Five million Danish ID numbers sent to Chinese firm by mistake - <AUTHOR> http://www.thelocal.dk/20160720/five-million-danish-id-numbers-sent-to-chinese-firm-by-mistake <comment><USER2> This is ridiculous. It's not just Danish personal identification numbers, but _ID numbers and health records_ for everyone who have lived in Denmark from 2010 through 2012.

Quick recap since it's in Danish: A danish health authority, SSI, accidentally _mailed two CDs_ containing _unencrypted CPR-numbers and health records for 5.28m residents_ to the Chinese Visa Application Office.

The Chinese delivered the letter to the intended recipient, Statistics Denmark, another danish government authority.

The bubble cushioned mailer containing the CDs had been opened, but regardless the issue of course is the extremely reckless handling of very sensitive information.

Edit: Article reporting on this in English [http://www.thelocal.dk/20160720/five-million-danish-id- numbe...](http://www.thelocal.dk/20160720/five-million-danish-id-numbers-sent- to-chinese-firm-by-mistake)

Edit 2: The specification and structure of the data that was sent with these CDs. [https://twitter.com/christianpanton/status/75574223004496691...](https://twitter.com/christianpanton/status/755742230044966912) (also in Danish, but this seems to include almost everything; the carelessness in handling this data appears to have been surpassed only by the extent and completeness of it)

<comment><USER3> Correction: SSI sent a letter containing two unencrypted CDs containing CPR- numbers and health records for 5.28 residents in Danish municipals between 2010 and 2012 to the Danish statistics agency (Statistics Denmark).

Post Danmark (postal service) accidentally delivered the letter to Chinese Visa Application Centre instead. When the employee responsible for receiving the letter noticed the mistake upon opening, the employee turned the letter with the two CDs to Statistics Denmark.

According to the employee's story, this was done immediately. And the investigation team says they have no reason to doubt the validity of her story.

To sum up: The investigation team believe that the Chinese Visa Application Centre never actually saw the contents on the CDs. SSI sent the data unencrypted, and the postal service delivered the letter to the wrong recipient.

Edit: Changed wording from blaming the postal service.

<comment><USER4> That's the problem with blame culture. It needs to be someones (emphasis ONE) fault, and then anyone else can breathe a sigh of relief and move on.

It's blatantly irresponsible that SSI even has the infrastructure to burn CDs with this information on it (it needs to live in heavily secured, jealously guarded and scrupulously audited (ideally airgapped) computer system). If they absolutely need this capability, it's blatantly irresponsible to let such a CD out of the care of trusted employees -- and if they absolutely need to post it, they need to heavily encrypt it.

It's not meaningfully "the post service's fault".

<comment><USER5> Likely the capability exits for when someone moves to another part of the country, and the local doctor wants to check the new patient's medical history.

Note also that the data was meant for what i assume is the national statistics office. Likely for investigating changes in danish public health over recent years.

Unless by airgapped you mean to build a separate, free standing, network just for delivering medical records to doctor's offices around the nation.

<comment><USER4> First, this is not about doctors exchanging patients' medical histories, it's about two central government offices exchanging _everybody 's_ medical histories.

Second, the fact that security is (really!) hard is not a valid argument against doing it.

Third, there's a huge difference between the appropriate levels of security around individual patients' medical histories, a single doctors office worth of patients' data, and then the collective medical histories for every single patient in the nation.

<comment><USER6> > Third, there's a huge difference between the appropriate levels of security > around individual patients' medical histories, a single doctors office worth > of patients' data, and then the collective medical histories for every > single patient in the nation.

Hang on: If you're extracting an individual's medical data and putting that on a USB stick you better make sure it's encrypted, and that there are audit trails in place for who extracted the data, when, and why, and where they put it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a Danish person living in China, I don't know how to feel about this.

In some weird way, I think it was a good thing this got delivered to the China visa office and not next door to them, in which case we would probably never have heard about this mistake and for sure it wouldn't be top post here. There is a good headline to be found in this story, as I have just discovered when browsing the Danish news.

If this information is handled so recklessly and so nonchalant, it makes me wonder what other people within Denmark also have access to this information. Students, secretaries, interns? Can I register as a scientist and get access? Who exactly has access to my information? I would like to know the answer to this question.

I know that visa office and have been there many times. It is not a Chinese government run operation but a private company handling the incoming paper work for visa applications, which get submitted for review at the Chinese run Chinese embassy :P

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if this would have been a story if a country other than China was involved. Of course, the information was carelessly handled but then again worse things have happened.. like sending a missile to the wrong address. The bias in the article is interesting, with the author of the article putting the words 'by mistake' in quotes to signal that the mere act of opening the package is suspicious. Over the years I have blindly opened plenty of mailed packages only to realize that it was actually addressed to someone else.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, it is not that big of a deal. Wrong address.. Happens all the time..

As a Danish person, I am really interested in the process of packaging these CD's. Who burned them? Who was in the room? Who collected that data? Was it an intern? Maybe a secretary? That is some really personal information. Maybe I can register as a researcher and get access? I dont know, but I want to find out. Maybe there is a really sophisticated social engineering attack hiding in this story....

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The story from the Chinese Visa Application Office (CVAO) is that an employee opened the letter "by mistake":

>"It said that it was contacted by an employee of the Chinese Visa Application Centre who said she opened the letter addressed to Statistics Denmark "by mistake" but then delivered the package to the statistics agency." (TheLocal, linked above, [http://www.thelocal.dk/20160720/five-million-danish-id- numbe...](http://www.thelocal.dk/20160720/five-million-danish-id-numbers-sent- to-chinese-firm-by-mistake)). //

Having worked as a civil servant I find this unlikely if it were properly addressed. In the office I worked at all mail came in via a mail room who checked and registered it and directed it to relevant personnel.

Presumably the CVAO receive a lot of mail, they must have a dedicated system for recording [because we're talking about legal documents and receipt dates therefore are important to record] and directing that mail. So a piece of mail comes in for "Statistics Denmark", now what happens?

What I'd expect is it's sent to a mail-room manager to handle. They can then either redirect the mail unopened or forward it to some other personnel. I really can't see them just opening things "by accident" at all. They have a choice to honestly redirect unopened or to actually open it. Now, the opening may have been an individual's simple curiosity, for sure.

Interested in any other analysis particularly with reference to how mail receipt is handled in other country's civil service locations. I expect things have moved on somewhat, something like 'tag with barcode, photograph and the computer records the article' is probably the current workflow?

<comment><USER10> well, the Danish mail service who's one of its main purposes is to read and process the mailing address correctly failed. And they most likely have _many_ more processes and safeguards than any office mailroom.

<comment><USER11> I am a Dane. I have twice received mail incorrectly sent to my current address. One was sent to somebody with a different name, to an address that was close to but not the same as my previous address, the other was to a person who may have lived here but was not the previous occupant.

This does not include the letters that should have gone to my neighbors but was put in the wrong letter box.

While I naturally assume this is deliberate I won't rule out that this is just complete incompetence.

<comment><USER9> You noticed that they were misaddressed though, right?

Now imagine you work in an office handling personal identity papers and travel documents mishandling of which is probably a sack-able offense and possibly a criminal one too. Every piece of mail entering your address has to be date registered and properly redirected. Do you think you'd just open letters without looking at the address?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Worse, at least according to Google Maps, it is only a 17 minute drive or 28 minute bus ride between Statistics Denmark and the Serum Institute.

At such a small distance, if such large amounts of confidential information must be delivered, I feel that it ought to be hand-delivered.

</comment><comment><USER13> These things keep happening in Denmark but the thing is, very few people actually care here. Avoiding mistakes of this caliber isn't rocket science but it does take a little effort and awareness and as long as nobody cares there is no motivation to make that effort.

In that sense this is just giving people what they're asking for. They're not asking for security so they're not getting it.

</comment><comment><USER14> Google Translate gives me, "Data Protection Agency takes no further action".

Is that true? No-one is fined or prosecuted for this? Or even sacked?

<comment><USER2> Yes that's true - The Data Protection Agency see no reason to take any further action in this case. Their assessment is that there is a low likelihood of an actual leak (based on a written statement from the Chinese employee who opened the letter). And the SSI has promised to send such information encrypted going forward.

<comment><USER15> If I were a senior official at the Chinese foreign service, and I heard that one of my employees got such a CD and just gave it back to the Danes without notifying higher-ups, then I would want that employee's head.

On the other hand, if I were a senior official in the Danish foreign service, then I would find my life a lot easier if no one was kicking up a fuss about the Chinese.

<comment><USER7> I know that visa office. I am not so concerned about them. That package could have been delivered anywhere.

What I mean is that it is private company handling incoming paper work just like any other company in that building. It happens to be doing paper work for the Chinese embassy.

I am more concerned about who put that information on those CD's and why did those people have access to that information. That information should be treated like a radioactive piece of material.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> To save other people the google search, population of Denmark is 5.6 million.

<comment><USER17> Good thing I only got mine in 2013! My data should be safe then.

