Automated Vehicles Can't Save Cities - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/02/27/opinion/automated-vehicles-cant-save-cities.html <comment><USER2> I get the argument, but my quality of life will be improved dramatically without the constant road rage-inducing craziness of my 23 minute commute.

<comment><USER3> It's quite likely that your commute will get longer than 23 minutes as autonomous vehicles remove the barriers to driving and encourage more people to drive, thus increasing congestion.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, but you'll be able to use all that wait time consuming ads!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What I think the author fails to touch on well is the fact that transit is not sexy or at least not sexy yet, at least in the United States.

Have you ever noticed that most car commercials capture the essence of a confident person in control of their own destiny? I know it sounds like b __ __ __* but they all do it.

The reality is drivers are in control of their own destiny if they were driving on a road by themselves.

The United States has to figure out a way to make mass transit sexy sooner rather than later,otherwise it will never work.

The hilarious thing is investing in High-Speed Rail maybe one of the best things that the US can do because not only will it make people happier if they run as efficiently as they do in Japan but the cost of goods could severely go down therefore eliminating some poverty which the u.s. census has reported that transportation or rather lack of access to it has been linked to poverty.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sorry, the figure of 1600 cars per hour is complete and utter bullshit. If just 5 cars get through a signal on a 30 second cycle, that's 600 cars per hour. For a single intersection. How many intersections are there in a city?

A well designed intersection can easily get 20 cars through per cycle.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of bus lanes and really a fan of light rail. But I really hate this type of hype where basic assumptions don't pass the smell test.

And if you want to get into some real economics, a system like the LA Metro Authority operates at about 20% Fare Box Recovery. That means for every $1 of fare collected, a subsidy of $4 is required to keep the system running. At least when someone drives their own car, they are actually paying their own way.

<comment><USER7> The numbers appear to be for how much traffic can pass in a single lane's worth of space. Their numbers make sense for a single traffic lane[1], one subway line[2] and one 2.5 meter (a bit narrower than a standard traffic lane) bike path[3], all of which take up pretty close to the same amount of space.

[1] [http://www.mikeontraffic.com/numbers-every-traffic- engineer-...](http://www.mikeontraffic.com/numbers-every-traffic-engineer- should-know/)

[2] [https://www.thoughtco.com/passenger-capacity-of- transit-2798...](https://www.thoughtco.com/passenger-capacity-of- transit-2798765)

[3] [https://nacto.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/5_Zhou-Xu- Wang-...](https://nacto.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/5_Zhou-Xu-Wang-and- Sheng-Estimating-Capacity-of-Bicycle-Path-on-Urban-Roads-in-Hangzhou- China_2014.pdf)

<comment><USER6> A single lane does not tell the traffic story for an entire city.

<comment><USER7> It would be nonsensical to state numbers for the total number of people can who move through an entire city because it is heavily dependent on how much space is dedicated to each mode of travel. They are making a comparison of how many people who can move through a given amount of space depending on what mode of transportation they are using.

<comment><USER6> The figure of 25,000 people/hour in buses makes sense to me in a city like L.A. This is where I'm taking issue with the whole article, their basis for analysis is apples-to-oranges.

<comment><USER7> If you look at the sources I linked they give the estimates of 1900 vehicles per hour as the theoretical maximum capacity for a lane of traffic, 30k people per hour as the maximum capacity for a single subway line and 10k people per hour as the maximum capacity for a 2.5 meter bike path.

Those are all pretty close to the numbers they gave for each mode of transit, so it seems reasonable to assume that they are basing their numbers on something similar to that. That is an apples-to-apples comparison because each of those things takes up very close to the same amount of space.

<comment><USER6> I read your sources. Your source, in particular the 1900 cars/lane/hour specifically illustrates the poor quality of this article, where the author tries to take us into an alternate universe where the theoretical maximum flow of passenger vehicles is 1600/CITY/hour.

<comment><USER7> The author never stated 1600/city/hour. That is an inference you are making.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This was some weak ass logic.

<comment><USER9> I was thinking that. Even the title implies cites need saving whereas in reality they are growing merrily - it's the isolated small towns that need saving if anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think we can all agree that cities should be "humans first", not "car first".

</comment><comment><USER11> cities don't exist in a vacuum. Many towns die because something essential like a coal mine was removed from the economy, just like removing cars (no matter how noble) could kill some cities too.

<comment><USER12> I wasn't able to read the article. It was completely blank in my browser.

Could you say who is saying that we should remove cars from a city, even to the point that it would kill the city?

Because I've not heard anyone propose that. I've heard of car-free regions of a city, and cities like Venice which effectively had no private cars, and bans on some cars (like gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles in favor of electric).

But never to the point that it would kill a city.

<comment><USER5> You have to physically click the page on it in order for it to load. The page is interactive even though the it doesn't explicitly say so. The New York Times assumes you know.

<comment><USER12> Interesting. It's acting different now than yesterday, so perhaps they fixed something?

Thanks for pointing it out.

Clicking on a bajillion one-sentence pages might win a design award but it's awful to read. I didn't.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Truemors For Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/26/truemors-for-facebook/ <comment><USER2> Who cares?

<comment><AUTHOR> I just think its interesting that Trumors is still alive. I can't help to wonder what the facebook verion cost. Another $12000 ...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best internal wikis? - <AUTHOR> The same question was almost 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3933429 But that's a very long time in the internet world.<p>In my research, there doesn't seem to be a new Wiki that's unseated MediaWiki— what are people using, and what do people like or dislike, in the world of wikis today? <comment><USER2> I run a local instance of Dokuwiki locally... plain text, no database required ([https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki](https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki))

</comment><comment><USER3> YMMV, but "TWiki is the most popular wiki used behind corporate firewall; it gets downloaded 3,000 times a month and is in use by the majority of Fortune 500 companies." \--- It's free... [http://www.wikimatrix.org/show/TWiki](http://www.wikimatrix.org/show/TWiki)

</comment><comment><USER4> The user interface for MediaWiki is poor. It is somewhat challenging for people who are not technical.

For instance, you can't easily upload a picture, or select a text to put as title, or add links. Most of the time you'll be forced to write wiki code manually.

<comment><USER5> MediaWiki is pretty terrible. In particular their table markup is just atrocious - at least the way our setup is configured; there might be a better variant.

It makes Sharepoint seem pleasurable, which is a feat indeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> We're using Apache Bloodhound, but only minimally by about 2 people. It does what it's supposed to do; that's the only thing I can say about it. There definitely seems to be room for improvement.</comment>


Show HN: Lua/C for mobile devices – Please tell me what you think - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vladpalos/PrimaLuce <comment><USER2> It is a nice little hacking project. However, it is not built on top of the Kernel (which would be possible using e.g. something like ljsyscall).

A look over at LuaJIT and its FFI would probably also be nice in the context of this project.

However, it is probably deemed to be a little pet project forever. It does away with about everything that Android provides, including the developer APIs that are often implemented in a proprietary way the closer you get to the driver layer.

The "Android without cumbersome Java and NDK" (from another comment) is - arguably - not an Android at all. It is a Linux kernel and the glibc, with lots of the hardware not accessible.

I've been going through a remotely similar experience when working on and with the Koreader project ([http://github.com/koreader/koreader](http://github.com/koreader/koreader), a document/ebook reader software aimed at e-ink devices, which often come with not much beside the kernel and glibc, plus a framebuffer to play on) and it takes some major design effort to create a proper event/GUI framework. Which we did in the Koreader project using Lua, too - it's just so nice a Language to prototype with. For Android - a platform we support for devices - we went via NDK (only a small wrapper, [https://github.com/koreader/android-luajit- launcher](https://github.com/koreader/android-luajit-launcher)). Though we have an SDL (1&2) backend, too, in addition to a purely Kernel framebuffer/input API oriented backend. Maybe worth a look, though also maybe an overwhelming amount of code to begin with.

