When Einstein Was Just Another Physicist - <AUTHOR> https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/when-einstein-was-just-another-physicist/ <comment><USER2> One of my enlightening experiences has been to visit the Einstein's house in Bern and walk on the same path that he did every day to get to the patent office. The question in my mind had always been how Einstein suddenly started thinking about synchronizing clocks using light signals out of nowhere? My walk had the answer:

In Bern, you see clocks _everywhere_! Towers after towers, buildings after buildings have clocks of varying sizes and shapes and artwork. The city of Bern is crazy about having giant clocks all over. In 1905, all these clocks must be manually synchronized and people may have often noticed slight differences as they walked and you cannot not think about synchronization every day!

Inventors in Bern were working on how to synchronize them automatically. One of those patents landed on Einstein's desk which started his thought process on synchronizing clocks using the fastest signals possible, i.e., light. But then things got weird when you think about light signal taking _time_ to arrive. What if the clock is on the railway station and we need to synchronize the clock on the train? Now the train is moving away and the light signal is taking longer and longer. And so the relativity begins... It is very likely that these ideas would not have born if Einstein wasn't in Bern _and_ working in that damn patent office!

<comment><USER3> That's a great write up, thanks for sharing.

I'd add that a genius like Einstein would have thought of fantastic things wherever he was – it just so happened that this was the experience he was exposed to which led him to think about time and light, per your story.

I wonder what sort of amazing discoveries he would have made if he had been exposed to, say, biology and healthcare instead!

<comment><USER4> > I'd add that a genius like Einstein would have thought of fantastic things > wherever he was – it just so happened that this was the experience he was > exposed to which led him to think about time and light, per your story.

I don't think this is true. Because of survivor bias, we have no idea how many Einsteins never had the opportunity. It seems likely there have been a million people with similar cognitive capabilities, yet very few make such progress.

<comment><USER5> Credit to Stephen Jay Gould for this

<comment><USER4> Can you say a little more about SJG? I've heard the name and been meaning to read something of his, but never got around to it. Would appreciate a good rec!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just wanted to respond to "just another physicist". In university about a million years ago, I was very unhappy. I loved being a programmer, but I found my CS courses very limiting and actually boring. I decided to switch to honours physics. At my university, the school realised that there is no demand for a huge number of physicists. In the honours program, they simply gear the course for the top 2 or three students, with the intent on only graduating those few people after 4 years. Everybody else they expect to drop out of the honours program and do a general science degree.

I always thought of myself as a pretty smart guy, but honours physics kicked my ass really badly. I remember getting assignments with differential equations before I had ever seen them before. I asked my prof what I should do. He indicated that there were several good books in the library on the topic. After spending virtually every night studying and only just barely able to keep my head above water, I realised. I am not going to get a PhD in physics. it was a valuable lesson. I went back to CS and ate it up (my god it was easy after that).

Thinking about "just another physicist" reminds me of the 2 or 3 people who could actually make it through the programme and then go on to do a PhD. Well, in my case, the class I was in eventually graduated 5 people -- the most ever! It turns out they had to turn it up to 11 and _still_ couldn't pare it down, so I don't feel that bad. But I still feel that the ordinary physics PhD is not really so ordinary ;-)

<comment><USER7> You're probably selling yourself short. Differential equations isn't a bad course if you did well in Calculus and have the patience to grind out a ton of examples. E&M, StatMech and/or Lagrangian Mechanics also ain't bad if it's taught well, but this is a case where you really have to do the diff eqs before you can do the physics piece. Diff Eqs is the language of most of physics; trying to wrap your brain around the other parts _and_ differential equations at the same time is too big a lift even for a galaxy brain. It's like being asked to compile kernel modules without knowing how to use a mouse or keyboard.

I've thought about trying to write something like Lenny Susskind's "theoretical minimum" book, assuming you have the prerequisites of differential equations and linear algebra. I mean, everyone struggles with the complicated problems, but more people should be able to appreciate the results. Meanwhile Susskind's book is pretty good!

<comment><USER8> I'll echo the grandparent that learning diff eq at the same time as the subject (e.g. mechanics) is "par for the course" for physics programs.

There's many times throughout the progression to Physics PhD where "yes ideally you'd learn the math first" but there is only so much time. And some physics math is uniquely physics.

I get your general point Scott, but I disagree with "trying to wrap your brain around the other parts and differential equations at the same time is too big a lift even for a galaxy brain". Learning both in the same course is doable.

<comment><USER7> The guy I was responding to, mikekchar, claimed that he was given advanced physics problems requiring diff eqs without having studied them before; this is absolutely not the case in any physics program I've ever heard of. By the time you get to Junior Year physics, you've had diff eqs, or at least an introduction to the ordinary diff eqs you get in late Calculus. You can probably learn them both in the same course; but only if the course is designed for this purpose (aka Boas based "math methods for physicists" or something).

I do remember some guys in grad school who had never seen a Greens function before (I was doing them in sophomore years; guess I was lucky) encountering JD Jackson, but that's about the only disconnect I've seen.

<comment><USER8> Just speaking from my own expedience, I had advanced (jr year) mechanics before diff eq... but admittedly was taking it early. It was doable but tough.

Greens function were new to me in grad school. Grad school mechanics had be learning math I didn't know before too... can't recall what it was at the moment.

And then the advanced AMO class had some more math I hadn't seen.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Most of the Cloud Business Models Have Been Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://www.mikebz.com/2016/02/most-of-cloud-business-models-have-been.html <comment><AUTHOR> Many Cloud startups have built their business models assuming that the cost of acquiring a customer can be recouped in a reasonable amount of time through recurring revenue. These calculations based on Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) and Long Term Value of the customers (LTV) have omitted a major factor in running a recurring revenue business – Customer Management Costs (CMC). As a result, a lot of the Cloud Startups are overvalued because investors incorrectly assume there will be little or no marginal cost to maintain recurring revenue from existing customers.</comment>


Who do you want to be in life? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@yansh/who-do-you-want-to-be-in-life-ca8ffa3d72e7#.8dk1m9ba3 <comment><USER2> I know only a handful of people who did exactly what they wanted in terms of career choices. It's no statistical sample, but they all managed to make a living at it (except one, who is too young). More importantly, they are HAPPY.

On the other hand, I am surrounded by people who did NOT follow their hearts, and all they do is bitch and moan all day about how they hate their jobs, their lives and how everything sucks. They have nothing positive to say about anything.

If someone were to ask me, I would say ignore the noise, do what you want and work REALLY hard. I did not do so in my teens and early 20s because I did not have the clarity and confidence to just go for what I wanted to do (military aviation). I went into engineering and you can bet your ass I feel empty many many times, wondering what if.

</comment><comment><USER3> A cog in the machine. A couch potato. Someone that has accepted his powerlessness to change the world into a better place and is waiting for the big leaps that will improve all human lives. His included. E.g. fully autonomous vehicles, molecular assembly(engines of creation), the cure to aging, etc. Nothing else will.. no politician no charity no nothing</comment>


Kill Your Personas - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/microsoft-design/kill-your-personas-1c332d4908cc <comment><USER2> Personas always seemed like the worst of the standard UI design practices.

For one thing, they seem to usually just be an amalgam of cringey stereotypes or cringey attempts to invert stereotypes.

And look at the alternatives to personas:

A) Use your own head and think about what you would want. Use yourself as the persona

B) Use an actual living user. Ask a person

It just seems like in almost every situation one of those two is going to serve you better than a persona.

I do like the suggestion in the article of doing persona spectrums instead. Neat idea.

