What's wrong with social science and how to fix it - <AUTHOR> https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/ <comment><USER4> > Publishing your own weak papers is one thing, but citing other people's weak > papers? This seemed implausible...

This is practically required by reviewers and editors. If you wade into a topic area, you need to review the field and explain where you fit in, even though you know full well many of those key citations are garbage. You basically need to pay homage to the "ground breakers" who claimed that turf first, even if they did it via fraud. They got there first, got cited by others, and so are now the establishment you are operating under.

And making a negative reference to them is not a trivial alternative. For one thing, you need to be certain, not just deeply suspicious of the paper, which just adds work and taking a stand may bring a fight with reviewers that hurts you anyway.

<comment><USER5> _You basically need to pay homage to the "ground breakers" who claimed that turf first, even if they did it via fraud._

Even referring to it as "science" is fraudulent. Testable theories and repeatable outcomes, anyone? Time this whole field was defunded.

<comment><USER6> Might be that I am older than most of you, but when I was in high school the term was "social studies" then later it evolved to "social science" so the university crowd could legitimize it to get more funding. there obviously is no science in it.

<comment><USER7> "Social studies" refers to a variety of different social science and humanities subjects taught in public education. The term comes from US lawmakers around 1900.

"Social sciences" are generally considered the "science of society," and the term comes from philosophers in the mid-1800's.

<comment><USER8> > "Social sciences" are generally considered the "science of society," and the > term comes from philosophers in the mid-1800's.

Some of the philosophers named it "science" of society in order to piggyback off the reputation of real science.

Because real science has such a great reputation, everyone from creationists ( creation science ) to social "scientists" ( social science ) have tried to associated themselves with science to gain credibility.

Social science isn't science. Neither is creationism.

Real science ( as most people understand it ) deal with natural laws and the natural world.

<comment><USER7> Society is an observable phenomenon that we are able to run experiments on and acquire empirical evidence about. Those experiments have so far been much more difficult to run, rely on poor measuring tools, and the limited data we have acquired is given too much weight. That's still science though.

They very much are a part of the natural world, and presumably have some kind of "natural laws" guiding them. Creationism is not, as it is about things outside our observable world

<comment><USER8> > Society is an observable phenomenon that we are able to run experiments on > and acquire empirical evidence about.

Yes we can. But not in the scientific way. Society changes. You cannot replicate your test on a society because of that. Natural laws do not. So we can reliably hypothesize and test it.

> That's still science though.

It's not a science. By definition.

> They very much are a part of the natural world, and presumably have some > kind of "natural laws" guiding them.

Yes. They have natural laws guiding them. It's called physic, chemistry, biology, etc. Social "science" doesn't delve into "natural laws". Society is run, not on natural laws, but human laws.

> Creationism is not, as it is about things outside our observable world.

No it is not. It is about our observable world but uses the bible ( another thing in the natural world ).

Laws, history, political science, economics, etc are are real sciences. They are political/propaganda/etc tools to shape society.

Using your logic, just because literature exists in the natural world, it must mean literature is a science. Obviously it is not.

Just because you can observe society doesn't make it a science, no more than the fact that you can observe a play or a concert makes them a science.

In order for your claim to hold, society has to be constant. But they are not. We must have multiple copies of the same society to test on. We do not. And societies are guided not by natural law, but human law. Which leads to an absurdity because different human societies have different laws. If we follow your logic, then means that there are different natural laws depending on where you live and what country you are from.

For example, that there are laws against interracial or interreligious marriages in some societies isn't a natural law, it's a human law. There is no science in social science. No more than there is science in religion or astrology.

<comment><USER9> Math is the foundation of science, right? Things in science are provable because of the rigorous mathematical proofs applied to data, correlating with reproducible results, is my perception.

There are many models of societies currently and previously in existence that can be measured, compared, and correlated with predictable cause and effects.

Society is not constant, it's probabilistic, like many topics in physics or other hard sciences.

Society has natural laws that can be mathematically derived and applied. Why can't science be applied to non natural processes? The point of science is to build a model that can be used to build other models, or ultimately be applied to game the subject.

Are you saying we learn physics just to learn it, not to manipulate it to somehow benefit ourselves? Don't we use research in physics as a tool to shape our world in exactly the same way we use research in social science to shape society?

Your definition of science seems to only exclude some folks from the term that are doing the exact same work in a different subject. The word science doesn't preclude a subject. I don't think your contrast is sound.

<comment><USER8> > Math is the foundation of science, right?

No. The scientific method is the foundation of science. Math is a wonderful tool that is used in science and other fields like business, architecture, music, etc.

> Things in science are provable because of the rigorous mathematical proofs > applied to data, correlating with reproducible results, is my perception.

Nothing in science is "provable". Science is not math or logic. Go look up what a scientific theory is.

> The point of science is to build a model that can be used to build other > models, or ultimately be applied to game the subject.

That is not the point of science. It is a benefit of science but not the point of science.

> Your definition of science seems to only exclude some folks from the term > that are doing the exact same work in a different subject.

Not my definition. I didn't make it up. Just because you haven't a clue what science really is doesn't mean it's "my" definition. How about you take a few seconds and relearn what was taught in high school.

You have a bizarre notion that science exists to benefit ourselves. Religion, art, literature, music, business, etc also benefit us. Doesn't make it science.

Society is a human creation with human laws. That is no more "natural law" than the man-made laws governing chess or monopoly are "natural law".

Now that doesn't mean social "science" is worthy of study. Of course, humanities are worthy of study. But it isn't a science. I think politics is just as valid a field of study as physics or art or literature. But it doesn't make political science a science.

But your real worry is that removing science from social science takes away much of the credibility and respect that real scientists in physics, biology, chemistry, etc have earned right? In my experience, it's usually the social "scientists" who are the most vocal about latching onto "science" because they so desperate want cling onto that unearned authority and credibility.

But then again, it's also why creationists ( creation science ) also want to latch on to science. Pretty much frauds who want to manipulate society want something to give them credibility.

<comment><USER7> >No. The scientific method is the foundation of science

Simple question then, which aspect of the scientific method is not compatible with "human law?" I can develop a question about how society works, form a hypothesis, develop experiments, and analyze the results.

I may develop poor experiments and as a result only be able to provide limited analysis permanently tainted by a "human law" bias, but it would still be science.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There were some stunning claims being made on Twitter last month based on a recently published study. Instantly skeptical, I dug into the methodology section and found this gem:

"It should be noted that the results cannot be estimated using a physician fixed effect due to a numeric overflow problem in Stata 15 which cannot be overcome without changing the assumptions of the logit model."

... The sad part was they didn't even choose a reasonable model in the first place.

<comment><USER11> (Ignore my previous reply I found it myself). To be fair to the authors, it is not their primary specification, that was a linear probability model. The logit model is just a robustness check to make sure the linearity assumption isn't driving the results.

<comment><USER10> Yes, the primary specification was a linear probability model for the likelihood of a binary dependent variable conditioned on two binary input variables. As far as I could tell, the fit was max likelihood without regularization and the paper's bombshell conclusion was based on the regression coefficients' p-values.

The Stata thing was just one of many, many red flags.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is there a similar study done on the physical sciences? I'm getting a bit of holier-than-thou feeling from this article.

Edit: from all this talk of reproducibility, I wonder what percentage of cutting edge ML research is reproducible (either from lack of public training sets / not enough compute)

<comment><USER4> There are definitely studies criticizing ML publications similarly. As a kind of statistics (but often without the rigor), screwups make ML methods appear better than they really are. Hence the literature is packed with screwups.

Other CS subfields that get a lot of criticism are "network science" and bioinformatics.

<comment><USER13> I've been playing with some ML lately. I'm sure some of this is because I only have a high level understanding of what I'm doing, but it really feels like throwing things at the problem and see what sticks and is fast. Add features, remove features, try different network architectures, different activation functions, etc. I think the best understood thing might be overfitting, which is oddly reassuring.