<comment><USER3> >>The "Android without cumbersome Java and NDK" (from another comment) is - arguably - not an Android at all. It is a Linux kernel and the glibc, with lots of the hardware not accessible.

MOAI suits the bill in this regard - all the hardware is available, and in some ways the MOAI host is more of a host OS than anything else .. giving true freedom, but of course more responsibility: the GUI frameworks available are not as polished (yet) as they are in the Android sphere but for some this may well be a positive argument for involvement in a non-vendor approach in the first place ..

MOAI: [http://getmoai.com/](http://getmoai.com/) Hanappe GUI for MOAI: [http://github.com/makotok/Hanappe](http://github.com/makotok/Hanappe)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The idea to build a full operating system in Lua/C is a good one .. and in fact there are others working on a similar effort. I know the luvit guys (luvit = node in Lua) are interested, and in the MOAI ([http://getmoai.com/](http://getmoai.com/)) community there have been rumblings as well. An embedded OS with luvit for the backend and MOAI for the front-end would seriously kick ass .. in fact, I think I'll work on that. :)

<comment><USER4> Also my project ljsyscall [https://github.com/justincormack/ljsyscall](https://github.com/justincormack/ljsyscall) \- you can run this on bare metal on Xen and other platforms too as well as under Linux/OSX/BSD.

<comment><USER3> Wow, nice! I'm going to give this a bit of a spin ..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey,

First of all thank you for all the comments!

@fit2rule: Yes, that is exactly my intention! I've also been working on a MOAI-based game and I love MOAI and the guys behind it. It also has a great enthusiastic community and a great/clean C++ source code. That is my next move: to use MOAI. And I think Luvit is also great (on my TODO list there is also a LuaJIT integration so Luvit will fit perfectly).

@hwh: You're right. It's not built on top of the kernel, it uses the Android- flavor kernel. Also koreader looks like a great project!

@StavrosK: Thank you! That's not forgivable :) I think I was overenthusiastic.

@dimman: Thank you! I was in a hurry but I'll fix that.

It's really nice to see so many people interested in this! I'll keep you posted!

</comment><comment><USER5> Bravo. AOSP hacker of 4 years and I have been meaning to write something like this for a while but never got around to it. Would love to contribute. Please add a few guidelines to the README.

</comment><comment><USER6> Great job! By the way, pet peeve: It's Lua, not LUA.

</comment><comment><USER7> This looks like a great idea, I'll be tracking its development for sure. Android without cumbersome Java and NDK sounds like pure bliss.

<comment><USER8> That won't be Android by definition.

[http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Android-System- Archit...](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Android-System- Architecture.svg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Quick note: Looks like you've checked in your swap files filename.c~ in the repository. These should probably be deleted and add an entry to ignore *.c~ in the gitignore file.</comment>


.NET and Node.JS – Performance Comparison; apples to apples - <AUTHOR> http://guillaume86.calepin.co/dotnet-vs-nodejs-performance.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps the most surprising to me is how much difference the

      array.map(function(item){ return parseFloat(item); })

statement makes. Removing this gives almost a 100% speedup.

Using the Cluster api to have one process per core results in another almost 100% speedup.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is hackernews so old-fashioned? - <AUTHOR> As a web developer, it's always seemed strange to me that a tech incubator would have such an old-fashioned website.
It's nice in some respects - pages load extremely quickly and the layout is compact and to-the-point. I was starting to think it was just minimalist by choice and not actually outdated, but then someone mentioned that async requests are done through an <img> tag instead of ajax, so now I'm wondering what the story is there?
Has it just been left alone because it's not broken? Or because they're worried people would get upset about changes? Or for maximum backward-compatibility? I'm not complaining; I'm just really curious. <comment><USER3> Dude, this is the only site that loads when I hit my data cap on my phone, and my 4G LTE " _unlimited_ " data plan slows down to something akin to a 56k modem from 1995.

Literally almost no other site loads in under a whopping minute, because all of them slam 10MB of transpiled javascript, and another 20MB of CSS, background images and high resolution sprite sheets for widgets I'll never even click on. Not to mention the pixels and third-party ad-tech, which may or may not be baked into the initial JS payload.

Then the document.ready() kicks in, and maybe a hundred other resources are invited to the party, and the videos try to autoplay with sound, while all the gifs start their loops.

You say old fashioned, but even wikipedia is bloated and horrible when my bandwidth allowance gets throttled by my mobile carrier. If HN didn't load, I'd either have to find a hobby and talk to people (The Horror), or cough up like $90 a week (what would actually happen) because every other web page tries to show me 2GB of video in ads alone, as if I'm going to patronize any business that blasts a cacaphony of unwanted sound in my face when I'm trying to read, all of which I suspect might be a concerted effort orchestrated as part of a conspiracy between advertisers and ISP's to poison net neutral rate plans and price gouge the hell out of anyone using their phone for internet related things, aka: everyone.

<comment><USER3> And, as an addendum, all this ties directly into your mention of  versus $ajax();

First of all, that very mindset is the foundation of the bloat we see everywhere else. Complicate a non-problem with a non-solution, because behind the trend is really a desire to shun open standards, in favor of obfuscating intellectual property as an effort to lock user behaviors, and prevent scrapers from ripping off designs that aren't even innovative. An example of the backlash against this sort of thing was the re-adoption of semantic and/or restful URL paths, because so many back-end goons were packing query strings with hundreds of CGI variable parameters, to control page state that no one could paste or email links to each other, and even advertisers started framing a renormalization of URLs under the SEO buzzword, because they saw their page rank taking hits from the drop in sharability.

Second, once you introduce _$ajax()_ , not only does backwards compatibility hang in doubt (as you mentioned) but cross-browser compatibility and _forward_ compatibility may also be sacrificed. Not to mention, you branch into an entirely different area of development. Because in order to make sure everything works everywhere, all the time, you'll need an ajax library, but which one? Choose carefully, you may seal you fate, if the maintainers disappear. Not only that, any JS error for any reason at all, including async resource errors, could kill alllllllllll of your images. So now we need unit tests and a QA team? Is that right? Gee, why not just use  tags, like every browser has supported by default, since... oh... the mid 90's?

<comment><USER4> You make it seem as though AJAX is some unstable, bleeding edge experimental feature that no one ever uses. There's no danger of sacrificing backwards compatibility, or of browsers no longer supporting AJAX in the future.

However, Hacker News does use AJAX, and I don't think it even uses whatever img tag trick OP is referring to. The only img tags on the page are the icon and the vote arrows. If it's there, I couldn't find it.

But read the javascript yourself - AJAX support is just a single, simple function. No unit tests and QA team, no depending on some flaky maintainer. Maybe they do unit tests, I don't know, this place is kind of a black box sometimes.

<comment><USER5> I think he's annoyed that lots of people are trying to re-implement the wheel using a poor AJAX based solution when an older solution is better, but no one likes using anything "old".

<comment><USER4> AJAX is not really a new thing, though. It's probably older than some of the developers who complain about it.

<comment><USER3> It's still implemented differently across different browsers, past and present, and despite being mature it isn't exactly future proof.

<comment><USER4> Cross-browser AJAX is= a solved problem at this point. You can just go to Stack Overflow or find one of countless libraries to handle it to whatever degree of compatibility you want.

And all code is a moving target - nothing is future proof, especially where javascript is involved, but AJAX seems a lot more future proof than hacking image tags to do something other than loading images. It's baked into front- end templates and the caching strategies of the biggest sites on the web so it's not likely to go anywhere anytime soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> See, this is the problem with the mindset of many web developers. You point out several things that makes this website work well, so you actually answers your own question, but I read between the lines that you think HN has to be "modernized" and I have learned this usually means something with infinite scrolling, Javascript required for simple things like displaying text and pictures, lots of whitespace, bloat and many other things that would make me prefer leprosy over using the site.

The web world would be a much better place if you web developers would rather ask "Why are modern websites so shitty and bloated" instead of wondering why one of the few useable sites left have not yet been "modernized".

