Challenges of Comparing Human and Machine Perception - <AUTHOR> https://thegradient.pub/challenges-of-comparing-human-and-machine-perception/ <comment><AUTHOR> How similar are human and machine vision really? Can we understand human vision by studying machine vision? Or the other way round: Can we gain insights from human vision to improve machine vision?</comment>


Watly - <AUTHOR> https://watly.co/watly/ <comment><USER2> I bounced off this page and won't come back because of auto-playing video. I can't stand it when the sound of my machine and my room are violated without my consent.</comment>


Show HN: Yet Another Photo Slideshow - <AUTHOR> https://silverscreen.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey all,

A little over a year ago, I was tasked with making a slideshow for my dad's wake, so I made a simple app that let all his friends and family email in their own photos, and my mom and I approved and curated them. It's kinda languished on the vine ever since, so I finally polished it up and made it usable.

As always, I'd love thoughts/feedback/opinions, it's how we get better! :)</comment>


UK's NHS Covid-19 App - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nhsx/COVID-19-app-iOS-BETA <comment><USER2> [https://github.com/nhsx/COVID-19-app-Android- BETA/blob/maste...](https://github.com/nhsx/COVID-19-app-Android- BETA/blob/master/app/src/main/java/uk/nhs/nhsx/sonar/android/app/ble/Scanner.kt) appears to be looking for Apple devices to wake them back up.

<comment><USER3> No, that comment is referring to the fact that advertisements change their format when an iOS device is sleeping, and thus devices listening need to filter on a different UUID.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can someone clearly explain the actual privacy risks of the centralised model (that UK Govt is pursuing) over the decentralised model?

My understanding is that in reporting our unique identifiers (and location data?) to the govt servers, this data could be de-anonymised and misused. But what data is actually being reported and how could it be misused?

<comment><USER5> Imo the threat here isn't just the government - that's a concern, but if you've been tested positive, the NHS already know you.

The bigger issue is potential leaks or poor access controls resulting in a malicious third party gaining access. With the decentralised approach where Apple/Google control access to their APIs, the threat surface is significantly reduced (e.g. contact tracing apps cannot also use geolocation)

Disclosure: Also a Google employee.

<comment><USER6> And so the question remains:

>But what data is actually being reported and how could it be misused?

All advertisers already know who I live with, and if I'm obeying social distancing I will only be coming into contact with strangers. Is this data really more sensitive than the stuff we firehouse out every day?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Having perused their Github, I noted the database for x-rays and scans.

<TinFoilHat>This is being run in 'partnership' with a relative non-entity, who in turn have links to a private American medical company.

Not sure I'm happy with private NHS medical records being slurped up in this way - unless consent is expressly given - which, based on their website that 'anonymizes' uploaded imagery, I guess we'll never know for sure.</TinFoilHat>

Good to see the code for both the iOS and Android clients being posted, as this should prove if these clients can ultimately be trusted.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think I would feel much better about this if it was accompanied by a legally binding declaration that the only entity that will ever have access to these data will be NHS, explicitly excluding any other government intelligence agency.

This is not a stab against the people who developed it, in fact I know some of the people involved in the development of the application and they have the highest ethical standards.

The problem is that in the post-Snowden era, no matter the good intentions behind such projects it is naive to not ask for as many safeguards as we possibly can.

</comment><comment><USER9> Well...at least they're open sourcing this which is better than letting some company develop the app entirely and keep the code under lock and key.

</comment><comment><USER5> ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION is an immediate red flag. Yikes.. that's gonna be a no from me.

[https://github.com/nhsx/COVID-19-app-Android- BETA/blob/43a16...](https://github.com/nhsx/COVID-19-app-Android- BETA/blob/43a167f8dba422fd9001b64f9c4fd82275abb1c8/app/src/main/AndroidManifest.xml)

<comment><USER10> Did you read the notes in the link next to that item?

"In order to use Bluetooth features in your application, you must declare the Bluetooth permission BLUETOOTH. You need this permission to perform any Bluetooth communication, such as requesting a connection, accepting a connection, and transferring data.

You must also declare the ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION permission, given that LE beacons are often associated with location. Without this permission, scans won't return any results."

<comment><USER5> Sure, but the Google/Apple contact tracing APIs do not need this.

<comment><USER11> do these exist yet?

My understanding is those are still in development and haven't yet been pushed to the world.

<comment><USER5> The API interfaces were published, but you're correct implementation is yet to ship.

[https://blog.google/documents/55/Android_Contact_Tracing_API...](https://blog.google/documents/55/Android_Contact_Tracing_API.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It looks like they are using beacons that are the same for 1 day. I think the google/apple version uses beacons that last until the bluetooth MAC address changes which I think is 15 minutes on iOS. So you can setup bluetooth devices around the city to track people's movements who are using this app.

</comment><comment><USER13> Firebase, seriously???

<comment><USER14> And Microsoft Appcenter Analytics: [https://reports.exodus- privacy.eu.org/en/reports/uk.nhs.nhsx...](https://reports.exodus- privacy.eu.org/en/reports/uk.nhs.nhsx.colocate/latest/)

<comment><USER15> Which they're using to track a couple of events, i.e. when the app fails to register with the API: [https://github.com/nhsx/COVID-19-app-Android- BETA/blob/maste...](https://github.com/nhsx/COVID-19-app-Android- BETA/blob/master/app/src/main/java/uk/nhs/nhsx/sonar/android/app/analytics/AnalyticEvent.kt)

(Though that analytics platform itself does do device fingerprinting, inasmuch as detecting phone model, OS version etc -- I assume no individually identifying stuff like IMEIs, but who knows what a bad actor can do with sufficient entropy?)</comment></comment></comment>


Great going, rejected from YC, 100 is now featured on lifehacker - <AUTHOR> http://lifehacker.com/100-motivates-you-to-learn-a-new-skill-in-100-days-1469708276

<comment><AUTHOR> Previous HN thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6757491](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6757491)</comment>


Freelance web developers: how do you handle the build up of maintenance work? - <AUTHOR>

One problem freelance web developers face is that alot of times the client will want a maintenance contract.  If you build enough websites and agree to maintain some or all of them, eventually you could hit a point where you can't take on any new work because you're doing maintenance all the time.  How do you guys solve this problem?  Outsource the maintenance somewhere?  Stop taking on new work?  Something else?  Thanks! <comment><USER2> Maintenance contracts can be really hard to manage if you're solo, because they can make it hard for you to throw yourself 100% into a project.

Since maintenance contracts are a mixed bag at best, write them in your favor - full price, fixed number of hours, use it or lose it. Then hire or subcontract the work out for some passive income.

5 years ago, my consulting partner and I ran into this situation. We managed it by hiring our first employee. We nailed down $5,000/month of guaranteed maintenance from three customers, and hired a designer/HTML guy. (Much of the maintenance work was simple HTML.) This worked out well for us - two years later, we had five employees and large projects, plus a small steady maintenance stream that was mostly handled by one person.

</comment><comment><USER3> The contract needs to stipulate a amount of hours (like 6 month timeframe or 36 hours or labour) and how anything above that is a new project or for to them to work on themselves, sub-contract etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> First off, write high quality code. High quality code requires less maintenance. Keep everything separated out properly so that clients can do some updates themselves (e.g. update the text here or change that color to this color) and make sure to stipulate in the contract that you are not responsible for such changes. Write comprehensive test cases. Possibly, limit the contract based on these tests.</comment>


Journey from Node to Crystal - <AUTHOR> https://www.duodesign.co.uk/blog/from-node-to-crystal/ <comment> cris-ward I wrote the article, happy to answer any questions.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing, It's interesting to hear how was the acceptance of other team members to the project moving into a different language ?

<comment> cris-ward Getting acceptance was much easier than I expected. We used coffee-script a lot before which has a bit of an overlap with Ruby/Crystal, which helped.

We've since moved to using typescript on the front-end and crystal on the back end and both type systems have a lot of similarities. They both also help catch many more errors earlier which gives us a lot more confidence in our code and simplifies the scope of tests which are needed. You can get to a point with a javascript application when you feel you'll create a new bug just by looking at the wrong way.

Crystal as a languages feels really cool. It's very low on boiler plate, which makes it really easy to read and doesn't take a lot of explaining. It takes the best bits of Ruby, so has a easy to follow logic which allows you to understand how everything hangs together. There is also very easy to get hypnotised by the 3ms response times when you're running it locally.

I'd say the only down points at the moment is the size of the community. The lack of 3rd party libraries and inability to 'google for a solution' could be an issue. However crystal's community makes up for in energy what it lacks in size, the gitter room is very active - [https://gitter.im/crystal- lang/crystal](https://gitter.im/crystal-lang/crystal)

Web dev is not the most complex of programming tasks and our team is small, so your mileage may vary, but so far so good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great experience, Thanks for sharing!</comment>


Sourcegraph Master Plan - <AUTHOR> https://sourcegraph.com/plan <comment><AUTHOR> Sourcegraph CEO here. We released this master plan to explain what we're up to and why it matters.

