Roger Boisjoly dies at 73; engineer tried to halt Challenger launch - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-roger-boisjoly-20120207,0,2248999.story <comment><USER2> From the Rogers report [1]:

Engineers at Thiokol also were increasingly concerned about the problem. On July 22, 1985, Roger Boisjoly of the structures section wrote a memorandum predicting NASA might give the motor contract to a competitor or there might be a flight failure if Thiokol did not come up with a timely solution.

Nine days later (July 31) Boisjoly wrote another memorandum titled "O-ring Erosion/Potential Failure Criticality" to R. K. Lund, Thiokol's Vice President of Engineering:

 _"The mistakenly accepted position on the joint problem was to fly without fear of failure and to run a series of design evaluations which would ultimately lead to a solution or at least a significant reduction of the erosion problem. This position is now changed as a result of the [51-B] nozzle joint erosion which eroded a secondary O-ring with the primary O-ring never sealing. If the same scenario should occur in a field joint (and it could), then it is a jump ball whether as to the success or failure of the joint because the secondary O-ring cannot respond to the clevis opening rate and may not be capable of pressurization. The result would be a catastrophe of the highest order-loss of human life."_

Boisjoly recommended setting up a team to solve the O-ring problem, and concluded by stating:

 _"It is my honest and very real fear that if we do not take immediate action to dedicate a team to solve the problem, with the field joint having the number one priority, then we stand in jeopardy of losing a flight along with all the launch pad facilities."_

[1] <http://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v1ch6.htm>

<comment><USER3> _Boisjoly recommended setting up a team to solve the O-ring problem_

And there was a team working on it. IIRC, a redesign of the joint was being worked on. But no one suggested, before the evening before the launch, that launches should be stopped until the redesign was completed.

<comment><USER4> No. But they did suggest that launching in unusually cold weather was a very bad idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The fate of the Challenger engineers is depressing because they were essentially kicked out of their profession for knowing the right and moral answer. Thankfully, very few of us will be faced with these honestly life-or- death technical decisions.

I think there are parallels to right-or-wrong issues that we face in our own industry on a regular basis, for example:

[http://johnnye.net/articles/ios-apps-want-your- contacts,-not...](http://johnnye.net/articles/ios-apps-want-your- contacts,-not-just-path.html)

Are phrases like "standard industry practice" and "covered by the click- through license" today's weasel words that rationalize us implementing immoral management demands?

<comment><USER6> > I think there are parallels to right-or-wrong issues that we face in our own > industry on a regular basis, for example:

If our software deals with privacy and personal information then it can even become life or death in some countries. A dissident in a brutal authoritarian regime could lose his life if the software has a bug in it, for example.

The other area were moral choices take place is in licensing and patents. Can be on both large scales (like we see with big companies use busybox for their platform) or smaller scales (copying code from one project to another without even giving credit).

<comment><USER7> Fine historical example:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust>

Please don't downvote me - I'm not invoking Godwins Law here ;-)

<comment><USER6> Yeah that is a good point. One can argue that technology is a tool and it can be used for evil. But with this stuff:

"without IBM's machinery, continuing UPKEEP and SERVICE, as well as the supply of punch cards, whether located ON-SITE or off-site, Hitler's camps could have never managed the numbers they did" [emphasis mine]

The idea is basically:

So there were not pocket calculators that they bought and then deployed in concentration camps and IBM can claim complete ignorance over the use. These machines need constant & professional service. Having them onsite meant that IBM sent technicians there probably. One had to wonder what those technician's response do the 24/7 billowing crematorium and emaciated bodies were.

However, on the other side (and I have not read the book, just looked at the topic many years ago superficially) I am not aware of any IBM engineers' stories about an actual site visit... So I don't know what to think and how guilty IBM really is...

<comment><USER8> I don't know, I think that IBM per se was really in a position to know how the census machines they had given to Germany were actually being used. Remember that this was before the days of satellite communication, and as part of their war strategy the British cut Germany's telegraph cables (just like they had in WWI) and intercepted packets of mail between the US and Germany whenever they could, and generally did a pretty good job of it[1]. I'm happy to believe that people who were nominally IBM employees were servicing the machines, but if IBM headquarters wasn't being told what was happening, and if the employees faced getting shot if they didn't do what they were told, I'm not sure how much you can say that IBM knew in any meaningful sense.

[1] This was a point of contention between the UK and US before the fall of France.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> While watching the new iPad UI course from CMU ( [http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/computing/2012/winter/ipad- cours...](http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/computing/2012/winter/ipad-course.shtml) ), the lecturer touched on what happened with the Challenger, using it as an example in a point he was trying to make.

However, I was struck by wrong he got it. He was making a point about how just having the data available isnt enough - the modern challenge is to make sense of big data in a meaningful way through visualization. And to back this point up, he made it sound like a bunch of engineers didn't look closely at the data sheet for the rubber used in their o-rings and oopsy! The challenger blew up. Shrug, Who knew?

I'll tell you who knew. Roger. "The engineers" knew perfectly well what was going to happen. It was management who refused to listen to them and launched anyway.

Feyman's account of his involvement in investigating this disaster in "the pleasure of finding things out" was excellent. In one exercise, he bad the engineers and management write down what they honestly thought the failure rate of the shuttle was. Management quoted 1 in 100,000, while engineering quoted 1 in 100. The challenger disaster was a symptom of a complete breakdown in communication between engineering and management at NASA.

<comment><USER10> One of my college mechanical engineering professors was a former NASA engineer involved in determining risk and investigating problems. He gave a gave a lecture & led a discussion on the Challenger O-Ring case (and I have since read a lot of the reports). As you mentioned, the CMU lecturer wasn't even close to the real story. But it also ins't so simple as to say 'managment didn't listen'.

The engineers knew what was going to happen with a fairly high degree of certainty - enough that the launch shouldn't hvae happened. Then they turned to management and tried to present their findings. Clearly the business guys didn't want to be the ones to hold up the launch, they had a strong incentive not to. So the engineers _had_ to convince them why the company should basically stick its neck out as one of hundreds and hundreds of vendors and stop this launch. The engineers didn't do the best job of communicating the certainty of the problem, the magnitude of the problem, etc. So it was a little bit of both.

That lecture was probably 8 years ago for me, but it definitely left a lasting impression. Today I work on systems that truthfully are more complicated than the space shuttle and also have a lot more lives at stake. "Intellectual honesty" is a phrase I live by. There have been times I fucked up some math and knew we needed to fix something - even though it would money and delay, but I stuck to my guns and made sure it happened. The alternative is too likely to lead to disaster. It keeps me up at night, and those are the near misses. I can't imagine what that guy went through knowing they almost stopped it, but didn't.

<comment><USER11> Interesting perspective, thanks for sharing. Can you say what you work on, or at least give us an idea? Systems more complicated than the space shuttle - that sounds really interesting and I'm not sure which ones those are.

<comment><USER10> I'd rather not share on HN because of how often it gets crawled by Google. You can generally find it through my LinkedIn which is easy enough to find from my HN handle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _"When he was pressed by NASA the night before the liftoff to sign a written recommendation approving the launch, he refused, and later argued late into the night for a launch cancellation. When McDonald later disclosed the secret debate to accident investigators, he was isolated and his career destroyed."_

This is quite simply astonishing; everything I have ever learned in my engineering classes said to do what McDonald did and look what happened to him.

<comment><USER13> Having integrity would be easy if you never had to fight and the results always benefitted you. Life is not a fair thing.

Engineers place a lot of emphasis on having the right answer and almost no emphasis on ensuring their influence. It doesn't matter how right you are if nobody will follow your direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ronald Reagan was supposed to give a state of the union address a couple days after the launch. He wanted to use the success of the space program as part of that speech. While there was no direct order, it's clear that NASA management felt significant political pressure to push the launch forward or risk reduced funding from congress. It's clear they screwed up, just wanted to add some context to the climate when they made these decisions.

<comment><USER15> This comment needs more upvotes. The political pressure on NASA is extreme. The only people doted over more than the astronauts were the politicians. Look into the origins of the Triana satellite and its subsequent fate for a particularly ridiculous example.

<comment><USER16> Seconded. It is a common cognitive failure of us the engineering-minded to underestimate how important politics and other human factors are.

<comment><USER17> I know this is a movie. But I think we all get the point.

<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086197/>

Gordon Cooper: You boys know what makes this bird go up? FUNDING makes this bird go up.

Gus Grissom: He's right. No bucks, no Buck Rogers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Stunning.

"When the space shuttle Columbia burned up on reentry in 2003, killing its crew of seven, the accident was blamed on the same kinds of management failures that occurred with the Challenger. By that time, Boisjoly believed that NASA was beyond reform, some of its officials should be indicted on manslaughter charges and the agency abolished."

"NASA's mismanagement "is not going to stop until somebody gets sent to hard rock hotel," Boisjoly said. "I don't care how many commissions you have. These guys have a way of numbing their brains. They have destroyed $5 billion worth of hardware and 14 lives because of their nonsense." "

<comment><USER18> Yes, nothing has changed. Lessons were not learned. And this was known before the Columbia disaster, in fact not long after the commission on the Challenger. It bears striking resemblances to the financial crisis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Their pleas and technical theories were rejected by senior managers at the company and NASA, who told them they had failed to prove their case and that the shuttle would be launched in freezing temperatures the next morning. _It was among the great engineering miscalculations in history._ "

Horsepucky: the engineers calculations weren't mis-anything. The historical record has long since proven that the engineers were repeatedly ignored by their management and by bureaucrats at NASA.

