The Ethereum-blockchain size will not exceed 1TB anytime soon - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/5chdn/the-ethereum-blockchain-size-will-not-exceed-1tb-anytime-soon-58a <comment> TD-Linux The described system is basically identical to Bitcoin's pruned mode. It's lot better than geth's fast sync, which trusts your peers to not have messed with the state.

<comment><USER3> I don't think there's any way they could mess with the state, since every block header has a merkle root of that block's state.

<comment><USER4> That just prevents anyone except miners from messing with the state. One of the nice properties of Bitcoin is that even miners can't magic more coins into existence than allowed by the protocol or spend other people's money. You lose that a little with this kind of fast sync. It's probably worth it from a usability standpoint though.

<comment><USER3> Miners could mess with very recent state, but if you download enough blocks with full state to be confident of finality for the earliest one, and verify just those transitions, you're still safe.

If the incorrect blocks were published on the network, they'd be rejected by other miners, so you don't have to look far back unless (1) there's a sustained 51% attack on the whole network, or (2) you're a very juicy target and a huge miner can take over your internet connection, and you don't notice a large drop in difficulty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Irrelevant, as it is not working on a powerful laptop anymore, which means it is not a real blockchain anymore.

<comment><USER6> Good thinking. I like that.

<comment><USER5> I'm not trolling: I have 50Mbit connection and specd out macbook - <USER2> most powerful laptop you can expect from a user.

This Mist/Wallet thing does. not. work.

Maybe if i tweak or use light client it would, but as a user I don't care.

<comment><USER7> I have a Dell laptop that I bought for ~$500 in 2014, upgraded to 16GB RAM and SSD, it holds ETH, LTC and BTC blockchain. It's constant network transfer is 4MB/s, avg. CPU usage 70%. Run Arch. What problem are you having?

<comment><USER5> How often do you sync? First of all, mist crashes way too often. Even when it works it takes hours to sync. DOes it work smoothly for you?

<comment><USER7> Mist crashed only once for me when I run out of memory, "swarm" consumed 15GB of RAM and was killed by kernel. Otherwise it never crashed for me. Mist is on all the time, bitcoin once day for a few hours (3-5hrs), litecoin is on for weekends.

<comment><USER5> Maybe because it's always on it works for you. I only open it once in a while, and leave frustrated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Depends on your purpose for running a node. I use it to validate transactions and to query transaction histories, for which the full state is necessary.

It would be nice if they could implement a version that allows this, without the bloat.

<comment><USER9> I also use it to query transaction histories and to trace the currency flows. For that, full sync is necessary AFAIK.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Someone help me with this, but why do people need the full history of the Ethereum blockchain? Shouldn't having a few of the last valid blocks be enough?

<comment><USER11> Each block does not replay the entire state of the system. There could be an unspent output in a block from a year ago, that is then spent in a transaction tomorrow. You need to track all of the valid inputs that might go into a transaction. You don't need the full history (i.e. you don't need spent outputs), but you certainly need a lot more than just the most recent N blocks.

<comment><USER10> Is this for Bitcoin or for Ethereum? I thought the former has UTXOs and the latter has accounts.

So the issue is, if you want to validate a transaction, I would have to find the block in which the input was made, and confirm all the blocks from that one to the current block?

<comment><USER3> You're correct, Ethereum uses account balances. You don't have to keep track of inputs and outputs, just check that the balance is sufficient.

Since each block header has a merkle root of the block's state, you can just get all the block headers to check PoW, get the current state, and validate transactions and states as many blocks back as you feel you need to make sure a miner hasn't faked the current state.

Here's an old article by Vitalik on the subject:

[https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/06/26/state-tree- pruning/](https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/06/26/state-tree-pruning/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Somebody still have to save the full chain. I don't think the idea is finally to have just one full copy of the chain.

<comment><USER3> Yes but you only need the transaction history for that, since you can reconstruct any block state you wish from the transactions.

<comment><USER13> If blocks doesn't have anything extra that transactions cannot create then why is block bloated and why do we even need it?

<comment><USER3> You don't. Full nodes do just fine without storing all those block states.

You need the current state, and very recent history just to make sure there's no shenanigans, but you don't need old state unless you're doing historical queries for some reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> 1/2 a TB now, [http://bc.daniel.net.nz/](http://bc.daniel.net.nz/)

<comment><USER3> That's only if you store the full state of every block, which isn't necessary even for a full node. If you just keep a few recent block states, plus the entire transaction history, it's in the low tens of GB but you can still fully validate the entire chain history, and reconstruct the state of any block you want.</comment></comment>


Levenshtein distance and the Triangle Inequality - <AUTHOR> http://richardminerich.com/2012/09/levenshtein-distance-and-the-triangle-inequality/

<comment><USER2> This post is confusingly written. As the author points out, the issue is not with Damerau-Levenshtein distance, which certainly does obey the triangle inequality; rather the issue is with the incorrect algorithm used to compute it. Nonetheless, after the initial introduction he usually refers to it as "Damerau-Levenshtein" when in fact it's an incorrect version of Damerau- Levenshtein.

The difference he's pointing out isn't that Levenshtein obeys the triangle inequality but Damerau-Levenshtein doesn't; it's that a naive algorithm to compute Levenshtein works, but a naive algorithm to compute Damerau- Levenshtein doesn't -- and that the measure it does compute does not obey the triangle inequality.

While it's clear that the author recognizes this, he should really be more explicit and avoid conflating terms like this; this sort of thing is going to confuse people.

<comment><USER3> according to wikipedia Damerau-Levenshtein does not obey the triangle inequality - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damerau–Levenshtein_distance#Ap...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damerau–Levenshtein_distance#Applications)

<comment><USER2> Read more closely -- it's the "restricted edit distance" which does not obey the triangle inequality, which, if you read the "Algorithm" section, is not actually the same thing as Damerau-Levenshtein distance. (Notice also how the section you point to makes sure to differentiate between restricted edit distance and real edit distance, i.e. Damerau-Levenshtein distance.)

That Damerau-Levenshtein distance obeys the triangle inequality follows trivially from the definition, since it's just distance in an appropriate graph.

<comment><USER3> Thanks, Sniffnoy!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You know, I have a mathematics and economics background. I love coming across CS/Applied Math gems like this. In my daily work I never even consider the computational consequences of resorting. Love it.

</comment><comment><USER5> Reminds me of this blog entry:

[http://blog.notdot.net/2007/4/Damn-Cool-Algorithms- Part-1-BK...](http://blog.notdot.net/2007/4/Damn-Cool-Algorithms-Part-1-BK- Trees)

</comment><comment><USER6> I must be losing my mind, but I can't figure out what 3 edits would get you from rick->irkc in the final diagram. It seems like the distance is 4, not 3 (not problematic because the triangle inequality still holds, but it's bugging the heck out of me).

<comment><USER7> I trust you will find the following works, based on following the minimal branches of the Levenshtein Algorithm.

"rick", "irkc": remove the final character of "irkc" (insertion)

"rick", "irk": remove the final character of both strings at no cost

"ric", "ir": remove the final character of both strings at a cost of 1 (substitution)

"ri", "i": remove the final character of both strings at no cost

"r", "": base case, cost of 1.

In summary, "rick" -> "rickc" -> "ickc" -> "irkc".</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to add "Discuss this on HN" to a blog - <AUTHOR>

I'm in the process of setting up a new blog. I'd rather have the discussion all happen on hacker news rather than set up disqus or facebook comments.
I'm also not that interested in submitting all the articles myself. I'd rather just say to readers: "If you'd like to discuss this article, go to this link on Hacker News". The first person to do it would have the opportunity to add the article.
How can this been done? <comment><USER2> Basically implement this: <http://ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html> on your site.</comment>


508 Mirrorboard for Linux (evdev/uinput) - <AUTHOR> http://www.ordecon.com/2008/12/29/mirrorboard-type-with-one-hand-use-the-other-for-something-else/

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I'm thrifty. I'm not going to pay 150$ for something that Linux can do for me. It turns out, it's more difficult to do this than I thought would be.

~3 hours of hacking with C.