In short:

1\. Make basic code intelligence ubiquitous

2\. Make code review continuous & intelligent

3\. Increase the amount & quality of open-source code

Happy to answer any questions here, and I'd love to hear what people think. We know it's a lot of work, but this is inevitable and will make development smoother for everyone.

<comment><USER2> Hey there, it seems I am late to the party (and it didn't really take off this time)...

Nevertheless, sounds like a good mission to me... Even if you don't succeed at every subtask, you could still make a difference. Do you plan to start work on Python support any time soon?</comment></comment>


The lat/lon floating point delusion - <AUTHOR> https://www.datafix.com.au/BASHing/2019-08-09.html <comment><USER2> Yes, why don't people spend their time doing the extra work to figure out the exact number of meaningful digits in their measurements when the defaults work just fine for their non-scientific, non-metrological purposes?

A mystery for the ages.

<comment><USER3> Because the value, as presented, is wrong. "[but it's being used for] non- scientific, non-metrological purposes" which doesn't change that it's the wrong value.

Imagine, for a moment, that someone uses these values to put up a fence. Is the fence on their property? Those crap values beyond the actual significant digits of the measurement may tell you that you are, when you're not. That will cost you time and money down the road.

<comment><USER4> > Because the value, as presented, is wrong.

That's not true nor is it the problem at all. The thesis was that the values, albeit correct, have too many significant digits, which in turn reflect differences which lie somewhere between having no practical use or being absurd.

> Imagine, for a moment, that someone uses these values to put up a fence.

That example is very poor. Any engineer can tell you that a measurement is meaningless without tolerances/margin of error, and the tolerance in effect when putting up a fence is not expressed in a microscopic scale.

<comment><USER5> > a measurement is meaningless without tolerances/margin of error

Reporting a value with too many significant digits is the same as reporting an incorrect margin of error, which (arguably) makes the value wrong.

<comment><USER6> That's certainly true in a scientific paper, where the concept of significant digits is relevant and widely recognized. In a "please remove dead animal" web request, the value is only wrong if it points to the wrong location (i.e. a location that does not contain a dead animal).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> People have this idea that when you take a measurement, you have so-and-so number of significant figures that are probably correct and the rest are just pure noise. But that's not how measurement error works. In the real world, physical measurement errors are more-or-less normally distributed (we don't have to argue about the "more-or-less" part because my argument here holds for any distribution other than a uniform one). Let's say your measurement gives you a latitude of 45.73490534578° with a standard deviation of 0.00001° (that's about 11 meters). Those last few digits of your measurement are almost certain to be wrong. But does that make them meaningless? No! Because if your measurements are unbiased, then slightly more than half the time, 45.73490534578° is still going to be closer to the true value than 45.7349053457° is. By performing significant figure rounding, you aren't throwing _very much_ information, you may not be throwing away any information you care about, but you are nonetheless throwing away information.

<comment><USER8> The problem is that these lat/lon figures are not displayed with precision information at all, so we can't even know the std dev. Sig figs are a simple and clear way to communicate the precision of a measurement, but if you want to be more statistically accurate, you can use parentheses to indicate the standard deviation. In your example (if I mess this up please correct me, but I think) it would be 45.73490534578(1000000)° Which again is silly because there is no way to know the standard deviation to that level of precision. A more reasonable number would be 45.734905(10)°

Is it difficult to include precision when reporting measurements? No

Is it sometimes valuable? Yes

Is it really too much to ask for? No

<comment><USER7> I've never seen the convention you're using and I don't think I understand it. Conventions I've seen include:

* Give an error bound like 45.73490534578° (±0.00002°) and indicate in prose that this is a 2σ bound.

* Put non-significant figures in parenthesis, like 45.73490(534578)° (EDIT: possibly I've misinterpreted this one when I've seen it, see logfromblammo's reply)

* Put a bar over the last significant figure, like 45.73490̄534578 (hopefully this one renders properly when I post this... (EDIT: nope))

<comment><USER9> You can see it done here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_atomic_weight#List_of...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_atomic_weight#List_of_atomic_weights)

<comment><USER10> The brackets in the table mean that different sources of the element have different proportions of isotopes, so the mean atomic weights for specific deposits may cover a range that differs from the overall mean for every deposit of the element ever measured.

I.e. if you measure carbon from the upper atmosphere, it's going to have more C-14 in it, from cosmic rays flipping protons in N-14 to neutrons. And if you measure carbon buried for thousands of years, it's going to have less C-14, from natural decay.

If you look at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_physical_constants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_physical_constants) you can see that the parentheses are omitted from _defined_ constants, and included for _measured_ constants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In contrast to his 4-digits-are-fine notions, let me offer a counterexample: [http://scissor.com/transient/destination_heatmap/](http://scissor.com/transient/destination_heatmap/)

I am working on a Twitter bot called @sfships, which monitors the comings and goings of large ships in the San Francisco Bay: [https://twitter.com/sfships](https://twitter.com/sfships)

As part of that, I generated the above map from AIS data. [1] It's basically where ships stop. If you zoom in on the San Francisco waterfront, you will see a grid of dots. That's because the AIS protocol stores lat/lon as minutes/10000 [2], throwing away more detailed information.

This is adequate for its initial intended purpose, which is putting ships on radaresque displays so that ships don't hit one another, etc. But it produces all sorts of artifacts and issues when one tries to use the data more broadly.

And in case anybody is interested in playing with this, I have written a python parser for AIS data with a bunch of Unixy command line tools, including one that just turns the weird 90s protocol into more modern JSON: [https://github.com/wpietri/simpleais](https://github.com/wpietri/simpleais)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_system)

[2] [https://gpsd.gitlab.io/gpsd/AIVDM.html#_types_1_2_and_3_posi...](https://gpsd.gitlab.io/gpsd/AIVDM.html#_types_1_2_and_3_position_report_class_a)

<comment><USER12> I used to have a job where I analyzed global ship tracking data (AIS and other less-open (i.e. more classified) data streams) for law enforcement and environmental conservation purposes, and learned one thing: _man_ is AIS data a bitch.

This is especially true when you're dealing with potential bad actors who can spoof their transmissions, combined with incredibly poor vessel metadata databases and strange satellite AIS coverage issues.

If there are any data scientists out there looking for a real head-basher, start an AIS project.

<comment><USER13> Why do bad actors spoof transmissions? Smuggling?

<comment><USER14> Many reasons, and a significant percentage of all AIS transmissions are dodgy. Smuggling is just one reason.

Other common reasons include illegal fishing in protected waters, covert meetings (e.g. a couple yachts coming together in the middle of the ocean), spy ships by state actors trying to look like ordinary commercial traffic, and misrepresenting state of shipping assets for commercial leverage in contract negotiations.

<comment><USER11> I would love to read more about this. Any suggestions?

<comment><USER14> These are things you learn by doing in-depth analysis of AIS and related data sources. As far as I know, no one writes about it. Physical world data sources are full of interesting patterns and anomalies. Few people ever look because the data sources are challenging to work with and very different from Internet data, which is the only kind of data most people are used to.

<comment><USER11> Well at this point I have terabytes of AIS data from the last few years, so if anybody is looking to dig into this, I'm glad to share.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I find it hard to get that worked up about this. The positions are accurate at least, and if you're really so hard up for space that saving a couple of digits is going to make all the difference then you can think about it for 5 mins and choose a precision/storage trade off that's appropriate for you.

<comment><USER16> The representation of the numbers doesn't convey any information about accuracy, and it's at least a good practice to store data in a way that conveys the precision it was gathered with.

<comment> yoz-y The issue then is that there is no reasonable primitive format to store a "real number with a small decimal precision". Arguably storing these as ints would be better but then everybody would need to agree on the denominator.

<comment><USER8> It is frustrating (to me, at least) that there is no common primitive data type the stores precision. But it isn't rocket surgery to store two floating- points (a value and precision) in a structure and format it properly for display.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not just lat/lon. I find myself amused when The Washington Post's education columnist Jay Matthews--quite a sharp guy from all I can tell--runs his high school "challenge index" (AP tests taken / size of graduating class) out to six decimal points for small schools. Somebody give that man a slide rule.

<comment><USER18> When I see those errors, I often try to work out the exact input figures that led to the stats reported.

At work, I recently saw a survey result from a small customer base reported as "31.3% of respondents" rather than the more communicative "5 out of 16..."

<comment><USER17> Quite. That way I was able to figure out how many students graduated from Washington International School that year.

For that matter, my wife taught a class one year at a local university. The class had 29 students, or at least 29 who bothered to fill out the evaluation, and the evaluation had a couple of places right of the decimal point. I found myself going reckoning, "hmm, 27 of 29 though that ...".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It doesn't matter how precise the value is, as long as it's precise enough for your use-case and as long as machines are handling it. If the value is displayed in a UI and it's rounded off to a reasonable decimal there, I don't see the point why you would get so worked up about it.

I'm sure my thermostat internal temperature representation is way more precise than the 0.5 degrees precision it's showing on the display.

