New finding: 600M years ago, a single mutation changed everything - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/01/11/startling-new-discovery-600-million-years-ago-a-single-biological-mistake-changed-everything/ <comment><USER2> One common objection to the theory of evolution claims that the theory is self contradictory. It says that it is impossible for complex features such as wings, eyes etc to evolve because they will require a series of mutations that do not individually confer any evolutionary advantage. Since they do not have any evolutionary advantage, they cannot spread in the population. Therefore the chance of these mutations appearing in series is almost as small as these mutations appearing simultaneously. The chance of these mutations appearing simultaneously is, of course, astronomically small.

The usual counterargument says that just one mutation is usually enough to create a functional prototype of a complex feature/organ (MVP, if you please). A series of mutations is not required.

This study provides yet another example backing this counterargument. One single mutation can change an unicellular entity and make it behave like a multi cellular organism. Intuitively, one would think this would take many mutations. However, intuition is wrong in this case, and in many others.

<comment><USER3> Even as someone fully accepting of evolutionary theory, this diagram felt like a revelation: [http://i58.servimg.com/u/f58/17/30/76/23/evolut10.jpg](http://i58.servimg.com/u/f58/17/30/76/23/evolut10.jpg)

<comment><USER4> The mutation from 4 to 5 is enourmous.

<comment><USER5> It's not a single step, it's just one sign post on a long highway (you can't show all of them). Every step along the way is pretty straightforward and immediately useful.

Eyes are an interesting example, because they are seemingly incredibly complex systems, yet eyes have evolved independently dozens of times. For example, octopuses and humans have equivalently complex eyes which have entirely different origins and have slight differences (for example, human eyes have a blind spot due to the nerve fibers being on top of instead of behind the light receptors).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> the article over generalizes the find to be basically bereft of real information.

"Instead of working as enzymes (proteins that facilitate reactions inside the cell) the proteins were now what's known as an interaction domain. They could communicate with and bind to other proteins, a useful skill for cells that have decided to trade the rugged individualist life for the collaboration of a group"

Enzymes switch between being enzymes and interaction domians across all taxa everywhere in the tree of life, so this is not the "money shot". Moreover, unicellular life do plenty of intracellular, collaborative communication (e.g. quorum sensing).

Reading the paper, the specific switch enabled the orientation of cell division to be communicated from one cell to another. This is interesting because this communication is not over an anisotropic chemical gradient, but encodes directional and spatial information.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is the closest that article gets to an "explanation":

> _A single mutation that repurposed a certain type of protein. Instead of > working as enzymes (proteins that facilitate reactions inside the cell) the > proteins were now what's known as an interaction domain. They could > communicate with and bind to other proteins, a useful skill for cells that > have decided to trade the rugged individualist life for the collaboration of > a group._

Which is total gibberish. Yet unsurprisingly the abstract to the actual paper (helpfully linked in the wapo article: [http://elifesciences.org/content/5/e10147](http://elifesciences.org/content/5/e10147)) is gibberish to me for different reasons.

Is anyone expert enough to attempt a "for technical dummies" reading?

<comment><USER8> I'll have a go. Disclaimer: I'm not a biologist; corrections welcome.

Consider a growing multicellular organism. It grows by a process of cell division. Each division turns one cell into two adjacent cells. The structure it ends up with will depend on the orientation of those dividing cells (you'll tend to get growth "along the axis of division", so to speak).

A wide variety of multicellular organisms have a mechanism that orients cells according to features on the outside of neighbouring cells. (It "mediates spindle orientation in diverse animal taxa by linking microtubule motor proteins to a marker protein on the cell cortex localized by external cues", as the abstract puts it. The "mitotic spindle" is a structure involved in cell division, also called mitosis. It's mostly made out of long thin things called microtubules, and its job is to separate the chromosomes for the two new cells, which it does using "motor proteins". The cell cortex is the inner surface of the boundary of the cell.)

One part of this process is the way in which a protein involved in the mitotic spindle attaches itself to that thing on the cell cortex. The relevant bit of that protein is called the "guanylate kinase protein interaction domain" or GK_PID for short. A protein interaction domain is a bit of protein that interacts with other things; multiple different proteins can contain instances of the same interaction domain, just as multiple different programs can contain (say) the same code for computing SHA-256 checksums.

The paper reports evidence that a single mutation enabled the GK_PID to attach itself to the marker on the cell cortex. ("The complex was assembled through a series of molecular exploitation events, one of which – the evolution of GK_PID's capacity to bind the cortical marker protein – can be recapitulated by reintroducing a single historical substitution into the reconstructed ancestral GK_PID."

So. This doesn't say that multicellularity was enabled by a single mutation. It says that one small but important part of a process that's necessary for complex multicellular organisms was enabled by a single mutation. Still pretty cool, but the journalistic science->hype conversion machine is clearly operating as usual here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> As another comment noted, some of the participants in this thread about the interesting article kindly submitted here appear to be unaware of the factual basis for evolutionary theory. For anyone who wonders how we know that the earth is much more than 600 million years old, or how we know that current living things descended from a common ancestor, more or less remote depending on how closely related the current living things are, see 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: The Scientific Case for Common Descent,[1] which is a very informative and interesting website with a lot of information about biological facts and geological facts that have been discovered since you and I graduated from high school.

[1] [http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/](http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/)

</comment><comment><USER10> How does it impact the probability of extraterrestrial life? I mean, after 4 billion years of relative peace, Earth still had only single-celled organisms. And it would have stayed that way, if not for this particular mutation. So it is not just how many planets can support life. First, it will need to continuously keep supporting life for billions of years before any form of intelligent life can emerge. THEN it has to wait till such a pathbreaking mutation occurs, which might take a random amount of time. I am starting to gravitate towards the lower bound of what the Drake equation estimates to be the number of planets with intelligent life. (= we are probably alone in the universe)

<comment><USER11> Don't worry too much about the possibility of multicellular life in other planets [0]. This press article is totally overhyped.

Read this comment of bmer about the original research article: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10884255](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10884255)

[0] [Or to be more precise, IIRC the transition from bacteria to eucariota is more difficult. I'd worry about that step instead.]

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is there another way than a mutation, propagation to an offspring(s), survival and successful reproduction of these, then over-reproducing others due to this adaptation (or by a pure chance) etc?

</comment><comment><USER13> I thought multicellularity on Earth evolved independently around 50 times? So it does kind of make sense that it would be the result of something as simple as a single SNP that changes a function of a protein from whatever to binding to proteins of external organisms. Perhaps more complex mechanisms (multiple mutations) wouldn't have the likelyhood of occuring so many times

</comment><comment><USER14> Obviously important to understand actual modern problems like cancer, but in a broad sense this is just the beginning of coming to a complete picture of the origin of metazoa. This was a single mutation that ends up in all animals, but perhaps other mechanisms were also involved in making the mutation survive and win.

</comment><comment><USER15> The scientific article makes a far from convincing case for the purported importance of this mutation. The journal its published in (eLife) is not exactly known for high-quality comparative genomics / molecular evolution work either. The Washington Post article is misleading at best. Hyperbole.

</comment><comment><USER16> AKA the "Cambrian Explosion". I wasn't aware this was new. I remember this in HS.

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

<comment><USER17> The Cambrian Explosion has been known for quite some time. This is a theory of HOW the Cambrian Explosion happened. One single mutation. Interesting ideas for sure!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I find the number of young-earth creationists in disguise here very surprising.

</comment><comment><USER19> "In the wild world of pre-complex life, this development was orders of magnitude better than Twitter for getting organisms organized." Ha ;)

</comment><comment><USER20> _insights into life at that time rely on researchers' imaginations_

Where is this 600M years taken from? big claims based on assumptions, I don't like this kind of science, building on too many assumptions and you are going too far from the truth and this is the opposite of what science tries to achieve.

<comment><USER21> Since the researcher was reconstructing the evolution of a protein I would say the date was determined using a technique called the molecular clock: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_clock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_clock)

That and the rise of multi-cellular life marks the beginning of the Cambrian explosion (542M years ago). That gives 60M years for the mutation to spread and specialize.

<comment><USER22> The Cambrian explosion is late in this game; this would be about the emergence of the Ediacaran biota (largely fractal-like body plans, followed by organisms with more specialised structural groups and less-local symmetries) and simpler aggregate colony organisms like sponges, which seemed to come out of nowhere quickly after the Cryogenian. The Cambrian explosion seems to have been mostly about riffing on the bilateral symmetry lick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> once-in-a-while What? 600M years? Really?

Are you folks aware that 1000 years is already a very long time? Any number bigger than, say 100.000 years is just the same as infinity, regarding to time.

This "infinity" problem simply requires too much faith, and will never have real evidence. Not very good attributes for a credible theory.

Maybe it's about time to get a better one, with less time involved? This way the faith required would be at a real human reachable level.

<comment><USER18> > Any number bigger than, say 100.000 years is just the same as infinity, > regarding to time.

Tell that to a geologist or an astrophysicist and you'll be laughed out of the room. There's plenty of evidence of timescales in the millions and billions of years.

