What If the Moon Orbited at the Same Height as the ISS? - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/05/19/close_encounter_what_if_the_moon_orbited_much_closer_to_earth.html <comment><USER2> This is not correct:

"Earth's Roche limit, the distance from the Earth where its tides could break another object apart"

It's a very common error. This limit is for an object "held together by gravity alone"! The moon is not held together by gravity alone - the dust on the surface is, but the rocks in the center are all fused together.

Additionally since they assume the moon will continue to have a synchronized orbit (the same side always faces us) it won't feel the tides in the same way. It would feel some constant stretching, but not the severe flexing caused by rotation.

The closer side would fall "down" and the far side would fall "up". Only the center would be in free fall. I suspect the moon could survive that - but I'm not sure.

If not, it would spread out into rings.

There's other errors too: In a situation like this the Earth would also synchronize it's orbit. A day would speed up and the moon pushed higher until the two matched. This would stop the flood, burn scenario in the article.

<comment><USER3> If the moon was orbiting the earth faster than the Earth's rotation, then the effects of tides would increase the Earth's rotation and decrease the moon's orbital velocity. This would result in the moon descending.

<comment><USER2> Yes, you are correct. So I wrote this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7769520](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7769520)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The friction of the tidal forces would generate enourmous amonts of heat, and that energy would be taken from the rotation of the earth and moon, causing both the moon and earth to be locked into synchronous rotation. At least if the moon did not fall down on earth as it probbaly would if going this low. This would cause the moon to stay in a fixed spot in the sky. Since the area under the moon would be in shadow from it most or all of the time, this would be an extra region with polar climate, that could bind up large portion of the earths water as ice, making the earth a lot dryer elsewhere. That is provided that the water did not boil away in the process of locking the rotation.

<comment><USER5> For a real example see Pluto and its largest moon Charon. And as you probably already know, our moon IS tidally locked to us ;)

Then, there's the question "What if the earth was a torus?": [http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2014/02/torusearth.html](http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2014/02/torusearth.html)

<comment><USER6> The Moon is tidally locked to us, be we are not locked to it. Because the Earth rotates faster than the Moon orbits, tidal interaction between the two trades Earth's rate for the Moon's orbital velocity. The Earth is slowing down (and if this process continued long enough, would become tidally locked to the Moon) while the Moon is getting further and further away.

If the Moon were in LEO this process would be reversed; the Moon would be spinning up the Earth while losing orbital velocity.

<comment><USER2> > If the Moon were in LEO this process would be reversed; the Moon would be > spinning up the Earth while losing orbital velocity.

The situation is not reversible like that. Angular momentum is linear, but energy is to the power of two.

So there is more energy than momentum here. You loose energy from fictional heating on the tides and energy as the rotation of the earth "pushes" the moon away.

But if you reverse it than as the moon slows down, it goes lower, but as it does so it orbits even faster than before, meaning it would have to speed up the Earth even more.

So rather than having extra energy (i.e. heat) you don't have enough, so instead of tidally locking to the Earth, the moon just gets faster and faster and then crashes.

<comment><USER7> Your forgetting about gravitational potential energy. Lower orbits involve less total energy.

<comment><USER2> I'm not forgetting that at all.

The moon can't move up or down without transferring momentum to the earth.

But the amount of momentum transferred and the amount of energy transferred don't match. The difference is expressed as heat in the tides on Earth.

So in one direction there is extra energy, in the other insufficient energy.

<comment><USER7> Conservation of momentum is why the moons orbit increases as the earth slows down dispite taking more energy. If your speeding up the earths rotation you get energy from the lower orbit and angular momentum from the same place.

Though to be really accurate you need to talk about the center of mass of the earth moon system ect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8I25H3bnNw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8I25H3bnNw)

<comment><USER9> For people that don't like clicking links without knowing what it is: This is a video from Vsauce - "What if the Moon was a Disco Ball?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> 1) Its interesting to contemplate a "death star" the size of the moon but of immensely lower density. Could be handy! All the cool aesthetics and applications with none of the planet killing tidal effects.

2) I think the alternative earth dwellers would have some interesting gravitational slingshot opportunities, given something that heavy and that low. Perhaps an interesting multigenerational mega-engineering project would be placing a giant spherical ball of lead in high-ish earth orbit for interplanetary vehicles to slingshot around, not necessarily moon size but a serious chunk of metal. Perhaps a large asteroid or two could be refined down to solid metal (to allow close approach to the center of mass)

3) The ham radio moon-bounce people would be excited to hear it'll take little more than a HT to bounce a VHF signal off the moon, although the multipath might make it impossible to do more than CW and the short orbital duration makes it nearly as annoying to operate as a low orbit satellite. None the less the effect on the ionosphere would be very interesting to look at / think about. Multipath in general might be a very serious problem for radio communication on a planet like this.

</comment><comment><USER11> I have always wondered about the Moon in geo-synchronous orbit. Over the ocean it could create a water mountain that didn't move. And geo-synch is nicely outside the Roche limit :-)

<comment><USER12> That is a really interesting problem to calculate. What would that water mountain look like? Could you even tell?

<comment><USER13> Since the position is static the earth itself would deform too eventually. So I believe the answer is "not much".

<comment><USER12> So the earth would take the shape of of an egg and the ocean would ride over it with a constant depth?

I wonder how that would effect rocket launches? Would it be better to launch on the far side of earth or the moon side?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I know how to find out for sure.

To:email@example.com

Dear Mr. Munroe,...

</comment><comment><USER15> Inside the Roche limit[0], the Moon would begin to disintegrate (depending on its relative strength compared to the disruptive forces) and the Earth would end up with rings.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roche_limit](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roche_limit)

</comment><comment><USER16> As far as I remember, the ISS orbits low enough that it requires regular rocket boosts to maintain its orbit against drag from the last bits of the atmosphere. So if the moon orbited there, I'm guessing it would have fallen back to the Earth within a few hundred years or so.

<comment><USER6> My guess is that tidal forces (speeding up Earth's rotation, but slowing down the moon (the opposite of what happens in this reality)) would dominate over atmospheric drag.

How much atmospheric drag affects a spacecraft in LEO is a complex problem, being a function of the spacecraft's mass, surface area, orientation, etc. However the moon is dense enough that it would probably be fairly content to barrel through the sparse atmosphere for quite some time.

<comment><USER17> Due to tidal forces, I suspect that the moon would start to steal some of Earth's atmosphere. I'm not sure if that would slow it down or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'd argue that the 'fantastic' video is not actually fantastic. Why is the moon transparent?

<comment><USER19> It's not. It's not bright enough to see through backscatter in the atmosphere. Go look at the fullish moon on a sunny day and you'll see the same effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> would the moon be able to orbit at its current angular speed / period as it does currently if it was closer and still maintain a constant distance?

i would think it would need to orbit much faster because the gravitational pull would be several fold larger. proportionally if it orbits at 27 days currently, it would need to orbit at (238,000 / (2160/2 + 260)) = 177.6x faster...and that's if gravity effects were linear, which they arent...they're inverse square.

<comment><USER21> This was addressed in the article, the new orbit period would be 90 minutes. Scary fast, for the size and distance of the moon.

<comment><USER20> ah, i'll read next time :)

it would likely also distort the earth significantly and tides would become hourly tsunamis.

<comment><USER22> You really didn't read the article, did you? ;-)

<comment><USER20> fml, i meant as in "after work"</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: MongoDb widget for Dashing - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/amalfra/dashing-mongo <comment><USER2> Dashing is dead :(

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah :(. There is a fork [https://github.com/Smashing/smashing](https://github.com/Smashing/smashing)</comment></comment>


Kenyan Runners - <AUTHOR> http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/2007/11/kenyan-runners.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps there are similar reasons behind US dominance in the tech sector.</comment>


Bookmarklet turns any webpage into a wireframe - <AUTHOR> http://www.volkside.com/tools/wirify/

<comment><USER2> This is very cool.

I'm working on something similar, which you might be interested in if you like this. jMockups, my startup, is a web app for designing high fidelity mockups. Kind of like a web-based Photoshop for designing mockups, if that makes more sense. I've been working on a new tool for the last two months that lets you import any _existing_ webpage into jMockups, which means that you will be able to instantly redesign and share any webpage in only a few clicks. It's a bit buggy still which is why I haven't launched it, but I'm really excited about it. Combine that with a wireframe toggle that I plan on adding in a few months, and you've got a killer web-design tool (hopefully). :)

If you're interested in trying it, check out jMockups [1] and if you want early access to the import feature when it becomes available in a few weeks, shoot me an email: firstname.lastname@example.com.

[1] <http://www.jmockups.com>

<comment><USER3> Your demo was quite interesting to play with. How does one get to that point and where does one go from that point within your software?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I feel like a moron for asking this, because clearly at least 18 people liked it enough to upvote without explanation, but...

Why would I want to do this...?

<comment><USER5> Enables you to easily borrow someone else's layout as 'inspiration' that you can then tweak. Don't discount the number of designers/developers that use another layout (or elements of it) as a base to work from - I've seen many do it.

Before there's a "Plagiarising!" response, also keep in mind that the final product in this case usually looks nothing like the original but that an original often serves as a more effective starting point than a blank canvas.

<comment><USER6> Good points prawn.

Certainly if someone was to 'rip' an existing website design wouldn't they just grab the HTML+CSS directly? Wirify is definitely not intended, nor useful, for that.

<comment><USER5> In some cases. In others, you might be starting with a simplified wireframe (and these remove identifying brands, colours, etc) or you would screen capture and use it as a layout base in PhotoShop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wish it didn't try to wireframe every object on the page.