<comment><USER20> As the article discusses, much (though not all) of the issue he has is with the display value in UIs or published data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The author also ignores the fact that the distance associated with a degree of longitude changes dramatically as you go from the equator (69m/111km) to the poles (0) - roughly as a cosine. So the number of decimal places of longitude should shrink as you get further from the equator.

[https://www.thoughtco.com/degree-of-latitude-and- longitude-d...](https://www.thoughtco.com/degree-of-latitude-and-longitude- distance-4070616)

"At 40 degrees north or south, the distance between a degree of longitude is 53 miles (85 kilometers)."

So while it's appropriate for Melbourne (37.8S) to use (very slightly) lower precision than Sydney (33.9S), they're both using too many digits.

<comment><USER22> Err, no, that fact is in the article.

<comment><USER21> Went back and re-read, still not seeing it there.

It is described in the linked wikipedia article, though: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_degrees](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_degrees), so it isn't completely ignored by the author.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I usually go with 6 decimal places.

Geojson format advises it also

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7946#section-11.2](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7946#section-11.2)

<comment><USER24> > For geographic coordinates with units of degrees, 6 decimal places (a > default common in, e.g., sprintf) amounts to about 10 centimeters, a > precision well within that of current GPS systems. Implementations should > consider the cost of using a greater precision than necessary.

If you actually read the RFC, it's giving a common example as an artifact of sprintf, and explicitly stating that implementations should consider how much precision they need...

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Agreement on the decimal places. But honestly, why would you commit to using GPS as the end means of locating in Australia when you'll be noticeable off in 20 years and outright inaccurate in 100?

[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/09/australia- mo...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/09/australia-moves-gps- coordinates-adjusted-continental-drift/)

<comment><USER26> Using GPS/WGS84 to locate is fine, you just need to convert to a plate-local datum before long-term storage of those coordinates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Professional geospatial systems frequently use fixed point internally but export floating point for convenience. The Internet treats all geospatial as floating point but positional measurement systems and mapping base layers often come from fixed point data models.

Many of the underlying fixed point systems are designed for meter precision, with some newer systems going down to a centimeter. As a practical matter, repeatable positioning on the Earth's surface becomes difficult below 10 centimeters of precision, so centimeter precision is widely viewed as the physics floor.

<comment><USER27> There are large networks of GPS monitoring sites that regularly report their positions, including movement, down well below centimeters.

<comment><USER14> The point is about repeatability, not precision. Nominally fixed points on the Earth's surface are constantly in motion relative to GPS and relative to other fixed points. Many of the effects that cause this lack of repeatability can induce centimeters of measured deflection from the mean position over relatively short periods of time. There are models that can be employed to correct some of these effects (e.g. fluctuations in the gravity field, which is measured by satellites) but not all of them. Consequently, the measurement may be precise but there is never a reference frame in which the points are actually "fixed" over time, which is indistinguishable from reduced precision. Local changes in surface geometry are also easily detected with LIDAR.

For surveys that require maximum repeatable precision, they will often use the mean position as measured over e.g. 12 hours. The magnitude of the variance varies quite a bit depending on where you are on Earth.

<comment><USER27> I've done a fair amount of work with GPS and precise positioning, and I'm aware of all the dynamics of earth, orbit, and electron path that are involved. I've never before seen a claim of 1cm being some kind of physical limit on position.

There are both short and long-term motions of the earth. All are sufficiently measured and modeled such that repeatable measurements are very much achievable well below 1 cm.

In fact, it is GPS that is used to develop the models of earth movement. So I don't quite get what you are saying.

<comment><USER14> The centimeter limit is an engineering heuristic used by people combining high-precision GPS, LIDAR, remote sensing, and sometimes other sensors to build high-precision models of the world e.g. maps for autonomous systems. LIDAR alone can routinely detect changes in relative local surface geometry in excess of a centimeter across a day in practice. Autonomous driving typically uses an error bound of around 10 cm on absolute positioning even though the sensors used to determine that positioning often have sub-centimeter precision, for similar reasons. Real-time localization is an interesting problem because measurement with orthogonal sensor modalities can produce conflicting results with differences greater than the nominal precision of those positioning algorithms. Getting the last few centimeters of functional precision out of contradictory measurements is one of the things you need AI for.

I agree that parts of the world have repeatable measurements below 1cm if you can account for the myriad effects that cause displacement, but others do not. The models are also approximate, since some effects require real-time measurement of things we do not have real-time measurements for, or which are not practically available in contexts where local position needs to be determined.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Did the author think about the implementation? If we assign semantic meaning to the number of decimal points, now we also need to store the number of significant digits side by side with the actual number. We shouldn't round off internally because we might use it in as an intermediate result in a calculation.

<comment><USER29> > We shouldn't round off internally because we might use it in as an > intermediate result in a calculation.

Only if the precision is meaningful. The author's point is that it isn't for geographical coordinates.

<comment><USER30> Error tends to grow as the calculation proceeds. 6th-decimal "insignificant rounding" done over and over as the calculation proceeds can grow to become arbitrarily large.

<comment><USER31> What numerically unstable algorithms are ever performed with geolocations?

Moreover, given the author's point that real measurement errors exceed the false precision of published data, if such a calculation were performed and did provide "arbitrarily large" error, it would indicate that the result should in fact be nonsense.

<comment><USER30> I'm thinking about the case where a calculation extends across many roundings.

<comment><USER31> That doesn't necessarily make the algorithm unstable. See for example:

      >>> import numpy as np
      >>> x0 = np.random.rand(1)
      >>> x_rnd = np.round(100*x)/100.0
      >>> for i in range(1000):
      ...  x = np.mod(x+np.pi,1)
      ...  x_rnd = np.mod(x_rnd + np.pi,1)
      ...  x_rnd = np.round(100*x)/100
      ...
      >>> x_real = np.mod(x0+1000*np.pi,1)
      >>> print(x_real,x,x_rnd)
        (array([0.51013166]), array([0.51013166]), array([0.51]))

Note no loss of accuracy for all of the intermediate roundings. The accuracy is preserved because there's no mechanism here to amplify the error.

That's why I ask about the kind of algorithms typically applied to geolocated data. Off the top of my head, I can't think of anything that would be both useful and error-amplifying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I recently ran into a weird error concerning Lat/Lngs and floating point numbers. Google has a service for retrieving imagery from Maps, and you can even request that imagery have certain paths drawn on it. You encode those paths as part of your request URI, but if you have a lot of points, you could end up exceeding their maximum URI length restriction. So they also define a hashing system for compressing those points into a single value, which is defined here: [https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/utilities/p...](https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/utilities/polylinealgorithm)

One of the things they don't mention is that the rounding step does not work as _they_ expect for single-precision floats. You have to use double-precision floats to get the same results that they are demonstrating in the example.

They are asking for 5 values to the right of decimal points, which, with the maximum of 3 digits to the left of the decimal point, means a total of 8 significant digits. Single-precision floats should be good to 9 digits, but the rounding step is off by one when using singles.

The solution was to cast singles to doubles before performing the rounding. Which seems absurd.

Single-precision floats should be enough precision for lat/lngs anywhere on the Earth, for everything other than some applications in commercial-grade surveying. And if that is the job you're doing, you shouldn't be using Google Maps.

</comment><comment><USER33> These kinds of issues are what we've solved at QALocate.

There are a number of different issues here, which I think are only partly explored through the article.

Let's take as given that you need to direct a person some place. In the article, they are directing someone to a restaurant. But this gets complicate fast. Is this person a patron rather than, say, a deliver driver there to pick up an order, or a plumber there to fix and appliance, or an inspector there to observe the kitchens, or ...?

By using a lat/long, or any geo-coordinate, we lose the human-value of context. Each of the folks I list above has a very different place they potentially need to navigate to. And even if their destination is the same, the routes they took may NOT have been. Where they park, or were dropped by ride share, and which doors they use are also influenced by their role.

Using a geo-coordinate to drops the rich meaning that humans in all their roles require. A better solution is to use a real identity and then, when and where coordinates are needed, derive them based on the persons role, whether it be patron, plumber, or paramedic. As roles change, or as the structure itself changes, then directions change to meet them. I find this a much richer solution than just blindly telling my maps app to direct me to some GPS location.

Another issue hinted at but not deeply explored is that often what we want to specify is a region or volume, not a coordinate. Things in the real world consume volume. Coordinates are idealized points and do not. This may seem a trite observation, yet, the majority of our tools think in terms of points. With the rise of autonomous vehicles, especially drone delivery, we need to move towards representations of regions and/or volumes, depending on needs. I'm not convinced that geopolys are quite right for this task and instead we need something that is comfortable with the fuzzy and complicated boundaries humans have to deal with.

[1] [http://www.qalocate.com](http://www.qalocate.com)

<comment><USER34> Is the Joe Pesci picture a joke or has your website been hacked?

[https://www.qalocate.com/company/](https://www.qalocate.com/company/)

<comment><USER33> HAHAHAHA! Having not met Joe I don't actually know, but I presume that is a legit picture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I think the issue is that people don't have an good intuition for how many digits past the decimal point are relevant in latitude and longitude. "42 degrees north" is obviously imprecise. 42.123456 is precise down to a millionth of a degree; but if you wake me up in the middle of the night and ask me how long is one millionth of a degree of latitude at sea level, I wouldn't just be able to blurt out the answer.