<comment><USER3> Generally, using yourself as a user proxy for most applications will be _worse_ than using personas, unless you're part of the core user base. Doing user-focused research and road-testing prototyping against users is critical, but impractical during the detailed define and design phase. So personas are an imperfect compromise, but a compromise that works well as long as you keep its pitfalls in mind.

Our practice is to define a taxonomy of user types that map to quantitatively- defined archetypes, with personas developed qualitatively to draw out specific motivations and viewpoints uncovered during ethnography. It sounds like the MSFT team got to archetypes and then dropped stock photos and a description on top of them, which isn't unusual but is definitely not good practice. You can't just create an "average user" and call it a day, because you need to encompass a pretty broad set of behaviors, intents, capabilities, and needs.

<comment><USER2> > Generally, using yourself as a user proxy for most applications will be > worse than using personas, unless you're part of the core user base

I disagree. Part of training to be a designer is developing the skill of empathy. You learn to live with users in your body.

Arguably, this is the most fundamental skill of design and the primary way the profession functions at all.

I think your suggestion that you can somehow model users in your frontal lobe as "the other" and get something more accurate is not correct.

<comment><USER3> I get where you're coming from, but I'd argue that design requires both formal and embodied empathy — personas let you manage the complexity around a multiplicity of viewpoints, whereas embodied empathy (informed by ethnography) gives you the ability to understand those viewpoints at a visceral level. Every design choice means tradeoffs between user desires, so personas are useful for "lensing" those decisions and ensuring that everyone gets an equal (albeit virtual) seat at the table during description and definition phases (just as actual users get their seats during prototyping and UAT).

Having said that, I know some designers are downplaying personas or even omit them entirely (at the risk of Alan Cooper rising from the sea to take his vengeance on them), so I'd be curious to know your experience in working without an archetype net for clients, especially with journey maps and similar high-level deliverables. There's nothing sacrosanct in the discipline, and if we can find better ways to get to the end state faster, so much the better for all of us!

<comment><USER2> Can you explain more what you mean by lensing and the equal seats at the table?

<comment><USER3> Sure! "Lensing" is just analyzing the effects of a design decision from the viewpoint of each identified type/archetype/persona. You can do it informally through think-aloud protocols, or through more formal tools like interaction tables or multifocal journey maps (which get hard to manage!).

For example, if you're designing a healthcare experience, you might stop at a critical journey point and fan out a set of archetypes —- say, physician, patient, nurse, and back-office employee. You walk through how this decision affects them functionally, then dive into the personas to explore emotional and PoV effects, using standard tools like affinity diagrams, roleplaying, emotion mapping, and so on. Once you've made a choice, or deadlocked on a set of choices, you can formalize the effects with an interaction table or narrative descriptions, and now you have an artifact that you can refer to elsewhere in the define/design phases, and that forms a basis for user stories during delivery.

All of this is basically to help create a kind of virtual roundtable that represents different users' POVs when it's not practical to involve them face to face. It also, I've found, sometimes lets us intercept usability and design problems that the users themselves might not be able to articulate or, for personal or political reasons, be unwilling to —- which is where your point about "living with the users in your body" is so critical! I completely agree that if you can't embody a persona, it's just a useless (or even harmful!) poster on the wall.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The advantages of building your website from scratch - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/the-advantages-of-building-your-website-from-scratch-da5748a1baaf#.7xg74ydym <comment><USER2> I write as little of my own code as possible. Other people's code is better than mine; it's more throughly tested, it's faster, and it's smaller. I use Bootstrap because I know it works on every browser, every iPhone, 20 flavours of Android, Windows Phones and Playstations. If I wrote my own code I'd have to charge a client for 6 months of my time just to get to where Bootstrap is now. Same goes for React or Angular. Writing your own code is fun, but if you want to do things properly you don't have time.</comment>


The Bionic Man – Testing a robotic prosthetic controlled with the mind [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/video/technology/100000003693281/the-bionic-man.html <comment><USER2> That is one of the most beautiful things I have seen in my life. I can't wait until we can give everyone a fully abled body.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hopefully the military is supporting this research also. Lots of vets with missing limbs that could use this. Maybe one day a soldier could even go back to active duty after losing a limb if they wanted.

<comment><USER4> They are. See: [http://www.darpa.mil/program/revolutionizing- prosthetics](http://www.darpa.mil/program/revolutionizing-prosthetics) and [http://www.darpa.mil/program/hand-proprioception-and- touch-i...](http://www.darpa.mil/program/hand-proprioception-and-touch- interfaces) among others.</comment></comment>


The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/opinion/nicholas-kristof-the-most-important-thing-and-its-almost-a-secret.html <comment><USER2> It's really weird to me how commonplace the attitude of "It is what it is" and "Government can't do anything".

The air and water quality in the US is vastly better since the passage of laws that created and empowered the EPA (Created by the Republican President Nixon). The endangered species act has had many similar successes.

I live on Maui. The waters are now filled with Green Sea Turtles and Humpback whales that were nearly non-existent just 30 years ago. Yet when development and global climate change are threatening our reefs, people look at you like you're crazy for thinking that laws can be effective in safeguarding the environment for the future.

<comment><USER3> What are you referencing in regards to poverty? I would have guessed that the recent reduction in poverty is largely attributable to wealthy nations _reducing_ efforts to centrally plan the economies of poor nations.

<comment><USER4> The conceit of the article -- borne out by economic history -- is exactly that: it's the reduction of efforts to centrally plan, and the rise of entrepreneurial, capitalistic efforts to advance, that has reduced poverty. [1] [2]

[1] [https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/deirdre- mccloskey-...](https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/deirdre-mccloskey- ideas-not-capital-are-root-cause-development) [2] [https://ricochet.com/perhaps-the-most-powerful-defense-of- ma...](https://ricochet.com/perhaps-the-most-powerful-defense-of-market- capitalism-you-will-ever-read/)

<comment><USER5> The article is actually fairly silent on the reasons so read into it what you will. If anything the author is endorsing his friend's book without giving away the thesis and if the link is accurate it covers a wide range of factors.

As for Deirdre McCloskey, as Noah Smith says,"do not believe things that Deirdre McCloskey says just because she says them."

[http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2015/06/deirdre- mccloskey...](http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2015/06/deirdre-mccloskey- says-things.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yes, a vast number of the world's poorest population have been raised out of nominal abject poverty, this is true.

What Kristof _doesn 't_ state, however, are these facts:

1\. Those people live almost entirely in China and India.

2\. The rise in nominal wealth has come from a _tremendous_ increase in energy consumption.

3\. Both nations have _extreme_ environmental problems, including the worst air pollution situations in the world, result of extreme amounts of coal consumption, water shortages, water pollution, and extensive land contamination from mining, industrial, municipal, and other waste.

4\. Though overall efficiency in GDP output per unit energy has increased modestly, overall, increases in _economic_ wealth require vast amounts of additional _resource_ consumption.

The combination of factors 3 and 4 above means that the gains in economic output are being accomplished largely by both strip-mining resources and exhausting effluent dumps in China and India.

5\. Much of the apparent "de-materialisation" of economies in the developed world _outside_ China and India is actually, on closer examination, based on exporting raw material (and effluent) demands to those countries. See research out of CSIRO (Australia) and UCSB.

6\. Outside of China and India (though yes, they're both huge countries), progress in the "developing" world has been far more modest. In cases, backsliding. Add to this economic regression through much of the Middle East and North Africa (much of the disturbances of the Arab Spring is attributable to economic circumstances), and even in OECD/European nations, particularly Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal.

And finally: the _foundations_ of modern economic wealth, vast quantities of nonrenewable resources, tapped at uttelry unsustainable rates, are quite simply not sustainable. Without looking to this basis, effectively the fuel in the tank, observations of altitude or velocity tell little.