<comment><USER7> Even a CSS change with better typography & legibility would go a long way. You wouldn't have to "modernize" the site.

Screen resolutions and pixel density have increased dramatically since HN was designed. It could at least use a fresh coat of paint :)

<comment><USER8> > Even a CSS change with better typography & legibility would go a long way.

About 99.98% of HN readers are capable of writing custom CSS rules.

I'd be sympathetic if people were saying HN isn't accessible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> King-Aaron This is what upsets me with the current 'design world'. Everyone has to keep 'updating' everything with no real need or understanding as to why it _needs_ updating. It's just an attempt to stay _trendy_.

I don't see any problems with this site that need a design solution to improve. Information is legible and easy to digest, it's quickly accessible on every device I have, and there's no unnecessary fluff that causes distractions or additional load times.

What issues have you identified that need solutions?

</comment><comment><USER9> The simplicity of the experience, nothing is there to tantalize the viewer in a manipulating fashion. If you read HN's Vision statement they also state that HN isn't designed to consume you in a way that Reddit or Facebook does. It's meant to be a culmination of relevant information, and topics that allow you to take a break from your work while still stimulating your mind. In comparison with say.. Facebook where everything you read has to be taken with a grain of salt, and has absolutely no foot to stand on in terms of credibility or substance. You can go to HN and browse lightly and enjoy yourself.

If you make an account on the website they also have a function that allows you only to use it for a certain time duration daily (or something of that nature) Because they realize that the world around us is already distracting to a very dark degree, and it's meant to be enjoyable but never to consume your attention at a level that effects your work.

It's fresh, it's simple and beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER10> imo, the design of HN emphasizes the text, anything fancier and it would take away from this. You can look at reddits new redesign as an example. I have a lot of trouble navigating the new reddit due to a few reasons, a big one I'm sure is that I'm just not used to it, but I'd say overall the new redesign de- emphasizes, and that's a damn shame.

<comment><USER11> Except code that needs to be scrolled 5km to the right, and text with little to no contrast. And the default font size is very small.

Neither of these are dealbreakers, but it definitely could be improved IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> One thing I like about hn is I can load up a bunch of long comment threads right before I get on a plane and have something to read for the whole flight. Other sites will pull tricks like automatically attempting to reload when I return them to focus, or will have their content smeared across a dozen pages, each filled with heavy images and scripts.

<comment><USER13> Or even when you have massive GB$ fee's for onboard wifi on a flight, it'd cost next to nothing to bring up HN and casually read through threads such as this.

When I first visited HM, my sentiments were the same.

'What on earth is this fucking thing? A site... for developers... that looks like it was written as a HTML text editor without the frills?'

Over time my position has completely changed and I now adore HN for the charm of it's minimalist impression.

Don't fix what isn't broken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Paul Graham commented on this in an essay, back in 2009:

> So the most important thing a community site can do is attract the kind of > people it wants. A site trying to be as big as possible wants to attract > everyone. But a site aiming at a particular subset of users has to attract > just those—and just as importantly, repel everyone else. I've made a > conscious effort to do this on HN. The graphic design is as plain as > possible, and the site rules discourage dramatic link titles. The goal is > that the only thing to interest someone arriving at HN for the first time > should be the ideas expressed there.

([http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html))

<comment><USER4> PG's view on this is, frankly, odd and kind of condescending.

No one is drawn to a particular website merely because of the stylesheet or UI, it's _always_ because the content and the community interests them - <USER2> and mainstream that content may be. There would be no rush of mainstream users to Hacker News with a more modern layout, nor would mainstream users be _repelled_ by its simplicity. Mainstream users don't come here because they don't even know the site exists and if they did, it would have nothing to interest them. Yet apparently PG thinks most web users are basically magpies drawn to shiny things.

<comment><USER15> > No one is drawn to a particular website merely because of the stylesheet or > UI

I was. The minimalism of the site has always appealed to me.

Internet forums are not only their content and community, but also their mechanics and their rules.

<comment><USER4> But if you had encountered the same community with the same level of discourse on a site with a modern layout, would that really have mattered?

<comment><USER16> If the modern layout was slow, yes.

There are a lot of sites with good content I don't visit. Much of the reason is they'll eat my mobile battery, data, or both. If I'm in a place with poor signal I can still browse HN in general. The snappyness and content keep me coming back.

<comment><USER4> Fair enough, but it seems what PG was describing was aesthetics, not necessarily performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Funny enough, this comes up fairly often. The basicish feel of the site belies its true nature, and it's downright intentional. Also, only brainy smarties would intentionally go to a 90's looking website to talk about technology and whatever else nerds and geeks discuss.

The negative sentiment usually comes from front-end oriented folks that have things twisted. I'm not disparaging, simply noting on my observation.

</comment><comment><USER18> Not sure if this is still true (checking...): HN is implemented in _Arc._

HN was created as part- YC project, part- functional demo of Arc, a lang Paul Graham developed (a Lisp, in Racket).

[http://paulgraham.com/arc.html](http://paulgraham.com/arc.html)

<comment><USER19> Still true!

<comment><USER18> That's really cool! Then, to clarify what I was hinting at above - my guess as to (1) why there's some quirky html/css usage and (2) why so little has changed over the years:

#1 is probably due to Arc.

#2 is probably due to Arc doing such a good job, still.

(please correct me if I'm wrong, @dang)

<comment><USER18> I imagine Op's question being brought up at some early morning staff meeting at YC headquarters:

 _Ohh and and one last thing everyone. Does anyone here who groks Arc want to make it their priority to start hacking around with Paul Graham 's Arc code, which helps render our extremely popular social forum for hackers, with content that loads on both desktop and mobile at blazing speeds, and with nothing in particular actually broken?_

(I don't imagine a lot of hands going up)

<comment><USER19> No, sctb and I are pretty avid Arc programmers. We were Lisp programmers before that, so it was a natural step.

<comment><USER18> This was the only other logical scenario ;) Glad to have u both steering this ship

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> HN does get updates occasionally, e.g. the mobile width change that happened a couple of years ago. I suppose there hasn't been a pressing need to make any changes.

If any sweeping redesign occurred the entire userbase would surely be angry.

<comment><USER21> There does seem to be a need for better methods of quoting. I've seen people quote text with code blocks that look absolutely abysmal on mobile.

Most people seem to end up doing it 4chan style, sans the highlighting 4chan provides.

Other than that though, yea- HN isn't in dire need of changes. There are alternative frontends if you want them, though. I like the chronological fixation of [http://hckrnews.com](http://hckrnews.com)

<comment><USER22> Quoting with a greater than sign, which is what I infer you are talking about, pre-dates 4chan by years. It was used on Usenet long before 4chan even existed.

Eric S. Raymond blamed it on an attempt to simulate having tabstops in every column, i.e. 1 character wide tabs.

* [http://catb.org/jargon/html/email-style.html](http://catb.org/jargon/html/email-style.html)

<comment><USER20> Certainly. But I think the gp is referring to the idea of putting a single greater-than sign at the beginning of a long, soft-wrapped paragraph. 4chan (and other sites) would highlight the whole paragraph, but on HN if it is very long it isn't immediately obvious that it's a quote. Hard-wrapping the quote and putting a greater-than sign in front of each line, as in email or Usenet is much clearer than the style typically used on HN.

<comment><USER22> That sort of quoting long pre-dates 4chan, too. It's the Fidonet convention for paragraphing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I would love that pinching and zooming-in with my phone screen would not only make the text bigger and easier to read, but also rearrange it to fit in the screem. But it doesn't.

</comment><comment><USER24> It is great that they are keeping it simple. Keeps the front and the backend fast.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes but there are things like ajax that wouldn't add any bloat, and in fact would eliminate a lot of weird and vestigial code

<comment><USER5> What code? The only JS I get is less than 5k, and the only css is 7k. That's not a lot to begin with, and I'm skeptical that adding AJAX wouldn't add bloat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "old-fashioned"? That's a misnomer, imo. A website should be judged based on form and function, and HN looks and works great for me. Does it not for you?