<comment> once-in-a-while Exactly the opposite is true: theres is overwhelming evidence that the Universe (and our solar system) can't be older than just thousands of years.

Often in history majority was wrong. And history is repeating itself, repeatedly.

<comment><USER23> _overwhelming evidence that the Universe (and our solar system) can 't be older than just thousands of years_

i'm _very_ curious about your sources.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dell's XPS 13 Developer's Edition: My Missed Opportunity - <AUTHOR> http://linuxterm.com/dells-xps-13-developers-edition-my-missed-opportunity.html <comment><USER2> It is worth mentioning that Lenovo has a very significant "Certified for Linux" program. Virtually every laptop model has at least one "Certified" SKU.

<http://lenovo.com/think/linux>

This is the major reason I ended up with a PC instead of an MBA -- I was just going to install linux on it anyway.

<comment><USER3> Note that it is Ubuntu etc certifying the laptops. You can't buy the laptops with the certified version of Linux on them, and for the model I own (T430s) the only version they list (11.10) is end of lifed in ~3 weeks. However Linux is likely to just work on Lenovo Thinkpads, although binary drivers may be problem if you pick an Nvidia GPU.

I'm also a member of the Thinkpad faithful. Other than screen resolution (grrr) and bezel size, they are delightful machines. It is trivial to change/update much of the hardware - they don't solder memory down, nor SSD drives. And Linux works perfectly - the only thing it doesn't support is the fingerprint reader which ironically is made by a company Apple bought not too long ago.

<comment><USER4> Just as a heads up to those thinking of buying an X1 Carbon, the RAM _is_ soldered in on that model, and the SSD is a non-standard size making it difficult/impossible to upgrade.

<comment><USER5> very good point, you literally get what you pay for (and are stuck with it).

I am really liking my x1 carbon and it performs very well with linux.

I do wish I had stretched for the 8gb of ram but the 4gb has never been an issue (despite me sometimes running windows in a VM), however my general toolset is quite light (mostly command line based) so YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yeah I don't understand Apple - why still put old and slow 500GB 5400rpm drives in brand new 15" Pros? Go to an Apple Store and try running anything on the 15" Pro and on an 11" Air - I guarantee that Air will load it faster. I've got the 2012 13" Air and it's a perfect tool for a developer, very quick, completely silent and very portable. I am pretty sure that guy would be very happy with his Mac,but he really needs to change that HDD for an SSD.

<comment><USER7> For casual users, that's probably not as big a deal as you'd think. Besides, those folks definitely aren't comparing it to machines with Ubuntu.

I prefer the 5400 RPM machines, as I'm replacing machines, not buying new ones, and my old upgrades (SSD and RAM) always come with me (put "new" hard drive in old machine and eBay it)

<comment><USER8> They are Macbook Pros - intended for Professionals.

They are extremely pricey laptops - but the hardware can stand to be improved a lot.

<comment><USER9>
      > They are extremely pricey laptops - but the hardware can stand to be improved a lot.

You certainly can upgrade (at a cost of course) to a 7200rpm or SDD drive.

<comment><USER8> You certainly can do this - I would have liked the 7200rpm or even a SSD drive to be included on the base models though.

<comment><USER9> You and me both. ;)

I am hoping future hardware refreshes round out the baseline systems a bit more nicely, especially on the retina models.

<comment><USER8> I'm also not too satisfied with the 4GB default on the MBP - I needed to upgrade to 16GB to work properly. Getting a 16GB MBP from Apple, however, proved to be more exp then getting a 4GB and upgrading it manually to 16GB vengeance ddr3 ram. (best upgrade I ever did)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm not sure why you'd want to trade, the biggest killer would be the 8 GB non upgradable ram. Ouch. You can upgrade the macbook pro to 16GB and throw in a SSD and your complaints will be gone. And yes, this will cost a bit more than the dell but you'll get a bigger screen out of it at least. My machine is upgraded to 16GB and a 500GB SSD and it's worth every penny. If you are ok with a 250GB SSD you can do it even cheaper (last year, I paid about $80 for the 16GB of ram and $500 for the 500GB SSD, 250GB SSD is significantly cheaper)

<comment><USER11> I have the 15" Retina MBP with 16GB RAM and an upgraded CPU... It's incredible and I love working on it. Ordering a machine with 4GB RAM now is asking for trouble, no matter the OS.

<comment><USER12> All my linux desktops do perfectly fine with 2 GB. Mac OS X is a slow memory hog, face it. That's one of the reasons I've bought the XPS 13 to replace my old macbook: with similar hardware my linux machines feel just much, much faster than my mac.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> TL;DR: he compares a computer without an SSD to a computer with an SSD, the computer without an SSD is slower.

Why do stories like this get upvotes?

<comment><AUTHOR> Real TL;DR: I compared a computer without an SSD, but with an Intel Core i7 clocked at 2 GHZ (quad-core, 8 threads) with a unix-like OS often cited as comparable to Linux to a 7 year old Core2Duo (2 threads) machine with 7 year old RAM and an SSD running Ubuntu (an OS not known as efficient).

The older machine with the slower CPU was faster.

It wasn't about the comparison, actually. It was about my surprise at how slow such an impressively spec'd machine can be -- and my regret that I didn't get the XPS 13.

<comment><USER13> Even a 10 year old machine with an SSD would be faster than a machine with a 5400rpm disk. Other things just don't matter when comparing operating system performance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The author is promoting a machine he has never used and is comparing a non-SSD machine to an SSD machine. This would have been semi-interesting if it was discussing the XPS 13 DE under actual use.

<comment><AUTHOR> Where do you live? May I bring you some tea and massage your feet while I rewrite my post to please you?

I linked to an exhaustive review of the XPS, if you read my entire post: [http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/04/it-just-works-dell- xp...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/04/it-just-works-dell- xps-13-developer-edition-linux-ultrabook-review/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Mbp 2012 15" is actually dual purpose. I own one. Apart from computing, it doubles up as a room heater.

</comment><comment><USER16> The author could just replace the hard drive with a SSD and add more RAM. Probably will run $200 to $300 depending on the size of the SSD. I did that with a 17" MBP, and it's still doing fine after 3 years.

[http://blog.laptopmag.com/how-to-replace-your-macbook- pros-h...](http://blog.laptopmag.com/how-to-replace-your-macbook-pros-hard- drive-with-an-ssd)

<comment><USER17> Apple's inflated prices for 128GB SSD and 8GB of RAM is 'only' $300. You can do better from NewEgg but when you have time ordering parts and installing them and warranty issues it works out.

<comment><USER10> I've never had warranty issues. I had to send in my macbook pro with a 3rd party ssd and 3rd party ram for repairs, and they fixed it no problems. Even better, they swapped out my budget brand ram for OEM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The specs on that MBP are bizarre. Why would anyone order a new machine with a 5400rpm drive and 4gb of ram? That was a bad purchasing decision.

I think the article would have been more helpful with some kind of first hand account about using the device. I'm super curious about it, but am still leaning towards a think pad x series. The keyboard alone is almost too attractive to pass up, and they appear to be quite Linux compatible.

Edit : correction, MBP not MBA. Typo.

<comment><USER17> That's the base config of almost every laptop out there. At least Lenovo has almost all the T-series coming with a 7200RPM drive now.

<comment><USER18> I suppose I should have clarified that the specs are bizarre for a developer's laptop. The cost associated with the upgrades are relatively minor, considering the life of the machine, and devs are typically customers that know how to spec out machines.

<comment><AUTHOR> When they were ordering it, all I knew was it would be MBP 15-inch. I didn't know they would go to the low end on the HDD and RAM. I was a little hands-off to be polite with coming into a new job.

<comment><USER18> Fair. I totally understand that. It's a habit I share myself, although having been stung by it as well I now try to be as assertive as possible about my needs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I personally find Mountain Lion more bloated than either Ubuntu or Windows.

<comment><USER17> If I boot up my Mac and Linux workstation with our environment setup and open up my day-to-day apps, the Mac is about 1GB ahead in RAM use. But after you start using them for a few hours they even out.

Firefox, Chrome, terminal windows, some Ruby sessions MySQL Workbench, FileZilla, a couple LibreOffice documents...

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm terribly confused here.

"continue to run Ubuntu in a VM on the MacBook with its relaxed HDD"

Did he try with bootcamp on Ubuntu 12.04 (the LTS version)? I just tested on two macbook pros (mid 2011, early 2013) and both seem fine.

<comment><USER21> Apple hardware sucks at running Linux.

If you are a kernel hacker and the idea of fixing compatibility bugs sounds like a regular afternoon then Apple hardware isn't so bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why didn't this guy just buy a 13" MBA in the first place?