<comment><USER7> > And finally: the foundations of modern economic wealth, vast quantities of > nonrenewable resources, tapped at uttelry unsustainable rates, are quite > simply not sustainable. Without looking to this basis, effectively the fuel > in the tank, observations of altitude or velocity tell little.

the fuel in the tank has been increasing a lot actually in the past 20 years. Did you notice that the US became the first producer of petrol ? And vast amount of natural gas have been discovered, and we have uranium for the next 10 000 of years at least.

The real question is: are we running out of Energy ? The answer is a resounding NO. and Peak petrol never happened, despite everybody claiming it would, 20 years ago.

<comment><USER8> > we have uranium for the next 10 000 of years at least.

No we don't. If you keep up with energy demand it's more like 300-1000 years.

<comment><USER6> Given current rates of nuclear electricity generation, and conventional reserves, about 75-80 years.

At _full_ energy supplied by nucelar, closer to 6.

If suggestions that 2ppm concentrations of uranium can be recovered from seawater, possibly a few thousand years, though that strikes me as a systemically risky proposition.

I've seen estimates for thorium all over the map, as well as other breeder- type fuels. Between refining, proliferation, reprocessing, and waste, many risks. We're also talking about nuclear power plant commissioning _and decommissioning_ rates on the order of one per day, until doomsday, with 15,000+ plants required worldwide.

And nuclear still doesn't, on its own, address the liquid fuels problem. Or other resource issues: fresh water, topsoil, phosphate, copper, tin, lithium, etc. We're facing sharp limits on these and many other mineral resources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off."

It always fascinates me how much my world view and the world view of those around me is based on the exceptional and not the mundane. The news outlets report the news assuming that the audience knows what's normal. When the news is used to become informed about the world many people come away with a skewed impression of reality. I am of the opinion that people would be better served by news reports that provide context to explain why the news is in fact news.

Here's some context I find interesting:

According to the CDC:

Americans murdered per year: 16,121

Americans killed in car accidents per year: 33,804

Americans killed by smoking related diseases per year: 480,000

[http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm](http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm) [http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/accidental- injury.htm](http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/accidental-injury.htm) [http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_...](http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_facts/index.htm)

<comment><USER10> Can putting those numbers side-by-side in such a way mislead people on the social impact of those events?

Murder is rare, but it has a very high impact on society and the surrounding people. It creates an environment of stress and fear. Car accidents do the same to a much lesser extent. Smoking related diseases are somewhat more expected, they aren't so sudden. People have time to adjust, receive medical attention, and so on.

When you put the numbers together it feels like we should tackle the causes of the largest number of deaths first, then work our way to the fewest. But I don't think that is beneficial, or even a rational approach to improving our society.

You could use those numbers argue for ignoring mass shootings: i.e., there are so few related to other causes of death. But it fails to take into account just how many people they effect and how much it twists society (e.g., having schools perform lockdown drills with 5-year-olds who don't understand why they have to hide in a closet [1]).

I don't think we have a good measure to use to compare murders, to car accidents, to death by disease. As raw quantities they skew our perception and priorities. As pure numbers they fail to indicate to us the impact they could have on our society.

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/rehearsing-for- death...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/rehearsing-for-death-a-pre- k-teacher-on-the-trouble-with-lockdown- drills/2014/10/28/4ab456ea-5eb2-11e4-9f3a-7e28799e0549_story.html)

<comment><USER11> The negative effects of mass shootings are largely because people don't understand the risks. So I think they'd go away if we realized they didn't matter.

You're right though that smoking shouldn't be top. Everbody dies of something but we can't save all old people from old age diseases forever.

<comment><USER12> > You're right though that smoking shouldn't be top. Everbody dies of > something but we can't save all old people from old age diseases forever.

The CDC disagrees. If you click through the last link in the post above they list in great big bold letters "Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death." The key word being "preventable". You're right in that there is little value in worrying about unpreventable causes of death but, please, don't make the mistake of thinking smoking is by any means unpreventable. Also, it's worth pointing out that smoking including second hand smoking kills people of all ages

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The only reason that I already know this is Hans Rosling. His work is excellent, check it out if you haven't already. [http://www.gapminder.org/](http://www.gapminder.org/) [https://www.google.com/webhp?q=hans+rosling&tbm=vid](https://www.google.com/webhp?q=hans+rosling&tbm=vid)

<comment><USER7> Yes, yes, yes, Rosling is right all the way and he is a very good communicator on top of that, and hates the political correctness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> _> We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off._

This is why everyone should read The Economist instead of The New York Times. The Economist does a phenomenal job avoiding the selection bias and finding a way to cover mundane trends. It makes the mundane interesting, and gives a view of the world that's much closer to reality than any other publication I've ever seen. I'd strongly encourage everyone to give it a shot.

<comment><USER15> I enjoy the fact that while they have a very clear opinion and bias (liberal economics and the free market), they avoid mudslinging, keep their criticisms factual, and are often quick to point out where their preferred system is failing.

That being said, I've few issues with The New York Times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Since this is HN, here's a question: what role could _technology_ play in eliminating extreme poverty by 2030?

<comment><USER17> Well an easy answer is to take a lot of that money people are earning in technology (I'm talking personal income or gifts from companies) and put it towards programs that either work towards ending poverty in those cases (through economic development, direct cash grants, etc) or improving health conditions, which often helps.

Some possibilities (although there are many others): [http://www.givewell.org/charities/top- charities](http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities)

If you have a novel approach using technology, you should pursue it, but don't let a lack of a technological solution prevent you from doing anything right now.

<comment><USER18> Also whenever you earn more money, some the tax you pay goes towards programs like this whether you donate anything extra or not. So getting a high paying job alone helps.

<comment><USER19> Your taxes also fund the IMF, the legal system used to defend drug parents, and the promotion of "abstinence-only" sex-ed.

The reality is federal programs aren't started or canceled based on total, let alone an individual's, tax revenue, so I call bullshit here.

<comment><USER18> OK, how about this for starters: do you agree that the following two statements are inconsistent:

1\. Increasing tax dollars does not benefit the world by increasing the services provided by the government.

2\. Rich people should pay more taxes.

The fact that total tax revenue must ultimately equal total government expenditure in the long run, is not bullshit, it's basic accounting. And the things you listed don't come close to canceling out the benefits of aid (and what is wrong with the IMF in the first place?)

<comment><USER19> Nope, I don't agree.

Total tax revenue does not need to equal total expenditures in the long run. Fiat currencies are created when the government spends money, and it's a choice (based on monetary schools of economics) to have them correlated with revenue. It is not a requirement. The government prints money.

The IMF is tasked with countering global inflation; anti-inflation policies disproportionately benefit those with cash and harm those with debts. In practice, structural adjustment has led to reductions in all sorts of public goods around the world, including education. Hence my inclusion of the IMF on a list with other government programs that increase, rather than reduce, wealth inequality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Another big secret, is that the source of a lot of poverty being lifted is because of China. That's right, that terribly _communist_ government suppressing its people and free speech, is actually responsible for lifting 500 million people out of poverty over the last 30 years. That is definitely a big secret of american media, and something that it neglects to report on, in favor of free speech violations, naval exercises, ip infringement, and "job stealing".

<comment><USER21> >That's right, that terribly communist government suppressing its people and free speech, is actually responsible for lifting 500 million people out of poverty over the last 30 years.

There isn't anything recognizably communist about the Chinese system aside from the name. And the big spurt of growth didn't start until Deng's market- based reforms of the '70s.

So a better way to put it would be "After its Marxist fantasy economics resulted in the starvation of more than forty million Chinese people, the government wisely switched to capitalism, which lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty."