In my opinion, wireframes are usually more helpful for organizing information on the page, than creating a perfect mockup of what the finished page should look like.

Lots of grey bars, as shown on the wireframe for this page, aren't very useful for organizing information. Instead, they make it seem much more cluttered and complex than it needs to be.

<comment><USER6> Fair points seancron. Wirify is already skipping quite a few HTML elements in its processing, however it certainly works better on some sites than others. I've found that proper 'semantic markup' also gives better results than old school table-based layouts for instance.

One of the earlier prototypes let you control the 'level of detail' in the wireframe: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuKJVZRDjRo> We've decided to ditch this idea for the time being though due to the extra complexity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Mcantor, that's a fair question, please see "Why would anyone want to do that?" in my original introduction: [http://www.volkside.com/2010/12/introducing-wirify-the- web-a...](http://www.volkside.com/2010/12/introducing-wirify-the-web-as- wireframes/#why)

Matt1, jMockups sounds cool, I'll have to have another look. We are currently working on OmniGraffle export for Wirify, here's a preview: [http://www.volkside.com/2011/01/preview-exporting-wirify- wir...](http://www.volkside.com/2011/01/preview-exporting-wirify-wireframes- to-omnigraffle/)

Thanks everyone for having a look at Wirify, much appreciated! Give me a shout on Twitter if you like: @jopas

</comment><comment><USER8> Hi there, we realised there were at least a couple people out there who didn't want to redo their sites as mockups, so we've created MockGen.

MockGen renders web pages as full blown Balsamiq (<http://www.balsamiq.com>) and ForeUI (<http://www.foreui.com>) mockups.

Find out more and try it out here: <http://mockgen.looksie.me>.

Cheers, Tim

</comment><comment><USER9> It seems really encumbered, lots of logging, restrictive license... I mean it seems nice but theres no guarantee its going to be around.

<comment><USER6> The Wirify terms of use are outlined here: <http://www.volkside.com/tools/wirify/#terms-of-use>

As for guarantees on being around, there certainly aren't any, but hey it's the internet right :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Aren't most people trying to go from wireframe to webpage? lol

<comment><USER6> Yes indeed, and Wirify doesn't really help you there :) However here's some of the situations where it might be useful: [http://www.volkside.com/2010/12/introducing-wirify-the- web-a...](http://www.volkside.com/2010/12/introducing-wirify-the-web-as- wireframes/#why)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> You may also look at "Topographic view" or "Topographic page layout" bookmarklet. See <http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/webdevel.html> .

<comment><USER6> Very interesting, thanks for posting! Do you have author or other details for the original source?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> it is an interesting idea. I think one other tool that does this is the eclipse based plugin. I am working on a prototyping tool (mockuptiger.com) and I have this feature in the product dev plan, although not in the initial release :)

Great job Wirify! Certainly something for the designers to start from and then remove things they don't want. I think the NY times website is too crowded, you could have shown a less busy example :)

<comment><USER6> Thanks infocaptor! Do you know the name of the Eclipse plugin by any chance, I'd be very interested in having a look?

For a less busy example, try www.apple.com :)

<comment><USER12> I think it is wireframesketcher, I haven't tried it but I believe it can scan GUI objects and convert to wireframe. Not sure if it does web sites</comment></comment></comment>


Sent to Prison by a Software Program's Secret Algorithms - <AUTHOR> http://blog.simplejustice.us/2017/05/02/shifting-sentencing-blame/ <comment><USER2> Unjust unethical unsustainable, how much money is wasted by the rich to subdue the poor?</comment>


NASA Actually Working on Faster-than-Light Warp Drive - <AUTHOR> http://techland.time.com/2012/09/19/nasa-actually-working-on-faster-than-light-warp-drive/

<comment><USER2> Can't put my fingers on it since I haven't read Time in ages but it seems like the format has changed. Seems more bloggish if that means anything.

</comment><comment><USER3> Make it so.</comment>


An open source Ruby on Rails Social Network and it's pretty damn cool. - <AUTHOR> http://lovdbyless.com/

<comment><USER2> Am I the only one that was ignorant of the annotate_models plugin?

<http://repo.pragprog.com/svn/Public/plugins/annotate_models/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's got all the neat features of a social network, now if only they add twitter type feature into the mix, wow, it's gonna get interesting....</comment>


Show HN: Open Source PHP CodeIgniter Reddit/Digg Clone - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/civilordergone/cmsfire

<comment><AUTHOR> You can find a working instance of it here: <http://cmsfire.timnuwin.com/></comment>


Change your thinking about Change Management - <AUTHOR> http://devops.com/blogs/change-thinking-change-management/

<comment><USER2> Chris Riley has been writing some great articles over on DevOps.com. This one on change management will have you looking at change in a whole different light</comment>


SharedHashFile - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/simonhf/sharedhashfile Share Hash Tables Stored In Memory Mapped Files Between Arbitrary Processes & Threads <comment><USER2> If this your project, good job dude. Reminds of of LMDB (symas.com/mdb/).

<comment><USER3> Aside from the fact that both use mmap, there's little resemblance. LMDB does zero-copy reads and writes, this does not. LMDB is a persistent data store, this is not. B+trees are inherently very memory efficient, hash tables are not.

This is limited to the size of RAM, LMDB is not - LMDB is only limited to the size of the processor address space. This uses locks for reads, LMDB does not - LMDB reads will scale to an arbitrary number of CPUs, perfectly linearly, this will not.

Hash tables are great for small data sets, horrible for larger data.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a link [1] which tests LMDB on a Rackspace server with 16 vCPUs. To make the test fairer to ShardHashFile then the LMDB data file is stored in /dev/shm so that the disk does not get in the way of the test. The test first inserts 70 million keys (tried but failed to insert 100 million keys; how to do that?) using 16 processes (one for each CPU), then it reads the 70 million keys again using the 16 processes, then it updates 2% of the keys while reading the other 98% of the keys again, again using the 16 processes.

Read performance without any writing does seem excellent at 6.x million reads per second across the 16 processes. However, insert speed is very slow at only 0.1 million inserts per second. But then LMBD does not claim to be fast at writing. Unfortunately the mix 2% update, 98% read brings the read performance down from 6.x million ops per second to only 0.7 million ops per second. So LMDB seems like an excellent solution if one hardly ever wants to insert.

I would also be very happy if anybody can find ways to optimize the test since I could not find a tutorial on programming with the LMDB API. For example, is it necessary to always use a txn when putting and getting? I also couldn't figure out how to insert 100 million keys because in order to make the map size big enough then mdb_env_set_mapsize() always complained when giving it super large values. Is this a limitation of LMDB or how else to increase the map size so that 100 million keys (or more) can be mapped? And as a side question: Inserting the keys is so slow: Is there a faster way to initially insert all the keys in order to speed up the performance test?

I was also surprised at how big the LMDB data.mdb file gets with 70 million keys & values. The keys & values are 4 byte + 4 byte, so 8 bytes each. However, the data.mdb file ended up as 1.8GB which works out to about 27.6 bytes per key,value pair... which does not seem that good compared to a hash table, or?

[1] [https://gist.github.com/simonhf/9677776](https://gist.github.com/simonhf/9677776)

<comment><USER3> re: your env size problem, sounds like you've built a 32-bit binary, so you can't use more than 2GB.

Also, please read the LMDB docs. Note that it is a single-writer design, so spreading writes across 16 processes will be quite poor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ambitious undertaking, possibly transformational.</comment>


How to exclude screenshot from Google+ Feedback? - <AUTHOR>

Google Plus - SendFeedback always captures the screenshot which has lot of private information. How to exclude it if I don't want to share that screen with Google? <comment><USER2> Black out the whole screenshot, perhaps?

<comment><AUTHOR> ya..i even tried to squeeze the screen to hide critical details. Wondering any better options</comment></comment>


Show HN: Now Mobile – An Open-Source Mobile Client for ZEIT's Now Platform - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.now.sh <comment><AUTHOR> Hello, HN!

For a while now I've been a big fan of ZEIT and in particular, their deployment platform - Now.sh.

It has great CLI, Desktop and Web experiences, however aside from web version of the dashboard, there wasn't really anything for mobile. And since I'm very mobile (and I imagine a lot of other people are as well), I decided to fill this gap :)

The app is built with React Native (and some native Swift parts) and is fully open source: [https://github.com/rdev/now-mobile](https://github.com/rdev/now- mobile)

It's also live on Product Hunt: [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/now- mobile](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/now-mobile)</comment>


An Investigation into PEPP-PT - <AUTHOR> https://nadim.computer/posts/2020-04-17-pepppt.html <comment><USER2> > Boos is also listed as a participant in the 2019 Bilderberg meeting

I'll get my popcorn when the app releases. It's gonna be great.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is about politicking and very questionable behaviour related to a proposed standard for contact tracing. It's short, relevant to current circumstances, and rather interesting.</comment>


Ask HN: What's your process for building a community around your product? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Go read Tribes. The following is my advice, not from that book.

Same as with creating a community around anything.

1\. Define a group of outsiders, explicitly (politics) or implicitly (privilege).

2\. This scaffolding sets up the emotional payoff necessary to motivate people to be involved and belong. The nature of community is also the essence of how you create it. Tap into people's reward circuitry. Their tribalistic instincts. If you find such notions repellant, you could be in the wrong business.

3\. Apply optimizations, such as letting people advertise recognition and status (reputation), develop mastery ("my skills are improving"), and act autonomously ("I got this").

4\. Make a safe space for them to congregate. You need boarder control / bouncing / moderation. You can take an editorial stance yourself, or work with the community to develop it collaboratively.