</comment><comment><USER2> Is there a Mac equivalent for this available? I'd love to get my hands on one. uControl used to have it, but then it was removed because it was threatened with patent infringement. <http://www.gnufoo.org/ucontrol/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm certainly going to try to make an OS X equivalent. I just need to haul my ass to the other computer :-)</comment></comment>


2014 Was Hottest Year on Record, Surpassing 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/17/science/earth/2014-was-hottest-year-on-record-surpassing-2010.html <comment><USER4> I wish the NYT article included more data (though there is a chart). Raw data is available at NCDC[0]

It is true that the data shows a continually warming trend, with 2014 as the warmest on record. It is also true that the recorded warming is proceeding at a very slow pace, with the new record anomaly of 0.69 C only 0.04 C higher than the previous records of 2005 and 2010 and only 0.06 C higher than the record of 1998.

It is false to say that the globe is not warming, but it also false to say that the warming is on pace for even a full degree of warming by the end of the century. The "warmest X years have all occurred since Y" but they are also clumping together pretty closely and moving up from that clump ever so slowly (which incidentally makes me quite optimistic about our continuing technological progress away from fossil fuels)

[0][http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2014/13](http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2014/13)

<comment><USER5> Thank you for the data, but it brings up a big question for me. How do they boil down "Global Temperature" to a single number from 1880 to 2014? In 1880 there were only 38 states and the Statue of Liberty hadn't been delivered yet for 5 years.

Today they have temperature sensors in Antarctica, the North Pole, Alaska, Utah, the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the middle of the Pacific Ocean, etc, etc. Did they have these same sensors in 1880? In 1900? In 1920?

Where is the data that shows the constituents of the "one true number" that claims to stretch over a period of 134 years?

<comment><USER6> You know the phrase "The sun never sets on British soil"? Well that dates to the 18th Century, and they we measuring temperature everywhere they were. True, expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic were later, but they also recorded temperature.

So, the record, while incomplete, is pretty good.

<comment><USER5> _So, the record, while incomplete, is pretty good._

Do you have any evidence of this claim? Specifically, do you know where I can find the formula used to calculate the global temperature and the constituent temperature readings, locations and time/dates?

Common sense says that such readings would be spotty at best and also that they would be incomparable between 1880 and 2014 but since they are comparing them I'm very curious of their methodology.

 _EDIT_ OK I found what claims to be the source code of the software that massages the numbers here: [http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/sources/](http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/sources/)

 _EDIT2_ OK I found the underlying data here: [http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/](http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/)

It's exactly what I thought. Hardly any of the stations go back to 1880 and the ones that do are unbelievably spotty with sometimes two years or more of missing data. Oh and they're apparently not even measurements - they're "reconstructions". And apparently they re-adjust these reconstructions all the time. (see [http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/09/nasas_rubber_rul...](http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/09/nasas_rubber_ruler.html#ixzz27YZRxqIW))

The environment would be much better off if we stopped pretending we know things we don't and just agree that it is stupid to squander a finite resource like fossil fuels and start conserving it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mentioned this in another thread, but I've been reading Stewart Brand's "Whole Earth Discipline" [1], and it's very interesting. In particular, I feel persuaded that nuclear power is our big shot at bringing atmospheric levels of CO2 down to manageable levels.

Brand was one of the first "Greens". His Whole Earth Catalog inspired a lot of the 70's techno-hippies, like Steve Jobs, and it's fascinating to read how his positions have evolved over the decades, and how he is championing positions he wouldn't have expected to be championing when he was younger.

1: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Discipline](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Discipline)

<comment><USER8> Does he at least consider Thorium as a nuclear power source?

<comment><USER9> If thorium was all it's cracked up to be by its proponents, it would _already_ be a major power source. Thorium reactor technology dates back to the 1960s, but there still aren't any commercial thorium reactors, although hundreds of other reactors have been built since then.

The lack of market drive to thorium - not just in the tree-hugging US, but in less sensitive places like China - is a dead giveaway that either a: it's not nearly as easy as it's made out to be, b: it's not economical relative to other reactor designs, or c: it's not nearly as safe as claimed. I think c can be ruled out, based on common sense and the fact that China doesn't care so much about safety. That leads to either a, or b, or some combination of the two.

At any rate, the hard reality of the invisible hand tells me that thorium isn't so awesome after all, or we'd see thorium reactors in commercial use by now.

<comment><USER10> Current reactors weren't developed by the invisible hand, they were developed as part of the effort to make bombs.

<comment><USER9> That just suggests that nuclear power is inherently uneconomical! It also doesn't make sense, because there are many nations that have nuclear reactors, but don't have or want nuclear weapons - Japan, Sweden, Belgium, and Spain come to mind offhand.

Think the implications through, in a serious manner. _If thorium is cheap and safe, why isn 't it being used at all today?_ This is the question thorium advocates never ask (and will downvote you for asking, as per my example here), and it infuriates me! I don't have an answer for this question. Thorium looks good, on paper. What I do have is observation, and observed facts do not match the written theory. Science says you should question the theory.

<comment><USER10> The countries without military nuclear programmes still made use of knowledge and technology that was developed in military programmes elsewhere. As with the bomb itself, just knowing that it can work will save a lot of time.

Your list of countries doesn't look very "clean" to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> At this point it's obvious: CO2, which traps heat by a clearly understandable and straightforward physical mechanism, is altering the Earth's climate with unknown but likely mostly negative consequences.

That means we can add this fact to an already _very_ long list of reasons that we must go beyond fossil fuels.

I personally don't think the CO2 problem is at the top of that list. The top slot by far belongs to the depletion problem. There is a finite amount of the stuff that is economically recoverable. We don't know exactly where the limit is, but when we hit it -- assuming we have no alternatives -- we will begin a downward spiral toward the collapse of modern civilization. This might also involve global warfare, possibly nuclear, and a "mass die off" of the human species. At the very least all economic growth would cease and with it all opportunity for anyone to advance their condition in life. The pie would begin shrinking, and this would bring a return to a scarcity mentality in all things. An "orderly die-back and return to bare subsistence" is probably the _best_ case scenario.

The fact that our entire modern technological society is _absolutely_ dependent upon a finite source of energy is probably the greatest existential threat that we face. That this isn't talked about more is likely a result of denial in the face of a very terrifying problem. A good way to think about it is to compare it to a planet-killer asteroid that we know is headed our way.

Next up is probably the geopolitical nightmare of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels transfer massive quantities of wealth from (relatively) liberal open societies to brutal totalitarian states where people are beheaded for questioning the dominant religion or dictator. It finances both terrorism and the ideologies behind it. The only alternative way to still get these fuels would be to embark upon a blood-soaked imperial crusade to simply seize these fossil fuel reserves, an alternative that's arguably worse than the existing state of affairs for many reasons.

I'd put the CO2 problem in the third slot below these. The fourth slot would probably belong to the _other_ environmental damages inflicted by fossil fuel mining and use including air and water pollution and the destruction of otherwise valuable land.

Anyone who argues for the fossil fuel status quo at this point is delusional or insane. I personally think this is the greatest problem facing our civilization.

<comment><USER12> "Can we stop arguing at this point? Anyone who still thinks the fossil fuel status quo is okay is insane."

72%[1] of republicans in the senate are insane apparently.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFOPf0s5u5E#t=54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFOPf0s5u5E#t=54)

<comment><USER13> They're perfectly sane (they see their constituency as their funders - <USER2> which Big Oil is a big name), but corrupt.

How do you remediate a corrupt system?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Some eye opening tidbits in here:

"The 10 warmest years on record have all occurred since 1997"

"Several scientists said the most remarkable thing about the 2014 record was that it occurred in a year that did not feature El Niño"

Of course all of this is in relation to a history starting only in the late 1800s, so we are looking at a blip on geological time scales, but still even micro-cycles within macro-cycles can be instructive and meaningful. Would like to hear from the experts on the macro view.

<comment><USER14> Not an expert, but the wiki page seems pretty accessible [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record)

        Satellites: 35 years
        Balloons: 65 years
        Instruments: 165 years
        Ice cores: 800,000 years
        Sediment cores: at least 500,000,000 years

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#med...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#mediaviewer/File:All_palaeotemps.svg)

<comment><USER15> It' not very clear, but the "on record" probably include only the instrument measurement period, or something like that. The ice cores graph (linked near the bottom) says that 125.000 years ago the temperature was much hotter (+8°C). [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record#mediaviewer/...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record#mediaviewer/File:EPICA_temperature_plot.svg)

<comment> mark-r The rate of change probably matters as much as the absolute difference. Given enough time, life can adapt. I'd love to see a chart of both the temperatures and the rate of change over those time periods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I had seen the anomaly graph a month or two ago and it had confirmed my perception of Summer 2014 in the the upper Midwest USA (Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota). We had a relative cool summer; The temperature didn't even hit 90 degrees until well into August.

