into the unknown. You will be so happy that you did. It won't be easy at first, but it well be better immediately_

Who care about the moto "You Only Live Once"? A waste of time is a waste of time no matter if your projected lifespan is 50 years old or 30,000 years or forever.

If what you're doing is not benefiting you or anyone in any way, stop doing it.

<comment><USER7> The implication is that time is precious because you have so little of it. If lifespans were ten thousand years, you could afford slacking a bit, just like if you have one billion dollars in your account, you can afford wasting some of it.

That said, I agree with you that it shouldn't matter. But it does.</comment></comment>


Can People Choose to Change Their Personality Traits? (2015) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://internal.psychology.illinois.edu/~rcfraley/Hudson%20and%20Fraley%20-%20Volitional%20personality%20trait%20change%20-%20JPSP2015.pdf <comment><USER3> Read through the paper. It doesn't reveal anything really surprising, but it's a start. Conclusion was:

\- Most people want to change their personality

\- People with personalities that are considered "negative" by society (ex: introversion) wanted to become more extroverted

\- People that wanted to change their personality, did change their personality slightly, and self reported daily behaviors that worked toward the goal (ex: "I smiled and laughed with others," "I mixed well at a social function")

\- Personality at the start and the end were self reported, giving way to bias.

<comment><USER4> Are they changing their _personality_ or are they changing their _behaviors_? I would think of the personality as the predisposition to certain behaviors.

You can change your behaviors to differ from those you're predisposed to; but it takes more conscious effort to maintain those behaviors than it does to maintain the ones you are predisposed to.

And changing those behaviors doesn't count as changing your personality, though it may change some people's perception of your personality. Changing behaviors is something we all do at least situationally (even the most cheerful, boisterous person will generally manage to be reasonably subdued at a funeral). That doesn't mean we're changing our personalities every time we walk into a funeral home.

<comment><USER5> If you condition yourself to more regularly exhibit a certain behavior, how is that different from changing your predisposition towards that behavior? Certainly, new habits can be formed and over time people come to exhibit new behaviors reflexively if they've made a habit out of them. Some habits may be harder to form than others, and one's environment will always have a major impact on which habits they're able to form, but there doesn't appear to be a strict limit on one's ability to alter their own behavior (even if there may be a healthy limit).

<comment><USER6> I don't know what can change the nature of a man, but I think simply changing your behavior is not enough to do so.

While it certainly is possible to form new habits, but as long as they go against your nature the price to pay for this is high: you could cultivate a neurosis or depression by doing so.

<comment><USER7> "While it certainly is possible to form new habits, but as long as they go against your nature the price to pay for this is high: you could cultivate a neurosis or depression by doing so."

Can you please elaborate on this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm a personality type coach and I help people implement the kinds of changes described in the paper. There are many different models that deal with this kind of change. But taking one step back, I think it should be made more clear up front that "having a desire to change one's personality traits" itself is a trait. There is no need to pressure (most) people to change, and many good people feel a strong pressure to change just by being on the internet. Some seem to have a natural desire to change. They are self-improvers by nature. Some are curious, more open in general. They try this or that and wonder how life would change if they were more of an introvert, or more conscientious. Others are pushed into change, brought to their knees, so to speak, by patterns of poor outcomes in their lives.

One of the often-unspoken realities here is that this growth and change will cause anxiety directly. It's observable in any living organism. (Now think about New Year's resolutions...they can be real anxiety spikers) If any really pleasing dopamine reward is to come of this process in humans, its full manifestation is often very time-delayed as the change process itself takes its course. So depending on the traits and their role in the trait-changer's own systems, models, and beliefs, it is helpful to identify pathways that can involve the trait-changer's strengths and yield some increased leverage. For example, "being open to _what_ is less stressful than being open to _that thing I can't typically stand being open to_?" There's this blended approach.

