Tiny AI Startup Vicarious Says It's Solved CAPTCHA - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2013/10/29/tiny-ai-startup-vicarious-says-its-solved-captcha/

<comment><USER2> The popularity of this story evidences how universally hated are CAPTCHAs. here are some of the submissions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6625245](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6625245) (forbes.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6625247](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6625247) (kurzweilai.net)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6625351](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6625351) (technologyreview.com) <\- Main discussion

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6626405](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6626405) (vimeo.com) <\- video of process in action

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6627848](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6627848) (vicariousinc.tumblr.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6628086](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6628086) (cbc.ca)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6628092](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6628092) (wired.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6629173](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6629173) (wired.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6629559](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6629559) (newscientist.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6629656](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6629656) (dailydot.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6629708](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6629708) (mashable.com)

</comment><comment>==

There are two other comments worth reading.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6629173](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6629173):

        That's a lot of fancy words to say that they overfit
        to their training data.

        That makes this sound like a very typical result in
        supervised machine learning (if it's a result at all).
        They have used an algorithm to learn a brittle heuristic
        that works in the cases it was trained to work on.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6628092](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6628092):

        Please look at this comment from Yann LeCun:
        https://plus.google.com/104362980539466846301/posts/Qwj9EEkU... [0]
        "Beware: It's a textbook example of AI hype of the worst kind"

[0] [https://plus.google.com/104362980539466846301/posts/Qwj9EEkU...](https://plus.google.com/104362980539466846301/posts/Qwj9EEkUJXY)</comment>


Announcing .NET Core Tools 1.0 - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/03/07/announcing-net-core-tools-1-0/ <comment><USER3> This is pretty cool and I was excited to hear about it.

But this release also changes the way unit testing integrates with the tooling, so now my suite of 1000+ nunit tests won't run via the 'dotnet test' command, nor in visual studio 2017.

If not for that, we would have upgraded today. Eventually the nUnit team will release a test runner that works with the new tooling, but in the meantime, we will stay on preview2 of the tooling & vs2015 where our tests work.

<comment><USER4> Is the change documented anywhere? I looked through all the release notes and couldn't find it.

It looks like it wasn't this release that changed the testing. The comments about nUnit not working are from November / January / February:

[https://github.com/nunit/dotnet-test- nunit/issues/91](https://github.com/nunit/dotnet-test-nunit/issues/91)

[https://github.com/nunit/dotnet-test- nunit/issues/101](https://github.com/nunit/dotnet-test-nunit/issues/101)

[https://github.com/nunit/nunit3-vs- adapter/issues/305](https://github.com/nunit/nunit3-vs-adapter/issues/305)

<comment><USER3> I think you are right, the change likely happened in one of the preview versions leading up to this release. I didn't notice any documentation on it for any of the releases, though I could have easily missed it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm done with endless refactoring of .NET Core updates.

The reality is they shipped RCs with 1.x version numbers.

I will be back to reassess after Core 2.0 gets a minor update.

Microsoft suck at versioning. Progress is great, but we feel tricked.

<comment><USER6> You make it sound like this change was a snap decision. It's been known for at least 10 months now that project.json was going away. All the documentation I stumbled upon on github also made this clear.

While I would love a simpler, more readable project file, I understand that the tooling already out there relying csproj format, probably makes it not worthwhile changing.

<comment><USER7> >You make it sound like this change was a snap decision. It's been known for at least 10 months now that project.json was going away. All the documentation I stumbled upon on github also made this clear.

Great and in those 10 months there was no alternative but to use the soon to be deprecated projects. And they released a 1.0 product like that.

Someone from Microsoft commented unofficially that there was pressure from partners who were using .NET Core in production to release a stable - <USER2> was very obvious and they put them self in a spot where they had to support a deprecated project.json system since people are using it in production while also developing the new system. Whoever decided on the release timelines dropped the ball.

<comment><USER6> Well for the last 4 months, MSBuild alpha has been out with the option to use "dotnet migrate" to migrate a project.json to a project.csproj file.

The other 6 months I agree has left people in a limbo. Only people following the discussions closely would have an idea of which direction they were going.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hopefully this will be the much-awaited end of all of the tooling confusion around the project.json to csproj change.

<comment><USER9> There's still a bunch of fundamental changes to how the XML-based MSBuild files work, such as the addition of wildcards and recursive includes, so expect a wait for the rest of the ecosystem to catch-up.

Note that the move back to MSBuild from Project.json was prompted by pragmatism rather than ideology - I suspect the JSON-camp are biding their time before putting forward another proposal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there any reason that I should care about .Net Core yet over .Net 4.6 if I'm a Windows only developer or should I just wait for things to settle down?

<comment><USER11> If you're Windows-only then there's no need to worry about Core. There may be some web optimizations there, but I'm pretty sure most of those are targeting Linux distributions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The only thing that has really bothered me about .NET Core is I haven't been able to figure out how to get NuGet to run properly on Linux.

<comment><USER13> > I haven't been able to figure out how to get NuGet to run properly on Linux.

Use the "dotnet" binary and just run "dotnet restore"? This will restore whatever packages your project references-

Or are you thinking about pakage-management, as in searching for and installing new packages?

<comment><USER12> The latter. Installing works fine. Is there a way to not have to manually add packages?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Still dont get it at all. I installed VS2017 today, dotnet --version = 1.0.0

I go to the dotnet core website, download a new sdk and install. dotnet --version = 1.0.1

Oh and the file is called "dotnet-1.1.1-sdk-win-x64.exe" Notice yet another version number.

Same thing on Linux. tar.gz has 1.1.1 in the name, installed version is 1.0.1

<comment><USER15> I didn't really get it until yesterday.

There are basically three major entities being versioned somewhat independently:

\- The .NET Core 1.0 runtime, which is now at 1.0.4.

\- The .NET Core 1.1 runtime, which is now at 1.1.1

\- The .NET Core SDK/tools, which is now at 1.0.1. The version released with VS2017 is 1.0.0 because the most recent update barely missed the VS2017 train leaving the station.

Everything uses semantic versioning, i.e. major-minor-patch, with the associated rules around breaking changes and new functionality.

The 1.0 and 1.1 runtimes are both maintained for compatibility/supportability reasons - if you have an app that runs on 1.0, you can confidently take advantage of 1.0.4 immediately.

What you see when you run dotnet --version is the version of _tooling_ you are using. The tools can output both 1.0.x and 1.1.x binaries. The tools hitting 1.0.0 yesterday was the biggest announcement, because it's been a circus - multiple "preview" releases, each with multiple point releases, as the CLI and functionality rapidly changed and (most importantly) support for the .csproj format was brought in. They dropped support for project.json/.xproj somewhere around preview4, but they kept maintaining older versions of the tools too to give people time to migrate away. Now that they're at 1.0.x, it's official and can be shouted from the rooftops: project.json/.xproj are gone, fully dead, no longer supported, don't use them, migrate away from them if you still have them, get rid of any old versions of the tools you have, move to the 1.0.x tools and don't look back.

There are basically two "families" of installers/packages/Docker images - those with the SDK and a version of the runtime, and those with only a version of the runtime. All installers/packages/Docker images are labeled with the _runtime_ version number, because all of the SDK packages include the newest version of the tools, and the tools can target both the 1.0.x and 1.1.x runtimes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Tried installing the Ubuntu 16.10 deb, but getting this error:

      $ sudo dpkg -i dotnet-sdk-ubuntu.16.10-x126.96.36.199.deb
      (Reading database ... 408184 files and directories currently installed.)
      Preparing to unpack dotnet-sdk-ubuntu.16.10-x126.96.36.199.deb ...
      Unpacking dotnet-dev-1.0.1 (1.0.1-1) over (1.0.1-1) ...
      dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of dotnet-dev-1.0.1:
       dotnet-dev-1.0.1 depends on dotnet-sharedframework-microsoft.netcore.app-1.1.1; however:
        Package dotnet-sharedframework-microsoft.netcore.app-1.1.1 is not installed.

      dpkg: error processing package dotnet-dev-1.0.1 (--install):
       dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
      Processing triggers for man-db (2.7.5-1) ...
      Errors were encountered while processing:
       dotnet-dev-1.0.1

<comment><USER17> You are clearly missing other dotnet dependencies. Apt output is mentioning dotnet-sharedframework-microsoft.netcore.app-1.1.1. Anyway I personally would go with docker image, so you won't mess up your system. I've tried microsoft/docker image om example from that arcticle and was successful.

<comment><USER16> Yes, I understand that I am missing a dependency. What I don't understand is how I am supposed to get that dependency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> [https://i.imgur.com/2uLUNH1.png](https://i.imgur.com/2uLUNH1.png) Why is Microsoft serving Panasonic.jp SSL certificate ?

<comment><USER19> They're both on Akamai's CDN. I'd suspect the trouble lies in akamai's setup somewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I saw CONSOLE and ASP profiles .NET Core profiles. Can .NET Core also be used to develop GUI apps?

<comment><USER9> Through P/Invoke, sure. But WinForms, WPF, and UWP (and Silverlight, and XNA) are not part of .NET Core by-design. Though I assume someone will port Xamarin over, if they haven't done already.

I'd love to see SDL support so OpenRA can have another build target.

<comment><USER20> It would be nice to see Winforms and WPF pulled out into their own projects on top of .Net core. Both could do with some cross platform open source love.