It was a welcome change, as our hot summers are always accompanied by brutal humidity. I'd like to know _why_ it was so cool last year.

<comment><USER17> Because as the Arctic warms, the Jet Stream becomes more chaotic and reaches further south.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Gavin A. Schmidt, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, said the next time a strong El Niño occurs, it is likely to blow away all temperature records." Terrifying.

<comment><USER19> That's likely to be either this year or next year. NOAA puts out an update weekly, and they are currently saying "There is an approximately 50-60% chance of El Niño conditions during the next two months".

[http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/la...](http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution- status-fcsts-web.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> In the meantime, scientists are struggling to make lawmakers actually believe in science! Scary stuff. I really hope that the GOP turns on this issue soon enough. It's hard to believe that this is actually needed: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFOPf0s5u5E#t=54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFOPf0s5u5E#t=54)

</comment><comment><USER20> [http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Salem_Hypothesis](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Salem_Hypothesis)

No you aren't crazy if you notice that engineering fields tend to attract many brilliant people with wacky beliefs.

It's very evident in any controversial topic, even on HN as you can see ITT.

<comment><USER21> Back when I helped edit wikipedia physics articles, it was very noticeable that almost every crank with an anti-relativity agenda had an EE background. Not just engineering, but very specifically electrical engineering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Was the cooler eastern US an anomaly or is this an expected long term result?

</comment><comment><USER23> 2014 was the hottest year. But the summer in my city was complete crap. It was cold and rainy. Hope its better summer this year :)

</comment><comment><USER24> Of course, no mention that this is based on the ground-station temperature record which is continually being "revised" so that the past is cooler and cooler. I believe the raw station records have now been "revised" three times so that the original data is becoming meaningless. The satellite record does not show that 2014 was the warmest.

<comment><USER24> No surprise I'm being downvoted, but here's the satellite temperature record:

[http://woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1980/to:2015](http://woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1980/to:2015)

[Edit: why would people downvote a link to the satellite temperature record?]

<comment><USER25> Why? Like Galileo, you are a heretic, fighting the orthodoxy, willing to contradict the true religion! Pope Laureate Guru will send out his acolytes to deliver his inquisition and excommunication! That's why!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Ah yes. Always remember, "weather isn't climate", except when it's warmer, then it is.

<comment><USER27> Weird, I thought this article was about a years worth of global weather data. Perhaps you don't understand scale?

<comment><USER26> Let me ask you this, if 2014 were merely an anomalously cold year, would the reporting and commenting be different?

Maintaining scientific rigor is difficult in the best of times. Unfortunately, people give in to vain impulses to try to short cut the process and "prove" their position is correct even though the actual scientific process is slow.

One hot year is just one year, as one cold year would be. It's proof of very little. Certainly the validity, or not, of incredibly complex climate models does not rest particularly strongly on one year out of many.

Short circuiting the climate debate when a year is warm is no better than when a year is cold, and merely legitimizes the practice.

<comment><USER28> Exactly. Let's pick one hot year out of the whole series of hot years so we can then say, "It's just a data point." Each year is just a data point. Nothing to see here. I can't live long enough to prove a trend, therefore nobody can with their climate science based on 100's of measurement backed up way more history baked into the geology, etc. To argue the science, at this point, questions the arguers understanding of the process of science or the grasp of the quality of the science at hand.

Unfortunately, people give in to vain impulses and try to desperately undermine science in action by parsing data and charts to cast doubt upon something which has an ever higher likelihood of being true. We can't wait 10,000 years to say, "Yep, the data didn't lie."

What's the real downside to hedging your bets and leading on actions to wind down the climate impact of people? Disruption to existing market systems? Painful career changes for fossil energy industries? Increases in the price of beef? All of that happens without planned change anyways. Who's afraid of change when you still have a modicum of control?

<comment><USER26> Climate models are complex. The data needed to validate them is also enormous and difficult to get right. Validating a climate model is an enormously challenging prospect, and represents far more work than simply saying "seems like a couple years recently have been pretty hot."

As for the rest, you seem to be arguing against a strawman that isn't present in anything I wrote.

<comment><USER27> I didn't realize that the current overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming is based on "seems like a couple years recently have been pretty hot.". If thats not the case, does that count as a strawman in something you wrote?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> For the US, it was only the 34st warmest.

To put it in a bit more perspective what the NY Times is saying:

[http://www.climatedepot.com/2015/01/16/scientists-balk-at- ho...](http://www.climatedepot.com/2015/01/16/scientists-balk-at-hottest-year- claims-we-are-arguing-over-the-significance-of-hundredths-of-a-degree-the- pause-continues/)

<comment><USER30> Ahh yes. Climate Depot. Brainchild of Marc Morano, whose previous career highlights include ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Morano](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Morano)):

"He began his career working for Rush Limbaugh from 1992 to 1996, during which time he was known as "Limbaugh's man in Washington".[1] After 1996, he began working for Cybercast News Service, where he was the first to publish the accusations from Swift-Boat veterans that John Kerry ... Beginning in June 2006, Morano served as the director of communications of Senator Jim Inhofe."

This is totally the person I trust to get an unbiased perspective on science reporting.

<comment><USER31> Ahh yes. Argumentum ad verecundiam. Let's bash a guy because he hangs out with someone you dislike instead of refuting his centrals points.

You're total the person I trust to make logical arguments.

<comment><USER32> We are talking about someone who doxxes scientists he disagrees with as a debating tactic and then justifies it on the basis that he receives hate mail, so why shouldn't they.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Political theater,the differences are within margin of errors for measuring devices, however if we needed more evidence that all models of warming were wrong and we still aren't, well here you have it.

After all, which models that all the alarmist have been using since the beginning of the century have modeled what we have been seeing?

I am not saying there is no climate change, mother nature does damn well on her own. I just find all the alarmist to be, rather like members of a radical religion

<comment><USER34> "Within the margin of errors for measuring devices" What is this nonsense? Yes... a single thermometer will have a known margin of error, but when you take a measurement across thousands of thermometers, and then look at the trend of those measurements over decades... I mean... what the hell are you talking about?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Oh great, now we are back to "Global Warming". For years that label was not working because many areas were experiencing record low temperatures which kind of made the "Global Warming" advocates all look a bit silly. Thus the term "Climate Change" was introduced because after all who can argue against the fact that the climate is changing! I am on the fence as far as "Global Warming" is concerned but even I must admit that the climate is changing - <USER3> fact that the climate has always changed and always will seems to be besides the point.

Now we have a warm year and back we go to "Global Warming". Really hard sometimes to take these people seriously.

<comment><USER36> what? Are you saying you dont think on average the planet is becoming warmer?

<comment><USER35> I am saying we do not know yet if the climate change is within normal parameters, and even what is the definition of "normal change". The earth has been much much warmer and much much cooler.

What I find irritating is the rather poor science behind much of this (statistical modelling being presented as scientific proof for example), and government agendas and business interests are all clouding the picture.

The UK government for example have raised a huge amount of tax on the back of these fears.

<comment><USER9> I find the lack of numeracy in this criticism disconcerting. It's not just a question of whether the Earth has been historically warmer or cooler - it's a question of _how quickly_ the Earth became significantly warmer or cooler. A temperature change over thousands of years is a tremendously different thing than a temperature change over a few decades, when it comes to how temperature-sensitive life forms respond.

Moreover, it's not just a question of temperature. Changing CO2 levels are also measurably impacting ocean acidity, which affects extremely sensitive single-celled life forms at the root of the ocean's food chain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> They have some data relatively good for the NYT, e.g., graphs of global average differences (they call _anomalies_ which is common but, still, wildly inappropriate value-laden terminology) temperature each year for the past 200 years, etc. Good. Next question has to be, measured how, by whom, and where we can get peer-reviewed reports because, frankly, I just cannot take what you publish seriously. Not a chance.

But, then, the NYT, with their usual interest in _drama_ and their _trilogy_ of human transgression, retribution, and redemption, go off on their usual, talking about extreme values.

NYT, again, once again, over again, one more time, just for you again, and not nearly for the first time, all your _get 'm up on their hind legs_ drama with extreme values (what's meaningful, nearly all that's meaningful in this case, are the averages; without the averages the extreme values would be better than nothing, but with the averages the extreme values are just mammary glands on a boar hog and at best distracting) is one of the main reasons all your many, nearly daily, in my e-mail inbox _offers_ of full access to NYT I just ignore because I know your real agenda and your main techniques. NYT, occasionally you publish what at least looks like some good stuff (on big issues but typically without the evidence that would justify taking your reports on big issues seriously), but, for nearly all the rest of your stuff, if you take it seriously then you are just wacko. Instead, about the best that can be said for your stuff is that it is just light entertainment.