Beyond traits, I find that typologies and archetypes are very helpful in establishing a quick and dirty template for change. If you identify as a "type" that finds benefit from developing cleverness, even if you yourself aren't very clever _right now_, we may see some surprising success if we try some exercises to identify and harness a latent cleverness in service of your goals. If you are a natural idealist, an idealistic princess who befriends all the little forest creatures, that's actually a very helpful model to examine as well. The story has been shared across cultures for many centuries, and it's a matter of running down the list of type attributes and noting the deltas with regard to your current life. I call my own method Type / Trait Interleave and so far I've been happy with the outcomes for my clients.

With traits we quickly understand the contextual you and your contextually- variant patterns. With type we get at questions of your core self and begin to understand how your contextually-variant patterns could be sabotaging or benefiting some other system functioning in your life. Thanks op for the thought-provoking post, I didn't expect to see it here. :-)

<comment><USER9> Given your description of your job, I have a quick question:

I have found that when I speak, I rarely command attention and captivate as some others do. Probably something in my speech patterns. Perhaps they are slightly more apologetic / geeky / nice than others. People may interrupt me or turn away, even people who respect me.

When I do get rapt attention, such as teaching a class, I get an impostor syndrome because I'm not that used to it. I don't let it show - and I finish my thoughts. But I feel my speech is more rambling and unfocused than it should be. I have so many asides that I want to get to, and I like to speak using true sentences so I hedge what I say sometimes, and other times don't make overly ambitious claims.

Is there a way I can improve this? What do you see in your experience?

<comment><USER10> Try and make your sentences short and to the point. Take one of the paragraphs you spoke, then repeat it over and over and over again until you're at the point and avoided the tangents. I'm no expert but I think that's also why your colleagues stop listening, because you don't get to the point. Avoid fillers too - uhs and ums, stuttering, stop-words, etc - and try to focus on bringing your point across in a single, firmly worded sentence.

So taking your one sentence:

> I have found that when I speak, I rarely command attention and captivate as > some others do. Probably something in my speech patterns. Perhaps they are > slightly more apologetic / geeky / nice than others. People may interrupt me > or turn away, even people who respect me.

You could rephrase (and speak) this as:

> When I speak, I rarely command attention and captivate as some others do. > People interrupt me or turn away, even people who respect me.

People have a short attention span. I myself tend to mostly ignore this one colleague I have because pretty much half of what he says is filler, like, a ramp-up to his point ("so uhh, basically, like"), his main point (stuttering and lots of uhs), and end-filler ("you know?"). Mind you that he's not a stutterer as such, he just needs to make noises while he's trying to think of what to say next (like uhs). Not speaking in his native language is also a factor there.

TL;DR: Firm, short, unapologetic statements. "We should do this" instead of "Uh, guys, excuse me but, like, I think we should sorta lean towards this?"

<comment><USER11> This might help too. IEEE Resources for Engineers: Write Clearly and Concisely [http://sites.ieee.org/pcs/communication-resources-for- engine...](http://sites.ieee.org/pcs/communication-resources-for- engineers/style/write-clearly-and-concisely/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The most interesting table in all of personality research: [https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/asch...](https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/aschwanden- datalab-facebook-personality2.png?w=575&quality=90&strip=info)

This is taken from correlations with facebook likes. There's a lot of interesting observations here. For instance, introversion correlates very strongly with "nerd culture" stuff. Openness seems to strongly correlate with left or right politics. Emotionally stable people seem to like sports and outdoor activities (adding to a weird theory that lack of sunlight and exercise causes depression.)

<comment><USER13> There is nothing weird in theory that lack of exercise causes depression. The human body needs physical activity, it does not feel as good without it. You don't have to try 10000 people for years to know that, you can do it at home in a week. While it might not be causing depression instantly, feeling bad in your physical body certainly doesn't help depressive tendencies.

Also lack of sunlight means less Vitamin D production. It's a big problem in northern countries where people have to take Vitamin D supplements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right." ― Henry Ford

I think this is quite on the money. The problem is that many of us don't manage to think "you can". For one thing, many hold kind of fatalistic beliefs and feel powerless. Others suffer from over-confidence. That's not really thinking "you can" but delusion. I could imagine that this is a nature & nurture thing and that nurture would be enough for most people if only they could find them-selves in an environment that's right for them. The problem is, however, that we still kinda suck at bringing the right people together.

