Interpretations of quantum theory: A map of madness - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.04711 <comment><USER2> This paper gives the context in which this other one has been written: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.03641](http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.03641)

Discussed 13 hours ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10228435](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10228435)

</comment><comment><USER3> Mermin put it perhaps most succinctly, that reality is "correlations without correlata", or as Ron Garret coined, the "zero-worlds interpretation"[1]

It also makes sense to me on a sociological level, that the way in which this interpretation seems to undermine the very foundation of western, scientific thought is the reason it has been so desperately avoided for so long, with many preferring to believe in an infinite forking (but somehow still "real) multiverse, than the idea that reality itself is intersubjective.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc)

<comment><USER4> Regarding "correlations without correlata": this feels to me like we are starting to hit on properties on our mechanism for describing/representing and confusing it with what we're trying to describe/represent. Rather than saying there's "nothing really there," couldn't it just be a property of human conceptual structure that it expresses abstract relations about abstract symbols, but there are never any 'things' that are related?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "We must consolidate into single school of thought"?

Scientific method, much. This is the thinking that lead to pilot wave qm being disregarded for a few generations.

If anything, pilot wave gives the easiest explanation of locality - there is none, and it's a deterministic universe.

<comment><USER6> That's not exactly the point of this paper (and the quote above is not in it?)

> these two types [of interpretations] are so radically different that there > _must_ be experiments that, when analyzed outside the framework of quantum > theory, lead to different empirically testable predictions

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The main problem with interpretations of quantum phenomena is that even today many physicists receive very little information about modern concepts in quantum mechanics (QM) during their University training. The standard QM course usually starts off by explaining the two "postulates" of quantum mechanics, i.e. that a state is described by a wave function which evolves in a totally predictable fashion, but which suddenly "collapses" to a classical state in a random and non-predictable way when we perform a measurement on the quantum system.

Unfortunately, this picture is almost completely wrong. In fact, there is no randomness and non-predictability in quantum mechanics. The fact that we observe wave function collapse in a quantum system is the consequence of coupling the system to a larger, external one that becomes entangled with the "small" quantum system and -through so-called decoherence- produces what we call the collapse of the wave function to a "classical" state. This process is entirely deterministic.

The theory of such "open quantum systems" is well established today and explains many of the seeming paradoxes that have plagued quantum mechanics, and it also provides clear answers to many of the questions posed in the article.

Some questions, in particular what happens to the parts of the wave function that do not become part of our reality after a collapse cannot be answered by any known theoretical framework, hence different people will have different opinions concerning those. The problem here is that we ourselves are described by a quantum wave function and therefore "live" inside the quantum world, we can therefore not "step back" and look at a wave function from the outside, which is why we can't answer what happens with the parts of a wave function that correspond to measurement results that we have not obtained when measuring an observable of a quantum system. Different interpretations of quantum mechanics like the "Many Worlds" or the "Copenhague" varieties are basically just arguing about what happens with a wave function after it "collapses".

To my knowledge there is no way to discriminate between different alternatives here, the preferences that individual physicists have in this matter are therefore based more on personal belief or concepts like simplicity or "beauty", hence we should not waste time trying to find out which is the right one.

<comment><USER8> The Many Worlds interpretation is the idea that the wavefunction never, ever collapses. It just evolves unitarily according to the Schrodinger equation forever.

<comment><USER9> Absence of collapse is not endemic to many worlds interpretation. Statistical interpretation does not talk about collapse either. A better characterization of many worlds is that the Schroedinger equation is put above anything else, even above the experiment and existence of definite measurement results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Locality in in quantum theory confuses the proverbial journalist because meaning of locality is different from the intuitive understanding of the word.

Two entangled particles light years apart share state. Physicists can still say that principle of locality is not violated because definition of locality in physics is does not include quantum state.

Quantum states have no location. Quantum correlations are non-local. As long as this is excluded from definition of locality everything is fine.

Information transfer and energy transfer follows principle of locality strictly.

<comment><USER6> I don't think that's correct? Bell's theorem implies you can't have a theory of local hidden variables that reproduces entanglement (and the rest of QM), no?

<comment><USER10> Quantum state is not local hidden variable. It's non-local.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The issues with explaining QM today seems to be that the math and experimental parts are all as tested and proven as they possible can be just as much as classical physics. Whats putting sand in the machine is that it just doesn't make sense philosophically.

So if you will allow a complete novice some wild speculation here to provide a different perspective.

Maybe they are just two different fields with a different base premise and maybe thats ok.

Perhaps what is really shown here, is the limits of western thought process.

I have always wondered if zen buddhisms way to deal with reality, is much better capable at explaining whats going on because it's comfortable dealing with paradoxes ("If it's not paradoxical it's not true" as Zen Master Suzuki Roshi wrote).

I am not a zen buddhist and there is a big risk that I as a westerner don't understand zen buddhism (I know i don't understand QM) but it seems to me that western semantics and rhetorics are actually getting in the way of providing us with a way to be at ease with what seems to be a fact; that we can't explain QM through language.

<comment><USER12> It looks like the "shut-up and calculate" school is the one with most adepts. It's also very zen-like to me (or I completely don't understand what zen is, not an unlikely alternative).

The problem is that the imaginary journalist has an agenda and will completely ignore any "shut-up and calculate" answer. The author really needs to make a better case about the interpretations having different empirical outcomes, because it's not obvious at all.

<comment><USER11> I don't think you are wrong at all in fact I think you are very much correct in the sense that the answer can't be formulated in language other than one closer to what it is and there mathematics is closer than english.

Problem is that mathematics isn't enough to make it useful (i.e. predictable) you need a combination of math and experiments to turn it into something that can be used.

<comment><USER12> Hum, the "shut-up and calculate" idea is that the theory works, people've tested it. Now you either use it, or go find empirical flaws, so people can improve the theory. But thinking about the reasons your math looks like that has no use, unless you get something with observable consequences, don't waste the time.

There's nothing in it about math being a perfect language, or experiments not being necessary.

<comment><USER11> Yes thats we have scientist and mathematicians for. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try and also see if we can put it in different perspectives that help us understand the field.

If you want to shut-up and calculate by all means. That doesn't mean I or others have to. After all we are humans.

<comment><USER12> No, I don't want you to follow it. In fact, my personal ideas are a bit different too.

But it is the most usual approach (or, at least, almost everybody works under it almost all the time - but people may identify with somehting else), and the article didn't make a good claim for why we shouldn't just shut-up and calculate.

<comment><USER11> Thats a completely fair point, however I wasn't basing it on this alone :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Still (and I am a quantum physics PhD) I don't get what is wrong with having many _interpretations_. Especially, as in physics there are many other phenomena that can be _interpreted_ in different ways. For the simplest: movement as forces vs as a teleological least action principle.

While for some phenomena one is easier that the other, considering that there should be only one "true" interpretation, is, at best, narrow-mindness (and at worst: dogmatism, a very enemy of science).

<comment><USER14> Well the reason that it is "wrong" is that for many people (generally the ones outside of scientific endeavours) the interpretations are physics. Let's face facts : most people are never going to learn even basic physics beyond high school level, and oversimplified "philsophy" is all they'll ever know. (As my philosophy professor said: history seems to indicate that science is the way to be right, and philosophy is the science of being wrong)

And the opinion that interpretation doesn't matter, there's equations, and what they say takes precedence over whatever a human mind produces. That they don't fit well in any of these "interpretations" merely amplifies that belief (as it should).

It's a matter of perspective.

<comment><USER13> Some interpretation may matter, as e.g. they can be more fruitful in generating new predictions, or extending a theory. And some may turn out to be wrong (e.g. the hidden variable interpretation, which before Bell was considered just a different interpretation).