<comment><USER22> That unrecognisably non-communist system still has huge elements of central planning, government control, censorship, and price fixing.

It's hardly a free market paradise.

If you want a free market paradise with minimal government, try Somalia.

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4017147.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4017147.stm)

<comment><USER23> As long as you cite the BBC's take on Somalia you might as well give it a fair shake:

* [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12278628](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12278628) * [http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-12285365](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-12285365)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is there any inflationary effect to the $1.25/day figure that has been used since the 1980s? It's not clear from the article whether it's adjusted for inflation.

<comment><USER25> I couldn't find any correlation to inflation. I put in $2.00 in the calculator, and the millions of people in poverty came close to doubling.

Maybe I'm missing something?

<comment><USER26> Who is down-voting all the inflation related questions? This shouldn't have to be explained to someone with downvote-level karma, but disagreeing with a comment's point of view is not a good reason to downvote it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Implied but not stated directly is that because vast reduction in disease and proportionate increase in life expectancy people are having fewer children so that the small resources people have don't have to be divided into smaller slices but rather into larger slices.

Globalization, the boogeyperson of lots of people, has allowed some income redistribution to the developing world -has the developed world not globalized, it's not a given that had the developed world hoarded their industry and jobs the poor countries would have done as relatively well as they have.

It's also surprising to not see much comment on the interesting phenomenon where countries which had relatively good economies in the early 20th century (Mexico, Argentina, etc) went way down hill after WWii, partly severe corruption and simple non-investment due to antiquated policies and emphasis on natural resources rather than technologies.

<comment><USER28> Nit pick: This is not about income redistribution to the developing world. The poor of the world has simply become more productive and generated more of their own income.

<comment><USER27> Right, but would the hundreds of millions of destitute subsistence farmers of China have become more secure without the foreign investment and "job shipping" of developed countries like Japan, North Am and Europe?

Would Africa be emerging as much without the Chinese foreign investment?

How does India plan on getting its poor on better standing other than inviting firms from developed countries to invest in Indian manufacturing with the lure of lower labor costs --even syphoning jobs off from China now that China's workforce has become more expensive as they have become a rich country (the second largest economy in the world).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Ending illegal wars, the death penalty and torture are even more important. Why would our government which has no problem killing, maiming and even "torturing some folks" even begin to care about poverty, illiteracy and disease? You may disagree but as a whole our government has a strong proclivity to violence which implies a lack of regard for life. Dealing effectively with poverty, illiteracy and disease presupposes our government is sufficiently motivated to direct its attention to those issues. Pick any metric you like and it clearly shows our government has other priorities. Poverty is up, illiteracy is up, education is overall declining, university tuition skyrocketing, cost of healthcare skyrocketing, planned parenthood under attack etc. Our government just bombed a hospital in Afghanistan, executed a woman in Georgia who should have served a life sentence instead, is about to execute a man whose guilt is unclear and still tortures people in dark forgotten corners of the globe. I don't think there can be any meaningful change until bad people with no respect for life are removed from office and replaced with good people who do respect life. It's no coincidence that since the warmongers seized control of this country that education and healthcare took a dive. Dr. Strangelove doesn't care one whit about poverty, illiteracy and disease .

</comment><comment><USER30> A minor note: the author refers to "Volkswagen corruption". I have not seen the company's actions called corruption elsewhere, nor was it justified in the provided link.

Volkswagen deliberately subverted regulations on emissions control. It would have been _corruption_ if they also bribed officials to get away with it.

I'm not attempting to defend Volkswagen in any way, but the phrase is sensationalist and strictly incorrect, even if only very slightly so. This is interesting given the overall point of the article.

</comment><comment><USER31> This article is deceptive because it speaks of raw numbers rather than percentages. While the number of people living on less than a dollar a day went up throughout the 20th century, this was because populations were exploding over the same period. At the same time, the fraction of people living on less than a dollar a day plunged dramatically. In fact, this trend slowed after 1990 - since then this rate has declined less quickly than it did during the seventies, when it fell from almost 30% to less than 10% in 1985. See [https://orderorder.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/capitalism.jp...](https://orderorder.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/capitalism.jpg?w=900) e.g.

<comment><USER32> That particular chart seems to show significantly lower numbers than most I've seen. Sub 10% since 1985.

This one shows 20% as of 2010. And over 40% in 1990. [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/USAID_Pr...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/USAID_Projections.png) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty)

Also from that article. "n 1990, the percentage of the global population living in extreme poverty was 43.1%, but in 2010, that percentage had dropped down to 20.6%." That doesn't line up AT ALL with your image which says 10% in 1985.

So I'm not sure what's going on here exactly. But I don't think it's as simple as absolute vs percentage deception.

<comment><USER31> Different definitions of extreme poverty might change the percentages; however, in all of these it ought to be clear that the rate of poverty declined throughout the twentieth century, it did not go up mid century as Kristof implies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So this is where some folks on HN should come and complain and the raising inequalities, despite the fact that literally everyone is getting richer. Which is what ultimately matters.

<comment><USER33> Not everyone is getting richer. People aren't getting richer because of inequality. Even if they were they don't lose their right to a fair share. "What ultimately matter" is a weak argument that could be said to justify anything e.g. security over freedom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Reminds me of this similar article on the global decline in violence: [http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/12/the_world_is_not_falling_apart_the_trend_lines_reveal_an_increasingly_peaceful.html)

</comment><comment><USER35> > The number of extremely poor people (defined as those earning less than $1 > or $1.25 a day, depending on who's counting) rose inexorably until the > middle of the 20th century, then roughly stabilized for a few decades. Since > the 1990s, the number of poor has plummeted.

I assume this is adjusted for inflation, but I didn't see anything in the link. Does anyone know?

</comment><comment><USER36> >One survey found that two-thirds of Americans believed that the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has almost doubled over the last 20 years.

Curious that the author attempts to attribute this to media sensationalism rather than, say, an increase in American poverty.

Or perhaps not, since Kristof is a fierce critic of the anti-sweatshop movement.

<comment><USER37> Looking at the data for American poverty it hasn't budged that much [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#M...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#Measures_of_poverty)

<comment><USER36> [http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/hunger-the-us-historic- highs](http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/hunger-the-us-historic-highs)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Disasters and tragedies sell, and we now get to hear about them from all over the world, so selection bias is sadly inevitable. This is why millenarian religions like the Jehovah's Witnesses (and, perhaps, radical Islam) are able to so easily convince the gullible that the world is on its last legs.

</comment><comment><USER39> >That's 95 percent of Americans — who are utterly wrong.

Sad, funny and completely unsurprising. At least this writer understands his profession's complicity in the stultifying of America.

<comment><USER40> The author himself is quite complicit to this misbehavior.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> It's just insane how good this is. Yeah, the middle class is hurting (worldwide, or pretty close), but the bottom is escaping poverty at an _amazing_ rate.

<comment><USER42> No. The middle class in the US and other highly developed nations is hurting, but by any global measure, this group of people is actually relatively wealthy. The global middle class has experienced an unprecedented level of growth and prosperity over the past 25+ years. Of course, this has in many cases come at the expense of the first group.

<comment><USER43> I agree. The standard of living in the first world countries will meet the third world countries in the middle. This explains why wages haven't increased significantly in the past 25 years in the US.

Where it gets interesting is when equilibrium has been reached.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> As a side note, mr. Nicolas is the one feeding the media with "war, scandal and disaster". It's enough to take a look at his wiki: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Kristof](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Kristof)

or the topics he covers: [http://www.nytimes.com/column/nicholas- kristof?action=click&...](http://www.nytimes.com/column/nicholas- kristof?action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&module=Byline&region=Header&pgtype=article)

</comment><comment><USER45> I think the average American is going to be shocked in the next couple of years when the rest of the world passes us by. The technological capability of developing nations has increased rapidly. Our rate of technological progress is slowing down. For example, Intel is having difficulty scaling down process technology past 14nm while the fabs in China are catching up at 28nm.