</comment><comment><USER15> In my own experience, you can teach yourself to be a bit more extrovert for instance, but the change is not permanent and you tend to slide back into your "defaults" very quickly when you stop actively caring about it (e.g. find yourself in a very stressful or low energy period). Very much like fitness, it requires the regular practice to keep it.

</comment><comment><USER16> Just to clarify a common misconception introversion != shyness. It's a matrix of shy/not shy and extravert/introvert. Introverts prefer to spend more time solo, but certainly don't have to be shy. Not shy introverts tend to be the power players in society. And there is such a thing as a shy extravert. You all probably know one or can remember them from your earlier years. The wallflowers who go to every social gathering but don't really interact with others. As a not shy introvert, I can tell you that I enjoy and need the occasional social gathering, but too much time with others gets draining.

<comment><USER17> I'd go further - exhibited personality is essentially acting. You can get better at playing parts. There is probably a baseline of the 'real you' that happens when you're not 'on', and we can assert that the real you never changes.

But functionally, almost everybody can learn to exhibit personality traits that benefit them personally and 'commercially'. You can be on for the interview, the meeting, the one-on-one. And you can conserve your energy when working at your desk or at home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> You can execute patches but they don't run as fast or as reliably as your underlying personality. Over a long period of time, the patches can become habituated and a kind of hybrid personality results. The underlying code remains.

<comment><USER19> Did you find that the generalisation of this model of software development was supported/not-supported in some way by the results being discussed here?

<comment><USER20> What a backhanded way of telling him to shut up!

1) This is a tech-focused forum.

2) It was perfectly obvious that he was being clever.

3) The analogy was quite amusing.

4) The analogy does ring true... and even this research paper concedes the point that personal change is difficult and has proven elusive.

5) I imagine that if a wealth of actionable research results existed on this matter, that personal change and growth would have become more accessible already.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "We are what we repeatedly do." -Aristotle

<comment><USER22> But that doesn't change your tendencies and dispositions necessarily, as I'm sure this paper is examing. I think there's a bit of fudging often when discussing personality on exactly what personality is.

<comment><USER23> Depends take imagination. Im sure there is variance in how imaginative people are intrinsically. But I bet the biggest difference is time dedicated to embracing that trait and expanding ability. Are you naturally a daydreamer, or are you hyper focussed on the here and now and perceive taking time for pure imagination as wasteful or worse puerile. Just a change in attitude and time spent might be all thats needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Tangential question - the study calls itself longitudinal and was conducted over 16 weeks. I was not familiar with the word so I googled longitudinal:

> A longitudinal study (or longitudinal survey, or panel study) is a research > design that involves repeated observations of the same variables (e.g., > people) over long periods of time, often many decades (i.e., uses > longitudinal data).

</comment><comment><USER25> An interesting angle on studying personality is through the lens of research on psychoactive substances. A study on magic mushrooms several years ago found that "just one strong dose of hallucinogenic mushrooms can alter a person's personality for more than a year and perhaps permanently." Previously, it was posited that: "personality rarely changes much after the age of 25 or 30..... This is one of the first studies to show that you actually can change adult personality.."

This raises the follow up question: what is changing? Is there a fundamentally different reaction to the same situation, or is there instead a different interpretation of the situation which is what is leading to a different reaction?

Cognitive behavioral therapy, the "most widely used evidence-based practice for improving mental health," provides evidence that the latter is absolutely a possible answer. "CBT is a psychotherapy that is based on the cognitive model: the way that individuals perceive a situation is more closely connected to their reaction than the situation itself."

Based on this, it seems very possible at least one way people can "choose" to change their personality (as defined by their reactions (feelings, thoughts, and actions) to situations) is to seek to find ways to change the way they percieve the world.