Turns out it's about 11 cm.

A millionth of a degree is about 1.75E-8 radians. For small degree values, sin(x) = x, so we can just multiply that figure directly by the radius: ~ 6400000 m * 1.75E-8 = 0.112 m.

</comment><comment><USER36> On the flip side - who cares? It's just a question of shunting data around - ok someone could add a format specifier somewhere and it would be neater. But there's no particular harm in it either.

<comment><USER24> Sending more data than you need is bad for two reasons.

1\. It implies more precision, which in many cases is a flat out lie. Savvy users will know to truncate, round or something, but others will be lead astray.

2\. It takes more space to represent. If the engineers storing double precious floating points had asked themselves if they needed to be sending these out at such a high resolution, they may have been able to cut the storage of these things down 50%.

Though yes, there are probably bigger issues to worry about. Doesn't mean we should outright dismiss these points.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> The presentation is just lazy and javascript defaults to double. No mystery.

You can use digits to indicate accuracy but if you don't know whether the measurement stored as a double is accurate to 2, 4 or 12 decimals then you can't really do much in presentation. The reader has to interpret the number. Usually the reader doesn't care much about accuracy, and simply copies the numbers to another system. The coordinates with full double precision is then basically a machine readable format.

</comment><comment><USER38> > Popping those long coordinates into Google Earth, it looks like the > georeferencing puts the point somewhere on ILI's back wall

Perhaps the Google Earth image is "wrong". Stitching aerial and satellite images together and aligning every pixel to the exact geo-location isn't as simple as it sounds -- especially given that the ground shifts over time.

<comment><USER39> And that the aerial images have perspective and optical distortion to deconvolve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I could explain this. Internally all those coordinates are stored as double (not long double). The precision of a double is max 15-17 digits. Usually it's very inprecise though. But not too imprecise, because tiny errors could lead to very costly mistakes. my biggest did cost ~40.000, wrong after the third digit. 30cm. You might remember the financial stories on microdiffs with improper arith. That why one of the most important lessons I told my students was precision and it's limits. Esp. when zooming in.

CAD/GIS system round to the default vsprint %f precision which is 6. They could use a zoom dependent number but nobody would do that, they would laugh at you. It's not a delusion, it's industry practise. If you have better precision, you stick to it.

</comment><comment><USER41> lat/lon kinda sucks because of the different notations (degrees with decimals? degrees and minutes with decimals? degrees and minutes and seconds with decimals?) and because of the way 0.1 degrees is a different amount of distance based on where you are on the earth.

UTM is better in every way, and already used on most modern hiking and topo maps.

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

<comment><USER42> Looks like regular grid, but they did special irregular 32v cell to cover land part of Norvegia. For me this places the UTM in "not reasonable" land.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I've been working with the AWS Textract, it scans image files and returns the coordinates of the scanned text. The coordinates are percentages of the width/height of the image where one edge is 0.0 and the opposite edge is 1.0. The software returns numbers like "left = 0.3140530586242676", which means that the text's left coordinate is 31% from the edge. This is providing sub- pixel precision for 150 dpi documents.

</comment><comment><USER44> Users don't usually care about raw lat/lon. If you want to display them as an approximate so you can tell them apart as some kind of logging output do something like "(%+07.4f,%+07.4f)".

</comment><comment><USER45> What about future GIs programs that can handle these digits, should we not futureproof anything that doesn't exactly utilize it today?

<comment><USER33> What would future proofing even look like?

For me I think we need to move away from thinking first/primarily in terms of coordinates. Yes, I know that sounds silly but hear me out.

Say someone is going out to meet a friend at a restaurant they haven't been to before, or perhaps they don't exactly recall the directions they took the last time -- how do they find directions? The first thing they most definitely do not do is say "hey maps app, tell me how to get to -37.80467681 144.9659498".

There is a level of indirection we go through via the names of businesses, places, etc. So we ask, "tell me how to get to I Love Istanbul". And we hop through a number of steps mapping that unstructured name to some coordinate.

But what if instead we used structured names instead of unstructured "names"? Then those names could map to a coordinate, or a street address, or well anything. What's more we could attach metadata to the name.

This is what DNS does. Humans know the names. They are structured according to some simple to follow rules. And computers take care of mapping those names to IPs, as well as other metadata.

Why not do exactly the same, but with locations? Re-use the same system but map to a coordinate? Or a region? Or whatever you need for your use case.

If you did this you'd now have an L-NS instead of a D-NS. That's exactly the insight we've had at the startup I'm working at.

[1] [https://www.qalocate.com/resources/](https://www.qalocate.com/resources/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Does anyone here know what's the actual precision that we can get by the available equipment?

<comment><USER47> Survey-grade GPS (using CORS and WAAS correction) using RTK will give you accuracy to ~10 cm within a few seconds. You can get that down to several millimetres if you can tolerate post-processing several hours worth of static data.

<comment><USER39> Is accuracy at that level actually possible with GPS? Precision seems likely, but it is substantially more difficult to provide absolute accuracy at that level.

<comment><USER20> Yes, but not on its own, that I am aware. High accuracy GPS is is based on a combination of GPS satellite data itself with real time or post-processed positional correction using references stations which themselves are placed in a known surveyed location.

In the US, 60 cm accuracy is often possible with nothing more than WAAS corrections. 10 or even 1 cm accuracy is often possible in real time with access to an RTK network.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Ugh. It's better to use geohash almost everywhere. It solves this and many other problems (lat/lon ordering), etc..

</comment><comment><USER49> When you completely run out of things to complain about.

<comment><USER50> That's pretty much what I was thinking as well. It's funny and an enjoyable read, but at the same time it's a complete non-issue. Unless you have some application that chokes on that many decimal places AND can't do any sort of input sanitation, why worry about it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Edit: This is what I get for only skimming the article. Ignore

<comment><USER21> While obxkcd is usually good for a few upvotes, you're probably losing karma because the article included this link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> As far as I know sig figs aren't a primitive type in most languages so the author's point is moot.</comment>


Bump (YC S09) Acquired By Google, Will Stay Alive For Now - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/16/bump-mobile-contact-sharing-app-acquired-by-google-will-stay-alive-for-now/

<comment><USER2> Can someone say acqui-hire?

<comment><USER3> Possibly, but if they are also getting the IP of Bump, then it's an acquisition AFAIK.</comment></comment>


Robust research needs many lines of evidence - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-01023-3 <comment><USER2> This paper really sounds like it advocates the status quo of attempting to take the "sum of the evidence", which usually leads to the generation of many different weak (low sample size, etc) lines of evidence. They don't seem to get that what made science so successful was its ability to generate simpler models of phenomenon. To do this you need to come up with (most often quantitative) theories that can synthesize various lines of evidence.

The practice of "counting heads" seen in fields like medicine is totally inappropriate (eg 2 out of 3 results support the theory so it looks good). The correct thing to do is more like what is seen in physics.

Eg, take the idea that "cancer is due to mutations that accumulate as cells divide, therefore cancer rates should be related to number of divisions and mutation rate." The status quo is to do something like:

      1) "cancer is positively correlated with number of divisions"
      2) "cancer is positively correlated with mutation rate"
      3) "cancer is positively correlated with number of accumulated mutations"

Instead, we should say "this means the probability of accumulating at least _n_ mutations after _d_ divisions given mutation rate _r_ should follow a law similar to":

       p(x >= n) = (1 - (1 - r)^d)^n

The two approaches are similar in that you measure mutation rate, number of divisions, accumulated mutations and frequency of cancer cells. The difference is that for the latter approach all the lines of evidence combine in a _nonlinear_ fashion.

This method allows us to subsume a myriad of factors such as genetic disposition, exposure to toxins, etc to be incorporated via a single value (mutation rate). So rather than an ever expanding apparent complexity as more factors are incorporated, there is an accumulation of knowledge as we estimate the model parameters more and more accurately and either reject, modify, or keep our models of the phenomenon.

<comment><USER3> Which paper are you talking about?

Do you actually mean the linked article? Because it contains the following:

> But replication alone will get us only so far. In some cases, routine > replication might actually make matters worse. Consistent findings could > take on the status of confirmed truths, when they actually reflect failings > in study design, methods or analytical tools.

This is a strong criticism against the counting heads method you also object to.

<comment><USER2> Look at their example.