Or so they say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Here is the Google translated version [https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.datatilsynet.dk%2Fafgoerelser%2Fafgoerelsen%2Fartikel%2Fanbefalet- brev-afleveret-til-en-forkert-modtager%2F&edit-text=&act=url)

</comment><comment><USER19> Just came here to ask what do you guys' think about centralized health care records?

It seems impossible to prevent these kinds of "stupid" mistakes from happening.

My doctor still works mostly on a paper based system, so in the worst kind of situation just his patients data are lost.

Are there any alternatives that prevent those kinds of leaks - esp. considering that even the NSA got out-Snowdened.

</comment><comment><USER20> The Danish personal identification numbers are useless for identifying someone since we pretty much give them out to anyone who asks for it, and they can be calculated using some methods, which have been done to some politicians just to show the flaws in the system behind them.

<comment><USER2> Seems more like this make CPR numbers useless for identity verification, but even easier to identify someone with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Absolute incompetence.

</comment><comment><USER22> So, to summarise - burning it to CD is actually fine, but they should have used an in-house courier.

<comment><USER23> Please don't be uncharitable in HN comments; i.e. please don't choose a weak interpretation of what someone said in order to make it look bad.

We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12128662](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12128662) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Disclaimer: I 100% believe in the idiom "don't attribute to malice what could equally be caused by ignorance".

But I think all those involved should have permanent monitoring on their bank accounts and living status incase a suspiciously large wire were to come from a Chinese entity. This is happening way to often not to become a source of plausible deniability to future criminals. "It was an accident officer I swear!". Sympathies to all those effected by this incident.</comment>


The Rise of Bullshit Jobs - <AUTHOR> https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/bullshit-jobs-david-graeber-work-service <comment><USER3> The economist Tyler Cowen has the best criticism of Graeber's argument that I've seen:

> Graeber too often confuses "tough jobs in negative- or zero-sum games" with > "bullshit jobs." I view those as two quite distinct categories... He doubts > whether Oxford University needs "a dozen-plus" PR specialists. I would be > surprised if they can get by with so few. Consider their numerous summer > programs, their need to advertise admissions, how they talk to the media and > university rating services, their relations with China, the student lawsuits > they face, their need to manage relations with Oxford the political unit, > and the multiple independent schools within Oxford, just for a start. > Overall, I fear that Graeber's managerial intelligence is not up to par, or > at the very least he rarely convinces me that he has a superior > organizational understanding, compared to people who deal with these > problems every day.

Source: [https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/bu...](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/bull- shit-jobs-theory.html)

<comment><USER4> Thea idea of "bullshit jobs" is ... bullshit. There's huge amounts of resources poured into eliminating jobs and extracting efficiencies. The idea that there's tons of people out there doing unnecessary work is incredibly misguided.

The root cause of a lot of this thinking is, in my opinion, a vast gap between what people think technology can do, and what it can actually do, in domains that they are unfamiliar with. The technology does not exist today to fully automate even the lowest-skill jobs. For example, even for something as simple as grocery store checkout, the automated solutions are pretty awful. Thus, if you're trying to compete even a little bit on customer service, having human cashiers is still a win. In my own field, legal services, I'd take a high school graduate working minimum wage over _any_ legal technology I've ever seen advertised here on HN.

<comment><USER5> I disagree. In all my experience working in corporate, most problems we solved with technology would have been better solved by having better simpler policies in place.

The real world is unnecessarily complex and messy because a lot of people in positions of authority dont know how to design good systems. This leads to tons of bullshit jobs.

<comment><USER4> What makes you think those simpler policies would work? The real world is complex and messy because people are complex and messy. It's like looking at the Windows or Linux source code and saying it "would have been better solved by having better simplier policies in place." It's superficially true in that you could have simpler designs that accomplish any given function of those operating systems. But for the most part _e.g._ Linux evolved the way it did for a reason, and almost none of the 20+ million lines in the source tree are "bullshit code."

<comment><USER6> Well that depends a lot on your definition of bullshit.

Linux evolved the way it did for various reasons, but how many are still relevant today?

Would you write a kernel in C these days? I wouldn't. There are production quality kernels written in _at least_ C++ which benefit from its features, and it's been demonstrated that you can write entire operating systems in managed languages like Java as well. Why should we suffer an endless parade of exploitable memory bugs in kernel space? It's not technical requirements driving that.

Would you write a GPLd kernel these days? I wouldn't. Not much new software is being GPLd these days, it's all Apache or similar licenses. The policy of trying to maintain every driver in-tree has caused vast amounts of time to be spent on workarounds like installers that compile things client-side, enforcement is poor, lots of time is lost due to needless recompiles, API churn, poor usability of desktop software and so on. Has Linux benefited from correspondingly amazing hardware support? No. Desktop Linux is a morass of bugs that often still can't suspend properly, and in the server realm it's now more often than not talking to virtualised hardware anyway.

I could go on. There's a LOT of simplification and "bullshit work" that could be optimised out, even in the realm of a very concrete thing without much room for innovation like an OS kernel - partly because times changed but Linux didn't.

<comment><USER7> > Would you write a GPLd kernel these days? I wouldn't. [...]

I think you're arguing a strawman here. The actual reason why drivers tend to live in-tree is that the kernel-driver API changes all the time, and Linus has consistently argued that being able to do backwards-incompatible changes to the kernel-driver API has been necessary to make the drivers as good as they are.

<comment><USER6> And yet where is Linux most used? On the server. What hardware do cloud machines have? It's not even public, much of the time. It's all talking to hypervisors.

OSv is an example of going back to the drawing board for the majority of Linux's use cases and creating something radically smaller and with radically less 'bullshit' (it runs much faster as a consequence).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article is missing a category: rain dancers. These people do something pointless but highly visible and take credit when something eventually goes right.

Suppose you a project manager forces a team of coders to run scrums and track progress in JIRA. Unless you're one of the coders, how can you tell whether the PM increased productivity or simply wasted time on making them appear more productive? Either is possible.

<comment><USER9> That's a good phrase I haven't heard before. A good example of this is economists (not all) who continually make public predictions on TV, but are never held accountable for the results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The rise? It seems many have existed for some time, in one form or another. Maybe there has been an expansion, but not the rise.

Sometimes I agree with the sentiment of "bullshit jobs" but other times, I think without them, the world would be a duller place. That's not to say I like SEOs, or telemarketers or inefficient charities, but they help at the margin and without that I think you get stagnation.

Author also puts down compliance folks. I would disagree with that being bullshit. It ensures people follow the letter of the law --and if they don't AND they get audited, then there can be trouble. And that's the point. It's like saying firefighters are "bullshit jobs".

<comment><USER11> >That's not to say I like SEOs

Even that has a skewed reputation as bullshit, which only _used_ to be deserved. Now it's a much broader group of people who add a lot more value than 2010 SEOs did, by a mile.

<comment><USER12> What kind of value? I still don't see any value a SEO person provides that a competent developer doesn't already do. SEO is not black magic (despite what the SEO scammers want you to believe). Google even gives you quite a bit of documentation on how to optimise your site for them.

<comment><USER11> The term "SEO" is now used to encompass a much broader area of online marketing than it did in the past (tricking Googlebot and not fucking up Googlebot).

You'll certainly run into lots of liars and conmen who use it to refer to outdated voodoo that worked ten years ago.

But in most ecosystems it refers to planning and developing websites and web content for the purpose of satisfying the needs of people performing searches. And now the advice is "don't ever trick googlebot or googlebot will end you."

As far as general human value goes, one aspect can be boiled down to "we found that 10,000 people look for such-and-such each month, but Google serves them all dogshit, and most of them go away knowing nothing. We will build a page that solves 5,000 peoples' problems a month, and it will be on your company website."

A big chunk of the content on the web is there because of this process - <USER2> not just the spammy garbage. Without it, you see marketing teams throwing years of effort into the black abyss of outer space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There are two previous discussion about David Graeber / 'Bullshit Jobs':

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs (strikemag.org) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478) (5 years ago, 349 comments)

On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs (libcom.org) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8561080](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8561080) (4 years ago, 381 comments)

<comment><USER14> And more recently, since the book came out:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17162935](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17162935)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17074058](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17074058)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995389](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995389)

<comment><USER13> > > [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995389](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995389)

This was the huge, recent discussion (470 comments) I remembered but couldn't find instantly due to 'bullshit jobs' -> 'pointless jobs'. Thanks.

<comment><USER14> Don't miss Graeber's appearance in the first thread I listed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There are also jobs/titles/positions that are created not out of necessity, but as a way to give someone a back-scratching, wealth-sharing 'promotion' without giving up someone else's, especially if the people involved are buddies or used to work at a same prior company. As employees, you sometime wonder 'Do we really need a Chief Retention Officer' ?

</comment><comment><USER16> > Nobody ever reads these reports, they're just there to flash around. It's > the equivalent of a feudal lord — I have some guy whose job is just to > tweeze my mustache, and another guy who's polishing my stirrups, and so > forth. Just to show that I can do that.