</comment><comment><USER15> I spent 6 years as a structural engineer on space shuttle flights. A few thoughts:

While I don't know the people involved with Challenger - I was in 6th grade at the time - it goes well against my own experience that NASA management had anything but the interests of the crew in mind. To a fault. In fact, your average NASA employee doted on astronauts like a star struck little girl. What the crew wanted, the crew got. You could always tell who the astronaut was when you saw a group walking about the centers - he/she was the one whose every semi-whimsical comment extracted voluminous and polite laughter from the others in the group.

I was, however, working when Columbia blew up. In fact, my mission was supposed to fly on it when it got back. Although sad, I feel comfortable saying that most of the people working on these things sort of know it's going to happen from time to time. It wasn't exactly surprising to us or the crew.

Blaming managers and celebrating engineers is overly simplistic. The line is not as well defined as you might think. I had few - if any (I can't think of a single one, actually) - managers (either contractors or NASA employees) who were not experienced engineers.

The safety rules for a shuttle _payload_ , let alone the actual orbiter, are voluminous and arcane. It is the primary reason that very little new technology comes out of the manned space flight program. Everything new is considered too dangerous because it hasn't been flown before.

This stuff is _insanely dangerous_. It is pretty damn easy to come up with a way some piece of hardware you're working on could kill someone. The complexity is enormous. The number of people involved is in the thousands, and they're spread all over the country. Different centers have different rules.

As a result, you make life-and-death decisions literally every day. It's not such a big deal, because there is a lot of formal process in place to make sure it gets done right. The the "standards" are what keep space flight as we know it as safe as it is. Are they or the processes by which they are enforced perfect? Hell no.

The system failed. People failed. But we knew this would happen, and we did it anyway because it's the price of exploring the frontiers. We learned from Challenger. We learned from Columbia. We will learn from the next catastrophic failure. NASA isn't perfect. In fact, you might say the bloated organization and government involvement makes this sort of thing inevitable. But I bet the small privateers exploring manned space flight will run into their own challenges.

Basically, what I'm saying is that we need to keep this in a larger perspective. Obsessing over one failure in what is a centuries-long quest is not helpful. Dissect it, learn from it, and move on.

<comment><USER20> Different teams working on modules is a very different animal than one engineer saying "this item is going to blow up" for years and obviously everyone ignoring him... I find it particularly shocking how your answer suggests a strong "well, shit happens" attitude when clearly the potential AND a strong reason to make things better was right there.

What would really be interesting is why he "failed to make his case" according to executives.

<comment><USER15> What you're not seeing is that pretty much everything you work on has some risk of failure, and much of it could be catastrophic. Sorting through all of that is not easy. Yes, in this case, there were systemic and human failures.

It just goes to show you that even when everyone is paying attention, things still go wrong. Some people heard him and made the call that it was still safe. They were wrong. That, unfortunately, is the state of the art today (or it was back in the 80's). The alternative is to stay on the ground.

But yes, shit does happen, and nobody climbing abord the orbiter is under any illusion that it is a safe thing to do.

<comment><USER21> If you've read Fenyman's appendix to the report on the accident and investigation (<http://www.ralentz.com/old/space/feynman-report.html>), I don't see how you can possibly believe that the decisions made around the Challenger launch were made with the right process.

<comment><USER15> I have read it, and I do think there are defects in the processes. But what to you _do_ about it? I'm sure there are many more unknown vulnerabilities in the orbiter that were never found out, but you keep trying and fixing.

<comment><USER22> Your willfully ignorant (and I don't mean that in a crude, insulting way) responses here lead me to think there remains some very serious cultural issues within NASA.

<comment><USER15> I think you've read something I didn't write. What you call willful ignorance I call a realistic assessment and acceptance of the risks of pioneering space flight.

Nobody is forced into an orbiter - people BEG for the opportunity. We gave them that opportunity, working in good faith to the best of our ability. Sometimes it doesn't work out. Sometimes things break. Sometimes people screw up. We all know the risks.

You can sit on the porch with a near 100% safety record or you can give it a try. Your choice.

<comment><USER20> Actually I have to say I am with "mistermann" on this... you make it sound like there is no other way. I can totally accept and understand that it cannot be all that safe to sit you on tons of rocket fuel, fire you into the oxygen- less and freezing depth of space and then hope you somehow make it onto another planet AND then do the same stunt from there back to earth. I get it, I can also understand the trade-off between "making it 100% safe" and "otherwise we'd never get lift-off".

What I cannot understand is: an unknown, unforseen contingency is a completely different thing than an engineer pointing out "this WILL fail, it will blow up and I have proof" and there really should not be any excuse for ignoring a warning like this... yes, you cannot make it 100% safe but you should at least aim to make it as safe as humanly possible given your current level of technology and knowledge... so, in my book overriding an engineer saying "this WILL fail and it'll blow up" is actually negligent man slaughter. When I get into my car in the morning and don't care that the brakes aren't working even my mechanic told me my brake lines were cut, what would you call that?

<comment><USER3> While this sentiment is understandable, it's not justified unless you know how many times people said "this will fail" and it didn't. We only have definite data on this one statement. You can _not_ from that data conclude (I'm not saying there isn't other data) that this was negligent. If every engineer who disagreed with something said "this thing is going to blow up", _eventually_ one would be right. But you can _not_ then infer that _that_ individual was any different than the others and that people should have known this. It's the "monkeys on typewriters" fallacy.

<comment><USER23> This is science and engineering not statistics. It is not a numbers game or "monkeys on typewriters" or how many bug reports we can file on the same issue to get said issue fixed!

At the end of the day, if even ONE person demonstrates scientific or engineering knowledge that shows a serious safety concern, then why would you actively _choose_ to ignore it. Period.

NASA management - whether it be by organisational process and or personally identifiable decision making - failed in their responsibilities in spectacular fashion!

<comment><USER15> While I agree (especially with the last sentence), I would point out that the engineering behind these problems is rarely black and white, and hindsight tends to make it look more so than it is.

I do not believe that if someone knew with 100% certainty that Challenger would blow up that it would ever have launched. The trouble came in in the judgment of that risk. In this case, from what I've read, they got it wrong - very wrong[1].

You can argue about how certain they have to be, or how negligent people were to ignore estimated failure probabilities of whatever magnitude. But it's not like someone says, "this will blow up 85% of the time, period. Make a call." It's more subtle, complex, and less concrete than that.

1\. Note that this is not equavlent to "if it blew up, they got it wrong.". Sometimes the small, properly calculated risk blows up on you just because you're unlucky - which is different from a miscalculated risk blowing up on you.

<comment><USER24> No hindsight was required to observe the following:

O-rings are supposed to seal on compression, not expansion.

As it is now, the O-rings are getting blown out of their tracks but still managing to seal the whole assembly quickly enough.

The above unplanned behavior, which is the only thing preventing a hull loss (and a crew loss since there's no provision for escape) is sufficiently iffy that sooner or later we're likely to run out of luck.

(I'd also add about the Columbia loss that NASA had a "can't do" attitude towards the problem they observed of the foam hitting the wing. Hardly a "crew first" attitude.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The story in more detail at NPR:

[http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo- way/2012/02/06/146490064/rem...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo- way/2012/02/06/146490064/remembering-roger-boisjoly-he-tried-to-stop-shuttle- challenger-launch)

[...] "We all knew what the implication was without actually coming out and saying it," a tearful Boisjoly told Zwerdling in 1986. "We all knew if the seals failed the shuttle would blow up."

Armed with the data that described that possibility, Boisjoly and his colleagues argued persistently and vigorously for hours. At first, Thiokol managers agreed with them and formally recommended a launch delay. But NASA officials on a conference call challenged that recommendation.

"I am appalled," said NASA's George Hardy, according to Boisjoly and our other source in the room. "I am appalled by your recommendation."

Another shuttle program manager, Lawrence Mulloy, didn't hide his disdain. "My God, Thiokol," he said. "When do you want me to launch--next April?"

These words and this debate were not known publicly until our interviews with Boisjoly and his colleague. They told us that the NASA pressure caused Thiokol managers to "put their management hats on," as one source told us. They overruled Boisjoly and the other engineers and told NASA to go ahead and launch.

"We thought that if the seals failed the shuttle would never get off the launch pad," Boisjoly told Zwerdling. So, when Challenger lifted off without incident, he and the others watching television screens at Thiokol's Utah plant were relieved.

"And when we were one minute into the launch a friend turned to me and said, 'Oh God. We made it. We made it!'" Boisjoly continued. "Then, a few seconds later, the shuttle blew up. And we all knew exactly what happened."

</comment><comment><USER26> What strikes me about the episode in terms of "general life lessons" isn't just "Listen to the engineers" (you should, though); it's that under the pressure to Get Stuff Done, there's a huge temptation to brush legitimate concerns under the rug. "These guys tell me this shuttle is unsafe, but space launch is never completely safe" --> "These guys tell me this user data isn't secure but no software is completely safe." Now that the newness of the space program has worn off a bit, it's easy to say "why didn't they just delay the launch?" but back in the day, it was an issue of national pride, and the managers, simple-minded as they may have been, were under an extreme amount of pressure to pull the launch off.