Theory: _" One example in which triangulation has helped is in establishing that smoking during pregnancy results in babies with lower birth weights"_

Lines of evidence:

1) _" women who smoke are more likely to have babies who weigh less"_

2) _" if a woman's partner smokes during her pregnancy, many of the same confounders apply as in maternal smoking, but the association with lower birth weight is much weaker"_

3) _" Birth weight can also be analysed according to levels of cigarette taxation across US states, which reduces the effects of confounders."_

4) _" the birth weights of siblings whose mother smoked during one pregnancy but not another."_

5) _" In cohorts grouped according to whether or not people carry a genetic variant associated with greater cigarette consumption in those who smoke, mothers who smoke and carry the variant tended to have babies who weighed less; non-smokers with the same variant did not."_

Conclusion: _" Taken together, these studies make it clear that maternal smoking affects birth weight directly"_

This looks exactly like what I described as "counting heads". There is no synthesis of this evidence, just a disconnected list of things (and who knows whether contrary evidence has been left out or never checked).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wanted to say that converging evidence is highly valued in neuroscience already. We know every single study is flawed in some way, but attacking the same problem from 3 angles and getting similar answers, you might really have something.

<comment><USER5> Yes, you can see this in astronomy and planetary science as well. As a basic example, the wikipedia pages on dark matter and dark energy cite various sources of converging evidence. In planetary science, one example is the multiple lines of evidence that there were once significant water flows on Mars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Often the first thing companies do when they license tech from academia is try to reproduce the findings in a rigorous setting, rather than jumping straight into novel work. Behind closed doors, big pharma scientists complain about the quality of academic work even published in leading journals

This problem is real and is probably not going to be addressed within the academic community. However, as more scientists realize that the path to running your own lab and directing your own research agenda lies in working at startups rather than in academia / big pharma, hopefully the way science is done will change

In CA at least, venture capital funds more life science R&D than do NIH dollars, and probably more than big biotech (Genentech / Amgen / Gilead etc)

<comment><USER7> There have been public complaints about this too, such as that "cancer findings don't reproduce" editorial (where "reproduce" is defined as "generalize") that got lots of press 5 years ago. My best understanding of the situation is that big pharma and research are going at opposite purposes. Big pharma wants something that generalizes and can lead to drugs that hit almost all of the target population. Research emphasizes novelty, and finding new stuff, which most often won't generalize.

Chasing the findings in "leading journals" is going to escalate this disconnect. Leading journals go for novelty and surprise alone. These are exactly the findings that are least likely to generalize.

I'd love to see how and where VC is funding life science research. It seems unlikely that the types of projects that VC funds would overlap the type of research that NIH funds, but I would love to be wrong on that!

<comment><USER6> Its definitely true that big pharma and academic research are def going at divergent purposes, which isnt always a bad thing, but i agree that when quality is sacrificed for "publishability" then i dont think anyone wins.

A more somber issue with reproducibility is that you simply cant replicate a study's results independently even if you do it the exact same way. Not only is it not generalizable, it isnt even robust in a specific case. A lot of this is just due to chance, but in the worst instances, this happens because researchers are able to bias experiments to get a result. There are so many tiny details of experimental design and execution that influence results, and a lot of these dont end up in the "methods" section of a publication

Some big pharma companies and startups are actually starting to look at specific rather than general populations (the whole "precision medicine" thing), which is good. This lowers revenue potential, but decreases risk of clinical trial failure, bc you are only targeting a group of patients where you have high-ish confidence it will work.

VC is increasingly funding stuff that would be done in academia. Biotech startups have been so successful in recent years that investors are taking on more risk, which means earlier stage, bolder science, and this overlaps with some academic stuff. Most VC funded stuff is translational in nature though, ie projects in between academia and big pharma. however only a few "profitable" diseases get funded, like cancer and orphan disease. very little going in in psychiatric disease, addiction, heart disease, diabetes</comment></comment></comment>


Work Is Worthless - <AUTHOR> I actually use a computer for more than entertainment. I typically have dozens of open browser tabs. I have running processes. I have running virtual machines.
Microsoft simply reboots my computer and destroys my work. Firefox tab crashed and it "automatically upgraded", destroying my work.
Apparently companies seem to think my work is worthless. I suspect they think your work is worthless also.
There is an unprofessional term for this attitude that is usually associated with a hand gesture. I wonder how long it will be before this is gesture-icon is the default. <comment><USER2> Are you just complaining about automatic updates? You can turn those off, or you can use linux, or you can build it into your workflow. These companies dont think your work is worthless, they just think that their upgrades are worth more, which frankly they probably are if it comes with security upgrades. They need to get better at dealing with upgrades, but interpreting their honest mistakes as some sort of war against you is a great way to accomplish nothing, theres no way to even have a conversation about this if they update your computer with security patches incorrectly and you respond with claims that they're flipping you the bird and think you are worthless.

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you tried turning automatic updates off? For corporate systems Microsoft makes this possible. Send them money and they will prioritize your work. For consumer-level systems Microsoft is basically saying "Oh, that's some nice looking work you're doing there... It would be a shame if something happened to it. You should buy this expensive upgrade."

I use linux in virtual machines because, as an open source developer, I need to ensure my code works on all flavors of linux. Microsoft automatic reboot doesn't save virtual machine state; it just destroys the virtual machine.

In the virtual machine my firefox web page said "that page failed... reload this tab?" and then, when I clicked tab reload it "automatically upgraded" my firefox image, losing over 100 open tabs which it failed to reload.

"Or you can build it into your workflow"... except that the updates are at random times, like when I might be asleep. I wake up with a fresh MS image and half a dozen destroyed virtual machines.

I have tried to complain on various forums at Microsoft and Mozilla. They won't listen. And they are getting more aggressive.

I used to work in the security field so I fully understand that they don't want to be brought to court over unpatched systems. So they force patching as a legally defensive strategy.

But their strategy has the side-effect of destroying work. Imagine if your database simply forgot every update you did in the last week. Would you be content to "build that into your workflow"?

Their security patch is worth more to them than any work you do. This isn't "an honest mistake" (as you suppose), it is deliberate policy. There is absolutely NO reason why consumer-level MS systems can't turn automatic updates off.

<comment><USER3> > In the virtual machine my firefox web page said "that page failed... reload > this tab?" and then, when I clicked tab reload it "automatically upgraded" > my firefox image, losing over 100 open tabs which it failed to reload.

In chrome, there's a feature that allows you to "bulk open" all the tabs that where previously "bulk closed". I don't know if Firefox can do this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Firefox used to allow this by using a "bulk bookmark" feature. Apparently this no longer works in my spiffy new "upgraded" firefox. Not only does my work not matter; the very tools I use don't care to remain stable enough to maintain my workflow.

I think the only viable option seems to be working on disconnected machines. Any data I need can be copied "by sneaker-nat" (copy to device / carry device to new machine / copy from device) for those too young to know of the idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Windows, at least, has a group policy to prevent that behavior, so if you have that problem with Windows you are either using a version not made for work (Home) or not managing it for your particular workload.

I think the default behavior is actually the right default for consumer and nonserver work machines, so I'm not seeing the problem, at least as regards Windows.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is why you buy _tools_ , not toys. You can't really expect an OS trying to foist Candy Crush and/or Minecraft through start menu ads and full-screen _mobile_ apps to respect your work, can you? Try a Mac, or Linux if you don't mind its less-than-stellar user experience.

</comment><comment><USER3> I work for a large bank, and here the bank just restarts our computers too. Their profit off of our work, and still think it's ok to trash it once in a while. I suspect they think the risk of being hacked due to non-upgraded machine is worse than the loss of work.</comment>


Should We Be Having Kids in the Age of Climate Change? - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2016/08/18/479349760/should-we-be-having-kids-in-the-age-of-climate-change? <comment><USER2> Rieder's argument against having children seems incredibly egocentric to me. Our children will inherit a hellhole, and he doesn't want to subject them to it. Might as well kill yourself while you're at it.

The issue is that without children, there will be no experience of the hellhole. As terrible as humans have been for the rest of the life on this planet, we are becoming more conscious of it, and I think intelligence is a worthwhile trait to preserve. Since immortality is a fiction, children are the way to do it.

Children are very adaptable. It's us old people who will suffer through change. I mean, in the US, college freshmen have grown up in a world where you can be jailed for discussing encryption and kicked out of the airport for sharing a name with a suspected terrorist and police use military gear, and they're doing fine. For the most part.

We see how the world is changing, and we're horrified. For our children, that will just be the way things are. I am optimistic that some aspects will even be better. Our great-grandparents would say the same about our world now, and we're only around to experience it because they chose to have children.

<comment><USER3> That doesn't have to mean everyone needs to have children or everyone needs to have multiple children.

I'm not proposing that people curb procreation, just that the logic you proposed does not talk about the magnitude of procreation that would be 'optimal', so to speak.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1\. Yes. You don't know if your kid will be the one who solves or ameliorates climate change.

2\. Human life is its own good.

3\. Bryan Caplan discusses this and many other interesting topics in _Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think_ [https://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Reasons-Have-More- Kids/dp/046...](https://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Reasons-Have-More- Kids/dp/0465028616?ie=UTF8&tag=thstsst-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957).

<comment><USER5> I'm having kids for one reason: I hate mowing my lawn.

<comment><USER6> You could always buy a goat.

<comment><USER7> I have an acquaintance who borrowed someone's goat for a few months to deal with her grass. Unfortunately, she also had a deck that surrounded a portion of her house. The goat destroyed[1] the deck (and I believe a portion of the siding). Having a relatively large animal (for a house) with hooves running (galloping) around on a wood structure isn't necessarily a good plan if you care about that structure.