I imagine that there are some poorly-run larger companies that have elements of this, but this seems cartoonish for the most part.

<comment> cup-of-tea I wouldn't have believed it either before spending some time in a financial company. One time I was sitting with a colleague who had been there many years and he received an email like a newsletter but with more flashy graphics than the newsletter that already went out on Friday. He immediately groaned and said "that's one more email to ignore then".

And ignore it we did. But someone somewhere decided we needed another newsletter, some team wrote the "news" and some other team designed the shiny new graphics. All just to be ignored and deleted by everyone.

The financial sector is rife with this. It is surely the most inefficient part of the economy. Most things are automated now, yet the number of people employed has actually grown and it's mostly bullshit. There are people who literally spend all day creating what can only be described as entertainment for other people in the same company. I wish everyone could see it first hand.

<comment><USER17> That's not just the financial industry. One company I was at built themselves a TV studio to broadcast the occasional C-suite roundtable. Executives love to see themselves in print (and video).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I recently read this book-- it is nothing short of revolutionary.

<comment><USER19> I still think he should've mentioned the peter principle and hierarchiology

<comment><USER18> Hierarchiology?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Some of these BS jobs aren't BS. Or at least, a subset of people maybe bullshitting their way through the system, but compliance personnel and corporate lawyers are necessary for reasons they don't give.

</comment><comment><USER21> The way I see it, the higher up maslow's pyramid, the more BS it is, roughly speaking. This in terms of the function of the job, aside from your own survival and having a job.

</comment><comment><USER22> People that manage people that do not need management amount to a lot of people in tech.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is right in line with the Tiny Homes explosion.</comment>


New technique produces real randomness - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencenews.org/article/new-technique-produces-real-randomness <comment><USER2> There was a previous discussion here not long ago (11 days ago, 159 comments, 385 points): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11719543](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11719543)

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting idea but I wonder why this technique is stated new since it looks very easy and comprehensive to me just by reading some sentences. Is this really new or is this just a bloated message containing something that isn't that hot?

Another side note: the article contains very much sentences (more than 2/3) not directly explaining the new technique. The read was not that great for me, and I guess this counts for most of the readers since it should be well known that random numbers are a hard thing. Don't get me wrong. Explaining things is great but the title doesn't match the most of the content.

</comment><comment><USER4> > But this still falls short of being truly random. If the mouse is on the > left of the screen one moment, it's less likely to be all the way on the > right in the following instant.

Except... that's not how it works... Entropy from input devices is gathered from the timing of interrupts. It's not just looking at the actual values.

</comment><comment><USER5> Clickbait. The algorithm is a new technique for combining entropy sources.

</comment><comment><USER6> I really don't understand how this is useful. If you have several sources of randomness, even if they are weak, can you not run them through a cryptographically strong hash function and get a more random output?

The voting system sounds even weirder. How does taking groups of threes solve malicious voters? What even are malicious voters?

<comment><USER7> > The voting system sounds even weirder. How does taking groups of threes > solve malicious voters? What even are malicious voters?

This is normally talked about in terms of biased coin tosses. You know Von Neumann's de-skew technique?

[http://pit-claudel.fr/clement/blog/generating-uniformly-rand...](http://pit- claudel.fr/clement/blog/generating-uniformly-random-data-from-skewed-input- biased-coins-loaded-dice-skew-correction-and-the-von-neumann-extractor/)

> If independence of successive tosses is assumed, we can reconstruct a 50-50 > chance out of even a badly biased coin by tossing twice. If we get heads- > heads or tails-tails, we reject the tosses and try again. If we get heads- > tails (or tails-heads), we accept the result as heads (or tails).

I'm not sure why the submitted article is any different from this technique.

<comment><USER8> BTW, there is no such thing as a biased coin, only a biased flipping mechanism. You can't inherently bias a flipped coin like you can bias a die.

You can create a biased 2-state generator , but not with a flipped coin.

<comment><USER7> Yes, but these are mathematical coins not real world objects.

(I upvoted your post. I don't think it deserved the downvote(s)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Detecting duplicates is not a solved problem; it's hard. You have to compare strings and everything.

<comment><USER10> We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11797275](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11797275) and marked it off-topic.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: YC Alum Made Gab; Should YC Condemn in Wake of Pittsburg Shooting? - <AUTHOR> Is there ever a bad time to condemn platforms that profit from hate speech? What do you think? <comment><USER2> EDIT: Didn't see this - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12934388](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12934388)

Still, maintain my comments below, but apparently already banned for the founder(s) own inappropriate behavior.

First of all, you cannot have any sort of conversation on the internet without having some hate speech.

This is especially true of a website dedicated to free speech. Now, in this case, the argument can be made they should have censored it or moderated it appropriately -- perhaps. So far, I haven't seen explicitly what was said on Gab.com. However, is that free speech? I think there's a line, I don't know where to draw it.

So far the only quote(s) I can find:

> "HIAS likes to bring invaders that kill our people. I can't sit by and watch > my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics. I'm going in."

> "Why hello there HIAS! You like to bring in hostile invaders to dwell among > us? We appreciate the list of friends you provided,"

I'm sorry, but that is not necessarily something that anyone would know to moderate. Even if it was, there were way worse stuff posted on twitter (which he was banned from, eventually). These things take time and I think trying to railroad a company for inadvertently not moderating is kind of silly and somewhat sad.

One final thought... perhaps this occurred because his ability to share his thoughts were stifled (by twitter for instance)? The ability to voice one's opinions is what this country was founded on. Not inciting violence mind you (I'm not super familiar with this case). From the beginning, it was understood the ability to share one's voice, is both powerful, but also a release to some of the tension. When people feel they lose their voice, they will often turn to the barrel of a gun.

Not saying that occurred here, just that we as a society need to consider slowly and methodically how to react. Not do any knee jerk reaction.</comment>


Photos of Elon Musk's 'test Tunnel' at SpaceX - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4195704/Elon-Musk-tweets-photo-giant-tunnel-boring-machine.html <comment><USER2> Bury that hyperloop!</comment>


Everything "Free" is Subsidized - <AUTHOR> http://personalmba.com/everything-free-is-subsidized/

<comment><USER2> This is a rehash of the old "no free lunch" argument. The difference is, most of what you see in the news media is opinion, hype, and repetition, and instead of paying 100 people to produce that full time, you can have 100,000 people generate it for free, select the top 100, and get better quality content.

Does anyone honestly think that the "breaking news" cycle of TV news conveys any more information than you'd get searching on the relevant Twitter hashtag?

Those of us who actually want good journalism are a niche market. We aren't well-served by most of the media and we won't be well-served from most of the internet, but there is a niche market selling to us. The Economist meets that market, and the NY Times aspires to. But most news has turned into the type of tabloid news that, frankly, can be produced at much lower price and annoyance by sites like Huffington Post.

</comment><comment><USER3> i would agree if the article said that everything "free" does actually get paid for in some form (especially with respect to business dealings).

but a "subsidy" and to "subsidize" has a specific meaning that isn't as universally applicable as the article tries to make it.

<comment><USER4> Then what is this specific meaning that the author fails to understand?

I think it's pretty clear what he means by it.

<comment><USER3> i understand what he's saying just fine, and i would understand it if he used "taxed" or something similar instead. i'm probably just being too picky about semantics here, but i'm taking issue with the actual redefinition of a specific economic term on a well respected business site.

n) subsidy (a grant paid by a government to an enterprise that benefits the public) <http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=subsidy>

A subsidy (also known as a subvention) is a form of financial assistance paid to a business or economic sector. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidy></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Gumby Framework vs. Bootstrap? - <AUTHOR>

Has anyone used Gumby Framework?  This seems to be a fork of Foundation with added features like  Responsive Images, Toggles & Switches, Fancy Tiles, Shuffle etc.  It has flexible Grid where you can change the columns from 12 columns to any number you like or embed a grid within a grid. Also the grids seem to be not restricted to 960px. I would like to know if anyone has used it and if so how was your experience?  Do the extra features make a big difference? How does it fare against bootstrap?<p>Gumby: http://gumbyframework.com Bootstrap: http://getbootstrap.com/ <comment><USER2> I've been a big fan of Bootstrap since V2 - have used it on over 10 websites from Wordpress to completely custom.

I think it's more of a matter of what you use first and get ust to; at this point, both are pretty similar to each other and any gaps can be filled in with additional jQuery plugins.

Lately, I've been using a grid from unsemantic.com - it has 20 divisions based on a grid-5 system and supports back to IE7 which some of my clients require - I roll that with bootstraps JS file for good results, but even that has fallen short sometimes - needing to add a grid-49 and a grid-2 to get layouts just right.