<comment><USER4> > ...throwing things at the problem and see what sticks and is fast.

That generally isn't enough to get published nowadays though, at least in a simple sense (in a broader sense that process might describe all research, of course). To get published requires some deeper demonstration of a new kind of method that not only works, but is superior to all that preceded it in some important way. In other words you show your new method compared to other methods, where yours must be better. Obviously, bad research here can show a supposed advantage by either doing a unfair job applying competing methods, or overfitting their new methods. Or both. As I understand it, the first one is quite common: comparing a poorly-tuned old method to a carefully-tuned new method.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This guy overstates his case somewhat. Consider:

"If the original study says an intervention raises math scores by .5 standard deviations and the replication finds that the effect is .2 standard deviations (though still significant), that is considered a success that vindicates the original study!"

Why the exclamation point here? The replication study isn't magically more accurate than the original study. If the original paper finds an 0.5 standard deviation effect and the replication study finds an 0.2 standard deviation effect, that increases our confidence that a real effect was measured, but there's no reason to believe that the replication study is more accurate than the original study. Maybe the true effect is less than measured, but maybe not. So yes, it should be considered a success.

<comment><USER15> If someone is selling you on rethinking an entire discipline they are probably overstating their case a bit. Or you're ignoring them outright.

That doesn't mean they're wrong, necessarily. Overcoming inertia is a huge challenge. Daunting, even.

<comment><USER16> Agree. In the face of institutional inertia - here crossing industry and academic fields - your starting point is when I see a fly I use a canon. It is extremely difficult to budge. As so the usual reminder: the first 51% of communication is repetition

<comment><USER17> > the first 51% of communication is repetition

Is this a famous saying? It sounds nice but I hadn't heard it before. (And Google doesn't pop up anything obvious.)

<comment><USER16> That's my own turn of phrase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The "social sciences" include a lot. Wrt Sociology, I'd say one problem is the overemphasis on quantitative methods - they try to be as serious as the big boys.

The best sociological research I've read was qualitative though. Questionable replicability is of course built-in in this type of research but the research dealt with relevant questions. Most quantitative sociology seems rather irrelevant to me.

Another problem is of course that most quantitative sociologists don't have a clue what they are doing. They don't even know the basics of statistics and then use some statistical methods they don't understand. It's some kind of overcompensation, I think. Although, psychologists are even worse in this respect. It's really fun to watch an psychologists torturing SAS.

I write this as someone who was originally trained as sociologist and over the years turned into a data scientist.

<comment><USER12> I'm really interested in what you feel about the potential applications of CS/ML to sociology. Or if you might have any resources that talk about that.

I ask because I'm enrolled in a research program in "computational humanities". My initial feeling towards the program is that it's kind of a sham.

Computational Humanities seems to be as computational as an accountant using Excel for their work. Not that I particularly mind, I'm not very interested in the computational aspect at all.

<comment><USER18> There is a Springer "Journal of Computational Social Science". That could be a source of inspiration. CS/ML in Social Sciences gets interesting where a great amount of routine data is generated -- i.e. areas close to public administration.

Why did you subscribe in the program when you're not interested in the computational aspect? Or are you more interested in some kind of grand social theory/philosophy of computation? If you read German, Armin Nassehi "recently" published "Muster. Theorie der digitalen Gesellschaft" (Pattern. Therory of a digital society). He is not the first but I find his stance interesting - based on several interviews, I haven't read the book though. Many sociologists deal with the Internet & AI but I find those works less inspiring because they usually lack an adequate technical understanding. To me it often feels like bushmen theorizing about empty coca cola bottles (you probably don't know the movie?).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've tried to understand this (obviously quite angry/ranty) article and cannot actually figure out what data it has.

It seems to not be based on _actual_ replication results, but _predicted_ replication results? But then the first chart isn't even predictions from the market, but just the _author 's_ predictions?

The author clearly has a real hatred for practices in the social sciences. But I don't see any actual _proof_ of the magnitude of the problem, the article is mostly just a ton of the author's opinions.

Is there any actual "meat" here than I'm missing? Or is all this just opinions based on further opinions?

<comment><USER20> It's based on this: [https://www.replicationmarkets.com](https://www.replicationmarkets.com), which is linked in the first paragraph of the article.

Per [https://www.replicationmarkets.com/index.php/rules](https://www.replicationmarkets.com/index.php/rules), volunteers are predicting whether 3000 social science papers are replicable. According to the rules, of those 3000 papers, ~5% will be resolved (i.e. attempts will be made to replicate). According to the article, 175 will be resolved. It's unclear to me who exactly will do that work but I would guess it's people behind replications markets dot com (they are funded by DARPA). The rules say that no one knows ahead of time which papers will be resolved so I assume the ~5% (or 175) will be chosen by random.

The data in the article seems to be based on what the forecasters predicted, not which papers actually replicated (that work hasn't been done yet...or at least hasn't been made public). The author of the article is assuming that the forecasters are accurate. To back up this assumption, he cites previous studies showing that markets are good at this kind of thing.

The tone is ranty but, by participating in the markets, the author is putting his money where his mouth is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I try not to look down on social science, for the most part data is data as long as you can reason about how it was collected and who by.

The only thing that worries me a little (or a lot sometimes) is that there doesn't seem to be much "bone" for the meat to hang off of - that is, in physics, if your theory doesn't match experiment it's wrong whereas in social science you're never going to have a (mathematical) theory like that so you have to start (in effect) guessing. The data is really muddy, but thanks to recent (good) political developments whatever conclusions can be drawn from it may not be right _in their eyes_. For example, (apparently) merely commenting on the variation hypothesis can get you fired [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis#Contemp...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis#Contemporary_controversies)].

<comment><USER22> Requiring social science theories to have a mathematical founding might be a little too much to ask the social scientists because unlike Physicists, their command of mathematics is far from adequate to do any serious exploration.

I majored in Mathematics but out of curiosity I took some Psychology modules when I was in university. What I found baffling was their lack attention to details. They just seem to have an intuitive model of their subject and they were just reinforcing that intuition while overlooking any details that could have challenged it. Coming from a field where every symbol, punctuation matters, I realised to Psychologists exact details of a curve don't seem to matter much as long as the general trend made sense.

Someone who really impressed me was Dan Ariely who is a behavirol economist. Even though I didn't see any mathematics in his lectures, I loved his approach to the field. I'd be quite happy if more of social science took a similar approach even if they didn't back it up with rigorous mathematics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Summary tweet thread by the author: [https://mobile.twitter.com/AlvaroDeMenard/status/13043994376...](https://mobile.twitter.com/AlvaroDeMenard/status/1304399437641461760)

<comment><USER24> Threadreader version: [https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1304399437641461760.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1304399437641461760.html)

He mentions changing the threshold for significance as a possible tweak but the issue is something more fundamental. Humans have flaws - like political biases or a tendency to favor one's own hypotheses (confirmation bias). Humans also operate within systems that have incentives that can motivate them away from truth seeking (publication bias). All this exacerbated the fundamental problem that statistical techniques are easy to manipulate. Virtually all academic (university) studies, in their published format, simply lack the necessary information, controls, and processes a reader would need to easily detect flawed statistical claims. Instead a reader has to blindly trust - assuming that data was not selectively included/excluded or that the parameters of the experiment were rigorously (neutrally) chosen or whatever else. There is no incentive for the academic world to correct for this - <USER2> isn't for example, a financial consequence for a decision based on bad statistics, as a private company might face.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I am glad this topic is getting attention. There is significant bias in academia in social science even outside flaws in statistical techniques. The field has been weaponized to build foundational support for political stances and blind institutional trust granted to academia is enabling it. This author mentions the implicit association test (IAT) as an example of a social science farce that is well known to be a farce, and notes that most social science work is undertaken in good faith.