So my impression is that the lay audience like hearing big words, even if they cannot understand it at all (but it is easier to delude oneself that one understands "many words" than a particular set of equations).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Well that was more abstract and citations than body. Slightly disappointed.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was too but then, well that's the point maybe: There's not much to be said about all of these interpretations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > As Mermin points out, "quantum theory is the most useful and powerful theory > physicists have ever devised. Yet today, nearly 90 years after its > formulation, disagreement about the meaning of the theory is stronger than > ever. New interpretations appear every day. None ever disappear"

Isn't this the essence of science (excluding the last sentence)? The widespread conflicting interpretations of QT is something to be proud of, every time a new interpretation is dreamed up it's yet another opportunity to draw closer to the truth. Science is a field where being wrong should be seen as a good thing and that certainly _used_ to be the case.

<comment><USER17> The problem is that _nothing is being proven wrong_. Science doesn't advance by the proliferation of theories, but by their narrowing into a smaller set of theories that agree on more and more points.

<comment><USER9> Well said. All the various opinions aren't going to matter much if "professionally unsafe" decisive experiments will not be suggested or if those suggested are not performed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > At the end of the day, the journalist asks: "How do you plan to make > progress if, after 90 years of quantum theory, you still don't know what it > means?

Maybe not asking for lay-person descriptions would gain more consistency. Also, it says "A Group of Physicists" which is remarkably vague - physics is a vast field, and picking random scientists doesn't guarantee actually finding someone who has more than a basic grasp (not a criticism of the individual scientists).

<comment><AUTHOR> I think this is a well observed phenomenon [1],[2]. At least in the theoretical quantum group I am in: there is very little agreement about the interpretation of quantum theory. (Maybe the experimentalists don't care as much.)

[1] [http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/01/17/the- most...](http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/01/17/the-most- embarrassing-graph-in-modern-physics/)

[2] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.1069](http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.1069)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Shut up and calculate."

\-- Richard Feynman (attrib.)</comment>


Don't Let Facebook, or Any Tracker, Follow You on the Web - <AUTHOR> https://blog.torproject.org/dont-let-facebook-or-any-tracker-follow-you-web <comment><USER2> It's kinda weird, that some of the greatest minds in the world, are gathered in Silicon Valley, solely working on how to make us click on more advertisements on the internet.

As far as hiding your online fingerprint, I feel that having a clean-slate browser container[1], while certainly a hassle, can go some way towards protecting yourself, but...these great minds will find another way.

[1] [https://tpaschalis.github.io/sandboxed-browser-with- docker/](https://tpaschalis.github.io/sandboxed-browser-with-docker/)

<comment><USER3> _I saw the best minds of our generation writing spam filters._ \- Neal Stephenson

 _We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters._ \- Peter Thiel

<comment><USER4> > We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters. - Peter Thiel

Well, don't forget mass surveillance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do you really need the Tor browser to do this?

I just sign into Facebook, Google, _& c_ services using one browser, and do everything else in another — all of which all have µBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, whitelist-based cookie managers and the like installed.

EDIT: One advantage of this approach is potentially significantly raising the noise floor in Tor traffic. That, by itself, is a win.

EDIT 2: Also IP-level tracking and fingerprinting. See below...

<comment><USER6> Do they not try to match you based on your IP?

After all if they know it is a residential IP, they probably know that no matter the user-agent, traffic belongs to the family. And I assume they know who all your family members are.

<comment><USER7> When you use tor it says not to maximize the window because sites can use your screen resolution to track you. More realisticly they could match operating system from the user agent with other data. I remember chrome being acused of putting serial number like strings in the user agent. Why would they not?

<comment><USER8> These are the basic basics for tweaking FF's about:config. There are many more. Try these and see how you fare...

layout.css.visited_links_enabled set to false; geo.enabled set to false; media.navigator.enabled set to false; media.peerconnection.enabled (WebRTC) set to false; network.http.sendRefererHeader set to 0; privacy.resistFingerprinting set to true; privacy.firstparty.isolate set to true; network.dns.disablePrefetch set to true; network.prefetch-next set to false; webgl.disabled set to true

Don't forget to also use something like uBlock Origin, Token Tracker Stipper, and Decentraleyes. Pass is all through a Pi-hole and VPN and you're pretty safe. Make sure your VPN does not expose your NAT'd IP with WebRTC. Both uBlock Origina and ScriptSafe can help with this, as FF will sometimes crap all over its about:config settings with updates.

<comment><USER9> FF also has an extension for always opening Facebook in an isolated container: [https://github.com/mozilla/contain- facebook](https://github.com/mozilla/contain-facebook)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For me it's the combination of uBlock origin [1], uBlock Extra [2], and Decentraleyes [3].

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock- origin/cjpa...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock- origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm)

[2] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin- extr...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin- extra/pgdnlhfefecpicbbihgmbmffkjpaplco)

[3] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/decentraleyes/ldpo...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/decentraleyes/ldpochfccmkkmhdbclfhpagapcfdljkj)

<comment><USER11> Umatrix (same guy) + privacy badger (eff)

Have been using it since it was called HTTPS switchboard. Uorigin is my go to install on all of my customers fresh installs or people who don't want to break their web experience. Works great.

<comment><USER10> \- I tried Umatrix but it was too much configuration for me. ublock provides me with a sane out of the box experience.

\- I am not sure whether privacy badger and decentraleyes are mutually exclusive.

<comment><USER12> I don't think they are.

For example, you can choose to enable a Google-hosted library (say, jQuery) on a certain domain, because you want it to work, and then decentraleyes will do its part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 4 weeks ago I found an injured pidgeon, took it a rescue place and got chatting to the owner about chickens. I came home, searched for chicked coops on my business laptop. This laptop runs Firefox, uBlock and Ghostery.

Last night, my wife has Facebook adverts for chicken coops pop up on her laptop. We've not spoken about chicken coops since, I've not searched for chicken coops since the original search, she's not searched for chicken coops on her laptop and she's not used my work laptop.

Creepy.

If they want to track you with a "normal" browser, they'll find a way of doing it.

<comment><USER14> Doesn't Ghostery allow in certain trackers if they're paid? I remember there was some controversy about their funding model.

I use uBlock Origin + uMatrix currently.

Your tracking situation doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility though.

1\. You searched for Chicken Coops at a place. 2\. That same laptop connects to your home Wi-Fi. 3\. The user (you) who searched for chicken coups is connecting from a new IP. 4\. Some ad engine rule says that IP belongs to a household (this probably doesn't matter; makes me wonder if people in a Starbucks get ads intended profiled against other customers). 5\. Now let's just advertise chicken coupes to everyone in that house.

So in theory, this tracking attempt can be done with just a cookie and selling sets of IP+search word data, right?

<comment><USER15> > makes me wonder if people in a Starbucks get ads intended profiled against > other customers)

unlikey, at your home location, usually it is just the same few people all the time.

At a coffee shop there might a couple of the same people every time, but also lots of other random people. So would be easy to ID home location / office location / public space location.

Or perhaps they know the location is a coffee shop from their facebook location ID.

but they will know somehow

<comment><USER16> Two ways I'm aware of. If your time at the coffee shop is regular (arrive at 3:15 because that's when your break is from work) they can place you with other regulars (you go there with your wife every day after work, you get dark roast and she gets a tea). Second if you're a black hole of privacy features and everyone else around you is not... well you get identified that way. Like herd immunity there is a risk if your behavior makes you an outlier.

Imagine for a moment though that they can't serve you ads directly. I wonder if anyone has done research into saturating adds in a coffee shop for all the patrons? Everyone sees the same add for the Dallas Cowboys and triggers a conversation about football. Now you didn't see the add but everyone around you is talking about football.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I just wish more web sites would provide official TOR and/or i2P addresses (so we wouldn't need exit-nodes) yet nobody among them seems interested in visitors they can't track. Both the fact there are hardly any non-illegal websites maintaining native TOR/i2P presence and the fact every major WWW site demands you to agree to be tracked now as GDPR doesn't allow this to be done silently suggests this.

<comment><USER18> FYI Facebook, NYTimes, Wikipedia, and a few other prominent sites operate hidden services: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tor_hidden_services](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tor_hidden_services)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I need a genuine advice. I own Google Pixel 2 because I needed a good mobile camera, I also have a Chromebook with Cruton as I needed a cheap Linux notebook. I use Google Maps, Gmail, WhatsUp, Google Photos, Google Drive, Messenger ( the only thing I don't have is a FB app).