All of them continue to fall short though - requiring multiple media queries in my css file to account for various screen sizes for a pixel perfect layout causing me to consider rolling my own. Which in the end means; there is no perfect grid system. You either use an existing one and work around the limitations, or don't use one and do more work from scratch.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Lsiunsuex. I'm more of a beginner and I doubt I'll ever run into the kind of needs that you had. What I would like to know is more along these lines. I'm a back end developer trying to learn frontend too. While bootstrap has by far the most resources online, it is often accused of being too uniform and hard to customise. I have heard good things about gumby especially that it is easy to customise. Since gum by is an upcoming framework, I would like to know if it will gain traction. Would I be wise to invest my time in gumby instead of bootstrap? Since I do not have much knowledge about UI, I'm not able to access both.</comment></comment>


Genius,17,develops maths theory that calculates problems faster than a COMPUTER - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3304659/Schoolboy-genius-17-develops-maths-theory-calculates-problems-faster-COMPUTER-idea-did-it.html <comment><USER2> Click bait title.</comment>


Software Company Ditches AdWords for... Kiva? - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ditching_adwords_for_kiva.php <comment><USER2> That might work... once.

AdWords strikes me as the death of marketing still shambling along as a zombie. (Not to dis an army of shambling zombies, they have their own sort of power.) The genius of a marketer is not required, just pick some words and pay the bill. P.T. Barnum would be horrified by AdWords. I expect he would have done better with the first two paragraphs of <http://www.jamasoftware.com/> too.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have no idea how well that will work, but it's creative.</comment>


Humans who are not concentrating are not general intelligences - <AUTHOR> https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2019/02/25/humans-who-are-not-concentrating-are-not-general-intelligences/ <comment><USER3> One of the things are about fakes is that they evolve over time.

Believe it or not, an incident in 1917 involving Arthur Conan Doyle, inventor of Sherlock Holmes, is instructive.

The "Cottingley Fairies" were imagined when a couple of teenage girls took photographs of themselves with pictures of fairies. [1]

The thing that is important is that, to my eyes and I think to a typical person of this era, these photos of girls with cutouts of fairies look like ... exactly that. When I first saw these pictures, I couldn't believe anyone could be fooled by them. But this period, circa 1917, was a period when photos only recently had appeared and so only recently had photo fakes. So the skill to spot the difference had only recently appeared.

Which is to say, I'm pretty sure the author is correct that deal of the OpenAI text generated isn't intelligent text generation but stuff with enough of the markers of "real" text that people might not notice it if they weren't paying attention.

Moreover, I strongly suspect that if this sort of sham were to become more common, the average person's ability to notice it would increase significantly.

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

<comment><USER4> > _The thing that is important is that, to my eyes and I think to a typical > person of this era, these photos of girls with cutouts of fairies look like > ... exactly that. When I first saw these pictures, I couldn 't believe > anyone could be fooled by them. But this period, circa 1917, was a period > when photos only recently had appear and so only recently had photo fakes. > So the skill to spot the difference had only recently appeared._

Tons of people believe in crude "ufo" and "bigfoot" and "chupacabras" and "lock ness" and such photos, well into today though.

<comment><USER5> Nitpick, but, isn't Loch Ness just the name of the lake?

<comment><USER6> How do you _know_ the lake is real?

<comment><USER7> I've seen it. It could have been a very convincing fake, but.. if that doesn't count, then nothing does.

<comment><USER8> How do I know you're not in on the conspiracy.

<comment><USER9> Maybe it was just an oversized puddle, and not actually a lake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This article and the Overcoming Bias post it links to ("Better Babblers") remind me of when I was in high school and was reading stuff like _Gödel, Escher, Bach_ and Dawkins's _The Selfish Gene_ (the two first books I ordered after mom allowed me to use Amazon) while also learning online about Wittgenstein and statistical text generation (Markov chains). All this led to a kind of crisis of identity because in their own ways all those things point to a deconstruction of the self.

That sounds hokey, but to explain briefly: GEB indicates that your self (your consciousness of being someone) is a swirling self-referential symbolic process (a "strange loop"); Dawkins indicates that your self is a kind of evolved meme whose function in nature is to further your family of genetic replicators; Wittgenstein indicates that your self is a habitual user of language where deep meaning is not as important as social function; and Markov chains indicate that your self's use of language can be modeled at least to a rough approximation by extremely simple statistics.

So I clearly remember wondering "Am I just a kind of slightly more advanced Markov chain?"

I think this is also the unsettling core question of _Blade Runner_ : are we also artificial?

I wonder what theologians might say about this question.

<comment><USER11> We clearly possess an autopilot and an actual pilot function.

Actual piloting (critical thinking, reasoning, creativity) requires more mental effort and is much slower. Perhaps our brains are optimized to have the pilot train the autopilot (so to speak) when necessary, but otherwise leave things to the autopilot? I suppose that's why training, muscle memory, and practice are so important.

I don't think any of this is controversial but it does seem a lot more human activity runs on autopilot than we thought.

<comment> pure-awesome I'd like to contest the use of the term "actual" pilot for the the more deliberate pilot.

For some reason, we as humans seem to like thinking of our conscious / deliberate pilot as ourselves, and the subconscious / autopilot as some form of "Other" somehow cohabiting our bodies.

(I'd expect this viewpoint to be especially true for the academic / programmer crowd here on Hacker News, who stereotypically tend to be more skilled in logical / deliberate forms of thought, and comparatively lacking in the intuitive / automatic, such as social skills).

However, the subconscious is as much YOU as the part of which you are more aware, and, in fact, probably has a GREATER effect on your action. In conclusion, the autopilot is as deserving of the term "actual" pilot, as the deliberate pilot is.

<comment><USER12> You can't just say it's "as much YOU" as an argument against the autopilot analogy. A plane's autopilot is still part of the plane as well and will also likely have a greater effect on the action (of flying the plane) than the actual pilot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> To be honest, I've read plenty of articles that read like those examples: superficially they seemed to make sense, but when you pay attention to the logic behind it, it makes no sense. And those were articles written by real people, by journalists.

And even scientists often seem to write a bunch of meaningless filler that feels scientific in their papers, presumably because that kind of text needs to go in that place in their paper.

Another thing, from the article: _" Simple correlations also seem sufficient to capture most polite conversation talk, such as the weather is nice, how is your mother's illness, and damn that other political party."_

You know how hard I had to work at that? I used to be incapable of small talk or maintaining a conversation. I could talk only in those "deep structures" but struggled to put that in sentences that formed a natural part of a conversation. I worked hard at those "simple correlations"; they were not so simple for me.

<comment><USER14> A key to smalltalk is to understand the game that's being played. When you're talking about something technical, the point is to discover and deliver useful insights on the subject at hand. When you're doing smalltalk, the point is to make the other feel comfortable and accommodated, to entertain, and be entertained. Therefore, it's more about trying to understand what the other person is feeling (this is usually a matter of looking at body language, imagining what's going on in their lives) then it is about delivering useful insight. Usually, if in doubt, listening attentively and trying to work out what makes the other person tick is a productive strategy.

<comment><USER13> I've often felt like an alien anthropologist in conversations. Even if I was aware of the game and saw what's going on, I wasn't part of it. I needed an extra processing step that made me always too late to say the right thing.

I'm suddenly wondering if my problem might be related to my youngest son's speech problem. When he was 3, he couldn't speak sentences; his sentences were just 3 meaningful words in a row. He never babbled, unlike his best friend, who always babbled in long, incoherent Trumpian sentences. He got special speech therapy for half a year which helped immensely, and now, at 4, he makes excellent sentences, if a bit staccato and clumsy, and certainly without any kind of natural flow.

He never babbles, though. I think his Markov chain is broken and he replaced it with an rule based system that he reworked to produce language.

<comment><USER14> I have a feeling that an alien anthropologist approach is ultimately better than the reactive approach - I grew up with an autistic brother who was nonetheless socially capable, simply through distilling social problems into a set of hard rules. Sometimes you get edge cases and he gets into trouble, but for 90% of the time, he was actually way more socially able than I was, simply by having a better-formed understanding, less overwhelmed by immediacy and assumptions.

You need a degree of alien anthropology to be able to respond to what's really important in a conversation - an extremely socially capable deaf friend of mine pointed out, for instance, that body language is more important than verbal content in most casual interactions. These kind of insights are kinda hard to gain from a neurotypical, non-deaf perspective like mine, because you're a bit like a fish that doesn't realize he's swimming in water.

<comment><USER13> Oh, body language! My 4 year old son is extremely expressive with his face and posture, possibly because of his verbal problems. Even when he could barely talk at all, he was very good at expressing what he wanted or needed. He's so expressive that I've always thought he should become an actor.

My older son, who is verbally very strong, is often nearly expressionless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Most normal people decide at some point that math is not for them in order not to embarrass themselves by claiming competence in a domain in which they are not confident at all. And hence, compared to nerds or seriously talented individuals who can confidently claim this status, they never spend much time on math and eventually seriously lack skills even in simple logical reasoning. This is basically math anxiety. Nerds, on the other hand, are incentivized to gain social status via math skills as a potential escape of their low status. I think this mainly explains the author's observations that these two skills are not correlated very much, basically an introversion vs extroversion polarization based on social expectations and incentives. Math is also intimidating, so I'd imagine someone with some experience in it also develops overall higher inhibition and hence is a worse verbalizer.