However the damage has been done and it doesn't matter if MOST work is done in good faith if the bad work has big impact. As an example, IATs have been used to make claims about unconscious biases and form the academic basis of books like "White Fragility" by Robin DiAngelo. Quillette wrote about problems with White Fragility and IAT as early as 2018 ([https://quillette.com/2018/08/24/the-problem-with-white- frag...](https://quillette.com/2018/08/24/the-problem-with-white-fragility- theory/)), and others continue to write about it even recently in 2020 ([https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/flaws-white-fragility- theo...](https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/flaws-white-fragility-theory- primer/)). However few people are exposed to these critical analyses, and the flaws in the scientific/statistical underpinnings have not mattered, and they have not stopped books like White Fragility from circulating by the millions.

We need a drastic rethink of academia, the incentives within it, and the controls that regulate it to stop the problem. Until then, it's simply not worth taking fields like social science seriously.

<comment><USER25> It could just be abolished. If the NSF was scrapped, what would the scientific world look like? Probably like the world before WW2, when most science was done by hobbyists or "inventors". Einstein did his seminal work whilst a patent clerk, etc etc.

Most analyses of the problems in science are really analyses of the problems in academia. There's no iron law that states academia has to be funded to the level it is today, and for most of history it wasn't. And let's recall, that these meta-studies are all about _science_ , which is one of the better parts of academia. Once you get outside that into English Lit, gender studies, etc, the whole idea of replicating a paper ceases to be meaningful because the papers often aren't making logically coherent claims to begin with.

A lot of people look down on corporate funded science, but it has the huge advantage that discoveries are intended to be used for something. If the discovery is entirely false the resulting product won't work, so there is a built-in incentive to ensure research is telling you true things. The downside is there's also no incentive to share the findings, but that's what patents are for.

Of course a lot of social psych and other fields wouldn't get corporate funding. But that's OK. That's because they aren't really useful except for selling self-help books, which is unlikely to be a big enough market to fund the current level of correlational studies. That would hardly be a loss, though.

<comment><USER26> > If the NSF was scrapped, what would the scientific world look like? Probably > like the world before WW2, when most science was done by hobbyists or > "inventors".

There were scientists who received financial backing from wealthy individuals in a manner not so different than VCs operate today; Tesla among them.

Regardless, I tend to agree that science that exists for the sake of publishing, because publishing is a requirement of receiving grants, has diluted the respectability of science.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Does anyone have links to the Replication Prediction Market results mentioned in the article? That sounds super interesting.

As an amusing nudge, I bet you could do some ML to predict replicability of a paper (per author's suggestion that it's laughably easy to predict) and release that as a tool for authors to do some introspection on their experimental design (assuming they're not maliciously publishing junk).

<comment><USER25> IIRC from prior discussions of this, a lot of the accuracy of the markets comes from people just applying common sense - like, if a really surprising claim that people should really have noticed before now comes with a huge effect size, it's probably false. ML can't judge that because it doesn't have the ability to do basic sanity checks on claims like that. It takes a sceptical human with life experience to do that.

<comment><USER28> Huh? That sounds exactly the thing that a ML system would learn quickly from the data. You probably don't even need shiny deep learning (though it helps).

Just like with the Netflix Prize stuff, where the conclusion was very similar, ie. just dump in as much data as you can, crank up the ML machinery, and it'll discover the features (better than you can engineer them) and learn what to use for recommendation ranking. And that's basically what we see with GPT-3 too. If you have some useful labels in the data it'll learn them even without supervision, because it has so many parameters, it basically sticks.

Get some papers run it through a supervised training phase where you give it a set with every paper scored based on how retracted/bad/unreplicating it is and you'll get a great predictor. Then run it to find papers that stick out, and then have a human look at them, and try to replicate some of them to fine-tune the predictor. Plus continue to feed it with new replication results.

That said, using an ML system as the gatekeeper as OP suggested is a bad idea, as it'll quickly result in the loss of proxy variables' predictive power.

Though ultimately a GPT-like system has the capacity to encode "common sense".

<comment><USER25> Even GPT-3 doesn't encode common sense, which is why it can't do a lot of basic physical reasoning. It's "just" word prediction, albeit very impressive word prediction.

If you look at what GPT produces closely, a lot of it is simply bullshit. It sounds plausible but is wrong. That's exactly the wrong type of AI to detect plausible-but-wrong-bullshit papers, which are the most common type.

<comment><USER28> Right, I worded that a bit lazily. There's no confidence score output from GPT-3, but if there were and if the user would select to only get high confidence results then it would shut up quickly. And that's what I meant by common sense. Of course it depends on the corpus. It's really-really just text, as you said. (It's possible that it can somehow eventually encode high level things like arithmetic, but so far it seems, even if it does have that model somewhere embedded, it doesn't know how/when to use it.)

The language model (GPT-3) doesn't have to understand physics, it just have to help extract out some semantics of the paper.

There needs to be a classifier on top trained with a labeled set of good and bad papers.

<comment><USER25> I think there is a confidence score actually! Most blogs about it don't show them but this one went into it:

[https://arr.am/2020/07/25/gpt-3-uncertainty- prompts/](https://arr.am/2020/07/25/gpt-3-uncertainty-prompts/)

It's really cool how the uncertainty prompts alter the confidence associated with the next words.

I guess I'm not disagreeing with you in the abstract that a theoretically strong enough AI could identify bad papers, especially if it had some help for 'real' arithmetic. It at least could flag the most basic issues like plagiarism, cited documents that don't contain the cited fact, etc. Detecting claims that are themselves implausible seems like the hardest task possible, however. That's very close to general AI.

<comment><USER28> > Detecting claims that are themselves implausible seems like the hardest task > possible, however. That's very close to general AI.

Yes, of course. I was simply trying to say that an AI can be quite successful in detecting the usual no-nos, eg. multiple comparisons without correcting for it, p-hacking, or ... who knows what "feature" the classifier would find. Maybe there's simply none, so it'll be really up to subject matter experts to review them. (But it's unlikely, because there are quite successful blogs devoted to simply picking apart shoddy papers simply based on looking at the controls, and other parts of experiment design and the methods sections, and of course the aforementioned stats.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Even if all the statistical, p-hacking, publication bias, etc. issues were > fixed, we'd still be left with a ton of ad-hoc hypotheses based, at best, on > (WEIRD) folk intuitions.

This is the quiet part which most social scientists, particularly psychologists, don't want to discuss or admit: WEIRD [0] selection bias massively distorts which effects are inherent to humans and which are socially learned. You'll hear people today crowing about how Big Five [1] is globally reproducible, but never explaining _why_ , and never questioning whether personality traits are shaped by society; it's hard not to look at them as we look today at Freudians and Jungians, arrogantly wrong about how people think.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias)

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

<comment><USER30> The people who use Hanlon's razor to explain away malice are both incompetent and malicious. Only someone who is an idiot would ever think to use 'I'm very stupid' as an excuse or explanation why they did something very damaging. If you are smart enough to realize you are incompetent after the fact you were smart enough to realize it before the fact, and that means you were malicious in not recusing yourself.

<comment><USER31> The way this was stated in one discrete thought leads me to a problem with human nature i dwell on: how much of what our society and culture is, and what authority is, is just a effort to disguise our frailty and fallibility? It is tremendously hard to be reliable and competitive across multiple disciplines and for the majority of tasks involved in basic human life. There is too big a trade off between available time and location and doing any task well. We are primarily hunting-gathering the easiest ways to meet our needs. How can you blame people for not recusing themselves from participating or misrepresenting themselves as competent when our culture values that and expresses it so dramatically at the highest levels of public performance,from IPOs to high office and everywhere else. Storytelling in the tradition of the heroic myth is mostly about becoming qualified to assume a social role, as an upward stuggle.