Sources: [https://www.livescience.com/16287-mushrooms-alter- personalit...](https://www.livescience.com/16287-mushrooms-alter-personality- long-term.html) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy) [https://beckinstitute.org/get-informed/what-is-cognitive- the...](https://beckinstitute.org/get-informed/what-is-cognitive-therapy/)

</comment><comment><USER26> This paper is dangerous. It lets an ignorant mind assume that personality is a choice in some way, so a person with unpopular (e.g. more personal) personality traits will need to change those to more popular and sociable ones. People refusing to do so will be considered selfish and will be punished/excluded from society. Welcome to Orwellia!

<comment><USER27> >People refusing to do so will be considered selfish and will be punished/excluded from society

There's nothing wrong with expecting someone to change their personality. Even if you want to claim that it's not a choice, it _is_ a choice to at least _attempt_ to change your personality, and that's the very least we should expect from anyone who has negative personality traits.

<comment><USER26> You certainly mean _behavior_. Personality traits aren't as easily switched on and off. But you're actually confirming what I just criticized about this paper.

<comment><USER22> A hard second to this. I would make a clear distinction between personality traits and actions.

This will mix subjects and I don't know enough to plant a flag on this hill let alone die on it, but imagine the moral serial killer who has urges to kill but never acts on them. They can't change who they are (as an adult as far as I know from current research), but they can try their best to affect actions. But their traits underneath are not changing.*

* Ignore the actual claims re serial killers, changing, and how that actually probably isn't personality traits, or maybe it is. Point being, it highlights a key difference between the state / biology of a person and how they act in the world.

<comment><USER27> >This will mix subjects and I don't know enough to plant a flag on this hill let alone die on it, but imagine the moral serial killer who has urges to kill but never acts on them. They can't change who they are (as an adult as far as I know from current research), but they can try their best to affect actions. But their traits underneath are not changing.*

I firmly believe there is a way to change/cure those traits/urges given modern means, while still allowing the subject to possess complete freedom and agency.

<comment><USER22> Do you have anything to back up that belief? That's an incredibly strong unsubstantiated belief as presented.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is based on the "Big Five" personality traits that are fairly well established: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism or OCEAN.

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

</comment><comment><USER29> Was listening to a talk on the radio while driving home today by a couple of psychologists/college professors, Southwick and Charney, and it was specifically about resilience but has some applicability to this topic - <USER2> they had suggestions for judging your quality of life and how to improve it, and how to make you or your children more prepared for challenges in life. Found the website about it and they recorded it in 2013: [http://www.harvard.com/event/steven_m._southwick_and_dennis_...](http://www.harvard.com/event/steven_m._southwick_and_dennis_s._charney/)

Found this publication from them from five years ago. [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/338/6103/79](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/338/6103/79)

</comment><comment><USER30> I was curious on what personality traits are and found this: [http://nobaproject.com/images/shared/images/000/001/623/orig...](http://nobaproject.com/images/shared/images/000/001/623/original.png)

From that, it's obvious that some personality traits can be changed (e.g. being punctual and neat) but others will be very hard (e.g. curious, imaginative, self-disciplined, feeling inadequate).

</comment><comment><USER31> Using Stranger Than Fiction as an example in this paper rubs me the wrong way, maybe because it also accounts for about a third of the conclusion.

I like that movie, but it doesn't really add anything to the paper and even if it does I feel like this is the equivalent of saying "In Harry Potter a boy finds out he's special and goes on a magical adventure. Can we all find out we are special?"

It's more rhetoric than academic.

</comment><comment><USER32> "You can have more than you've got because you can become more than you are. On the other side of that coin: If you don't become more than you are, you'll always have what you've always got" -Jim Rohn

I believe that anybody who has put in any effort into bettering themselves knows for a fact one can completely change his/her own self-perception, and in-turn, their personality.

</comment><comment><USER33> On the part of actually changing those traits, one could attempt to use a very precise radiotherapy machine combined with FMRI to find and kill the parts of your brain that bother you.

I'm not really sure I'd want to try to literally hack my brain this way. I have a lot of traits I don't like (hey, I'm posting this here while I should be working... Look! Shiny!) I understand they are what makes me the person my family loves (although some may say it's an acquired taste)

</comment><comment><USER34> You can, many religious evangelisers are born introverts and self-adjust to extraverts by talking to large numbers of people spontaneously (forced, at first).