5\. Let them communicate.

Do you really want to do this? A community is like a ginormous multiheaded baby. It will suck you dry and lay waste too all your other plans. But maybe it will also be among the most beautiful and amazing things you've ever helped create. Your call, buster.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wrong question.

Community is your market, and crucially, you.

You should have found the community first. Then, if you're truly part of it, you'll know what your product should be.

If you're asking the question you're asking, it means you built a product without a market which is going to be... challenging.

</comment><comment><USER4> I started a website, [http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com](http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com), years ago. It now gets a few thousand visitors a day so usually I'm able to market my products there or whatever I have. I don't have success or fail numbers, but I've had plenty of repeat contributors, so something must be working.

As far as putting my own products on there, I did put a link up which is on every page of the website, and I do get clicks that lead to it. For my more prominent products, I tend to write an article about the product or find similar products and write comparisons. Pretty much rather than selling.. I'm just trying to "make known" that this product is here for you.

</comment><comment><USER5> Platzi has a series of videos on this topic.

[https://courses.platzi.com/classes/build-grow-online- communi...](https://courses.platzi.com/classes/build-grow-online-communities/)

Edit: Apparently it's no longer free. The course isn't really worth $100 in my opinion, so here's a short writeup of the videos [http://cmxhub.com/article/product-hunt-erik-torenberg- commun...](http://cmxhub.com/article/product-hunt-erik-torenberg-community/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Right now, I am just going person to person telling them about my food project. I enlisted a dining club to help me test. I have not really found product market fit, so its hard to say if my methods will ultimately be successful.

</comment><comment><USER7> Building a community mostly consists of three parts:

1\. Creating value for a specific target group. An early product/market fit lets word-of-mouth spread.

2\. Let people participate. Giving people the feeling to be heard is crucial. A proper feedback management / cycle, helps.

3\. Inform people what is happening. Let's call it "content marketing".

4\. Start becoming an expert / create a personal brand

For step 1) you need to reach out to those people. Do things that don't scale. Go to meetups or wherever you find your target group. Talk to them, build relationships, ask for feedback, identify influencers. Try to understand the market, their problems, identify their needs, build relationships and build on that.

For step 2) have a proper feedback solution in place. Facebook Groups, an on forum are some options. We developed a platform exactly for this part. It's called STOMT (disclosure: i'm the founder). But we used our own product to build our own community. We invited anyone to checkout the product and leave us feedback on our profile: [https://www.stomt.com/stomt](https://www.stomt.com/stomt) \- That way you can easily collect wishes, discuss, vote, manage and react on them. It works great and from time to time more and more people started using us. Have a public dialog and people get a community feeling. The question is which tool you are using and if you can efficiently combine it with feedback management. As this can create a huge overhead. Another example which works even better than ours: [https://www.stomt.com/empires-of-the- undergrowth](https://www.stomt.com/empires-of-the-undergrowth) \- just check out the stomt/reaction ratio. And those guys are not on the market with their game yet.

For step 3) This costs time. But to get feedback/engagement/participation and to get people excited you need to share your status on certain aspects from time to time. I like how Taylor Otwell (Laravel Founder) does it on Twitter. Bloggig is great.

For step 4) Share your knowledge, use your relationships to speak on a stage, be the expert. This works great for me => for us and let people follow you.

Edit: It is important to mention to start early. Be the expect (step 4) from the first second on. Talk to your customers (step 1) from the first second on. Invite them to a place you define (step 2) as soon as possible. And share if you have something to share (step 3).

</comment><comment><USER8> That is the big question, isn't it.

It depends on so many things it's hard to define specific things, as each combination is distinct. It's like striking up and holding a conversation. How do you do that? That is what you are doing with the community.

Find out who they are. Find out what they want. Find out what they like Find out what they need. Try a bunch of combinations of these 4 observations that makes them happy enough with you to engage.</comment>


Everything You Wanted to Know About Yarn Package Manager - <AUTHOR> https://www.atatus.com/blog/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-yarn-package-manager/ <comment><USER2> This post contains content that is plagiarized verbatim from other sources. Namely Yehuda's blog post and the Yarn homepage itself.

<comment><USER3> [http://yehudakatz.com/2016/10/11/im-excited-to-work-on- yarn-...](http://yehudakatz.com/2016/10/11/im-excited-to-work-on-yarn-the-new- js-package-manager-2/) for those who where curious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> \- promises "everything you wanted to know about yarn"

\- has barely any content

<comment><USER5> What do you expect when Yarn has been out for less than a couple of weeks and this person isn't involved with the project in any way?

<comment><USER6> to not write an article proclaiming its everything?

<comment><USER5> Such is the problem with the majority of programming blog posts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have such a burning, unquenchable hatred for NPM that I just switched to using Yarn. It's fine, has done what I expect it to, and hasn't caused any problems so far. Maybe not an ideal solution, but for someone coming primarily from languages that have non-shitty package managers it's a breath of fresh air.

</comment><comment><USER8> Yarn needs to learn from lein for clojure. Yarn is the wrong way forward, but an incremental fix for npm.

<comment><USER9> What can be learnt from lein? (I've not used Clojure enough to know.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What's the benefit of having a lockfile compared to just specifying exact versions in your package.json?

<comment><USER11> Because you can only specify exact versions for your top-level dependencies. Whether or not they pin versions of their own dependencies is up to their own maintainers; you can't control it from package.json. And, while a lot of npm packages adhere to semver and avoid shipping breaking changes on minor version number bumps, a lot of npm packages _don 't_. So you can get hosed through no fault of your own by an Nth-level dependency.

'npm shrinkwrap' solves this by pinning the currently installed versions of everything under node_modules/, regardless of dependency depth. Yarn does the same thing, but by default rather than, as with npm, an optional extra. There's an argument to be made that the correct place to shrinkwrap, if you want to, is in your build process. But I suspect that, in practice, Yarn defaulting to it will prove a net positive, albeit a bit of a speedbump for people looking to do turnkey migrations from npm.

<comment><USER10> Oh, of course. Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> anyone knows if yarn has an equivalent of --no-bin-links option?

EDIT: guess not according to [https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/issues/929](https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/issues/929)

</comment><comment><USER13> Why can't all of this be patched in npm ? Why do we have to create a new tool every time ?

It makes no sense and honestly makes me want to tear my hairs.

<comment><USER5> I don't get why people say this. You're acting like the npm team is desperate for contributions and fixes and the Yarn people are like "No! We'll make our OWN tool!".

It's the literal opposite. npm hasn't been open to contributions or fixes for years.

<comment><USER11> Really? [https://github.com/npm/npm/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed](https://github.com/npm/npm/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed) would seem to suggest otherwise. Should I be looking elsewhere? Is there something I'm not seeing here?

<comment><USER14> I've contributed multiple issues and PRs which have been completely ignored. It seems from the outside that their focus on monetizing causes their API to be purposefully opaque and subject to change. It's been disappointing and certainly turns me off from ever purchasing private repo hosting from npm itself.

For reference:

[https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/12085](https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/12085)

[https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/8319](https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/8319)

[https://github.com/npm/couch-login/pull/13](https://github.com/npm/couch- login/pull/13)

I have a deep understanding of how it works now, and therefore more to contribute, but what's the point? I just keep running my own npm(s) instead and contribute to packages that appreciate it.

<comment><USER11> A strong statement, to be sure, for which one would hope to see equally strong evidence. But two out of those three issues have unfulfilled requests for followup. I'm not sure quite what you mean them to show.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The man who found the web's 'most dangerous' Internet security bug - <AUTHOR> http://www.theage.com.au/it-pro/security-it/stephane-chazelas-the-man-who-found-the-webs-most-dangerous-internet-security-bug-20140926-10mixr.html <comment><USER2> _He said he found the bug after reflecting on an earlier bug he found in Bash a few months ago._

The majority of the article seems to be focusing on the effects after it was found, but I would've liked more info on what lead him to discover the bug; was he reading Bash source code looking for vulnerabilities, or something more mundane? My current hypothesis is trying to debug a shell script that put '() {' in an environment variable followed by some commands.</comment>


In Case You Ever Want to Unicycle 21,000 Miles - <AUTHOR> https://www.outsideonline.com/2407533/unicycle-travel-gear <comment><USER2> I unicycled 1100 miles with a group through Europe (2001) and again about 500 miles in northern Norway (2003) with mostly the same group. Both were incredible experiences and a unicycle is actually a fun way to tour since you're upright and able to look around, use a camera, dig things out of other riders' backpacks, ride in close formation and hold a conversation easily. I tried to look up the website just now, but it's gone. However, here's the Norway trip on archive.org: [https://web.archive.org/web/20060622062249/http://www.unitou...](https://web.archive.org/web/20060622062249/http://www.unitours.org/tours/NUT/Update).

Edit: on both trips we had a support vehicle carry much of our luggage. I really admire Ed for fully self-supporting — it definitely adds a lot to the challenge especially since most of the equipment to carry it is custom.

<comment><USER3> The Wayback machine says its not archived, strange...

<comment><USER4> They forgot adding .htm to the link. Here it is: [https://web.archive.org/web/20050207215504/http://www.unitou...](https://web.archive.org/web/20050207215504/http://www.unitours.org/tours/NUT/Update.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was part of the group that broke the world record unicycling from Land's End to John O'Groats in 1986. I started as one of the five riders (we were all going to ride the entire distance, it was not a relay), but three of us dropped out due to injury. Nevertheless, Mike Day and Michel Arets made the entire distance, about 900 miles, in 14 days, 12 hours, and 41 minutes.