<comment><USER46> > For example, Intel is having difficulty scaling down process technology past > 14nm while the fabs in China are catching up at 28nm.

It's much, _much_ easier to "catch up" than to actually innovate.

With the education system and culture in China and India there's no way they're going to pass us by. Those are countries where having an original thought and arguing with your teacher gets you kicked out of school.

Hell, in China you need a license to put up a website.

<comment><USER20> China has plenty of "original thought[s]". I bet India does too. I always find it amazing that in the U.S. we tend to judge other countries as being "unoriginal" or "lacking creativity", simply because we are better right now. We forget to factor in that we are the wealthiest country in the world, have been for hundreds of years. We have the best resources, and that create a compounding effect for our accomplishments. Not to mention that a lot of our original ideas likely come from specifically China and India.

<comment><USER40> He talks about the culture of those countries. If you managed a typical Indian worker all you would ever hear is "yes, sir, I understood sir, it will get done, sir". Then an endless myriad of excuses and blame shifting and promises. People there are simply wired to always say "yes", never to question, never to doubt, never to criticize. I hope you can see why this might be a problem for transitioning to a "first world" economy, which relies on workers performing services, rather than standing on an assembly line.

Things in China are a bit different, but not quite. Chinese culture makes people very reluctant to admit they do not know something. In addition to that in Chinese culture it is the responsibility of the listener to understand what is being said, as opposed to western culture where it is the speaker's responsibility to make sure that he is understood. This makes transfer of knowledge en mass a very difficult task.

These simple, but fundamental differences are major hurdles for those economies going further.

<comment><USER20> I don't really know much of Indian culture, but I doubt it's as simple as a "yes sir" from your "typical Indian worker". That sounds like a gross oversimplification.

Again, I reiterate that while cultural effects can be there, I think it's much more prudent to look first for the historical and social causes of differences (wealth, resources, times of prosperity & peace vs war and famine). I'd bet money that those effects are orders of magnitude greater than any cultural effects. It's not as simple as you make it out.

As a point of reference, I want to again point out that immigrants from India and China to the U.S., carrying that same culture, have created much of the innovation from America over the past 20-30 years. I don't think that would've happened with typical "yes, sir, I understood sir, it will get one, sir" attitude, that you are placing on the "typical Indian".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Not to overreach here but thank you Internet! The single greatest equalizer in human history.

</comment><comment><USER48> This journalistic impulse to sell the world as worse than it is will not end because a single journalist caught a quick (and likely fleeting) guilty conscience. It will continue until the profession recognizes that their addiction to narrative harms the entire population.

<comment><USER49> No, it will continue until it stops generating revenue. It is our appetite for this sort of journalism that feeds it; if all the journalists in the world suddenly stopped writing fear-baiting stories, then someone else would start writing those stories to fill the void.

The journalists aren't the ones with the addiction; it is their readers that have the addiction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Meanwhile,

[http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/19/humans- cr...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/19/humans-creating- sixth-great-extinction-of-animal-species-say-scientists)

<comment><USER50> Kristof also conveniently doesn't mention that poverty in the United States is actually increasing.

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

<comment><USER51> That article is a textbook example of cherry picking. If you pick the height of a boom as your baseline, of course poverty will increase during a major recession.</comment></comment></comment>


Migrate your Posterous blog to Jekyll, host on GitHub Pages - <AUTHOR> http://alexeymk.com/2012/07/01/moving-to-github-pages-and-jekyll.html

<comment><USER2> And this is a great content editor interface to extend your Jekyll blog with: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4157321>.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not to toot my own horn, but I rather like Hakyll hosting to S3. It's simple, almost unkillable, and the code for Hakyll is quite beautiful.

My site's code is hosted on github for your perusal: <https://github.com/KirinDave/public-website>

Note the makefile for how its deployed. All the code for site generation is in Main.hs.

</comment><comment><USER4> when you migrate, you may want to setup jekyll to handle your redirects (from your old site's url structure)

I wrote about a jekyll plugin that allows just that (used it when I migrated away from tumblr)

<http://rawsyntax.com/blog/blogging-on-jekyll-url-redirects/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! That's a useful solution; the Posterous importer I used added a permalink, IE "/path-to/original-post" in each post's header. Worked reasonably well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I feel kinda bad about the idea of using GitHub pages for your personal blog. Sure, they allow you to do it, but I feel like GitHub pages should be reserved for project pages, and this is an abuse of sorts.

<comment><USER6> It seems encouraged, to me. They give us jekyll ("a blog-aware, static site generator") and provide a real simple way to host such a static site at <username>.github.com by creating a repo by that name.

<comment><USER5> Oh I know it's encouraged, it just feels wrong to use a code hosting site for a personal website, somehow.

<comment><USER7> If you blog about programming, and if many of the programs you blog about are also on GitHub, maybe it makes sense to blog on GitHub too?

<comment><USER5> Ooh, good point. Almost everything on my website is about programming, or one of my JavaScript experiments, so I suppose it would make sense.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Chuck Berry has died - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39318602 <comment><USER2> A brilliant showman. If you can make your way through the corny "Rock! Rock! Rock!"[1] movie of 1957 you'll see some pretty awful performances from artists of the day. But then on comes Berry[2] His segment was heads-and-shoulders above the rest and still enjoyable today.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCt4_Dwt- Lk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCt4_Dwt-Lk)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jKrHzps0XM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jKrHzps0XM)

<comment><USER3> The first video is some one and half hours long. Any idea where to skip for the Berry performance? edit: Ah, I get it, the second link is the Berry's performance starting at 22:34.

<comment><USER2> See link [2] above. Watch his body-language. His facial expressions. His unique dance-movements. Where did all that come from? He was an original

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's hard to imagine how much of an positive impact Chuck's music has had on the world over the last several decades.

I think it's worth mentioning that his music was selected to represent earth on "Music from Earth" [1] which is a pretty great honour in my opinion. Whether or not any other extra-terrestrials get to groove out to some Chuck one time is another thing, but I sure hope they do.

Rest in peace Chuck Berry, thanks for all the great music!

[1] [http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/music.html](http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/music.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> I always found it amazing that the guy who could be credited for the birth of rock'n'roll more than anyone else was still alive. Longevity isn't as much of a thing in the rock circles, and the genre has changed so much over time.

Also, major props for putting out a new studio album almost 40 years after his previous one.[1]

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_(Chuck_Berry_album)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_\(Chuck_Berry_album\))

<comment><USER6> Chuck Berry and Elvis generally get the "King" label not because of the music they created, but because they achieved mainstream success with that music. They crossed the racial divide to bring music which had very much a black background (but also a white background) to the white youth of the day. Another artist which often gets the "King" label is Little Richard, but for the music rather than level of success.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Chuck Berry was so much a part of my childhood. As a kid in Detroit I was a fan of WXYZ disk jockey Lee 'the horn" Allen. He was good friends with Berry and often told the story that Chuck wrote several of his hits in the back seat of his Caddy as they went from bar to bar.

As I went through school his music was never far behind. Even in his eighties he could still rock the joint. Hoping I could see him do it in his nineties but I guess not.

<comment> k-mcgrady >> Hoping I could see him do it in his nineties but I guess not.

He was supposed to have a new album in the works so you might at least still get to hear that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Will never forget that time Marty McFly taught him how to play rock and roll.

<comment><USER9> "I guess you guys aren't ready for it yet, but your kids are going to love it."