I guess it's just worth remembering that even if you're under pressure to ship, launch, or publish, if the guys whose job it is to know tell you to reconsider, you probably should.

<comment><USER20> I guess this is also a problem of different goals, according compensation and what you have to pay in case you were wrong... those guys having to push things through and make it happen in time, under budget get paid for just that - and not for having prevented a disaster. Just like bank managers make fat profits from taking on huge risks and then don't have to pay for it when it explodes in their face and nothing happens there; no person is responsible. It just happened.

(Another problem probably is communication between engineers and (project) managers - you can not be blatantly un-subtle enough... if the worst case is complete data loss then you paint them that picture in no subtle terms; if the worst case is catastrophic equipment failure, explosions, launching pad annihilated and several lives including the millions spent training them lost, then that's what you tell them and document in very direct terms.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> You can go through any catastrophe in a complex system and piece together a chain of events that show how "obvious" it was that it was going to happen. What you miss are all the chains that say _every_ complex system is going to end in catastrophe, because when they don't end, nobody looks. It is kind of an anti-survivor bias.

It is also why it is a bad idea to make policy changes strictly off the cause of a single failure, and that is where things like commissions should help: you can move the focus to looking at the entire problem set for weaknesses instead of just leaving it with "make a better o-ring".

</comment><comment><USER28> Here's the memo in which Boisjoly warns of a potential "catastrophe of the highest order - loss of human life."

[http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/10/result-would-be- catastr...](http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/10/result-would-be- catastrophe.html)

</comment><comment><USER29> For more background on the engineer-manager disconnect that led to the Challenger disaster, it's worth reading about Richard Feynman's famous appendix to the Rogers report (even Wikipedia's summary is a fascinating read):

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report#Role_o...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report#Role_of_Richard_Feynman)

</comment><comment><USER30> What I find most interesting is the contrast this article's discussion paints with the one we saw only 2 weeks ago, _How Much Is an Astronaut's Life Worth?_ [1]. Some of the highly-rated HN comments included:

 _Space is dangerous. We should stop pretending it can be made "safe". It just gives politicians something to wag their tongues at when something inevitably goes wrong._

 _The problem here is that NASA is a political agency, not a scientific one. Each year, elected politicians sit down and decide how much they're going to get._

 _This provides thoughtful perspective on policy trade-offs. As Thomas Sowell has written, "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics."_

[1] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3518559>

</comment><comment><USER31> I don't know science so please pardon me if my comment makes no sense in this context.

What if by some stroke of luck, Challenger was extremely lucky enough to not explode on that 1st launch...What would happen to these righteous people such as Roger? Condemned by the people around them as some over worrying, insane self righteous people who thought they know everything. If you get what I mean...

It's sad that the challenger explosion happened, but at the same time it helps to highlight an important issue which may otherwise remain buried.

In software/web development context, it's of course harder to say this thing is going to blow up because a serious technical debt usually only climbs in after a much longer time for which by then, the people responsible may have left . Leaving the next victim to clean it up. This also is a sad state when it comes to final year projects, where students try to do everything that could impress to the graders on the outside to get the top grade. While students who make the extra effort for a clean and maintainble backend did not get the top grades because the lecturer only looks at the outside during presentation.

</comment><comment><USER32> In "Visual Explanations" <http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_visex> Edward Tufte wrote a must-read analysis of why admonitions to postpone the launch were ignored.

<comment><USER33> Boisjoly and others have argued that Tufte's criticism is misguided, as he misunderstands the engineering: <http://people.rit.edu/wlrgsh/FINRobison.pdf> . Shorter blog summary here: [http://eagereyes.org/criticism/tufte-and-the- truth-about-the...](http://eagereyes.org/criticism/tufte-and-the-truth-about- the-challenger)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> What are the names of those above Boisjoly who ignored him and made the call to launch? Good to know the names of the heroes in this story, but good also to know the names of the villains.

</comment><comment><USER35> RIP Responsible Engineer

</comment><comment><USER36> For the curious, I ran into an excellent document which is an excerpt from an after the fact risk assessment of the Shuttle System over time: [http://traffic.libsyn.com/sciencefriday/NASAShuttleRiskRevie...](http://traffic.libsyn.com/sciencefriday/NASAShuttleRiskReview- excerpt.pdf)

It's quite fascinating and pretty eye opening.

</comment><comment><USER37> "Boisjoly could not watch the launch, so certain was he that the shuttle would blow up."

One thing is to believe that the chance of blowing up is ~1% (which is enough to prevent launch).

Another thing is to be certain, that it WILL blow up (I assume 90%+ probability here).

If he was so certain, why he could not convince his management?

<comment><USER38> It's worth reading the Wikipedia entry on the following report and Feynman's findings. Anonymous polling of engineers showed they estimated a general probability of catastrophic disaster in a shuttle launch between 1% and 2%.

<comment><USER37> So latimes.com's article blew it out of proportions. 2% chance of disaster is not nearly the same as "so certain was he that the shuttle would blow up."

<comment><USER39> You're conflating two different estimates: Boisjoly was certain that the particular launch would fail, and a survey of engineers gave a 1-2% estimate for failure across all flights.

Both of those predictions turned out to be extraordinarily accurate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Now for contrast what happens when those lower field engineers are management in the SpaceX case?

Hopefully no loss of life ever..

<comment><USER24> That's unrealistic. I'd settle for no _stupid_ , reasonably avoidable loss of life.</comment></comment>


Maintainable Code and the Open-Closed Principle - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@severinperez/maintainable-code-and-the-open-closed-principle-b088c737262 <comment><USER2> I wonder why posts about software design seem to have low points on HN</comment>


Blueprint for a more accessible internet - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1407450/theres-already-a-blueprint-for-a-more-accessible-internet/ <comment><USER2> The best line is at the end:

*> "Many of us are temporarily able bodied and will face exclusion as we age. When we design for inclusion, we're designing for our future selves."

Accessibility is like security, usually neglected and left as an afterthought unless one is impacted by it. Actually it's worse than how security is treated because the consequences of not being accessible aren't as wide or as bad as a security incident (even in jurisdictions where accessibility has more value).

What would make it easier for developers to include accessibility is better built-in tooling, similar to the MS Word example cited in this article. There are browser extensions that can help test for and report accessibility issues (and remedies), but it'd be better if these are built-in in the toolset used.

</comment><comment><USER3> Of course the first thing that happens when you open qz.com is a banner ad that pushes the content past the fold by having css set to "width: 100%; height: 100%"

Of course, the author has no control of this and I'll keep reading.

<comment><USER4> You might like umatrix and stylus. The make the Web bearable.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/umatrix/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/umatrix/)

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl- us/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Serious question: who is paying me as a freelancer or small business owner to work on mobile accessibility? It's not the client.

The amount of work and hours put into developing and maintaining (nevermind learning from scratch) is hugely exceeded by the 10-15% potential increase in revenue, which I'm dubious about to begin with. Is the 200 hours/year it would take to maintain at $100/hr worth $20,000 in incremental revenue? I just don't seethat happening.

I don't disagree with most of the article, but the expectation that "you should do this without considering opportunity cost" makes the entire argument moot.

<comment><USER6> As a professional, there should be many decisions your client hires you to make for them. Unless there is specific regulation, competitors can undercut you by taking shortcuts in any number of areas. You can choose to try to win a race to the bottom, or work on establishing your reputation as premium quality developer.

I use Firefox, and I rarely see a site that doesn't work because I'm not using Chrome. Firefox market share is somewhere around 5% now, and most people will use another browser if they need to for their bank or other important site.

If a business owner gets a call from a Firefox user who can't access their site, it's the developer's fault. Treating the requirements of an estimated 15% who _need_ a small number of aids as though it is a decadent extra seems like a problem of professional standards.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to get started contributing to open source? - <AUTHOR>

By my own estimation, I'm at an intermediate level of my preferred language (happens to be python, but not central to what I'm asking): I'm capable of understanding most of what I read, and of writing what I want, but I know there's a lot of learning still to be done (not that it ever ends...)
I think that contributing to open source projects would help me learn a great deal about being a better programmer - and especially about programming as part of a larger project.
Another reason for doing this is just to contribute, to give something to the community. But I'm not at the level of making my own useful things for people yet, so I'd like to help out on existing things.
So, how do I start? Is there any central 'help wanted' noticeboard, or do I have to go to every project I might be interested in and check out what they need doing? And if the latter, what are some good ones that might need some help? (For me that's python projects - but feel free to add others as replies for other readers' usage)
Any advice appreciated. Thanks. <comment><USER2> Scratch your own itch for purely selfish and pragmatical reasons... the rest will come by itself.

A quick story:

A long while ago I liked to dabble on video editing using Linux (That was installed on the only box I had with the horsepower required). The choices where not many, the one I decided on was (and still is) overly complicated, with very little info on how to use it. I started learning the hard way, It was hard, foreign to non video people and had plenty of bugs but no show stoppers..

Then for my own selfish needs, I started writing a manual for the thing, the catch was that I had the good idea of putting it on a wiki, so others would also contribute.. Because it was something actually useful, pretty soon people started dropping by, saying thx and a few even contributing articles.. Few months later, someone asked to translate it to slovenian, then someone else to italian, then rusian,spanish and so on.. After a while we had quite a nice manual that in turn help to make the program popular, which in turn got more developers involved, who then fixed the bugs that I initially encountered and could not fix because I suck at C programming.