We were using unmodified 28" unicycles, neither gears nor brakes, and no armrests or equivalent. It's interesting to see how the unicycle has been adapted for these ultra-long journeys.

After dropping out I become the support vehicle driver, finding accommodation _en route_ (which sometimes were tents, and sometimes kindly donated hotel rooms), buying food (no restaurants as we were skint students doing this on zero budget), and generally looking after the riders.

It was an interesting experience.

For reference, the previous record had been 19 days, 1 hour, and 45 minutes, so we beat that by about 4 1/2 days. The _current_ record is 6 days, 8 hours, and 43 minutes. Which is insane.

Also for reference: The current bicycle record is 43 hours, 25 minutes and 13 seconds, set by 40 year old Michael Broadwith on 17 June 2018. Note that this is roughly an average speed of 20mph for roughly two days, non-stop. This is also insane.

Unicycles, by comparison, are _quite_ sane. Honest.

</comment><comment><USER6> Ed has an absolutely fabulous YouTube channel [https://www.youtube.com/user/worldunicycletour/featured](https://www.youtube.com/user/worldunicycletour/featured)

I have been sponsoring him on Patreon for a while as not only did he ride those 21000 miles (with no freewheel!), but he also self-filmed and self- produced one of the most original, high-quality video series on the platform. You can really see how much he learned about video making as he progressed on the journey.

If you are new, start with the USA series. Well worth it: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLocRYksAqGOIS5qv3zfJ5...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLocRYksAqGOIS5qv3zfJ5eqWPfCY0sBGi)

</comment><comment><USER7> For something more accessible to laypeople: bicycle touring is a thing. Pack a few bags, attach them to your bike and cycle across a province, country, continent or around the world. I biked across Europe in 2017 and it is my most happy and memorable life event to this day.

<comment><USER8> Ahh I wish this were as easy in North America.

<comment><USER7> It is! I spent a week traveling the Pacific Coast Highway in 2018. I brought camping gear, but never used it because I found a warmshowers.org host (sometimes multiple) at every stop.

<comment><USER9> I did a section of the PCH too (northward starting at San Francisco). As pretty as it was, it was not my favorite place to ride a bike. No shoulder, winding road, zero visibility... it felt like I was taking my life in my hands every time I approached a curve.

<comment><USER10> It's a very dangerous road, I love cycling but refuse to ride on the PCH.

I've lived in a few PCH-adjacent neighborhoods over the years in the bay area, and I always had neighbors affected by bad accidents on hwy 1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> When my kid was about 3 he had a nanny who was a circus performer and dedicated unicyclist. So my 3 yo could unicycle (with a cute tiny unicycle) before he could bike.

The nanny said he was a "mountain unicycler". I thought it was an absurd exaggeration until he showed us a video that had been made of him and a friend doing stunts on a cliff face. We began to worry about his sanity...Luckily my wife considered that a positive thing.

This is not him but some of the kinds of stuff I am talking about: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkppaV- gQXU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkppaV-gQXU)

<comment><USER12> One thing that sticks out to me in that video is that they seem to grab the seat like a handle a lot. I'm not sure why this surprised me, as it seems pretty natural, but for some reason it never occurred to me that unicyclists might do that. It almost looks like it's a pogo stick with a wheel when they do that!

<comment><USER13> He says in the video "My left arm maintains the brake" @ 1:26 in. So I assume there is a brake lever there along with the other comment saying it helps keeping the bike close during airtime.

<comment><USER2> Yes, I used a brake as well. It can help with stopping quickly but only with much practice (well, stopping isn't hard, but doing it comfortably). A brake also helps to drag on hills so as not to fatigue the legs and knees. Some in my group used a shift lever to operate the brake, carefully increasing until the right amount of drag was reached for comfortably going downhill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ed is an absolute legend. Can't imagine the courage it took for a 19 year old to head out into the world like that. Would highly recommend checking out his youtube channel, on which he has hours of very well edited video documenting the entire trip.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm curious about the legality of this. In Australia I don't believe it'd be legal to ride a unicycle on public roads; the laws vary by state, but the standard definition of "bicycle" requires that it have at least two wheels (e.g. [https://www.vicroads.vic.gov.au/safety-and-road- rules/road-r...](https://www.vicroads.vic.gov.au/safety-and-road-rules/road- rules/a-to-z-of-road- rules/bicycles#expanding-F05A1A0220DD49B1A242B6E445A3A118) for Victoria, [https://www.transport.wa.gov.au/activetransport/bicycle- rule...](https://www.transport.wa.gov.au/activetransport/bicycle-rules- standards-and-safety.asp#31424) for Western Australia), and I doubt that unicycles would be covered by any other category.

</comment><comment><USER16> I tried unicycling.

I couldn't get past the, uh, pressure it put on my groin. I don't know how men do it for more than a couple of minutes, let alone a globe trotting distance.

<comment><USER17> It doesn't necessarily put that much pressure on your groin once you get the hang of it. You can rise up a bit, and it eases that. It's definitely exhausting though. I made the mistake of trying to keep up with a group on bikes once. It was only a mile and a half, but even so it was almost impossible to keep up. Not being able to freewheel is a big resstriction.

<comment><USER18> I doubt you'd be able to keep up with a fixie either though. I believe the core issue is the energy required to balance front-to-back.

<comment><USER19> I've done quite a bit of unicycling. The better your balance, the less energy is required for balance. I think for a skilled unicyclist the difference in pace compared to being on a fixie would be slight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The inflatable globe is genius.

</comment><comment><USER21> Great adventure!

Just a small correction to: "I used an app on my phone called Maps.Me, which creates open-source maps that are completely free and downloadable...snip..."

Maps.me is using OpenStreetMap data created by more than six million contributors including Maps.me users who also can edit the map data.

</comment><comment><USER22> Been watching his videos for a couple of years now, really great guy.

<comment><USER23> His mic and camera skills improved a bunch over the trip. It's inspiring to watch him grow as a creator

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Maybe in a death stranding DLC?</comment>


What the nine debris finds may tell us about the MH370 end point - <AUTHOR> http://www.duncansteel.com/archives/2652 <comment><USER3> I'm no expert on ocean current modelling but it seems to me you should multiply the probabilities from each find, not add them up.

</comment><comment><USER4> I posted this about the MH370 search strategy a week ago, after reading a book on Bayes statistics [0]

[0] - [https://www.atsb.gov.au/media/5733804/Bayesian_Methods_MH370...](https://www.atsb.gov.au/media/5733804/Bayesian_Methods_MH370_Search_3Dec2015.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> I keep thinking they need to put a black box on the top of these planes that auto ejects at the first sign of crashing and can float etc.

<comment><USER6> Or just continously upload the data to the internet, should be quite feasible these days with satellites everywhere.

<comment><USER7> >Or just continously upload the data to the internet, should be quite feasible these days with satellites everywhere.

That would probably be a bit too much for existing satellite communication systems; while most flights wouldn't need to transmit such a signal most of the time (If a plane went missing over, say, the Midwest, we'd find it!), frequent transmissions from every flight over sea, for instance would probably overload today's networks - meaning you'd need to launch new satellites to provide this service, meaning it would be outrageously expensive, meaning it wouldn't happen.

However, if we relax the requirement to, say, once every five minutes or so, at least you'll have a much better idea of where something went down than 'Probably somewhere in the southern hemisphere.'

<comment><USER8> A quick googling tells me there are about 10000-15000 planes in the air around the world. GPS coordinates take less than 100 bytes, but let's give some headroom for plane ID, timestamp, etc.

That would mean about 1.5 megabytes per minute, globally. I think the global satellite network is easily up to the task.

<comment><USER7> The raw data rate is pretty low, but keep in mind that there's all sorts of signaling traffic going on just to establish a connection, depending on protocol requiring multiple transmit/receive cycles - which in turn means waiting. Again depending on protocol, you may also have to handle collisions (more than one transmission in the same channel at the same time) etc - <USER2> still maintaining service for the network's regular customers.

Multiple short transmissions are more taxing than a few long ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It would be interesting if this crash location was an accidental side effect of a pilot/hijackerhijacker. Making it crash in the most remote location, following a very hard to follow path fully out of sight of modern tech.

<comment><USER10> This is explored in another article, the "controlled ditch" scenario: [http://www.duncansteel.com/archives/2601](http://www.duncansteel.com/archives/2601)

It is a possible scenario, although I have yet to see a reason for anyone to do this (as the article shows, it would require quite deliberate planning).</comment></comment>


'Shocking' unification reduces disparate spin models to just one - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/shocking-unification-reduces-lot-tough-physics-problems-just-one?utm_campaign=email-news-latest&et_rid=17042337&et_cid=332196 <comment><USER2> TL;DR:

> Crudely their proof works as follows. First, the two scientists note that > the up-or-down Ising spin resembles the true-or-false character of a logical > statement such as "the car is white." They then prove that any particular 2D > Ising model—i.e., with a particular set of coupling and external fields -- > is equivalent to an instance of a logical problem called the satisfiability, > or SAT, problem, in which the goal is to come up with a set of logical > statements, A,B,C, … that satisfy a long logical formula such as "A and not > (B or C) …" The theorists present a way to map the SAT problem onto the 2D > Ising model.

> Next, they show how any other spin model can also be translated into a SAT > problem. That SAT problem can then be translated onto the 2D Ising model, > thus making the two spin models equivalent. There is a price to pay, > however. The 2D Ising model must have more spins than the original spin > model. But De las Cuevas says that the computational demands of the Ising > model are only modestly bigger than those of the original model.