Given all this information how I am supposed to disconnect from all of this? Cause surely simply having something blocking tracking of you in a desktop browser is not enough? Also, I really enjoy services provided by Google, why should I give it all up and replace everything with "safe" alternatives? I know I am a product and my personal info and preferences are all of over the place. But I always understood this to be the price I pay for using this services ( taking about Google mainly ).

</comment><comment><USER20> Tor is too slow for general browsing. I only use it for security related stuff. I wish it was faster.

<comment><USER14> It's a tradeoff. You can't easily have both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Related question:

What is the impact of IPv6 on regular users privacy?

<comment><USER14> In theory you can track individual devices in a household instead of grouping everyone in one house, small business, building, etc. as one IP.

Currently, even with the limitations of IPv4, most trackers can use cookies and browser fingerprints (your browser's headers, fonts, etc.) to individually identify you even behind NAT. But with IPv6, ad engines could potentially identify that you're running two different browsers on the same laptop or device, and associate both of those browsers to _you_ (some type of single targeting profile).

They also have a more precise way to track you without a browser fingerprint.

<comment><USER22> Note that 95% of people browsing with IPv6 are probably using SLAAC with privacy extensions, so all your devices IPs should be frequently changing (at least every day, but you can lower the timeout). Only the subnet would stay the same, similar to a NAT'ed IP.

<comment><USER23> As it's evident from NAT they can track even behind a single IPv4. As long they know your prefix the privacy extensions don't really help. Of course one could have a dynamic prefix similar to dynamic IPs residential ISPs use. It's funny, in the past a static IP was considered a valuable feature for a residential internet connection. Nowadays, I'm wondering if dynamic IPs are more viable from a privacy perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> On the totem pole of tech nous, I am very close to the bottom. So can someone explain to me "remote browsing" is not a thing? Login to your VPS (or whatever), start and encrypted X session, and browse away.

That is very unusual traffic, of course, and others connecting from my inet- facing IP probably make it even more so: Steam after school, missus hitting the foreign news sites in the AM, the traffic peaks and troughs at certain times of day... we're fucked.

<comment><USER25> They can identify you a number of ways without your knowledge or consent. One is timezone allocation. Another effective way is browser fingerprinting. IP addresses. Browsing patterns. Device screen size.

Privacy on the web is an information theoretic arms race with tremendously deeply asymmetric stockpiles of information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> There are many chrome extensions disabling Facebook tracking. I use "Disconnect Facebook™ pixel & FB™ tracking".

It tracks not only by cookie or fingerprints, also by 1x1 pixel. And with the phone app even more, but nobody in his privacy aware mind should use the 2 apps anyways. Their constant recording of audio drains the battery too much, and their m. and mbasic. web urls are good enough.

</comment><comment><USER27> its an irony that on accessing the link in Chrome, it warns me about privacy error,

"blog.torproject.org normally uses encryption to protect your information. When Google Chrome tried to connect to blog.torproject.org this time, the website sent back unusual and incorrect credentials. This may happen when an attacker is trying to pretend to be blog.torproject.org, or a Wi-Fi sign-in screen has interrupted the connection. Your information is still secure because Google Chrome stopped the connection before any data was exchanged.

You cannot visit blog.torproject.org right now because the website uses HSTS. Network errors and attacks are usually temporary, so this page will probably work later."

</comment><comment><USER28> How good is Brave browser at blocking tracking?

</comment><comment><USER29> I have a portable browser just for Twitter/Facebook etc.

And a separate browser with just ad blocker and blocked 3rd party cookies.

Do I really need Tor?

<comment><USER30> Tor isn't the answer, it's broken. What's needed is a replacement for the modern web. At the protocol level it's busted in so many ways it isn't salvageable. The sooner we recognize that the sooner we'll be able to create its replacement.

<comment><USER31> Completely agree about broken protocol. Unfortunately, I doubt their will ever be a real impetus to abandon it; we will just keep muddling along strapping ever more duct tape.

But let's dream, what would your protocol be?

For some reason I have always had a hang up on the headers. The lack of real concrete specs, forging clients, and now the ugly monstrosity of CSP. I love the effect, but in my dream new protocol we have to opt into features during some kind of app / client handshake.

<comment><USER14> > muddling along strapping ever more duct tape

Let's strap some sockets to HTTP and run them through a web server. We'll call them Web Sockets.

Chat? I have this crazy idea called WebRTC. .. although our original idea was a huge security hole and now it's pretty much just used for games .. because browsers don't do Datagrams so let's just do some more hacking with WebRTC.

Anyone remember when Firefox was the lightweight version of Mozilla and web browsers were used to browse the web?

I feel like all modern web browsers are in a pretty sad state of bloat, are pretty much mini operating systems, and Javascript is taking over the world. It's frighteningly like that parody talk about "Yavascript"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Also consider using obfuscation instead. E.g. AdNauseam and Noiszy are two examples I'm aware of.

<comment><USER33> I used to feel for smaller companies who buy ads, concerning the damage possible caused by tactics like AdNauseam regarding outragous advertising bills.

Now I think it's likely the best weapon available which can be easily wielded by the average user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> You don't need Tor to do this. Tor is slow and frustrating.

I use a heavily-modified Firefox instance over a VPN with uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, Disconnect, No Coin, Script Safe, Token Tracker Stripper, Neat URL and too many about:config edits to mention.

I do recommend disabling http/s referrer, CSS visited links, and others as can be learned online.

In addition, I pass all of this through a remote computer with a Raspberry Pi/Pi-hole instance. This has worked well for me for a couple of years. As I have no real social media accounts, I'm not building any meaningful profiles. Accounts like HN or Slashdot don't get any real info. I also don't add any apps to my iPhone. The apps that ship with the device are all I need. I can pass all of my phone's traffic through the VPN/Pi-hole instance and keep relatively safe. Being with T-Mobile means I get unlimited data so I don't need to connect to potentially hostile Wi-Fi.

I rather enjoy the "cold war" between the corporations and the security- minded. There are so great add-ons to uBlock and other add-ons that completely bypass the complaint scripts of using adblock.

Another quick way to get past fake paywalls or complaining pages is to use Startpage's proxy or even Google's cached link. I've set up so many people to use this set up and they are thrilled.

I am thinking of setting up remote desktops that can be accessed by friends and family that are VPN'd, Pi-holed, and with other security features that hide their real IPs, etc.

<comment><USER34> > Tor is slow and frustrating.

> I use a heavily-modified Firefox instance over a VPN with uBlock Origin, > Privacy Badger, Disconnect, No Coin, Script Safe, Token Tracker Stripper, > Neat URL and too many about:config edits to mention.

That's faster for you? I guess I'm a bit of a speed freak, but I recall even Disconnect by itself slowed down pages enough to make me uninstall it, let alone that combination...

<comment><USER35> Tor speed is not is your control. Your hardware is in your control. As a "speed freak", I find it amusing that Disconnect would be slow for you. Interesting to see that a "speed freak" is running slow hardware.

<comment><USER34> > Tor speed is not is your control. Your hardware is in your control. As a > "speed freak", I find it amusing that Disconnect would be slow for you. > Interesting to see that a "speed freak" is running slow hardware.

I'm not on slow hardware; you just seem to prefer to just quickly make naive assumptions. First of all, the system naturally clocks down on battery, so I'm not always running at max GHz. Second, I'm not pulling this out of my rear -- I actually sat down in 2014 and measured in detail how much each of my extensions slowed the loading of Gmail, and I even still have the records. AdBlock slowed it down by 1.8 seconds; Disconnect slowed it down by 0.7 seconds (IIRC this was on AC power but I didn't record that part). I found both of these ridiculously unacceptable. Now, I've upgraded my laptop since, and so in response to this discussion right now I just did another quick test on Gmail on my current system (which I can again assure you is not slow hardware). On AC power, Disconnect still adds 120ms. On battery, it adds 400ms. Still neither of which I find acceptable (this is my _email_ I'm talking about, not cat videos), though it's definitely better. Feel free to spend some time doing your own measurements and report them here if you have disputes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I use Pi-hole, a DNS level blocker, + uBlock Origin. This combo should provide a much better protection against tracking.