1: Well, maybe not destroyed. Achieved the equivalent of 10-20 years of normal wear in months may be more appropriate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It seems like if you want kids and are very concerned about climate change you can do both. Just purchase carbon offsets.

By my own calculations, it looks like offsetting 100% of an American's carbon footprint costs $55/month.

Sources:

[http://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/survey-of- carbon-...](http://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/survey-of-carbon- offset-services.html)

[http://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/articles/carbon- offset-p...](http://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/articles/carbon-offset- prices-vary-widely-by-standard-and-project-type-study/)

9,441 metric tons of carbon * $5.5 /metric ton / 936 month average lifespan = $55 / month

<comment><USER9> That's very rational of you but boy do people love a good morality play. If you solved CO2 storage with a new technology you'd be stoned to death by a pack of wild journalists with copies of Evgeny Morozov's books.

<comment><USER10> I'll go one further on the slippery morality slope: What if carbon credits could be used to pay for permanent birth control (voluntarily! it must always be voluntarily!).

Based on the math above, you'd pay a woman $51480 to have her tubes tied.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Am I the only one who thinks that a shrinking population might also result in large-scale technological growth?

Scarcity often results in innovation. A finite resource like labor will result in higher salaries due to competition and innovation to increase productivity to circumvent his costs.

Conversely, a glut of labor results in low wages and societal problems as fewer positions exist than job seekers.

This appears consisten historically: After the black death in europe, workers were more valuable and this helped break the chains of serfdom and feudalism.

I am all for a smaller global population, particularly in light of the growing automation I expect to observe in the next 30 years.

<comment><USER12> > Am I the only one who thinks that a shrinking population might also result > in large-scale technological growth?

The problem is the only population that's shrinking is well educated white liberals. Ironically, they're the only ones that buy that not having kids will somehow benefit the "planet".

<comment><USER13> Yup. The people who need to be told to stop having kids are the people in India, Mexico and Nigeria etc. who are currently having population explosions that have crippled their economic progress and have lead to intractable poverty, environmental mismanagement, and starvation.

<comment><USER14> India has a fairly low fertility rate compared to other countries of similar socio economic conditions, it is just that it has a very high population base and most of it is very young.

Also the fertility rate is varies significantly across the country.

If you think about it countries like Saudi, Pakistan and most parts of Africa have the highest fertility rates

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not sure it's over-educated upper-middle-class NPR listeners that they need to be convincing here. :)

<comment><USER16> On the other hand, it is exactly their (assumabley) also educated offspring that could make a difference. Cutting smart people out of the gene pool seems like a bad idea, even if they're convinced to do it willingly.

<comment><USER17> They're not smarter because of some gene, just richer and better educated (which, given today's universities doesn't say much).

<comment><USER18> So, you're claiming intelligence isn't heritable? Citation needed.

<comment><USER19> The money is.

<comment><USER20> And so is the intelligence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate)

"Population boom: 40% of all humans will be African by end of century": [http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/africa-to- experien...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/africa-to-experience- population-boom/article19998373/)

"By the end of the century, almost half the world's children may be African": [http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and- africa/2161334...](http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and- africa/21613349-end-century-almost-half-worlds-children-may-be-african-can-it)

But apparently the real problem is white, college-educated westerners having too many children. Thanks NPR.

</comment><comment><USER22> If you're the kind of person who thinks about these things, then yes, we'll probably be better off with your offspring existing.

<comment><USER23> Reminds me of the beginning of the movie Idiocracy: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unoMMru4-c0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unoMMru4-c0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It depends on how apocalyptic you are about the future.

On the one hand, I'm pretty pessimistic about the current political will necessary to create global policy on climate change solutions. I feel we are too primitive right now; too fixated on historical inertial factors such as religion, ethnicity, and nationalism to let go and embrace the one thing that will allow global solutions to happen: tolerance.

On the other hand, I have faith in the human race that if we do get to a crisis point, that sanity will prevail and we will pool our resources to overcome these global issues. However, much pain will occur before this pooling (hopefully) takes place. For example, if projections are correct, the Persian Gulf will be uninhabitable by 2050 which will make today's refugee crisis pale in consideration.

So I say have kids, but we must instil upon them that their generation needs to wrestle the power away from the current band of old white males. They cannot stay on the sidelines because basically they are fucked if they do.

<comment><USER24> Why is race and sex being brought into this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The people who would be willing to sacrifice having kids for climate reasons, should have two kids. You don't want to have next generation where everyone's parents don't care.

</comment><comment><USER26> Working to reduce the total fertility rate worldwide to between 2.0 and 1.5 may be beneficial to the environment and to our development since it would relieve pressure on food and health systems.

After all, with the advent of AI and the rapid pace of robotics research the transition to a near-jobless society will be interesting...

</comment><comment><USER27> According to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions) US and EU make up 22% of world's carbon emissions.

So if we (ie the people addressed by the article) stop to exist, the population will continue to grow in size (4bn in Africa by the end of the century) and carbon emissions will probably catch up to where they are now in a decade or so.

</comment><comment><USER28> I thought no, and wrote about it [1]

1: [https://joelkuiper.eu/change](https://joelkuiper.eu/change)

<comment><USER29> You say: "I'm thinking about planting trees. A lot of them."

 _Children_ are the trees that we plant. They are our contribution to the future of our species. For most of us, they are our _only_ contribution to the species.

So plant trees. Lots of them. Raise them up to be like you: concerned for the welfare of our species and it's only home. Humanity will need as many of their kind as we can get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There's never an ideal time to have kids.

</comment><comment><USER30> Yes. Should we have fewer kids, yes. Should all the smart people say no and pull and idiocracy, no.

<comment><USER13> The tone of the piece is serious, but I can't help the feeling that it is a parody. How can this be serious? "Males are the weaker gender, don't be fooled; just look at the flimsy Y-chromosome."</comment></comment>


PhoneGap AppStore Approval - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.nitobi.com/jesse/2009/11/20/phonegapp-store-approval/ <comment><USER2> I guess all they care about is blocking the flash to iPhone compiler.

<comment><USER3> Apparently, since their own header site talks about cross platform compatible code. This makes somewhere between 0 and negative sense, considering Jobs basically said "read Gruber" and Gruber said all kinds of things about why cross platform platforms were bad for apple.

I...I... I'm really damn confused by this.

<comment><USER4> Nothing in PhoneGap is against the TOS. It's a wrapper around HTML and JS, providing in _WebKit's javascript engine_ access to system services. In that sense, it's not against the part of the TOS which says specifically you can use Webkit.

<comment><USER5> "providing in WebKit's javascript engine access to system services"

Yes, it's almost as if it were some kind of "intermediary" or "translation layer".

<comment><USER6> Right. One written in Objective-C, likely using the native iPhone UIWebView container and thus able to run Javascript, all supported languages.

<comment><USER5> We'll have to see how this pans out. The language in 3.3.1 puts Javascript and the Cs into two separate categories with regard to access to "the documented APIs" and _taken at face value_ would appear to rule out Phonegap.

(and yes, I have looked at their source and know how it works.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Prediction: Lua and Unity3d are allowed too...MonoTouch and Flash stay banned.

<comment><USER8> Why MonoTouch?

Also, it would be interesting to not only get a list of Unity3D apps together, but ones on other translation/framework platforms as well. Anyone working on this?

<comment><USER9> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1259988>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hope Appcelerator's Titanium gets this approval too. Superficially it seems similar enough to PhoneGap in how it works, with the added advantage of native UI widgets on mobiles.

<comment><USER11> Seems very different. Titanium translates code into native widgets. PhoneGap just wraps everything in a webkit, and provides the scripts to power the apps using web ui components.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if the PhoneGap people just cold asked Apple if their framework was okay. If so, have any other iPhone developers done this? Maybe someone who isn't even trying for cross-platformness, like someone using Lua in a harmless way. There's a lot of mystery surrounding this; wouldn't it be a thing if some of it could be cleared up by just asking?

Not that anyone should feel safe.

<comment><USER13> I doubt this will ever happen.

If Apple clarifies that only Flash is evil through an offical statement of acceptance for other technologies, they make themselves vulnerable to antitrust and free-market jurisdiction, at least in Europe.

IANAL.

But I have the nagging feeling that the best PhoneGap users can hope to archive — is a silent allowance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wrote my first app with phonegap. I loved it at first but moved to Titanium because PhoneGap (UIWebView) is really slow. Now doing native. Can someone point out a phonegap app that isn't trivial/doesn't suck?

Also, it's a lot of work to do even simple things like, say, have your search field stay at the top when you scroll. <http://cubiq.org/scrolling-div-for- mobile-webkit-turns-3/16>

</comment><comment><USER15> What about titanium, any news?

<comment><USER11> No news. I'm sure HN will be the first to know.

This is a good sign, no doubt. But I'm still pessimistic about Titanium on iPhone. I've stopped all development until I know for sure my apps will allowed on the AppStore.