<comment><USER11> I don't think it is wrong to say it is old-fashioned. It literally uses things that went out of fashion a long time ago (tables, not using ajax, design is not 'modern').

Not saying it doesn't work or event that these things makes it a 'bad' website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> don't fix what ain't broken

</comment><comment><USER27> Less IS more. Just love HN for that. If you want something more stimulating for your senses, go watch a movie.

</comment><comment><USER28> I have no problem with the layout, design or lack of javascript, in fact i like it, but think I there are several real functional flaws in this site which are annoying.

Why is there no search function? You have to go to a third party site to search hacker news. Why can you only go back 3-4 pages of articles? Why is there no mention of the formatting available to you when writing a post? I think you have to browse the FAQs to get that data?

Even just now I had to login after writing this post and clicking "add comment", once I logged in the post I had written was no longer in the form! This is basic stuff guys.

Those are some issues which would be as true today as they were 10 or 20 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER29> The only thing that needs a tiny bit of work is how the website works on mobile devices. The voting arrows and collapse [-] links are too small for fat fingers, and the top menu could also do with increasing in size. No need for some mystery meat burger menu, just increase the text size of the menu item, size and padding(?) of the arrows and the collapse links when on narrow viewports.

</comment><comment><USER30> I would argue the only significant area for improvement is in fact the compactness. There is too little whitespace on the listing pages to easily read the links, the fonts are small and the lines of text are too long. The latter can be fixed by browser zooming-in, if you want to make your users take actions to read your content, the former needs css.

</comment><comment><USER31> The only thing missing for me was tracking seen/read stories/comments, so I added it myself [https://github.com/raszpl/hackahackernews](https://github.com/raszpl/hackahackernews)

</comment><comment><USER32> Can you elaborate on the  tag instead of ajax for asyc requests?

</comment><comment><USER33> As a fashion designer, I cannot fathom why people wear T-shirts, jeans and deck sneakers. I mean, I do get about how you don't have to spend 45 minutes getting ready to go out, ...

</comment><comment><USER34> It's not old fashioned... it's great.

You said it yourself

</comment><comment><USER35> I actually like the site a lot it displays well in lynx. I did wish there was a way to up vote posts on lynx though.

</comment><comment><USER36> HN is my favourite site because its 'old-fashioned'

</comment><comment><USER37> People come here for the content and not for the UI.

</comment><comment><USER38> We like it this way

</comment><comment><USER39> Young devs - learn minimalism. Discover what fast means.</comment>


Electronic surveillance up 5x in DC area since 2011, almost all sealed cases - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/us-courts-electronic-surveillance-up-500-percent-in-dc-area-since-2011-almost-all-sealed-cases/2016/10/22/48693ffa-8f10-11e6-9c52-0b10449e33c4_story.html <comment><USER2> Uncovering secret surveillance enabled by the courts? Easy to read graphs that have a y-axis starting at zero? Paywall free, informative content? I clicked a few ads to say thanks.

When only 1 of 4,100 cases over five years in a particular district has the _public record_ unsealed, I think it's safe to call this a cover-up.

> Yet the listings of how often law enforcement applied to judges to conduct > covert electronic surveillance — a list that itself is usually sealed... The > information about what are known as pen register and trap and trace orders > was made public after litigation by the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier > Foundation (EFF), journalists and others, including some service providers.

You know, when the press operates as it should, as nonpartisan fact finder and uncovering truth through hard-fought FOIA battles, well first your sick about whatever you just read, then at least you feel a bit better knowing that at least someone is trying to shine some light on it.

<comment><USER3> Its not paywall free. You are limited to a set of free articles every month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems odd that they didn't define the term "pen register" beyond the "(outbound messages)" in the graphic. From Wikipedia: "A pen register, or dialed number recorder (DNR), is an electronic device that records all numbers called from a particular telephone line."

> ... warrant appeared to authorize the FBI to secretly place code, or > malware, on all computers that logged in to an anonymous email service...

I keep thinking of the parallels between the actions of spearphishing criminals and these law enforcement agencies.

</comment><comment><USER5> Every time I see Northern Virginia and these volumes of requests from the government, I think Amazon and us-east-1.

</comment><comment><USER6> One thing worth noting here, is that it's unclear if this means electronic surveillance is up 5x in the DC area (as the area of investigation). As the article notes, these courts routinely handle requests for nationwide investigations. It would be interesting to repeat this process with other federal districts, especially in major cities.</comment>


Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram Are Just Making Every Human Event Feel the Same - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcodesign.com/3052001/twitter-snapchat-and-instagram-are-just-making-every-human-event-feel-the-same <comment><AUTHOR> I think as Socality Barbie has shown, these "moments" are becoming quite mundane and similar.</comment>


A bunch of floating point errors - <AUTHOR> http://j2labs.tumblr.com/post/4600391346/a-bunch-of-floating-point-errors

<comment><USER2> double x0 = 0x1.0000000000001p0; double y = 0x1p-53 * (1. - 0x1p-11); double z1 = x0 + y;

or other examples taken from [http://hal.archives- ouvertes.fr/docs/00/28/14/29/PDF/floatin...](http://hal.archives- ouvertes.fr/docs/00/28/14/29/PDF/floating-point-article.pdf) would have been more interesting than 0.1 + 0.2, for which every tested language seem to compute the proper IEEE 754 double precision result.

</comment><comment><USER3> Au contraire, there are no errors here.</comment>


CSS Sprites vs. Data URIs: Which is faster on mobile? - <AUTHOR> http://www.mobify.com/blog/css-sprites-vs-data-uris-which-is-faster-on-mobile/ <comment><USER2> I'm all for research and hard data, but I can't help being a little sceptical of these results.

We use data: URIs all over the place, typically storing icons and other small graphics as background-image sources in CSS. Over the broadband connection I'm using right now (roughly 5Mb/s download speeds) and with a cleared cache, our home page seems to be downloading and rendering in about 1.5s in all of the major browsers, and the lion's share of that is downloading the HTML file first and then downloading various standalone images that we haven't yet optimised at the end. Over a 3G mobile connection of dubious quality, in the browsers I can readily test with, there's a lot of extra lag up-front, but little difference in the middle section where we download and render the CSS/data: images. These results are both fairly consistent with what we've seen throughout development and testing, across a decent range of test scenarios over an extended period.

So while I'm not sure from these articles where the difference might lie, I don't see how to reconcile the results we've seen with the idea that switching to data: URIs somehow slows things down by 6x or 10x as reported in the linked article series. I wonder whether either the people doing these experiments weren't measuring what they thought they were measuring or perhaps they've hit an awkward use cases that some/all major browsers don't optimise well rather than a general problem with using data: URIs. The latter is certainly plausible, as there are cases with for example SVG where some browsers seem absurdly slow but everything works with the kind of performance you'd expect in others.

Meanwhile, data: URIs continue to have some concrete practical advantages for mobile, perhaps most obviously that they tend to circumvent mobile Internet providers "helpfully" compressing your graphics on the fly so they look terrible on your visitor's 300dpi smartphone/tablet display, which is a particular problem with image sprites if their compression starts bleeding one image into the next. For reasons like this, we've found that in practice our decisions about how to send graphics on web pages are rarely dominated by speed considerations anyway — though they surely would be if using data: URIs really slowed down our pages by a factor of 6-10x!

</comment><comment><USER3> For completeness, it could be interesting to also test:

• separate image files: after the cost of the initial many-separate-loads (which might be minimized by pipelining/SPDY), once reaching the cached- condition, might having them as individual artifacts again show some wins (no translations/trimming; shorter/simpler CSS)?

• data URIs inside CSS rather than HTML: on the off chance that leads to better post-data-decode image caching than re-parsing the cached HTML

</comment><comment><USER4> The main takeaway seems to be: "This is in spite of the fact that the CSS sprite actually requires an extra connection and incurs all the associated connection overhead including TCP slow start!"