<comment><USER4> How does that protect you against trackers and against identifying you based on your IP address and browser fingerprint?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> 1\. Always-on VPN - kills main tracking feature, your IP

2\. uBlock Origin in medium mode - kills 3p scripts and 3p frames

3\. Private windows/tabs by default - kills 3p cookies and storage

That's all kids :)

</comment><comment><USER38> The innovations that make trackers possible are:

\- browsers cache results

\- cookies

If you do neither of these things trackers become much harder to implement.

<comment><USER39> I think this list is missing:

\- HTML5 "local storage"

\- Plugin detection

\- Javascript (particularly xml-rpc)

\- fetching embedded content based on a URL (images, movies, css, javascript, ...)

\- Hidden frames and/or WebRTC - can scan your local network

There are probably more.

[Edited: Updated to clarify that local network scanning can be done with hidden frames or WebRTC. A followup comment from me gives a public example of how]

<comment><USER40> Do you have any more information on the local network scanning?

<comment><USER41> Not sure if this is what grandparent is referring to, but DNS rebinding[0] is what springs to mind.

It's simultaneously kind of smart and also really stupid. Basically, you give a valid 3rd-party domain multiple IPs, one of them normal and one of them resolving to a local IP. Then you cut off the normal one and the browser just allows you to make calls to whatever local interface you want.

There was a good defcon video about this a while back[1]. It's a much bigger problem than most people realize. This is why it's good practice to have at least some security around devices even if they're only connected to your LAN.

[0]: [https://www.twistlock.com/2018/02/28/dear-developers- beware-...](https://www.twistlock.com/2018/02/28/dear-developers-beware-dns- rebinding/)

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stnJiPBIM6o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stnJiPBIM6o)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Honest question why wouldnt i let them track me? Arent there a bunch of benefits to being tracked too?

<comment><USER43> Care to name some benefits?

I don't want to be tracked because information gathered can and will be used in ways I don't expect. Websites will game me on pricing, etc based on where I've been on their site and other sites. I could easily fall into a filter bubble, where I am only given results based on previous preferences. I would have zero control over the information gathers regarding my habits, and any conclusions they make based off of this data. And it will get stolen. And it will be used against me.

So I take as many steps as I can to prevent websites from tracking me.

<comment><USER44> >Care to name some benefits?

Improved ad targeting may increase revenue for the website, and will improve ad relevance for the end-user. This was historically seen as a win-win; particularly if it allows a service to remain free to use.

I often get ads for programming IDEs, which I don't mind that much. I'd rather have them than beauty products, or other irrelevant items.

Not that it's actually possible to discuss the pros and cons of targeting anymore. It's become a religious issue to too many people.

<comment><USER5> Not to imply that there aren't strong feelings around the subject, but don't you think calling it a "religious issue" might preemptively poison discussion a bit?

<comment><USER42> I am being downvoted quite heavily for asking the question so i would say it is pretty religious.

<comment><USER45> how do you downvote on HN ?

<comment><USER44> There's a karma threshold before you're granted the ability. 500 karma, maybe?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I download a website for offline viewing? - <AUTHOR>

It seems like the problem is not solved by a trivial wget. Links get broken, files are missing etc. Is there a tool that works perfectly? <comment><USER2> I used to use <http://httrack.com/> when I needed to do this.

</comment><comment><USER3> wget -r <http://the_site_you_want>

</comment><comment><USER4> lynx?</comment>


What Medieval England Can Teach Us about Software Development - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@fergiemcdowall/hackathons-on-festivals-and-feastdays-what-medieval-england-can-teach-us-about-software-661c73b328c2 <comment><USER2> Not to shit on your nice story :) but much what we know is either wrong or incomplete about archery.

Lars Anderson made a nice series of videos on this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEG- ly9tQGk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEG-ly9tQGk)</comment>


Partial meltdown likely under way at power plant - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/12/AR2011031205493.html?hpid=topnews

<comment><USER2> I don't know what's going on in that powerplant but this article is alarmist. One of the reasons you know is the only expert they could find to support their claims is a blogger ([http://theenergycollective.com/peterbradford/53418/fmr- nrc-c...](http://theenergycollective.com/peterbradford/53418/fmr-nrc- commissioner-evacuations-indicated-fukushima-seriousness-early) ) who worked for the US nuclear regulatory commission in the 80s and who's on record as being against nuclear power.

Also they quote Yukio Edano as saying it's "highly possible" there was a meltdown. What he actually said was in response to a question asking if a meltdown could occur. His response was...

"it's highly possible.Because it's inside the reactor, we cannot directly check it but we are taking measures on the assumption of the possible partial meltdown"

To me his actual response doesn't match how the post used it</comment>


Mirror Lake - <AUTHOR> http://katierose.itch.io/mirrorlake <comment><USER2> This is an entry to procjam, a game jam hosted by Michael Cook (@mtrc on Twitter).

You can browse the rest of the entries here: [http://itch.io/jam/procjam/entries](http://itch.io/jam/procjam/entries) — there's a little of everything, from procedural chess rulesets to castle builders, to the obligatory twitter bots.

</comment><comment><USER3> Beautiful, but the full screen crashed my browser :(</comment>


Cheddar is For Sale - <AUTHOR> https://cheddarapp.com/buy I'm selling Cheddar. The whole kit and caboodle — API, web and native apps, acclaimed code base and documentation, and 33,000+ user community — is being sold, not necessarily to the highest bidder. <comment><USER2> 33503 users, 2.61% are paying 'plus' customers, at, say $20/year = ~$18k in revenue. You'd need to grow and monetize that base a lot more to get back $125k purchase price.

I'm guessing someone might buy it, but there's a heck of a lot more ways you could spend $125k building a similar company to get to profitability faster. There's even more ways to spend $125k to make $18k/year. I'll happily let you invest in my company at $125k with returns of $18k/year for few years. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Solid point. On the other hand, getting 30k users in general is pretty expensive from a marketing perspective.

The real value is the potential.

<comment><USER2> No doubt, and it wasn't meant as a potshot, although perhaps it came across _too_ sarcastically; anyone that can build an audience of that size, especially with paid users as a portion, is doing something right. I wrestle with free user bases barely 20% of that, and growth is harder to achieve that most people think.

Serious question here: what portion of the audience base is using this because of you personally? Not that you _know_ 30k people, but perhaps a large part came because of your connections. Relatedly, how many of them might leave if they saw it changing hands to someone they didn't know (or perhaps everyone would cheer because someone with more time for new features was taking over)???

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You're batshit crazy to try selling for this price. The most recent reviews suggest it loses data and isn't very innovative. I tend to agree. It's yet another fish in a sea of todo apps.

Your craftsmanship and attention to detail on the UI and experience are great. I'll give you that. But this is a todo application. Not only that, but it's open source. Hell, I've built it and run the iOS app myself.

The only thing you're selling is 33,000 free users (rather, a list of them, not necessarily 33k active pekple) and a Ruby on Rails app. You also said it requires 4 dynos to operate, plus a Postgres db. I'd imagine the reason you're selling this is that it's costing you $200 per month and not making anywhere near that.

While I'm grateful for everything you have done with cheddar in terms of transparency and sharing with the community: I think you shot yourself in the foot. Reverse engineering the back end (from the app and api docs) and rebranding the iOS app would take me 2 weeks tops.

$125,000? Good luck man. If you can get that.. You're an even better magician than you are a developer.

</comment><comment><USER4> Your stats don't mention how much revenue Cheddar is generating. That's the most important metric for determining the price!