<comment><USER3> Note that SAT is NP-complete. The fact that they reduced from SAT to Ising spin suggests that Ising spin itself might be hard.

And indeed [https://www.siam.org/pdf/news/654.pdf](https://www.siam.org/pdf/news/654.pdf) shows that Ising spin is NP-complete. So this result looks like a case of "all NP-complete problems in this class can be reduced to another NP-complete problem". Which sounds pretty unsurprising to me.

I'd therefore need more context to figure out why the result is so shocking.

<comment><USER4> I'm thinking now that maybe there could be a magnetic material solving an NP- problem

<comment><USER5> Speaking roughly, spin glasses exist because nature itself can't solve the minimization problem. Here's a book on the topic: [http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9917.html](http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9917.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Science article is paywalled, but the paper is on the arXiv: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.5955](http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.5955)

</comment><comment><USER7> Hopfield was the first to poke at Ising model spin to create memory-having systems, creating his Hopfield model where memory states are represented as attractors in the Hamiltonian search space. Add hidden units to that, and you get the general Boltzmann machine. Restrict the connections, you get a restricted Boltzmann machine. Layer them up, you get the 2006 Hinton and Salakhutdinov advance in deep learning.

<comment><USER7> And if you want to solve SAT with neural networks, you usually go back to a modified version of the Hopfield network.

Rumelhart was also inspired by poking at MAX-CSP, at least according to McClelland.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > It's the sort of physics advance that Sauron might appreciate. [...] That > "Ising model"

They're taking the models to _Ising_ ard?

<comment><USER9> Goddamnitsomuch.</comment></comment>


Apple is Building iMessage into OS X Lion's iChat - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2011/09/14/apple-is-building-imessage-into-os-x-lions-ichat/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is going to be great for folks who'll have iOS devices and Mac OS X "Lion" on desktops and laptops. So looking forward to it.</comment>


Does anyone know how to do js background effects? - <AUTHOR>

Like you see on Google sometimes - such as when they did the Game of Life in the background.
I am building a super generic B&W webpage and want some 8-bit looking randomized subtle color changes in the background but have no idea on where to start.
Any tips appreciated. <comment><USER2> Here, look at something horrible I did just to see if it could be done. It runs in the background, both in the "continuous calculation" sense, and that it's actually _behind_ the words on the page via z-index.

<https://rachelbythebay.com/fun/sier/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool - could that be done in squares and randomly across the page? I'm going to build a concert/fan site/photo/blog and its going to be very generic. Having a very subtle background pixilate may be a cool look.

<comment><USER2> Like this? I got bored and whipped one up for you: <https://rachelbythebay.com/fun/square/>

Twiddle the knobs at the top to adjust things. Go here to contact me later, or to send a few bucks my way as a reward: <https://rachelbythebay.com/contact/> ... thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks dude! I'll adjust as needed - but this is what I was looking for. Kicked you down a few bucks for a few beers.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Frequentist Statistics are Frequently Subjective - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/lw/1gc/frequentist_statistics_are_frequently_subjective/

<comment><USER3> The real problem with statistics is that people want an answer to an impossible problem. Namely they want to be told the probability of the world being a particular way. But anyone familiar with conditional probability can easily see that there is no way to come up with that answer, because the conditional probability of something _after_ an observation depends on the assumed probability _before_ the observation.

There are multiple approaches to this problem. What frequentist statistics does is answers a _different_ question. Namely, "What is the probability of getting a result this strongly against the null hypothesis if the null hypothesis is true." This is appealing in that it is an objective probability that seems to say something about the problem under discussion. However people consistently read it as, "What is the probability that the null hypothesis is true?" Which is simply wrong.

There is a second problem with frequentist statistics, which is what this article is about. Which is that the objective-looking probability you get depends on the null hypothesis chosen in ways it shouldn't. Basic familiarity with Bayes' Theorem and conditional probability demonstrates that it is impossible for it to matter whether your intention was to flip a coin 6 times, flip it until you get both heads and tails, or flip it until you get heads. This factor cannot affect the conditional probability of the coin being biased. But those three different intentions translate into 3 different calculations, and 3 different answers in frequentist statistics.

So that's the frequentist approach. What is the Bayesian approach? It is to come up with statistics that inform us on how prior beliefs before observation turn into posterior beliefs after observation. The advantage of this method is that it is intellectually honest. The disadvantages are that it is complicated and people notice that it is confusing. (The frequentist approach is confusing as well, but people don't notice their confusion. Instead the confidently draw the wrong conclusion that the null hypothesis has been proven.)

There are other approaches. The article touched on my favorite when it pointed out that we should report likelyhood ratios rather than probabilities. This is absolutely right. The effect of an observation is to modify our prior beliefs, and likelyhood ratios concisely describe how we should modify them. Plus they have the great ability to stack - you can take 3 experiments and combine their likelyhood ratios to come up with the likelyhood ratio for having seen all three experiments.

Unfortunately, though, everyone knows frequentist methods, people accept them, and it is very hard to get people to see what is wrong with them. So alternate approaches, though theoretically superior, face an uphill battle towards acceptance.

<comment><USER4> The difficulty I tend to encounter in promoting Bayesian statistics among scientists is the "sudden" appearance of a statistical model. Too many people go one further than believing frequentist statistics are answering "What is the probability that H0 is true" but instead just fully over the analysis and believe that frequentist methods tell you, simply, accurately, objectively, whether an experimental treatment is "significant".

If you try to press on what people believe "significant" to mean it gets ugly fast, but it's generally a good thing and definitely necessary to publish. If you don't get significance it's just because you need a bigger n. If you can think of some factors or covariates then you really need to use ANOVA.

Stating that there is anything more complex to looking at data and deciding what it means is practically unthinkable.

Likelihood ratios are definitely nice, though. I've sort of gotten people to think about it at a high level by talking about "information flows" and log likelihood values.

<comment><USER5> A separate problem, not dealt with in that particular essay, is the quite hideous degree to which average scientists don't understand the statistics they use.

I would put a good deal of the blame for this squarely on frequentism as well. Bayesianism isn't hard to understand, it's just takes an effort of the teacher to explain well - I've made certain notable efforts in that direction myself. Once you do get it, you get it.

<comment><USER4> I think, roughly, the blame goes out to Fisher and anyone else who promoted the "Recipe for Understanding the World" style statistics. It's not that people are being blocked by their understanding of complex frequentist methods but instead the idea that they don't need to understand anything more because statistics is just a black box you use for verification.

Insert results, get a green or red "significance" light, move on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This debate has been raging for 250 years. Brad Efron, one of the greatest living statisticians today and one of the few who can transcend the debate, has VERY interesting things to say about it. He believes that Empirical Bayes, or using some of your data to model your prior, will win the day.

[http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~ckirby/brad/papers/2005NEWMode...](http://www- stat.stanford.edu/~ckirby/brad/papers/2005NEWModernScience.pdf)

<comment><USER7> > or using some of your data to model your prior

I think that kinda missing the point.

<comment><USER6> I beg to differ (not sure if you actually read the Efron talk I just posted). I get the thrust of the Less Wrong article, though I think that frankly his language and vitriol is direly misplaced. He's railing against some class of Frequentists who attack Bayesians. This is sort of a Fox News tactic; pick someone, in this case, a commenter on a blog, and generalize their comment to the entire population. It's fairly unstatistical, if you ask me. I don't get why anyone would do this. A good Frequentist is not a lost idiot, nor does she rail against Bayesians. In fact, a good Frequentist understands the beauty of Bayesian methods, too. I'd even wager that a good Bayesian understands why Frequentist methods have dominated the 20th century.

I'm attempting to realize that rare event in these vitriolic philosophical academic debates - add a bit of middle-groundness. In this case, the middle ground of Empirical Bayes has proven to be very, very useful in large-scale simultaneous inference problems. It's proof that there IS such thing as convergence in this debate. Taking the shrill tone the author takes as a signal of how little regard the two sides have for each other, it's obvious that we need some convergence.

<comment><USER7> > it's obvious that we need some convergence.

Why? This isn't politics. Maybe one approach IS better than the other. Or maybe there are better methods we don't know.

In fact I think most Bayesians would consider Frequentist methods either plain "wrong" (like, at best works in special cases) or as approximations to the full Bayesian way.

And that doesn't mean they are useless, because going fully Bayesian normaly requires "a lot" of computation, or maybe we have issues with elicitation (I suspect this is the biggest hurdle for frequentists). But Bayes is still the gold standard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> To my (limited) understanding, Bayesian statistics are just as subjective. If you and I start with different priors, and are then are fed the same evidence, we can end up with vastly different conclusions.

Since priors are defined as a function of my state of mind (or state of ignorance, as it were), it seems pretty subjective that the 'result' should depend so heavily on my initial state of mind.

E.T. Jaynes' book has a example of this with regard to E.S.P. research (I believe <http://omega.albany.edu:8008/ETJ-PS/cc5d.ps> is the relevant chapter - but it's been a year or two since I've read the book).

A real statistician should feel free to correct me though - I'm more of an algebra guy ...

<comment><USER3> Your understanding is incomplete. Bayesian statistics are not subjective at all. Instead they objectively describe the correlation between prior belief and conclusion. People may draw different conclusions for subjective reasons, but that subjectivity is in the people, not the statistics.

Now it seems you are objecting to the fact that your initial state of mind affects your conclusion. But it is unavoidable that there is no way to make sense of observation except through the lens of prior beliefs. You can be explicit about it and draw conclusions with a correct methodology about it as in Bayesian statistics. You can be implicit about it and draw conclusions with an incorrect methodology as in frequentist statistics. (See my other post in this thread for an explanation of why frequentist methodology is incorrect.)