However, if the CSS file and sprite reside on the same server, and HTTP/1.1 with keepalives is used, chances are that the sprite will come down a preheated TCP connection (and thus also foregoing an SSL handshake, if fetching via https). The article doesn't actually mention how client and server are set up, and what the base network latency between them is.

It would be nice to see the test results with and without keepalives to see how this influences the results, as well as what the median network latency between client and server were during these tests.

</comment><comment><USER5> Data URIs use base64 which adds quite a lot more the to image size. Ofcause it will be slower. Also, using Data URI over images will hang the users connection longer waiting for the Css to load before being able to see the page.

<comment><USER6> even though base64 increases raw size by about a third, this is mitigated by gzip or deflate encoding by the webserver. The actual transmitted size is only about 5% bigger

<comment><USER7> I measure less than that:

        dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1024 count=64 | base64 | gzip | wc -c
        64+0 records in
        64+0 records out
        65536 bytes (66 kB) copied, 0.0127386 s, 5.1 MB/s
        67302

This particular run comes out to ~2.7% overhead, and in fact it's very repeatable. The half dozen runs I did were within 20 bytes of each other.

<comment><USER8> The overhead is slightly worse when it's compressed alongside normal HTML content (the Huffman trees aren't so favorable).

        $ wget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII
        $ (cat ASCII;dd if=/dev/urandom bs=8000 count=1 | base64) | gzip | wc -c
        50578
        $ (cat ASCII;dd if=/dev/urandom bs=9000 count=1 | base64) | gzip | wc -c
        51621

Around 4% overhead. Either way, it's negligible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd be curious as to the underlying why here.

I imagine that CSS parsers aren't particularly designed with any kind of parallel operation, whereas grabbing images (& decoding them) is largely done in parallel (up to the number of max connections). So while you're parsing the CSS you can be getting the images, offsetting the connection cost.

In the CSS case, the device needs to get the (slightly larger) CSS, un-gzip it (with more complex tables), Base64 decode - and then decode the image as before. I wouldn't be surprised if this is a completely sequential activity with the rest of the CSS parsing.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd be interested in seeing these results with SVG.

There's a lot of commonality between the images, [http://g-ecx.images- amazon.com/images/G/01/common/sprites/sp...](http://g-ecx.images- amazon.com/images/G/01/common/sprites/sprite-dp-2._V384267953_.png)

Even with Base64 encoding, much of that commonality would remain and thus I'd think that if you had all these sprites as SVG in a single file, as Data URIs, gzip would do a very good job indeed on the CSS file.

In a PNG sprite I wouldn't be so sure.

</comment><comment><USER11> Inlining all of your images as data URIs in your CSS is not a good idea because it will block the rest of the stylesheet from loading whilst images will not.

<comment><AUTHOR> and thusly will block the document from loading, most likely delaying first paint.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I must have missed the Data URI hype, because I'm not at all shocked that CSS spriting is faster than using Data URI. We are comparing using a binary image format, and a base64 encoded image inlined into CSS/HTML.

What isthe basis or the source of the idea that base64 encoded images inlined into the CSS would be faster?

</comment><comment><USER13> I have the same question as Jochem Bökkers and Anil Namde had in the comments - why wouldn't you use both? I'm sure there's a good answer, but I don't understand.

</comment><comment><USER14> I see the author has previous posts about what is not causing the delay, but what are the mostly likely culprits and do all browsers suffer similarly?

</comment><comment><USER15> Might want to see whether this varies with the number of images (instead of 1) and the size (instead of 25kb).

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't imagine having two or more images would make much of a difference until you start reaching the max # of TCP connections per host, since these images would download in parallel. Would still be interesting to see results for.

<comment><USER16> Article author here -- I agree, it would be interesting to see results. One reason for using more than a single image: no navigation timing API in iOS.

iOS may now lag behind Android in handsets shipped -- but it's still a dominant player in web visits on mobile!

Unfortunately that means that for RUM tests I needed to have results that were insensitive to differences of a few ms.

Here's a petition asking Apple to include the navigation timing API in a future iOS release:

[http://www.change.org/petitions/apple-please-support- navigat...](http://www.change.org/petitions/apple-please-support-navigation- timing-api-in-safari)

<comment><USER17> As someone who is grateful for your research and analysis, thank you, but filing a bug report is going to be WAY more effective, at least for iOS. [https://bugreport.apple.com/](https://bugreport.apple.com/) will get the ball rolling, even if it's been filed already. The more reports they get, the more likely they'll look at fixing the issue, especially if good use cases are provided.

<comment><USER16> Noted and filed! Thank you!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Steve Jobs Was Bad Typist - <AUTHOR> http://amistakes.com/2013/04/23/steve-jobs-was-bad-typist/

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure how this shows he was a bad typist. Doesn't seem "slow" to me at all.</comment>


Conway's law - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law <comment><USER2> "As above, so below; as within, so without; as the universe, so the soul."

~

"That which is Below corresponds to that which is Above, and that which is Above corresponds to that which is Below, to accomplish the miracle of the One Thing." Thus, whatever happens on any level of reality (physical, emotional, or mental) also happens on every other level.

\- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeticism#.22As_above.2C_so_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeticism#.22As_above.2C_so_below..22)

# The Principle Of Correspondence

This Principle embodies the truth that there is always a Correspondence between the laws and phenomena of the various planes of Being and Life. The old Hermetic axiom ran in these words: "As above,so below; as below, so above." And the grasping of this Principle gives one the means of solving many a dark paradox, and hidden secret of Nature.There are planes beyond our knowing, but when we apply the Principle of Correspondence to them we are able to understand much that would otherwise be unknowable to us. This Principle is of universal application and manifestation, on the various planes of the material, mental, and spiritual universe , It is an Universal Law. The ancient Hermetists considered this Principle as one of the most important mental instruments by which man was able to pry aside the obstacles which hid from view the Unknown. Its use even tore aside the Veil of Isis to the extent that a glimpse of the face of the goddess might be caught. Just as a knowledge of the Principles of Geometry enables man to measure distant suns and their movements, while seated in his observatory, so a knowledge of the Principle of Correspondence enables Man to reason intelligently from the Known to the Unknown.

\- [http://sourceoforigin.com/universe/as-above-so-below-as- with...](http://sourceoforigin.com/universe/as-above-so-below-as-within-so- without/)

</comment><comment><USER3> > constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication > structures of these organizations

This seems true, given how the current fad of open offices where privacy is rare has lead to the people occupying those open offices implementing "surveillance as a business model".</comment>


Backbone Debugger - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Maluen/Backbone-Debugger

<comment><USER2> That's nice but what about garbage collection. Doesn't this extension prevent views/models from being cleaned up? Or does it use weak references of some kind?

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't even know what to say. I think I might cry. This is going to be so useful.

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://github.com/angular/angularjs- batarang](https://github.com/angular/angularjs-batarang)</comment>


Consciousness: The Mind Messing with the Mind - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/05/science/what-is-consciousness.html <comment><USER2> > It's not the existence of this inner voice he finds mysterious. "The > phenomenon to explain," he said, "is why the brain, as a machine, insists it > has this property that is nonphysical."

There are plenty of real, non-physical things. Evolution is real, and non- physical, you can describe it using mathematical formulas. Math decides how the real world happens.

Think about, oh, say, a road. What's the difference between a road and a random patch of asphalt? Collect the differences in your mind and those are the definition of a road. That something is a road and not just a patch of asphalt has real consequences for the world around us.

There is the world of ideas. Things held in the mind, in the consciousness of people have real-world effects on the physical world around us.

Ideas can have properties, all of these properties are themselves non- physical. You can compare ideas to each other.

One could place on a continuum things that are wholly physical, and things that are wholly non-physical. Road properties and evolution closer to the physical, story themes and potential political platforms closer to the non- physical. The non-physical would seem to be infinite, whereas the physical would be finite. So many, many, many more things in existence are non-physical than physical.