</comment><comment><USER22> Any word on if the SSD it user changeable? I know the RAM is not which is a shame.</comment>


Show HN: Spaceboard – Pinterest for Markdown Notes - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cktang88/spaceboard <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN! This is something I made for personal use, but thought others might find it useful. It's pretty much just a board that you can add random notes to, which can be formatted in Markdown or just plaintext. You can also drag around and rearrange notes, which will auto-tile to not have overlaps. If you have feature requests/ideas, please feel free to create an issue or PR :)

The demo is here: [https://spaceboard.vercel.app/](https://spaceboard.vercel.app/)

<comment><USER2> Where's the license?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, forgot to add. Made it MIT license.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Fwiw, I made something really similar to this a couple of years ago. It's available for free on sandstorm.io

[https://github.com/azeirah/brainstorm](https://github.com/azeirah/brainstorm)

Made in meteor

<comment><USER4> Nice. Tip: add topics such as 'markdown' to repo for findability. I overlooked this on my recent GH search for markdown projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Would be awesome if you could share the notes (either individually, or the whole space)! I'd probably use this just bc you can arrange things wherever you want :D

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, this is on the short list of my todos at the bottom of the README. Unfortunately, this would seem to conflict with the whole local browser storage setup currently ...

<comment><USER6> A simple way to share a note that would work with your current setup could be generating a link with the notes content encoded in base64 or similar.

e.g. [https://spaceboard.vercel.app/content/SGVsbG8gSE4hIFRoaXMgaX...](https://spaceboard.vercel.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)

Like yeah, it's not pretty. But it would work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks great! I'm a big fan of using markdown for simple formatting of notes.

I've also used the layout library (react-grid-layout) with great success for my toy lorikeet alerting dashboard project: [https://github.com/cetra3/lorikeet-dash](https://github.com/cetra3/lorikeet- dash)

</comment><comment><USER8> Cool! Add a persistent, server-side storage to it, and you've got a whiteboard for "work-from-home" situations.

Of course, having a 65"\+ touch display in the office could be useful for this use-case. :D

</comment><comment><USER9> Similar to [http://manifest.app](http://manifest.app)

</comment><comment><USER10> This looks awesome! I love the tech stack as well, huge fan of TypeScript/React/Next.js

</comment><comment><USER11> Does not work, at all, on mobile for me (iOS)</comment>


Show HN: A mini-app that can store all my bookmarks built using Google Sheets - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1I8bV9u8dcA1Ee08GWSA97qLo5nbXrdeoMtvKS74dvmU/edit#gid=0 <comment><AUTHOR> I'm sharing this with HN to show off some of the neat things you can do with Google Sheets/Google Scripting. It's neat that Google does all of the hosting/backend for this. Originally, I was using a spreadsheet to keep track of all of the links I've been meaning to read and using formulas like ImportXML to scrape data from the webpages to make it easier to categorize. Then I stumbled on the scripting capabilities and came up with this.

Feel free to ask me any questions!</comment>


Show HN: 60+ Beautiful Terminal Spinners for Your Command Line Applications - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ManrajGrover/halo <comment><USER2> This package is only the animation.

The spinners are in [https://pypi.python.org/pypi/spinners](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/spinners) / [https://github.com/ManrajGrover/py- spinners](https://github.com/ManrajGrover/py-spinners)

Which is a port of [https://github.com/sindresorhus/cli- spinners](https://github.com/sindresorhus/cli-spinners)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm the author of the package. Thank you for the comment. You are correct. Halo works over py-spinners which has also been ported by me.

I spoke to @sindresorhus on Twitter and he was okay with me porting the libraries to Python ([https://twitter.com/manrajsgrover/status/904396978531983360](https://twitter.com/manrajsgrover/status/904396978531983360)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Move over fidget spinners...</comment>


Real Differences Between OT and CRDT for Co-Editors - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.02137 <comment><USER3> Here's the key sentence: "concrete implementations of CRDT in co-editors revealed key missing steps in CRDT literature." This paper may be correct for academic CRDTs but it is very wrong when looking at industry implementations.

My hunch is that because CRDTs are so much easier to grok than OT, engineers are empowered to make use case-specific improvements that aren't reflected in academic literature.

For example, the Logoot/LSEQ CRDTs have issues with concurrent insert interleaving; however, this can be solved by dedicating a bit-space in each ID solely for followup inserts. The "Inconsistent-Position-Integer-Ordering" problem is solved by comparing ids level-by-level instead of in one shot.

Fundamentally, CRDTs have strong strategic advantages over OT. Given a document size N and a document edit history H:

* CRDT size is O(N) where OT is O(H)

* CRDT updates are O(log N) where OT is O(H^2)

In any nontrivial document, H ≫ N. This means CRDTs have much better perf than OT. Additionally, the best CRDTs (like Logoot/LSEQ) don't require tombstones, garbage collection, or "quiescence." The complexity burden is far lower.

To top it off, CRDTs are offline-capable by default.

<comment><AUTHOR> The time complexity of most OT systems is not related to H.

<comment><USER4> I've been working in OT systems for years (G Wave, ShareJS, ShareDB, some other stuff). I'm consistently surprised by how badly academic papers predict OT systems will perform. In reality, they perform _great_. My little C implementation of text OT can handle about 20M text operation transforms / second[1].

Part of the gap is that many academic papers model text operations as just single character edits. If you do that, copy+pasting some text into an editor can inject thousands of insert operations into the system all at once. But that design is really sloppy - nobody actually designs real world OT systems like that. A much better way to design text OT operations uses a list of skip, insert and delete parts. That way you can arbitrarily compose edits together. This way an entire pasted string just gets inserted in one operation and performance is fine. (Or if the user goes offline, you can merge all the edits they do into a single change, then transform & commit it all at once).

I've still never seen the OT algorithms of anything I've worked on have a meaningful impact on performance. Actually thinking about it I'm not sure if I've ever even seen the OT code show up in profile traces.

[1] [https://github.com/ottypes/libot](https://github.com/ottypes/libot)

<comment><USER5> I fully agree, I don't understand the emphasis on performance both in the literature and in comments on the subject.

Additionally, it is more common to see CRDT libraries that make character-wise operations and create an object for each character (eg. y-js.org, github.com/google/ot-crdt-papers), which is not ideal.

Obviously there are also libraries such as Atom's Teletype that have string- wise operations.

The cynic in me feels like the CRDT vs. OT war misses the forest for the trees. What matters is lacking features, and the feature that is most needed and least described is a systematic way to offer a diff editor matching the normal experience. Indeed, after having been offline a while, one wants to see and select how their changes will integrate the shared resource.

<comment><USER6> I think you'll find the article supports your sentiment to an extent.

One of the key messages we tried to get across is that academic research for co-editing ought to go beyond theoretical analysis but rather drive research by pushing the envelope in new areas of application and/or features. OT's evolution has been symbiotic with new applications, while we haven't seen this in CRDT (for coediting) research. The reality is that you'll find new CRDT papers every year that still (a) make fairly broad claims of benefits are either theoretically dubious or not backed/validated by application/system implementations, (b) dwelling on technical issues that were resolve years ago. To move beyond this, we want to have put these issues in context (a general transformation approach) and dispel the most common fallacies in theoretical analysis.

Related to the 'visual-merging' feature you mentioned, when I worked on making MS Word collaborative as a research project, one of the UX research questions was how to allow users to visualize the different combined effects of updates to objects (e.g. if you changed the background of object X to red and I change it to yellow at the same time). We came up with a multi-versioning technique to display the potentially different combinations and help users select one that's the most desirable. It is definitely a interesting and challenging problem to consider for text documents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The argument of Sun's paper seems to be that CRDTs have hidden performance costs. Perhaps this is true.

This completely misses the main point. OT is complex, the theory is weak, and most OT algorithms have been proven incorrect (see [http://hal.inria.fr/inria-00071213/](http://hal.inria.fr/inria-00071213/)). AFAIK, the only OT algorithm proved correct is TTF, which is actually a CRDT in disguise.

In contrast, the logic of CRDTs is simple and obvious. We know exactly why CRDTs converge. There are several papers proving that specific CRDTs are indeed correct.

Furthermore, I'm somewhat doubtful of the performance discussion, since Attiya et al. proved that there is a lower bound on the complexity of concurrent editing, independently of the technology used. See [http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2933057.2933090](http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2933057.2933090).

Disclaimer: I did not read the paper in detail, just skimmed over it.

<comment><USER7> "Most OT algorithms have been proved incorrect": a better reference is [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tcs.2005.09.066](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tcs.2005.09.066)

<comment><AUTHOR> Representative CRDTs, at least Logoot and TreeDoc, were never truly proved. The correctness of Logoot and TreeDoc are claimed under the assumption that the required property of ids is preserved by the CRDT design. However, the existing id generation algorithms cannot achieve the desired property.

To be specific, I will enumerate two examples.

First, in Logoot ([https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00432368/document"](https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00432368/document"), the function generateLinePositions in section 4.2 has a serious error, which could lead to the failure of generating new identifiers. This flawed design can be also found in the following research (Logoot-Undo, [https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00450416/](https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00450416/))

Second, in TreeDoc ([https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00445975/document](https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00445975/document)), the function newPosID described in section 3.2 may generate incorrect ids. This function is to generate an id r between any two ids p and q (p<q) so that p<r<q. However, in line 5, if pn=0, then we would get r<p. Readers can refer to Figure 3, in the tree, the character dY precedes the character dZ in infix order, however, the id of dY (10(0:dY)) is greater than the id of dZ (100(1:dZ)), thus their positions are inconsistent their ids.

In the literature, CRDT researchers always claim their CRDT designs are formally proved.