It seems built into human character to bite off far more than we can chew, as in free real estate, and then leverage the social value of holding something others are willing to compete for. I think it amounts to a social survival instinct, and i lament how there's very little chance of discouraging people from doing it because of the potential payoff. If anything i think it's a failure of institutions for being built to exploit that competition rather than guard against its excesses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I guess I fall under the field of "Progress Studies" though I think I'm much less concerned with the replication crisis than most.

Most new social science research is wrong. But the research that survives over time will have a higher likelihood of being true. This is because a) it is more likely to have been replicated, b) its more likely to have been incorporated into prevailing theory, or even better, have survived a shift in theory, and c) is more likely to have informed practical applications or policy, with noticeable effect.

Physics and other hard sciences have a quick turnaround from publication to "established knowledge". But good social science is Lindy. So skip all the Malcolm Gladwell books and fancy psych findings, and prioritize findings that are still in use after 10 or 20 years.

<comment><USER33> > This is because a) it is more likely to have been replicated, b) its more > likely to have been incorporated into prevailing theory, or even better, > have survived a shift in theory

Not if this article is to be believed! He claims that studies that could not be replicated are about as likely to be cited as studies which are. That implies the problem may instead get worse and worse, the structure more and more shaky as time goes on.

<comment><USER32> Citation is not an endorsement—plenty of things are disagreed with in order to disagree with something, reference history in a field, or contextualize a result against past findings.

Here, the author seems to only look at recent papers, and so we don't really get to see how the citation patterns have evolved over 10, 20, or 30 years. But even then, established ideas tend to not be cited at all— the concept of "knowledge spillovers", for example, is common in Economics and other fields, yet the original reference is rarely used. Other times, more established claims will be encoded in a book or some work of theory—and people will cite the theory rather than the paper that made the original claim.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It's common to see this topic: what's "wrong" with social science. But there are always some things wrong with every science. If nothing was wrong, there wouldn't be any science left to do.

Social science asks more of us than any other science. Physics demands that we respect electricity and don't increase the infrared opacity of the atmosphere. Chemistry requires that we not emit sulfur and nitrogen compounds into the air. But social sciences will not rarely call for the _restructuring of the whole society._

This is the "problem" with social science, or more properly, with the relationship between the social sciences and the society at large. When we call for "scientific" politics, it is a relatively small ask from the natural sciences, but it is a _revolution_ \-- even the social scientists themselves use this word -- when the social sciences are included in the list (Economics is no different). Psychology, as usual, falls somewhere in between.

So the relationship between the social scientists and the politicians may never be as cordial as the relationship between the natural sciences and the politicians. The "physics envy", where social scientists lament that they do not receive the kind of deference that natural scientists do, will have to be tempered by the understanding that the cost of such deference differs widely.

(All of this is ignoring that physics had a 200-year head start)

<comment><USER30> >Physics demands that we respect electricity and don't increase the infrared opacity of the atmosphere.

Physics does no such thing. It tells us that increasing the heat retained in the atmosphere increases the planets surface temperature. It is a descriptive science. Not a prescriptive one. Wanting to have industrial civilization possible in the next century is why you don't increase the infrared opacity of the atmosphere. But that is a value judgment far outside the scope of physics, and one social sciences claim is theirs by right of ... something.

The metaphors people use to think about the natural world are terrible, or as Carl Sagan put it Demon-Haunted.

The reason why physics, and other hard sciences, are so useful and respected is that you can switch dependent and independent variables around with a lot of success.

If I have the ideal gas law:

PV = nRT

Then I can rearrange it and be fairly confident it still works.

P = nRT/V

If you are an engineer this is a godsend. You want to set a hard value for P but can only directly control V or T? Try the second equation! You have a chance at succeeding without having to spend decades building machines that blow up and kill everyone around them!

Politicians see that and are jealous. Surely if those lame eggheads can get things to work like that we can too. So the social sciences give you equations as well. After a bunch of statistics we see that:

time spent in school = a*wealth - <USER3>

We can't control wealth, but we can control how long people spend in school:

wealth = (time spend in school + c)/a

So if we force everyone to stay in school until they are 50 everyone will have 20 million dollars in their bank accounts.

And to anyone who asks how this works, politicians say: Why are you against science and hate poor people?

<comment><USER35> This is why knowledge of causal inference is essential.

Causality is not established via tweaking a correlation or regression analysis, and we social scientists should know that.

<comment><USER30> Casual inference is the bottom most rug of what gives hard sciences its power. It is that we understand the objects we are manipulating at a much deeper level so we don't sound like idiots.

Suppose that we take:

g = ma

A perfectly valid way to find experimental values for gravity at a location. But that doesn't mean that if we push an object really hard we increase the gravity in that location, or decrease it if we pull on the object. Just because symbol manipulation gives as an answer doesn't mean that the answer makes sense, you need to keep track of all the implicit state of the universe.

<comment><USER35> > so we don't sound like idiots.

I'm fine sounding like an idiot so long as my slope is increasing :)

Right, Judea Pearl covers this in [i]The Book of Why[/i].

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> > Stupidity: they can't tell which papers will replicate even though it's > quite easy.

I am not familiar with this work. What exactly makes a paper predictably replicatible?

<comment><USER36> There is a footnote for that claim - [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/25152459209196...](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2515245920919667) \- but basically "things that are hard to believe" and "things that barely passed statistical analysis" (high p-values).

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Of malice vs stupidity, I'm pretty certain it's stupidity. Or more precisely, self-delusion.

The story of Millikan's oil drop experiment replications and also James Randi's (and CSICOP's) battle with pseudo-scientists convince me of this.

<comment><USER38> There's probably a mix of both. At some point, most people probably realize that there's something fundamentally wrong - but by then, they're a few decades in and too much of their career and personal life depends on it being true, so openly changing course is very daunting. When your identity and career depends on something wrong being considered true, you have no incentive to point out problems, and every incentive to mislead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Shameless plug with the ten relevant problems I scooped from a very recent literature review: interculturalism, introspection, truth, authenticity, human enhancement, critical thinking, technocracy, privilege, ethics, higher education. Link to free intro: [https://www.tenproblems.com/2020/08/01/ten- problems-for-soci...](https://www.tenproblems.com/2020/08/01/ten-problems-for- social-sciences-in-the-2020s/)

</comment><comment><USER40> That's a lot to say before even the replication results are actually out.

</comment><comment><USER41> It's not science.

</comment><comment><USER42> The epistemal value of epidemiological studies is very low. Nothing can be done to fix it.

</comment><comment><USER43> Most people just don't have a clue about what they are doing and have no passion for their research whatsoever. When you have money as the main driver for science, this kind of stuff is exactly what you should expect. There's homeless and crackheads etc at a 3km radius from the majority of social sciences schools around the world. It's a complete a failure and scam. Science development is analog to social development and nothing is going to change by appealing to scientists to don't cite weak research lmao

</comment><comment><USER44> Lots of social science in crap, for sure, no arguing about it, dunno how to make it better then not to do it. Though, some are interesting if you have the patience for it, ex. Linguistics, Psychology and Economics, even things like critical theory are sort of useful, think of it like the abstract algebra of social science. Just people pulling apart concept to see if they can be put back together in another way to create something new. I now a lots of CS researchers and they do shit work and cite each others excrement, honestly CS is the sociology of STEM. Their I said it.</comment>


Fusion power could arrive sooner than expected - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/137520-clean-limitless-fusion-power-could-arrive-sooner-than-expected <comment><USER2> Wow, fusion power in less than 15 years! Gee whiz!

Actually, the 15 years out time frame puts it beyond what I've expected, 10 years out. That's where fusion has been for most of my life, 10 years from now.

<comment><USER3> 1\. Who said it was 10 years out? I've never heard that. Sometimes milestones are 10 years out and the public tends to confuse milestones with the finished product.