Nobody cares how many hours you put into something when determining price. Based on your traction so far, this acquisition would be based on a revenue multiple, not as a strategic sale. For a niche SaaS product like this one, I would expect a valuation of 12X-24X monthly revenue depending on growth rate. Is this product making about $10K a month now to justify the $125,000 price? Take a look at some of the products on Flippa to get a sense of how much you could get.

<comment><USER5> On flippa it's worse than that 10x, 12x at most. People there have a huge BS radar, they seen it all. Their revenue is maybe $900/m after apple's 30% cut looking at the stats.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does he really charge $1000/hour or is it a joke I didn't get? <http://hire.samsoff.es/>

edit: explanation <http://soff.es/one-thousand-dollars-an-hour>

By that rate and the 800-hour figure, Cheddar would be one of the most expensive apps ever (utility vs cost).

<comment><USER7> The best sentences on that page are

> This rate is designed to weed out less serious clients. Serious clients > generally have more exciting projects. I'd rather not freelance. I need to > focus on Cheddar.

I guess now that he's no longer focussing on Cheddar he can lower his rate.

<comment><USER8> He works full-time at Seesaw now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is something I've experienced first-hand, and an _extremely_ valuable lesson for people thinking about starting a startup. At a low average monthly cost (say less than $30), it's really damn hard to get enough people into your funnel for a reasonable cost of acquisition. And you need to reach a LOT of people for your service to be a significant source of long term income.

If you're about to start a startup, I'd strongly encourage you to come up with some hypothetical figures for these metrics:

* Number of monthly uniques

* Percentage that will convert to trial

* Percentage that will convert to paid

* Average monthly subscription cost

* Churn rate

* Cost of acquisition

You'll be way off, but run the numbers you've made up past as many experienced founders as you can, and you might be able to come up with a model that's semi-realistic. Of course it will evolve over time as you get some real data and more experience, but the main point of the exercise is to then ask yourself questions like: "How can I get X0,000 uniques to my marketing site on a $0 marketing budget?", and "What can I change about my product/positioning/target market so I can triple my average monthly subscription cost?".

</comment><comment><USER10> Perspective.

When I read the original announcement for this app. It sounded cheery. The design is really pretty good.

Over time, though, I've learned to keep an eye on these announcements. Not just cheddar, but all of the 'check us out' posts. Sure enough, a lot of these do not succeed. Some even blog during their process, to share some epiphany. Building a successful product is hard. Filtering the noise on HN is hard as well. When I see a new announcement, I look at the 'good' in the product, but only time will tell if the founders have hit the right mix.

Sam, the OP, is not one to hold back from backlash. He doesn't have too much pride. He shows his product on HN to ask for users. He isn't afraid to admit failure when it happens. He needs the money, so he asks for it. I'm sure there are hundreds in a similar spot. Yet, they will not make a similar post.

It is super important to see the lifecycle of projects here. It adds a good perspective to this community.

Back to Cheddar. Without a passionate founder, a product like this will die. It isn't a turnkey business. It will require much more product work to become a success.

</comment><comment><USER11> To answer a question on the page: "I'm not sure how transferring apps from one Apple ID to another works. We can figure it out though."

I'm fairly sure this is impossible. I know people (with large apps and the right contacts) that have tried, and never heard of it being possible. Unless something changed recently. You could transfer the account (unless other apps are also on it).

<comment><AUTHOR> That's what I was thinking I'd have to do. The only other app on the account is Shares - <http://getsharesapp.com>.

Thanks for the info!

<comment><USER12> I've heard anecdotally that you can transfer apps but you'll need App Store support involved. It's not immediate though.

<comment><USER13> They will only merge accounts if a government documented merger takes place between multiple corporations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >This price is $125,000. I think that's a steal for what you get... If you were to hire me or anyone else to make Cheddar for you, it would be much more expensive.

Not to be a jerk. I really wish you well. But I'm curious: it would cost over $100k to make a todo list app? I would think that would be one of the simplest apps you could possibly make. Am I missing something?

[hmm... didn't see that your rate was $1000/hour. That answers part of my question.]

<comment><USER15> I don't mind him charging that price to

\- Lawyers

\- Dentists

\- Doctors

\- Notarys

But charging $1000/h for making trivial things is making the rest of us look bad. Especially when people do projects with 10000000 times the difficulty... for free.

<comment><USER16> _Especially when people do projects with 10000000 times the difficulty... for free._

Thats imho the wrong way to look at compensation. People are not being paid by the difficulty of their projects but by the value of the problems they solve. Being a construction worker is certainly a lot more physically demanding than an office job. Still they are (usually) paid a lot less because they are easier replaceable, less training, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This might be considered off-topic, but i find the VentureBeat post about Cheddar's sale (<http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/05/cheddar-for-sale/>) really sad . The app is called a "cult classic" among "hackers and mac fans" and there's a disclosure at the end: it was written by the wife of Seesaw's founder (where Soffes currently works).

</comment><comment><USER18> You'd probably have more success posting this on Flippa if you haven't already.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haven't heard of that. I'll post it. Thanks!

<comment><USER4> I would set the minimum bid on Flippa far lower than the $125,000 asking price if you want to get any interest on there. People on Flippa are not startup guys and are a lot more realistic about valuation. I for one would be interested in exploring buying this, but it's not worth anywhere near what you're asking, so it's a non starter for me.

<comment><USER19> Two separate points there. On Flippa, you want to start lower to generate interest and start bidding, but you want the bidding to build up to a higher amount. But it's also true that Flippa users tend to be "value investors" not ones who buy high potential. They also are not developers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Talk to the guys at Asana or similar. If you could transition your 33k users to Asana or similar (through an upsell, conversion, etc) then they would be paying (roughly) $3.73 per acquiried user.

With an email address worth .60-.90 per month or more, they should be able to easily justify it. Just a thought

</comment><comment><USER21> Just curious -- why are you choosing to sell it instead of holding onto whatever passive income it generates?

I love Cheddar, and judging by some of the sales data shown in the TechCrunch article it doesn't exactly look like it's bleeding money.

<comment><USER22> _At best_ , it's generating about $1,750 per month right now[1], and probably represents a huge opportunity cost for Sam, especially given that he's involved full-time with another startup.

[1] (33,499 * 0.0262) * $1.99/month = $1,746.57. More annual accounts means less money.

<comment><USER5> \- 30% apple cut

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Sam - how's the $1000/hr consulting going? In your original post you mentioned that it was intended to supplement your income while working on Cheddar. Are you going to continue consulting now that you're selling Cheddar?

</comment><comment><USER24> Just because I think this is relevant, here are the three founders talk(<http://5by5.tv/founderstalk>) podcasts Sam did:

Part1: <http://5by5.tv/founderstalk/38>

Part2: <http://5by5.tv/founderstalk/39>

Part3: <http://5by5.tv/founderstalk/40>

They really are a great listen.

</comment><comment><USER25> I am a Cheddar user with a free account and have to say that it really is a well designed, intuitive app.

Personally, while I really like Cheddar I do not feel that it is a service that I would ever pay a recurring fee for.

I am a pinboard, fever rss, and instapaper user and feel that all of these nominal one time investments were more than worth supporting these projects.

I could see paying a one time $30-$50 fee for Cheddar

It will definitely be interesting to see what happens.

</comment><comment><USER26> Sam, what's the plan if you can't find a buyer for the amount you're looking for?

</comment><comment><USER5> It's worth whatever the buyer will pay for it. Best of luck guys

</comment><comment><USER27> Curious - are you selling because it's a flailing company with not enough revenue or because the growth is hard to handle on the development side of the company?

<comment><USER28> How do you expect someone to answer this question?

<comment><USER18> With honesty, I'd hope.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> As a Cheddar user you're worth $2.50 more than a Facebook user. Isn't that nice. :)

Cheddar user $3.71 Facebook user £1.21 (May 2012)

</comment><comment><USER30> Can I ask what is defined as a plus user? I cant see any evidence of a plus option on the cheddar web app.

<comment><USER5> look at the left hand side: <https://itunes.apple.com/app/id524382948>

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> What makes Cheddar stand out for me is how well crafted the experience is. Good luck with the sale.