However, there are various scenarios whereby CRDTs would have inconsistency issues as stated above.

In my opinion, I don't think there are much validity for these claims.

<comment><USER7> Well, RGA has been proved formally [DOI 10.1145/2933057.2933090]. Regarding Figure 3 of the Treedoc paper, I believe the IDs of dY and dZ are in the correct order, according to the rules in the paper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you're interested in this stuff, you might also like Raph Levien's writing on it:

\- [https://medium.com/@raphlinus/towards-a-unified-theory-of- op...](https://medium.com/@raphlinus/towards-a-unified-theory-of-operational- transformation-and-crdt-70485876f72f)

\- [https://github.com/xi-editor/xi- editor/blob/e8065a3993b80af0...](https://github.com/xi-editor/xi- editor/blob/e8065a3993b80af0aadbca0e50602125d60e4e38/doc/crdt-details.md)

<comment><USER9> Thanks! I think a unification of OT and CRDT is a very promising space, both for practical implementation and for deeper academic understanding. To be honest, I only skimmed the posted paper, but it didn't grab my attention. It's very difficult these days for me to motivate spending time in this space.

<comment><AUTHOR> TTF is a CRDT-like approach. They both maintain an extra data structure including tombstones. And TTF-operations are only applied on the designed data structure. To be applied on the document visible to users, TTF-operations need to be translated like CRDT.

Your solution is to combine GOTO with TTF. Actually, it is a combination of OT and CRDT.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Only tangentially related, but today I was reading about collaborative editing using Quill.js (a rich text editor) and found a really nice solution based on sharedb (using ottypes/rich-text): [https://github.com/pedrosanta/quill- sharedb-cursors](https://github.com/pedrosanta/quill-sharedb-cursors)

Before I dive knee deep into this, does anyone have any opinion on sharedb or better alternatives? (it was listed in this post under it's old name, sharejs, as one of the more successful OT implementations out there so that's a good sign)

<comment><USER11> The article above says sharedb is originally written by a Google Wave developer.

<comment><USER4> _waves_ Y'all are talking about me. I was indeed on the wave team, although I joined Wave right near the end. (And then I stayed on to help opensource the whole thing.)

We wrote ShareDB at Lever[1], which was in the 2012 YC batch (iirc). We wrote it to allow realtime collaborative editing in our application of all our data fields by default. I'm still really proud of that work. ShareDB primarily uses JSON-OT[2], which lets you do realtime OT over arbitrary application data. The lever team has been maintaining & improving sharedb for the last few years, which is really lovely to see as I've moved on to other projects.

One nice thing about OT is that its much easier to implement. The original quilljs author (Jason Chen) wrote the rich text OT implementation. ShareDB works with any OT code (so long as operations can be JSON stringified / parsed). And its all hooked up in quill, which is super neat. And looking at the quill github[3], it looks like David Greenspan has been maintaining quill recently. David Greenspan is one of the original authors of Etherpad, which is one of the first web based text OT engines.

[1] [https://lever.co/](https://lever.co/)

[2] [https://github.com/ottypes/json0](https://github.com/ottypes/json0)

[3] [https://github.com/quilljs/quill](https://github.com/quilljs/quill)

<comment><USER11> Thanks a lot for the background on sharedb! Great work, indeed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I enjoyed reading this paper. I also recently talked with Chris Colbert about his new plans to use a CRDT approach to collaborative editing of Jupyter notebooks. This made me curious again about how CoCalc's collaborative editing is related to OT and CRDT approaches, so I wrote up a blog post about that just now. [http://blog.sagemath.com/2018/10/11/collaborative- editing.ht...](http://blog.sagemath.com/2018/10/11/collaborative-editing.html)

<comment><USER6> Enjoyed reading your thinking around what "Intention preservation" means for CoCalc. I think "Intention" was left open-ended since it was always meant to be defined in the context of a specific application, e.g. image vs text editing would like have different notions of user-intentions and what it means to preserve them.

TP2 has been made into this monster that seems to scare anyone starting to look at OT. You don't need to worry about TP2 with a suitable protocol with a server or fully peer-to-peer, and either solution are simple enough to implement. A fine point is that TP2 and intention-violation are distinct properties: you can easily achieve convergence by serializing the operations through a total order at every site (but your won't have intentions preserved), on the other hand, if you insert 'a' and I insert 'b' at the same location simultaneously, it's reasonable for both results 'ab' or 'ba' to be intention preserved, but without transformations we'd each see a different result (thus divergence).

We've documented plenty of CRDT's performance and correctness issues in that article. I think a bigger app design question I would ask is if you want to "lock-in" your apps internal data model with a consistency-maintenance scheme -- there is real value in separation of concerns (SoC) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> An article of disappointing quality from well known OT authors.

Like,algo x has issue X, algo y has issue Y, z has Z, so CRDT has issues X, Y _and_ Z... and many things like that.

<comment><USER14> I agree. I don't understand why they are attacking CRDTs at all.

<comment><USER15> I'm not accusing the authors of this, but some people seem to have knee-jerk reaction against CRDTs because from far away they look like magic. "Use this magic data structure and all your conflicts shall disappear." Of course, once you look closely you see there are plenty of tradeoffs, just like anything else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Are there any CRDT-based industrial co-editing apps? Please, do not mention the toy implementations and applications unrelated to co-editing.

<comment><USER13> Recently one guy reverse engineered Apple Notes. It is a CRDT. I personally made a CRDT sync for Yandex. There is also list on Github... [https://github.com/ipfs/research- CRDT/issues/40](https://github.com/ipfs/research-CRDT/issues/40)

<comment><USER16> Good work. Which CRDT alg was adopted in your product?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "most other OT solutions ... do not require a central server to do (any part of) the OT work, but only require the use of an external causal-order- preserving communication service (the same as most CRDT solutions). "

CRDTs don't require an external causal-order-preserving communication service. That's kind of the whole point of CRDTs. At the same time this is what imposes certain limitations on how they can be used. But so is automatic conflict resolution in collaborative editing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Except for WOOT, which CRDT for co-editor does not require causal ordering?

<comment><USER13> RON CT/RGA may consume inputs in arbitrary order.

<comment><USER15> Some background on the Causal Tree (CT) that gritzko is referring to: [http://archagon.net/blog/2018/03/24/data-laced-with- history](http://archagon.net/blog/2018/03/24/data-laced-with-history).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sorry, what?

OT requires centralized servers to do intention resolution.

CRDTs are a set of operations that can work on any peer and resolve correctly, without extra coordination or central resolution.

The two things are about opposite as they can get. Some CRDTs can be used to make Google Docs style OT, but are not specific to OT use cases.

Source: Me, I'm the leading industry and open source expert on CRDTs which power the popular [https://github.com/amark/gun](https://github.com/amark/gun) decentralized database that the Internet Archive, D.tube (1M+ monthly visitors), notabug.io (1K/daily users) use. CRDTs have let us scale to 3K tx/sec on $99 hardware in P2P mesh networks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why OT cannot be applied on P2P networks? Does Google Docs use a transformation-based server mean that all OT need a central server?

<comment><USER18> Yeah, I thought the whole point of OT was that it allowed any client to do resolution (because all operations transform other operations in a way to make them all resolve the same way no matter their order) Which is what made it seem like such overkill for Google Docs where there is a central authoritative server, so a much simpler architecture could have done the job...

<comment><USER4> Simple OT algorithms do work a lot better with a centralized server.

With a centralized server, you can consider every resolution as happening between 2 nodes (server and client). This means transform / catchup is as simple as a for loop.

In contrast, in decentralized context OT code needs to support Transform Property 2[1] in order to converge correctly in all cases. TP2 dramatically complicates the OT implementation, and you need a much more complicated resolution algorithm to merge arbitrary changes between nodes.

For text, this means you need:

\- Tombstones (or something like it) - <USER2> [https://github.com/josephg/TP2/blob/master/src/text.coffee](https://github.com/josephg/TP2/blob/master/src/text.coffee)

\- Either an operation prune function (anti-transform) or full history, forever.

\- A resolution algorithm that can flatten DAGs of operations into a transformed list. This stuff gets really hairy, and hard to implement efficiently. This is my attempt from a few years ago. Its correct, but super slow: [https://github.com/josephg/tp2stuff/blob/master/node3.coffee](https://github.com/josephg/tp2stuff/blob/master/node3.coffee)

Implementing high performance OT with centralized servers is easy. Implementing OT in a decentralized network is hard to do correctly, and much harder to implement in a highly performant way. For decentralized systems, CRDTs are a much better approach imo.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation#Tra...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation#Transformation_properties)

<comment><USER18> Very insightful, thank you for the detailed comment. About the DAG flattening algorithm you mention - in what way does this differ from a topological sorting? ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_sorting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_sorting) ) E.g. does it need to know about expensive or cheap combinations of operations, and try to avoid the former?