I never meant to do anything of this.. I just had personal needs and did something about it. the catch is to share your work with others not expecting to be paid in any way what-so-ever.. (other than to enjoy other contributors work)

</comment><comment><USER3> Choose a project that you use yourself and implement something that you would like to see in it. Or go to its bug tracker and start fixing stuff. Subscribe to the mailing list, hang out in the irc channel. Let them know what you want to work on, to find out if anybody else is already doing it. Get feedback on your contributions, and give feedback on others. But work on a project that you use. Easier to stay interested.

<comment><USER4> Great advice. One addition: Learn the coding and doc conventions of the project before submitting code. And find out the preferred format. Usually it's a diff patch, but it could be a git pull request or something.

Some project leaders prefer that all code be accompanied by a unit test.

Bottom line is, try to make it easy for the people who might review your contribution.

Good luck!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> First, well done for wanting to improve your skills and contribute. You might find these links useful (especially the first, which is identical to your question):

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/117561/what-are-good- open...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/117561/what-are-good-open-source- projects-in-python-for-which-i-can-be-a-contributor)

<http://pythonsource.com/>

</comment><comment> marcelo-br There is no real central repository for open source contributors. In fact, most help comes from real users with real needs.

To get started, first choose a project that you use and like. Think as a user, what would you do to make it better. What features do you miss?

If you can't find any, go to their bugzilla and search for possible easy fixes to get started... Don't contact their developers before you have some code/patches in hand (lots of people talk about helping, but few do).

</comment><comment><USER6> Remember that code isn't the only form of contribution,You can provide non- code help as well. Add/Update documentation of open source projects.

The only reason why RTFM fails is because documentation is outdated or non- existent.

With intermediate level this is lowest bar to achieve, and you will learn a lot just documenting the stuff as you will be forced to understand internals.

</comment><comment><USER7> Start with projects that you personally use and enjoy! You'll have more insight in the project, and you'll feel more motivated. (e.g."I'll write a patch for feature X becuause I want to see it in the next release.")

Look for projects that are in the middle stages of maturity. A project that is too mature will require technically difficult work; one too young will require lots of discussion on design and specification.

Work on easy tasks first, such as minor bugs or gaps in documentation. These tasks tend to finish faster, and they'll encourage you to go on to tougher stuff.

Get familiar with the tracker (e.g. Trac, Bugzilla) and repository (e.g. SVN, Git, Mercurial). In particular, know how to create and submit a patch. Most projects rely on these tools for collaboration, so you should cater to their workflow processes.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER8> >>Is there any central 'help wanted' noticeboard,

The closest thing I can think of is Source Forge's help wanted section.</comment>


Study: Older Profs Better at teaching in Advanced Courses - <AUTHOR> http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2010/06/young-profs.html

<comment><USER2> Older profs are better in general imo. They've used to teach with finite methods of conveying your points...

Now there's these new professors who have been blinded by the boundless possibility of telling too much stuff with powerpoint slides - you can always create another slide to tell _everything_...</comment>


Anonymous survey about daily life/tools/joys and pains of DevOps/SRE - <AUTHOR> https://surveyhero.com/c/9a96a48 <comment><AUTHOR> I'd like to know what daily life is like for DevOps/SRE people. If enough people respond for the results to mean anything (100+), I'll make the results public. I'm interested in the results as someone who has spent most of my time on the application engineering side of things, but I should also mention that the results will be helpful for crafting a product at a startup I work for.

Note that responses on this thread about your experiences with DevOps/SRE are also nice, but the survey is better as it will make the results a little more structured.</comment>


Ask HN: (Freelancers) What do you do when you need a quick paying gig? - <AUTHOR>

I (somewhat out of desperation) took a client on fulltime freelance which kept me from having a diverse set of clients. Of course he bails on me right before the holidays and I haven't been able to book anything for a month. This came right after being downsized and I don't have a proper cash reserve. Most of this is my fault, I know.<p>What I want to know from HN. How do you guys and gals find gigs quickly when you need some cash. Bonus points for work that actually pays partial upfront or just pays within a month. <comment><USER2> Are you in a metro area? You can get a lot of mileage from local web development groups. Maybe not a gig coding up the next cool thing in Haskell, but hammering out brochure sites or customizing WP blogs certainly pays the bills, and in addition helps you build up your network to lean on in future dry spells.

</comment><comment><USER3> \- I just hustle harder, that's all I can say.</comment>


Redfin launches React Server, a React framework with server rendering - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/redfin/react-server <comment><USER2> [https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1WvCBOMqUyGlB5KMU_cWw...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1WvCBOMqUyGlB5KMU_cWwMVZeXoOUAXqeyCRPDCRNfn0/edit#slide=id.g140b994cfd_0_377)

10^3 req/s is 1000 req/s on 192 cores? What does it mean?

<comment><USER3> Yes, that's right.</comment></comment>


Cool d3 visualization of paper ranking - <AUTHOR> http://academic-rank.azhuang.me/authorrank

<comment><AUTHOR> oops, the link is wrong, should be: [http://academic- rank.azhuang.me/paperrank](http://academic-rank.azhuang.me/paperrank)

The posted one is for author ranking</comment>


18 year old who wants be be millionnaire by 21 completely villified. Unfair? - <AUTHOR> http://www.smarta.com/blog/2010/9/jamie-dunn-why-other-peoples-negativity-wont-get-me-down#comment-76935294

<comment><USER2> At first glance I thought for sure that his critics are probably just jealous bitter old anti-youth types who think young people need to be kept in line.

But upon checking out his website, it is very hard to figure out what he actually does, and what his business is all about. He seems to be trying to sell himself and his achievements rather than a product, and while this can be a type of "lifestyle" business, people still need a reason for why they ought to listen to him.</comment>


Applitude: DSL to create iPhone apps in Eclipse - <AUTHOR> http://thechangelog.com/post/3011931500/applitude-applitude-is-an-objective-c-runtime-framework

<comment><USER2> I have developed a similar framework also built on Xtext, but not Applause. The tool is cross-platform and generates back-end data services using PHP/MySQL and HTML forms for the mobile application companion web site. It can also connect to existing HTTP or SOAP based services.

<http://www.moppr.com></comment>


Adieu To ScorecardResearch, Comscore And, Especially, ShareThis - <AUTHOR> http://www.wicasta.com/blogs/adieu-to-sharethis-and-scorecardresearch/

<comment><AUTHOR> Addthis and Sharethis provide _free social sharing services, but the problem is that the cost turns out to be you letting them drop any number of pixels on your users for different advertising networks. This is a great description of the discovery process this guy went through to figure it out._ not really free, also known as "comes with externalities". jk.</comment>


YC launches a new fundraising format: The one-slide summary - <AUTHOR> https://www.sketchdeck.com/blog/yc-one-slide-summary <comment><USER2> Nice, thanks for linking back to prior blog posts in the past six years!</comment>


Really cheap Kubernetes cluster on AWS with kubeadm - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cablespaghetti/kubeadm-aws <comment><AUTHOR> See discussion on reddit [https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/9ajm1p/kubernet...](https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/9ajm1p/kubernetes_cluster_on_aws_for_as_little_as_3_a/)</comment>


Hackers on the big screen - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/fashion/17Noticed.html

<comment><USER2> And this was the scene that hooked me on the movie. It was the first time I have seen the field properly portrayed in cinema. The energy, mindset, and faithfulness to the technical details. It gave me that fire-in-the-belly feeling just watching it.</comment>


Ask HN: If some of VCs/angels is your customer should you contact them? - <AUTHOR>

Hypothetical question: If you find out that some of top-level VCs is your customer and you are prearing to raise some $$, should you contact them? If yes, how? The assumption is that VC actually uses your product to solve their problem - not just investigating. <comment><USER2> Yes, absolutely contact them.

Start the conversation with a casual email introducing yourself, thanking them for using your company, and asking if they have any questions or feedback on the product or service you provide. It opens up the initial conversation without being pitchy, and would potentially allow you to get an honest critique before asking for a phone call or meeting.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't imagine this ever happening, but the question of "how to contact your own customer" is bizarre.

The fact is, when they are already your customer it's what is known as a warm lead, as opposed to a cold call. You seem to be imagining this "problem" without knowing the game.</comment>


First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/the-first-gear-discovered-in-nature-15916433 <comment><USER2> This article was posted to reddit, and incidentally the author is a redditor.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1m9eke/scientists_d...](http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1m9eke/scientists_discover_the_first_mechanical_gear_in/?sort=top)

They're taking questions.

<comment><USER3> Just to clarify, it looks like the journalist is taking questions, not the author of the paper.

</comment></comment><comment> m-photonic "They're rather specialized, and there are lots of other jumpers that don't have them, so there must be some kind of advantage."

Not necessarily. Evolution has a lot to do with path dependence and in no way guarantees the best of all possible adaptations.

<comment><USER4> Almost every complex AND specialized adaptation has an advantage.

In this case it seems pretty obvious that gears can be better than friction at transmitting torque.

<comment><USER5> I don't think you can really get away with saying that.

I think a better phrasing would be, "the summation of all adaptations in addition to environmental state (including benefits or constraints to itself and all others) has led to the survival in its present environment".

It's really about optimization gradients in a particular time/environmental/social niche. Everything can change with the purturbation of any factor--but that's evolution for you. Adative curve fitting.