Just want you to know that you are not fooling everyone.

<comment><USER37> You have been down voted (not by me), which is reasonable given that you say the report is lying, but offer no counter-evidence.

If you look at the press release ([http://www.nasa.gov/press/2015/january/nasa- determines-2014-...](http://www.nasa.gov/press/2015/january/nasa- determines-2014-warmest-year-in-modern-record/)), you can notice a pointer to the data and the methods. If you want to be taken seriously, you'd have to engage that, rather than making empty claims and diverting the conversation to a referendum on the limitations of the NYT.

I also want to mention that the word "anomaly" in this context is a term of art for any difference between a value and a mean value -- this is not an editorial injection by the NYT. It is necessary to use these differences because seasonal and regional temperature variations make plots of raw temperature (or precipitation, etc.) fields not very useful. If you were aware of the literature in this area, you would know this.

<comment><USER25> > you say the report is lying

I never did any such thing. I just said that (1) their graph data was good but (2) their concern about extreme values was bad. Both (1) and (2) are plainly obvious and need no "counter-evidence".

I don't trust the NYT, but I didn't say that they were "lying".

> making empty claims

I made no claims except the obvious one that the NYT was emphasizing extreme values which, clearly for such data analysis, is wrong.

The _argument_ about _global warming_ is totally clear, "settled": No one knows what the climate will be in 10, 50, or 100 years for any scenarios having to do with humans.

Proof: Look at the results of the climate computer models; they are in fairly good agreement and predicted that today the temperatures would be much higher. They were wildly wrong. QED

Why were the models so wrong? For the technical part, assuming that the work was done honestly (and I don't really believe that), Freeman Dyson has a remark, I don't recall precisely, that maybe the problem was the models didn't do well modeling the effects of the biological responses or some such. So, maybe they did well enough with the Navier-Stokes equations, Planck black body radiation, sun spots, etc. but blew it on green leafy vegetables. But, at least from Freeman Dyson, we don't know.

Why would the NYT emphasize extreme values? That's not a scientific or technical question and, instead, is about their motivations. My guess about their motivations, YMMV and no technical references needed, is that they want to pass out _drama_ to get attention for their ads. Believe it or not. But a long time ago people saw that truth and the newspapers were not good bedfellows:

Evidence: An Andy Hardy movie from the 1930s where, clearly, the audience accepted that newspapers passed out nonsense. More? Sure, _Citizen Kane_ , which a lot of people can find believable.

For the sources of the NYT, I didn't see any mentioned. Sorry to say, at this point, given Obama's political positions, I can no longer take data from NASA or NOAA very seriously, but that is not a biggie in this case. I didn't claim that the extreme values were wrong, just that, when we do have average data, for the data analysis in question here, extreme values add nothing but confusion. Here I am on very solid ground: Clearly the temperature is a _stochastic process_ ; commonly we get new extreme values right along even if nothing is really changing. There are some quite precise results in the cases of coin flipping, Brownian motion, and martingales. What would be surprising would be that we didn't get new extreme values -- if we never got more extreme values, then we would have some bounds for the process that we would have a tough time believing.

"Anomaly" is still the wrong word. Actually, with a good meaning of _anomaly_ , we should just f'get about them; that is, they are _anomalies_ , and in that case the whole NYT article is moot.

Yes, I mentioned that it is common in this global warming mud wrestling to say _anomaly_ \-- it's still the wrong word. _Critical reading comprehension 101_ would have us conclude, correctly in my view, that here _anomaly_ is intended to mean not really from nature but from humans and their evil CO2, and that is _value-heavy_. Or, the suggestion is that there is a reason for the _anomaly_ , and their claim of the reason is human CO2. Send your money now to your favorite green political pressure group.</comment></comment></comment>


PandaBot: A friendly, affordable 3D printer - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pandarobotics/pandabot-a-friendly-affordable-3d-printer My good friend Kelly is finally rolling out his inexpensive ($800) 3D printer for everyone. Please support the Kickstarter. <comment><USER2> The video mentions they've only been working in the 3D printer world for less than a year. So now they know how to fix "all the problems" to make 3D printing available to the masses? The leadership page doesn't give me a lot of confidence in that blanket statement.

Regular 2D printing isn't something that's been easy for most people after 20 years of modern computing. It's a toss up whether or not software, hardware, or user error.. For that reason, I think 3D printing will be a hobbyist thing for another 5 years at least. The delta between a PandaBot and a high-quality MakerBot 2 with a good reputation is only about $1,000. Thats not much for a die-hard hobbyist, or rich geek wanting a new tech toy to fiddle with.

The MakerBot 2 is on its second iteration, designed and built by a thought leader, and looks really fucking impressive compared with the 2-tower and unprotected print head design of the PandaBot.

When people want to bring devices to the masses, they need to consider what that means. How many kids may stick a pencil or finger into the moving parts when Dad isn't paying attention? Or what about my maid who's spraying dust repellant around my desk? How are you going to fight warranty issues on things nearly impossible to prove, and for which you're not protecting against via thoughtful product design?

In effect, you've reduced costs to make the PandaBot accessible to a class of people who aren't really your customer, and that cost-cutting meant the removal of key parts that truly make a device ready for the masses. Like protecting the 'auto calibrating' head.

I think it's great you're working on that goal but expectations seems a little disconnected from reality (from my perspective).

<comment><USER3> _In effect, you've reduced costs to make the PandaBot accessible to a class of people who aren't really your customer_

And you know this how? I've been surprised at the consistent hostility of some people on HN to innovating on price. This is the same mentality that led to the US car market going temporarily insane and assuming that everyone wants the biggest SUV possible.

<comment><USER4> That wasn't fair. Pricing so close to COGS that you can't sustainably deliver the product isn't price innovation, nor is pricing so low that COGS forces you to deliver an inferior product; the comment you're responding to took pains to spell out why this particular 3d printer price didn't make much sense.

The consistent hostility towards low prices on HN is based on this site's manifest tendency to underprice things, or to calculate price from cost or from pie-eyed notions of how big their addressable markets are.

<comment><USER3> But Tom, what basis do you have for suggesting they can't sustainably deliver the product? I don't know whether this is the case, I'm waiting to find out. But I'm perplexed by the assumption that they can't, and thought the grandparent comment assumed its conclusions. I don't agree on the inferior product angle; that assumes someone else should define what the minimal acceptable functionality is.

I don't necessarily think the PandaBot is directly competitive with the Makerbot- I'm sure corners have been cut to achieve that low price. But I don't necessarily need everything that the Makerbot does. It seems to me that as a technology is refined, you have the choice of adding more features, or keeping more limited features and lowering the price - that's what I'm referring to as price innovation.

Consider that the Thing-o-matic was $1200 or so, and people were happy with that at the time of release (3q 2010, IIRC). So the new Markerbot is a lot better, but it's also nearly twice the price. The PandaBot is offering something similar but simpler for $800-ish, which doesn't seem wildly unrealistic to me given the 2-year interval. I can see from the Kickstarter page that it's more of a no-frills product - one which requires more user supervision and safety-awareness, for example - but the tradeoff is that it costs less. I'm not sure whether I'd buy one (since it would be more of a hobby than a tool purchase), but being under $1000 is a big factor in any purchase decision.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I don't know. You make a good point too. Maybe the parent comment was worded too stridently, but I thought it asked a valid question, and I think HN needs that question to be asked more, not less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Ultra-Bot 3D Printer Kickstarter ends in less than 22 hours and has a full assembled unit at $899 ($99 more).

It's based on the original Makerbot Cupcake but upgraded and improved from trial and error. And there is a version with a larger build area (8x8x8"), which is the one I've pledged to receive. And with the heated build platform you can run ABS or PLA.

The thing that bothers me about the PandaBot is the lack of details on the build area size (update: 11x11x11" Print Envelope" and heated platform). Also the price isn't that great compared to other fully assembled 3D printers with the same tech. Also I'm not a fan of the base moving instead of just the print head. I can't think of any wide format printers that move the base instead of the entire head assembly/gimble.

I do love the snap together setup process and the look of the machine. It looks like something you would buy in a store and almost anyone could setup and start using immediately.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for your comments.