<comment><USER9> WinForms is, unfortunately (in my opinion), a hack on top of Win32/hWnds, the fact that every Control wraps a top-level hWnd window is a source of performance issues. It needs a fundamental re-thinking... but Xamarin Forms is a better concept, it just needs a Win32 target.

<comment><USER20> I thought Xamarin Forms was for phones?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm somewhat confused as to why the Centos and Fedora pages tell you to install from binary tarballs, but there's a yum repository for RHEL.</comment>


Could vertical take-off electric planes replace cars in our cities? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/jul/20/could-vertical-take-off-electric-planes-replace-cars-in-our-cities <comment><USER2> I wonder when entrepreneurs will stop pursing the flying car dream?

<comment><USER3> About a generation after we have working Star Trek-style transporters.</comment></comment>


(One Of Many Reasons) Why Students Hate Algebra - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=5781&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dydan1+%28dy%2Fdan+posts+%2B+lessons%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> I taught high school level algebra for two years, so I have a moderate familiarity with this subject.

I, too, dislike these types of problems, and I refer to them as "math book" problems, because that's the only place you'll ever see them. I mean, if Luigi can paint 1/2 of a room in 3 hours and Mario can paint 1/4 of a room in 2 hours, the way you find out in the real world how fast they can paint the room together is to throw them in the freaking room with two sets of painting equipment and let them go to it. If it's not going fast enough for you, then you go find Mario's friend Bowser and hire him to help them.

But, I don't think lack of realism is the worst thing about these types of problems. I think lack of fun is. I have a graduate degree in mathematics, and I frequently work on problems that have little connection to anything (so far as I know) in the real world, just because it's fun for me to do so. To me, the real problem with high school algebra textbooks is they're so goddamn boring -- and I'm saying this as someone who really, really _likes_ math.

If I had my way, there wouldn't be such a thing as "algebra 1", "algebra 2," "trigonometry," etc. as high school math courses. I'd teach "Year 1 math," "year 2 math," and so on, and put the focus on problem solving rather than any one particular corner of math. If the problems are interesting, the students will do the work and love it. I've seen it happen. I can't imagine that such a problem-solving based course would prepare students for either college or the real world any worse than what we're currently doing.

<comment><USER3> _I don't think lack of realism is the worst thing about these types of problems. I think lack of fun is._

I can recommend an algebra textbook with fun. And it was written by a mathematician with rather better credentials (theorems that bear his name in higher mathematics) than most algebra textbook authors. The book is Algebra by Israel Gelfand and Alexander Shen

<http://www.amazon.com/Algebra-Israel-M-Gelfand/dp/0817636773>

I discovered the Gelfand-Shen textbook through Professor Richard Askey's review of that book.

[http://www.aft.org/publications/american_educator/fall99/ame...](http://www.aft.org/publications/american_educator/fall99/amed1.pdf)

Askey's review is actually a review of Ma Liping's book Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics that quotes a passage of Gelfand's book in a sidebar. I later saw a glowing description of Gelfand's books in the same series in a bibliography by a U of Chicago mathematics student.

<http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~abhishek/chicmath.htm>

I use the Gelfand textbook to teach supplemental math lessons for gifted elementary-age students. They LOVE the Gelfand problems. They haven't even gotten to the really funny parts of the book yet, which such sections as "How to Confuse Students on an Exam." Gelfand's book(s) exemplify what you are looking for in math textbooks. Of course they are not used in very many public schools in the United States, nor in very many remedial college classes.

<comment><USER2> Thank you so much for introducing me to this textbook. I've only read a little sample (what Amazon will let me see when I "look inside"), but I can see it's an improvement over at least 95% of the books I've seen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am reminded of a talk I attended in college about (elementary-level) math education. One of the first intro problems to estimation was something like 27+75, and the presenter showed us a (real) dialogue where the student gave the exact answer, and the teacher had to "correct" them to the estimate, and then proceeded to talk about how this wasn't exactly correct. The teacher's guiding the student through the "proper" reasoning was convoluted, and not effective teaching. The presenter concluded that if you teach estimation, you should use an example like 209385324579+394875293745, where estimation is actually faster and easier than exact arithmetic.

Now, what real-life example demands systems of equations? I suspect none, until you get into industrial applications. Therefore, maybe you should ask what the kid wants to be when he grows up, and create an example in that setting.

<comment><USER5> > Now, what real-life example demands systems of equations?

Finding the cheapest phone card to use is a good example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> As soon as I read that problem my brain went on instinct and quickly calculated you need 3 vans and 2 cars. And somehow I'd skipped over the part that implies you need the number of vehicles to total five.

But I guess I'm just wired like that. And one thing I'm getting out of this how-do-we-teach-math kerfuffle is, people who are "just wired like that" think differently from the people who most need to learn math. Paul Lockhart would advocate dropping the pretense of real-world relevance altogether: "Suppose I were thinking of groups of five and seven things (as I very often am). How would I divide 31 things into groups of five and seven with none left over? It's the _beauty_ of solutions to problems like this, which exist purely of and in the imagination, that we are denying today's children!"

<comment><USER2> But, 3 vans and 2 cars isn't the only valid solution, unless you assume every vehicle has to be full. Four vans and 1 car works, and a previous poster gave the example of 5 vans, which also works. The fact that there are multiple valid solutions when you remove the constraint that each vehicle should be as full as possible makes me think this is a lousy example for illustrating systems of equations. It is, however, a great problem for teaching combinatorics, since, for each solution, you can count the number of ways to fill the vehicles, and thus the total number of distinct ways to transport the 31 people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Might this be titled as: "Why Students Hate _Word Problems_?"

The OP's argument is that common word problems in high-school textbooks are very contrived and that it problems made to be less contrived and more like what a student might expect to experience they might have more success in keeping their interest.

I'm not so sure of this conclusion. Making examples that aren't contrived but still illustrative and simple enough to retain their didactic value is _very_ difficult, especially if you are attempting to make it relatable to teenagers.

<comment><USER8> However, making contrived examples, even if illustrative, does make students think math is pointless and detestable. Many high school students, in my experience, really do develop a belief that they dislike math because they are led to believe that math is only good for things as boring, useless, and contrived as solving a linear system to figure out how many cars and vans to bring.

In this case there are even many other simpler and faster solutions compared to the proposed one. The obvious solution if the problem actually occurred in reality, barring other unmentioned limitations, is to take five vans. In many math courses, if a student given that problem during the lesson on linear systems were to suggest taking five vans, the teacher would mark the answer wrong. Seeking the simplest solution involving the fewest and simplest steps(and thus fewest opportunities to make a mistake) is a virtue in mathematics. Is not a shorter and simpler proof of the same theorem usually the most well-respected amongst mathematicians? Likewise should our mathematics education teach us to seek the shortest and simplest route to a correct solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I hated math. Absolutely loathed it. I had a terrible algebra teacher (8th grade) that left me a gap I never truly closed until college.

However, the 'lights' finally came on in my senior year of high school. I took an experimental trigonometry course, instead of calculus. This course focused on the application of trigonometry to real life problems.

It was by far the best class I've ever had, and it opened me up to understanding the application of ALL of the math that I had been taking for 12 years. It was truly seminal to me. That I had gone 11 years without ever being taught how to actually apply those principles is, in retrospect, mind boggling.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm still in education, doing my A levels - and I experience questions of a fixed form all the time.

Now this seems quite good in principle. In lessons you learn about the same ladder against the same wall or whatever, with very slightly changed values each time. Then you do the past papers - and it has the same problems - so you end up with a nice qualification at the end.

The problem with this is what I experienced today. The examiners changed the exam - not massively - just enough so that the standard solutions people had learned became worthless.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is actually a useful word problem, they only left out one part that would make it more practical: cars cost $50 to rent, vans cost $100 to rent. Now you've got a reason to prefer cars over vans.

I (and in my experience most students feel the same) always liked learning better when it was about concrete problems and not just an abstract operation. If I'd had to learn programming without real-world applications, I wouldn't have bothered.

I explain this by pointing out that physics has theoreticians and experimentalists. Seems to me that's about mental style. Also, it's easier to communicate an idea when you've got a physical metaphor.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's funny, algebra is when I first started liking math. I hated arithmetic and got poor grades because for some reason I could not memorize addition and multiplication facts very well so I was slow on the tests.

With algebra I started to see that I could actually do something useful with math. It became more about thinking than memorization. Yeah a lot of the problems were contrived but at least it was more interesting than long division.

</comment><comment><USER13> I always liked math for the sake of math. Math that has "real-world" applications is boring.

(Of course, Calculus, number theory, and differential equations have lots of real world applications, but the "real world" that these apply to is not "daily life", and is interesting as a result.)

</comment><comment><USER14> Why on earth would we want to "waste" the time of teachers and students on such un-"realisitic" problems? Its not like they would have to solve the usary equations in the fine print in a bank contract in the future ... and if we ever need people who have encountered systems of two (yikes!) equations, I'm sure we can outsource it to India and China and elsewhere.</comment>


Canada now able to revoke citizenship of dual citizens convicted of terrorism - <AUTHOR> http://news.gc.ca/web/article-en.do?nid=981809

<comment><USER2> seeing the term terrorism used more broadly every day, that is not really such a good thing?</comment>


Create a Node.js project from scratch with Node-Sass - <AUTHOR> https://www.codefellows.org/blogs/create-a-node-js-project-from-scratch-with-node-sass

<comment><USER2> Very helpful. When is libsass just going to built into the browser?</comment>


Israeli scientists say they found a cure for cancer - <AUTHOR> https://www.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/A-cure-for-cancer-Israeli-scientists-say-they-think-they-found-one-578939 <comment><USER2> Title :

"We believe we will offer in a year's time a complete cure for cancer."