<comment><USER4> You (and the other posted) have conveniently ignored the word "almost" in my post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm pretty sure that the bacterial flagellum is effectively a mechanical gear: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotating_locomotion_in_living_s...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotating_locomotion_in_living_systems)

<comment><USER7> No, it converts the proton concentration gradient into mechanical energy.

The ATP synthase also works that way. The ADP and Pi are mechanically squeezed against each other in order to create the covalent bound.

See the last two videos of [0] for the general process. The first three focus on details.

[0] [http://www.mrc- mbu.cam.ac.uk/category/slideshows/atpmovies](http://www.mrc- mbu.cam.ac.uk/category/slideshows/atpmovies)

<comment><USER6> "ADP and Pi are mechanically squeezed against each other in order to create the covalent bond."

I have a PhD in Biophysics. If I ever said "ADP and Pi were squeezed together", I'd have been laughed out of journal club. The fine details of the reaction coordinate are still being argued about.

I'll grant you there are no canonical gears as a mechanical engineer would recognize them. I wasn't talking about the motive coupling. But a number of the physical structures (proteins) that couple the anchoring to the moving body have gear like properties. These are used to orient and clock the moving body in its cycle.

OK, I'll up it a notch since you guys are being picky. There are motor proteins which use ATP hydrolysis to do directed (non-random) motion. One of the plausible (IIRC it's passe now) mechanisms involved coupling the ATP hydrolysis free energy to a physical ratchet-like mechanism which, while didn't physically look like a gear when you looked at static crystal structures, seemed to behave like one using various subtle time-resolved mechanisms.

<comment><USER7> Doctor of medicine here, with basic notions of chemistry and biochemistry from courses I took 16 years ago. I sure know what I'm talking about!

;-)

More seriously, I had inferred the squeezing from the videos I linked to.

If I understand properly, the mechanical constrains on the ADP, Pi and AA residuals involved result in the formation of the high energy covalent bound between the two phosphates.

Thus mechanical -> chemical energy.

I thought that the pressure between the electron clouds of the two molecules caused some superficial electrons to hop, resulting in the new covalent bound (that's what I meant by squeezing), and the dehydration.

Is this mostly correct (with possible intermediate steps where either the Pi or the ADP end up in a temporary covalent bound of even higher energy with subunits of the ÀTP synthase), or is this pure hogwash?

Also, thanks for the explanations regarding the flagellum, that's very interesting :-)

 _> I'll grant you there are no canonical gears as a mechanical engineer would recognize them. I wasn't talking about the motive coupling. But a number of the physical structures (proteins) that couple the anchoring to the moving body have gear like properties. These are used to orient and clock the moving body in its cycle._

Is it mediated by alternating, matching stripes of charged or polar AA residuals?

<comment><USER8> Protein-interaction videos often make molecular reactions seem "deterministic" when in reality everything is quite stochastic; the molecules are "bouncing" around like crazy and each step may go back and forwards several times before completing. That said, I love the videos--its really amazing to think about all these little proteins bending and folding around all the time!

<comment><USER7> The stochastic aspects were also completely neglected in my chemistry courses. We were just taught about macroscopic, aggregate probabilities, and high level descriptions of the reactions, but not the nitty gritty details.

I knew that chemical bounds were vibrating (with a frequency proportional to their energy, E=h(nu)), but, for some reason, I had never envisioned macromolecules wiggling and vibrating as a whole.

 _Updating mental model_ :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _> In 2 milliseconds it has bulleted skyward, accelerating at nearly 400 g's—a rate more than 20 times what a human body can withstand._

This is entirely incorrect. 9g is the limit that someone can stay conscious, but the body can withstand a lot more.

Experimental subject John Stapp withstood 46.2 g.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=G-force#Horizontal...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=G-force#Horizontal_axis_g- force)

<comment><USER10> I think it depends on the direction of the acceleration. The John Stapp experiment was horizontal acceleration, right? Right above that:

"... if g-forces are not quickly reduced, death can occur. Resistance to "negative" or "downward" g, which drives blood to the head, is much lower. This limit is typically in the −2 to −3 g (about −20 m/s² to −30 m/s²) range."

<comment><USER11> relevant: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_Coaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_Coaster)

<comment> guard-of-terra Surprisingly it doesn't use reverse g "upwards" but rather an ordinary 10g "downwards". I wonder why is that and can't they make the system much smaller by aiming for the head.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder how its prevents wear? Could be something quite revolutionary there for the finding. Some sort of new organic lubricant, or something in the gears that self lubricates.

<comment><USER13> Maybe it doesn't. The last paragraph of the article implies that wear eventually would compromise the gears, but that the insect molting and replacing the old gears with new ones (frequently?) prevents it from being a problem.

<comment><USER14> Which leads to the classic answer to the age old question of how you make a car last forever: buy three, one to keep, and the other two for parts.

<comment><USER15> That's for very small values of 'forever', after 3x the average lifespan of some critical component you are again without transportation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I found it amusing that to view the 1 second video at the end I had to watch a 30 second advert first

</comment><comment><USER17> Why do they say the gears "look nothing like what you'd find in your car"? They look very similar to me.

<comment><USER18> To me it appears that there are teeth on one "side" of the gear, but on the back of it is a flat surface. The valley between the teeth is sloped from front to back, going from a deep valley to no valley at all. At least, that was what I took from that picture.

<comment><USER19> Just like herringbone gers you find in old sewing machines, designed to self- align in one direction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The Transformers evolved from naturally occurring gears. It says so in Issue 1 of the comic series.

</comment><comment><USER21> Does that mean the patent for the gear is now invalid?

<comment><USER22> No, the issus is obligated to pay royalties.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> >Even stranger is that the issus doesn't keep these gears throughout its life cycle. As the adolescent insect grows, it molts half a dozen times, upgrading its exoskeleton (gears included) for larger and larger versions.

Gotta catch em all.

<comment><USER24> It's kind of like getting your timing belt replaced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> So assuming we can one day mimick this feat of engineering, can I look forward to my car _literally_ dying on me in traffic?

</comment><comment><USER26> Maybe a little cruel but I'd be interested in some sort of study where a large number of issus' are placed in an environment with a couple of predators.

Repeat this with young and adult versions and see if/how much the gear system (adults don't have it) improves the odds of surviving attacks.

<comment><USER27> What you would be testing is how much of an advantage the young have over the adults. I find it extremely unlikely that the gears are the only difference.

<comment><USER26> Yes and the gears would be hard to isolate as the lone cause (adults have more experience fighting prey etc.) so maybe you'd have to genetically engineer two groups one with gears and one without.

Either way the hypothesis they gave as to why the gears are eventually mutated away makes sense but has me wondering why they don't keep replacing them instead of settling on living without them.

Thus I'd like to quantify the edge said gears provide as a starting point for the investigation :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Some proteins like ATP synthase kind of act like gears as well: [http://www.mrc- mbu.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/images/imag...](http://www.mrc- mbu.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/images/image/atpsynanim.gif)

</comment><comment><USER29> This is misleading. It looks like a gear, but they are just evolved nodules that caused friction that helped the bug escape predators better. We call it a gear but it is just a mix of physics, life, and death.

<comment><USER30> If this isn't a gear, then what is a gear ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Hmm.. the text wouldn't load for me. Anyone have a copy of the article?

<comment><USER32> It's Ghostery, it killed it somehow. Not sure if it's the site's fault or Ghostery's?

<comment><USER33> I just incognito when Ghostery messes up the page view.

<comment><USER31> I tried the viewtext.org Chrome extension, but it hasn't worked in a while :( I really loved that one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Can someone explain what this means? I don't get it:

> Most other bugs synchronize the quick jolt of their leaping legs through > friction, using bumpy or grippy surfaces to press the top of their legs > together

<comment><USER35> I don't know much about biology, but I imagine that if your legs were very lightweight and bumpy, and you pressed them firmly against each other, they would probably stick together pretty well, and so if you tried to move them both in the same direction, but with differing amounts of force, they'd probably stay together and therefore press down in sync.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> OMG - that electron microscope picture, as long as it is genuine, just blows you away. it's a picture of a gear - cogs and teeth and - wow ...

</comment><comment><USER37> I can swear I saw pictures of this years ago. I a series of lectures by different speakers. This can't be a new finding.

</comment><comment><USER38> In other words, we, human beings, are just reinventing natural occurring (or may have been extinct) mechanics and are putting patents on it.

Okay if you own a patent and sued someone for it, it's time to hand back the money!

</comment><comment><USER39> I would like to see the patent trolls trumf that.

</comment><comment><USER40> God is real.

<comment><USER41> Unless declared integer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> It is for beauty like this that I believe all living things were originally designed by _some_ intelligence, somewhere.

Perhaps designed to mutate and evolve, or perhaps that was a limitation in the source materials, but there are some _beautifully_ engineered _living_ systems on our planet.

<comment><USER43> Just because something looks "engineered", doesn't mean it is.

A perfect example is the eye. An organ of great complexity, but one that is very easily explained by logical evaluation, as well as existing living creatures and fossils: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwew5gHoh3E](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwew5gHoh3E)

If you're a software engineer, I hope you understand how procedural systems and algorithms can transform data and functions. Similar processes take place via chemistry and biological interaction. Conway's Game of Life is a good example of a simple system giving rise to complex interaction and patterns.