We've found that moving the bed horizontally helps reduce the size of motors necessary to move the head as well as simplifies the required inertial calculations to properly model the fluid flow to give a detailed, low defect object.

We're definitely aiming for a store bought look. We've violated the sacred law of demos time and again and not yet been caught. To do Canada's CNBC we dragged it out of a cab and had it set up and printing in 5 minutes with no adjustment, with an alpha prototype! On live, national TV! So it's a decently robust design.

<comment><USER5> awesome job on the look and ease of use and good luck on the project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love 3D printers, but this is the third one I've seen this week in addition to MakerBot and Form 1. I'm really not understanding what the differentiator is after seeing the video except a slight change in price.

<comment><USER8> This is a FDM printer that is a lot cheaper than the MakerBot ($800 vs $2100). The Form 1 is a SLA printer, which means it is better at making small, precise parts; but worse at making parts that are durable enough for actual testing in assemblies (as opposed to just looking pretty).

It is interesting to see competition to the MakerBot, since $2k is still a bit high, and if the PandaBot's "calibration-free" design works as well as they claim, the ease-of-use factor is still a big thing to exploit.

If it has even moderately good print quality, a commercial, fully-assembled FDM printer for under $1000 is an interesting prospect.

<comment><USER9> Thanks.

The basic thought was to get it to a point that we could provide it to designers and university students with little to no engineering experience and they could start printing their 3d models right away. Hence, the heavy emphasis on self-calibration and ease-of-use.

The price range just works because we also designed it from the start to be a manufactured product, so we get an economy of scale very quickly as more people pick it up.

You can see print quality examples on ponoko, Derek swung by our office to see it close up in action yesterday: [http://blog.ponoko.com/2012/10/04/pandabot-3d-printer- launch...](http://blog.ponoko.com/2012/10/04/pandabot-3d-printer-launches-on- kickstarter/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Even though it's 3x the price, I'd take the Form 1: [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/formlabs/form-1-an- affor...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/formlabs/form-1-an-affordable- professional-3d-printer)

3x the price and 10x the machine.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm waiting for the 3d printer you download and assemble entirely from 3d-printed parts.

<comment><USER12> I'm waiting when you can get plastic in a form that works with these things at $2/pound.

<comment><USER13> There has been a lot of work lately at creating filament makers that would allow people to recycle scrap plastic into filament you can print with at home. I think that when this technology starts to mature things ought to get rather interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Anyone else remember having to hand-calibrate 2d printers?

</comment><comment><USER15> Toronto based company!

<comment><USER9> Yep, just across from OCAD and AGO. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16>
      1. What is your firmware based upon?
      2. What computer software do you use to assist PandaBot? Slic3r?
      3. Do you need a computer hooked up via USB to facilitate printing?
      4. Do you publish schematics and/or physical part dimensions for repair
      and replacement?
      5. What makes your product better than a RepStrap?
      6. A MendelMax full kit costs $699 USD. The kit is complete with full build
      instructions and fully repairable if/when something goes wrong. What makes
      your printer better than this model?
      7. How do you handle inertial jerk when you have a partially printed model due
      to the moving table?

<comment><USER6> 1&2 We are using available firmware and software with the prototype while we build our own versions ( fully respecting the licenses the community is using for different projects). We're building software and firmware that are properly paramaterized for our system and give great results - you need to get the exact fluid mechanics right for your hardware. But it will be totally hackable and you are more than welcome to roll your own g-code with your favorite tool or even pick your firmware.

3 We load files via USB but you don't need to keep the computer plugged in after a successful transfer

4 We're generally using off the shelf parts but it's a commercial shelf. Trade-off of quality, tolerances, capabilities. We feel that the improvements to the stability and reliability of our product are worth going in this direction.

5 We're building a tool to let people focus on designing and producing physical objects. Different design objective than kits. By not being a Rep* we get access to interesting components with very tight tolerances which will give users a wonderful experience in reliably producing objects.

6 We're shipping a manufactured product, it comes in 2 pieces to reduce shipping costs. It's a tool that plugs in and goes. Auto-calibration and the incredible rigidity really help make it "just work".

Again, it's a different focus from kits so different strengths and weaknesses. If you want to build your printer from scratch, we're not the right choice. If you want to be printing out of the box with no calibration, re-calibration, or learning all of the details of Slic3r or other tools, then we are the right choice. And then, if you want to explore Slic3r or optimal 3D material strategies without having to become a hardware/robotics guru, we are the right choice.

Lots of room for different people to focus on different things, or for people to have different tools for different projects.</comment></comment>


Show HN: SquadMap.app - <AUTHOR> https://squadmap.app <comment><AUTHOR> open source graph viz tool built with svelte and cytoscape to map exposure risk of who you hang out with (especially for countries still in this mess...). I'm open to feedback!</comment>


Show HN: I made this to get up on time, or do good - <AUTHOR> https://getupordie.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> You would like to work on this other side project, get fitter, read, volunteer,… in 2019? Same here. And I know first-hand it can be challenging to make time.

A great first step is to beat the charm of the snooze button in the morning. Get up on time, to have more time. And that's how I came up with 'Get up or die'.

How it works: 1\. Set a time to get up 2\. Get reminder messages in the morning, like a friend is chasing you 3\. Get up on time – or donate $3.00 to a charitable organisation

So you either get up, or you do good. Win-win.

Would love to hear your thoughts on the current simple implementation. Also - to which charity shall donations go to?

Thank you. :)

<comment><USER2> quick question - how does it verify that you actually got up, instead of me just hitting the "I got up button" and going back to bed?

<comment><AUTHOR> hi @allthatisrael - great question. currently, the service is entirely trust- based. thought of extending the functionality in the future to include e.g. a photo challenge (in the sense of submitting a picture of your breakfast for instance). but more validation needed if that's appealing to users - and there would be still an element of trust.

how would you go about this? ideas welcome :)

<comment><USER3> I'd do something like this: have the user load up X dollars upfront. When they set the time they want to wake up, configure it such that if they don't hit a button on your site within half an hour from their wake up time, the money automatically deducts.

<comment><AUTHOR> @mds101: Yes - the current sequence of messages allows for about 30min after the set wake-up time. Brainsync.

And I like the idea to add a balance. Would also limit the amount of partial / dummy records being submitted. Some people are cautious about giving their cc details to new services like this though, see e.g. wozmirek's comment further up. Any ideas how to give these users more confidence in the early days?

<comment><AUTHOR> @mds101: I've added a $10 balance request for first donations if users get up late. Will monitor acceptance level and look forward to additional feedback!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> @all: Thanks for trialling 'Get up or die'. There is currently an issue with delivering text messages to some of you. This looks to be related to country codes, e.g. messages to China, Indonesia, Thailand and Hungary are affected. Checking with the provider - please hang in there. If anyone has experience with sending text messages to these country codes using Twilio, please let me know. THanks

<comment><AUTHOR> Solved - anyone with the same issue with Twilio, check out setting geo permissions on [https://www.twilio.com/console/sms/settings/geo- permissions](https://www.twilio.com/console/sms/settings/geo-permissions)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like the idea, however, it's not very applicable to me personally since I don't have problems getting up on time. I would, however, be interested in a similar approach (give money to charity if you fail a resolution) for other things like reading, working out or something similar, so there's an idea you can maybe improve upon :)

<comment><USER5> Nothing to do with charity but there's this: [https://gofuckingdoit.com](https://gofuckingdoit.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, big fan also of Pieter's other services / sites!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just subscribed. A bit worried there's no more explanation behind it (also giving out my phone number and email, ummmm, okaaaay). I don't think I'd try it if you would have asked me for cc details though ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's early days, bear with me. :) What are the key questions you think the current site / implementation leaves open?

Regarding donations - any thoughts welcome to which charity they shall go to: [https://twitter.com/GetUpOrDie/status/1080870052382035968](https://twitter.com/GetUpOrDie/status/1080870052382035968)

<comment><USER6> Lemme try it for a week and I'll get back to you with some better feedback :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How do I unsubscribe from both email and SMS?

Please help!

<comment><AUTHOR> All sorted as per separate chat - thanks for trialling and your feedback!</comment></comment>


Blog post about motivation among programmers - <AUTHOR> http://mussol.org/2015/03/15/about-motivation/

<comment><USER2> For me, I typically can get over most motivation crises if I just manage to get started making steady progress. Then, typically the most boring pieces will be rather soon overcome, but it also happens quite often that as soon as I have gotten into that boring task a bit, I start to realize that it isn't that boring at all, but rather might have a lot of things that I can learn from etc.