<comment><USER4> Oh! I didn't know that had a name. Yes - it is indeed a topological sort. At least the way I've implemented it, the performance problem is that moving an operation from position K to position N in the output requires O(|K-N|) steps. CRDTs can do this work in O(log(|K-N|)) steps.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Profits over People: How Fantastical Lost Loyal Users on Product Hunt - <AUTHOR> https://theproductperson.substack.com/p/-the-product-person-12-profits-over?r=2j20m&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=copy <comment><USER2> The facts of this article seem to be in dispute:

 _Flexibits (Fantastical's developer) went out of its way to let anyone who owned Fantastical 2 keep the features they already had access to when upgrading to Fantastical 3. If you owned Fantastical 2 you can use Fantastical 3 free of charge and keep the features you already had._

[https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/02/04/fantastical-3-a...](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/02/04/fantastical-3-app- store)

IANAL, but I'm curious whether Flexbits might have a case against Product Hunt over this.</comment>


Jony Ive Sighted Driving the Apple Car Through SOMA - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/bretthellman/status/659097576277315584 <comment><USER2> I'm not sure statistically if it's a more likely theory than "guy who looks like Jonny Ive forgot to or chooses not to take his unusual paint only protecting car cover off before driving somewhere"

Without some better statistics on how unlikely it is that any normal person would have such a bizarre car cover, I'm unsure how to apply Occam's Razor to this.

<comment><USER3> That's got to be a car under development cover. Now as to whether that's Ive is pretty questionable.

Apparently Apple were in talks with BMW to make a car based on their i3 so you'd suspect the Apple car might look a bit like that and there is some similarity

i3: [http://images.thecarconnection.com/lrg/2014-bmw-i3-leaked_10...](http://images.thecarconnection.com/lrg/2014-bmw-i3-leaked_100434426_l.jpg)

prototype thing: [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CSWVwEMUYAEtB8r.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CSWVwEMUYAEtB8r.jpg)

<comment><USER3> Does look a bit like Ive though [http://pasteboard.co/1ImkRv2u.png](http://pasteboard.co/1ImkRv2u.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That "car-wrap" thing-- NOT a good look! Where's the gleaming aluminum?</comment>


Revealing letters in rolled Herculaneum papyri by X-ray phase-contrast imaging - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150120/ncomms6895/full/ncomms6895.html <comment><USER2> This was a pleasure to read. The researchers are tasked with reading letters on a scroll burned to a complete char. The progress they've made is incredible.

</comment><comment><USER3> This has been going on for a while, with several HN submissions over the years, but this time the article ("Received 17 May 2014, Accepted 19 November 2014, Published 20 January 2015") has pictures of the letters that can be seen, still quite fuzzy:

[http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150120/ncomms6895/images/n...](http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150120/ncomms6895/images/ncomms6895-f3.jpg)

[http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150120/ncomms6895/images/n...](http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150120/ncomms6895/images/ncomms6895-f4.jpg)</comment>


"This is how TechCrunch works..." - <AUTHOR> http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/11/08/paulCarrsPieceIsRubbishAnd.html

<comment><USER2> This article deals with Carr's in only the most superficial manner. Carr clearly wasn't saying, 'these two people had mobile technology, therefore people with mobile technology are heartless.' The two people in his examples used mobile technology in the same way, and were both enabled and (according to Carr), motivated by 'citizen journalist' technology to act unethically.

You can argue that link, or even argue that it doesn't apply in all cases, but Carr clearly argued for a substantive causal link, a meaningful thread running through: the sort of technologies that involve instantaneous broadcast, the sort of audience and expectations that grow up around those technologies, the behaviors that people develop to fulfill those expectations (and to satisfy their own desires regardless of any audience---the look-at-me-looking-at-this syndrome), and the people who acted unethically in his examples.

You may agree or disagree (myself, I think the issue is more cultural, and it may just as well have been a Fox News crew rushing to get a great shot of the suffering)---but Winer is being deeply disingenuous by claiming that Carr's thesis is as simple as his absurd, clumsily constructed Christian-British- Homosexual analogy. I won't claim he's being disgusting, because the step from logical criticism to righteous moral judgment is a precipitous one.

<comment><USER3> Well said, sir. Well said.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The problems with Carr's piece are:

1\. That he points out a problem with mainstream journalism (failing to vet sources), not one with citizen journalism, as he says. (Note: citizen journalism has that problem too, but not here.)

2\. His definition of "citizen journalism" is far too wide, in my opinion. Moore isn't a citizen journalist. She's just a person who happened to be talking to her friends about an event as it happened.

If we accept the "everyone is now a journalist" definition that Carr seems to use, then journalism becomes something of very little value. Journalism is removing the signal from the noise, and his first example (Moore) demonstrates a failure on the part of trained journalists to do that properly.

His second example (the video of the Iranian protesters death) is tragic, but again, not a failure of journalism or journalists. It's a failure of human decency, perhaps (and one that's certainly debatable)... but that's another topic altogether.

<comment><USER5> Surely his point wasn't that 'citizen journalism' is bad, but that sorting the signal from the noise is extremely hard, and no one has really solved that yet. Certainly not twitter.

Also the other point that I got was that people are often more interested in whipping out their camera/twitter client/etc than actually helping/enjoying something/participating etc.

Personally I thought those two points were valid and worth making. Also thought it a bit sad that pg killed the discussion on HN, because I think it would have been interesting.

<comment><USER4> I'll grant you the second point, though I think you developed it further in once sentence here than Carr did in his piece. (By which I mean to say, the correlation between that observed phenomena and the rise in emphasis on citizen journalism may be valid, and would have fit with the topic Carr was editorializing on, but he didn't do a very good job developing that supposed link.)

But to the former, I don't think Carr was trying to say citizen journalism is bad, but I do think he was trying to say it often fails us. Unfortunately (for his argument), the example he picked was one of a citizen's voice (not a citizen journalist's) being amplified by a mainstream press that had failed to properly vet those reports. So that failing was with the traditional media, rather than new media, imho.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "They write something stupid, then people write rebuttals explaining how it's stupid, building flow and page rank"

37Signals is also guilty - however proving that the system works brilliantly.

Too bad all the rebuttals are typically incoherent nonsense making the original nonsense seem even more important and profound.

(edit: Thank you, I accept your down-vote as proof that the link baiting works and that you agree 37Signals and TC are both brilliant marketers as well as writers.)

<comment><USER2> Actually, I suspect you're getting downvoted because the article has nothing to do with 37Signals, and thus your comment was wildly off-topic.

<comment><USER7> That was actually one of my first thoughts upon finishing Carr's article: "sounds just like 37-signals". Attack random people, make controversial points (even if you contradict an earlier post), do anything to generate noise and traffic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What's that video game where you pick the locks on the doors by solving a puzzle routing fluid through pipes? Same deal. Here, TechCrunch is the source. Maybe Scoble's the sink? Winer's once again piping the goo from place to place. But it's all the same sewer.

<comment><USER9> Bioshock was a modern one that did it. There was probably a precursor.

<comment><USER10> Pipe Dream on my old Windows 3.1 was the first incarnation I saw.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What a conundrum! Dave Winer is ranting against Techcrunch, so is the enemy of my enemy my friend? I'm thinking odds are low: <http://www.penny- arcade.com/comic/2007/03/05/>

</comment><comment><USER12> MG Siegler's response: [http://parislemon.com/2009/11/on-citizen-journalism- the-degr...](http://parislemon.com/2009/11/on-citizen-journalism-the- degradation-of-society-and-bitchmemes.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> It's important to note, though, that a television crew typically _also_ records what is happening without interfering.

Which is not to say that I disagree with his point, just that the intervene/record dilemma isn't exactly new.

</comment><comment><USER14> Gadgets and tech don't make people evil; they're just empowering the voyeurs and gossips along with everyone else. This all seems like much ado about nothing.

</comment><comment><USER15> So Dave bitches about Paul Carr using two articles to prove a trend by using one article to prove a trend? :-)</comment>


A Print Magazine for Hackers - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/print-magazine-hackers

<comment><USER2> I've known Eric since the 1980's, from not long after he started the magazine (in 1984, hence his handle). One thing I always liked about respected about him is he did things on his own terms.

2600 really is a startup in some ways. It started in 1984 around the time of the decline of TAP, and from 1984 to 1986 was mimeographed. Finally by 1987 Eric could put together a magazine with a real cover. Then in the early-mid 1990s I began seeing it appearing at Barnes and Noble.

He did it on his terms, bootstrapped, counting pennies, along with the contributions of collaborators and writers of course. It grew and grew to where he didn't have to scribble down every dollar he spent in a notepad any more.

A lot of people here have the idea to find another programmer, build a prototype, maybe try to get exponential growth and then go find an angel with a whole pitch to the angel. Then to VC, and then some point the investors look how to make their investment liquid which means you either go public or get bought by a public company. Eric made exactly the magazine he wanted, did what he wanted, and just did it year after year as word spread and until he could have a nice little business, doing exactly what he wanted to do. To me it's more of a success stories than many of the B2B/SAAS golden parachutes I see. You're going to live a few decades and die, who wants to spend it pounding out code for Microsoft, or Oracle, or pleading with VC's to be the lead in your SAAS series A?

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice article! If you're nostalgic for the magazine, definitely check out the Best of 2600 anthology that came out a few years ago: [http://www.amazon.com/The-Best-2600-Hacker- Odyssey/dp/047029...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Best-2600-Hacker- Odyssey/dp/0470294191) It's huge and loaded with tons of classic articles from the magazine.