If consciousness itself were something on the same order as an idea, then it would lose none of its potency. People who argue this think they are arguing over reality, but are only debating semantics.

<comment><USER3> >many more things in existence are non-physical than physical.

What does non-physical existence even mean? This isn't an idle question. Surely we know what physical existence is: some capacity to interact; be causally affected or causally affect other physical things. This definition is a bit circular in some sense, but it has closure which is important.

The word "exist" has a foundational importance in all of human intellectual activity. What is the analogous notion of non-physical existence that supports it sharing this term?

>If consciousness itself were something on the same order as an idea, then it would lose none of its potency.

When we say consciousness exists, we're not saying something of similar importance of how a child might say giant pink elephants exist. They're both ideas, but we mean something very different.

<comment><USER4> > What does non-physical existence even mean? This isn't an idle question

Much of modern life exists by convention only (by agreement among people) and has no physical existence. Bank balances, ownership of property, no-parking zones, national borders, having a college degree, the prestige level of a school, friendship, being a Seahawks fan, agreements, the law, political affiliation, religion, etc.

<comment><USER3> But all those things have an "ontology" (mode of existence) owing to being constituted by or supervening on things we know to exist (carbon, hydrogen, electrons, etc). These things are abstractions, but ultimately are grounded in physical existence either by the instantiating substance or substances that operate on the abstraction (e.g. brains). But those who argue for non-physical existence of things such as numbers are going further than this by saying that these non-physical entities are _independently_ members of the constitutive fabric of the universe. This seems entirely unsupported and unnecessary.

<comment><USER5> The concept of existence seems to require conscious observers.

<comment><USER3> Sure, inasmuch as concepts require conscious minds. But surely the universe would exist if it had never spawned conscious observers. So I don't see that the question of existence begins and ends with conscious observers.

<comment><USER2> It has to begin and end with conscious observers, because they are the only ones that can consider the question. The universe does not need your answer, you do. The question quite literally ends when you do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > "the body is made of things, and things don't have thoughts."

Ha! I could say the opposite. The body is not made of magical stuff, just plain matter. And it has consciousness, it feels like something to be alive. So, consciousness cannot be but the result of matter arranged in space.

Let's make an analogy. Say you have a car on the road. It is free to move. Then come many more cars. Suddenly, the road is gridlocked. Is "being gridlocked" a property of the single car? Is it a property that only appears when multiple cars are in a certain relationship? Where does "being gridlocked" reside, in the car, in the road, in the other cars? [http://biser3a.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/12/gridlock.jpg](http://biser3a.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/12/gridlock.jpg)

I believe that emergent properties can and do occur. The new properties emerge from the complex structure of causal relations that exists between simpler elements. This complex web is "stuff" that adds to, and changes, the simple elements of which the system is formed. In other words, the emergent system is made of its constituent parts plus the internal structure, and this internal structure is a property of space and time. Similarly, matter itself might be insentient, but matter arranged in special patterns in space and time is conscious, thus consciousness comes from the properties of space-time, not just from the constituent matter of the body. The space-time arrangement is the software, the atoms of the body are the hardware. They work together to generate consciousness.

<comment><USER7> Of course "being gridlocked" is a property residing in the individual cars. It just becomes measurable only when you pile up a lot of them in one place. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've spent a lot of time thinking on the 'hard problem.' My current stance is that it works like this:

Imagine you are a sphere. Got it? Wait—hold on now! You didn't really imagine that you /are/ the sphere, you imagined you were a sort of disembodied human spirit residing within the sphere. Now, really imagine your total existence is /being/ the material constituting the sphere. Can you imagine that being the sphere in this way is very, very different than interacting with it externally as a human?

The hard problem is trying to explain how our total experience at any moment could be as it is, when we also know that it is in some sense created by the neurons in our brains. How can a clump of twisted neurons be the same thing as the feeling of warmth or the perception of the color blue?

My solution is that our experience (in the above sense) is how it is to actually /be/ a neuron aggregate.

Additionally, I think the problem is so hard because it doesn't involve a system that exists /within/ the material universe; instead it's an aspect of the whole thing itself. This is analogous to how we shouldn't expect the rules of Monopoly to be useful in describing the physical constituents of, e.g., paper Monopoly money. We shouldn't expect the notions of 'system,' 'consistency,' 'causality,' 'time,' etc. to apply to the nature of the universe itself just because they are good for describing things within it.

<comment><USER9> Very nice reasoning. It still doesn't explain how a paramesium, without neurons (so no neuron aggregate there), can experience (a sub-human) consciousness.

Ref: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5OMuFMFUIU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5OMuFMFUIU)

<comment><USER8> Sure it does: the sub-human conscious experience of a paramecium is what it's like to /be/ the part of the universe comprising the paramecium. Although that part of the universe is as much a paramecium as the part that's human is human, so I don't think what's going on there is 'sub' human. That said, there's less complexity there, so it seems like being that part of the universe would be less 'interesting'\--but then again, that's just a human value judgement and probably similarly irrelevant to the universe and paramecia. Neurons aren't central to what I'm talking about; I'm just applying something like a variant of the panpsychic hypothesis to the human situation.

<comment><USER6> DNA is a complex language, it's words are chemical signals and it exists in a soup formed of mineral and organic stuff. I think even a paramecium has quite a lot more complexity than we give it credit for. We also know that cells talk to each other by electrical and chemical signaling, so there is that external language besides the internal one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article starts out noting that talk therapy combats depression. It contrasts this with the fact that prozac and other SSRIs also combat depression.

SSRI's being chemicals added to the human brain, are "physical." But somehow, talk therapy is "non-physical".

That's where the article lost me.

Isn't two people talking a physical activity? There are two physical people, sound waves moving between them, neurons firing in their brains. It's even observable by outsiders.

<comment><USER8> I think the difficulty the author is pointing out is that it seems odd we would could obtain similar modifications to brain state by chemicals and speech. The issue is highlighted if you consider a hypothetical analogous situation that we never observe: imagine if we could become literally drunk just by hearing a certain sequence of words.

<comment> qu4z-2 But plenty of words can have huge impacts on mental state. Is that odd?

"Your significant other was just involved in a serious car accident and is in critical condition."

Or consider attending a (good) stand-up comedy act. That situation can put you in a very different mental state even without the use of alcohol or other drugs (although people do often combine the two).

<comment><USER8> Right. The tricky thing is having words and chemicals lead you to precisely the SAME state.

<comment> qu4z-2 Sure, but "combats depression" is probably a broad enough effect that they wouldn't necessarily be the SAME state in this case either, right? They could both treat depression in different ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For anyone interested in this, I can highly recommend Giulio Tononi's book "phi". Part fictional, part art, part science. Pleasure to read while being an informative introduction to his findings about consciousness

<comment><USER12> Seemingly the only relevant reply in this comment section. That said, the article is kind of vague and has a few big misunderstandings unrelated to Tononi's Phi and Information Integration Theory.

Phi is basically a complexity metric that tries to put a number on the effect of memory in a system. I'm unsure wether this has any relation to 'consciousness', but it's at least interesting to measure effects of having a low or high Phi.

For example functional programming languages favor a low Phi. Everything is defined by the input, memoization is possible (sort of what you call 'mocks' in other programming languages). There are no side-effects (memory of past events elsewhere), or at least they have to be invoked explicitly as 'unsafe' operations.

Also, code that calculates Phi: [https://github.com/wmayner/pyphi/blob/develop/pyphi/examples...](https://github.com/wmayner/pyphi/blob/develop/pyphi/examples.py)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Regarding how talk therapy and meditation could have similar effects on the human brain to medication: we have cognitive subsystems whose behavior is is partially determined by our 'schemas' ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_(psychology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_\(psychology\))), and partially determined by something like coefficients that scale chemical responses to certain mental states arising.