So, to me it seems the main challenge is to be able to make steady progress with or without motivation!

So, how to do that? Well, I'm sure different people have different stories, but to me, the one single thing that immediately made this possible, was to carefully implement the technique described in "Pomodoro Technique Illustrated", by fellow Swede Staffan Nöteberg [1].

The book isn't that long, and you probably could get the gist of the idea elsewhere on the net, but to me this was so "game-changing" :) ... that I don't regret buying the book for a second.

[1] [https://pragprog.com/book/snfocus/pomodoro-technique- illustr...](https://pragprog.com/book/snfocus/pomodoro-technique-illustrated)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wrote a short-ish blog post about motivation. Is that the case for you as well that you suffer from motivational peaks in your work? What do you do about it?</comment>


Surveillance Kills Freedom by Killing Experimentation - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/mcsweeneys-excerpt-the-right-to-experiment/ <comment><USER2> The generalization and broadening of scope of such laws is one of the most troubling agendas/trends of the surveillance state.

From what I've observed, countries are only more and more eager to adopt intelligence gathering methodology in a collective manner ( _à la_ Five Eyes). I'll quote Atlas Shrugged for this one:

> There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is > the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough > criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it > becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation > of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the > kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively > interpreted—and you create a nation of law-breakers—and then you cash in on > guilt.

<comment><USER3> girl uses song lyrics in a instagram caption post

gets slapped with "an eight-week community order, placed on an eight-week curfew and told to pay costs of £500 and an £85 victim surcharge."

[https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england- merseyside-43816921](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921)

oddly enough I had just learned about this and laughed about it 2 days ago

surveillance state ethos is becoming a joke in the mainstream zeitgeist with memes propogating about "the fbi man" watching our selfie cameras and asking our google home/alexa device "wiretap" what the best recipes are available... most people are very aware of what's happening with their data and they've chosen convenience

<comment><USER4> has the UK gone fucking insane in the last ten years or so? was it always like this? it seems like i just keep hearing these mind-boggling police state stories lately. maybe in the US we have to worry more about getting shot by the cops but i'd take that astronomical chance over worrying about posting song lyrics on my instagram or making a dark joke: [https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/7686779/vile-grenfell- effigy-t...](https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/7686779/vile-grenfell-effigy- thought-police-rod-liddle/)

<comment><USER5> When you have to worry about getting shot by the cops rather than the criminals, then there's something seriously wrong with your society.

<comment><USER6> I'd rather have that than the UK dystopia.

<comment><USER7> I'd rather have neither of those

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> [https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animal- emotions/2016...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animal- emotions/201602/ravens-know-theyre-being-watched-bird-brain-theory-mind)

People (and ravens) cannot help but act differently when they're being watched. Being watched (by anonymous viewers) is a stressful vigilance state.

<comment><USER9> I feel a little bad about it, but scaring corvids have become somewhat of a past time for me.

You can get very close to them, when they are foraging on the ground, if you turn your face away from them and only look indirectly. Then when you've gotten close you stare directly at the poor bird. Except for jackdaws, I haven't met any corvid that isn't gravely startled by a such sudden leer.

City birds are very used to us humans paying them no attention and happily dart around our legs. But if they get the sense you are watching, can no amount of french fries make them take the risk of sticking around.

<comment><USER10> Careful!

Crows (and probably other corvids) learn to recognize individual humans, and are smart enough to know that whether a human is friendly, indifferent, or hostile varies from human to human and is fairly consistent for a given human.

Oh, and there is evidence that they have some way of communicating their knowledge of individual humans, so a crow that has decided to dislike you can tell other crows you are bad, and they will start acting as if you had wronged them, too, and can pass on the message.

Corvids are fun to play with. I've got several Steller's jays [1] coming by every day to get peanuts, and recently a flock of about 20 crows. But with the crows I'm limiting my messing with them to things that they can't interpret as hostile or annoying, because I do not want 20 crows trying to annoy me back.

The crows would win.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steller%27s_jay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steller%27s_jay)

<comment><USER11> Before I make a few on-topic words, first I have to commend you for having got the taste for bonding with 'god's messengers'. I advise you to indulge further. You will be in good company, read about Tesla the man and his relationship with feathered friends. Go fully avian, try and work these bird brains out for yourself as you are doing, it is all extremely rewarding.

In a former workplace I used to feed the gulls and film them in slow motion. I had them taking homemade wholewheat bread (that I baked for them...) out of my hand with them flying quite hard into the wind. The bread could have letters written on them so a video could have a 'get well soon' or 'happy birthday' type of personal message spelled out for someone. Getting that one take with 'nobody' dropping the squares of bread was an art, particularly since slo-mo requires being massively quick.

I had names for about twenty of the gulls, could individually recognise fifty of them as 'regulars' and, depending on the gulls busy schedule, could have a hundred of them to entertain.

Unlike my other workmates I had them follow me as I walked to and from the office, not just at lunchtime, my presence would always be noted. It would take them a few hundred yards to realise I had 'the wrong bag' and to calm down. I had plenty of assistants - workmates that sometimes needed to chill out - but they never had the full 200 yards of 'Mexican wave' from the feathered ones.

The 'Mexican wave' from the gulls was actually quite cool. Fancy clothes and fancy cars might impress some but having a flock of birds follow you in some ribbon in the sky has magic to it that money can't buy. Well it can if you are into your home baking and don't mind spending $0.50 on flour every day.

Anyway, that is way off topic, however, as it happens I really would like facial recognition for gulls, to use the tech of surveillance for some conservation work. As well as the faces the missing feathers, broken feet and other characteristics could be part of the A.I. with each gull resolving to a made up name by way of a one-way 'hash'. Therefore if one of 'my' gulls was spotted two miles away (e.g. Percy) then he/she should resolve to the same name in someone else's picture. They should be able to find out where this particular gull normally hangs out and also have the same given name of 'Percy'. If 'Percy' then crops up regularly in their photos then they will have a name to the face, he won't be just a random gull, more of a recognisable neighbour.

The app is not something I have chosen to dedicate my life to, however, it is an interesting thought experiment in the age of surveillance. This is because we only see the oppressive side as victim, obviously with 'nothing to hide'. To understand things that stress you out it is helpful to imagine what the view is like from the other end of the telescopic panopticon. This makes it a bit easier to survive in the more normal 'Winston Smith' 1984 mode.

In 1984 there are a few details that can be missed on the initial few read- throughs. He has health problems that aren't due to Big Brother but then they are. There is also the small matter of him actually doing very little with his life. The 'proles' are able to procreate, party and live a little. Meanwhile our protagonist who is 'party' is not partying. He never goes to dinner parties, never entertains kids in a wider family, doesn't go on holiday or get on with those normal things. Big Brother ain't stopping him but because Winston has a fight going on in his head he isn't able to emotionally engage with people doing normal happy life things. Obviously Orwell wasn't writing that detail in and Winston's health issues may have been autobiographical but these also happen to be finer points of surveillance society if you are not a 'prole', 'proles' being the 'nothing to hide' crew.

<comment><USER9> I have thought about if computer vision could be used to identify individual birds as well. Maybe image data with ultraviolet light included would be useful. A digital camera that captures the ultraviolet spectrum might be expensive though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is the way we should be talking about privacy. Using vivid examples that are relevant to everyday people's lives on both sides of the political divide. Avoiding broad, philosophical-sounding proclamations.

I hope people on HN are taking note.

</comment><comment><USER13> As a librarian at a large university library I feel this.

I'm uncomfortable poking too much around in scihub. Even though it's not something a national security agency would care about (I hope). Could any connection between papers from scihub and myself, be a huge issue both with my career and potentially for my institutions position when negotiating licenses. It might be paranoid, but there are so many possible ways to be compromised, that I choose to direct attention elsewhere.

I find it sad that I'm afraid to inquire on one of the most important developments in scholarly dissemination in resent years. I'm a research librarian for Price's sake.

<comment><USER14> I have a few thoughts about privacy for you.

Don't use academia.edu or researchgate. It's a big story waiting to get out. There's absolutely no privacy on these sites and they track everything. I get an email notification from these sites every time someone does a _search query_ that happens to display my paper as a result. I also get notified when someone has been reading a paper through their platform. The privacy implications are really gross. I hope that they delete this data, stop collecting it, and that nobody ever gets a copy of that.