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Chuck would have been (in one way or another) the inspiration for almost everyone who plays guitar today. Aside from "Stairway to Heaven", the opening riff to "Johnny B Goode" is one lick that almost every guitarist learns to play. I've been playing that lick for 40 years, but still can't get it to sound as cool as Chuck did... RIP.

<comment><USER11> That lick is my go to when I'm in the middle of a solo and need a minute to think about where to go (and he definitely plays it cooler than me).

Even if lots of people today aren't aware of him, they're probably aware of the uncountable number of artists he directly influenced. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bruce Springsteen [0] immediately come to mind.

[0] Coincidentally, I was watching a video of a Springsteen concert where he was arranging a cover of a Chuck Berry song for his band on the spot yesterday: [https://youtu.be/L-Ds-FXGGQg](https://youtu.be/L-Ds-FXGGQg)

<comment><USER10> Exactly. Many youngsters I meet today who were inspired by more contemporary guitarist usually don't realise that _their_ heroes were in turn influenced by Chuck. He was definitely one of the 'founding fathers' of modern guitar playing.

<comment><USER12> And most who associate that riff with Chuck Berry aren't aware of this 1946 version of it:

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

Edit: Fixed link

<comment><USER11> I thought the parent was referring to playing a fifth on the top two strings with a slide, not the blues shuffle (which dates back to at least Robert Johnson).

<comment><USER12> Cyberferret refers to "the opening riff to Johnny B Goode", which is extremely similar to the opening riff from Ain't That Just Like a Woman. For some reason the link I pasted started several seconds in, which might be causing confusion.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for posting, and for fixing the link too - I played it the first time and missed it, and thought that you were talking about the standard blues shuffle beat too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Many people don't realize that the only #1 hit Chuck ever had was the novelty song "My Ding-a-Ling". It still cracks me up.

</comment><comment><USER14> "the great 28" was part of my musical "coming of age" in the 80s, and I definitely annoyed the heck out of everyone else in the house practicing along to that double album.

this is one of those people whose influence and impact will be felt for decades to come (like les paul, hendrix and many other icons)

</comment><comment><USER15> One of the first celebs to create a sex tape, Berry famously coined the phrase "I like to do that" after farting in the face of a hooker. The video was recovered in the late 1980's after a drug raid on Berry's house by Police. A great man has left the world.

[http://efukt.com/21881_Chuck_Berry_Farting_On_Hookers.html](http://efukt.com/21881_Chuck_Berry_Farting_On_Hookers.html)

<comment><USER16> Just a warning for anyone who doesn't know, efukt is as NSFW as NSFW can get.

<comment><USER15> And yet, an undeniable cultural resource in this instance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Send more Chuck Berry"

<comment><USER18> Two thumbs up... I saw that Weekend Update as well.

<comment><USER17> I think of Berry every time Voyager's golden record shows up on Hacker News.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> One day, I thought "I should go see Chuck Berry, because he's getting old and I'd like to see him before he dies"

So I did. That was in 1987.

Unlike standard rock concerts, Chuck Berry came on stage at exactly the time printed on the tickets. He played exactly one hour, then he went off again. No encores, no banter.

It was great, though. RIP.

</comment><comment><USER20> A bit of interesting history about the es-345 Marty used to play Chuck Berry's Johnny be good in back to the future: [http://bit.ly/2mHQzFG](http://bit.ly/2mHQzFG)

Spoiler: The guitar also traveled through time

</comment><comment><USER21> I think it's remarkable that a recording of Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode [1] printed on gold is on its way towards Gliese 445 [2].

[1] [http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/music.html?linkId=356...](http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/music.html?linkId=35613580)

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

</comment><comment><USER22> This was one of those TIL xxx was still alive moments.

</comment><comment><USER23> Reading this obituary reminds me of Michael Jackson's death. Someone dies and suddenly all the bad things in their life are expunged. Berry was a very influential and talented musician but he spent time in prison related to being caught with a 14 year old suspected prostitute. He spent time in prison for robbery. He spent time in prison for tax evasion. He settled a lawsuit for video taping 50+ women including underage girls in the bathroom of his restaurant. I get it, no one is perfect and a person's death is a time to celebrate their life, but these crimes are part of his legacy. Not even giving them a passing mention in his obituary sends a horrible message that if you are talented enough you can get away with anything.

EDIT: This is currently the top comment, which likely isn't fair either. These things are a part of the story of his life but they also probably shouldn't be the top line. My point is simply we should be talking about his entire life and this is a poor obituary for not even mentioning it. The New York Times has a better obituary available at [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/18/arts/chuck- berry-dead.htm...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/18/arts/chuck-berry- dead.html)

<comment><USER24> Wait was Michael Jackson ever convicted of a crime? How can you conflate the two?

<comment><USER25> No, but he settled lawsuits accusing him of being a child predator before they made it to court.

<comment><USER24> It was settled by his insurance company, against MJ's wishes. He was also actually tried, and found not guilty on 14 charges.

Not quite the same boat as Chuck Berry.

In any case, I'm a "separate the art from artist" kind of guy. There are no saints.

<comment><USER26> At what point do you conjoin the two? Does the line vary? If a brilliant painter turns out to be a convicted pedophile, for instance, would you still hang their art on your wall? Just curious to hear opinions. I was just wondering about this sort of thing the other day.

<comment><USER24> I guess I'd say that great art always speaks truth, and that truth has no need for morality.

In particular I might argue that society might be better off if we were collectively more offended by bad art than by good art made by bad people.

<comment><USER26> I see the argument. How bout this scenario: We uncover that Hitler (hello Godwin's law) was a master sculptor, absolutely unparalleled. His art speaks volumes, especially to those unbeknownst of its origins. How do you see the art being viewed then? On one hand, he has the legacy of attempting genocide, but on the other hand his art is amazing. What are the morality guidelines behind this sort of predicament?

Does humanity keep it on display in a museum and continue his legacy in the vicinity of works such as Rembrandt's? Even though it would undoubtedly offend millions? Does the fact that it's great art outweigh the social negativity surrounding the whole predicament?

<comment><USER24> Sure - I did consider a hypothetical Hitler as artist argument.

So, the boring rejoinder is that, yes, his work ought to be recognized on its merits. Sculpture as a discipline shouldn't be punished for Hitler's sins.

Hung next to Rembrandt? Probably not, but then again how much do we know about Rembrandt? There are plenty of great artists whose personal life we know little about (see Shakespeare for instance. We don't know where he went to school or what he looked like!) If we found out tomorrow he peeped on women in the bathroom should we burn all our copies of Hamlet?

Anyway, regarding Hitler, a more interesting answer (to me) is that I'm not convinced great art and the will to extinguish an entire people really exist in the same soul. We know Hitler to be a failed artist. I wonder if good art requires a sensitivity to the world that sociopaths simply do not possess.

<comment><USER23> >Anyway, regarding Hitler, a more interesting answer (to me) is that I'm not convinced great art and the will to extinguish an entire people really exist in the same soul. We know Hitler to be a failed artist. I wonder if good art requires a sensitivity to the world that sociopaths simply do not possess.

This is somewhat different from what you were discussing, but it genuinely is interesting looking at his paintings. There is a penchant to read into them as coming from the mind of one of humanities worst, but I am intrigued by the fact that they are almost all paintings of architecture with some landscapes mixed in. Any human that is depicted is just happenstance. There is also the fact that Hitler's signature seems to be different in every painting that I have ever seen of his. Do these facts suggest the painter is a man that never identified with other people and constantly was in search of his own consistent identity? Who knows. But it is at least a worthy discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Sort of relevant. I was watching an old movie that featured the original writer and performer of "I put a spell on you." His name is screamin' j Hawkins. I actually thought he was doing a cover. Apparently he is the real father of shock rock. I consider myself to be a music afficionado and I was completely unaware of this guy's contributions. I'm sure there are many that don't know how much Chuck contributed to the creation of rock. Rest in peace man.