2\. Ideas for parallel implementations of nuclear fusion have expanded, and as a result, funding and research has arguably become fragmented and resources have been diverted. In reality, there's a fixed amount of capital and knowledge (which is also a function of the availability of money) available for this kind of research. The amount of money the US puts into fusion research is quite paltry compared to the potential benefits. It may be a priority, but the way Washington spends money says otherwise.

Scientifically, fusion is maybe 10 years away. Politically, it's more like 40 for a real power plant, but with the current congress, I couldn't say. In addition to that, it's an expensive enough endeavor that it would be corporate suicide for a private company to attempt it, especially considering the majority of companies with enough capital to pursue something like fusion tend to be in the Oil and Gas industries.

<comment><USER4> Well, some types of fusion are too expensive for private companies. But Tri- Alpha, General Fusion, and Lawrenceville Plasma Physics are three private companies trying to achieve practical fusion power within the decade.

Tri-Alpha has over $90 million in venture capital, some from Paul Allen. General Fusion has about half that, with Jeff Bezos as an investor. LPP is a lot smaller, but also doesn't need nearly as much at this point.

There are several other approaches in the works that could conceivably by privately funded, including Helion (needs $20 million for a full-scale reactor, already built a 1/3 scale version) and petawatt picosecond laser fusion (once the lasers get a little better).

Another promising approach is levitated dipole, but I don't know what costs look like for that one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Andrea Rossi's Ecat is already here: <http://www.e-catworld.com/> <http://youtu.be/JWoaJ5NEj-w> <http://youtu.be/S7lAlzMBzLQ> <http://youtu.be/2cOEHQmnG-I> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGmgTo2Kw1U&feature=share...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGmgTo2Kw1U&feature=share&list=PL3D139E169DDAEA56) (CC ON unless you can understand Italian)

Francesco Celani's experiment is being in a process of replication: <http://youtu.be/Q2qWgh7Gx4g> <http://youtu.be/gHpYuUykWw0> <http://youtu.be/qc5RoGg6n8E> <http://youtu.be/HN4VK82Mngc>

Please, please - at least watch this video: <http://youtu.be/26k3Cz3wW-8> -> This is a great initiative.

Folks, the clean controllable energy source out of LENR process is almost here. Please go through my links with an open mind and consider sharing them with your family friends and colleagues...

</comment><comment><USER6> I hadn't heard of magnetized liner inertial fusion before. Is it really as promising as the article makes it seem?

What happens if they get just a little above break even?

<comment><USER4> It's looking really good. Sandia ran simulations, found a sweet spot, and recently ran a test in which they magnetically crushed a liner without fuel. That test worked out exactly how the simulations predicted.

They have several other tests to do and plan to do a complete test by the end of 2013. If it still works the way their simulation predicts, they'll approximately hit breakeven.

The next step will be to build a machine several times bigger. According to the sim, that would take us from breakeven to a 100x to 1000x energy gain (depending on how powerful they make the machine.)

Such a large gain helps a lot for turning it into a practical plant. For one thing, they'd only have to fire a shot every ten seconds or so. NIF's laser approach, by comparison, would require ten shots per second.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article does not mention some important context.

I don't know all the ins and outs, but it's important to understand that the big US experiment in nuclear fusion was NIF, at LLNL. They (perhaps rashly) promised net energy gain by the end of this fiscal year. This whole thing was part of an elaborate political deal regarding maintaining nuclear expertise during the test ban treaty.

Anyway, net gain did not happen; the ratio of energy out to energy in at the NIF is 0.1. This had been expected for many months now (indeed, it was predicted by some as soon as the deal was cut, years ago.)

At this point, the pie of nuclear research dollars is going to be re-cut with different allocations. For one thing, the fusion/non-fusion balance at NIF is going to tilt away from fusion.

So, in the absence of a NIF fusion success story, this press release could be part of a campaign by other labs or other experiments to press their own research agenda for fusion.

For partial background:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/science/fusion-project- fac...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/science/fusion-project-faces-a- frugal-congress.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> I wouldn't mind a small amount of the money that goes into fusion research heading to liquid fluoride thorium reactors instead: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor>

Amongst the many attractive properties of LFTRs is the ability to burn spent fuel from existing nuclear plants.

</comment><comment><USER9> A new breakthrough is typically announced shortly before the current round of funding is scheduled to run out.

</comment><comment><USER10> "Clean"?

Less dirty than fission, absolutely. Enough less dirty to make it manageable in a way that fission doesn't seem to be, more than likely. But not clean.

Any material in and around the reactor becomes nuclear waste in the same manner as it does for fission: by getting blasted with high-energy particles until it becomes radioactive. And while there wouldn't be any spent fuel rods to deal with, one of the products of hydrogen fusion, tritium, is also a source of concern.

<comment><USER11> Clean, yes.

By any measure, cleaner than what else is out there. Already a fission nuclear power plant will produce less leakage of radioactivity into the environment than many coal plants, fusion drops that level several orders of magnitude more.

First off, no fission products, which are typically the most dangerous radioactive waste from fission reactors. Second, the materials used in the reactors don't have the same engineering constraints that fission reactors do and so can be chosen to produce far lower quantities of hazardous radioactive isotopes bred from intense neutron flux bombardment. Also, Tritium is a fuel, and of enormous value so it would be handled very carefully. More so, it would be bred specifically in custom built containment vessels within the reactor.

On top of all that you have the fact that a fusion reactor cannot be made to undergo a meltdown or overload the way a fission reactor can. If something bad happens in a fusion reactor the immediate result is usually that fusion stops, which compares very favorably to the what happens in a fission reactor: fission chain reactions continue, temperatures build as the heat from fission products decaying builds up, etc. And you don't have weapon proliferation concerns.

Overall what you have with nuclear fusion reactors is no chance of a meltdown, very much less hazardous waste generated (by orders of magnitude) and a very clean energy profile.

<comment><USER12> ^ -intact- fission nuclear power plant ^ should ^ might ^ dramatically greater engineering constraints than fission reactors ^ (if you exclude engineering and manufacturing and plant construction costs)

Sorry for the highlighter attack, but fusion still means building extraordinarily complex and expensive reactors that are going to have one hell of a carbon footprint and shed tons of radioactive waste in normal operation.

Let's roll it back to "potentially cleaner in some key ways".

<comment><USER11> This is just plain FUD with no backing in reality.

Let me make it as clear as possible. Fusion energy is fundamentally safer and cleaner than fission energy, period. Firstly, it is simply not physically possible for fusion energy to generate even a tenth as much of the radioactive waste as an equivalent fission power plant. Secondly, it is not possible to have a dangerous power excursion at a fusion plant. When a fusion plant malfunctions it doesn't experience a runaway reaction, it stops working. If a fusion plant experiences some sort of catastrophic structural failure everything stops. This is in stark contrast to fission reactors which can undergo continued fission chain-reactions even if, and perhaps especially if, the reactor vessel is disrupted and the fuel melts down and also produce fission byproduct isotopes which continue to generate enough heat after the fission reactions have stopped to melt the reactor core if it is not continuously cooled.

Also, there is little evidence that the construction of a fusion reactor would entail a higher energy-usage footprint than a fission reactor, and the lack of a need for massive reinforced concrete structures in a fusion reactor tends to argue that the footprint would be rather less.

Let's roll it forward back to: undoubtedly cleaner if it can be made to work.

<comment><USER12> I hear how passionate you are on this issue and I understand the enthusiasm. I'm not here to strangle the baby in the cradle. But my concerns are real.

Granted: Fusion energy is a conceptually simpler process that is virtually impossible to runaway by its very nature. That alone is a massive plus any way you look at it.

Granted: the total bulk volume of radioactive waste products is dramatically lessened.

Granted: the radionuclides created by a fusion reactor are likely to be less problematic than those from a fission reactor.