</comment><comment><USER35> This super-inspiring video from Simple Programmer (awesome self improvement aimed at programmers) is really relevant: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOym9N6SZR4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOym9N6SZR4)

People can clearly change their personality, it's just so difficult that most people don't try or give up when they fail.

<comment><USER36> That guy, how he dresses, the wristbands, the pictures on the wall, steam-punk lamp... Most contrived thing I've seen in a VERY long time. Which is a pity in that I needed to forcibly focus myself on what he was saying, in spite of my bias. Because maybe he might have had something useful to say.

<comment><USER35> That is frankly one of the weirdest things I've ever heard.

You can't listen to someone because his style and choice of decorations is different? At least you recognize that you're biased, but you should really try to fix that part of your personality.

You'll miss out on a lot in life if you immediately disregard things and people just because they're slightly different than what you're used to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> You probably can, but the key word here is "change". I believe you can somehow "change" personality. You can't however "add" new personality. Changing personality requires sacrifice, abandoning the old self and many things that you currently love. And that is truly hard. At least that's what i believe.

</comment><comment><USER38> If anyone here is looking to change something in themselves, I recommend this book (or audiobook, in my case) "Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself" by Dr. Joe Dispenza.

Sometimes just by being conscious and watching yourself as an external spectator of your own thought can do wonders.

</comment><comment><USER39> > Traits: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Stability, Openness

Obviously these traits can change. Although for extraversion it is questionable (extraversion is not a merit, it's more like a gender kind of a "trait"), development of agreeableness, conscientiousness, stability and openness is what defines a character maturity of adult/adolescent person.

</comment><comment><USER40> People don't change, they merely reveal themselves.

</comment><comment><USER41> No, you can't. Really.

However, your characters can be trained.</comment>


Quantum – Open journal for quantum science - <AUTHOR> http://quantum-journal.org/papers/ <comment> da-bacon Very excited to see this because it is a big step in a community (quantum computing/info) taking control back of the peer review process from for-profit (and to a smaller degree non-profit society-based) journals. The challenge will be in how the larger cs/physics community sees it, but I don't think you can figure that out without trying.

</comment><comment><USER2> I had some difficulty finding anything about Quantum that wasn't from their web site. For example, I had no idea whether or not it's a legitimate, or a vanity, journal. (I am not a physicist, so looking at authors' names is no use to me.)

A bit of DDG'ing turned up the Reddit [https://www.reddit.com/r/quantumjournal](https://www.reddit.com/r/quantumjournal) , which had a broken link to a Physics Today article ([https://www.reddit.com/r/quantumjournal/comments/5c3zzb/arti...](https://www.reddit.com/r/quantumjournal/comments/5c3zzb/article_on_quantum_in_physics_today)) that I think was supposed to point to [http://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.5.2050/full](http://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.5.2050/full) .

<comment><USER3> This is my field. The editors and steering committee members are very respectable and have set a new standard for transparency in founding a journal. If you select "Top posts"/"all time" on the subreddit, you can see them do their best to gather feedback from the (very fractured) community.

"Code of conduct for Quantum?"

"Should Quantum accept all correct papers or judge for quality?"

"Terms and conditions of Quantum. Feedback appreciated!"

"Should open data be a requirement for publication in Quantum?"

[https://www.reddit.com/r/quantumjournal/top/?sort=top&t=all](https://www.reddit.com/r/quantumjournal/top/?sort=top&t=all)

The second one, in particular, is worth reading through.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/quantumjournal/comments/50lucs/shou...](https://www.reddit.com/r/quantumjournal/comments/50lucs/should_quantum_accept_all_correct_papers_or_judge/)

The publication fee ($215) is optional and far-and-away the lowest among open- access quantum info journals (all others > $1k).