There is a huge literature on the relation between logical reasoning and verbalizing, which the author sadly ignores.

<comment><USER16> >Nerds, on the other hand, are incentivized to gain social status via math skills as a potential escape of their low status.

This is certainly not how I approached math, and it's the first I've heard anyone say it, even.

Instead, I'm good at math because I _enjoyed_ it. It's simple and logical and my mind worked really well in that way. There was never anything standing in my way of learning math, so I always just picked up any new math easily. Later, because I was already so good at math (and so many people were bad at it) I sought out more math courses as a way for more easy A grades.

Never was it a conscious effort to set up my career or social status.

<comment><USER15> Some individuals are perhaps purely intrinsicly motivated, but I think it's a very tiny minority. I also think there is a good chance that intrinsic motivation itself is a status enhancing adaptation, evolved by runaway selection. So ultimately, you are executing this adaptation whether you want or not, much like this fish carefully creating beautiful patterns in the sand, not knowing why he is doing it. It's all about sex.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B91tozyQs9M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B91tozyQs9M)

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

<comment><USER17> If nerds were pursuing math to get status they would quit when they got absolutely no status.

<comment><USER18> But they do get status. With their teachers. With their parents. And, probably the most important, with their peers, aka other nerds.

Damn I'd even expect most "cool kids" having more respect for someone better at math (all else being equal), even if their social context won't allow them to show this in any form.

<comment><USER16> Being good at math got me some "kudos" occasionally, but _nothing_ like being good at almost anything else. Art (music, writing, singing) was way better to be good at. Even other nerdy things like spelling bees and programmer got _way_ more acclaim than math.

Math, instead, got mostly derision from other kids and little to no respect from teachers or parents. No, "cool kids" never had even an ounce of respect for math nerds. If they secretly had any respect for them, they certainly never showed it.

And what's the point of trying to gain respect that nobody expresses? It's certainly not something that would be worth pursuing just to get that respect.

<comment><USER15> Long-term planning/deferred gratification. You were setting up a career as a source of status later in life.

<comment><USER17> > _Long-term planning /deferred gratification. You were setting up a career as > a source of status later in life._

It sounds like you're tying yourself up in knots to explain something that everybody already understands. Math is intrinsically fun, but only if you can cut through the ruinously bad educational system and the difficulty of getting started.

<comment><USER15> Such intrinsic interest to that extent was sexually selected for, so we're doing it only because of that. That's all I'm saying.

Intrinsic motivation makes sense to learn about the world to some extent, but there was not much to learn for hunter-gatherers to survive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Whatever ability IQ tests and math tests measure, I believe that lacking that ability doesn't have any effect on one's ability to make a good social impression or even to "seem smart" in conversation."

It's funny that he uses the phrase "seem smart" when we humans can't give a hard definition of intelligence. In the quote he makes it seem like intelligence is coupled with IQ and mathematical ability yet concedes to the thought that one could "sound smart" in language. He also says those same people could be creative, funny, and relatable so why not just define different metrics do intelligence here and say that they actually are smart (albeit in different ways). I can assure you no one would "sound smart" when discussing advanced mathematical theories if their grammar was bad and no one understood the branch of mathematics they were in (a counter example where one could be smart through IQ and mathematical ability metrics but not be able to generate coherent speech).

<comment><USER19> Practical intelligence is clearly multidimensional, and there's no reason why someone who scores well on one dimension should also score well on the others.

Any suggestion that talent-for-math = general-intelligence is actually rather dumb. Ditto for assumptions about poor math skills, which can easily be a product of poor teaching rather than unusually low native ability.

If IQ tests measure anything, it's raw mental speed and memory - <USER2> traits, but not nearly enough to draw a bounding box around general intelligence, which also includes abilities such as intuitive modelling, creative originality, and informal inference.

As the cliche goes, smart people can do stupid things in at least some situations.

Raw high IQ is just as likely to get you to wrong conclusions quickly as it is to give you useful predictions. If your modelling skills don't give you a good working model of the situation you're in, you're going to have a bad time.

Outside of core STEM, modelling depends on social and cultural experience and contextual training. If you don't have those, you're going to be handicapped even if you have a stratospheric IQ.

<comment><USER20> > there's no reason why someone who scores well on one dimension should also > score well on the others.

Except that this is literally what happens; this correlation between seemingly unrelated cognitive tests is referred to as "the g-factor". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_\(psychometrics\))

To be fair, this doesn't actually contradict most of the rest of what you say. But this correlation does suggest that there are some shared factors (whether innate, or developed, or both) that affect many or all kinds of "practical intelligence"; one might reasonably call these factors "general intelligence".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Whatever ability IQ tests and math tests measure, I believe that lacking > that ability doesn't have any effect on one's ability to make a good social > impression or even to "seem smart" in conversation.

Ever wonder why incompetent people get promoted? Or why consultants can sell projects using only buzzwords? Ever had that strange conversation where two colleagues are seemingly discussing something absurd, obvious, or impossible, but they think they're being clever?

<comment><USER22> While I agree to some degree this also sounds overly dramatic.

First, there's a ton of evidence that people also get promoted/appreciated for the right reasons, not just because they're a fancy Markov chain of buzzwords (example: serial entrepreneurs, like Musk).

Second, there's underlying reality that eventually comes crushing people that fail to meet the expectations that they had built around themselves.

<comment><USER23> >First, there's a ton of evidence that people also get promoted/appreciated for the right reasons

You're gonna have to post some of that evidence please.

<comment><USER22> Sure, the correlations between X1:{IQ, conscientiousness} and Y:{income, educational attainment} are stronger than between, say X2:{agreeableness, height, race} and Y.

Y are examples of what people want (wealth). X1 are examples of "valid" reasons to be recognized as useful and therefore attain wealth, X2 are examples of "less valid" or "completely invalid" reasons.

<comment><USER23> Your opinions are not evidence no matter how much you dress them up in notation. I asked for evidence as I could use it. Self-discipline is a better indicator for income and education than IQ.[0] So I know for a fact that your a priori fact is not valid. It's all good to share opinions, but please do not present them as reality when they are _not_.

[0] [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2005.01...](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2005.01641.x)

<comment><USER22> Oh well there's a misunderstanding. Conscientiousness is the psychometric term for self-discipline (not 100% the same, but extremely close): [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientiousness](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientiousness)

And I didn't bother to point out particular studies validating my claims because much of this has been known to humans for close to a 100 years. In the same vein as linking to a proof of the undecidability of the halting problem would be excess references given the nature of HN community.

If you want an example study look at the "Health and longevity" section on the above linked Wikipedia page.

Or to directly support my thesis about X1 and X2 separation, first look at Wikipedia IQ page and the "Social correlations" section, it's generally around 0.5: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient)

Or look at your own link.

Second, height is correlated to about 0.29 with various measures of success: [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Daniel_Cable/publicatio...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Daniel_Cable/publication/8545837_The_Effect_of_Physical_Height_on_Workplace_Success_and_Income_Preliminary_Test_of_a_Theoretical_Model/links/00b495390a8394aea7000000.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Interesting. BTW I thought it was ironic that in the first part of the post the author points out the lack of logical connections between sentences in GPT2-gerenated texts, while in the second part she changes the topic to performance on IQ and math tests, which have nothing to do with how well people can detect the failure-modes of GPT2 - after all, people with high IQ or math scores can easily be inattentive when reading texts. Maybe this post itself was generated by GPT2?!?!?!?!? (or GPT...3?!?!?)

</comment><comment><USER25> > what the median student actually learns seems to mostly be a set of low > order correlations. They know what words to use, which words tend to go > together, which combinations tend to have positive associations, and so on.

This really resonates with my experience, especially with people I work with.

I hope in the future people are trained to tell these sorts of generated texts from real texts. I think including some test for this would greatly improve our hiring procedure

<comment><USER26> When I was young, I thought I was just naturally "gifted" (I was in the "gifted" program in grade school after all, so there was that). I figured that I was one of the smart people who could figure out anything and not one of the dumb people who had to work to understand things. I felt this way for a while, right up until I ran into calculus. Man, calculus chewed me up and spit me out. I had this sort of epiphany when I realized that, no matter how smart I was or was not, there were things out there that were difficult for me to understand and there may well be things out there that may be impossible for me to understand. I got to be a bit more humble after that - but I interact with people who, I believe, have never had that experience or, worse, ignored it: if I can't figure it out, and I know I'm smart, it must be pointless, so I'll ignore it. I depressingly suspect these people of mistaking need to concentrate with stupidity, regardless of the topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology, we are > not releasing the trained model.

Doesn't that go against the mission of OpenAI? I thought they were about making technology publicly accessible to everyone so that it can't be abused by only a few people. This makes them seem more like a business with proprietary data.

<comment><USER28> Their mission is to build safe AI. It's pretty clear how this model can be abused and I am glad they are not releasing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> So the next corollary to this would be - if you wanted to sneak information past people, what would you need to do to their concentration in order to achieve that?