<comment><USER28> I hope you've heard Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_n0vkzc8PU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_n0vkzc8PU)

<comment><USER27> I actually have not. Thanks for sharing that. Now I've got something to watch tonight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> RIP ! very sad to hear this. His guitar style was unique and popular. We all will miss you

</comment><comment><USER30> I am curious, when HN became reddit? This seems like a total social shit post not in keeping with HN.

<comment><USER31> HN was always more than mere startup culture / computer science posts.

The same way that every balanced programmer (or scientist for that matter) has always been.

And it's difficult to be an entrepreneur of any major scale if one doesn't understand the society they live in, its culture, and its roots. Selling socks, maybe.

<comment><USER32> Celebrity news and gossip is explicitly the sort of mainstream content which HN is supposed to select against, and which doesn't belong here. No one on Hacker News cared enough about Chuck Berry to post about him when he was alive, why should his death be worth discussing now?

<comment><USER33> Someone's death is often a moment to consider them, and HN has had discussions like this for years. I'm sure no two readers share the same list of which such discussions belong on HN, but as long as it's not excessive or predictable I don't see why we shouldn't have them. Chuck Berry's a pretty important historical figure.

<comment><USER34> Why isn't this thread being flagged/deleted?

EDIT: I mean the comment thread, not the post.

<comment><USER32> I was downvoted considerably when I made similar complaints in the Carrie Fisher thread, and so far I'm at -1 for my comment here.

It could be because Chuck Berry isn't nearly as much of a trigger for pop- cultural nostalgia and trivia as Carrie Fisher, and so the thread simply isn't as popular, or it could be that I'm not entirely wrong.

I used to be fine with these threads but over time they've gotten more and more grating to me.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tutorial: Android Inter-App Content Sharing - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/openmobster/wiki/ContentProvider

<comment><AUTHOR> This tutorial covers how to use the ContentProvider component to expose your content to other Apps including the parent App. It provides a detailed explanation of how to implement the ContentProvider backed by a SQLite database. The tutorial comes with an App with full source code to take the concepts for a spin!!!</comment>


Show HN: Grepsr Data Store - <AUTHOR> https://store.grepsr.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Just soft launched the Grepsr Data Store. We hope to provide "Data Feeds as a Service".

The data will be updated factual public data delivered as CSV, JSON and APIs. Starting out with location data, but will move into other areas soon.</comment>


FRACTRAN - one-more-minute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRACTRAN <comment><AUTHOR> [http://malisper.me/2016/06/11/building-fizzbuzz-fractran- bot...](http://malisper.me/2016/06/11/building-fizzbuzz-fractran-bottom/)

1st paragraph:

"In this post, I am going to show you how to write Fizzbuzz in the programming language Fractran. If you don't know, Fractran is an esoteric programming language. That means it is extraordinary difficult to write any program in Fractran. To mitigate this difficultly, instead of writing Fizzbuzz in raw Fractran, what we are going to do is build a language that compiles to Fractran, and then write Fizzbuzz in that language."

<comment><USER2> Scroll down, see Lisp's parens. Why am I not surprised?

Also, I bet that one of other posts in this blog proves something to be Turing-complete.

<comment><USER3> Yeah... Lisp has a long history as a test bed of sorts for language ideas. (For the same reason it's particularly well suited for DSLs.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This language is brilliant - at first, it's difficult to believe that such a simple _numerical_ scheme is a programming language. Once you look a bit deeper, you see it's a very clever encoding of a register machine.

</comment><comment><USER5> Man, this ought to take the cake for the worst esolang I've seen...

<comment><USER6> Worst, or _best_?

<comment><USER7> Esoteric languages tend to play along that "so bad it's good" spectrum.</comment></comment></comment>


Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/03/AR2007090300933.html

<comment><USER2> Appealing stories are often not true, and if true, often not important. Unfortunately, the demand for stories is based almost entirely on how appealing they are. So any place in the media where editorial judgment is absent tends to be filled with speculation, rumor, myths, triteness and trash.</comment>


Korea and Its Big-Ass Smartphones - <AUTHOR> http://pandoralive.info/?p=3491. <comment><USER2> I lived in Seoul 2012-2013. Generally I think this post is accurate. Here are some general observations from my time there:

\- there's a small but growing startup community growing there who were very welcoming to foreigners.

\- you only see web developers with macs. A basic 13" MacBook can cost close to $1800 there.

\- already in 2013 there's was a huge surge of people with these larger phones in Korea.

\- trends travel very fast in Seoul. riding the subway, you'd see a smartphone game become popular and die out over a 2 week period.

\- mass transit is very efficient. Last night I heard Gavin newsome claim that the Bay Area has one of the best mass transit systems in the world. All I could do was laugh.

<comment><USER3> Forget about looking abroad, NYC's public transit is far better than the Bay Area's. But Newsom is a politician, so blatantly lying and generally being incompetent is part and parcel of his job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I used to think my iPhone (4) screen was big enough. I could do anything on it that I needed. But now that have a larger Android phone, everytime I test someting on the iPhone, it seems so little and toylike.

<comment><USER5> Well, as another data point, I used big-ass android and switched to 4S and found it to be much more appropriate size.

Ordered in 5S not 10 minutes ago, and I'm afraid it's not really gonna be better form factor.

I do find your "toylike" adjective appropriate. But I don't think that's neccesarily a critique.

<comment><USER4> Interesting indeed! I usually struggle with the general size of the icons and the width of inputs being so short that only a dozen characters fit on there. What are some advantages that you experience with the 4s screensize?

<comment><USER6> Smaller phones fit more easily into pockets. Also, anecdotally and in my experience, they have better battery life.

<comment><USER7> I actually find that a bit surprising. I would expect with a larger form factor one could fit a bigger battery into the phone (like an iPad has much better battery life than an iPhone). A longer charge would be more motivation for me to upgrade my phone to a larger size than a bigger screen.

<comment><USER6> Possibly this is due to the larger screens being primarily Android, which had/has worse power management than iOS. I'm out of the loop on the current state of the relative power management between the two, so this may have changed in the last year or so.

But anecdotally, my friends who carry Android phones keep their chargers nearby in their purses/briefcases.

<comment><USER8> Current Android devices with smaller screens almost universally have less powerful hardware. A slower CPU, slower GPU and smaller amount of RAM will consume less energy. They also tend to have lower pixel densities, which usually mean higher light transmission (with LCDs) and therefore less energy spent running the backlight. There's also less area to illuminate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Google cache version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hfW8CmD...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hfW8CmDSmKIJ:pandoralive.info/%3Fp%3D3491+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&strip=1)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, OP here. Not sure why the server went down (I have a caching function enabled), will see what I can do to put things back online... :P

<comment><USER10> Still down

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am a Galaxy Note 1 first day owner, now on Galaxy Note 3, waiting for 4.

As I partly lived in Bangkok, it's common all over Asia, to like big phones. I don't know why only westerners complain "man, it's too big!". That was never a complain the asian countries I traveled.

For me, I also don't care of the bigger size. It's only a plus, since you see more, better, more clear, more content, better media consumption. It fits in your pocket.