I can also heartily recommend Off The Hook--I've been listening for about 15 years now and it's been really cool to get different perspectives on technology news filtered through the 2600 lens.

</comment><comment><USER4> _Correction: An earlier version of this post misidentified the programming language C as the operating system Unix._

</comment><comment><USER5> I was always paranoid 'they' tracked buyers of 2600 so I always used cash. Anyone else worry about that too?

<comment><USER6> I paid with a credit card _and_ had the Kindle subscription. I also bought Catcher in the Rye with a credit card. Hack the planet.

<comment><USER7> Hack the planet!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's nothing better than leafing through a random 2600 from the 90s.

</comment><comment><USER9> This almost sounds like an oxymoron.</comment>


Siri in practice - <AUTHOR> http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2011/10/15/siri-in-practice/

<comment><USER2> To me, the main shortcomings, at the moment, as a UK customer, are the male voice (seriously... I want the nicer american female voice... it subconsciously annoys me to think of "Siri" as a British male) and, perhaps more importantly, the fact that Siri won't connect to Yell/GMaps/etc in the UK yet, so I can't emerge out of the tube and ask "How do I get to 123 Some Street?" and be presented with a map. I'm not quite sure why that doesn't work in the UK - surely, the interfaces to Google Maps and even Yell don't differ by country.

Despite those, it is already very useful. I'm using the timer all the time ("Set a timer for 3 minutes", "Wake me up in 20 minutes", "Wake me up at 7am tomorrow"), and the weather ("What's the weather like tomorrow?"), and using it to set meetings ("Add event 'drinks with Enrico' at 6pm on Friday").

The real killer, imho, will be the integration with services. The voice recognition seems good enough, the "parsing what you mean" could be improved but is good enough. What makes or breaks Siri is the integration with services. The timer/reminders/calendar integration is extremely smooth and so it is great and a huge help. Bits that aren't integrated (e.g. Twitter) or less well integrated (e.g. sending SMS's), less so.

All in all, a great start, and useful from day one, though, like all new Apple products, there's plenty of room for improvement. I'm waiting to see where they take it - unlike some other companies, Apple do have a reputation for relentlessly pushing forward after releasing an initial, "it doesn't do much but it does it well" device.

<comment><USER3> Do you know if you can set the British English of Siri independent of the phone language? As a Brit in the US, my Android phone doesn't understand anything I say unless I say it in a so-bad-its-almost-xenophobic American accent. Same with my car.

YouTube videos indicate that Siri does understand British accents, but if I have to set the phone language to full on British, that would be a bit annoying (sadly, it is now tires, color, favorite and temperatures in Farenheit for me).

<comment><USER4> Yes. The Siri Settings screen has a language choice that is Siri specific. I'm pretty certain that Siri, like most open ended recognition systems has separate recognizers for various accents, and of course, languages. (Though Apple has apparently set Siri's responding voice using the same control, they probably should have made them separate settings.)

[http://techbend.com/2011/10/11/iphone-4s-siri-look-like- scre...](http://techbend.com/2011/10/11/iphone-4s-siri-look-like-screenshot- video-apple-release/)

You can also turn off voice feedback if the British Male voice annoys you as well.

<comment> X-Istence I really like the Australian accent, but as soon as I turn that on Siri will no longer find any businesses that are close to me since that is only supported if set to US English.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I just popped down to the store to try this out. It's a bizarre limitation... the phone knows where it is, why should it matter if I want to speak to it in Australian/British English/Spanish?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> X-Istence If you set up the phonetic first and last name, Siri will pick up on them the next time your data is shipped off to Apple (yes, your data exists in the cloud when using Siri), also, I have set nicknames for certain friends, and saying "Call <nickname>" works exactly as one would expect. This is a killer feature, I have nicknamed my dad, my step-mom, and various other people so that Siri knows to call my Dad when I ask it to.

I've already gotten better at asking Siri questions, yes it may seem unnatural at first, but overall the benefit I gain from using a little less natural language is enough for me.

I've had my new iPhone 4S for all of one day now, and it remains to be seen if I will continue to use Siri, but this morning when I woke up and couldn't find my glasses I was still able to find out what my boss texted me about, send him a reply and all of this using my voice. That is fantastic and I absolutely love it.

</comment><comment><USER5> My biggest issue is that my wife's name is "April" every time I say something like "call April" or "text April" it try's to set a reminder for April 1st.

<comment><USER6> You can say "April is my Wife" and hopefully that will record the relationship. If that doesn't work, go to your contacts and edit your own contact info and add her as your spouse. Then you can say "call my wife" & that should work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It is _all_ a matter of how useful it is already. If it is already much better than using the normal touch interface in many cases, the technology will evolve a lot in some way. There will be more users willing to pay for it, more competitors, and so forth. I really hope for this to happen.

On the other hand, if it is not good enough to be an improvement over the normal touch interface it will likely not be very used if not to show it to your friends for the first months. Next phone you buy you'll not care if it has or not that feature (unless somebody else or newer iPhones will be able to improve it a lot), and the technology will hardly evolve.

I don't still know as I don't have an iPhone 4s, and stories I read still can't tell me if it is going to be used a lot or not. Also in the specific case of Italian, I guess the at least the recognition can be near perfect as Italian is a lot simpler than English to turn into text (probably simpler than any other language given that things are spoken exactly as they are read). But then the interpretation I guess will pose very similar problems, with the disadvantage of not being a mainstream language.

<comment><USER2> _If it is already much better than using the normal touch interface in many cases, the technology will evolve a lot in some way. There will be more users willing to pay for it, more competitors, and so forth. I really hope for this to happen._

That is the case (at least as far as I'm concerned, as a happy iPhone 4S user. The use cases are still fairly limited, but for those use cases it works very well, much better than the touch interface.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> One thing I'll say for Siri: a few months ago I had an idea for a dictaphone device with a calendar function and voice recognition. As we know voice recognition is notoriously unreliable, but I figured it could be heavily optimized for the lingual subset necessary for setting appointments/reminders. I think that would be extremely useful to people with bad memories (eg. many elderly people), or lots to keep track of. Everyone I mentioned this to thought it was a great idea.

Looks like Siri does precisely that.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been using Siri as a utility and for entertainment for the past 48 hours.

It's incredibly useful especially when driving. I've plugged my iphone into my car stereo and have been using Siri to get directions, recommendations, play music and to compose messages. I'm able to get work done now while driving and Im doing so safely.

The success rate that she understands me (im not speaking into a ear/mic piece rather it's speaker phone like) is about 80%.

The only thing I have found to be a learning curve and source of frustration is composing messages. You really need to think of exactly what you want to say before speaking it. Also, you need to speak proper punctuation at the end of each sentence, like "Do you want to get food <question mark>" "We can meet at Applebees <period>".

This learning curve may turn some people off, though maybe others won't face a similar challenge? Either way I have found Siri to be enjoyably useful!

</comment><comment><USER10> It's most valuable feature is the novelness of it - it is likely being used by over a _million_ people right now. I assume that Apple is tracking result click-throughs to guess when Siri is providing (or actually, not providing) the right answer to your query. This should mean it'll become exponentially better over time.

<comment><USER11> I'd expect it to be more like a logarithmic increase than an exponential one. The asymptote is the point where you reach perfect integration or fine tuning of the algorithm, at which point extra feedback stops being useful. Or perhaps I'm just taking "exponentially" too literally...

<comment><USER12> How does exponential growth differ from logarithmic growth? An exponent is a logarithm, no...?

<comment><USER13> Woof! Someone's been out of high school for too long :P

exp(x) takes e (the constant) and raises it to the x power. Log(x) finds the power to raise the base (usually 10 but sometimes e) to produce x. They are essentially inverses of each other. Log(exp(x)) = x;

Graphically they are quite different: <http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=exp%28x%29>

<http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ln%28x%29>

<comment><USER12> Sure, but that's just a matter of how the terminology is used. Setting aside natural logs for a moment, consider that log10(1000) is 3, where 3 is simultaneously the "exponent" to which 10 must be raised to equal 1000, and the "logarithm," in the sense that it's the result of the log10 function, as might be found by looking in a table of logarithms.

<comment><USER11> I understand what you mean, but the problem is that the terminology has a precisely defined meaning, and if you ignore the convention you will be misunderstood. It would be like saying that a certain O(log n) algorithm has an exponential complexity -- the meaning is completely different. The growth of a function concerns the dependent variable, so y=e^x has exponential growth, while y=ln(x) is logarithmic. See also:

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

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

(Sorry for the off-topic tangent!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Having now actually used it, I've got to say it's pretty impressive, especially for location based searches ("Where's the best steak in town?" got me a load of steak restaurants, whether or not their the best is probably another matter, but I was impressed none the less).

Tell it, "I love you Siri". The response made me smile.

</comment><comment><USER15> today i learned that windows seven can do speech recognition. I wrote this comment with it but it took me five minutes.

</comment><comment><USER16> Unfortunately, the English (Australia) recognition is infuriatingly bad.