<comment><USER19> Politics, economics, and religion have been playing this game for centuries. Advertising and PR are relatively recent newcomers, but operating in the same space. If you want to know how it's done, look at how the experts do it.

In outline you create the simplest possible narratives with a strong emotional kick - preferably one that induces anxiety in the receiver, and/or blames an outgroup for all the bad things that are happening.

Then you can sell yourself as the solution to the anxiety and fear.

The narrative itself can be nonsense. It needs a certain superficial narrative coherence, but that's all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> >I've noticed that I cannot tell, from casual conversation, whether someone is intelligent in the IQ sense.

For me a giveaway is both how quickly and how well they take in what I'm saying; that is, how much processing gets done? E.g one of my really intelligent friends would have already connected what I'm saying with what they know about me, and would have already guessed at what I'll say next. This isn't just the domain of intelligent people, but for me, how quickly it happens is telltale sign. Intelligence can be blinding as much as it is enlightening, though, and I prize kindness and compassion far more than intelligence, which our culture puts on a pedestal.

<comment><USER31> I'd consider it more a sign if they were able to do that and not know you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> > The point is, if you skim text, you miss obvious absurdities. The point is > OpenAI HAS achieved the ability to pass the Turing test against humans on > autopilot.

The Turning test requires an ongoing conversation between an interrogator and a subject. I think even an interrogator "on autopilot" (whatever that means) would pretty quickly notice if a subject's responses contain "obvious absurdities".

<comment><USER33> Just a random associated though: I wonder if the game of Mafia [1] is somewhat better way to discern intelligences, than the Turing test.

E.g. imagine a game where mafia (AIs) can eliminate actual humans from the game by convincing their fellow humans, that eliminated people are actually the mafia (e.g. AIs).

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_%28party_game%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_%28party_game%29)

<comment><USER34> So-so. But it makes emotion a lot more involved. And faking emotions might be hard for humans, it is trivial for AI, and also easy to appeal to our empathy.

<comment><USER33> The point of the game would be to eliminate AIs, not mafia. No in-game "nights", just a free for all discussion with periodic elimination rounds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I got more intense results from intentionally shallow models such as only training on the work of a single author but then letting the shallow training run for long periods. What I got was sometimes useless but sometimes amazing stuff. It came up with a strange kind of plotline and even characters that were kind of like the source author but it was still a unique piece of work. It has its own voice that I think you lose when the model uses too many sources.

<comment><USER33> Care to share a link to the code of the training setup?

</comment></comment><comment> d--b See "thinking fast and slow" [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow)

</comment><comment><USER36> An excerpt from Anathem (Neal Stephenson, 2008):

> "Early in the Reticulum — thousands of years ago — it became almost useless > because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading > information," [he] said. "... [Crap] — a technical term. So crap filtering > became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses > came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They > began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their > products to filter that crap back out. ... But it didn't really take off > until the military got interested. ... Artificial Inanity systems of > enormous sophistication and power were built ..."

</comment><comment><USER37> A while ago, before I realised the obvious truth that arguing with people on Facebook isn't exactly productive, it dawned on me that many people mistake the ability to form a grammatically correct sentence for thinking. It's nice to see a more formal argument for that theory.

<comment><USER26> An awful lot of people think the grammatically correct part is optional, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I agree. I tend to skim through articles and even books, and that's no good. Instead of the ten books I "read" last year, had I put in effortful attention, focused and thought through only two books last year, I would have come out ahead.

<comment><USER39> Thats very true, it's also true that most books don't demand a high level of attention. Most media in general is designed to require zero effort on the part of the consumer.

I just worked through 'Gravity's Rainbow' and was very mindful and careful in my reading. It was a great experience, but at the same time it was fairly boring in comparison to something like social media.

<comment><USER40> "Reader, Come Home" by Maryanne Wolf is a good book on the topic of how new technology influences our reading habits.

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35887237-reader-come- hom...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35887237-reader-come-home)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Slightly off topic but I found contemplating this possibility amusing:

Would it be possible that once we manage to eliminate obvious logical and contextual mistakes in the generated texts, they could be used to discover alternative (and consistent) views of the world (e.g. about art, philosophy...)?.

The AI would be able to create a huge number of theories and it's possible that some of them would be both interesting and original.

It would be a kind of restrained (restrained because we would prune mistakes we do not want the AI to make and wouldn't just be a random typing) infinite monkeys way of exploring theories about the world.

It would be even funnier if we could filter the subset of generated tests that is testable :)

<comment><USER42> Sure, but there is an easier way: just read what other cultures have come up with!

They usually went into great detail on the matter, and it has the advantage of being _actually_ based on someone's real experience of the world, rather than just randomly aligning with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> It this related to feeling stupid in conversations? I think most people just auto-generate a lot of nonsense which throws me off. Maybe other people can somehow guess what the point was behind the nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER44> Some of these generated examples still make sense to me:

>> Aragorn drew his sword, and the Battle of Fangorn was won. As they marched out through the thicket the morning mist cleared, and the day turned to dusk.

> Yeah, day doesn't turn to dusk in the morning.

I interpreted this to mean a literary jump in time, from morning to day to dusk, in one sentence.

So, the text itself doesn't bother me. What scares me is the ability for an AI to overwhelm us with a volume of content such that the signal to noise ratio is exponentially amplified through massive amounts of auto-generated content.

</comment><comment><USER45> I wonder - could this be used to ensure attention?

Add some randomly generated sentences to a text that students need to learn and then ask them to identify these sentences in the text.

</comment><comment><USER46> GPT-2 & human writers with a poor grasp of logic both produce content that might seem sensical on the surface, but ultimately nonsensical at a deeper level.

Hopefully we can find a way to counteract this in a systematic way. Perhaps the trick would be to punish'low order correlation' text in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER47> > But if you ask an exam question where the deep structure answer differs from > answer you'd guess looking at low order correlations, most students usually > give the wrong answer.

Every kid knows about these. They're called trick questions, and they've been fooling students at all levels for centuries.

</comment><comment><USER48> > I've noticed that I cannot tell, from casual conversation, whether someone > is intelligent in the IQ sense.

This is because casual conversation is predicated on EQ and not IQ. In order to be able to ascertain IQ you need to actually test for it, opportunities to demonstrate it aren't going to come up randomly.

This should stare smart people in the face, but it seems we have a blind spot for the general uselessness of our own intelligence in normal situations.

The author goes on to discuss interviews, and I'd argue that EQ is generally more important in thriving and producing on a team than IQ is as well, with a few important exceptions.

<comment><USER49> Firstly -- Is there even actually a standardized/normed EQ test?

Secondly -- Is there research to validate it as a predictive measure of success?

<comment><USER48> I'm not aware of any, no. EQ is still a somewhat fuzzy concept. It needs to be more well-defined before it can become a fruitful research topic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The examples he presents of false text can all basically be discriminated from human generated text by looking for logical consistency. I wonder if this will be something attention focuses to within schools. With all these fake news articles, spam emails, and fake viral images I think this new generation should be trained to recognize these things early on. Even if we can't make discriminating classifiers through technology as of yet, we can hopefully train ourselves to discriminate between fake and real media in the meantime.

<comment><USER50> > Even if we can't make discriminating classifiers through technology as of > yet

Doesn't the existence of GANs restrict the space where discriminators can win to NP problems?

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Not quite correct: Publius Ovidius Naso ("the one with the nose") Looks like AI > human blogger already.

</comment><comment><USER52> English is not my native language. Can someone please explain to me the title of the article. I read the article and I get the point, although, is that syntactically correct english ?!

<comment><USER53> (Humans (who are not concentrating)) are not (general intelligences)

<comment><USER26> English is my native language and I still don't understand the title even after you explained it, but the article was interesting anyway. Maybe "Humans who are not concentrating may as well be dumb humans?"

<comment><USER54> Humans who are concentrating are acting with general intelligence. Humans who are not concentrating are acting with lesser kinds of intelligence. The title is pointing out that human intelligence is not always the 'general intelligence' that is supposedly unique to humans. It is grammatically correct, but you have to understand that "general intelligence" is a term of art.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> That's the real danger of AI, not the "raise of machines". It gives theoretical foundation for saying "humans who are not X are not Y".

</comment><comment> pure-awesome > I've taught public school teachers, who were incredibly bad at formal > mathematical reasoning (I know, because I graded their tests), to the point > that I had not realized humans could be that bad at math — but it had no > effect on how they came across in friendly conversation after hours. They > didn't seem "dopey" or "slow", they were witty and engaging and warm.

> Whatever ability IQ tests and math tests measure, I believe that lacking > that ability doesn't have any effect on one's ability to make a good social > impression or even to "seem smart" in conversation.

> If "human intelligence" is about reasoning ability, the capacity to detect > whether arguments make sense, then you simply do not need human intelligence > to create a linguistic style or aesthetic that can fool our pattern- > recognition apparatus if we don't concentrate on parsing content.