My points: There is still radioactive waste: magnetic confinement reactor liners will handle so much corrosive flux they'll essentially be disposable and replaced frequently - possibly on the order of weeks or months. Same (but lessened) story for inertial confinement reactor liners and the metallic waste products. Those have to go somewhere safe. They're not small.

Same story for the electrical generation system. Regardless of the final reactor type, it's still going to involve managing heat-exchange fluids with neutron exposure.

Then there's the environmental + carbon load from building a reactor complex, which is not going to be quantifiable until there are working reactor designs and working fuel flows and a working understanding of how much staffing and security and land and ancillary support is needed. NIMBY is going to be just as strong for fusion as it is for fission, and that's going to mean compromises.

Then there's going to be the cost of purifying the fuel source, which won't be negligible when it literally involves boiling the seas. Then packaging it. Then shipping it. Then handling the waste products. Then planning for the plant's functional lifetime, which won't be forever.

The conceptual clarity of fusion is wonderful and I fully support the research, but the execution is going to be quite a bit less sexy and come with some well-known downsides.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What about the combined fusion/fission options? I mean that's what the h-bomb and the sun do right?

<comment><USER14> In fusion-based nuclear weapons, a fission bomb is used to create the temperature and pressure needed to kick off nuclear fusion. Calling that "combined fusion/fission" is like calling my car an electric hybrid because it uses an electric starter.

Detonating a nuclear weapon inside of a power plant isn't really practical. :-) Existing nuclear power plants don't get anywhere near the temperature and pressure needed to start nuclear fusion.

So, now we have the engineers trying all sorts of ways to get to the needed temperature and pressure without turning the plant into a smoking crater. That's where all the fancy lasers and magnetic pulses described in the article come in: They're trying to aim the heat source so they can superheat the fuel without melting the containment vessel.

<comment><USER15> That's a popular misconception, IIRC. Actually, in thermonuclear weapon the bulk of energy comes from fission. [1] Fusion is technically only used to get the high energy neutrons to get the bulk of fissionable material to undergo fission. So, ironically, calling it a "fusion bomb" is very much like calling your car an electric hybrid.

1\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon>

<comment><USER16> Where those weapons get the most energy from depends heavily on the design. It's true that multi-stage thermonuclear devices often have a final fission stage where huge amounts of energy are released, however if one were to purposefully maximize energy release while minimizing fallout there are some relatively clean fusion/fission ratios achievable.

For instance, the test version of the Tsar bomb had its last fission stage removed, reportedly resulting in a 97% fusion detonation. Of course, those still cause a huge lethal neutron flux, but at least the amount of fission material released is pretty small in relation to the overall power of the device.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Uber: Discovery shows Waymo has "zero evidence" - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/uber-discovery-shows-waymo-has-zero-evidence-plays-blame-game/ <comment><USER2> How does that explain how Uber copied the Lidar chip design? Wasn't that the original smoking gun which brought this all to light?

<comment><USER3> > Alsup also called Waymo's claim of patent infringement "meritless," and > noted, with regard to trade secrets, that Waymo has "overreached, in > attempting to claim ownership over general principles and approaches in the > field."

[https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/15/15640934/uber-waymo- lawsu...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/15/15640934/uber-waymo-lawsuit-self- driving-car-injunction-ruling)

It seems clear that Levandowski did _something_ but Waymo hasn't found any evidence that Uber did anything improper.

> By granting Waymo permission to seek the return of its stolen documents, the > judge also agreed with the Alphabet company "that at least some information > from those files, if not the files themselves, has seeped into Uber's own > LIDAR development efforts." Even so, he did not see enough evidence to > completely block Uber from operating its LIDAR-equipped vehicles in the > public.

I don't know what he means by "at least some of the information", but it wasn't enough to stop Uber from continuing, which is confusing to me. Obviously the Judge didn't think whatever information that "seeped" into the development was significant enough otherwise he would have stopped Uber from continuing development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wait.. Levandowski took files from Google as leverage in case they didn't pay him his bonus? What did he plan to do exactly? In what case does that ever make sense? One can't assume any ownership of or rights to the files whether or not Google pays them the bonus.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, the explanation doesn't make any sense. Even if he decided to release it to the public, that IP wasn't his to distribute, so he'd get sued out of the _obscene_ $50m he had already been paid. At this point, I can't find a single course of action from Levandowski that would paint him in any good light at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is so strongly stated that if it comes to light that Uber did use Waymo's files at this point, they will have a very tough time weaselling out of it. They'd better be telling the truth or what little credibility they still have will go straight out the window.</comment>


A Life Far Less Ordinary - <AUTHOR> https://inference-review.com/article/a-life-far-less-ordinary <comment><USER2> > John Mathew is Associate Professor of History of Science, Humanities and > Social Sciences, and Sciences at Krea University. He previously taught at > the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Harvard University, > the University of Massachusetts, and Duke University. He holds advanced > degrees in Zoology, Medical Anthropology, Ecological Sciences, and History > of Science.

5 advanced degrees?? Doesn't seem plausible

<comment><USER3> He has[0]:

\- Bachelors, Masters and M.Phil in Zoology from Madras Christian College

\- Masters in Medical Anthropology from Harvard

\- Doctorate in Ecological Sciences from Old Dominion

\- Doctorate in History of Science from Harvard

As long as you accept that a Master's is considered an advanced degree (I do FWIW), he doesn't seem to be lying about it.

[0][https://krea.edu.in/faculty.html](https://krea.edu.in/faculty.html)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Trello for GitHub Issues - <AUTHOR> http://waffle.io <comment><USER2> Does this work with private repos? If so then SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!

<comment><USER3> I'm a huge fan of this kind of business model: Public free/private pay.

And if you do that, consider taking a page from the Sprint.ly playbook..only charge for months the user actually uses your service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very nice. It's fun to look at Backbone.js' issues list from within a Backbone app ;)

[http://waffle.io/jashkenas/backbone](http://waffle.io/jashkenas/backbone)

<comment><USER5> Javascriptception

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Awesome, I am a trello fan. Too bad this didn't exist a year ago. Already migrated to JIRA because Github issues was so underpowered. I'd use it otherwise. :(

</comment><comment><USER7> Also see [http://huboard.com/](http://huboard.com/).

<comment><USER8> Application Error

An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Based on the email at the bottom of the page, looks like this is from the [http://rallydev.com](http://rallydev.com) folks? I hope they have plans for an internal/private version, because while I'm not sure I'd use this for my open source projects, I'd love to try it for our internal repos.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's built by a team of interns at Rally. We'd love to know why you'd use it for private repos but not open source projects, hoping to help people know where they can start contributing to an open source project.

<comment><USER10> I think this could be used by staff that aren't familiar with github/scared of it (this is more common than you think) to manage issues in a simple and familiar way. I think it would certainly be helpful in my organization, but like GP our repos are private.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have this new system for "agile". You write everything down and then cross it out when it's done, continue until everything is done.

</comment><comment><USER8> [http://waffle.io/rallysoftware/waffle.io](http://waffle.io/rallysoftware/waffle.io):

Application Error

An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.

<comment><AUTHOR> back up, sorry!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm going to test this right away for Docker. We are completely overwhelmed with github issues, and the bottleneck is not contributors: it's our ability to communicate where we need the most help.

<comment><USER13> FWIW, issue labels can help this a lot. You can have a one-click link to a list of tagged issues, which helps to narrow the field a lot.

<comment><USER12> Tags do help. Our problem is the sheer volume of issues - 260 currently open and counting [1]. So prioritizing becomes an issue, as well as the unbarably slow web ui.

[1] [https://github.com/dotcloud/docker/issues?direction=desc&sor...](https://github.com/dotcloud/docker/issues?direction=desc&sort=created&state=open)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nice. Looks similar in design to the now defunct wallsome (Which used basecamp as the backend). Were you inspired by that?