Complex beauty can arise from the interaction of systems, but if you say to yourself that it "must have been engineered by something greater than me", you settle in your mind, and shortcut around critical thinking and never progress toward _understanding_. And that's a great, great shame.

<comment><USER7> What more, the vertebrate eye has a flaw: its blind spot. The fibers of the optic nerve and the central retinal blood vessels irradiate in front of the retina.

You may think that it is a necessary defect, but the squid eye, which evolved independently to end up almost identical to its vertebrate counterpart doesn't have it. The nerve fibers and blood vessels run behind the retina.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This gives us four possibilities:

1\. This geared creature must be considered part mechanical. A cyborg, if you will.

2\. A "gear" is no longer (and was never) a "mechanical" device, but instead an organic one. Using gears is no longer (and was maybe never) doing mechanics.

3\. Whether something is mechanical or organic depends on the process which created it. This is the "colored bits" or "patent" view. (If I build something using intuition instead of reason, am I no longer doing mechanics?)

4\. A gear is no longer (and was never) either mechanic or organic, and is simply a physical process. The whole "mechanical" and "organic" division is a false dichotomy.

<comment><USER45> 5) Organic creatures have mechanical systems as part of their physiology. "Mechanical" doesn't mean "made of metal", it means "uses movement and friction to achieve some effect". Some mechanical devices, such as levers and swivels, are seen frequently in the animal kingdom; others, such as gears, pulleys, and wheels, are almost never seen in nature. Discovering one of this latter category is a fascinating find.

<comment><USER46> Pulleys are not that rare. Block and tackle is, but you have pulleys in your hands.

<comment><USER47> Wikipedia defines pulleys as _" A pulley is a wheel on an axle that is designed to support movement of a cable or belt along its circumference"_, though I think the wheel/axle requirement is probably shouldn't be considered a _hard_ requirement.

On the other hand, I don't think I would call the loops that fishing line passes through along the length of a fishing pole "pulleys".

I guess I'd say that block and tackle is not common, and neither are "wheeled pulleys", but "friction pulleys" are.

<comment><USER46> If your line is out, and you take up slack and the fishing pole starts to bow, the loops are indeed functioning as pulleys.

<comment><USER47> Absolutely, in the technical sense, though I would hesitate to actually describe it that way. It seems strange.

Alternatively, shoelace eyelets are pulleys ('block and tackle' in fact) , but describing them that way seems odd.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Inside the CIA's black site torture room - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/oct/09/cia-torture-black-site-enhanced-interrogation <comment><USER2> I've visited the Stazi jail in Berlin. It was a pre-trial jail, you would go there to await trial. During that time you were interrogated. The Stazi jail had something like a 98% success rate for extracting confessions.

They used similar techniques. Dark sound proof cells. Hypothermia and exposure in outside cells. You were referred to by a number, and when walking down hallways you were not allowed to look up. A series of red/green lights allowed the guards transporting prisoners to make it so that prisoners never saw each other.

On the rare occasions that you shared a cell with another prisoner, there was a 50% chance that they were an informant, and the rooms were bugged.

So. I live in a country that has a Stazi-style prison. :-[ What does one do with that information?

<comment><USER3> By 98% success rate I assume you mean for the "guilty ones."

But how many others were tortured in the same way that had no relevant information to give, because they were innocent?

The issue with torture is not that it doesn't work _on the guilty ones_. I'm sure it does on the vast majority of them. The issue is you will torture 9 out of 10 in order to finally land upon the 1 out of 10 that is guilty.

<comment><USER2> I can't find a citation, but I remember the tour guide saying it was 98% for _anyone_ who entered the Stasi during it's last decade of operation. (They had gotten good at extracting confessions.) Yeah, people would confess even if they were innocent, because of the conditions or because of threats to their family.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How useful (if at all) are these torture techniques in extracting useful information though? I would have to guess little, if any, at all. It's well documented in the media that Guatanamo Bay prisoners would routinely mislead the interrogators on the whereabouts of Bin Laden and send them off on wild goose chases and waste their resources.

During World War 2, Hanns Scharff, a "Master Interrogator" was so good at getting information out of prisoners that he became a legend. His methods were so effective at extracting useful, accurate info that the US also (allegedly) ended up adopting them.

Hanns Scharff's techniques did not involve any kind of duress or torture. Instead, he befriended the prisoners and used kindness and empathy.

> Hanns had another secret weapon – kindness. He would befriend them, bring > them food, and take them on walks in the surrounding woods. Sometimes, he'd > even take them to the local zoo. One POW was even allowed to test drive a > plane. None tried to escape.

> His method, now called the Scharff Technique, was made up of four > strategies:

> (1) befriend the prisoner,

> (2) let them talk but don't press them for information,

> (3) pretend to know everything, and

> (4) use confirmation/discontinuation.

Source: Hanns Scharff – Nazi Germany's POW "Master Interrogator" Who Used Kindness Not Brutality => [https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war- ii/hanns-scharff-...](https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/hanns- scharff-nazi-germanys-master-interrogator-used-kindness-not_brutality-x.html)

What happened to these techniques that the US allegedly adopted after WW2? Or would the Scharff Technique not be effective in this type of situation i.e. Radicalized individuals who have been brainwashed and conditioned to hate their captors ( "infidels") so much that they wouldn't let any American interrogator befriend them and put up a wall around their emotions ?

<comment><USER5> > What happened to these techniques that the US allegedly adopted after WW2?

What happened was the war against reason. Having empirical knowledge about what works didn't count for _squat_ with the people who were making those appointments. It might even have been a negative. The people who got ahead were the ones who could project the "real American tough guy" image, no matter how fake it was or what obvious psychopathic tendencies came attached to it.

Now for the _really_ bad news. The same kind of people (if not worse) are in charge again, and they're focused on domestic "threats" instead of international ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a long article but worth reading, though not easy to stomach.

What irks me most use of phrases like 'enhanced interrogation.' Bullshit. Call it what it is. It is torture. Anything less minimizes it.

<comment><USER7> > _Anything less minimizes it._

and that's exactly the point.

<comment><USER6> And that's why it irks me.

I'm usually fairly unflappable, but this is something worthy of my outrage. Torture is unacceptable, and is even less acceptable when done in my name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Keep in mind that this is based on info the CIA released.

This could be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to bad things these guys presided over or they could be scapegoats. This is an organization that manages truth, half truth and lies.

<comment><USER9> There is no question about that. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_CIA_interrogation_tapes_d...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_CIA_interrogation_tapes_destruction)</comment></comment>


Plaid Launches in France, Spain, and Ireland - <AUTHOR> https://blog.plaid.com/plaid-in-france-spain-and-ireland/ <comment><USER2> Something I've always worried about: if I provide my bank's login credentials to a service which uses Plaid/Yodlee and due to a security breach my bank account is somehow drained, who's liable? Most banks explicitly state that losses due to sharing of credentials are not protected by their fraud guarantees. Are customers at risk by using Plaid?

<comment><USER3> My bank has explicitly told me that using Pliad/Yodlee violates their T&Cs and voids their entire online fraud protection, regardless of if one of those services is at fault.

<comment><USER4> Which bank is this, if I may ask?

Most of the popular Financial Institutions seem to be on board with Plaid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been using Plaid for a toy project for a while, and, while it works well, what surprised me the most was their support. I had an issue with my bank not sending me SMS and their support was quick and helpful, responding to my problem with actual feedback rather than canned responses.

Now that I'm saying this, I realize what a low bar our current support climate has set, but Plaid is great on that regardless.

<comment><USER6> Would you be interested in sharing your project?

<comment><USER7> My guess is that the project he's referring to is IMGZ (found via his HN profile then his twitter)

You can read more about that here: [https://imgz.org/](https://imgz.org/)

In addition, he has a page on his site with some really cool personal projects: [https://www.stavros.io/projects/](https://www.stavros.io/projects/)

<comment><USER5> Haha, no, it's not that. I just used Plaid to get my own balances so I can track my finances, it was nothing exciting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What is Plaid's long-term competitive advantage? It made sense when scraping was the only solution (albeit an extremely dangerous one) but now banks are launching their own APIs, which is allowing some competitors to come in with free bank account linking. A few simple features address most of the needs of a typical fintech, and I don't think anyone is happy with having to integrate Plaid's SDK nor pay their rates.

<comment><USER9> bank's APIs are extremely limited as of right now. Fragmentation is also very high. It is also true that this may change in the future, but not very soon

<comment><USER8> Fragmentation is definitely high. Although if you can seamlessly fall back to other services, a handful of bank integrations can get you ~80% of the customers.

I haven't worked with Open Banking, how is it? In the US, for bank transfers, NACHA files are fairly easy to work with, as long as you can access and verify bank account numbers (ideally get balance and identity information too). I think all the APIs support this, eg: [https://developer.wellsfargo.com/apis/payments/account- valid...](https://developer.wellsfargo.com/apis/payments/account-validation- services)

It's hard to tell how quickly things will change and improve. Banks should have an incentive to work on this, since it will give them more control of their data and logins, potentially lowering liabilities and hack potential.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been really impressed by Plaid's service, but also the level of customer support they provide. I have been experiencing issues connecting CapitalOne accounts in the Plaid test environment. I let them know, and got a long, thought out response, and I'm not even a paying customer yet.

Congrats Plaid!

<comment><USER11> I love it when companies realize that a problem impacting a « free » customer could impact their paying customers too.