Let me offer a simple example. Suppose a pregnant woman you know gives birth to a boy. Is that evidence that babies are more likely to be boys than girls? Obviously it is. Is it strong evidence? Obviously not. Should we upon observing that conclude that boys are more likely than girls? Obviously not.

Now suppose that you have no prior knowledge other than we see about similar numbers of boys and girls. I know that of the last 100,000 babies born in the USA, 51,157 are boys. Suppose we are both told that at the local hospital, 92 of the last 200 babies born were boys. I submit that we both will _and should_ wind up with different conclusions about the relative likelyhood of boys and girls. Why? Because different prior knowledge lead to different prior beliefs, and those prior beliefs when modified by identical evidence lead to different conclusions.

<comment><USER8> You have to admit that your example is pretty contrived though - <USER2> setting priors isn't so clean.

How do you 'properly' set the prior probability that someone really has E.S.P.? That a researcher is secretly colluding with a test subject? That a researcher is flat out fabricating their results? That this is just an instance of the Hans effect? Or a thousand other possible hypotheses ...

<comment><USER3> I picked my example so that the proper influence of the prior would be clear. You are absolutely right that there are many cases where different people with equivalent information have different beliefs. But being faced with complications like this makes correct reasoning _more_ important, and not less.

When you try to sweep the proper influence of the prior under the carpet, people will manipulate their statistics to draw the conclusions that they want. Worse still, if each is using subjective techniques that they believe are objective, the unexamined assumption will lead to them talking past each other.

By contrast with correct reasoning you can show each why they continue to believe what they believe while showing them how the other side is not going to have their opinions changed. In my experience this opens up a bigger possibility of useful dialog and changed opinions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I get lost in the argument with these simple coin flipping examples. The way it's presented is so confusing for the weird second case of how many trials it takes to get a tail.

In the first case, the probability of getting "five tails or more" from a fair coin is 11%, while in the second case, the probability of a fair coin requiring "at least five tails before seeing one heads" is 3%.

I didn't check the numbers here, but this seems perfectly reasonable to me in terms of hypothesis testing. He's playing on the fact that for cases like THXXXX you would get a result of 2 in the second experiment. You are taking the same results, but applying a different metric to them (position of first head versus count of tails). Of course p will be different.

I understand that the value chosen for significance of p is subjective, but the experiment itself makes perfect sense to me.

<comment><USER3> The problem is that the conditional probability of the coin being biased given the observation of TTTTTH absolutely does not and cannot depend one whether you intended to flip until you saw a heads, or were going to flip 6 times. Therefore you've got a subjective factor influencing your conclusion that probability theory says should _not_ be a factor if you are reasoning consistently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> To me, more interesting than Bayesianism versus Frequentism was the observation that scientific procedure as it currently stands allows a field like Parapsychology to survive.</comment>


Version SAT - <AUTHOR> https://research.swtch.com/version-sat <comment><USER2> > Dart's pub includes a simple backtracking solver that often takes a long > time.

I'll note two things:

1\. The backtracking solver isn't _that_ simple. It's got a handful of pretty smart heuristics that we've added over time to help it get stuck.

2\. It doesn't get stuck very often. It does happen. In particular, our ecosystem has one package that is very heavily depended on and also frequently ships breaking changes, which is always a recipe for version solver pain.

But pub works fine for probably >99% of invocations of it. Installing dependencies is a gating issue for getting _any_ work done, so if pub was getting stuck often, users would be screaming at us.

Also, Natalie, the other half of the pub team, put together a comparable proof of version solving being equivalent to 3-SAT a year or two ago, but I can't seem to find it now.

Personally, I think the idea of treating breaking versions of packages as distinct and allowing them to co-exist is interesting but I worry about the usability impact of it. It will be _very_ confusing for users if objects flow between those two packages and you get type errors like "Expected type Foo but got Foo." Good error messages can help a lot, though.

<comment><USER3> > It's got a handful of pretty smart heuristics that we've added over time to > help it get stuck.

I assume you mean NOT get stuck? Or do you mean something else like settling on a solution?

<comment><USER2> Heh, oops, yes. Help it find a solution. :)

Leaving my mistake to bear my shame publicly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Relevant: Russ Cox, the blog author is one of the core members of the Go team. Russ gave a great talk on challenges with code refactoring at GothamGo last month: \- writeup [https://talks.golang.org/2016/refactor.article](https://talks.golang.org/2016/refactor.article) \- video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6Cw9iCDVcU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6Cw9iCDVcU)

A group of community members have been working on a proposal for a package manager for Go. Sam Boyer also wrote an article about their progress here: [https://blog.gopheracademy.com/advent-2016/saga-go- dependenc...](https://blog.gopheracademy.com/advent-2016/saga-go-dependency- management/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Possibly related: [http://wiki.apidesign.org/wiki/LibraryWithoutImplicitExportI...](http://wiki.apidesign.org/wiki/LibraryWithoutImplicitExportIsPolynomial). This one seems to avoid the NP-completeness by giving up when it encounters a conflict between major versions of the same package. (instead of trying to figure out whether it could modify the solution to avoid the conflict by upgrading/downgrading some packages).

In the context of language package managers avoiding NP-completeness is interesting: if you have a global repository then you have to deal with conflicts in some way, however per-project repositories could try to get around limitation #4 (2 different versions of same package allowed to be installed). Whether it is desirable to do so is another matter though, you'd end up with various buggy versions of same package installed, never knowing whether you've fully upgraded to the fixed version...

Treating different major versions as different packages is interesting though, and happens to some extent in system packages already (e.g. both python2 and python3 can coexist)

<comment><USER6> > Treating different major versions as different packages

For emphasis, because I think that's what should ideally happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wondering how Nix plays into this. I'm no expert on it, but IIUC it attacks point 4 of Russ' list: "Two different versions of a package cannot be installed simultaneously." Nix allows you to install multiple versions of a package, but I'm not sure how that affects its dependency resolution.

<comment><USER8> Nix allows two packages to exist simultaneously on the filesystem and can even put both in your $LANGPATH (i.e., PYTHONPATH, CLASSPATH, GOPATH, etc), but the linker/runtime will still only look at the first package to resolve correctly, ignoring the second. In other words, Nix just sets up your environment--the language tools still have the final say about how they resolve multiple dependencies within that environment.

<comment><USER9> I suppose one thing to keep in mind is the interface that the packaged software provides. If packages A and B provide standalone binaries /bin/A and /bin/B, and package C depends on both, then the dependencies of A and B are pretty much isolated: each can use their own versions of whatever they like, and C can invoke both binaries.*

On the other hand, if A and B provide (some sort of) libraries which C imports, then their dependencies may be exposed by appearing in the pool of libraries available to C. This is certainly the case for Haskell, where all of a library's dependencies accumulate in the ghc-pkg database and multiple versions of a library aren't allowed in the same program. As you say, such things are existing problems in external, language-specific tools, and aren't caused by Nix; although Nix may provide a useful abstraction to better manage such problems.

* There may be application-specific problems at runtime, e.g. if A and B try to de/serialise each other's data, but I'd count that as a bug: if A and B are meant to be standalone then they're buggy, as their I/O formats should be more robust; on the other hand, if A and B are meant to be used together then the packaging is buggy: A and B should expose their shared dependency as a parameter, and C should pass in the same version to both.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Red Hat's DNF package manager (which does _not_ stand for "disjunctive normal form") and SUSE's Zypper package manager both use minisat for dependency resolution for RPMs.

[https://lwn.net/Articles/503581/](https://lwn.net/Articles/503581/)

[https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Libzypp_satsolver](https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Libzypp_satsolver)

</comment><comment><USER11> I believe the conda package manager also has a SAT solver [1]

[1] [https://www.continuum.io/blog/developer/new-advances- conda-0](https://www.continuum.io/blog/developer/new-advances-conda-0)

</comment><comment><USER12> one more, FreeBSD's pkg uses picosat - [https://github.com/freebsd/pkg/tree/master/external/picosat](https://github.com/freebsd/pkg/tree/master/external/picosat)

</comment><comment><USER13> It would be really awesome if the SAT Competitions required open source licenses instead of academically-restricted licenses. It would be amazing if we could use {Lin,Plin,Treen}geling solvers or the like for open source software like this.

<comment><USER14> I think you'd find you wouldn't have any serious entries in the competitions any more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The Solaris package manager (aka "pkg(5)") also uses a SAT solver for dependency resolution (minisat):

[https://blogs.oracle.com/barts/entry/satisfaction](https://blogs.oracle.com/barts/entry/satisfaction) [https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E36784_01/html/E36856/glulp.html](https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E36784_01/html/E36856/glulp.html)

However, a large drawback to SAT solutions is friendly messaging when no solution is found; just as hard as doing the initial dependency analaysis if not more difficult.

There are also interesting corner cases such as "metapackages" (in Debian terms) and alternatives, etc.

[https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E53394_01/html/E54820/dependtypes...](https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E53394_01/html/E54820/dependtypes.html)

For pkg(5), almost all of the magic is here:

[https://java.net/projects/ips/sources/pkg- gate/content/src/m...](https://java.net/projects/ips/sources/pkg- gate/content/src/modules/client/pkg_solver.py?rev=3476)

</comment><comment><USER16> Gosh I wish someone would solve this problem in the Java ecosystem. I work at a BigCo and the developer years that are lost each year to old fashioned JAR hell is astonishing, and it's only getting worse as runtime environments grow in complexity, we run in increasingly managed contexts which violate core assumptions of build systems, code dependencies are getting more complex, some people don't model package dependencies correctly, etc. Please, someone solve this and convince everyone to use it!</comment>


Vladimir Lukyanov's hydraulic computer - <AUTHOR> https://pruned.blogspot.com/2012/01/gardens-as-crypto-water-computers.html <comment><USER2> Image @ [http://www.digitaljournal.com/img/7/7/5/0/6/8/i/1/3/3/o/wate...](http://www.digitaljournal.com/img/7/7/5/0/6/8/i/1/3/3/o/water_computer.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER3> In the 1980s people in chemistry labs that needed to find the area beneath a curve used to print/plot the curve, cut out the area and weigh it. This worked quite well as they had accurate scales.