</comment><comment><USER15> onclick on the "Go!" button is broken - it's incorrectly referencing the goToURL function as gotoURL. To get past it, use Enter on keyboard instead of the button. (Using jQuery, yet inline event definitions?)

<comment><AUTHOR> fixed, thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nice! Love the simplicity of it all!

</comment><comment><USER17> thx, this is awesome!</comment>


Why Russia Keeps Getting Away with Hacking America - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-07-31/why-russia-keeps-getting-away-with-hacking-america <comment><USER2> Dear god. More anti-Russian fear mongering and propaganda.

a) There's no proof Russia was behind the DNC hacks

b) Even if they were, why does no one care about the corruption that was uncovered? Don't shoot the messenger...

c) Does no one remember the whole Snowden/NSA thing? Every state hacks every other state, the US does it more than most, other countries don't whine nearly as much.

Recent weeks have also shattered the idea of the US 'free media'. So much propaganda Stalin would be proud...

<comment><USER3> A poor attempt at obfuscation.

I suppose you would also say that Russia had nothing to do with with Litvinenko's murder, Nemtsov's murder, Shooting down MH-17, having no soldiers in Eastern Ukraine, etc.

And concerning your comment about Stalin (Russians always did adore their Tyrants), he would have been very proud today.

Over 50 % of Russians have embraced him.

[http://www.newsweek.com/putin-russia-economy-communist- party...](http://www.newsweek.com/putin-russia-economy-communist-party-485630)

> For the first time this year, a majority of Russians (52 percent) indicated > in an annual opinion poll that they considered Stalin's bloody rule > "probably" or "definitely" a positive thing.

<comment><USER4> > A poor attempt at obfuscation.

Just because Russia is guilty of some things, does not mean that they are automatically guilty of others.

> nothing to do with with Litvinenko's murder

Probably the Russian government was involved.

> Nemtsov's murder,

Nothing has been proven, it is just pure speculation. I really don't think the government benefited by killing him on red square -- it created a huge embarrassment.

> Shooting down MH-17,

Russia may have provided assistance to rebels (e.g. in the form of air defense). But there is no proof at all that a civilian plane was shot down on purpose on orders of the Russian government. In most probability it is a tragic accident (as happened earlier: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia_Airlines_Flight_1812](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia_Airlines_Flight_1812)). These accidents are bound to happen when civilian planes fly over warzones.

> comment about Stalin (Russians always did adore their Tyrants),

Russians have a complex and tragic history. It is not that easy to reject all of your history (the good and the bad).

I wonder if you are equally vocal about neighbouring countries who still adore their Nazi independence fighters...

<comment><USER3> Again, a poor effort to deceive rather than inform. Making excuses for evil and murder and then adding your customary Whataboutism.

This isn't Reddit. The folks around here are quite Intelligent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _" Earlier this week at a speech at Fordham University in New York, FBI > Director James Comey sounded a similar note. He said cyberattacks from > states and non-state actors "needs to be called out, it needs to be > sanctioned, it needs to whenever possible be prosecuted."_

Agreed. Let's start with the NSA.

<comment><USER6> He's talking inter-state not intra-state actors.

It's like somebody shooting themselves in the foot, why would they? Everyone is looking out for themselves --sometimes with intent to help others too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article is extraordinary. We now know the biggest offender by far in term of hacking other networks is the US. But when you read it, it feels like we are talking about the US being attacked by a bunch of rogue actors.

Do as I say, not as I do.

<comment><USER5> It's almost as if there were some sort of bias in the mainstream media...

<comment><USER8> Well, the MSM is an extension of the US govt., so the bias is expected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Why Russia/America/China/Britain/Israel keep getting away with hacking...

Clearly it's because they all do it to each other. Besides, I have a hard time believing the US is not the best and most advanced at it. Other countries would be stupid not to follow in their capabilities in this absurd game of chicken.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why in God's name are reputable news outlets repeating the completely unverified rumor that it was a Russian hack of the DNC? It seems insane to me!

The NYT had an article about "How should Obama retaliate for the hack of the DNC?" That is not just putting the cart before the horse, thats dragging out the cart when there is not even evidence indicating a horse is there!

<comment><USER11> Why indeed. I think particularly no network has ever earned a better title than CNN with their Clinton News Network. They're all shills for her at this point no matter what she does, they'll hold her to one standard while holding Bernie or Trump to another.

<comment><USER12> You're getting downvoted, and for the people doing that, the DNCleak emails provide evidence that the DNC is colluding with and directly influencing stories and content at major US news outlets. Unfortunately, this person is right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It would be better to tighten security and prevent such activity, than to accuse any state actor, accusing a state actor, I would guess, gives them more power in political negotiations.

As far as I understand, its mostly impossible to be certain who did what in hacking since the location doesn't really determine who it is.

<comment><USER3> Nothing is impossible.

Don't think for a moment that the US Gov doesn't know who did this. The problem is how to approach it without giving away too much.

It is my feeling that all Russian Networks have been compromised including the Kremlin's. There is no other country on Earth the has the reach the USA does.

So better to sit quietly and give them nothing. Let the media make the assumptions and suggestions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Assuming the Russians are to blame for the DNC hacks, the mistake is thinking the US will respond in kind or openly. Russia faces more economic and security challenges now than perhaps at any time since WWII and US pressure can be applied in many ways. Whose to say the Panama Papers were not a CIA operation aimed at exposing Russian and Chinese money laundering? Either way, Chinese hacking appears to be a far more serious threat as the OPM hack illustrates.

</comment><comment><USER15> Oh please. It's not like we Americans don't hack other countries.

<comment><USER16> If that's the case our victims are really good at not crying about it. It's like we're the only ones who shout, "I got hacked!"

<comment><USER8> How do you know you've been hacked when the "hacking" is done via a backdoor in a Cisco edge router or switch or in a Microsoft software?

Most small nations that use backdoored devices and software don't have the means to investigate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Because you live in a country that is more concerned that exposing the corruption of your democracy poses more of a threat than the corruption of democracy itself.

</comment><comment><USER18> Or, Why Clinton's DNC Keeps Getting Away With Not Keeping America's Secrets Safe.

</comment><comment><USER19> Anyone else think this great emphasis on Russia hacking the DNC is a way for the existing US govt agencies to gain brownie points with the future President (Clinton).

I read the same in the "I advise not to prosecute Clinton for the classified emails on her server" statement by the FBI investigator. Can you imagine advising to prosecute, then she becomes your boss.

At some point I'd imagine, all the "experts" and heads of agencies will expect a little promotion, or other favor for contributing to her campaign -- diverting attention from the contents of the email to the hacking itself.</comment>


Project Great: General Relativity Einstein/Essen Anniversary Test (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://www.leapsecond.com/great2005/

<comment><AUTHOR> A little excerpt:

 _According to Einstein, fast-moving clocks run slow (special relativity), and high-elevation clocks run fast (general relativity). Clocks that run fast gain time, so given our high elevation and how long we stayed, the prediction was that these clocks would gain about 22 nanoseconds. This, not because the clocks were moving (they were in a parked minivan), but simply because the clocks experienced a lower gravitational field by being 5400 feet above sea level for two days._

...

 _The plot show the clocks aren 't perfect (even these excellent atomic clocks vary randomly at the nanosecond level) but they each undergo positive time dilation and the average (black line) time jump in the three clocks while up on the mountain for two days is around 23 nanoseconds. Not bad for a first attempt._</comment>


RSA Signature Forgery in NSS - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2014/09/24/rsa-signature-forgery-in-nss/

<comment><USER2> For those of you playing the home version, this is in Set 6 of our crypto challenges:

[http://cryptopals.com/sets/6/challenges/42/](http://cryptopals.com/sets/6/challenges/42/)

Ironically, Firefox is the only browser that had this flaw when Bleichenbacher originally described it almost 10 years ago.