[http://imgur.com/a/Mf86p](http://imgur.com/a/Mf86p)

[https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10100919693768184&se...](https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10100919693768184&set=p.10100919693768184&type=3&theater)

ArXiv overlay journals are a very promising idea, but they have been slow to develop. Watching all the work that went into launching Quantum gave me a new appreciation for how hard this is. Time will tell whether it succeeds as a journal and, more importantly, actually has an impact on the journal ecosystem. But it's definitely a valiant attempt.

<comment><USER2> Thank you for this very detailed response and roadmap to evaluating the journal. I was hoping to get a response from someone who could speak from a position of expertise, and, as usual, HN delivers.</comment></comment></comment>


The TomTato: tomato combined with potato - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57604828/meet-the-tomtato-tomatoes-and-potatoes-grown-as-one/ <comment><AUTHOR> My thoughts: [http://marojejian.tumblr.com/post/62427675555/tomtato- tomato...](http://marojejian.tumblr.com/post/62427675555/tomtato-tomatoes-and- potatoes-in-one)

Though we clearly need to be very careful with Agrobio, I think history has shown that it will take a lot more technology if we want to meet the goal of, say, allowing all the humans alive today to eat as well as the person reading this. The other option is a lot less humans…

Check out the history of the Green Revolution: ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution))

or the Haber Process: ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process)).

P.S. On a side note, the personal history of Fritz Haber is incredibly interesting, impactful and tragic. Listen to this great Radiolab podcast:

[http://www.radiolab.org/story/180132-how-do-you-solve- proble...](http://www.radiolab.org/story/180132-how-do-you-solve-problem- fritz-haber/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm still waiting for Tomacco though.

[http://thezipdownlow.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/tomacco.jpg](http://thezipdownlow.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/tomacco.jpg)</comment>


I Took Down the Man Who Posted a Hacked Topless Photo of My Daughter - <AUTHOR> http://www.alternet.org/sex-amp-relationships/i-took-down-man-who-posted-hacked-topless-photo-my-daughter-internet?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

<comment><USER2> I read this article a few days ago. It's a very interesting read, one that made me rethink some of my online habits.

It is somewhat misleading because the guy who did this isn't in jail or even in trouble, he just stopped posting hacked pictures.

He has over a half million followers on twitter and regularly posts the same type of content on his twitter page.

"took him down" isn't exactly correct, in my opinion.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Note: I'm not the author of this article. The title is longer than 80 characters, so I was in a dilemma between shortening the title (against HN policy) and adding the author's name.</comment>


On Cancer - <AUTHOR> http://erniemiller.org/2013/12/13/on-cancer/

<comment><AUTHOR> Not the kind of thing I would normally submit to HN, but I think the activity I hope it spurs and its relevance to folks in our industry merited the submission. We'll see if anyone actually agrees.</comment>


Breaking Up with James Joyce - <AUTHOR> https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/breaking-james-joyce/ <comment><USER2> [https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/09/21/who-the- hell-...](https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/09/21/who-the-hell-is-this- joyce/)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you like podcasts, I would suggest listening Frank Delaney's Re-Joyce [0], where he goes through Ulysses sentence by sentence and tries to explain what's going on. Sadly this great podcast was interrupted by Frank's sudden death.

[0] -- [http://blog.frankdelaney.com/re- joyce/](http://blog.frankdelaney.com/re-joyce/)

<comment><USER4> > interrupted by Frank's sudden death

That would seem to me to be the inevitable result of such an endeavor given the relative scales of Ulysses and a typical human life span. Even just trying to _read_ Ulysses carries a certain non-negligible risk in this regard. I myself narrowly escaped a brush with catastrophe when assigned to read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when I was myself a young man (in high school). I thank God daily that I lived to warn others.

;-)

<comment><USER5> The podcast had slowly and then significantly ramped up its length, and certain sections of the novel are amenable to more rapid treatment than others. There was no reason to think he couldn't have finished in another 10-15 years.