It's like, free beta test report so you don't piss off your real customers. Maybe not something to just trash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Having previously used Yodlee, I'm now migrating onto Plaid in the UK.

Speaking from a documentation and API point of view, you can more or less think of Yodlee as PayPal and Plaid as Stripe.

Yodlee still covers WAY more banks than Plaid in the world, so we still need to use them for some countries.

</comment><comment><USER13> For those who have used Plaid for personal projects, can someone confirm if you can pull basic monthly stats by account for all account types, including cash, debt (CC/mortgage), and assets (investment accounts, etc.), and then net worth and net income, all while on the free or pay as you go plans?

It appears from the docs that I'd need to pay $500/mo for very basic stats for anything not cash account balance related which is not feasible for my personal use.

My current alternative is Mint which is really lacking in the "automating my own spreadsheet with the data" department.

<comment><USER14> pocketsmith ([https://www.pocketsmith.com/](https://www.pocketsmith.com/)) is a pretty good solution for this. I was a Mint user that was concerned about the privacy and also looking for a service that provided an API. I'm not 100% sure about the privacy, but they do provide an API for your own financial data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can someone pls ELI5 how Plaid, Yodlee, AuthLayer are valid businesses and not hit with regulatory hurdles? They seem to be scraping bank websites behind the scenes. Whilst I have no idea abt the US/EU market, I know for a fact that most banks do charge exorbitant fees to access accounts over APIs (esp if you're a BigCo and need that kind of control). Surely, the banks can't be happy abt that? Surprising they haven't lobbied yet against this or aren't stampeding all over Plaid et al with lawsuits?

<comment><USER16> Per PSD2, the banks have to offer APIs. It's already possible in Europe to see your balances from another bank on your primary banks app

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The Spanish translation is awkward. Not the level of Google Translate, but still not looking native. This will make many people not trust it with their bank credentials IMHO.

"Esta aplicación usa Plaid para conectar su banco"

This is missing a connector like:

"Esta aplicación usa Plaid para conectar a su banco"

Or change the whole sentence:

"Plaid se conecta a su banco con esta aplicación"

"Plaid se quiere a vincular a su banco" (if "Plaid" and "this application" are the same)

And of course, everything still sounds way too formal and old-school. Looking at the English site, it's clear it wants to transmit a young startup vibe. But the Spanish version sounds like an old boring bank app more than a young useful one. Either it's been translated by non-natives, or translated very individual sentences without context, or by someone in Latin-America (the Spanish over South America in general is a lot more formal sounding for Spaniards).

</comment><comment><USER18> Wow, congratulations to the team! Amazing to break through regulatory barriers and make new things possible.

<comment><USER16> Why break? They're leveraging PSD2, not breaking it

<comment><USER6> Thanks Europe for using regulation (PSD2) to open up banking to fintech startups. Would anyone be interested in joining me in championing similar legislation in the US through congressional representatives, the Federal Reserve, and FDIC?

<comment><USER19> I don't know PSD2 fully but I know that my bank rolled out support for it and as far as I gather, applications should not have to ask for my username/password via their own UI (which after testing Plaid, they do), but rather use the authentication systems from the banks to authenticate. Maybe I used it wrong though.

<comment><USER6> Your understanding is correct. It's an OAuth2-type mandate for banking services providers.

[https://transferwise.com/gb/blog/what-is- psd2](https://transferwise.com/gb/blog/what-is-psd2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Developers should refuse to use Plaid. Plaid abuses its account privileges and takes much more than it gives the users. For instance, Carta should never need Plaid to pull every transaction from a bank account just to let someone exercise stock options.

</comment><comment><USER21> Hmm. I thought this was about the electronic music duo Andy Turner and Ed Handley [1] on Warp Records [2].

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaid_(band)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaid_\(band\))

[2]: [https://bleep.com/music/artist/27-plaid](https://bleep.com/music/artist/27-plaid)

[https://m.soundcloud.com/bleep_bot/bleep-warp-records- plaid-...](https://m.soundcloud.com/bleep_bot/bleep-warp-records-plaid-3rd- february-2019)

</comment><comment><USER22> I am kind of suspicious of Plaid stage managing their coverage on HN. I've had a Plaid employee recommend Plaid to me on a comment on a different finance related thread. If it was recommending a tool or utility it would have been fine,but recommending a paid service of your employer looks very close to commercial solicitation.

</comment><comment><USER23> Can anyone use Plaid and then start connecting to banks? I think the product makes complete sense but it's always a little worrisome that it's seemingly easy for anyone to launch an app that connects to your bank account. From what I know in the US you're not covered by the FDIC by connecting through the API.

<comment><USER19> No, seems there is steps for validating each "stage" that the created app for connecting to banks has to go through. See this screenshot: [https://i.imgur.com/1w7YUnf.png](https://i.imgur.com/1w7YUnf.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> And what is that? From the front page, "Plaid is the easiest way for users to connect their bank accounts to an app." Why would I want to do that? This smells like an attempt of bringing the concept of a credit score to Europe, is that what it is?

<comment><USER25> Nope. It provides an API so that you can make apps that can do things like read your bank statement, get the balance, and many other things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Does anyone know if European SEPA actually overlap with Plaid here ? Was SEPA supposed to "commoditize" the whole "grant access to my bank account to 3rdparty" ?

<comment><USER19> No (AFAIK), SEPA is meant for facilitate bank transfers (cashless payments) across the members of SEPA. Basically taking the fragmented system across Europe and try to unify it under something to make things easier across the region.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Does anyone have the list of banks supported? On their website they only link to their WS to fetch them instead of a simple list

</comment><comment><USER28> I read that as "Paid lunches"

</comment><comment><USER29> Plaid should be sued by asking people to disable their 2FA! For example, Bank of America and Wells Fargo provide APIs, but Plaid is not using them - instead, they advise me to turn off my 2FA just so that they can steal my banking data. They should be out of business. It's not 2000, it's 2019! Not to mention, their service is SOOO expensive!</comment>


Show HN: Modern lightweight ASP.Net Core CMS, runs without db - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jamesej/lyniconanc <comment><AUTHOR> We have built a modern, lean, flexible CMS which runs on ASP.Net Core (.Net Core 2.0). Please have a look at the GitHub repo and let us know what you think.</comment>


Your brain makes decisions while you sleep - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/09/17/your-brain-actually-makes-decisions-while-you-sleep/ <comment><USER2> There's been a few times in my life when I've heard a sound while sleeping that my brain decided "wasn't right" and woke me up. Often the sound is very quiet - perhaps a mouse in my bedroom or an event outside the house. Generally there's a very bizarre process where I'll sort of wake up and then "hear" the sound, allowing me to process it consciously. It's obvious that I wasn't awake when the sound happened, but that there's some sort of constantly running sound-comparator listening to the world and triggering alerts when something that isn't easily matched to the known is heard.

The similarities with FPGAs/ASICs are really quite interesting.

<comment><USER3> Light too. A DirecTv box with super-bright blue LEDs (don't get me started) decided to turn itself on randomly in the middle of the night, and that definitely woke me up from a deep sleep (maybe my brain thought it was a fire?).

Now, granted, we do fall in and out of stages of deep and less-deep sleep throughout the night, however in my experience I have definitely been woken out of deep sleep by an usual sound or light (although it seems like it takes less from a less-deep sleep to wake you).

<comment><USER4> > super-bright blue LEDs (don't get me started)

I bought a package of 400 small black sticky "dots" for the sole purpose of conquering bright blue leds... (Search for "sticky dots" on Amazon)

<comment><USER5> Thank you!!!!!! Grrrrrr..... Nail polish failed me miserably.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is quite a specific test, but I often get creeped out by how well "sleeping on it" works. I don't even have to actively think many hards problem (in my usual problem domain, naturally) but a day or two later a solution will appear in a flash. This annoys some people, because they'll ask "how shall we do X?" and I'll want it to sit and compost for a few days as I know the solution will be better than something forced!

<comment><USER7> Oh me too. I've often the real smart person in my life was my subconscious. Like you said though, the downside is there is no progress reporting and it can take a really long time. But I would say many of the slick solutions to programming problems have come from my subconscious, either after sleeping or just taking a break and eating some food or something.

<comment><USER8> > I've often the real smart person in my life was my subconscious.

I think you accidentally a word. Your subconscious must not have written that sentence... :-)

<comment><USER7> Or my silly new phone keyboard I was testing :-). But yes, "I've often thought" or "I've often felt" is probably what I meant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "sleep on it" now makes more sense, in Spanish we have something similar "consúltalo con la almohada", which loosely means "ask your pillow about it"

</comment><comment> atom-morgan Has anyone here spent any time in a sensory deprivation tank? After going in one myself, the conclusion here makes a lot of sense.

While you're floating, you don't feel like you're actively processing everything that's going on around you as you do in a normal environment where all senses are available to you. While floating, it feels like you're spectating your mind as it processes things.

So when you shut off all your senses and let go, you enter this observation mode where information is being processed but it doesn't feel like _you_ are doing it. It seems like the same thing is happening while we sleep only we're not as lucid.

I'm interested to see if others have had similar experiences.

<comment><USER10> In (I think) a slightly related topic, I sometimes listen to white noise when sleeping on the bus. I've noticed that I'll hear voices as I drift off to sleep - they sort of coalesce from the static and as I start focusing on the voices they disappear. I think it's my brain trying to make sense of the input, and as I start going to sleep the "reigns go free".