Academic PDFs downloaded from academic publishers include deanonymizing information such as your name, your institutional affiliation, IP address, and sometimes your email address. I wrote a tool to help remove this information from pdfs: [https://github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia](https://github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia)

As for scihub, many of your concerns can be mitigated by having an offline copy. There are torrents published by scihub (or libgen's scimag, which is supposedly a mirror of scihub?). I have had a lot of trouble getting a relatively complete copy due to low seeder bandwidth and lack of seeders. There's a forum somewhere that you can request libgen users to seed certain torrents, your mileage will vary.

I think every academic library should have a complete copy of scihub. Keep in mind, scihub isn't just using library ezproxy accounts, she also has a large cache of files. Supposedly that's 70 million papers at the moment. It's about ~50 terabytes or something.

My recommendation is that scihub should be running pdfparanoia on all of their papers. It only removes visible watermarks. I haven't investigated invisible watermarks yet. I'm definitely interested in those.

Turning up the paranoia dial a little more, I am concerned that scihub may have a deal with a nation state actor for the purposes of phoning home about research article downloads from certain countries, in exchange for allowing scihub to continue to operate. Going further, this could include pdf malware (or metadata tainting for fingerprinting) or browser exploits. This level of international espionage would be very useful to a nation, and might explain any nation's interest in keeping scihub operational despite political or civil court pressures. Of course, it's also helpful that scihub is running in an area of the world that doesn't really care about demands from U.S. courts, so none of this is necessary to explain the continued existence of scihub.

Ever since I began thinking about the deanonymizing data inserted into pdfs by academic publishers, I've been wondering about collaboration between academic publishers and nation state entities. This is a concern even in absence of scihub existing. Also, many of these publishers have really bad web security and it's trivial to take data like apache logs or whatever, because they are publishers not software experts especially the smaller publishers. Who else is taking that data, and what can they do with it?

Academic privacy is extremely important for the freedom of science and human progress, and I haven't figured out how to juggle those priorities against the priority of making complete mirrors of scihub. I am deeply worried about that data trove disappearing. It's one of our most important data sets...

<comment><USER15> > Academic privacy is extremely important for the freedom of science and human > progress, and I haven't figured out how to juggle those priorities against > the priority of making complete mirrors of scihub.

Just to be clear-- the fundamental priority is for _scientists_ to demand free public access to the research that pubic funds have paid to produce. There are many ways to achieve that. It could but doesn't necessarily mean mirroring scihub or even using scihub.

Whatever the approach it requires no technology. It's a social problem. Until some sizable group of prominent scientists take a stand and demand that discovering and reading research papers be as easy as discovering and reading a Wikipedia entry (and accessible/maintained by a similarly reputable entity) the fundamental problem will go unsolved.

Until then practical discussions about digital privacy are unfortunately part of a continual cat-and-mouse game.

<comment><USER16> I dislike the current debt-based economy that depends on extracting more money from consumers anyway. Student debt and universities is a good example of the problems. You can also see this in things like textbooks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Also ever relevant are Martin Fowler's thoughts on the matter of privacy or lack thereof

[https://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome- privacy.html](https://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> It's odd that people welcome it. I've had a person tell me that he doesn't mind being watched because it helps catch terrorism and crimes and such.

<comment><USER19> That's because they've been brainwashed into blindly accepting mass surveillance being supposedly necessary, due to terrorism, crime, etc.

Problem with the reasoning is that surveillance doesn't really stop terrorism and crime.

Indeed, if I were a criminal worth my salt, I'd slither into positions where I am effectively exempt from surveillance, or could control how surveillance is used against me.

<comment><USER20> I think it's a bit dismissive to say they've been brainwashed. With some of the career choices I've made, I've given up huge amounts of my expectation to privacy. I thought about these things and came to my own conclusion for my personal life, and I don't think brainwashing ever came into it.

I have a big problem with how deeply flawed the 'nothing to hide' argument is (it's almost a direct Kafka reference ffs), but people are allowed to have their own opinion on privacy and surveillance.

<comment><USER21> This may have been implicit in your comment, but it's not just dismissive: it's actively counterproductive if your goal is increasing awareness of the real harms of indiscriminate surveillance.

In today's polarized political environment where terms like bot/shill/NPC are thrown around willy-nilly, implying that someone lacks agency over their views is a fantastic way of getting them to shut down and refuse to engage with you as anything but a tribal enemy.

That's a particular shame because opposition to indiscriminate surveillance has the potential to transcend partisan feuding, as exemplified by Schneier's careful selection of examples that have appeal across the spectrum. Sanctimonious sniping by tech elites at them darn brainwashed masses is one way to ensure that an anti-surveillance coalition of 2a defenders and immigration reformists remains a fantasy.

Note that I don't disagree that mass surveillance is a poor way of fighting terrorism/crime, but tone of messaging is everything.

<comment><USER22> They made up their mind to be okay with it a long time before that comment.

> I don't disagree that mass surveillance is a poor way of fighting > terrorism/crime

No, it itself is bad for reasons that make other crimes and terrorism bad. It's a crime worse than terrorism, we're just too primitve to have it on the books yet. And plenty of entitites using surveillance also commit terrorism and other crimes, and are in bed with all sorts of people who do all sorts of things, as long as its useful. It's a great "tool" to fight activism of all sorts, and it's used for that.

Actually, I would say it's not _even_ a tool, it's a weapon. I hope future historians will get a chuckle out of this, to me it's like people arguing about how useful a minigun is for hunting deer. As Hannah Arendt said, intellectuals are great with coming up with all sorts of high-fallutin, complicated explanations, they're the best at not seeing the obvious, not the quickest to understand. It really just boils down to this: when they came for X, Y and Z, it was more comfortable to rationalize that than to realize that they're going through the alphabet, backwards, and that all of us could have been born as anyone, and that even when they came for Z, they really came for you.

But you see, if people don't care about others, I also don't care about them. If X Y Z are not enough for someone, I'm not going to bend over backwards to explain to them them how they will also get affected at some point, how it already changed them, how ultimately, _nobody_ gains from it, not even the very tippity-top, and so on.

If a kid kicks a dog, yes, you probably shouldn't descend on it with fury and preach to it for hours on end how horrible a person they are. But you _also_ probably shouldn't just say "it's great you have this much energy, but check out this pillow". No, they hurt another being, they wouldn't want to be hurt that way themselves, it's not okay and they shouldn't do it again -- if there is no way to tell them that without them getting upset, let them get upset. Some things are simply too serious to be _too_ soapy and sloppy about.

At this point, the sheer amount of crimes people have NOT cried bloody murder about, the rationalizations they already invested in, are enough to make people upset regardless of how nice you are. Nevermind personal choices, we are too many _generations_ into too much bullshit for anyone to come away from a good, hard look unscathed. If they want to hold people who haven't even been born hostage with their petty selves, their fragile egos, their life choices that can't have been for nought, then they need to be overcome, not catered to.

The quality of seeds is not determined by how a rocky surface interacts with it, but what happens when there's fertile soil and some rain. Sometimes when the seeds are actually fine, but there's still a holdup, the soil might simply not be fertile, it might be rock. Maybe it needs more time and rain, but either way you don't wait around until something grows or doesn't. Instead you do rounds, and only after you've done at least one round can you even _begin_ to justify focusing on the patches where nothing has grown. But instead, those patches actually demand a veto right, seeking to stop the whole thing even though the fault is with them.

If you get hung up on "brainwashed" you're simply not going by the strongest most possible interpretation, and _take_ offense at a word people people use in casual conversation without a problem for decades. And that's not even getting into serious thinkers, or any of that.

> _Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall > should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and > in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not > unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat > difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the > way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it > possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never > existed at all._

\-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

> _The frightening coincidence of the modern population explosion with the > discovery of technical devices that, through automation, will make large > sections of the population 'superfluous' even in terms of labor, and that, > through nuclear energy, make it possible to deal with this twofold threat by > the use of instruments beside which Hitler's gassing installations look like > an evil child's fumbling toys, should be enough to make us tremble._

\-- Hannah Arendt

Someone who not sometimes trembles to their core because of that, who never loses sleep because of the realization that right now, millions of people are in physical and/or psychological _agony_ , which is carefully curated and hidden from sight -- how could I be moved in the least by them trembling over being called anything but innocent yet wise?