In the context of the article, these are troubling assertions for the author to be making. They seem to be implying that people who struggle with mathematics are fundamentally less intelligent that those who don't, in a way that cannot be picked up by chatting to them.

If I understand correctly, the author furthermore seems to be saying that a GPT-2 style text generator will sooner be able to match the conversation of such a person than of someone more well-versed in formal mathematical reasoning.

This seems factually wrong to me; I think the author vastly underestimates complexity of the subconscious processing that people do in order to come to the viewpoints they hold, and to transform ideas into coherent speech.

As a related point / analogy, the process by which humans do conscious mathematics (such as arithmetic) is inherently slow and inefficient, whilst at the same time it manages to perform incredibly advanced "calculations" in the process of being a highly-advanced motion-control system.

I posit that the human process for synthesizing ideas is happening primarily in this more complex underlying format, which we are still some way off from being able to simulate (though I do believe we will be able to, eventually).

The author's conclusion seems a bit like seeing that computers are better at arithmetic than humans are and thus concluding that they will soon surpass us in intelligence.

Furthermore, the author's reasoning seems demeaning to people who struggle with mathematics and explicit logical reasoning, and is a few steps from a claim that such a person is inherently less "conscious".

To claim that a strong grasp of formal reasoning is necessary for those in a position of policy and decision making is one thing. But to assert (without substantial evidence to back it up) that someone with low mathematical-logical reasoning ability has speech which is significantly easier to emulate because it fundamentally contains less content seems to be simply a form of intellectual/academic self aggrandizement.

<comment><USER56> Being good at math (here I am talking more than just arithmetics) usually is a very good proxy for being good at manipulating abstractions. And, imho, that's at least one of the cornerstones of the intelligence.

<comment><USER57> The issue that the GP is pointing at is that the ability to reason in the abstract the author is implicitly stating to be _the_ marker of intelligence.

It may be one form of intelligence, but certainly a brilliant writer, a gifted musician, or an exceptional artist can all be considered intelligent even if their ability to grok logical constructs is limited compared to those that spend their waking hours doing just that, and almost certainly have been honing this skill for their entire lives.

<comment><USER58> I think the second essential part of the GP's marker for intelligence is the ability to form sentences that convey information, and do it efficiently.

Ability at abstract reasoning is invisible to outsiders unless the bot can also transmit their information to others, as well as understand transmissions from others and react appropriately (constructively or entertainingly).

AFAIK, up to now, none of the measures of synthetic intelligence have tried to measure the flow of information from and into a bot -- its efficiency, coherence, or relevance. I think the rise of master aper bots like GPT-2 and Q&A bots like Watson that beautifully model syntax and rhythm yet no semantics may finally force this issue to the surface. To wit, information matters more than style.

Frankly, I welcome the arrival of bot overlords like these. Maybe they'll motivate us humans to pay more attention to the meat of what we hear, read, and say, and therein act less robotic ourselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Don't we know this already from Kahneman (Thinking, fast and slow)?

"Humans who are thinking fast are not general intelligences."

</comment><comment><USER60> How did the question answering occur? The computer correctly found that the race lasted seven days??

</comment><comment><USER61> tl;dr: APPLY YOURSELF

</comment><comment><USER62> L. Ron Hubbard spent some time in Arizona in the early 1950s, when legendary hypnotist Milton Ericson was lecturing.

Ericson described a "confusion technique" that is in evidence in lectures that Hubbard gave later in Philadelphia. You'd catch him saying things that somebody might say in a lecture but that people don't. For instance he would continuously say something wrong and 'correct' himself. (e.g. "The Japanese Alphabet has 48 letters, or was it 46 letters?"; quotes around 'correct' because it was all bullshit anyway)

Have people listen to lectures like that with a malfunctioning tape recorder for hours with high social pressure and structured communication, that will turn their brains to mush. No wonder Scientology practice is twice as harmful per hour as what other cults do.</comment>


Show HN: Kontext – Learn new words by watching movies in a foreign language - <AUTHOR> https://kontext.xyz/ <comment><AUTHOR> Most of you actually don't get it, so I will try to explain it without this marketing-ish language which I used on the landing page - obviously not very well.

Consider you already know English well enough to consume your favorite shows in the language. We all do this to maintain our knowledge, improve our understanding or pronunciation by listening, or just to hear the show in its original language.

Imagine you hear words and expressions, even full, shorter sentences which you don't understand. It doesn't really matter, because you understand the story as a whole, but you obviously miss an opportunity to learn new words. This is the moment when you can pick up your phone and press the bookmark icon next to the subtitle line, to get back to it later. That was scenario (use-case) A.

Or, you might not understand longer sentences, even complete dialogues for a few seconds. This is when you can use the app to see the translations for that actual part of the movie. That was scenario (use-case) B.

The app promises that it "helps you understand your show better and allows you to quickly save expressions you want to remember". It don't want you to learn a new language. Actually, it assumes that you know the language well enough to watch a movie in it.

It wants to help you to learn new words. Do you know why you don't learn new words easily after you reach a specific knowledge level? Because there are less and less of them, and you don't hear them again and again, and you don't recall them. This is how you learn new words in school when you start a foreign language.

So I started to build this app for myself to be able to grab new words out of kontext (do you see what I did here?), and re-read them later again until I finally learn them.

<comment><USER2> I thought most of it made sense. However:

 _Open the translation

If you don't mind the distraction, you can also check the translation of the current subtitle line while you are watching the movie._

I would shorten that. For starters, take out the intro phrase "if you don't mind the distraction." It's an unnecessary distraction.

My mother says she learned English by watching TV. She had less of an accent than most German immigrants I knew growing up.

I think this is a great idea.

<comment><USER3> I learned spoken english by purely watching english movies & tv shows, initially with subtitles & re-watching again until I hear & understand all dialogues, & later other movies without subs.

Later, I started working with some British co-workers & socializing also, & developed a British accent. I am Indian/Punjabi by birth & hav spent most of my life in India only.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's a cool idea, but unfortunately subtitles are notoriously inaccurate. Even in normal translations, you lose context and meaning due to cultural and structural differences in the language whose intents are difficult or even impossible to preserve. Add in the space and time constraints of subtitles, and you're basically forced to provide a bad translation of what's actually happening. This is especially true for poetry, lyrics, and jokes. And that's of course assuming that the translator is any good at it, or hasn't inserted politically motivated inaccuracies (most commonly with sexuality for translations to English). I've seen some HORRIBLY inaccurate subtitles and dubs, even by professionals ( _cough_ Akira _cough_ ), even to the point where the "translation" is a complete fabrication in some places.

Movies with subtitles are a nice aide, but to properly learn a language, you must learn it IN the language, WITH the attached culture.

<comment><USER5> Thoughts on subtitles also in the language you're learning? My sense is that this helps with my comprehension, but it may also be a crutch.

Unfortunately, they're no help on Netflix, because they apparently farmed dubbing and subtitles out to two different teams that came up with independent translations.

<comment><USER6> That's a popular beginner complaint on /r/learnspanish, where I try to help people, but it's a weird fixation.

Deviating every once in a while from 1:1 dub:sub matchup is not even close to an obstacle to language learning. In fact, if anything, you hear and read two different ways to express the same thing at once.

If you depend on 1:1 matchup, I'm not sure you were consuming either dubs nor subs in a way that's all that productive to language learning. Consider relaxing and getting used to fuzzier comprehension which is necessary for transcending to conversational speed+slang.

Also, I recommend graduating to reading books ASAP to avoid languishing in the limbo of Netflix for language learning.

<comment><USER5> The ones I've tried aren't deviating every once in a while; they're using completely different translations.

I find that challenging because I've focused on reading for so long that I'm severely under-developed on my understanding of vernacular, spoken language. The upshot of that being, if the subtitles and audio differ significantly, my brain handles it about the same way as if I'm watching with English subtitles: The ears get disconnected from the brain, and I default to reading without really listening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can't get it to load and the "about" isn't terribly informative, but (I think) I made a proof of concept of a similar thing. Mine is an offline video player that shows dual language subtitles. It has modes for skipping non- dialog sections, repeating the same dialog section, and slowing down playback.

What killed it, though, was a near impossibility of finding a movie that wasn't edited differently in each language (causing at least one of the audio track or language tracks to be out of sync or otherwise unmergeable). Maybe that was just an issue with Mandarin and other languages have better availability, but for me it ended up just being an endless swamp of comparing subtitle files to see if they were different, screwing around with time offsets, and eventually giving up. The player itself worked, albeit with a terrible UI, I just couldn't find more than a handful (OK, actually only one: Lost in Thailand) movies + dual sets of matching subtitle tracks to use it with.

If anybody has a solution to this I'd love to be able to use it again and even willing to post a cleaned up version if there is interest.

I also had vague thoughts of looking at the youtube API to see if there's a solution there for videos that already have multiple subtitle languages, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Most of the information is on the landing page now. Congratulations for your app, but no, mine is not for that. Please read my comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17627899](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17627899)

Also, take a look at this, it is related to your problem: [https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/8ue04x/le...](https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/8ue04x/learn_new_words_by_watching_movies_in_a_foreign/e1g1ufk/)

If you still have time, please explain what happened exactly, how and where didn't it load for you?