</comment><comment><USER32> How about sharing your next big ideas in public or at least some of them? You might encourage more people to buy it.</comment>


The JIT Startup: Why we waited 2 years to build a change email form - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cronitor.io/the-jit-startup-bb1a13381b0 <comment><USER2> We've had a lot of great feedback on this article since it was published on our blog last week -- check it out!</comment>


Towards λ-calculus - <AUTHOR> http://lambdaway.free.fr/workshop/?view=lambdacode_inside_min <comment><USER4> For those who want to grok lambda calculus, I would highly recommend "An Introduction to Functional Programming Through Lambda Calculus" book by Greg Michaelson[0]. After going through the book, I could say that you're brain will adapt the functional programming paradigm if you are used to the imperative programming language. Functional programming will change the way you think and make you a better programmer.

[0] - [https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d986/546bc3780db3a3c0f8d88b...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d986/546bc3780db3a3c0f8d88b35e421ae4eec21.pdf)

<comment><USER5> I was lucky enough to be taught lambda calculus and related topics at Heriot- Watt by Greg - I'll never forget the moment when he introduced the S and K combinators - been fascinated with those ever since.

[NB Related topics included strongly recommending GEB].

<comment><USER6> > I'll never forget the moment when he introduced the S and K combinators - > been fascinated with those ever since.

Rabbit hole warning. If you go down this particular hole you will lose at least a month and maybe more. It will be the most fun you've had in a long time but your productivity will take an extreme hit.

<comment><USER5> Indeed, my final year project was to build a functional programming language that macro expanded into lambda calculus the transform that into different sets of combinators and look at the performance improvements.

To this day (almost exactly 30 years) - I am staggered that you can express Y in terms of S & K. I know this follows trivially but actually having coded it and watched it run (slowly) did made it very real to me.

NB This was running on an Orion minicomputer with rather limited memory - <USER2> had to implement a mark and sweep garbage collector to get expressions of any size to run!

<comment><USER6> Do you still have this? That would be a very nice project to share.

<comment><USER5> I still have a print out of it - I did find myself considering the idea of re- implementing it in something a bit nicer than 1980s K&R C.

<comment><USER6> I'd be happy to help if you want.

<comment><USER5> It's somewhere on my long list of projects to work on - thanks for the offer though :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN folks,

Again and again, as a personal work, I try to find the best minimal foundations for a language. Beside lambdatalk and its "non standard" regexp based implementation, I explore with lambdacode a standard AST based implementation.

Am I on the good lambda-calculus way?

       - http://lambdaway.free.fr/workshop/?view=lambdacode_inside_min
       - http://lambdaway.free.fr/workshop/?view=lambdacode
       - http://lambdaway.free.fr/workshop/?view=helloworld
       - http://lambdaway.free.fr/

If you are willing to read it as pure speculation, I would appreciate that. If not, I am sure you have a waste basket handy.

Thanks

<comment><USER7> >>> If you are willing to read it as pure speculation, I would appreciate that. If not, I am sure you have a waste basket handy.

Langlands :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> :) :) :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Factorials in pure lambda calculus that actually run in non-geologic time:

[http://www.flownet.com/ron/lambda- calculus.html](http://www.flownet.com/ron/lambda-calculus.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Something like [http://lambdaway.free.fr/workshop/?view=NIL](http://lambdaway.free.fr/workshop/?view=NIL)

<comment><USER8> That is actually very cool. You should submit it to HN.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I did it 3 months ago without any comment. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16202754](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16202754)

<comment><USER8> A lot of good stuff is falling through the cracks nowadays. Even YC content is going unnoticed, e.g.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16946261](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16946261)

But if a submission gets no comments you can re-submit it after a few hours without setting off the de-duper.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sometimes (quasi) re-submissions are flagged [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16066019](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16066019)

<comment><AUTHOR> And sometimes they stay alone for ever: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16983540](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16983540)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For people who wanna learn Functional Programming, I recommend this resources:

[https://github.com/allenleein/brains/projects/9](https://github.com/allenleein/brains/projects/9)

</comment><comment><USER10> Learnt functional programming and lambda calculus under Raul Rojas, happy to see he's mentioned here. He taught us the evaluation step as a vacuum cleaner sucking in the variables.

<comment><AUTHOR> I began to understand lambda-calculus with this introduction from Raoul Rojas. But I was lost when he explains recursion via the Y-combinator. In fact I think that recursion is best understood when lambdas are introduced to bring a bit of lazyness in an by default eager evaluation. The (if bool one two) control structure is not so easy to understand under the cap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't get one thing from this article. Am I suppose to be impressed by this code that prints some fruits?

> In order to understand what can be done with so little

        ((lambda (f n) (f f n)) (lambda (f list) ((((lambda (n) (n (lambda (x) (lambda (z) (z (lambda (x y) y)))) (lambda (z) (z (lambda (x y) x))))) list) ((lambda (x y) (lambda (z) (z x y))) (lambda (list) '.) (lambda (list) (join ((lambda (z) (z (lambda (x y) x))) list) (f f ((lambda (z) (z (lambda (x y) y))) list)) )))) list)) ((lambda (x y) (lambda (z) (z x y))) 'apple ((lambda (x y) (lambda (z) (z x y))) 'banana ((lambda (x y) (lambda (z) (z x y))) 'lemon ((lambda (x y) (lambda (z) (z x y))) 'grapes ((lambda (x y) (lambda (z) (z x y))) 'orange (lambda (s z) z)))))))

        apple banana lemon grapes orange

Not too impressive if you ask me, maybe if you want to obfuscate your code so nobody will understand it. Maybe then.

<comment><USER12> Lambda calculus is an attempt to build the foundations of computation using a couple of primitives and some re-write rules. It's the equivalent of ZFC for math.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's just what I try to do. I think that the lambda-calculus is the Maxwell's equations of the computer field and not the LISP as Alan Kay said. The implementation is also an important point. In the wiki page "towards λ-calculus" I use a standard AST based evaluator, a minimal version of ( [http://lambdaway.free.fr/workshop/?view=lambdacode](http://lambdaway.free.fr/workshop/?view=lambdacode) ). In this other wiki page ( [http://lambdaway.free.fr/?view=NIL](http://lambdaway.free.fr/?view=NIL) ) I use a completely different implementation, {lambda talk}, where the re-write rules are the heart of the machine: 1) finding from inside-out S-expressions in the whole code and replacing them by words and 2) inside lambdas, replacing in the body arguments by the given values. Not only this implementation works like (what I understand to be) a Turing machine, but it works fine in a wiki context where quoting words and bracketing sentences would be unacceptable. I find this "inverted" implementation worthwhile, from the both theoretical and practical points of view.

<comment><USER13> Lambda Calculus is perhaps the Maxwell's equations of _computability_ , not of the _computer field_. What Kay might have meant is that Lisp is the Maxwell's equations of programming a computer to do something useful.

Lambda Calculus doesn't even have numbers; you either have to build them out of functions, or else extend Lambda Calculus with numeric terms. Lambda Calculus doesn't have _eval_ or _quote_ , and if it did, they wouldn't work because Lambda Calculus doesn't have a data structure representing Lambda Calculus source code. Lambda Calculus also lacks practicalities like assignable variables, which are part of computer science and mutable data structures in general.

MacCarthy had another analogy: Lisp for programming is kind of like the advantage of using binary over decimal for digital computers:

> _This internal representation of symbolic information gives up the familiar > infix notations in favor of a notation that simplifies the task of > programming the substantive computations, e.g. logical deduction or > algebraic simplification, differentiation or integration. If customary > notations are to be used externally, translation programs must be written. > Thus most LISP programs use a prefix notation for algebraic expressions, > because they usually must determine the main connective before deciding what > to do next. In this LISP differs from almost every other symbolic > computation system. COMIT, FORMAC, and Formula Algol programs all express > the computations as operations on some approximation to the customary > printed forms of symbolic expressions. SNOBOL operates on character strings > but is neutral on how character strings are used to represent symbolic > information. This feature probably accounts for LISP 's success in > competition with these languages, especially when large programs have to be > written. The advantage is like that of binary computers over decimal - <USER3> > larger._ [History of Lisp -> LISP prehistory - Summer 1956 through Summer > 1958.]