It works okay (75%) for built in commands, but anything to do with transcription (messages etc) is about 50/50. And that's really not good enough for a shipping product.

<comment><USER17> Just curious - does it recognise 'full stop' instead of 'period'?

It's very unfortunate that it doesn't transcribe Australian English that well - do you have a particularly broad accent, if you don't mind me asking?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I noticed the new address book has entries for phonetic first/last names (use the Add Field). I assume those are used by Siri (just like the Related People fields) and would solve your name problem.

<comment><USER19> Weren't those there since 2.x? I remember using them.

<comment><USER18> Possible. What were they used for before? Voice control?

<comment><USER19> Sorting, I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> For things like names, has anyone tried using the "Phonetic First/Last Name" field in their address book? I suspect it's there for reasons like this.

<comment><USER21> I cannot check this, but <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard#vCard_extensions> seems to indicate that is for alternative Japanese spellings, not for truely phonetic entries. If it is for phonetic entries, I would expect that one would have to use the international phonetic alphabet for entries there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We've been down this road before with both the Newton and the Palm Pilot. The Palm couldn't properly recognize text at all, and so its users learned a custom form of hieroglyphics in order to use it. The newton had some trouble with particular letters in particular handwriting --where really the letter isn't properly formed at all, but humans are able to get it with more context than the recognizer. A slight change, like better writing, resolved the issue.

So, users will adjust to Siri some.

At the same time, whenever Apple introduces a new technology, it is always lacking in some area. Apple limits the breadth and polishes what it does ship to as high a degree as they possibly can... and then extends it over time. Siri doesn't work in all languages or all places right now.

Apple's always extending, and unless the initial version is so useless that it has no adoption, over time Siri will get better and we'll adjust.

The real question is, whether Siri is useful enough now to use regularly... or if it will be a passing fad, soon forgotten.

<comment><USER22> The hype around Siri as a "personal assistant" and the carefully-crafted ads that show it working in an ideal context remind me a lot of the hype around Newton, which caused a backlash when it turned out to be just a computer after all.

The problem is deeper than recognizing what you said or wrote. Newton's "intelligent assistant" had the same sorts of trouble with meaning, like having to use literal text from your data ("When is Dentist?" vs. "When is my dental appointment?") Apparently while computers are better at determining what words you said than they were in 1992, there hasn't been a ton of improvement in _understanding_ what you said, even at this apparently simple level.

<comment><USER23> The problem with Newton is that there was little alternative to struggling with the handwriting recognition. You could plug in external keyboards, but they added even _more_ bulk. I believe there was an onscreen keyboard, but who on earth wanted to tap out text with a _stylus_?

When Siri screws up you can laugh off the problems and go with Plan B: "Use iOS the usual way, like we all did last month".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Siri is a game changer. Wait for siri-enabled apps in the future.

<comment><USER24> "I want to watch Hot Tub Time Machine on Netflix"

"Send 3 dozen roses to my wife tomorrow"

"I want two large pizza delivered to my house"

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Siri is saving me from a lot of typing while driving.

<comment><USER7> while driving? It is saving your life as well I guess.

<comment><USER25> You've never punched something into google maps while on the road? Am I alone here?

<comment><USER26> > You've never punched something into google maps while on the road?

Correct.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Dell Outlet stock notification service - <AUTHOR> http://outletmeknow.redfern.me/ <comment><AUTHOR> I realised that there may be a gap in the market for a tool like this after writing a quick python script that helped me find a laptop for my brother.

This is a fairly early prototype of such a service -- it's written in Python (Django) with celery and celerybeat handling the stock checking. I'd like to add more features, like being able to filter by machine spec or condition -- if there's any interest then that'll come shortly.

At some point I might try and get some beer tokens by joining an affiliate scheme and getting a few percent on every sale, but for the time being I thought I'd get this out there ASAP to try and assess how much use this kind of thing would be to people.

I've open source the code here: [https://github.com/josephredfern/OutletMeKnow](https://github.com/josephredfern/OutletMeKnow). It's fairly rough, any comments/contributions would be welcomed.

Oh, and SSL is coming imminently. LetsEncrypt's new rate limits have caused a bit of a delay but it's on the way. [edit: now live]</comment>


Noodle acquires Lore - <AUTHOR> http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/03/15/noodle-buys-lore-lms-help-colleges-take-programs-online

<comment><USER2> Congrats Joe and the team at Lore! A fast exit for a young team and company. Excited to see whether the team will stay in place or go off on new adventures.

</comment><comment><USER3> Official blog post: <http://blog.lore.com/post/45416094480>

</comment><comment><USER4> I think this will be great for the Lore team. Katzmann seems to have great instincts for making money in education (Princeton Review, 2tor), and Lore has a solid software but no realistic business plan.

Noodle.org is a great business model. They are getting in front of customers just before they make a $100k purchase decision. The lead gen value must be tremendous.</comment>


Researchers show that memories reside in specific brain cells  - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/conjuring-memories-artificially-0322.html

<comment><USER2> And if you induce a memory physiologically that wasn't there previously -- inception!</comment>


AimBrain: A startup trying to kill the password - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/12045182/AimBrain-Can-this-start-up-finally-kill-the-password.html <comment><USER2> No. I'm sorry, but no. This is not a good idea, and will not work. First, you would still need passwords. Second, "how i use a site" can vary wildly depending on if I get distracted or am in a rush, or just exploring.

Can you do behavioral monitoring and use it to understand whats normal for a user? sure. if a user normally only works with data thats newer than 12 months, and all of a sudden wants to see something from 10 years ago; that might be weird. or totally normal.

but monitoring keystrokes and clicks? I am highly suspicious of what that would be able to tell you.

> AimBrain is launching facial recognition capabilities

That's better/different, but that's no different from a thumbprint, which is just a username.

And I can guarantee, without question, this won't kill or mame "the password".

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not looking forward to a future where I have to "act natural" while typing in order to access my personal accounts.

<comment><USER4> Mordac is: [http://dilbert.com/strip/2007-11-17](http://dilbert.com/strip/2007-11-17)</comment></comment>


An Emacs conference - nic-ferrier http://emacsconf.herokuapp.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Please make sure to have reasonably high quality a/v records of the presentations.

<comment><USER2> Hi @gnufs, the idea is to have it done non-profit. So I'll be looking for volunteers to help me out with this aspect. Or I might approach Confreaks since they do a lot of conference filming. But not really sure how they operate...

<comment><USER3> You might want to contact the debconf video team for advice/help. <http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/Videoteam>

I've worked on it before, so you can PM me if you have any questions.

<comment><USER2> @BCM43 how do I reach you? I'm @dotemacs on twitter.

<comment><USER3> msg me at firstname.lastname@example.com (which is an alias to my real email address, which I would prefer not to post on HN).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Egads! Just what I have been waiting for!

Emacs really sweet, but I think that, as it is commonly said with Lisps, its problems are largely social, not technological. As such, the community could really use some social solutions.

</comment><comment><USER5> The site doesn't seem to say anything about where and when, anyone knows?

<comment> nic-ferrier the organizer says he is collecting interest right now. Once he's gauged the level it will be decided when and where.

<comment><USER6> Top story on HackerNews probably indicates interest.

<comment><USER7> Indeed it does, but I'd love to have input from other emacs related communities (emacs-devel, #emacs@freenode, org-devel, ding etc,) too.

Also, I'd love to see more presentations from active developers about the current situation of Emacs and possible future directions, or even presentations about less-known features or even some how-to-get-involved- propaganda.

<comment> nic-ferrier I'd love to hear tromey talk about his plans to rebase emacs in CL: <http://tromey.com/blog/?p=709>

<comment><USER8> I thought the plan was to rebase in Guile Scheme?

<comment> nic-ferrier that's just one plan. a lot of emacs people think that's a good plan, a lot of emacs people think that's a bad plan. I'm in the latter camp and prefer CommonLisp. But, hey, whatever works.

<comment><USER9> I was under the impression that while a lot of people think CL is a better plan, the work is actually under way for Guile (I guess more by the Guile team than the Emacs team). But, I feel like you would know better than I do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Would this be appropriate for emacs wannabe users like me? I'd love to shave off some years of the learning curve.

<comment><USER11> I recently put this guide together: <http://david.rothlis.net/emacs/howtolearn.html>

Its focus is on self-driven discovery by leveraging the Emacs built-in help and source code. Feedback welcome.

<comment><USER12> Very very nice tutorial.

Careful when you say elisp `if` is a function, it's a `special form` aka different evaluation semantics.

<comment><USER11> Thanks! After "pretend that if is a function" I do immediately proceed to explain evaluation semantics: "what does it mean by 'if is a special form'? It turns out that if isn't a regular function." Of course, I am open to suggestions for better wording etc.

That's assuming you were talking about the "cc-mode customization" chapter. If I've called "if" a function anywhere else please let me know! And keep the feedback coming. :-)

<comment><USER12> My bad I stopped reading too soon. So maybe just using a different verb than 'is' would be enough to avoid confusion. (and yes I was on the cc-mode customization page)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Funny, the conference isn't even planned, yet it taught me the existence of Ecukes (cucumber for emacs). awesome

</comment><comment><USER13> I can't make it out to London (if it's happening there) but I'm excited to see how it all turns out!