Talk therapy (and cognitive behavioral therapy) work by modifying a patient's schemas. For example, suppose you have a schema for human relationships that effectively says "in any relationship there is a winner and a loser"; holding that belief is going to direct the patient's behavior (and interpretation of events) in ways that probably lead to unhappiness. So, by modifying the patient's view on that point (i.e. altering a schema of theirs), this cognitive subsystem that uses schemas to interpret events and decide behavior ends up behaving differently. Drugs (e.g. SSRIs) seem to effect something like the 'coefficients' I mention above—but potentially you could have similar net changes by modifying this cognitive subsystem's coefficients or the schema input it operates on.

The importance of schemas in this kind of dynamic seems under-appreciated, though there's evidence of thinkers honing in on it from way back (William James' "The Varieties of Religious Experience", for example, is basically a study of this cognitive subsystem I mention. More recently I noticed Carol Dweck discussing schemas as foundational to the theory behind her work on learning styles.)

(P.S. I believe learning meditation is essentially non-discursive, totally experiential/empirical schema modification [your beliefs can be modified by arguments or new observations; CBT uses arguments, meditation observations], so that's how I see it relating to the rest of this.)

<comment><USER13> Learning Meditation is related to this, not because it brings new Schemas or modify existing ones but rather, because it trains to be more detached from them. After all, the very goal of the practice is to identify those schemas forming and letting them go.

<comment><USER8> I agree with that, but the process of /learning/ meditation specifically (which is largely done by practicing) works at least partially through schema modification.

For instance, you probably have schemas relating to the importance of addressing thoughts as they come up. If you believe your thoughts are super important, you are very attached to them; if you take a view that they are these wispy non-essential things that one may delve into or not, you are more detached.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The mind is not Consciousness.

Mind is behavior. A Philosophical Zombie has behavior and a mind. An AI will have some sort of automata mind.

But that's not Qualia. Consciousness is necessarily something else.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1Yo6VbRoo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1Yo6VbRoo)

<comment><USER14> How can a mind have the intelligence of a human and not be aware of itself? I never liked the philosophical zombie argument. I haven't yet been able to realistically imagine such an entity.

<comment><USER15> The funniest part is that, since his behavior is indistinguishable from his non-zombie variant, Philosophical Zombie will write long papers about how they have qualia but Philosophical Zombies don't.

<comment><USER9> Indeed, that's mind-boggling. The only alternative is to start valuing more self-experience.

You know you are experiencing qualia and that you are not a philosophical zombie but you can't prove that others aren't. At least not so far.

:)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The article discusses a professor who hypothesises that consciousness is simply an illusion the brain creates for itself. But you can't explain the concept 'illusion' without reference to 'consciousness', so this explanation is meaningless.

[https://www.amazon.com/How-We-Know-Harry- Binswanger/dp/09856...](https://www.amazon.com/How-We-Know-Harry- Binswanger/dp/0985640618)

This is the book I recommend to anyone genuinely interested in the nature of consciousness.

<comment><USER17> I don't think Ayn Rand's Objectivism is useful for knowing anything about consciousness.

<comment><USER18> Or for any other purpose, actually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is one case of the larger issue of the limits of human knowledge. According to some versions of mysticism, it is possible to unify completely with the universe so nothing in it is beyond our knowledge.

However, if you stick with the methods of the natural sciences, it seems there must be limits. For instance, if you explain an observed phenomena in terms of an underlying law, then you have the question of why that law is so. If you explain the law as due to a deeper law, then you in turn must ask why that law is so. It seems pretty clear that, going down in levels like this, eventually you would have to reach a point where you would say "That's just the way it is, we don't know why"

Now with respect to consciousness, the question is whether we can explain it through some more fundamental, knowable features of reality. Many think you can, and are striving to do so.

Others, like the noted philosopher Colin McGinn, say no, this is a question we will never be able to answer. In particular, he argues the human mind was designed to understand many sorts of things, but this is beyond its abilities. I tend to think he is right.

<comment><USER20> The truth is the opposite, and always has proven to be: the natural sciences are the only way to acquire real understanding, while every form of mysticism by which "nothing is beyond us" ends up being us fooling ourselves again.

<comment><USER19> I think you misunderstood my comment. I was not saying that mysticism is correct, but that there are matters that are beyond the understanding of the human mind, including natural science.

As to natural science being the only road to truth, natural science is itself founded on human experience, and human experience is also the basis forms of truth, such as ethical and mathematical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One thing I've been wondering about lately is whether our brains have more than one consciousness arising from it and we are just one of them. In split- brain experiments, it's shown that two independent consciousnesses can exist in the same skull, since they have been physically cut from each other. The predominant assumption is that when both hemispheres are connected, only a unified consciousness arises. Tononi says that in any composite system of consciousness, the component consciousnesses are suppressed and only the highest-level one is active. But what if they're still active and have their own subjective experiences? We won't necessarily see it in other people just as split-brain patients seem like one person until you scrutinize them. And that all consciousnesses will have access to the same memories sort of muddies it up a bit, but it still accounts for different phenomena, including unconscious thoughts, desires, and behaviours; and changes in personality.

<comment><USER21> Here is a perfect read for you then: [http://www.meltingasphalt.com/neurons- gone-wild/](http://www.meltingasphalt.com/neurons-gone-wild/)

<comment><USER17> Thanks! Apparently, there's a subreddit for cultivating these other sentient agents in a way that you are conscious of them: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The most interesting problem out there :)

Would it help to perhaps, instead of philosophizing, guessing and mathing, to try and look at things that definitely do influence consciousness (birth, death, alcohol, sleep, others) and experiment from there?

No matter how far removed it is from answers, at least you can get some arguably measurable datapoints, compared to guesswork that's a big win!

<comment><USER22> > alcohol

Alcohol has an effect on the brain, which then results in effects on consciousness. It might seem like a pedantic difference, but we don't really have a solid grasp on how the brain results in consciousness, so I would imagine that investigating alcohol>consciousness has so many confounding variables involved is so complicated that we might not benefit from it.

Of course I'm certainly not under the impression that my college psych 101 class makes me any sort of expert, and I might be being far too pessimistic.

<comment><USER11> Seeing you took one psychology 101 class that makes you more of an expert than me :p

I'm more of a consciousness enthousiast..

I'm less interested in the question of "can computers be conscious?", and more interested in "what is consciousness". I believe taking the direction of the first question leads to a dead end, because even /if/ you build a consciousness computer, you still wouldn't have a way to prove it.

Experiment with your own consciousness, it's the only one that's provably observable to you. Based on this assumed truth, you can ask others to do the same.

Following the alternative path of experimenting with our own consciousness, I come up with questions like these, very fun to think about.. but I don't know what I can do with it. I'm no neuroscientist, or even a scientist at all. Are any of them actionable?

What would it take to add another qualia space to our every-day experience (and with qualia spaces I mean the range of qualia experienced that are linked to any sensory experience, all possible observed images fall into one qualia space.) Would it take another sensor attached to our body? Adaptations to our brain? Are the ones we have (vision, sound, smell, touch, internal feelings, emotions, heat, thought) all the qualia spaces there are?

Imagine a volume slider for your hearing. You know that louder sounds in the outside world means a louder experience of sound in your mind. What is the mind's volume limit? Is there even a volume limit? Can we reach it with by producing sound waves? Assuming the limit is far higher than whatever we have ever experienced in our every-day lives, what would it do to a person to hear a sound that is so much louder?

So much to think about!

<comment><USER23> > I'm less interested in the question of "can computers be conscious?", and > more interested in "what is consciousness". I believe taking the direction > of the first question leads to a dead end, because even /if/ you build a > consciousness computer, you still wouldn't have a way to prove it.