Let's say 5% of the people had no problem with being this "unflattering" because that's a near invisibly tiny thing compared to what others endure and what's at stake. Those, without interference from the rest, would probably achieve more than 30% who have the top priority to never be offended and never be sad.

How many women were suffragettes, how many weren't? This very notion that it all needs to be made inoffensive and smooth enough, until everybody can agree on it, itself may impede progress way more than people who are more blunt about it than you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Interesting to see hard-learned lessons in software development generalized into the rest of life so neatly.

> We can't really justify all our decisions, many them are hunches, many of > them are wrong.

[https://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2014/06/heisenberg- developer...](https://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2014/06/heisenberg- developers.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> Certainly there is too much surveillance which not only prevent your freedom but also waste too much energy.

</comment><comment><USER25> In China now the goal is the make surveillance omnipresent. Already in premier universities, including Peking University, classroom lectures are routinely surveilled to monitor inappropriate discourse.

<comment><USER26> Can China have an innovative science and technology sector under persistent omnipresent surveillance??

<comment><USER17> No. But let them figure it out the hard way. Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat its mistakes.

<comment><USER27> It's a terrible thing for well over a billion people to have to go through in order for a tiny elite to learn. I can't think of a better solution, though.

<comment><USER17> > It's a terrible thing for well over a billion people to have to go through > in order for a tiny elite to learn

And this is why we have democracies. Also, if history is any indication, it won't end well (although East Germany's end was remarkably peaceful).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Not a new result, but should be more widely known and understood.

An argument easily extended to running an adblocker suggests you'd going to be more creative and productive because there are fewer eyes watching you.

</comment><comment><USER29> People on MySpace censored themselves after 9/11? I didn't know middle and high schoolers were so politically aware.

<comment><USER30> I didnt see this in the article and myspace was started in 2003, 2 years after 9/11.

<comment><USER31> The parent makes a sarcastic comment, based on:

> In the months and years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, many of us > censored what we spoke about on social media or what we searched on the > internet.

from the TFA.

i.e. Which those "many of us" were, and what "social media" were they censoring themselves in around 9/11?

Since

(a) the only successful website that one would classify as "social media" back then was MySpace, and

(b) it was mostly for teens,

(the parent asks) if people on social media back then censored themselves, does that mean that teens of MySpace censored themselves? Either the article is BS on that part, or teens at the time quite politically aware....

<comment><USER32> The TFA?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Sandbox : banning LaTeX from the Mac App Store - <AUTHOR> http://vallettaventures.com/post/20458410521/the-sandbox-banning-latex-from-the-mac-app-store

<comment><USER2> I haven't delved deeply into the problem they're describing here, but it seems like I haven't really heard any very creative solutions to this.

For instance, can you still create a named pipe inside the sandbox that the parent process can have the right to use? Write to it, then you could just have a consumer that takes the output of that process and writes it to an imposed directory structure in SQLite blobs in a data store that the parent also owns. You'd lose some key functionality unless you chunked the data a bit. And, you know, mmap() would be impossible to simulate, but nobody ever promised a reliable implementation of that.

It confuses me, because I've seen a handful of these worries expressed, and it seems like a bunch of traditional UNIX-y methods for dealing with these kinds of problems are still open. I don't know what all the rules are, because I haven't really seriously looked at it, but I can think of at least three old UNIX tricks off the top of my head that probably solve this concern acceptably for 80% of apps that have it - you could use named pipes; you could redirect output to a third process like netcat that connects back to a handler process via a domain socket and deals with it; the parent could open a shm segment and maintain a DMA-like sweeper that takes blocks off, puts them into files it owns, and keeps its own little virtual FS.

I know none of those is straight fopen(), but somebody would only have to write it one time. Seems like a classic my-current-filesystem-is-mounted-ro problem. That used to be a pretty everyday occurrence, and any old sys admin has 100 workarounds for it.

And remember before you squawk about chunked byte streams being inserted into blobs: there's 15 years of Oracle Video Server delivering PPV porn to the hotelier masses that says it works fine.

<comment><USER3> I seriously doubt any such attempts to sidestep will succeed in a world where the problems is not just technical (you may be able to fool the sandbox enforcing system), but a matter of getting your app approved, not just once but with every update, small or large.

The added complication is that in this case LaTeX itself decides to spawn a few calls to various utilities it uses under the hood. Those attempts will simply be blocked by the OS inside the sandbox. So you won't be able to typeset successfully.</comment></comment>


Hacker Says He Could Access 70,000 Healthcare.Gov Records In 4 Minutes - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.computerworld.com/cybercrime-and-hacking/23412/insecure-healthcaregov-allowed-hacker-access-70000-records-4-minutes

<comment><USER2> Original link [http://blogs.computerworld.com/cybercrime-and- hacking/23412/...](http://blogs.computerworld.com/cybercrime-and- hacking/23412/insecure-healthcaregov-allowed-hacker- access-70000-records-4-minutes) Well, it's really a collection of interesting links to other sources, but at least it's useful.

 _Or, given the numerous vulnerabilities, perhaps a breach already has happened. These are exactly the kind of security flaws bad guys exploit in large-scale breaches._

That's exactly what I've been wondering. Hackers have certainly had enough time to get in there and look around. How much data has been taken, and where will it show up?

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://boingboing.net/2014/01/21/70000-healthcare-gov- record...](http://boingboing.net/2014/01/21/70000-healthcare-gov-record.html)

Except not. This was misreported and spread like wildfire.

</comment><comment><USER4> No....No he didn't.

[https://twitter.com/HackingDave/status/425640931690565632](https://twitter.com/HackingDave/status/425640931690565632)

<comment><USER2> That says he didn't hack the site to access the data. In the video he says the information was collected using "passive reconnaissance" which means he could get the data without attacking it directly.

<comment><USER4> Yes. It does say he didn't access the data. There is a difference between passive and active attacks.</comment></comment></comment>


Didn't know about this place until just now Hacklab.to (Toronto Hackerspace)  - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/v/6J3JT9b1DI4

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. Seems they have an open house on Tuesdays @6</comment>


D3 utility to apply Nelson rules of process control to a set of data - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kiernanmcgowan/d3-nelson-rules <comment><USER2> Looks like someone beat me to the punch on posting this to hn :)</comment>


U.S. States Investigating Breach at Experian - <AUTHOR> http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/04/u-s-states-investigating-breach-at-experian/ <comment><USER2> The Senate remains broadly interested in the data broker industry, so this dovetails with other ongoing policy issues.

</comment><comment><USER3> The whole article reads as a declaration that some secret-service-entrapped foreigner was chosen as the scapegoat for everything.

My paranoid sense tingles.

<comment><USER4> For me it's my unauthorized-purchases-made-in-my-name sense that's tingling.

<comment><USER3> Buy you really buy that powerful and politically entrenched American corporation whose only purpose is tosell your info was "tricked" to sell your info when it's exactly what it exists to do for it's clients?

<comment><USER4> True. I really despise the credit reporting industry.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: HN Document Repository - <AUTHOR> https://www.udocz.com/users/HackerNews <comment><USER2> Looks impressive. What's the primary use case though? I couldn't tell from the about page.

Also, what tech are you using to display the documents/pdfs?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, this is my first Show HN, I'd love to hear some feedback from you. :) Let me know what you think of the reader and the UX in general.

<comment><USER3> It looks really nice, what are your use cases? Do you expect to build a Scribd competitor?

How will you fight spam? (when I search for a book I'm interested in, I get a lot of Google Docs and Dropboxes and stuff with the search terms and a link to shady sites)

And legal risks? I'm pretty sure many of the documents I'm seeing are not free.

Are you based in Lima, Perú? Are you thinking of going to Startup Chile?

PD: My native language is Spanish, but for those browsing for English documents (probably most of the HN crowd) do you provide any functionality?

<comment><AUTHOR> Scribd: We don't expect to compete with Scribd. We think there is a lot of space to find a different niche, but in order to get to that we basically need to tread a very similar path as Scribd's.

Language: The website is translated automatically for all Latin American Countries and defaults to english for the rest of the world. The only difference is, when you're browsing in english, you only get english documents and when you're browsing in spanish you get both spanish and english documents.

Legal: The way we're approaching the legal situation is by removing any document that is reported and requesting appropriate proof of the copyright claim.

Spam: We fight spam by allowing the users themselves to moderate the content, much like medium or even hacker news itself.

Startup Chile: As far as Startup Chile goes, we haven't thought of going there. Have you been there yourself? Any hints or advice you could share with us? :)</comment></comment></comment>