<comment><AUTHOR> "Lambda Calculus is perhaps the Maxwell's equations of computability, not of the computer field." I agree with you.

"What Kay might have meant is that Lisp is the Maxwell's equations of programming a computer to do something useful." But what I discovered is that lambda calculus + S-expressions define a consistent infrastructure on which useful superstructures can be built, data structures (pairs, trees, lists,...) and data controls (recursion). And make implementation a pleasure, either via AST (lambda code) or via regexps {lambda talk}.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Judge: EFF's "Stupid Patent of the Month" Clearly Protected by Constitution - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/eff-need-not-remove-stupid-patent-post-about-australian-troll-judge-finds/ <comment><USER2> Discussed a few days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15745022](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15745022)</comment>


Free Five Second User Testing - <AUTHOR> http://fivesecondtest.com/

<comment><USER2> This is farking great! It needs some usability fixes but what I really want to know is...

WHY AREN'T THEY CHARGING ME to make tests!?!??!

Don't give this away for free! Maybe I could earn credits by taking tests, but please, make some money on this!

I guess they need lots of tests to make it work... but they should offer pro level features? Say, you get 5 feedbacks for free, all of them on subscription. You could also pay per test for all reasults.

This could be a low maintenance gold mine.

</comment><comment><USER3> Found it quite fun to do several of these actually - almost like a game :) It helps you spot things or realize what things you're doing wrong in your own designs by just rating others.</comment>


Rand Paul returns $500K in office budget to Treasury - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-congress/2012/01/rand-paul-returns-k-in-office-budget-to-treasury-110637.html

<comment><USER2> It's always amazed me how inefficient the government is. A budget is set for a department. The department knows that if it doesn't spend all of the budget, it won't get more next year, probably less. Hence, departments spend to hit the target budget instead of trying to cut down and be efficient.

Assuming that he is still performing at the same level as other politicians, what Rand Paul is doing is revolutionary. I wish more politicians were more like him. This gives me a little hope for the future of politics.</comment>


A Google programmer blew off a $500k job offer because he is already making $3M - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/a-google-programmer-blew-off-a-500000-salary-at-startup--because-hes-already-making-3-million-every-year-2014-1

<comment><USER2> BusinessInsider is garbage, I see similar posts on reddit too. The article has absolutely zero info, is < 300 words, has a stock/irrelevant image, a quote from an anonymous founder of an anonymous startup who approached an anonymous Google employee. I mean honestly they are not even trying to make the post informative.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the majority of Google programmers earn less than $100k let alone $3M

<comment><USER4> I don't know the values, but there are a few things to consider.

A typical Google engineer has several sources of compensation: a base salary, annual bonus, and stock.

The base salary is effectively a fixed value you know in advance. The annual bonus depends on performance, but you get guidance and can estimate it. The bonus is significant, but typically smaller than base salary.

However, the stock grants are wacky. You're granted stock which vests according to a schedule. After several years, the vesting schedule starts to grant more and more stock per unit time (you get new grants, old grants take a while before they vest, etc).

Finally, Google's stock has been increasing since 2008 (there was a big drop in early 2008). This makes stock grants lucrative in a way that scales very differently from typical base income or bonuses.</comment></comment>


How Slack Lost Over 800,000 Messages - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@kailanblanks/slack-lost-800k-messages-60018891c4e7 <comment><USER2> While that really, really sucks for the team (suggestion: take your latest count and just keep a manual tally of the new messages, maybe?) the final point they make is something that needs to be stressed over and over again. Don't trust third-parties to care about your data. They may have backup strategies in place or they might not. No one is going to care as much about your data as you do and you should treat every piece of data as if you have the only copy of it.

If it's important to you, then you are ultimately responsible for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with this completely. Although we may not have caused the issue, we could have prevented the damage by having our own copies of the data. We'll be doing this in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hypothesis of "least surprise:" Sane defaults implies warning users about impending destructive actions ie deletion), give them a chance (ie grace period, lotsa warnings) to change settings and/or pay more money to keep large datasets. Implicit, destructive system behavior is flawed by non-design.

</comment><comment><USER4> > no messages found from @slackbot retention.

Wouldn't that message have been purged after 7 days, along with the rest of them?

<comment><AUTHOR> Only messages in public channels were removed, which is why we had a massive proportion of private messages after the incident.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> matrix.org</comment>


FalseCall - iOS app for the polite introvert - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/falsecall/id483854319

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm the creator of the app.

Uses fakecall.net, which was discussed a month ago. [1]

Scott (the creater of fakecall.net) has been immensely helpful in creating this. I really can't thank him enough.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3225542></comment>


MIT Researcher Proposes Rights for Robots - <AUTHOR> http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/119440-MIT-Researcher-Proposes-Rights-for-Robots <comment><USER2> While I think this is interesting, we can't even protect rights for humans. Thus I couldn't give a shit about rights for robots.

Wait until robots are used for crime. I can't wait until the day when someone uses robots to rob a bank and see how the moronic political system reacts.

We wonder why the future is portrayed as some cyberpunk dystopia; because technology advances at a far greater pace than the intelligence of our outdated, shitty political system.

Technology is supposed to enable us, but politics is designed to control us. They are diametrically opposed.

Also wait until some (non-government) agent uses robots to do real terrorist acts (like attack some government facility)

No, robot rights will be a joke for a long time. In fact we will have legal limits on the features civilian robots are allowed to have once these scenarios become reality.</comment>


Ask HN: Who is using AWS Workspaces for your development environment? - <AUTHOR> In order to secure access to our AWS infrastructure, we are leveraging AWS Workspaces for development work, e.g. Devs remote into Workspaces and assume proper IAM roles for invoking AWS's API.
We have a wide assortment of latency issues, keyboard shortcuts not being acknowledge, etc.
I am curious to how prevalent development work via a remote desktop is in the industry?
Throughout my career I have only developed locally via my own workstation/laptop. Is this not the case for some organizations?
What is your dev setup for communicating with your Cloud Provider's API? <comment><USER2> Some organizations in regulated fields do dev work via SSH/mosh interactively, so latency / bandwidth requirements aren't necessarily as high. But there are obvious limitations to this (eg building an interactive web app could challenging if you're not able to port forward through one or more bastion servers, etc)</comment>


Mopidy – Server which can play music from multiple sources - <AUTHOR> http://docs.mopidy.com/en/latest/

<comment><USER2> I am both happy to see such a useful software and saddened to see that it's reimplementing tomahawk [0] from scratch.

Let's see where it all leads!

[0] [http://www.tomahawk-player.org/](http://www.tomahawk-player.org/).

<comment><USER3> Part of the reason for having started mopidy was that we wanted something MPD like, but with Spotify support, which at the time was not reasonable to integrate directly.

Now we've evolved quite a bit since then and are now at a stage where we are modular music server, where the MPD frontend is just one of many possible ways of talking to our server. Additionally everything is an extension, so we don't end up like some other systems I've seen where plugins end being second class citizens.

Edit: Other things to note is that at the time we started, 2009, we were not aware of Tomahawk, and more importantly, we wanted a server, not a GUI app.

<comment><USER4> i'm assuming spotify and soundcloud management doesn't really work with the mpd clients does it?

also, i think part of the reason why i moved away from mpd, and towards cmus, was because of things like ape, and library management. i see there is a beets plugin for library management.

what about cue sheet support? how complex, simple, would it be to add cue sheet support?

<comment><USER3> Do you mean playlist management? The upcomming 0.19 release has a target of fixing that for the MPD frontend, from there the backend authors just need to make sure they implement the right interfaces and this will work.