<comment><USER7> Same as Inanek2. Looks like maybe related to this (Firefox 52.8 on Linux, from China, via VPN):

Blocked loading mixed active content "[http://www.opensubtitles.org/en/captcha2/redirect-%7Cen%7Cdo...](http://www.opensubtitles.org/en/captcha2/redirect-%7Cen%7Cdownload%7Csrc- api%7Cvrf-19bf0c5a%7Cfilead%7C1953178609.gz"\[Learn) More] app.kontext.xyz Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at [https://dl.opensubtitles.org/en/download/src- api/vrf-19bf0c5...](https://dl.opensubtitles.org/en/download/src- api/vrf-19bf0c5a/filead/1953178609.gz). (Reason: CORS header 'Access-Control- Allow-Origin' missing). (unknown) Error: XHR error vendor.c1d3cea4dc48e57eff24.js:333:26904 GET [https://www.google- analytics.com/collect](https://www.google-analytics.com/collect) [HTTP/2.0 200 OK 355ms]

<comment><AUTHOR> From the error message, it seems that it really didn't load, Inanek2 had different problem (I think).

That "captcha" part in the request to OpenSubtitles.org is strange, I will ask them about it. You should try it later, maybe it is some sort of rate-limiting as a lot of people started using the app after I posted on HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I guess it's broken? I picked Chinese, then Shutter Island, then at the "Start the movie now, then press start here." prompt the play button didn't do anything.

That said, I've found this implementation to be really great: [https://support.viki.com/hc/en-us/articles/231829048-How- to-...](https://support.viki.com/hc/en-us/articles/231829048-How-to-use-Learn- Mode-)

Although not all movies have all the extra subtitle work done to support learn mode.

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you clicked on the play button? Well... it is not a button. The black one is the start button, which says start.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> As someone who learned English purely from Hollywood movies, I can confirm its a solid way to learn a language. I even picked up the accent to the extent that I'm frequently asked if I'm American - even though I never lived in an English-speaking country.

It may not be for everyone though. The only reason why it worked for me is because I've seen so many US movies and TV shows. I started with subtitles and gradually moved to watching without them (though I had lots of difficulties understanding everything, especially in the beginning). I'd argue its a great way to learn the little language 'quirks', expressions, idioms, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

How much time did it take?

<comment><USER9> Hard to say really, as I didn't exactly start with the intention of learning the language, I just liked the movies. If I had to guess, I'd say probably a couple of years to get to a fluent, above-average level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cool app!

Unfortunately, I'm not sure how useful it would be for language learning. I've been using the Fluent Forever approach and whenever I've dipped back into "translation" style methods like Duolingo it feels counterproductive, like I'm tying English words to Spanish words rather than creating a direct connection between the Spanish word and the object or concept that it represents.

I like the idea of subtitles _in your target language_ while watching a show or movie in your target language but that's usually available without third party help.

<comment><USER11> Care to explain what is Fluent Forever approach and how do I download their app?

<comment><USER10> I would probably stick to Anki, I'm a little suss about the app. The website is [https://fluent-forever.com](https://fluent-forever.com) and the book outlines a method for using Anki to learn languages. The approach is to start with pronunciation first, then work on phonics, then vocabulary, then grammar rather than learning a bunch of canned sentences.

The book mentions moving on to movies and tv shows when you have a decent grasp of grammar and know the ~800 most common words in your target language. I have a trip to Spain coming up and my plan is to spend the last two weeks before I go watching movies and reading/listening to audiobooks in Spanish. (Listening so I can follow along while reading.)

I'm very happy with my progress so far after having little luck with Rosetta Stone and Duolingo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The UX doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It's totally separate from the movie itself, I have to click any one line to see a translation (which doesn't mean I'd want to "save it), clicking a line doesn't pause the actual movie which I had to start elsewhere... I'm failing to see how this is an effective language teaching tool.

I think there's something there in leveraging movies/tv to teach language, as well as leveraging the existing subtitles. But it probably would need a deeper understanding of the languages themselves... for example being able to even map a given word to the translation versus an entire sentence (and perhaps being able to expand further).

That said, one of my best friends growing up learned English at age 11 by watching American TV. She was from Poland, and had no formal teaching. Several years later not only did she know English fluently, she has a perfect American accent. It helps that she was young and motivated (and really smart).

<comment><AUTHOR> Please read my comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17627899](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17627899)

The app is working differently because it solves a different problem. It actually need a deeper understanding of the language as you just wrote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd rather just watch content with proper subtitles in the language I'm trying to learn. Say I'm learning German, I could either watch some original movie in German with English subtitles, or watch an English movie with German subtitles. This problem seems already solved.

<comment><USER14> That was my thought too... why not just watch a foreign film? Those even take place in the country you want to learn about.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wanted to solve a different problem. Please read my comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17627899](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17627899)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Cool stuff, I've had similar ideas but can never figure out the best approach to go about it. Just coming up with an approach that makes some kind of sense is an achievement in itself!

How do you go about syncing the subtitles? For huge films it's generally not a bother as the top subtitles will often be from the same source (and therefore follow similar formatting rules, if nothing else) but you can get pretty wide deviations when you get down to things with fewer subtitle options available.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Yes, actually it is the 3rd iteration on the implementation of the idea.

Handpicked movies are subtitle pairs which were selected carefully to be in sync (both of them are webrip/webdl/nf). The sync itself is done by simple intersection, and the user can delay the subtitles to each other by an offset value (available clicking on the cog icon). It can help fixing the differences like the first subtitle file includes the intro/theme song, but the second doesn't. If the cut is totally different, it just won't work. It can be avoided by following the hints for choosing the subtitles which are available on the search page.

Also there is an interesting idea which I will consider in the future: it is possible to search on OpenSubtitles.org by fingerprint. Those who are watching something download from torrent, could search basically by the movie file itself, and they will get a list of subtitles which will match perfectly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Great work! How does this work? Do you map the subtitle timings?

</comment><comment><USER17> I like the approach - might try it out - even i need to look at two screens at the same time ;) Maybe consider to have the app in a pop-out window, which I could overlay on my Netflix browser tab?

One thing I noticed, Query Strings contain the SRT filename, indicating the content could come from an unofficial, pirated source, such as "Se7en.1995.REMASTERED.1080p.BluRay.6CH.ShAaNiG.srt" ...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

The app doesn't work like that. Please read my comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17627899](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17627899)

Yes, the subtitle files coming from OpenSubtitles.org, they have unofficial and official subtitles too. If you use the search in the app, you can select the subtitles you want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I guess you start the movie on Netflix and mute it, and then read the subtitles taken from 'Open Subtitles DB' The UI using a list is a bit jarring, I would prefer a smooth scoll, like a very large page scolling down, not a listbox populating.

"Find more movies in German" button not working as expected, takes you to a screen where you have to choose your language.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, the app is not for that. Please read my comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17627899](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17627899)

Thank you for your honest opinion about the UI. I'm experimenting with it, I will try out what you advised.

Find more movies in... buttons just continue to the search page, and it has this one-time native language selector page before that. From the landing page you can only see the handpicked subtitles, but you can also search for any movie in the app itself (on the search page).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's a pretty cool idea I think and is a great adjunct to traditional language learning. Maybe there could be an API so that open-source media players would be able to show the text on the screen together with the video. Hope you make it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

There are other apps for that, it doesn't meant to do that. Please read my comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17627899](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17627899)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wasn't able to figure out how it works. I guess you start the subtitles at the same time as the show/movie? --Not sure how I could possibly learn this way. I cant read Japanese, so what good is seeing Japanese subtitles?

<comment><AUTHOR> Please read my comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17627899](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17627899)

Hope it helps, and maybe you will try it out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I find it hilarious to put on a cheesy American comedy that I've seen before on the TV in a foreign language. I wouldn't watch it actively but it's something nice to have on while I clean up or do dishes.

<comment><AUTHOR> As others commented here, you can even learn a whole new language in a way like this! But without the cleaning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The thought of building something like this has definitely crossed my mind while trying to learn Spanish. Looks cool, I will definitely try it out!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Let me know what do you think after you tested it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm getting [https://i.imgur.com/NrcA5v6.png](https://i.imgur.com/NrcA5v6.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> Is JavaScript disabled?

<comment><USER23> I had "3rd party scripts" disabled in uBlock. After enabling it, looks OK.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the landing page is not part of the bundled Vue.js app, it loads Vue as a standalone script from a 3rd party - from a CDN specifically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Cool, I'll try this out later! Would be nice if you could convert the Chinese characters to Pinyin, which is far easier to learn

<comment><USER7> I have a python script that will convert chinese character .srt files to pinyin. It's not perfect (sometimes doesn't recognize word boundaries correctly and puts spaces in the wrong spots). But it's good enough for me to tolerate watching a movie with the output. Send me an email (in my profile) if you want it.</comment></comment>