Closing paragraph of the article :

Morad said that so far, the company has concluded its first exploratory mice experiment, which inhibited human cancer cell growth and had no effect at all on healthy mice cells, in addition to several in-vitro trials. AEBi is on the cusp of beginning a round of clinical trials which could be completed within a few years and would make the treatment available in specific cases.

Sounds like a premature announcement.</comment>


How blockchain will revolutionise far more than money - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/how-blockchain-will-revolutionise-far-more-than-money <comment><USER2> Why is there this hype around "blockchains"? What does this even mean?

Bitcoin has a proof-of-work chain which, through wasting superlative amounts of energy and destroying the atmosphere, establishes consensus about transactions as a distributed system. It is clear what a "blockchain" is there, and in Bitcoin clones and forks.

But outside Bitcoin, what does it refer to? Peer-to-peer? Distributed systems? Global warming? It feels like a meaningless buzzword. How, exactly, does having a Bitcoin-esque distributed consensus system – if that's even what you mean – actually solve some given X? It never seems to be explained, it's just "blockchain will solve X".

I think "blockchain" might be the new ".com".

<comment><USER3> > through wasting superlative amounts of energy and destroying the atmosphere

It's true, Bitcoin does spend a lot of energy to provide proof-of-work, the underpinning of distributed trust in the blockchain.

But you might find proof-of-stake[1] interesting. It requires far less energy --no repetitive hashing. It could also provide stronger protection against sybil attacks, requiring the attacker to spend far more in real terms in order to obtain a 51% stake.

The Ethereum blockchain is planning a move to proof-of-stake[2].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of- stake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake)

[2] [http://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/9/why-does- ether...](http://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/9/why-does-ethereum- plan-to-move-to-proof-of-stake)

EDIT: Formatting

<comment><USER4> Proof of stake has been around for decades in some form or another (Quorum based consensus was what it was originally called) Andrew Poelstra has compiled a pretty decent list of reasons why it's an uninteresting idea: [https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf](https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf) (He's created other documents on the subject)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> All these articles completely disregard the cost of the system - and this is not a trivial problem. The bitcoin blockchain is subsidized by the speculators.

Eventually I think that the solution will kind of relax the 'permisionless' aspect of the system and have some cheap but slightly more centralized timestamping. Just like the PrivaTegrity proposal by [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chaum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chaum) (I can't find the source for this - but Google finds many articles about it: [https://www.google.pl/search?q=privategrity](https://www.google.pl/search?q=privategrity)).

The timestamper does not need to know what it is timestamping and additionally timestamping might be distributed across many jurisdictions - so the damage of a rogue timestamper can be limited. And it is only timestamping that requires that wasteful proof-of-work.

<comment><USER6> You are correct - permissionless blockchains have a completely different threat model that results in a high cost to secure the blockchain from attack. The vast majority of new blockchain systems we're seeing developed are private, permissioned systems. This offers a different security model that is still useful for a variety of situations, such as in existing financial network where there is already a fair amount of trust between the actors.

<comment><USER5> It is kind of confusing to use the terminology from bitcoin on solutions unrelated to the element that was the technological breakthrough in bitcoin.

<comment><USER4> It's fraudulent, even. Many of these "blockchain" companies are just writing weird crud apps, and marketing it as something else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _> But you will soon be able to vote from your mobile phone in a way that is 10 times more secure than the current US or UK systems, at a fraction of the cost and fraud-free._

Malware on the phone: No need to attack the block chain if there's a weaker part of the system.

Also only those who really understand the technology and math behind the block chain as well as the voting software's source code are able to verify the votes. All others have to trust the technology/math/software.

Not so with voting on paper: It doesn't require special knowledge to check that votes have been counted correctly. In Germany everybody has the right to observe the voting process, including the votes being counted.

</comment><comment><USER8> What a load of crock. I work in fintech. And every week or so, someone will mention 'blockchain' completely out of context, presumably because they think it makes them sound intelligent.

Blockchain won't solve anything. Sure, it's interesting as a distributed ledger, but that's as far as it goes. You think financial institutions care about innovation? Think again. They'll gladly talk about the latest buzzword if they think it can make them any money, but no one is working on anything credible using blockchain in fintech.

Banks are scared of decentralized services, and they will gladly pander FUD at governments who are willing to listen.

<comment><USER9> Financial institutions won't be making the decision as to whether the technology is widely adopted or not in the long term. If there is another financial crisis, then people will eventually work out the existing financial system (esp the role of central banks) is fundamentally f#cked. Alternative currencies may then boom in popularity. It's a high risk area for startup investing, but someone, somewhere is going to make a ton of Bitcoins (?) out of this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > All the information in the record is permanent – it cannot be changed – and > each of the computers keeps a copy of the record to ensure this. If you > wanted to hack the system, you would have to hack every computer on the > network – and this has so far proved impossible, despite many trying, > including the US National Security Agency's finest. The collective power of > all these computers is greater than the world's top 500 supercomputers > combined.

Isn't this totally incorrect?

Not buying the hype.

</comment><comment><USER11> Slow? I was under impression that adding records to blockchain is fairly slow...

Was it improved in recent projects to make blockchain more multi-purpose solution?

<comment><USER12> Yes, ethereum: [https://www.ethereum.org/](https://www.ethereum.org/)

confirmation times are much, much quicker than bitcoin. Plus you can make the blockchain "programmable" because it adds a turing-complete programming language. It's getting a lot of momentum right now and could (in my opinion) take over the market cap of bitcoin.

<comment><USER4> No one needs turing complete smart contracts. The overhead of this unnecessary feature will likely sink this project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> When? We've been hearing this for at least 4 years now. Where's the revolution? Did I miss it?</comment>


Ask HN: Ideas for first implementation for encryption algorithm - <AUTHOR>

I have designed what I think is a pretty clever algorithm to encrypt web communications. It basically allows two or more people to communicate through a browser without any plaintext data leaving their local machines. My servers only hold ciphertext. I think this can be used in a number of implementations; but I have to start somewhere, so I would like to know what the HN community would like to see and use. My ideas: -Encrypted Twitter-like app -Encrypted social network -Encrypted web-chat -Encrypted email -Anything else?
I think it is advantages to be able to be able to charge for the first implementation, so things like an encrypted social network may be a bad idea (even though I think there is probably a market for it).
Thanks for all the feedback! <comment><USER2> I don't have much cryptographic experience--but I've read Applied Cryptography, and if there's one thing I learned from it, it's not to design your own cryptosystem. Are you sure that this algorithm is secure from cryptanalysis? Have you tested it against differential cryptanalysis, boomerang attacks, et cetera and so forth? Just a few things to keep in mind.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha, I have learned that lesson too. My algorithm deals with the key management. I use an encryption algorithm that has been thoroughly vetted.</comment></comment>


Facebook AI, AWS partner to release new PyTorch libraries - <AUTHOR> https://ai.facebook.com/blog/facebook-ai-aws-partner-to-release-new-pytorch-libraries-/ <comment><USER2> Does that mean AWS finally give up on MXNet and turn to embrace PyTorch?

<comment><USER3> TorchServe seems to share code with MXNET. I think this is more AWS/Facebook responding to Google's power in ML with TensorFlow/GCP. AWS doesn't have a framework, and Facebook doesn't have a cloud. This gives PyTorch better feature parity with TensorFlow (TorchServe == TF Serving) and gives AWS a point of differentiation from GCP.

<comment><USER4> > AWS doesn't have a framework

They do - it's MXNet. It's just that no one really cares about it.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, but as you say, MXNet doesn't have the market of PyTorch or TF, and while AWS has deep ties within MXNet, they don't outright control it to the same extent that Google owns TF or Facebook has PyTorch.

<comment><USER4> It's an Apache project sure, but AWS employs the vast majority of contributors. I'd say in practice it controls MXNet like G/FB control TF/PT. Although MXNet is a much more community friendly project than TF.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Odd, the article itself has the date set as "April 20, 2019," but appears as "April 21, 2020" on the "Blogs" page.

</comment><comment><USER6> How is this different than Cortex? [https://github.com/cortexlabs/cortex](https://github.com/cortexlabs/cortex)</comment>


Ask HN: How to promote to web designers? - <AUTHOR>

Hey,
Right now, I'm building and online course aimed to teach web development, from novice to employable. For free. It's located at http://howtocode.io
So far, I reached a little over 50% of the targeted users registrations. Surveying the users so far, I notice many have a technical background of some kind. Still, I strongly believe that web designers (not coders) would not only benefit from the course but also be interested.
My question is this: how do I get in touch with them? I don't want to spam or spend fortunes on ads. How would you tackle this?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Have you considered reaching out to different design blogs and giving their users a free month? Have you reached out to influential twitter users who have a design audience? Let us know what you've already tried.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very good ideas, there! Thank you.

But giving users a free month? No way! The entirety of the course is... free for all!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Landing page says:

> The crowdfunding campaign and building of the course will start as soon as > enough people have signed up.

If you plan crowdfunding, why not do it earlier? Putting up a Kickstarter may give the project some publicity.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't want to start a campaign before getting an audience :-) I think this is a mistake that many new entrepreneurs make.</comment></comment>


California fault capable of producing a magnitude 8 earthquake has begun moving - <AUTHOR> https://www.stripes.com/news/us/unprecedented-movement-detected-on-california-earthquake-fault-capable-of-8-0-temblor-1.603516/quake-1.603517 <comment><USER3> > But new satellite radar images now show that the fault has started to move, > causing a bulging of land that can be viewed from space.