<comment><USER4> Ha! Very interesting. And the density of paper was uniform enough? Or maybe they used a different material?

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure if they ever did a scientific study on this, but you can choose your accuracy by playing with the scale of the plot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In a related vein, Ars Technica writer Sean Gallagher did a fantastic story on the US Navy's analog fire guidance computers a few years ago:

[https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2014/03/gears...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2014/03/gears-of-war-when-mechanical-analog-computers-ruled-the- waves/)

The instruction videos alone are worth the visit. Geekery of the first order.

<comment><USER6> Incidentally, these were the computers in the early Heinlein books.

I was mulling the comment here a few days ago pointing out Heinlein's prescient depiction of networked computers, and thinking that the hard part would be having mechanical computers pick up the phone and sending electromagnetic pulses down the line. Perhaps pecking at telegraph keys ...

<comment><USER7> Ash the Android in Alien used a water based computer. Or maybe that was milk. It looks like he might have been had problems solving non-homogeneous differential equations, because the cream would rise to the top.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA8jv1M6Y2g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA8jv1M6Y2g)

<comment><USER8> I always thought it was some kind of hydraulic fluid but I prefer your explanation. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I know of two excellent examples of this. One is an entertaining modern attempt to recreate economic models with a fluid computer: [https://vimeo.com/131690448](https://vimeo.com/131690448)

The other is the fucking fantastic Bay Model, a 1:1000 physical model of the San Francisco Bay: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Army_Corps_of_Engineers_B...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Army_Corps_of_Engineers_Bay_Model)

It was built in the 1950s to study the effects of various plans, including one proposal to divert all incoming rivers to "productive" use. It was eventually made obsolete by computer simulation, but it's still there. I bring a lot of my nerdy out-of-town visitors there; it's amazing to walk around on a 2-acre simulation.

<comment><USER10> Yes, first link is based on the MONIAC: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There's a little more info in this (somewhat wonderful) article: [https://pruned.blogspot.com/2012/01/gardens-as-crypto- water-...](https://pruned.blogspot.com/2012/01/gardens-as-crypto-water- computers.html)

<comment><USER12> OK, we've changed to that from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_integrator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_integrator). Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > he water level in various chambers (with precision to fractions of a > millimeter) represented stored numbers

I wonder how did they deal with thermal expansion. Maybe instead of using water at room temp they heated it to something higher and then a thermostat took care of it? But it still would be very hard to distribute heat evenly.

<comment><USER14> Thermodynamics lab tech was pretty advanced by that time.

The part that reads bogus to me is the fractions of a mm, water meniscus is sensitive to contamination and diameter, its "always" been easier to measure liquid masses to higher sig figs than to measure liquid volumes, I suspect the journalist filter turned mg into mm or the precision scale produced repeatable results equivalent to fractions of a mm in the container. The only solution I can come up with that would work in that era would be something weirdly optical involving mirrors and multiple floats.

I vaguely remember a quarter century ago in a chemistry lab placing a beaker of distilled room temp water in a very nice precision scale as a demonstration while the instructor had us calculate how long it would take the inch or so of water to evaporate based on the slowly decreasing mass, and the result during a dry winter was somewhere around a month. The room must have been sealed and 100% humidity because small fractions of a mm in height would represent in a very hand wavy way around a minute of evaporation if represented as time in normal winter lab air. I also wonder how volume of water changes as CO2 is absorbed or emitted by the water, even the smallest gas bubble could mess up fraction of a mm measurements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you squinted, you might consider the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Bay Model a giant low tech special purpose water computer.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Army_Corps_of_Engineers_B...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Army_Corps_of_Engineers_Bay_Model)

>The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Bay Model is a working hydraulic scale model of the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta System. While the Bay Model is still operational, it is no longer used for scientific research but is instead open to the public alongside educational exhibits about Bay hydrology. The model is located in the Bay Model Visitor Center at 2100 Bridgeway Blvd. in Sausalito, California.

</comment><comment><USER15> I believe now one could use microfluidics to leverage similar principles but miniaturize it almost into the size of a chip.

Here is an interesting demo:

[https://youtu.be/7z8I7awRYY4?t=114](https://youtu.be/7z8I7awRYY4?t=114)

</comment><comment><USER16> Hydraulic integrator would be a better translation.

<comment><USER17> Fix it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Reminds me of the stone/water brains of the Quatzoli people in Ken Liu's short story, "The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species".

[http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-bookmaking- hab...](http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-bookmaking-habits-of- select-species/)

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm not sure how different this is to the ball integrator?[0] or Vannevar Bush's differential analyser?[1] The water computer article says partial differentiator, then integrator, it's unclear.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball-and- disk_integrator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball-and-disk_integrator)

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

</comment><comment><USER20> Pretty cool. Reminds me of MYST

[http://myst5.com/images/mystgallery/channel_2.jpg](http://myst5.com/images/mystgallery/channel_2.jpg) [https://lparchive.org/Myst/Update%2015/3-1103_Switchflip.gif](https://lparchive.org/Myst/Update%2015/3-1103_Switchflip.gif)

</comment><comment><USER21> This reminds me of "rod logic" computers: [https://hackaday.com/2015/10/19/rod-logic-and-graphene- elusi...](https://hackaday.com/2015/10/19/rod-logic-and-graphene-elusive- molecule-scale-computers/)

</comment><comment><USER22> This rather reminds me of the economic model in Terry Pratchett's "Making Money".

<comment><USER23> Fun fact, the device you're referring to was actually based on a different real-life water-based computer, the MONIAC[1]. It used basins of water, pipes, and adjustable flow regulators as a physical metaphor for the movement of money in macro-economics. I'm personally a really big fan, and I've need meaning to work up a simulation for quite some time now.

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

<comment><USER10> Awesome. I imagine a Water Computer Construction Set that allows you to "plumb" a computer program.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Similarly there was a story about a ~computer based on water surface tension to encode complex equations and let the physics approximate a solution in parallel. Can't find the name though.

<comment><USER10> Found an online link to one of the articles Dewdney wrote for Scientific American about "analog computers" (this is the second article, there was one a year earlier):

[http://www.softouch.on.ca/kb/data/Scan-130202-0003.pdf](http://www.softouch.on.ca/kb/data/Scan-130202-0003.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> That sounds like something out of the Dune universe.

<comment><USER26> I think that would be forbidden* - a machine doesn't have to use semiconductors or even electrical current to be a machine.

* "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Wonder if they had cross-core security vulnerabilities?

<comment><USER28> Even better, is remote hacking of analog computer even possible?

<comment><USER29> It's not connected to anything, so probably not. However back when we used purpose-built electromechanical switching systems for telephones, people exploited them[0].

[0][https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking)

<comment><USER7> If the phone system used water instead of electricity for in-band signaling, would phone phreaks have to inject blue fluid into the pipes to exploit them?

<comment><USER29> If water pipes were used for signalling, it would probably be as acoustic conduits (analogous to wires, which are electromagnetic wave conduits). You would exploit them in just about the same way as the electromechanical systems were.

<comment><USER8> Gives a whole new meaning to the term "wiretap".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> More details

[https://pruned.blogspot.com/2012/01/gardens-as-crypto- water-...](https://pruned.blogspot.com/2012/01/gardens-as-crypto-water- computers.html?m=1)

<comment><USER12> We've changed to that from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_integrator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_integrator).

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Talk about floating point precision!

<comment><USER32> "Can someone mop up the memory leak?"

<comment><USER33> Reminds me of a discussion I heard:

Customer: the phone complains memory is full. Rep: ok there is probably a memory leak. Customer: no, it cannot be leaking since it is full!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> If I recall correctly, the world3 model which the authors of 'the limits to growth' used also utilized fluids to simulate the increasing, or diminishing influence of different factors on our ecosystem.</comment>


Ask HN: Looking for co-founder in Toronto - <AUTHOR> Looking for a tech co-founder who's interested in machine learning.
I'm technical myself but I also studied business. Over the past year, I've spent exploring the need for solutions around location analysis and email marketing.
Currently, I'm building a smarter, more automated CRM that will hopefully help people build better relationships. I've built in in AngularJS and Python at the moment.
The reason why I started building this CRM is so I can stay on top of my personal and business relationships. However, I can also see there's use for this application in sales and business development, in which case, it'll be very similar to SalesforceIQ but we're going to put our own unique spin on it. <comment><USER2> Does she has to be in Toronto? Or remote is an option? Also what kind of commitments are you looking for?

<comment><AUTHOR> Remote is fine too. I'm looking for someone who's committed enough to spend some evenings/weekends as we look for product/market fit. I'm happy if you have a day job so this isn't an all or nothing proposition. I would also like someone to exchange ideas with while keeping each other accountable.

For context, family is important to me as well but I am crazy enough to think that building a business and having a family is possible.

<comment><USER2> I would like to check. How would you like to connect?

<comment><AUTHOR> We can connect through email - mine's in the profile.