I agree with you, but I don't think the first question is a dead end... suppose you devise and install a computer chip that can replace a tiny portion of your brain by interfacing with neurons around it, and over time it learns to perform the same function as the piece of brain tissue it replaced. If you think this is physically possible (even if not feasible with current technology), then by extension, over a long enough period of time you could replace every bit of biological nervous tissue with synthetic components. Assuming the synthetic components were able to wholly serve the same functions as the biological ones that they replaced, you would have a computer which was conscious, and you would have an inside perspective on it. :)

On the other hand, in theory it might be possible to do that complete nervous system replacement without actually understanding what consciousness is. So I agree that "what is consciousness?" is still a more interesting question. I found The Ego Tunnel[0] to be a good jumping off point for defining consciousness.

At this point I think the problem of consciousness is one of scope: any description of consciousness that fits into the the mental capacity allocated to our intuition will lack explanations for aspects of our conscious experience that we can easily identify with a few moments of introspection, and any more comprehensive description of consciousness will exceed our ability to intuitively grasp as a whole. I don't think this is a fundamental limitation; I think it's just a reflection of how much base knowledge is necessary to build up adequate intuitions because of the complexity of the system.

[0]: [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0097DHVGW/ref=dp-kindle- redirect?...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0097DHVGW/ref=dp-kindle- redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1)

<comment><USER24> I've never found that argument convincing.

It seems to suppose that consciousness is an either/or phenomenon. Either you're conscious or you're not. But what if consciousness is more of a continuum and the intensity of your conscious experiences can increase or decrease. Further let's suppose that the source of consciousness is somehow distributed throughout the brain. When the first small set of circuits is replaced your conscious experiences became ever so slightly less intense, by such a small amount that you didn't even notice. This continues every time another small brain region is replaced until at the end you no longer have any conscious experiences at all.

<comment><USER9> Yeah but that's still considering the epiphenomenon hypothesis and not other possibilities. What if the only thing you can explain with the epiphenomenon idea is the Philosophical Zombie (mind) but you still didn't explained a bit about consciousness.

Ref: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1Yo6VbRoo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1Yo6VbRoo)

<comment><USER24> My intent was actually not to take any firm position on the nature of consciousness but rather to present one possible model, that I think many would find plausible, as a counterexample to the progressive replacement argument (ie. the argument that a machine can be conscious because you can gradually turn a human brain into a machine).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> >> The brain is a computer that evolved to simulate the outside world. Among its internal models is a simulation of itself — a crude approximation of its own neurological processes.

Oooh. That's a little problematic. Because you have to wonder how far that sort of simulation has to go to be of any use. If they mind has an image of itself, then wont' the image have an image of itself, and so on ad infinitum? Is that physically possible? If it isn't and so the mind doesn't have that infinitely recursive image of itself, won't then its perception of itself be inaccurate? And if it's inaccurate, how useful is it after all? Specifically, how well can the mind use its image of itself to influence itself if it doesn't know itself very well?

I mean, we're in angel-dancing on pin-heads territory here. Maybe not state facts about how the mind works with such absolutely conviction when all we have is speculation? Just a thought, like.

</comment><comment><USER26> Interesting, but I'm not sure how you can summarize the cutting edge of ideas about consciousness without mentioning Daniel Dennett

</comment><comment><USER27> > Michael Graziano, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, suggested to the > audience that consciousness is a kind of con game the brain plays with > itself. The brain is a computer that evolved to simulate the outside world. > Among its internal models is a simulation of itself — a crude approximation > of its own neurological processes.

Hoffstadter argues that there are multiple levels of simulation.

> The discussion, broadcast online, reminded me of Tom Stoppard's newest play, > "The Hard Problem," in which a troubled young psychology researcher named > Hilary suffers a severe case of the very affliction Dr. Graziano described. > Surely there is more to the brain than biology, she insists to her > boyfriend, a hard-core materialist named Spike. There must be "mind stuff > that doesn't show up in a scan."

Understanding what this instance of Firefox is doing from imaging and signal tapping would arguably be nontrivial. Especially without very much about the software. Right?

</comment><comment><USER28> The argument that we are machines made of meat and so machines made of any other substance may be conscious too is a remarkably weak one to me (a lay person, not a consciousness or AI researcher).

Isn't any arbitrary region in space a _machine_? Because it has physical inputs, physical outputs can some kind of physical computation within? An elevator is a machine but so is the building with many elevators. A city with many buildings, cars, people etc. (all the physical space and things in it withing the bounds of the city) is another machine. Is a city conscious? Clearly it is more complex than an individual brain?

From a slightly different angle - why does my consciousness stop at the limits of my body while the physical chain of reactions extends smoothly well beyond it, and infinitely into the universe?

</comment><comment><USER29> Michael Graziano's Attention Schemata Theory is in my opinion a pretty convincing way of thinking about consciousness. Here's a talk he gave about it:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peHcu8LEgEE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peHcu8LEgEE).

(warning: includes wacky ventriloquist act)

</comment><comment><USER30> The article mentions the brilliant Scott Aaronson, who's written a couple of articles on the subject:

1\. [http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2756](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2756) 2\. [http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1951](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1951)

I'll admit that 85% of what he said flew way over my head, but the 15% I did grok was quite interesting.

</comment><comment><USER31> This article lost me at David Chalmers

<comment><USER18> That's just cognitive dissonance kicking in. I had no problem with Chalmers, but had my own dissonant moments beginning with panpsychism. Why anyone would give credence to such ludicrous, unfalsifiable theories is beyond me.</comment></comment>


Two Factor SSH with Google Authenticator - <AUTHOR> http://www.mnxsolutions.com/security/two-factor-ssh-with-google-authenticator.html

<comment><USER2> If you're willing to spend $20 to avoid typing in the code, this looks promising: <http://www.yubico.com/yubikey>

<comment><USER3> Yeah, YubiKeys are great.

I have been using mine for about a year now and I also use a YubiKey PAM module to log in into my Ubuntu workstation.

If you search google a bit I am pretty sure you will find a discount code to get it even cheaper :)

<comment><USER4> What if you lose your YubiKey?

<comment><USER2> You need to have a recovery process similar to if you lose your phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One thing the article did not really answer was why this is necessary - why is it necessary? I thought that public and private keys were a pretty secure way to SSH into a machine.

<comment><USER6> They're plenty secure.

Unless you lose them. Authentication isn't just about allowing people you know in, if they know the secret pass-phrase that never changes. It's also about knowing they are who they say they are. Two-factor authentication _radically_ improves that second aspect (in most / ideal cases).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I could see where this could get annoying for those who create many separate SSH sessions. What would be the best way to require two-factor authentication only if a user is connecting from a new IP address?

<comment><USER8> I was thinking about the same but I guess that's the downsize of having an extra security.

Something to make it less painful is to use the ControlMaster ssh feature which should allow to reconnect to your server during your session (as long you have the first ControlMaster still connected).. tutorial how to use it randomly taken from google here <http://goo.gl/26Oxx>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> interesting, but two factor ssh authentication can be achieved mucheasier than this: encrypted ssh keys. Something you have (the private key) and something you know (the password to the private key).

<comment><USER10> "Something you have" actually implies "something an attacker wouldn't have".

Hardware tokenizers, SMSes via mobile phones or secrets available only on your phone are all things that confirm a physical link with you that the attacker cannot reproduce even if it has a keylogger and root access on your computer.

Which cannot be said unfortunately about private keys. You can regard them as long passwords saved in a file on your computer (which you need to bring with you on a USB stick and copy on any remote computer from where you'd like to login). Sure, they do not travel over the network, but they have zero protection in case your laptop is rooted and keylogged.

<comment><USER11> This is a very good point.

The whole US financial industry has their heads in the sand over this one. In 2005 the FFIEC (a US regulator) declared that single-factor authentication alone wasn't sufficient for high-risk transactions.

What did the industry do? They rushed half-baked solutions out the door. One of the worst offenders is Harland Financial Solutions. They created a "Multi"-Factor authentication product for online banking, which is multi- factor in name only. When you login using a computer without a cookie set, the "MFA" system asks a security question (like, "What was your elementary school?"), then sets a cookie.

Harland considers the computer+cookie combination "something you have", and will claim with a straight face that this system is secure and multi-factor.</comment></comment></comment>