Wow, it'd be sure be great for the article mentioning this to, you know, either host the pics or provide a link.

<comment><USER4> I imagine it's something most people would look at and go "I have no idea what I'm looking at".

For example: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaging_radar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaging_radar)

If you showed me the images in the Wiki entry with no context, I would assume i was looking at lichen growing on a rock like in this image [https://cumuseum- archive.colorado.edu/Research/Objects/Image...](https://cumuseum- archive.colorado.edu/Research/Objects/Images/sep04_lichen.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Relatively relevant, there's a review of the current challenges in detecting, correlating and acting on seismic events:

[http://gfzpublic.gfz- potsdam.de/pubman/item/escidoc:2405891:...](http://gfzpublic.gfz- potsdam.de/pubman/item/escidoc:2405891:5/component/escidoc:2408890/2405891.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER6> Having listened to a short podcast about the predicted big earthquake that would hit California ("the Big One"), I'm not sure how people in California manage to get a good night's sleep.

<comment><USER7> I keep coming back to an observation that the places where civilization tends to exist are geologically and climatologically 'interesting'. If it's not one thing it's another.

<comment><USER8> There are plenty of places without any particular natural risks, e.g., New York City and London, both of which standard and dull four-seasons temperate climates and dead geology.

<comment><USER9> NYC earthquake risk is on-par with the Bay Area because while the magnitude of the quakes would be lower, the bedrocks transmits the energy better, the buildings are under-engineered for earthquakes, and it has a higher population density.

<comment><USER8> NYC is not close to any major geological activity. The east coast, unlike the west coast, has been quiet for, what, 60 million years? The Appalachian mountains are worn-down nubs. The closest seismic zones are, what, the Caribbean and the New Madrid area of Missouri, IIRC.

<comment><USER10> Depending on how you define "major" (I just saw a Twitter status arguing that San Francisco does not get " _truly_ big" earthquakes because it's a transform boundary and not a subduction zone), New York has a bunch of faults and does get significant geological activity. [https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1183984933733158913](https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1183984933733158913) [https://nypost.com/2017/09/09/new-york-city-is-overdue- for-a...](https://nypost.com/2017/09/09/new-york-city-is-overdue-for-a-major- earthquake/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Question: What's the fastest earthquake notification source publicly available? I ask because USGS seems to have a 5-10 minute delay, whereas I'm hoping for less (ideally a few seconds).

<comment><USER12> I was also hoping to create an early warning system and at least wake me out of bed a few seconds before an earthquake hits so I'm at least on the way to sheltering myself from falling objects.

The response I got from USGS was this:

> You can read our FAQ on that at [https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-fast-does- > earthquake-informati...](https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-fast-does-earthquake- > information-get-posted-web-site-get-sent-out-earthquake-notification).

> You may also be interested in ShakeAlert - <USER2> > [https://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/earlywarning/](https://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/earlywarning/).

So in short, no, they don't really have it yet. I wonder though if we (hackers) could create a realtime system for the bay area since USGS has been on it for years without results. About 20-50 sensors scattered in homes around the bay would probably be enough for an early warning system. Warnings can be delivered via a mobile app, or some kind of realtime API that anyone can use for their own purposes (e.g. stopping machinery, sounding building alarms, ...).

<comment><USER13> Write a bot that detects earthquake-related tweets, a la xkcd.

<comment><USER14> I've actually done this and get notifications usually 30 seconds post quake just like xkcd suggested.

<comment><USER12> I thought of that but 30 seconds is too long for an early warning system, the waves travel pretty fast.

<comment><USER14> Depending on where the epicenter is, it may take 1-2 minutes for the S waves (which are the slower, damaging ones) to travel to the major population center. Up to 30s of warning for an earthquake early warning system is enough for people to take cover and for cities to shut off things like water/gas lines. That being said my system is definitely not ready for that, and twitter can be seen as one source of information used to augment other early detection systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Money quote from the article: "We don't know what it means."

<comment><USER16> I remember a Seismologist that said that moving rocks in a region with fault lines are a good sign. At least better than not moving rocks that are constantly building pressure. Of course "we don't know" is probably the most accurate prediction.

<comment><USER17> The small energy released by small movements doesn't add up to a large earthquake. For example, magnitude 8 earthquake is a billion times more energy than a magnitude 3 earthquake. This was the sobering perspective of a geophysicist when I asked if small earthquakes are a good thing in California to help relieve potential energy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if this is posted because of the California Shakeout drill today.

>Whether the destabilization will result in a major quake soon cannot be predicted. In September, the U.S. Geological Survey said the most likely scenario is that the Ridgecrest quakes probably won't trigger a larger earthquake. Nevertheless, the USGS said that the July quakes have raised the chances of an earthquake of magnitude 7.5 or more on the nearby Garlock, Owens Valley, Blackwater and Panamint Valley faults over the next year.

So keep your china cabinets tidy, keep your earthquake kit stocked, but don't fret and carry on like normal? Seems a tad alarmist.

<comment><USER19> It's not possible to please people with these kinds of notifications. On a long time scale, that fault IS gonna rip and if civilization exists around it at the point it goes, a LOT of people are going to die.

But, our ability to predict quakes on a short time span (read: human lifetime) is abysmal. The best we can say is eh, maybe. There are no consistent, confirmed precursors.

So, what can you do? Every warning will be accused of being alarmist if it doesn't eventuate, and every failed prediction (note that you don't see these from reputable professionals working in the field) mocked. If a warning is ever actually borne out by a significant seismic event, expect a TON of criticism that someone knew but didn't provide sufficient urgency in their warning.

Putting all the stuff about warnings aside for a moment, let's examine at individual's justification for and capacity to make preparations for such an event. At one extreme you have preppers, and at the other end there's folk that do nothing. Both approaches seem predominantly to hinge on pure opinion on the immediacy of the threat. If you immerse yourself in various materials on the topic to be found online, you'll probably adopt a prepper mindset. If you simply never bother to do that and continue about your day, you'll likely sit on the 'do nothing' extreme. There really isn't a 'right' here without a crystal ball, which everyone seeks from seismologists and get frustrated when they can't provide any tangible insights.

In summary: Mankind's ability to risk assess and rationally respond to long- interval threats of high severity is very, very poor.

<comment><USER20> I'd distinguish between prepping and doomsday types. Prepping can be as simple as having some basic supplies and nonperishable goods such that you're not going to die if, for any reason, you need to survive independently for some period of time. It's not like some lifestyle or even dependent upon an assumption that you'll even ever need these things. So it's a relatively low cost decision to be able to be at least somewhat prepared for an eventuality that, though extremely improbable, would have disproportionately negative consequences if you were of the 'do nothing' extreme on the other end.

To put it mathematically, if I said there was a 1 in a million chance of you losing a billion dollars sometime in your life, and you agreed with me, it'd certainly be logical, if you could, to provide insurance against that eventuality for $1. In fact it'd still be mathematically sound to spend $1000. But this is for an event that you are literally 99.9999% sure will not happen. I think the big difference is in seeing reality as a neverending stream of probabilities as opposed to seeing reality as a neverending stream of certainties. The probabilistic mindset can lead you to conclusions and decisions that look peculiar to a deterministic mindset. By contrast doomsday types are those who have a deterministic mindset and have decided that the world (as we know it) is going to end and thus make that a part of their persona and worldview. Granted, they could also be of a probabilistic mindset with a different weighting but, at least in my experience, that's not usually the case.

<comment><USER21> I distinguish between prepping vs doomsday as;

1) Acknowledging there is a chance of a significant event vs. I know what is coming.

2) It takes a minor part of your life vs. significant proportion/resource.

Personally I keep a couple months food stored. I dont keep freeze dried barrels of meals etc, just buy bulk on stuff we use that's 1) on special and 2) stores; like jars of pasta sauce, peanut butter, toothpaste etc so really it also saves money as a portion of my grocery is always half price rather than that weeks on special usage.

The way I look at it is pretty much every 2nd generation experiences a significant catastrophic at some time. If I can keep things covered for a couple months it covers most non-extreme scenarios, where as if the end of civilisation did come I figure there would be so many variables there not much you can really do unless you devote you life to this and sacrifice you lifestyle for a likely non-existent outcome.

Keeping some extra food/supplies is insurance of a kind. And surprised more people dont while so many have things like house content insurance.

For me I dont have content insurance on my house while most people do. Many people would think I'm strange for having a couple months food, but the way I look at it is, if all my house goods disappeared it would suck but I can sort it out fairly easily over 3-12 months. If something happened that broke supply lines, while significantly less likely than the house being being burgled/fire etc, the consequences are so much greater. I prefer to be covered for a much less likely event that would have significant impact on me, than a more likely (though still low) event that will have little impact on me in the over arching story of my life. PLus there something nice about the planning organising mental exercise of it

<comment><USER22> Precisely! While the risk of most disasters is rather low for most people, there is a considerably larger risk that _something_ will happen at some point. It's only reasonable to be able to survive on one's own if society is disrupted for a few weeks or so.

There's a long way to go from that to bunkering down in the wilderness and withdrawing from society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> There was just an earthquake in LA

</comment><comment><USER24> If you picked up a paintbrush, you could say "human capable of painting the Mona Lisa has started painting". The article doesn't really give any information about what makes this fault special, besides not having seen it move before. Is the original paper available?