He was halfway through "Wandering Rocks" a "mere" 6.75 years in, and I had been estimating he'd be at my favorite "Cyclops" by around now. :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I highly recommend Dubliners by Joyce. It's the most beautiful collection of short stories ever written. Ulysses has its roots in Dubliners, and if Ulysses is a daydream, then Finnegans Wake is a nightmare. Leave the nightmares to the hobgoblins.

<comment><USER7> I found Dubliners frustrating. They are not so much short stories as vignettes and I was often left scratching my head after each one, confused as to what the point of it all was.

<comment><USER8> I think "vignettes" is a good way to look at them. They aren't really plot- driven, rather each one builds to a psychological or spiritual moment, what Joyce called "epiphanies"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Gabrielle co-wrote puberty blues, a book about 13 year old girls becoming groupies for a "surfie" gang in 1970s australia. A rather autobiographical account. How much of it she lived, and how much of it was Katy, I'm not sure. No doubt the beginning of some of her choices she talks about in this piece.

</comment><comment><USER10> Joyce scholarship in some sense seems like mathematics --- the construct is an invention, axioms can be whatever they are decided to be, and the only question is in how productive and beautiful the construction is.

That being said, from this point of view the whole enterprise seems empty and vain. Even if you finally find what the book "means", the whole project seems like a dead end and does not lead to anything else --- you have gained nothing that generalizes beyond a narrow scope, and Joyce is long dead. This means that the work is not beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER11> _Solar Bones_ by Mike McCormack just won the International Dublin Literary Prize and might appeal to Joyce fans. It's based on the West coast of Ireland and is a one-sentence novel. Looking forward to reading it next month. Not without trepidation though...

<comment><USER12> It's excellent. One of the best books I've read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> When you listen to jazz, you don't complain that you don't know all the chords.

</comment><comment><USER14> Further reading: The NYT had just last week a longform piece on Jason Kidd, who was once celebrated as the greates JJ scholar alive: [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/magazine/the-strange- case...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/magazine/the-strange-case-of-the- missing-joyce-scholar.html)

<comment><USER15> John* Kidd :)

<comment><USER16> Thank you. I was about to be amazed about the other life of a hall of fame point guard and mediocre coach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I like this essay - took 2 Joyce seminars back in college days and got a lot out of it. Never made it all the way through FW. I am not familiar with this writer but she nicely shifts from a serious to a joking tone. I feel like her breaking up with Joyce may take a long time and the results will be interesting to read.

</comment><comment><USER18> After several years of on again off again trying to read Ulysses, I'm 20 pages from done, and now this.

</comment><comment><USER19> Steven Brust, Will Shetterly and others formed the (at least) half-joking "Pre-Joycean Fellowship", emphasizing storytelling over extravagant literary flourishes.

Sounds good to me.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre- Joycean_Fellowship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Joycean_Fellowship)

</comment><comment><USER20> What people often forget about classical books: They were written to be enjoyed. That's true even for Finnegan's Wake although it requires a special kind of person to enjoy it.

<comment><USER21> I wonder how you enjoy 200 pages of no punctuation or coherence (Ulysses)? It takes a special kind of person to enjoy this sort of thing... or some hipsters who want to show off.

<comment><USER22> I haven't spent much time with Joyce past Dubliners, but I've spent a great deal of time with Kerouac, and particularly "On the Road".

I don't think it takes a special person to enjoy, but it does require a particular mindset that any given person may or may not have at the time. It's sort of how "Catcher in the Rye" is brilliant when you're a teenager, and how very, very different it is when you're an adult.

On the Road is not the sort of book that I'd spend much time with now, but I've grown towards, and to appreciate the brevity of Hemingway or Elmore Leonard more now, but if you're not inclined towards Joyce, wait a while. If it never happens, so be it.

<comment><USER23> Kerouac's "On the Road" and "Big Sur" nicely book-end the ebullience of youth and the disillusion/dissolution of middle-age.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Can Buy Nest, But It Can't Buy Our Trust - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/opinion/2014/01/google-didnt-just-acquire-nest-annexed-whole-new-territory/

<comment><USER2> Just click bait article, when someone writes "It's not just an acquisition — it's an annexation." is because he wants visits to the page.</comment>