Now I'm back in Switzerland, one of the last "iPhone nations". On public transport I see those small screen iPhone users and they look at my Note with that "man, you're weird" expression... Haha

<comment><USER8> _I don 't know why only westerners complain "man, it's too big!"._

When carried in the left-front pocket of my pants, my Nexus 5 slightly encumbers my ability to bend my left leg. Were it any taller, the encumbrance would not be slight. I also find it difficult to use the keyboard one-handed and to reach the notification bar when gripping the phone so as to be able to use the keyboard. If it was any taller or wider, these difficulties would turn to impossibilities.

I understand the appeal of a larger screen, but convenient, comfortable pocket carry and one-handed use are more important to me than how much content it can display. I use a Real Computer when that's a priority.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It is true that big phones are popular here in Korea. It is not uncommon to have more than an hour in public transport to get to work, two hours happens quite frequently as well. Some people even have a telscope antenna for tv reception in their phones.

Using the telephone as an entertainment device on long commutes doesnt explain it all though. I think there is a small part status symbol in screen size, and the fact that korean phone makers have few other ideas in what to improve in their next top of the line model.

</comment><comment><USER13> As a Korean, the most surprising part of this article was that there was no mention of KakaoTalk. (But Naver was mentioned.)

KakaoTalk is literally the reason why people buy smartphones here. Seriously.

<comment><USER14> So it's the korean version of whatsapp ? funny how such 'simple' needs are the market driving force.

<comment><USER3> WhatsApp has a much more minimalist feel than KakaoTalk. Take a look at some screenshots[0]. On the upside, it supports PC, but idiotically, it's a desktop app (Windows-only), rather than a web app.

Their revenue streams are very different too. Whereas WhatsApp relies on subscription fees, KakaoTalk has a built-in gaming platform. It also sells "stickers," basically emoticons you can send to friends.

0: [https://www.google.co.kr/search?tbm=isch&q=카카오톡+대화](https://www.google.co.kr/search?tbm=isch&q=카카오톡+대화)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Japanese manufacturers were notoriously absent from these stores, except for > the Camera section where Sony and Canon were widely represented.

...meanwhile, in Japan, 'who are Samsung?' 'Didn't know they made phones...'

<comment><USER16> Do you know why this is?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because Phone companies here do not advertise the models, and they rename them with their own brand line names, minus the manufacturer's name. It's probably because they don't want to make it look like these phones come from outside of Japan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In China and Hong Kong I've seen similar trends -- much bigger devices, and far more of them than in the UK and North America. The decreasing cost of high-resolution displays and being located closer to the electronics manufacturing capitals of the world probably also play a role. When buying a smartphone people there will generally choose the biggest size that comfortably fits in one hand.

I wonder if the size categories came from how the device is intended to be used; I've only seen the screen-size distinction but suspect it's more like this:

Smartphone: can be easily held and operated with one hand

Phablet: can be held between the thumb and fingers of one hand, but big enough that many operations will require two hands

Tablet: designed to be held and operated with two hands

<comment><USER8> _Smartphone: can be easily held and operated with one hand_

I think this is getting stretched a bit with the current crop of 5"\+ flagship phones. I have very close to average male size hands according to [http://theaveragebody.com](http://theaveragebody.com), but I find my Nexus 5 difficult to use one-handed. It was nearly impossible before I made a case for it that gave me a better grip.

Men with smaller than average hands, and women with anything but unusually large hands will probably find the Nexus 5 and similar phones hand to use one- handed. Samsung and LG have already exceeded this size with their flagship models.

<comment><USER17> Maybe that's because the term "phablet" is still foreign to many and they want to emphasise the phone functionality, so that's why they continue calling them (no pun intended) smartphones. 5" is right on the border between smartphone/phablet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I presume the author lives in Japan? Living in Korea, I find the different perception interesting. To me, Korea is much more modern than any Japanese city. In contrary, to me Japan has some kind of "old flair" everywhere. Just how you'd expect from a nation that boomed some time ago – where the success has settled, so to say.

That contributes to my general perception of Japan as being very very different from all I know. Compared to that, Korea is much closer to the US or Europe. For traveling/exploring Japan is awesome, but talking about living I know why I chose Korea.

</comment><comment><USER3> Two reasons why the iPhone is so popular in Japan:

1\. It's free on contract (yes, the latest version)

2\. You can type Japanese easily with just 3x4 keys (which made it perfectly suited for old flip phones), and so many use this method even on smartphones. Much easier with a small screen than Korean (which typically uses a keyboard the same size as English on smartphones)

Edit: my bad, looks like there's a 10 key Hangul input method for iPhone[0]. I haven't seen it used very much though, probably because it looks like a pain in the ass to use (compared to the 3x4 setup for Japanese), sort of like how no one would use T9 to type English on a smartphone, even if the screen were small.

0: [http://emscloud.tistory.com/m/post/176/slideshow?order=2](http://emscloud.tistory.com/m/post/176/slideshow?order=2)

<comment><AUTHOR> > 2\. You can type Japanese easily with just 3x4 keys (which made it perfectly > suited for old flip phones), and so many use this method even on > smartphones. Much easier with a small screen than Korean (which typically > uses a keyboard the same size as English on smartphones)

Nope, I saw koreans using a very similar input method for korean with a 3*4 layout and they all seemed to be using that, making it very fast for them. On Android devices.

Btw I have an android phone in Japan and you can do the exact same thing on Android for Japanese. No difference with the iPhone, really, at least on that aspect.

<comment><USER3> You're probably talking about something like Moakey[0], but this is nowhere near universal. More importantly, it's not available on iOS[1]. This may be fine for younger people, but it wouldn't be so easy to use for older folks.

0: [http://lovingkorean.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/moakey- keybo...](http://lovingkorean.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/moakey-keyboard.png)

1: [http://i248.photobucket.com/albums/gg168/owbee/Mylinguistics...](http://i248.photobucket.com/albums/gg168/owbee/Mylinguistics/iPhone6.jpg)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, it was not this one. It was a 3*4 layout and the top row were the "vowels" (I know that's not the right word for it, but well...) you combine with the other letters to make full korean signs. This is apparently standard on Korean phones. At least Samsung ones.

<comment><USER3> Well, I don't know what you saw, but this is the default Korean keyboard on a Galaxy S4: [http://cfile22.uf.tistory.com/image/2469083B51DDE07613BAE1](http://cfile22.uf.tistory.com/image/2469083B51DDE07613BAE1)

Maybe there's a toggle option.

<comment><USER19> Yes there is, and OP is right, an awful lot of people still use the 4*3 keyboard, even on phablets. For instance, last year Pantech was advertising the fact you can use the Vega R3's keyboard with one hand: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7ObLdqUOHU#t=30](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7ObLdqUOHU#t=30)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This cached version has the pictures, apparently: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hfW8Cm...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hfW8CmDSmKIJ:pandoralive.info/%3Fp%3D3491+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment><comment><USER20> Im currently living in S Korea and most the people I see have Samsung Note 3's. I think they've sold 10 million of them here? I've also not seen more broken screens anywhere else than here. Teenagers and young peoples phones screens are broken. They use them so much they drop them a lot more probably and also might be partly because of the alcohol.

</comment><comment><USER21> [http://xkcd.com/37/](http://xkcd.com/37/)

Works every time.</comment>


Your Guide to Silicon Valley Culture – Silicon Valley Dictionary - <AUTHOR> http://svdictionary.com/ <comment><USER2> I can't agree with the one at the top for Waterloo, which is described as "A mythical University in Canada where many good Engineers and Computer Scientists come from." I personally hired tons of interns from Waterloo during my tenure as a manager in Silicon Valley, and then subsequently hired many of those as full-time engineers after they graduated. It is an actual real place with great engineers. The interns there usually did better than interns I hired from other top schools in the USA.

</comment><comment><USER3> I still prefer the hacker jargon file: [http://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html](http://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html)</comment>