<comment><USER25> "A major California fault capable of producing a magnitude 8 earthquake has begun moving for the first time on record, a result of this year's Ridgecrest earthquake sequence destabilizing nearby faults"

Is that not information enough?

<comment><USER26> Not really, because the article goes on with this quote:

>"We don't know what it means."

Then...

>Whether the destabilization will result in a major quake soon cannot be predicted. In September, the U.S. Geological Survey said the most likely scenario is that the Ridgecrest quakes probably won't trigger a larger earthquake.

And of course...

>Also, a creeping fault triggered by a nearby quake doesn't necessarily mean a big quake is coming. The southernmost tip of the San Andreas fault has traditionally crept in response to distant quakes, including the magnitude 8.2 quake off the coast of southern Mexico in 2017, nearly 2,000 miles away. "But that doesn't mean the San Andreas went off," said USGS research geologist Kate Scharer, who was not part of the study.

They do their best to not link to the actual study for which the alarmist headline seems to be derived. It is probably this:

[https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6463/346](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6463/346)

What I'm really wondering is whether the '8.0' figure is present in this paper or not. Because otherwise, where did they pull that number?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> >The creeping illustrates how the Ridgecrest quakes that began on the Fourth of July have destabilized this remote desert region of California between the state's greatest mountain range, the Sierra Nevada, and its lowest point, Death Valley.

A cruel joke one could say.

</comment><comment><USER28> man... some of these titles are getting harder and harder to understand

<comment><USER29> Temblor, his arms wide.

<comment><USER30> When the walls fell.

<comment><USER31> Sokath, his eyes uncovered!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Chicago's Ruby Developer Crisis - <AUTHOR> http://nuts.redsquirrel.com/post/2680658687/chicagos-ruby-developer-crisis

<comment><USER2> I didn't know there was such a thing as a [language]-programmer.

Picking up a new language has to be nigh trivial for any programmer, right?

Getting to know the frameworks and libraries intricately takes time, but if you're not able to write code in a new language within a day, you're doing something wrong.

And after a few weeks working full time with a certain framework, you should definitely be up to speed.. right?

<comment><USER3> Exactly, and I think that was kind of the gist of his message; companies can find good developers and spend the time teaching them how to do it.

Besides, a good Ruby developer for one company might still not be using whatever cool tools the new company is asking about. Ruby may be a smaller community than others, but in a room of 10 Ruby developers, I bet you'll find 10 different ways to implement a Rails app (Haml vs. ERb, Steak vs. Cucumber, TestUnit vs. RSpec, and so forth).</comment></comment>


The Universe Knows Right from Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/89/the-dark-side/the-universe-knows-right-from-wrong <comment><USER3> Maybe im missing it, but the argument seems to be morality is objective because everyone thinks it is. How is that not begging the question?

Then there are a bunch of pithy lines, which the author seems to treat as obvious in context revelations, but to me seem to utterly lack evidence/argument.

> "No matter how the universe had turned out, two plus two would equal four > and it would have been wrong to torture people for fun."

Umm why? That seems non obvious to me.

>"Pleasure is good and suffering is bad because Reality is essentially directed toward the former and away from the latter"

Is it though? And that's ignoring the whole question of wtf does it even mean for reality to be directed in some direction.

> "My proposal is that the inherently directed nature of Reality entails that > it's objectively good for Reality when it manifests as pleasure and > objectively bad for Reality when it manifests as pain."

Umm ok.

>"It is broadly agreed that (all things being equal) pleasure is good and pain is bad..."

Isn't the definition of pleasure, being good. Seems kind of circular - everyone agrees feeling good is good and feeling bad is bad.

>"The reality of objective value is a non-negotiable data-point and we are entitled to make whatever postulations are required to account for it."

'kay then.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, doesn't make sense.

I prefer a simpler argument for why there is a subset of morality that's universal for (vast majority of) humans: argument from shared brain architecture.

We're essentially running the same wetware under the hood, at least on the time scales of human civilization. So while the universe doesn't necessarily privilege a set of values, _human brains are_. And that's all that really matters (until we meet aliens or start building conscious AIs) - <USER2> experience is a feature of brains, not laws of physics in general.

<comment><USER5> There is an even simpler explanation: some moral principles push people towards a game-theoretic optimum, so evolution selects for it.

Eg, a society that allows random murders will be at a staggering disadvantage. By magic, most (all?) societies have strong moral arguments against murder. Ditto honesty - honest societies have structural advantages.

Any cooperative species will have something that looks like morality. Even ants practice first aid.

<comment><USER6> "Optimum" is a moral notion. You're begging the question.

<comment><USER7> I don't think so. In this view, the concepts of what constitutes ethical behavior have arisen from individuals coming to understand what sort of society is most likely to give the best outcome according to their own long- term self interest. This is no more begging the question than the concept of survival of the fittest in theories of evolution, the point being that there is a coherent concept of fitness in that case, and self-interest in this one. In both cases, the question being addressed is "how did we arrive at the current state of affairs, when other outcomes are at least logically possible?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > But the problem for .. anyone who tries to ground moral truth in the natural > world, is that moral truths, like mathematical truths, are _necessarily_ > true, which means that it's impossible for them to be false.

What a bizarre argument. Mathematical truths are _defined_ to be true -- entirely the opposite of what the author is trying to claim about moral truths, so this is about as absurd a comparison as one could make.

I'm no expert but this article reads to me like hand-waving psychobabble.

<comment><USER9> > Mathematical truths are _defined_ to be true

Perhaps a nitpick, but: _axioms_ are defined to be true. Mathematics, roughly speaking, is the business of exploring the consequences of chosen sets of axioms. Sometimes published mathematical theorems turn out to be wrong.

<comment><USER10> Do you think? I'd say that axioms were just taken; there's no commitment to their truth (since there is no need for it, and mathematics likes economy).

<comment><USER11> It also doesn't make sense to define axioms as true. What if later it turns out that the axioms were a mutual contradiction?

<comment><USER10> Truth is tricky. If I state "The sky is blue", I can look out of the window, the sky _is_ blue, my statement corresponds to the state of the world, my statement is true, right? But in mathematics there is no window, everything is internal, abstract, so what does "truth" mean when there is no state of the world with which to compare? More importantly, would the mathematics be any different if the axioms are declared to be true? No, it wouldn't make any difference at all. So let's leave "truth" to the physicists and philosophers.

<comment><USER12> That's the first error of the objectivists. Mistaking "blue" as a property of the sky.

Color happens in your head.

That is why trichromacy, tetrachromacy, pentachromacy, dodecachromacy etc. is a thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Panpsychism is a pretty interesting idea, but this article does a poor job of explaining it and then making its own moral argument. I'd say skip the article and read this instead:

[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/)

One line of argument for panpsychism that I don't often see mentioned is that humans/animals assume that we're the only form of consciousness in the universe. This strikes me as rather myopic, at least as a baseline assumption. It seems like the starting point should be _assume that other bodies in the universe are constituted in similar ways_ and not _animals on Earth are exceptionally, unexplainably unique._

</comment><comment><USER14> I am a believer in a form of panspsychism myself, but this article is baffling.

> But the problem for neo-Aristotelians, or indeed anyone who tries to ground > moral truth in the natural world, is that moral truths, like mathematical > truths, are necessarily true, which means that it's impossible for them to > be false.

The author completely fails to prove why that is the case, not to mention that this isn't even true for Mathematics either, depending on your starting axioms...

</comment><comment><USER15> Here is my take:

All knowledge is ultimately based on assumptions, and those assumptions ultimately hang in thin air. We rely on our senses to observe the world around us, and we rely on our mental faculties to interpenetrate what we observe. But we have no way of knowing if our senses, and our mental faculties, can be trusted, if they are accurate to some objective reality.

It might very well be that what we take in from our surroundings and environment isn't an "objective reality", but an incredibly twisted and mangled version which is has more falsehoods, inaccuracies and errors, than any truths. To say that the sky is blue is an incredibly "human" observation, which relies on our eyes having divided the light spectrum into arbitrary ranges we call colors. There is no grounding to distinct colors, other than what our eyes and brain arbitrarily imposes to make sense of what it's taking in. It's a clever, but arbitrary, way to look at the light spectrum.

But we do the best with what we have, there is no point in wallowing in pity, we simply work with the tools we are given. Now, even if we cannot justify it, it does appear to us that murder is morally wrong. We are repulsed by it, we wish to avoid it, we want to minimize it, we label those who do it as being flawed and broken, and we have all sorts of theories and ideas about how murder doesn't fit in with how human life operates.

Even though I cannot point you to any objective anchoring as to why murder is wrong, I can neither point you to any objective anchoring for anything. I cannot prove that what I see, touch, feel, smell and hear is really there, nor that what I am observing is in any way accurate. Even the most basic mathematical facts are suspect, if you can't verify the mental faculties behind it.

So why reject the moral facts I cannot verify, but accept the observable, evidential, mathematical facts that I cannot verify? Who gets to choose which ones gets a pass? I think murder is wrong for the same reason I think the sky is blue: because that's what my senses, body and mind tells me.

<comment><USER16> Consider that even murder isn't universally considered bad. Examples include wars, self defense, proponents of the death penalty, the sentinelese, etc. Debates can get particularly heated when one gets into things like abortion and ethical dilemmas.

As for the dichotomy of logical verification given our meat-based fallible physical medium, I'm reminded of Godel's incompleteness theory, i.e. that it is possible for a set of axioms to be internally consistent (e.g. basic algebra), yet we can construct a meta set of axioms to demonstrate that it is impossible to mathematically prove every truth therein.