<comment><USER2> OK I will send you an email. Sorry but its not there. However you can ping me on smasher21382 at gmail dot com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Have you talked with anyone? do you have customers or trials customers?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't have customers yet - mostly beta testers at this point. All have mentioned they wanted to see something before buying since it's a CRM-ish type of app. But some have said that there's a great need for it. I'd like to test that fact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> you should check out this thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11737851](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11737851)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Great tips and I had wanted to work on a similar idea before.</comment></comment>


Partisan Gaps in Caucasian Racial Attitudes - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/03/31/the-gap-between-republicans-and-democrats-views-of-african-americans-just-hit-a-new-high/?tid=hybrid_experimentrandom_1_na <comment><USER2> The partisan intelligence gap is widening...</comment>


Simulation on Disruptive Battery Technologies - <AUTHOR> http://cb.hbsp.harvard.edu/cb/product/7015-HTM-ENG

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a better link (more detail and playable demo): [http://forio.com/store/harvard-christensen-innovation- techno...](http://forio.com/store/harvard-christensen-innovation-technology- strategy-simulation/)</comment>


Show HN: Taxaroo – professional tax preparation without leaving your house - <AUTHOR> https://www.taxaroo.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey, HN! Long-time fan, infrequent contributor here.

My co-founder and I are excited to share with you our startup - Taxaroo. At the risk of sounding cheesy, think of Taxaroo as "Uber", but for tax preparation. Taxaroo is a marketplace that matches tax filers with professional tax preparers entirely online. We offer up-front, fixed-price quotes based on clients' unique tax situation, and match them with experienced tax preparers that are able to handle that specific scenario. Clients pay no additional fees to us - we only charge tax preparers a referral fee.

Beyond simply a marketplace, Taxaroo is also a convenient (and secure) platform for you, as a client, to exchange documents and basic personal information with your preparer (rather than emails, lugging stuff to someone's office, or [ _shudder_ ] faxing docs). We also enable you to pay with a credit card and only be charged once you've approved your final tax return(s).

Though we've been working on this for nearly a year, we only recently opened up the platform for tax preparers and have already received a strong response and lots of enthusiasm. We have signed up professionals from across the U.S. with an average experience of over 17 years preparing taxes. We rigorously validate several levels of identification and credentials, and verify these with the IRS.

We'd love for you to check it out and let us know what you all think! If you're getting ready for tax season, we want to offer HN a 10% discount for the first 25 people using this promo link: [https://taxaroo.com/getstarted/LOVE4HN](https://taxaroo.com/getstarted/LOVE4HN).

Thanks,

Tim (Co-founder and CTO, Taxaroo)

<comment><USER2> This is great, I was doing my tax the other day and thinking "Why the f __* don 't they make it a web form with simple English terms".

Tiny suggestion: Add a page saying which countries it's available for. Since it had a 'roo' I and ~25M Australian will hope it supports Australia. t was obvious once I started the form but first I look for an about or faq page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks for the suggestion! Unfortunately, since we're U.S. based we weren't comfortable branching outside the U.S. just yet (since we aren't sure of the laws in other countries in this area). I hope we can support other countries in the future!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> These guys are great! Glad to see this launch.</comment>


Zuck & Me: What I Learned Competing Against Mark Zuckerberg's The Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://socialtimes.com/zuck-me-what-i-learned-competing-against-mark-zuckerbergs-the-facebook_b136315

<comment><USER2> The irony here is plenty of colleges I was familiar with had a forum/marketplace/craigslist like competitor of their own (as the author did). I have a hard time thinking of a campus that I knew of that didn't. The social profile angle Facebook ran with was less common in comparison</comment>


Stack Exchange deletes most downvoted post on Meta (gender pronoun FAQ) - <AUTHOR> https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334900/official-faq-on-gender-pronouns-and-code-of-conduct-changes <comment><USER2> Maybe it's in order to cite an upvoted blunt answer there:

> This post seems to simply continue the same tone-deaf tradition we've been > seeing throughout this whole debacle. Since the SE folks don't seem to be > good at picking up on hints, perhaps a bit of bluntness is in order:

> StackExchange, it's not Monica's values that are out of alignment. Your > values are out of alignment. The overwhelmingly negative response to this > post is pretty solid proof of that; this is the community telling you in no > uncertain terms that your values are not aligned with ours!

> Compelled speech, even in the name of a worthy cause, has no place in > civilized society. Period. Our values reject it.

> Forcing people to choose between violating their conscience or leaving, in > the name of inclusiveness, is an Orwellian nightmare that has no place in > our community. Our values reject it.

> Telling people that the acceptable solution to being in a position where > they might be required to violate their conscience is to "disengage" > (refrain from posting at all) is incompatible with a site in which > reputation is built entirely on posting. Our values reject it.

> Telling people that the acceptable solution to being in a position where > they might be required to violate their conscience is to "disengage" > (refrain from posting at all) sets up a "heckler's veto," incentivizing > people to act in bad faith in order to force people they disagree with to > disengage rather than voice their opinions. Our values reject it.

> Putting identity politics front-and-center in what is supposed to be a > neutral, objective Q&A environment promotes division and strife, not > inclusion, and more importantly, it distracts from the primary mission of > these sites: getting good answers to good questions. Our values reject it.

> If you truly value your community, that means respecting the community's > values, not attempting to impose new and incompatible ones by fiat. Your > values are out of alignment with the values of the community you are > supporting. Please fix them.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://web.archive.org/web/20191020051643/https://meta.stac...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191020051643/https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334900/official- faq-on-gender-pronouns-and-code-of-conduct-changes)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm done with stackoverflow and anyone who would infringe on my rights in the excitement of pandering to someone else's ad hoc demands when there was no substantial or life-threatening need to do so in the first place.

What is this world coming to, is everyone so asleep as not to notice that something is very wrong? This is an example where sick and toxic meets nonsensical and comedic.

Im ready for an alternative.

</comment><comment><USER5> I still don't understand why using people's request pronouns is a problem, or even why some feel the like they need to walk on eggshells because of these issues. Just be respectful.

<comment><USER6> I'll copy a response that I wrote elsewhere.

One issue that a lot of trans supporters don't realize is that similarly to how trans people could be offended when they are referred to by a gender not of their choice, so to could some speakers be offended if they are forced to refer to a person as a gender not of their (the speaker) choice.

This may be easier to understand by using a comparison. When I talk about the Muslim prophet I say Muhammad. However, many Muslims would say Muhammad pbuh (peace be upon him). This isn't that problematic, but let's say they the term was Muhammad ttp (the true prophet). Now I as a non Muslim believer would never use ttp because that would be insulting for whoever I believe in. If SE required that whenever I mention Muhammad that I append ttp, I would refuse as it would be extremely offensive to me.

Similarly by referring to a person with XX chromosomes [1] as she, is offensive to people who believe that genders cannot change. A reasonable compromise would be to let whoever is righting chose what they want, or even allow gender neutral pronouns. But what SE chose to do was to say that people who believe that XY is a guy are wrong and deserve no respect for their beliefs.

[1] someone corrected me and pointed out that there is a rare genetic condition where someone could have XX chromosomes but have many other male characteristics. So I would like to correct myself and say that for certain rare genetic conditions, I wouldn't mind being corrected. But for the vast majority of transgenders who are genetically similar to either males or females the above holds.

<comment><USER7> Forgive me, but this is a load of absolute horseshit. There's a gulf of difference between choosing given terminology based on religious belief and choosing terminology based on personal interpretation of scientific text.

Sex and gender aren't the same thing. It boggles my mind how seemingly complicated this is for some people to grasp. There's a substantial corpus of established science and historical research that more or less proves that physiological sex and social gender are not and never have been mutually causal; your argument here is predicated upon the notion that a person's chromosomes are inextricably linked to their gender, which simply isn't true.

In [1], you're literally making the exception that proves the rule here. What do you define as "male characteristics"? Doesn't it seem like that might not be the most rigorous qualifier for determining whether or not somebody falls on one side or another of whatever arbitrary boundary you seem to be defining?

Does it not strike you as a little cruel to suggest that treating a person with a modicum of respect over a social issue that barely (if at all) affects you is as offensive as disrespecting an entire religious viewpoint?

Is it really that hard to understand that in pursuit of whatever maladaptive compromise makes you feel more comfortable in your belief, you're actively harming people who have to constantly struggle to be understood or even recognized in modern society?

Doesn't that feel a little selfish? Like you're missing the point a little?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As for most downvoted, I think Sara Chipps' Non-Apology [1] has taken the crown for now.

[1] [https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334248/an-update- to...](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334248/an-update-to-our- community-and-an-apology)

</comment><comment><USER9> Can anyone detail what exactly this is about? This link just redirects to a 404.

<comment><USER10> We don't know.

There was a post explaining how to use pronouns, by a well-respected stackexchange.com employee, not fantastic but, well, one doesn't have to follow all the rules all the time anyway. There may also have been something else.

Then a very-well-respected moderator was thrown out rather abruptly (and whatever "else" might be was surely was no fault of hers). After that, and because of various other tonedeaf behaviour on part of stackexchange.com in the past couple of years, umpty more moderators quit, [https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/390427](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/390427) is an example.

<comment><USER10> Replying to myself to add this link, which explains much of the anger well: [https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/334268](https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/334268)

Note that "I was there" comment.

<comment><USER11> To me, the long-term unhappiness with StackExchange expressed in the many posts on Meta suggest the necessity of creating a tipping point. Every moderator has a chance to air their grievances. Every moderator has an opportunity to move on in a principled way when their core values conflict with the proposed workplace standards.</comment></comment></comment></comment>