CUE sheets as in using them as playlists? There are a few ways of doing this depending on what your use case is, but very much doable. Drop by #mopidy on freenode or send us an email and we can help work out the details.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Mopidy is a fantastic piece of software. I once wrote a Node.js server to provide a public web interface to a single shared playlist, put it on a Pi, and hooked it up to an amplifier.

[https://github.com/mplewis/accentor](https://github.com/mplewis/accentor)

I might come back to this project later—the docs are pretty lacking, but the software works!

</comment><comment><USER6> Looks like I have a new weekend project. If the dev or someone who has used this heavily is lurking here: I couldn't find this in the documentation but is it possible to setup multiple local sources? Would I just setup mopidy on all of those computers? Is there a way to stream them into a single library so I don't have to connect to all of the sources every time I change clients?

Thanks

<comment><USER3> Normally you would have one machine hooked up to your speakers and then use clients on the other ones to control the central music server.

In the longer run I keep wanting to get [https://github.com/mopidy/mopidy/issues/408](https://github.com/mopidy/mopidy/issues/408) solved, basically having a main server and then audio only servers for true multiroom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very cool. This has been on my sparklist[1] for quite a while. I'll be installing on a Pi tonight, but from the documentations it looks very well executed. Awesome work!

[1] [https://github.com/nichodges/sprklst/blob/master/sparklist-n...](https://github.com/nichodges/sprklst/blob/master/sparklist- nic.md)

</comment><comment><USER8> I am searching from a long time for some (free) app with the following features

-can grab music from multiple sources (local, youtube, etc)

-i can vote for each track (up/down/rating)

-based on my votes it will guess my favorites (with some entropy so sometime will try to show me new kind of music)

Is there such a music player?

<comment><USER3> This idea keeps coming up and I believe mopidy is perfect for building such a system (of course I am biased as one of the main contributors).

The way to go about building this with mopidy is essentially one of the following:

\- Create the voting system based on the MPD protocol to talk to mopidy

\- Create the voting system using our JSON-RPC websocket access to the core APIs.

\- Create a frontend in python with full access to the core APIs.

Each of these of course have it's advantages and disadvantages. But to me one of our main strengths is the architecture we've designed over time and how people can use mopidy almost like a framework for exposing the media server in a novel way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Curious. Does anyone know whenever it plays only locally or can stream it further (like to a desktop computer or phone)?

If so, it could be plain awesome. I'm imagining a server in closet that aggregates music collections from various sources and provides uniform interface to play it anywhere network-accessible.

<comment><USER10> yes, you can access it remotely. mopidy is an MPD server, so any platform that has a compatible MPD client should be able to access it. The docs list a lot of the available clients and their compatibility with mopidy:

[http://docs.mopidy.com/en/latest/#clients](http://docs.mopidy.com/en/latest/#clients)

<comment><USER3> You can control mopidy remotely, but not yet stream to remote clients.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ampache

A web based audio/video streaming application and file manager allowing you to access your music & videos from anywhere, using almost any internet enabled device.

[https://github.com/ampache/ampache](https://github.com/ampache/ampache)

<comment><USER12> Ampache is awesome, although my iOS client is pretty old and ugly unfortunately. It's couple with ownCloud, so it's pretty seamless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Mopidy is also used in PIMusic Box - a Raspberry Pi based music player. [http://www.woutervanwijk.nl/pimusicbox/](http://www.woutervanwijk.nl/pimusicbox/)

I use it to stream my Google Music playlists... out via a USB DAC to Onkyo amp etc. Works a treat.

<comment><USER14> Can Mopidy be used to access a distributed / btsync / torrent / files? For example a university hub of 100GB of local music?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> something similar: [http://www.onairplayer.com/](http://www.onairplayer.com/)</comment>


The Secrets in Greenland's Ice Sheet - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/magazine/the-secrets-in-greenlands-ice-sheets.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> impressive facts.</comment>


Hardware startup Trontium wants to make a 'universal battery' - <AUTHOR> https://trontium.com/

<comment><USER2> I know the rainbow light thing is so it doesn't just look like an aluminum tube, but I hope you can turn that off. I wouldn't want my battery to sit there and continually use power to light up the HEY LOOK AT ME lights.

<comment><USER3> The lights can be turned off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Its an Aluminium tube with a Lithium battery.</comment>


Ask HN: Can my new side project be turned into a business? - <AUTHOR>

I built http://little.io/ over the holidays and I'm wondering whether you guys think there's a business there. The idea is to provide common small features as a service (micro-services). (actually, I started in november but had to drop it for a while)
The inspiration came from a Show HN post a while back for http://www.mapcrunch.com/. I noticed that you could vote for your favorite image and sort by most voted...I wondered how often that same code has been written and will be written. When I showed it to a friend, he pointed me to http://parse.com which is similar (you could call them a micro-service provider for mobile developers, whereas little.io is for web developers).
Anyways, I suck at business and all that, and I'm a pessimist, I personally don't see it, but I thought I'd get some input :) <comment><USER2> Well because you are just helping customers implement certain small features, I'd say you might have a niche consulting position here. Market it like that 1 feature = $X, any 2 features = $Y, and 3 or more features implemented = $Z

From your use case it just seems like you know how to add a few features and will be implementing with companies/sites that need them.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://little.io> (clickable)

<comment><USER3> Why was this down voted, I'm viewing on a mobile, and having a clickable link is a massive time saver compared to copy and paste with a touch screen. It's an upvote from me :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like the idea very much.

I'm not sure I would use them, I might be too afraid about your service's stability and how long it will be alive etc since you are not (yet?) a big name.

Another micro service idea: geolocation API

<comment><USER5> Yes, we are currently looking for a good geolocation API. If we have to built it ourselves I suppose we could monetize it..

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't get it. Can you provide an example use case?

<comment><AUTHOR> Each service is independent (you might only use 1 of them, or all X)..but tagging is probably the simplest to explain.

Say you run a site that display videos and you want people to be able comment on certain parts. You'd hook into the the tagging api to let users tag the videos.

Here's a working demo..you can click on the tag that I added, or add your own.. <http://little.io/playground2></comment></comment>


The science that made Stephen Hawking famous (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://quantumfrontiers.com/2014/11/05/the-science-that-made-stephen-hawking-famous/ <comment><USER2> (2014)</comment>


DIY Electric Car Breaks World Record Going 624 Miles on One Charge - <AUTHOR> http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/05/diy-electric-car-mira-ev-japan-world-record-624-miles-one-charge-battery.php

<comment><USER2> "If they can do it, big automakers should definitely be able to do it."

Does anyone understand engineering as a economic activity? It's not whether you "can do it" it's whether you can do it in a reproducible and economically feasible fashion. That means reliability down the road (10 years, 100,000 miles) not "yeah we did it one time, take that big auto".</comment>


Show HN: TerminusDB 1.1 – Big Babushka' OSS graph DB that stores data like Git - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/terminusdb/terminus-server <comment><AUTHOR> TerminusDB 1.1 - the Big Babushka! So happy to put this out. It could almost be a 2.0, but given that we are a young DB, we want to save those release numbers for future exciting developments (I did see another DB on release 0.50.0 - I won't name names, but come on folks, give us a 1.0!).

The major development is our new storage backend, terminus-store. With the introduction of the new store, TerminusDB takes a radical departure from traditional database architectures. Our approach has three parts:

1\. We have a graph database with strong schema to retain simplicity and generality 2\. The graph is implemented using succinct immutable data structures which enable more sparing use of main memory resources. 3\. We adopt a delta encoding approach to updates ('like git, but for data') which provides the whole suite of revision control features: branch, merge, squash, rollback, blame, and time-travel facilitating CI/CD approaches on data.

This final point is crucial - with TerminusDB we can now use advanced CI/CD workflows in data operations. The large impact of git on the software development world can now be envisioned in the world of data. This is made possible by synergies between an immutable layered approach and the succinct data structure approach that we've used for encoding. The DevOps revolution becomes the DataOps revolution.

In addition to the new backend, we have a re-imagined console, our query language WOQL has been extended and, importantly, we have a Python Client. We are the database for data people and there are no more data people than Pythonistas.</comment>