<comment><USER15> True enough, but even so, in these examples you mentioned, war, self defense, death penalty, people struggle a lot with being mentally harmed by taking lives. I read somewhere that Nazi Germany moved to gassing those they persecuted rather than simply killing them by firing squad because the firing squads couldn't handle it day in and day out. The majority of mankind abhors murder, and has to invent elaborate methods and rules to avoid facing the brute reality of it, even when they say that it's good.

My point is just that to me, and my society as a whole, murder is seen as something bad, as a simple and obvious fact, a safe assumption. If somebody wants to tell me that assumption is wrong and should be removed, I want to see what sort of stuff their assumptions are built out of to justify such confidence.

<comment><USER17> Because not everyone think the same. We are not machine where everyone run the same software. Some people like chocolate, some people hate chocolate. Likewise some people think murder is good, some people think its bad.

<comment><USER15> Humans are not a chaotic collection of random emotions and opinions. You'll find that those who like to eat dirt and murder others are far outnumbered by those who like chocolate and want to live in harmony.

<comment><USER17> Maybe outnumbered but still exists and still human.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Right off the bat it fails epicly in its comparison of Gandhi to Epstein as bastions of good and evil, as apparently the author is completely unaware of Gandhi's sleeping with children? What a horrible choice for the side of good, given Epstein's horrendous misdeeds.

What a horribly written horribly reasoned article. Very frustrating to read.

> But if Reality is itself a very general form of consciousness, and my > consciousness is a specific form of that general form of consciousness, it > follows that Reality is present within my consciousness.

No it doesn't follow. You are fully capable of experiencing things that are not reality. That's just poor reasoning.

I work hard to keep my tone online positive but this article is simply religion presenting itself as science, and it enrages me.

<comment><USER19> I share your disdain.

Half the people talking about panpsychism are just bloviating in-between hits on DMT and are hoping to achieve Nirvana and merge with some Jungian collective unconscious, but are usually completely ignorant of that entire concept.

Panpsychism doesn't mean everything and everywhere is tripping on acid having a great time. Panpsychism is actually kind of terrifying; just think about what it must feel like to be one of a trillion trillion trillion hydrogen atoms suddenly recruited into a massive supernova and then drifting alone for 5 billion years and being washed through the entirety of life's evolution on Earth, taking part in a trillion different DNA molecules and cell walls; not having any clue about what you've been a part of or why. Being a horrible- looking blood-sucking mosquito downed by a bug-eyed frog, munched on by a croc, farted out a horse...or frozen into a granite hunk in the dark bowels of the Earth for eternity. No, panpsychism doesn't mean your preference for the Yankees over the Mets are somehow the moral code of the universe, or that damn squirrel with a twinkle in its eye is the manifestation of the all-knowing god, you fool (author).

<comment><USER20> > just think about what it must feel like to be one of a trillion trillion > trillion hydrogen atoms [...]

Usually the models of Panpsychism have a spectrum of consciousness and associate complexity of the thing with consciousness. So sure, let's say atoms have some consciousness, they have as much as is seen by a first look, that is their behavior and intelligence shows it, and it's not much, basically zero. A rock probably has more. It probably has rock-like consciousness, it has rock- behavior and rock-thoughts. It probably likes being a nice rock, hosting all those crystals, flowing through places sometimes slowly, sometimes flying off from a volcano, sometimes dissolving in a melting pool, merging with other rocks' rock-consciousness. Of course there are grumpy rocks too, just like there are many kinds of humans. And so on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> " _Arguemnt by analogy is very powerful and entirely fallacious._ " —Mr Dawson, my teacher of _Theory of Knowledge_ (epistemology and critical thinking), circa 1997

So... there is this guy, who has an opinion... okay... and?

</comment><comment><USER22> > It might be nice to think that the universe has an inherent moral direction, > but do we have any evidence that it does? And if we lack good evidence for > these claims, surely respect for Occam's razor ought to stop us from > accepting them? This objection, though, is jam-packed with value-claims: It > claims what we "ought" to believe and references "good" evidence. The very > challenge pre-supposes the reality of value.

So in attempting to provide evidence for his claims, Goff creates a weak framing for the necessity of evidence and then attacks the framing?

<comment><USER23> Yes, this is where he finally lost me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> There is an argument for theism that I find very persuasive, which is that, faith is a ridiculous conclusion but a necessary axiom. The point being it's not something you arrive at through reason after ruling out the alternatives, it's just a point you start at, or not.

It's not an artifact of reason, but it's the other way around, where we can only reason about the things the theistic object of faith has caused. (or even just deistic).

Without too much woo, I'm less circumspect about these beliefs, and think we all believe what we respectively perceive we need to. However, something curious I think I may have discovered is that both faith and fear cannot be experienced simultaneously. If this were true, and fear was just an interpretation of an emergent chemical/biological artifact of life in the universe, it implies that something which necessarily extinguished it could also be just as real.

On the question of what is more absurd, belief in the existence of a superbeing we cannot conceive of yet whose will we can somehow divine, or that our reasoning is sufficient to rule out the existence of such a being, if you have ever tried to argue with a dog or a horse or even a baby, the limits of the latter case seem too stark to provide much confidence in their powers.

</comment><comment><USER25> I tried reading "Mere Christianity" by CS Lewis on the strong recommendation of a friend.

Its core claim is that while many of our ideals of morality shift over time, some are absolute and transcend place and time, and therefore they must have been created by something outside of the universe. That claim occupies only the first few pages, and from there he attempts to further conclude that not only is there something, it is specifically the Christian god.

<comment><USER26> > some are absolute and transcend place and time

Which ones? I honestly can't think of any of the top of my head for which I wouldn't know a civilization which didn't honor them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> "(...) consciousness pervades the universe and is a fundamental feature of it (...)". I'm not sure if it means much. It's like saying that spheres prevade universe. Great, now what? Is cat hunting little bird good or bad? Depends who you ask. Consciousness and forms of life in general are recursions where emergent memory and prediction qualifies it on the wide spectrum of sophistication. Natural selection creates unhappy "recursions" from the moment when one eats the other and discovers it gives great energy boost. Feeling pain/pleasure is emergent feature shaped by natural selection. But there is nothing fundamental about it that says good predictors must have it. Evaluating options on more global scale move you closer to more global rights/wrongs, that's all.

</comment><comment><USER28> Bart Streumer is mentioned in the piece. His book "Unbelievable Errors: An Error Theory about All Normative Judgements" begins with a pretty cool sentence:

> You cannot believe the view I will defend in this book. I therefore will not > be able to convince you that this view is true.

<comment><USER13> Honestly not a bad approach. I wish more people just shared their ideas instead of trying to persuade and convert me to their position.

<comment><USER29> How can you really understand someone's ideas without understanding all the premises?

Isn't it necessary for then to try to "convince" you insofar as just stating a conclusion without supporting arguments is no different than stating an opinion?

Or put a different way, why would you ever desire to hear opinions without trying to understand them or establish their truth?

<comment><USER13> Not sure how you get this from the quote. I meant that I prefer it when the mood of a book is _this is interesting /beautiful/insightful_ and not _this is my conclusion, now I'm going to construct an argument to convince you it's the right one._

<comment><USER29> I think my reaction stemmed from

> You cannot believe the view I will defend in this book. I therefore will not > be able to convince you that this view is true.

This appears as a concession that the truth about the topic cannot be determined. In which case, from a philosophical point of view, what's the point?

That being said, I often prefer the presentation of "Here are some interesting things I've observed and thoughts I've had. Do what you will with them."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> >This objection, though, is jam-packed with value-claims: It claims what we "ought" to believe and references "good" evidence. The very challenge pre- supposes the reality of value.

There's no reason those terms need to be taken as objective. They're as socially constructed as the rest of science and philosophy. We ought to believe things with good evidence because that's what our scientific culture values.

If another culture didn't value that, we'd pity them for being less effective at their goals - it turns out that updating beliefs on evidence makes you more effective. But there's no _objective_ more sense in which they're "bad", they're just less effective.

</comment><comment><USER31> Grounding a discussion of universal morality in Greek philosophy as a basis for condemning Jeffrey Epstein is a remarkable excercise at ignoring the elephant in the room.

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

(This is _not_ a defence of Epstein but a criticism of the article's argument and coherence.)

</comment><comment><USER32> I have only a layman's grasp of philosophy. Why doesn't this field challenge its definitions of consciousness more, and why is ethics treated as an axiom? These both seem like anthropocentric positions to me, limiting the discourse. Why can't trees have a conscious experience? And who cares about the morality of a storm cloud?

</comment><comment><USER6> "We cannot account for necessary truths in terms of things that could have been different. To take Aristotle's view: We might have evolved to have natures directed toward cruelty. In such a counterfactual scenario, we would have moral grounds for cruelty, which runs counter to our deepest moral convictions. Any view which tries to ground moral truth in things that might have been different is going to face a similar problem. There will be some counterfactual scenario in which the putative ground of morality is absent or points us toward evil rather than the good."

What is cruelty? He's just juxtaposing abstract "cruelty" with some unspecified hypothetical and assumes it is meaningful. Cruelty presumes opposition to nature, so it makes no sense to say that some act A, understood in the abstract, is cruel.

"Different statues are made of different clay; on the container view in contrast, everything that does, or could, exist is a manifestation of the same Reality."