I may continue dev anyways though since Android support is pretty nice. But iPhone was the focus and now its very much up in the air.

<comment><USER16> I am also pessimistic about Titanium on the iPhone, as the seems to be in the same boat as Adobe, etc.

I am following your same path with using obj c for iPhone development, but using Titanium for Android, and Blackberry when support for it is release this summer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not a surprise. PhoneGap is written in Objective C, and Apple has no beef with Web technologies, otherwise they wouldn't make the UIWebView control available to iPhone developers. Indeed, there are many formatting situations that demand you use it.

</comment><comment><USER18> Of course, PhoneGap just give an easy access to developers to the WebView component, but it's still a native Obj-C application.

</comment><comment><USER19> doesn't the new tos only effect os4 sdk applications ?

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't mean to be the grumpy sceptic, but how do we know that's a credible claim? There are no names mentioned, no specifics, no emails presented. On the other hand, if you were to be the skeptical kind, Nitobi, fearing the unthinkable - abandonment of their hard work - could have fibbed a little, they'd have every incentive to do so.

Some confirmation would be nice, just saying.

I have no reason to think they fibbed, I have no reason to believe they would do something like that, I'm just saying there's a claim, would be nice to get specifics. Making an app takes a lot of time and effort, reassurances are nice to have.

<comment><USER21> Is it not Flash? Then it's probably ok.

What!? We all know whats going on...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Interesting that Jobs complained 'sub-standard apps', and then allows PhoneGap? I think PhoneGap is a great tool and should be allowed, but look at some apps made with it. They feel chintzy to me. Navigation bars and toolbars don't stay on screen when you scroll for instance.

I don't think that's really a big deal, but the logic doesn't work if that's your reason for 3.3.1 and blocking flash.</comment>


MetaCartel: A Mysterious Community in the Ethereum Ecosystem - <AUTHOR> https://www.telefuel.com/blog/inside-metacartel-a-mysterious-community-on-the-frontier-of-the-ethereum-ecosystem <comment><USER2> The power of the MetaCartel community is incredible. Stoked to watch where this goes!</comment>


Federico Musto has stepped down as Arduino CEO - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/01/federico-musto-is-out-as-arduino-ceo/ <comment><USER2> TL;DR major shareholders want to make profit, therefore found a way to kick out visionary CEO to replace with MBA/financial CEO. Without a publicliy valid reason they just complained about the CV, a document which barely ever is 100% honest. But since the old CEO doesn't seem to make a fuss of it, the severance package probably was good enough.

<comment><USER3> > Without a publicliy valid reason they just complained about the CV, a > document which barely ever is 100% honest.

At least in Germany lying in the CV is considered as a _very serious_ issue. What you called "barely 100% correct" would thus probably be called "fraud" in Germany.

<comment><USER2> Can you be more specific? This is the first time I hear someone say that. I'm educated to individually write CVs for each company related to what they need. I never needed to provide any proof either.

<comment><USER3> > Can you be more specific?

Here are some articles about this topic (all in German):

> [http://hoesmann.eu/im-lebenslauf-gelogen-was-sind-die- > jurist...](http://hoesmann.eu/im-lebenslauf-gelogen-was-sind-die- > juristischen-folgen/)

> [https://arbeitgeber.monster.de/hr/personal- > tipps/rekrutierun...](https://arbeitgeber.monster.de/hr/personal- > tipps/rekrutierung-verguetung/bewerberauswahl/frisierte-bewerbungen- > entlarven-74644.aspx)

> [http://www.spiegel.de/karriere/luegen-bei-der-bewerbung- > das-...](http://www.spiegel.de/karriere/luegen-bei-der-bewerbung-das-droht- > bei-lebenslauf-manipulation-a-1041634.html)

> > [https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/karriere/tipps/article1349518...](https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/karriere/tipps/article13495184/Wie- > Arbeitgeber-Blender-und-Aufschneider-entlarven.html)

Principally if a lie in your CV is uncovered, you can immediately be fired (even if it was not fraud in the legal sense; being a relevant reason to give you the job suffices), even if you worked for years in the company. So be honest.

> I'm educated to individually write CVs for each company related to what they > need.

I am not a native English speaker - so I am not sure what you are trying to say here.

> I never needed to provide any proof either.

Some time ago as a sick leave cover I was in a commission for a rather prestigious academic scholarship for students. I had a lot of exaggerations and concealments in the application forms and CVs to uncover. If someone uncovered such one in the selection interview, you could be sure that the candidate would not be selected. For example so many candidates who claim to be interested in opera - and so easy to check. Or so many candidates who claim to be seriously interested in Linux or Android - no, only having installed some GNU/Linux distribution or having rooted your phone is not what I consider as serious interest. Or some guy who claimed that for altruistic reasons he developed some math training app for iOS for disabled pupils - but concealing that it had in-app purchase. If he had honestly claimed there was interest in entrepreneurship, this would have been no problem (surely even very positive). But since he claimed he did it just out of social conscience and concealed the in-app purchase, this was a central reason why the commission did not trust his integrity and decided against giving him the scholarship.

Similar things also hold for job applications. Things _will_ typically be checked in the job interview - especially if they are relevant for the job. So taking an example from one of the above articles: Don't claim that you apply because you are looking for new challenges if the honest reason is that you had trouble with the previous boss (the new employer can simply ask the old one if he suspects this reason). Also don't claim that you were on parental leave or travelling the world if you were unemployed at that time etc.

<comment><USER2> I honestly believe even many Germans don't know that, because I really never heard anybody saying something like this before. So thanks a lot, I certainly try to honor it now that I know it.

<comment><USER3> > I honestly believe even many Germans don't know that, because I really never > heard anybody saying something like this before.

I would rather say that at least for jobs it is so deeply ingrained in German culture that most German would not even consider that somewhere else such a behavior is tolerated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> the-dude I am confused : is this the evil Arduino or the non-evil one?

<comment><USER4> It's not really evil as such. It's more the intersection of money and greed.

Musto has lied about a lot of things (some more bizarre than others), and clearly gives zero thoughts about the community side of things. Banzi and co have also some interesting history when it comes to acknowledgement of Arduino's history, especially in relation to the original wiring project and processing.

There isn't really an evil or non-evil Arduino. The original Arduino is a modification to Hernando Barragan's Wiring board to support the Atmega8 chipset. Banzi was Barragan's supervisor. Banzi and a bunch of other guys at IDII forked the project (for reasons Barragan says he doesn't know) and founded Arduino, eventually building the Uno, still based on the Wiring board.

The Nano and Pro Mini followed, and when Arduino realised there was money to be made, proceeded to fall out with each other.

Now we're in a situation where both Arduino orgs are claiming to be open source, but only some products are open source. Deals have been made with companies that will only ever provide binary blobs and require NDAs that mean that there are Arduino products out there that will _never_ be open source hardware.

If Arduino was to turn around and say, "Hey guys, the Arduino Uno, Nano and Pro Mini are open source. The Yun, ARM boards and others aren't", I think people would understand. Instead, Arduino uses ambiguity to hide it's open source status.

There's huge sums of money at stake, and that's what's driving it. The push from Maker Magazine and Adafruit may have put pressure on Musto to step down (or not), but it's not like Adafruit don't have their own competing boards, which makes it a little difficult for Adafruit to get too close without facing possible accusations of competitive badmouthing.

<comment><USER5> The push from Adafruit at least seemed rather bizarre and cynical to me. All of a sudden, they started caring about the open-source status of hardware that predated the Arduino split and using it as justification for why Musto was evil and needed to go. This wasn't something they'd cared about before. Indeed, when Bre Pettis and Makerbot went against their loudly-proclaimed principles and took their 3D printers (which borrowed heavily from other's open designs) closed source while hiding behind vague statements, Adafruit's response was to post a piece that compared the people who criticised Makerbot to "fundamentalists" who "blow things up" and claimed to be defending "open source innovation and polite disagreement" by doing so: [https://blog.adafruit.com/2012/09/21/in-defense-of-open- sour...](https://blog.adafruit.com/2012/09/21/in-defense-of-open-source- innovation-and-polite-disagreement/)

Honestly, ever since the Makerbot fiasco it's increasingly felt like the main principle in open hardware is what makes the right clique of insiders most money, and this hasn't done much to change my opinion on that.

<comment><USER6> I find your post to be cynical.

The article you attribute to Adafruit is not written by them, they just linked to it from their blog, ostensibly as food for thought and discussion.

A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to interact with Limor and PT over email after they reached out to me in response to a project I'd posted on a forum. I found them to be gracious, supportive, and genuine, and based on the conversations we had I find your claim that they don't care about open-source hardware to be dubious.

<comment><USER5> There was no discussion. They systematically deleted comments that disagreed or that (correctly) interpreted Makerbot's comments as them going closed source. I personally had one deleted for pointing out that the "fundamentalists" were far politer and less damaging than Bre Pettis's own public shaming of newcomers to the open hardware community who merely had trouble understanding the proper format they should release their hardware files in, and that politely holding someone to their own standards isn't really fundamentalism. Suggestions from others that comparing opponents to terrorists is not in fact contributing to polite disagreement got similarly short shrift.