Sort of eerie. (No, I don't hear voices when I'm not listening to white noise).

<comment><USER11> This happens to me with the sound of running water even when I am fully awake, especially when I am expecting an important sound. For example, if I am in the shower and expecting an important call on the phone, I often get a feeling that the phone is ringing. But it's just my brain trying to be super alert and picking up noise as signals. If I turn off the water, the sounds go off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm presently reading a book called Psycho-Cybernetics. It's rather old. I got it for free from an estate sale. Looked interesting because it has Psycho and Cybernetics in it; where could I go wrong?!

The main thesis is that the subconscious is a machine for doing things. Like a machine, it only reacts to data. It makes no judgement calls on the data. The goal of a person is to use their conscious mind to filter the information the doing machine gets. It was one of the first cognitive behavioral therapy books.

The book advocates sleeping on it for the reason given. The mind will process the data and come to a conclusion. The trick is to managing the data to get a good conclusion.

</comment><comment><USER13> I discovered this by accident years ago, and now "sleeping on it" is absolutely essential to my making progress, in fact it's probably my most important work hack.

I started off by decoupling programming from analysis, doing each at a different time in a different place. This led to doing analysis at bed time. I may not have figured things out that night, but invariably, elegant solutions "came to me" in the next day or two.

I have talked about this many times here. My earliest comment:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191275](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191275)

</comment><comment><USER14> Thomas is a labmate of mine, fire away if you have specific questions, either I can answer them, or ask him!

</comment><comment><USER15> Isn't the same study? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8306849](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8306849) (6 days ago)

<comment><USER16> yes, both link to this paper:

Kouider, S., Andrillon, T., Barbosa, L. S., Goupil, L., & Bekinschtein, T. A. (2014). Inducing Task-Relevant Responses to Speech in the Sleeping Brain. Current Biology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Years ago, for a period of about 3 months, 2 friends and I would get together after work and play an XBOX fighting game for 4-5 hours (We had literally nothing else to do. No money, no cable, just this one game). Winner plays again and loser waits his turn.

Everyone's style and character picks would constantly evolve during this process. But generally, one friend would lose far more than he would win, and we would tease him mercilessly, as you do.

One day, out of nowhere, he was unbeatable. Winning game after game, to all of our amazement.

My other friend, who I don't think graduated high school and almost certainly never read anything about sleep science or brain development, made the following comment, which struck me as profound at the time:

"JP was dreaming this shit last light. No doubt, dreaming it all night"

Another example of sub/unconscious learning happens in sports. Another pastime of mine is playing pickup basketball.

One of the best ways to get into a hot shooters head is to simply say "You're shooting really well today. What are you doing differently?" the same applies to things like a golf swing.

</comment><comment><USER18> I sometimes stay conscious while asleep.

The first time it happened I thought I was dead, because I felt completely conscious but could not control my body nor receive input from my senses. I kind of panicked, and with what felt like an extreme effort was able to become fully awake.

Since then it happens from time to time (I can't make it happen) and it's a very pleasant experience since you're in a dreamy state where you can pretty much decide what you dream about.

It's a state that is between awake and asleep; when in that state, it's very easy to fall into actual sleep (to lose consciousness), and very difficult (but possible) to awaken completely.

I keep good memory of the experience each time.

I would like to talk about it with people who experienced the same thing, but could never find anyone just by talking about it to friends around me. Where should I look? Does this thing have a name?

<comment><USER18> Thanks for all the rapid responses!

The Wikipedia page about Sleep paralysis make it sound like something horrible where you're attacked by monsters that you can't escape because you don't control your body.

I actually enjoy it when it happens (and would like it to happen more often!) but apart from that it seems that, yes, that's what it is, so thanks.

Lucid dreaming (at least according to Wikipedia) is something different -- a brief lapse of consciousness inside a dream. That happens to me also, quite frequently, but is quite a different experience. When I dream about unpleasant things I often begin to think "meh, this isn't real, it's probably a dream", and the dream takes another direction -- but not one that I control. I wouldn't say I'm fully conscious then; it's more that my dreaming self is aware he's in a dream.

<comment><USER19> I enjoy and dread sleep paralysis at the same time in a very odd way. When my sleep schedule gets _extremely_ messed up and/or I'm extremely stressed, sleep paralysis can resurface which makes it a sign that I'm not currently healthy. At the same time though I understand what you are saying. It's an extremely unique and harmless experence and gets the juices flowing so to say.

I gotta say though, the first time it happened (I must have been 12 years old), I thought that was it. I thought I'd never move again. I hope the world can educate children and bring more awareness to what sleep paralysis is. It's an extremely stressful and unusual experience and one you would not be able to recognize unless you knew about it beforehand. God knows how many "I've been abducted by aliens" lunatics have actually just experienced that.

So if you have kids, take 10 minutes to tell them about it.

<comment><USER18> Good point; I was maybe 30 the first time it happened to me and didn't think I was paralyzed -- I thought I was dead, and it was kind of interesting in some way: "so that's how it's like to be dead; not what I had imagined!" but also frightening of course.

You're right it happens more often when I'm super tired.

About telling my kids, I don't know. Kids have a way of taking everything you say very seriously, and growing it in their head like it's an Important Thing (which is good and bad at the same time). Why bother them with something they may never experience?

It's so much more important to teach them how not ti be run over by a car!!! and something I have to repeat every. single. minute. (They don't generalize; they know they shouldn't cross the street without looking when we're walking to school; but during weekends if they drop something they'll run after it in the middle of the street like it's a totally different situation. But I digress).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Rich Hickey's Hammock Driven-Development[0] talk is a good talk about how getting away from the computer, and sometimes even sleeping, can be the best way to solve technical problems.

0 - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc)

</comment><comment><USER21> Anecdote: I once came up with a joke in my dream and laughed so hard at it that it woke me up (and my girlfriend). I also sometimes speak in English in my dreams although it's not my native language. There's also several stories of famous writers and scientists who had their "haha" moments while sleeping (James Cameron claims the idea behind Terminator came in a dream).

</comment><comment><USER22> Wasn't there a movie by Christopher Nolan about this same concept?

</comment><comment><USER23> This is a dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8306849](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8306849).

</comment><comment><USER24> Article seemed to make a quantum leap here

> But most importantly, our work revives that age-old fantasy of learning > during our sleep

Can someone elaborate on how responding to preconditioned stimuli (a voice repeating the same question over and over) can translate to learning things while we are asleep?

<comment><USER25> My guess - and it is nothing more - is that there may be a possibility of learning procedural tasks, making them more and more automatic, provided that one begins the procedural task prior to falling asleep, as in this experiment.

As noted in the article, brain centers associated with attention are deactivated during sleep, so the possibility of acquiring semantic or episodic knowledge seems remote, as does the possibility of acquiring procedural knowledge without the "start it just before falling asleep" condition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Fast forward to the point where we're able to utilize this sleeping brain function to some level of usefulness. I wonder how this sort of sleep-work will affect the quality of one's sleep and their cognitive functioning in the long term.

<comment><USER27> The dystopian-cyberpunk perspective would say that it'll be a new kind of sweatshop, with poorer people slowly burning out, selling their sleeping hours as the lowest form of labor.

Alternately, we might find that certain people are very good at certain tasks, and it'll be a more like trade guilds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> When I was studying piano as a child, my instructor required me to practice the song I was working on just before going to bed and again when I woke up.

I always assumed this helped my brain solidify the mechanics of the song.

</comment><comment><USER29> Could this be linked to the Tetris effect[0] ?

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

</comment><comment><USER30> Only slightly related, but I often solve hard(ish) programming problems while I'm in that state between asleep and awake throughout the night. Take that, cliche!

</comment><comment><USER31> Is there any research to suggest you can learn while sleep by listening to audio recordings? I have heard about it before but thought it was quackery?

<comment><USER25> As noted in the article, brain centers associated with attention are deactivated during sleep, so acquisition of semantic knowledge seems unlikely, as you suggest.

The experiment's novel condition was to begin a procedural task before sleep then continue the task as subjects fell asleep and slept, monitoring them the whole time.

Cf my other comment in this thread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> My brain needs to decide to keep sleeping, and help me out with my damn insomnia.

</comment><comment><USER33> Very interesting article. Why do I only dream in the morning?

<comment><USER34> As you get more rest, REM cycles increase. We recall the dreams we see in REM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I hope my brain tells me about its decision after I awake.

</comment><comment><USER36> very interesting.. Napoleon Hill once said that he came up with the title of his global best seller "Think and Grow Rich" while he was asleep.

</comment><comment><USER37> > At the end of the experiment and after they woke up, participants had no > memory of the words they heard during their sleep, though they recalled the > words heard while they were awake very well. So not only did they process > complex information while being completely asleep, but they did it > unconsciously

I think that even while awake, the decision making happens first unconsciously, then it gets brought into our consciousness.

You think that you are thinking about it, but actually you're just waiting for your subconscious to arrive at the answer and tell it to you.

<comment><USER38> "you've already made the choice. Now you have to understand it." \-- The Oracle

Edit: If that's true, its freaks me out. Maybe our intelligence is overrated if we make our decisions while unconscious. In other words, if I'm making choices while unconscious, are my knowledge, belief, moral compass, etc involved?

<comment><USER37> Sure they are. The decision process is so complicated, if you were aware of every step in the algorithm, it'd be slow as hell!</comment></comment></comment>