Prima facie, sounds like a vulgarization of God-as-Being, i.e., all things exist as potentially existing in relation to actually existing things, and actually existing things are like potential things in relation to the act of existence that causes them to be, which is God.

"If we follow Aristotle in grounding moral truth in the goal-directed nature of human beings, then we fail to account for the necessity of moral truths."

The aim was never necessity but nature. The natural law is called thus for a reason. I don't know what "good" or "bad" is apart from the nature of a thing.

"My proposal is that the inherently directed nature of Reality entails that it's objectively good for Reality when it manifests as pleasure and objectively bad for Reality when it manifests as pain."

He's elevating the world of plural substances to the level of a single substance and referring to it as Reality. But this does nothing to convert the natural moral law into the necessary moral law because you've just reduced the universe to one thing whose nature is such that such-and-such is good for it and such-and-such is not. To accomplish that kind of necessity, he would have to identity nature with necessity and that would require identifying what he called "Reality" with God. If Reality is God, then this is pantheism. But why this need to posit necessity?

"Foundational theories of morality have been locked in a perennial tug of war between the supernaturalism of Plato and the naturalism of his opponents."

Has he explored Thomism? Forms exist only in things and the mind, but also in God. Thus, you have both access to moral truths by knowing the natures of things, but even with the destruction of those things, they continue to exist in God (even if we may not be able to know them). Also, it is bad for human beings to harm others at least because it harms the common good and thus their own good. It is against our own natures to do so.

</comment><comment><USER33> This part of the universe, me, knows that the article is wrong. So yes. But the same part of the universe also knows that the rest doesn't know shit. No evidence required, you can trust me, I'm from the universe.</comment>


The Conker – Ultimate Living Pod – Your Happy Place - <AUTHOR> https://conkerliving.com/ <comment><USER2> You had me at, "Live inside a soccer ball".</comment>


Ask HN: Up-to-date information about current travel and gathering restrictions? - <AUTHOR> I've been trying to find a single source where I can see the current situation regarding quarantine and containment efforts that might effect me without having to dig through tons of news stories. Does anyone have a reliable one-stop source for that kind of information? <comment><USER2> CDC travel restrictions [https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/index.ht...](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/index.html)</comment>


Dive into Python 3: Strings - <AUTHOR> http://diveintopython3.org/strings.html

<comment><USER2> This is actually one of the best intros to Unicode (and string encoding in general) I've seen. If the rest of the book ends up being of this quality, I'll be pretty pumped.

<comment><USER3> This especially: "In Python 3, all strings are sequences of Unicode characters. There is no such thing as a Python string encoded in UTF-8, or a Python string encoded as CP-1252. "Is this string UTF-8?" is an invalid question. UTF-8 is a way of encoding characters as a sequence of bytes. If you want to take a string and turn it into a sequence of bytes in a particular character encoding, Python 3 can help you with that. If you want to take a sequence of bytes and turn it into a string, Python 3 can help you with that too. Bytes are not characters; bytes are bytes. Characters are an abstraction. A string is a sequence of those abstractions."

Couldn't have said it better myself.

<comment><USER4> "In Python 3, all strings are sequences of Unicode characters"

What does that mean exactly? Everything seemed really well explained until then. The line above lost me.

EDIT: I think I'm confused with the difference between UTF32 and Unicode. Is there one?

<comment><USER5> Yes. Unicode is a method of converting between code points and characters. A character is a symbol used in a human language or other written communication. A code point is a number, commonly written as "U+<decimal integer expression of the number>".

There are many different ways to actually store these sequences of code points in a computer. UTF-32 is one of those ways. It takes the decimal integer, coverts it to a 32-bit binary integer, and then splits that number into four 8-bit bytes. As the book says, there are problems with space usage -- in ordinary English text, all the code points will be U+127 or less, which leads to a lot of zero bytes taking up space. In addition to the waste of space, zero bytes can cause problems in C, since they're the symbol for the end of the string. So people invented other 'encodings' to convert Unicode code- points into bytes. UTF-16, UTF-8, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love how you can hover your mouse over certain lines of code and it highlights a paragraph below that explains something about it, and vice versa.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for noticing!

Fun fact: I originally coded that "by hand," i.e. manipulating the DOM in pure JavaScript. Then I decided to rewrite it in jQuery, which I had heard about but never used. Then I realized that I will never voluntarily write JavaScript without jQuery, ever again.

<comment><USER8> Nice work, this is probably the nicest looking technical material I've ever seen (but then I'm a sucker for nice clean typography).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9>
       "On the other end of the spectrum, languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have thousands of characters."

This is not exactly true. Chinese has an iconic lexicon where each glyph is a single word. Both Cantonese and Mandarin speakers both use the same lexicon, but have different pronunciations. There are several lexicons (pinyin, big5, ancient) and thousands of glyphs in each.

Japanese has three lexicons; hiragana, katagana, and kanji. Kanji is the oldest and adapted from Chinese. Glyphs are iconic. Hiragana and katagana were developed in Japan and are phonetic. Together they form most of what you see as Japanese text today. I think katagana is used more for foreign, non-Chinese words. There is also romanji which is essentially English letters. Anyway, apart from kanji which is Chinese, there are less than 100 hiragana and katagana glyphs.

Korean is even simpler. They too borrowed from the Chinese and occasionally still use some Chinese glyphs, but the official lexicon is Hangul. Hangul is phonetic and has 24(?) basic glyphs. Some glyphs can be combined into compound glyphs called double consonants and double vowels making about 40 glyphs total. A Korean word can be written by breaking it down into syllables, combining glyphs to form a syllable super-glyph, then putting those together to form a word.

The explanation of unicode and python3 is great. I just wanted to clear up the misconception stated in the first paragraph. Nothing more to see here...

<comment><USER10> I am having trouble seeing what you're claiming. Are you saying that there are not thousands of characters in Japanese and Korean because they borrowed from the Chinese? If so, I'd say your correction is misplaced. These characters must still be taken into account for a charset to be used for these languages.

In any case, I found many of your comments to be irrelevant to the question of how many characters must be used in a language. For instance, the difference between Cantonese and Mandarin pronunciation doesn't have anything to do with this issue. Nor does Chinese origin.

edit: I just spent a little time researching Korean (which I know much less of than Chinese or Japanese), and now I understand more what you were saying about it. However, it seems to me that each "super-glyph" as you call them counts as a character, as far as any charset is concerned. The fact that they can be broken up into constituent glyphs is irrelevant.

<comment><USER11> Really? I thought the idea of Han Unification was that the duplicated characters between the CJK languages all map to the same unicode codepoints.

<comment><USER10> Yes that's true, but even so, you can't fit all those characters into 8 bits, which is basically the point of that first section. Also, I don't see how mapping to the same codepoint would mean that Chinese has thousands of characters, while Japanese does not. They just share many of those thousands in common.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here's another great explanation of Unicode from PyCon '08: <http://farmdev.com/talks/unicode/>

It is really helpful in understanding Unicode handling in Python pre 3.0.

</comment><comment><USER13> Mark... thank you for doing this and making it available on the web. I will buy a hardcopy of it when it's out.</comment>


Last Post Sends Emails and Letters to Loved Ones When You Die - <AUTHOR> http://www.centernetworks.com/last-post-letters-after-death

<comment><AUTHOR> I think this is a brilliant idea in theory. In practice, the sticky part seems to be how Last Post finds out about your death. I guess someone has to notify them officially. Otherwise your relatives might be surprised when they open their mailbox some day. And you would be rather embarrassed that they had learned your parting thoughts before you wanted them to.

Could become a popular service among Wall Street types at the moment.

<comment><USER2> dead mans knob. Don't respond to x polls in a row and you're assumed to be incapacitated or deceased.

Trains have a similar mechanism, hence the name, it is to avoid a train going on to build an accident with a dead driver at the wheel.

I have a similar idea yet to be fleshed out revolving not around sending messages after you're dead but to alert others there might be a problem. Say you're travelling on your own between x and y, if you don't reach 'y' and reset the timer then an alarm is generated.

For solo travellers, people living alone in remote areas that sort of thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Makes complete sense. I like your idea. You should do it.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Who Is Using Basecamp? - <AUTHOR> How many people are on your team and how long have you been using it for? <comment><AUTHOR> Wondering where Basecamp fits in right now. Dug into it a bit, but the campfire, pings and other nomenclatures didn't feel like they lend themselves to an easy transition from other PM tools.</comment>


FOSDEM 2017 Schedule - <AUTHOR> https://fosdem.org/2017/schedule/ <comment><USER2> I (a Strine, free software advocate, sysadmin / devops / something living in Europe for a few years) went to four FOSDEMs between 2008 and 2013 -- and even in that short space noticed the increasing difficulty in getting into rooms I thought would be interesting.

Happily they're rapidly approaching, or have just reached, the state where all talks are filmed and made available online.

The Delerium Cafe event on the first night was (and likely still is) one of the most memorable events for free software tourists.

<comment><USER3> Sort of my feeling as well. I'm usually over in London for another event the week before and I used to take the train over to FOSDEM (and Config Management Camp) afterwards. But as it became more crowded, I basically lost interest. Even the Delirium Cafe event became just too mobbed to be interesting.

I wouldn't really discourage anyone from attending but it just stopped working for me a couple years back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Shameless plug for Config Management Camp, which is in Gent, on the Monday and Tuesday after FOSDEM:

[http://cfgmgmtcamp.eu/](http://cfgmgmtcamp.eu/)

Great conference for sysadmins/devops!

<comment><USER5> Sold out though now isnt it?