</comment><comment><USER14> I still haven't gotten a confirmation email (and I checked my spam folder). Is the site overloaded?

<comment><USER2> Hey natep, contact me on twitter, I'm @dotemacs and I'll resolve this for you. Thanks

<comment><USER14> Can you use the email address in my hn profile? Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sounds good, and if it's in London even better :) Where do I sign up for updates?

<comment><USER2> Hi @almost, I haven't gotten that far yet. But I tweet as @dotemacs on Twitter, so that might be a good temporary step.

Also the codebase for the site is here:

<https://github.com/dotemacs/emacsconf/>

so, maybe somebody can add what they'd like, such as a RSS feed...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I certainly would attend this ... Europe based best for me ... preferably Prague (which is a surprisingly good place for a conference).

</comment><comment><USER17> A meetup group would be great <http://www.meetup.com/create/>

</comment><comment><USER18> This is a fantastic idea! I'm hoping it ends up being held in the bay area.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is awesome! I'd love it if this happened!

</comment><comment><USER20> Sounds great.

</comment><comment><USER21> Want!</comment>


Temporal – Workflow as Code - <AUTHOR> https://docs.temporal.io/docs/overview/ <comment><AUTHOR> TL;DR: Temporal allows one to write business logic that spans multiple services and hide temporary failures.</comment>


HTTP Request & Response Service - <AUTHOR> http://httpbin.org/

<comment><USER2> What's different about the EU flavour? There's nothing obviously different about the cookie options.

<comment><USER3> It's hosted in the EU (heroku EU)</comment></comment>


Targeted Attacks on Speech-to-Text [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.01944 <comment><USER2> If asked I would have answered yes, of course this is possible, but it never occurred to me. I wonder if these adversarial attacks are possible in ML because there's too much overfitting in the models or they're too high rez or? Can someone in this space help me grow a better intuition of how these work?</comment>


10 common mistakes companies make when hiring in IT - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jobbox.io/10-common-mistakes-companies-make-when-hiring-techies/

<comment><USER2> We discuss hiring frequently here on Hacker News. Almost everyone who reads this site has looked for a job at least once before, and many people who read this site have had occasion to hire someone into a company. I read the new blog post kindly submitted here after noticing how fast it was gaining upvotes, and I see a list of gripes with the tech hiring process that we have discussed many times before here on Hacker News. But the author buries the lede by putting his best point, point 10, at the bottom of his ten-point list. That point,

"10\. Not challenging/testing candidates

"When you're recruiting in tech it's crucial to test your candidates."

is the most important point, and it generalizes to all kinds of hiring. A well liked FAQ post I have posted to comment threads before here on HN notes (shortening here)

"The review article by Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter, 'The Validity and Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings,'[1] Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 124, No. 2, 262-274 sums up, current to 1998, a meta-analysis of much of the _huge_ peer-reviewed professional literature on the industrial and organizational psychology devoted to business hiring procedures. There are many kinds of hiring criteria, such as in-person interviews, telephone interviews, resume reviews for job experience, checks for academic credentials, personality tests, and so on. There is much published study research on how job applicants perform after they are hired in a wide variety of occupations.[2]

"EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: If you are hiring for any kind of job in the United States, with its legal rules about hiring, prefer a work-sample test as your hiring procedure. If you are hiring in most other parts of the world, use a work-sample test in combination with a general mental ability test.

"The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work reasonably well. One is a general mental ability (GMA) test (an IQ-like test, such as the Wonderlic personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample test, where the applicant does an actual task or group of tasks like what the applicant will do on the job if hired. (But the calculated validity of each of the two best kinds of procedures, standing alone, is only 0.54 for work sample tests and 0.51 for general mental ability tests.) Each of these kinds of tests has about the same validity in screening applicants for jobs, with the general mental ability test better predicting success for applicants who will be trained into a new job. Neither is perfect (both miss some good performers on the job, and select some bad performers on the job), but both are better than any other single-factor hiring procedure that has been tested in rigorous research, across a wide variety of occupations. So if you are hiring for your company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into all of your hiring processes."

Note that a work-sample test can be a lot less time-consuming, and lot more possible to standardize, than some of the procedures suggested in the blog post submitted today.

The author of the blog post writes, "Regular work: have your candidate work a couple of afternoons or days side-by-side with a team member. I've seen companies like Automattic asking for candidates to come work with them for several days (and paying them for their work of course)."

Previous comments from Hacker News participants suggest that that procedure takes too long for many competent job-seekers to be willing to do that. It probably also has the defect of not allowing objective comparisons between different job candidates.

"Live tech testing: having a series of live tech tests or a technical questionnaire with a couple of tech employees from your company."

Maybe "live" is not the key idea here so much as "genuine," and it may be better still to have the test be standardized to compare applicants well.

"Moonlighting: creating a mini-project within your company for the candidate to perform. Give him/her a deadline and analyse the results."

This has the same problem as the first suggestion: lots of time commitment required from the applicant, with little comparability among different applicants (depending on the nature of the task).

The list of common mistakes is suggestive of problems, but if you'd like a better list of answers about what to do about them, see another recent thread here on HN[1] and the various comments there.

AFTER EDIT: It looks like the main post here is receiving a penalty either from user flags (not from me) or from detection of a voting ring. Maybe I'll be the only person to discuss this post today.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8232746](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8232746)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey @tokenadult, thanks for the feedback! You are right, the point 10 is important and should've been placed a bit earlier. What we mention here stems from our experience. Yours might be different and suggest some issues our suggestions. Thanks for pointing it out and suggesting the more extensive blog post.</comment></comment>


A Simple, Portable, Inexpensive Standing Desk Solution - <AUTHOR> http://lifehacker.com/5928335/a-simple-portable-inexpensive-standing-desk-solution

<comment><USER2> Check out <http://www.ikeahackers.net/> for a lot of cool ideas like this one.</comment>


Ask HN: Is it ok to pursue master in cs at Maharishi University of Management? - <AUTHOR>

I am a software engineer from Nepal. I am thinking of studying Master in CS at Maharishi university of Management at Fairfield, Iowa. University seems pretty good and is affordable since I only have to pay max. $7000 in the beginning and it provides paid internship after 1st year at college and remaining fees is deduced from the earning. However I have found many negative reviews about university. Can someone from USA or those who have attended university before can provide me insights on status of university. Is its degree recognised by big companies of USA like it advertises on its websites. Please help. <comment><USER2> Sorry, I don't know the details, but I'll make a few comments about a random link in a Google search: [http://mum-master.blogspot.com.ar/2009/01/be- carefull-of-mah...](http://mum-master.blogspot.com.ar/2009/01/be-carefull-of- maharishi-university.html) (don't believe everything that is in the Internet, but be careful)

>> [from a promotional email] _You will earn an MSCS degree from a highly respected, accredited university that integrates the study of computer science with a scientifically proven technology for awakening your total brain potential._

I never heard before about this university. Apparently, this is an accredited university, but I don't understand the details of the accreditation system. From the Wikipedia page, it looks like CS is not the main area.

I really don't like _"with a scientifically proven technology for awakening your total brain potential"_ (But this is a alleged quote from a link. Did you get a similar promotional material?)

> _They attract people from outside the US by saying that they are going to be > hired which is 100% false, you will never get job due to many factors such > as student visa limitations by employers who seek H1B or residency._

USA's visas are a very difficult topic. To work you need the right visa. I think that it's not so easy to get an internship with a student visa.

<comment><USER3> > USA's visas are a very difficult topic. To work you need the right visa. I > think that it's not so easy to get an internship with a student visa.

Well, not quite. Getting an internship is actually pretty easy if you are on an F1 visa to the United States. You file for something called CPT (Curricular Practical Training). Go intern at the place of your choice; this internship has to be related to your field of study so no working at McDonalds as a summer intern or whatever.

On the other hand, getting a full time job is different. If you are graduating from a STEM school, you apply for something called OPT (Optional Practical Training), which lets you work for any STEM company for upto 27 months before you need to get into an H1B.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My personal opinion: if you can get admission into a state university with better accreditation that attracts recruiters from Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc, it is far better to go that route. These are the only companies hiring lots of H1-b visa holders.

That said, I have a family friend who is teaching at that Maharishi university and he previously studied at IIM in India and worked in Austin, TX for IBM in a management role for many years. He can give you some good perspective.

My email address is in my profile. Contact me and I can put you in touch with him. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER5> From what I see, it provides a unique approach to higher education. My advice is it deserves consideration to the degree that approach is more in line with your personal values than more common or traditional pedagogical practices.

I would not recommend attending on the basis of cost or primarily on that basis. The compromise for someone not attracted to the pedagogy seems too great.

As for mixed reviews, its approach is not for everyone so that would be expected.

</comment><comment><USER6> Search on LinkedIn to see what recent graduates of this university are currently doing. That will give you an objective sense of the available paths after graduation.

</comment><comment><USER7> Its a giant scam. Avoid it at all costs.

I'm dead serious.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Please upvote so that many HNers would answer.</comment>