<comment><USER7> @makomk the only reason we'd delete a comment is if you cursed, made personal attacks, etc.

we covered makerbot going closed-source on adafruit, including the class action lawsuit. [https://blog.adafruit.com/?main_page=blog&s=makerbot](https://blog.adafruit.com/?main_page=blog&s=makerbot) additionally, we covered the close-sourcing of the arduino.org products (federico's arduino) - [https://blog.adafruit.com/?s=%23freearduino](https://blog.adafruit.com/?s=%23freearduino)

and just to be super-duper clear, my opinion is that it was a mistake for makerbot to go closed source the way they did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder what was the amount on the check, given that he claimed the business could grow from 15 to 50M [https://www.open-electronics.org/from-arduino-to- genuino-the...](https://www.open-electronics.org/from-arduino-to-genuino-the- reasons-for-a-choice/)

Even if 50M was a bold one, I wouldn't have sold 50% of the company for less than 20M.

I fear Arduino is gonna pay a mortgage for a long time, mining its ability to innovate.

</comment><comment><USER9> I thought everyone there already suspected he was the CEO? But I'm glad he finally came out with it. Must have taken some courage!

<comment><USER10> I genuinely can't tell if you're serious or not

<comment><USER9> Nope, it was a joke responding to the title itself only.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Doing business in open-source is hard.

I never really fancied Arduino as a business, then came the Raspberry Pi Foundation and I found my true love.

<comment><USER12> What do you prefer about the Raspberry Pi Foundation?

<comment><USER11> What I actually meant that I switched platforms...</comment></comment></comment>


Disque: a distributed message broker - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/antirez/disque <comment><USER2> Disque is being reimplemented as a redis module rather than a standalone project. It's scheduled for the next redis release.

[https://gist.github.com/antirez/a3787d538eec3db381a41654e214...](https://gist.github.com/antirez/a3787d538eec3db381a41654e214b31d)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great! Did not know about that. Thanks for the information :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Disque is being redesigned, it is scheduled to be released soon.</comment>


Source Code in TV and Films - <AUTHOR> http://moviecode.tumblr.com/?og=1

<comment><USER2> Some movies care, some don't. It's very hit or miss.

When The Internship was being filmed, I got asked numerous times for appropriately licensed code for a given scene. They would tell me what the scene was about, i would go and find code that made sense for it. You would think nobody would care about that in a comedy.

Some of the bug fixing people are doing here and there (some was cut, some was not) is actually me fixing bugs in the same code in vim. They wanted it to look completely real.

Interestingly, the people i've worked with who have cared the most about getting stuff right are actually the Silicon Valley (TV show) folks.

<comment><USER3> Silicon Valley is easily my favourite comedy and arguably favourite TV show of the last few years.

I live in the North of the UK so I have no idea how accurate it is in terms of culture but it certainly does a fantastic job on the technical accuracy.

<comment><USER2> They work with a ton of technical consultants. The number of legal things they've went well into the weeds to get right was impressive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Funny to see my Tumblr get voted up on HN. Here's a Wired article explaining the genesis: [http://www.wired.com/2014/01/movie-fake- code/](http://www.wired.com/2014/01/movie-fake-code/)

I tried to follow its success with "Better Living Through Microcontrollers" which didn't take off for some reason :-)

[http://bltuc.tumblr.com/](http://bltuc.tumblr.com/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm a software developer who likes to read conde but I must confese something when i'm watching a sci-fi movie and some computer stuff/hack is shown I do not pay much attention to that specific detail, I really like to believe the lie of the movie.

I really enjoy to read these blogpost after the fact, about these easter eggs and how someone figure out what is the conde shown and how unrelated to the scene it is, but I don't do it during the movie just because I don't feel the urge.

<comment><USER6> What is conde?

<comment><USER7> I'm going to assume ESL and a typo when typing "code". That or autocorrect gone wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Join us at [http://www.reddit.com/r/itsaunixsystem](http://www.reddit.com/r/itsaunixsystem) for more like this :)

</comment><comment><USER9> As per the usual, there's a relevant xkcd. [https://xkcd.com/1451/](https://xkcd.com/1451/)

Seeing any sort of code, hacking, programming or just about anything computer related in movies is always interesting, I've always thought it would be an interesting experiment to try and create a visual one-click method of "hacking" movie style. The closest I've seen is zANTI, a phone app with fairly basic MITM exploits, and stuff like shellshock- all of which can be done with a couple buttons.

I mean, you can never get away from the versatility of a terminal, but sometimes blinkenlights are cool.

</comment><comment><USER10> This one is interesting. It actually gives the appearance of having something to do with the subject matter.

[http://moviecode.tumblr.com/post/80751023812/from-hack- quant...](http://moviecode.tumblr.com/post/80751023812/from-hack-quantum-lisp- that-appears-to-have)

<comment><USER11> And whoever wrote it out took the time to follow syntax. Although I think this is actually Scheme? Defining a function in Lisp is slightly different if I recall.

<comment><USER10> Also, Lisp dialects tend to use 'nil' for false and 't' for true. Schemes usually use #f and #t

There's the convention of using "?" for predicates. Lisp usually would use 'p'. As in 'stress?' vs 'stress-p'

So yeah, most likely a form of Scheme. Which can be considered as a 'Lisp' dialect, so not exactly wrong either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In Interstellar(2014 Movie), Matthew McConaughey chases an Indian Surveillance drone and hacks it through his laptop in which, all the instructions were in Sanskrit (It was a 1-2 second glimpse of the screen so don't know exactly what was there or whether it was in Devnagari).

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm a fan of "Access Main Computer File" \- a collection of fictional computer interfaces from cinema.

[http://accessmaincomputerfile.net/](http://accessmaincomputerfile.net/)

<comment><USER14> [https://scifiinterfaces.wordpress.com/](https://scifiinterfaces.wordpress.com/) is a blog dedicated to fictional computer interfaces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> from the creator, a year ago [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7006317](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7006317)

</comment><comment><USER16> [http://hackoftheday.securitytube.net/2013/04/my-code-made- it...](http://hackoftheday.securitytube.net/2013/04/my-code-made-it-to- hollywood-movie.html) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5502878](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5502878)

This is also an interesting story on this topic.

</comment><comment><USER17> Not code exactly but I noticed this gem in the climactic scene of Elysium (spoiler alert!):

[http://imgur.com/xZSnKro](http://imgur.com/xZSnKro)

During reboot, the space station flashes up a BIOS POST screen and detects the four attached IDE devices :-)

(screen cap from [https://youtu.be/30BTQ6B4Y6M](https://youtu.be/30BTQ6B4Y6M))

</comment><comment><USER18> Here is one from CSI:Cyber, "A Firmware that can burn printers." It is plain HTML.

[https://twitter.com/brajeshwar/status/581169913412382720](https://twitter.com/brajeshwar/status/581169913412382720)

<comment><USER19> It seems like CSI always has the most laughable faux code/terminology. I've heard that writers have internal competitions to see who can get the most ridiculous dialogue in, "gui interface in visual basic" etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The most amusing ones are where the submitter has stated how absurd the code is for the situation. Like the Spanish Ministry of Culture video telling people to become programmers, where complete jibberish (asdfghjkl kind of thing) is being typed.

</comment><comment><USER21> So few of these have syntax highlighting!

</comment><comment><USER14> The first two seasons of Alias did a decent job in the depiction of computers, computer use and code.

</comment><comment><USER22> I miss more art projects using source code. Movies is one of the few exceptions.</comment>


Wolfram Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2012/08/30/wolframalpha-personal-analytics-for-facebook/ <comment><USER2> Cool idea, but the first two comments on SW's blog post are about privacy and data usage. I admit I have some concerns as well.

What's Wolfram's policy about personal data usage? (And is it better or worse than Facebook?)

<comment><USER3> From the link provided below the analysis tool (<http://www.wolframalpha.com/facebook/>):

 _Come back again! Fresh data = new results every time!

Your information is only stored for one hour, so each time you return, we'll run fresh analytics on your Facebook data._

<comment><USER2> Cool, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can anyone actually get into this? It keeps dying when I try to 'get started'

<comment><USER5> You're not alone – I can't even get their "sign in" page to load.

<comment><USER6> 2 hours later +1

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is absolutely amazing!

<comment><USER8> It's a bit scary as well!

<comment><USER7> scary to know how much info facebook has about you. wait until they _actually_ start selling all of our little secrets

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I really want to like Wolfram Alpha. But I can't. It's too slow.</comment>


A summary of the draft EU directive that might abolish DST next year - <AUTHOR> https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2018-September/026836.html <comment><USER2> > * Member states can make one-off changes to a different UTC offset but must > give at least 6 months notice and can't change their mind during the 6 month > window (but can before that).

> (I suppose a state could give notice of one-off changes every 6 months, but > I think that would be seen as a violation of the "no seasonal changes" rule, > which takes precedence.)

Deciding it year by year would be similar to what Brazil did before 2008 and I've been badly bitten by that. I hope no member state will do this.</comment>