<comment><USER4> We usually have more room, I don't think it's hard limit, I'll talk to the organizers and see if we can open up more tickets, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The niche rooms are the best. In my case I get to meet with 45 people who are all extremely knowledgeable about Graphs. We can talk about the heart of the issues we have and the different ways we cope with them.

First time I went I felt I had found my Tribe.

</comment><comment><USER7> When I look at the schedule, I feel I'm more and more away from Fosdem. There are so many talks on so many subjects that look so "niche", I don't know where to go. What would you attend, as a generalist coder/project manager ?

<comment><USER8> That is exactly why I consider fosdem as a very interesting conf: I am myself somewhat generalist, and attending a room almost "at random" leads to very interesting discoveries. Last year I saw a talk about the internals of the jvm. It lead us to drastic performance improvements in the last year. Two years ago, a talk about measuring time lead me to dive into theoritical physics in my spare time.

Alongside these discoveries, I will attend devrooms directly in line with our technological stack.

In short we will learn stuff, aligned with our core needs, learn to think outside the box and finally meet great people in a great city, Brussels.

<comment><USER9> I regret missing FOSDEM every year. Even when it was tiny. The announced schedule always has a lot of meat. Doesn't feel like filler, resumeware, fads, or corporate pap.

I imagine its like the difference between PAX and E3.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For anyone going to FOSDEM, there's Git Merge 2017 also in Brussels just a day before FOSDEM starts: [http://git-merge.com](http://git-merge.com)

<comment><USER11> There's PGDay as well.

[https://2017.fosdempgday.org](https://2017.fosdempgday.org)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice to see there are three back-to-back eBPF talks on Saturday, starting at 1pm:

[https://fosdem.org/2017/schedule/room/ua2114_baudoux/](https://fosdem.org/2017/schedule/room/ua2114_baudoux/)

The focus there is networking, but we're also using eBPF for performance observability, and security monitoring.

</comment><comment><USER13> We have a talk here on the Big Data track on integrating Tensorflow with our Hadoop Distribution, hops.io. I haven't been before, but I've heard great things about it being a real tinkerers' conference - where developers go to actually find projects to work with and work on.

</comment><comment><USER14> Planning to go, first time to Brussels. Any advice from regulars about making the most of the experience?

<comment><USER15> Been there the last 5 years. Here a few small tips:

\- Plan your interesting talks before (via iOS / Android-App)

\- Be early in the rooms (some rooms are _really_ crowded, e.g. when an engineer of Youtube presents something in the Go devroom -> Popular speaker, popular topics / technology)

\- If you want to meet people there for a chat / beer / coffee, get in touch with them before via twitter, slack, you name it

\- Want to make the best out of it and come from abroad? Events before FOSDEM: GRIMOIRECON EU 2017 ([https://grimoirelab.github.io/con/](https://grimoirelab.github.io/con/)) and Git Merge ([http://git-merge.com/](http://git-merge.com/)) and after: Config Management Camp ([http://cfgmgmtcamp.eu/](http://cfgmgmtcamp.eu/))

\- Get a hotel near by or with a tram station near by. Location is quite good reachable by tram.

\- If you join by car and want to drive to FOSDEM directly be early every day. Parking spots on the campus are very limited. There are some near parking spots at the street here: [https://goo.gl/maps/4gf2Ag2YktA2](https://goo.gl/maps/4gf2Ag2YktA2) (dont park on spots reserved for goverment persons)

\- If you love books, get some money with you, i think O'Reilly has a big booth there and sell books for lower prices

\- If you love to met new people (FOSS, tech people) and don`t fear crowdy places and drink beer, join the Friday beer event in the city: [https://fosdem.org/2017/beerevent/](https://fosdem.org/2017/beerevent/). But be aware: If you don`t feel well joining crowded places (i mean really crowded like a music festival in front of a stage), don`t join. Personally i love the event. Every year i meet know people. Last year some people from the VLC project. The year before some people who running big public accessible networks in a private college from Scotland with support from the goverment, and so on. Nice chats

\- If you are part of a technology / community / project that is represented there (e.g. Go, MySQL, Jenkins, etc.), get in touch with them before on the mailinglist or slack and ask who is there. Often those groups are going for dinner on friday, saturday or sunday evening to meet people they know often from internet only. Most of these groups are open to join, just ask before

\- According to your behaviours on breakfast: There will be a small booth where you can buy belgium breakfast (mostly crossaints). If you more like bread, buns with cheese or sausages or whatever, have breakfast before you join the event in the morning. Do it in a bakery, hotel, or in a rush on your way.

\- According to your behaviours on lunch: There are small foodtrucks there who sell food like sandwiched, fries, noodles, etc. Mostly fast food related things. If you a more used to salad and eat in a calm location, go outside (you have to leave the campus for this)

\- Get your notebook charger: There are hacking rooms available

\- Hold a few bucks / euros back to buy a FOSDEM shirt and support the organizers.

These are a few tips that comes into my mind. If you have dedicated questions, feel free to ask them. I do my best to answer them.

PS: I will be joining this year again. Starting with a car from Düsseldorf, Germany. ~2h ride.

// Edit: Only formatting

<comment><USER16> _\- According to your behaviours on lunch: There are small foodtrucks there who sell food like sandwiched, fries, noodles, etc. Mostly fast food related things. If you a more used to salad and eat in a calm location, go outside (you have to leave the campus for this)_

I've attended the past two editions, and this was the only thing I disliked. The first year was OK-ish, though the food is not great even for fast good, but last year was pretty crappy, waiting in the rain in long lines.

As an alternative, I recommend a shop nearby[1] which makes decent sandwiches, and as a bonus it's located right by a beer shop with a wide selection.

[1] [https://email@example.com,4.3799702,3a,90y,225.61...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,4.3799702,3a,90y,225.61h,87.69t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sCyWXOSDCho-t6nDwLx8dTg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656?hl=en)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The location is just 20 minutes away from where I live now so it would almost be silly not to go. :-)

</comment><comment><USER18> [http://linux.conf.au/](http://linux.conf.au/) is another great open source conference.

</comment><comment><USER19> Given the current situation, is it safe to go there?

<comment><USER20> The current situation?</comment></comment>


Technical Writing Tips - <AUTHOR> http://www.rbs0.com/tw.htm

<comment><USER2> That's not a bad guide, and it touches on a few of my pet peeves (using units, being precise in quantifications).

It misses the key principles of any documentation, and one that far too many documentation departments fail utterly on:

1: Grant your marketing department _one_ page for trademarks, and tell them as politely or otherwise as you care, to fuck off. Your customers/readers in the midst of trying to solve some problem at 2AM, and/or under the watchful eye of the CTO/CEO, and/or in a colo's hot or cold aisle with fans blaring and a melted-down stack, aren't going to tolerate your Yoyodyne Tron-a-matic Blipvert Flux Capacitor Mark 5-1000[tm] descriptions line after line. It's "it", "the device", or some other simple pronoun or generic phrase.

2: You're writing to solve a problem, to accomplish a goal. Figure out what the problem and goal are. If you don't know, get an engineer who designed the product, or more likely, a solid sales engineer who uses it and encounters customers who know the ups and downs, to straighten you out. Actually, they're the ones who're probably best off writing the docs (they probably already have), and you as a technical writer should squeeze this into your publishing system and verify correctness of the information.

3: Descriptions of features shouldn't mirror the text or name of a feature, but _explain their purpose or function_. The quantity of proprietary/commercial documentation which falls down on this point is staggering.

4: Document significant product bugs and failings, clearly. This is a necessary corrolary of the first principle above. The "BUGS" section of UNIX manpages were (and are) revolutionary.

5: The bulk of the style guidelines in the "Technical Writing Tips" article referenced are really niggling points of grammar and/or exposition. They're best left to a last pass through the documentation. Yes, it's helpful when the piece doesn't read like a 7th-grader better versed in SMS texting wrote it. But if you're addressing these issues before hitting the four previous points, you're rearranging the belly button lint on the deck chairs on the Titanic. It's a complete waste of time to start with, and at least three degrees removed from the real problem.

</comment><comment><USER3> It advises using Strunk and White. I think it would be helpful to point out that S&W need not be considered all that authoritative: [http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid- Grammar/2549...](http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid- Grammar/25497) The people behind Language Log often have something to say about writing advice.

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's a simple piece of advice I read a while ago and find great:

if it ends with "ly", consider removing it. Or, put differently (teehee), use adverbs sparingly (teehee).

<comment><USER5> Except, of course, for all the words ending in "ly" that aren't even adverbs. Ally, fly, costly, supply, bully, replay, folly, family, ugly, elderly, bitly, etc.

<comment><USER4> That's why you have to "consider" it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A fair amount of this is like _Strunk & White_ in that it's bad advice made to look good by a disingenuous example. For instance:

 _Avoid using nouns as verbs. [...] avoid saying "He authored ...", instead say "He wrote ...". avoid using "obsoleted", instead say "made obsolete"._

You won't often see the verb 'to author' in technical writing, but not because 'author' is also a noun. It's simply the case that technical writing aims at plainness, and 'to author' is a bit hoity-toity. So the example, while accurate, doesn't illustrate the intended rule.

Anyway, I wish I could say that tips like 'affect vs. effect' are unnecessary for working writers, but just last week I had to fix several instances of 'insure vs. ensure' in an old document, so. Yeah.

</comment><comment><USER7> Tip number 1: Check for spelling mistakes in your submission before posting to HN :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Muphry's Law?</comment></comment>