I'm particularly fond of this bug; it's what started me off down the path of learning about serious crypto attacks.

</comment><comment><USER3> Right now, the most popular phone for Firefox OS is the Intex Cloud FX (the $33 phone), which was released last month and runs 1.3[1]. However, Mozilla has said that they are only applying updates to 2.x[2].

This means that their flagship phone that was released only a month ago has a critical security vulnerability and there are no plans to fix it. Great work, Mozilla!

[1] - [http://www.intexmobile.in/product_detail.aspx?PID=191&PCatID...](http://www.intexmobile.in/product_detail.aspx?PID=191&PCatID=3)

[2] - [https://www.reddit.com/r/FireFoxOS/comments/2hf13o/security_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/FireFoxOS/comments/2hf13o/security_update_for_all_mozilla_products_released/cks1ivg)

<comment><USER4> This is far from the truth.

<comment><USER5> If you know they have plans to fix it, it would be helpful if you would say so.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Coddle.app – Keeping a watchful eye on all your precious sites - <AUTHOR> https://coddle.app/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, this is a side project I've been toying with the last 2 months or so. It's in beta, se please let me know if you find any issues, bugs or typos.

Any feedback welcome too!

<comment><USER2> Hi there,

Would be nice to see what it looks like and what it reports on in more details (like images) without having to sign up first. :-) Just the first thing I noticed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool thanks for the feedback, will get to it!</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Inverse - Team convos and knowledge sharing on any webpage - <AUTHOR> https://www.inverse.network <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN,

We're excited to share Inverse, a Chrome extension that enables groups and teams to have conversations and share knowledge on any webpage. Unlike email or chat apps like Slack or Teams, where information is siloed inside each app, Inverse lives alongside you in the browser so you can view and take part in discussions without leaving your current tab. These discussions are tied to specific URLs, so you can create a common thread that connects related pages, like a document, ticket, design, or dashboard. You can find discussions by revisiting relevant pages and opening Inverse.

We started building Inverse after realizing how much time and energy we were wasting looking for things just to get our jobs done. It was always the same thing: copy and paste links back and forth, have discussions around them, and then lose track of it all over time. So we built Inverse as a way to help teams instantly capture and share information across all their tools without having to decide where or how to do it.

This is just the start. We've got a lot more on the way. Soon you'll be able to link threads to multiple pages, mention members in threads and send them notifications, and a whole lot more.

We'd love to hear what you think! How do you currently collaborate across tools? What is one thing you could change about the way you and your team communicate/share information?

\- Haris and Sunil</comment>


Interactive Résumé of Robby Leonardi - <AUTHOR> http://rleonardi.com/interactive-resume/ <comment><USER2> It's a fun and cute resume, but delving in to the code you see things like;

      function blinkRobbyEyes()
      {
    	if (layersMovement != "not moving 2")
    	{
    		$(robbyEyesCloseDiv).fadeTo(0,1);
    		$(robbyEyesCloseDiv).stop().delay(300).animate({opacity: 0}, 0, function() {});
    	}
      }

"if (layersMovement != "not moving 2")" is a boolean that should be passed as a parameter if you're ever going to write a working unit test against that function. Consequently, it shows a pretty poor knowledge of "making nice looking _and maintainable_ HTML5 scrolly animations" in any sort of a real- life environment. Many people can make fancy webpages; someone with "the best resume ever" would be able to make fancy webpages with code that's relatively well abstracted in to testable, reusable functions.

<comment> at-fates-hands I've always found this interesting. If you're a developer, it should be your number one priority to make sure the code you write for your own site be top notch. God knows how much we all complain about other people's code, you should know however cool it is, developers are going to crack the hood and see how good the code is.

Great idea and quite original. I still give him rube cred for having such a nice concept despite the flaws in his code.

<comment><USER3> You know, you just gave me an idea: not to have top quality code on personal web site, but have a comment instead "I can explain what's wrong with this code or any other you will show me and how to fix it". I think that gives opportunity for much more interesting discussion :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> No, it's really not. It's tacky and takes too long to get all of the relevant details...and they're not even all in one place. Everything a resume should do, this does not. This being included in a sampling of workpieces is a different story.

Not to mention it's a repost.

<comment><USER5> We know this isn't designed to convey work experience, skillset in an efficient and clear way, it's just attention-grabbing hit bait so he can make some claim of "going viral" on his real CV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, best?! EVER?!

Where can I find this list of unchanging objective criteria for how good a resumé is, so that I can apply them to my clearly inadequate CV?

</comment><comment><USER7> I saw "Loading..." and left after 3 seconds.

</comment><comment><USER8> I am not sure this is the 'best', as a hiring manager in my work life, I won't be too impressed if this is the only piece of information delivered to me. It is a useful piece of reference nonetheless, but definitely cannot replace a regular normal resume.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think this is creative and shows some serious design skills. I am looking to hire a designer and this got my attention, so I'm reaching out.

So I'd say it works as a resume.

</comment><comment><USER10> Cutest? Sure.

Creative? Absolutely.

Best? No.

I think this would work well as a supplementary portfolio but you still need a more to-the-point condensation of relevant information.

</comment><comment><USER11> For resumes I'd define best as "highest converting". If this is the best it'd be great to see some data.

</comment><comment><USER12> Very cool and creative. People need to stop getting butthurt on this site.

</comment><comment><USER13> Charming, but blinding after a rather short time.

</comment><comment><USER14> this was submitted & discussed already a couple of weeks ago. TL;DR nice showcase, no interactivity

</comment><comment><USER15> Repost, really? Are we reddit now?

</comment><comment><USER16> LAUNCH SITE LAUNCH SITE LAUNCH SITE LAUNCH SITE LAUNCH SITE LAUNCH SITE LAUNCH SITE

PLEASE TURN ON YOUR JAVASCRIPT

Was that all he wanted to say?</comment>


Go Concurrency versus C and pthreads - <AUTHOR> http://denis.papathanasiou.org/posts/2015.12.26.post.html <comment><USER2> One can use the same Go style concurrency in C with libmill [1].

Another interesting choice for concurrency would be lthread [2].

      What's special about lthread is that it allows you to

      make blocking calls and expensive computations, blocking

      IO inside a coroutine, providing you with the advantages

      of coroutines and pthreads.

[1] [http://libmill.org/](http://libmill.org/)

[2] [https://github.com/halayli/lthread](https://github.com/halayli/lthread)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for those references; when I was searching for how to do concurrency in plain C, only pthreads came up in the results.

<comment><USER2> You are welcome ;) Finding good C resources is rather hard...</comment></comment></comment>


TweetNaCl.js - <AUTHOR> http://dchest.github.io/tweetnacl-js/#/ <comment><USER2> I really wish there weren't two popular projects that were abbreviated to NaCl.

For others, this is a port of the "salt" NaCl crypto library, and has nothing to do with Native Client.

The dangers of JS crypto in the browser are well trodden (anybody who can snoop the connection can probably replace the JS, for example), but the rise of JS-based client apps (through node-webkit et al) make this a bit more meaningful.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I was initially excited expecting to see something awesome for Google NaCl, but it turned out to be yet another script written in a legacy language... Well, he did add .js to the name though.

<comment><USER4> What exactly are you referring to with "legacy language"? Could you elaborate?

<comment><USER2> I'm pretty sure it was just snark at Javascript/ECMAscript.

IMO it's pretty hard to justify calling it a legacy language when there are 4 major JS JIT engines actively competing for performance, and a pretty thriving developer ecosystem. It's about as young as Ruby, and younger than Python and Haskell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Javascript is also a supported target for libsodium, through Emscripten. The Javascript file size (minified/gzipped, with most operations including password hashing using scrypt) is 136K.

TweetNaCl.js doesn't have the same features set, but it is tiny, has been written in Javascript, is easy to use, well-documented, and well-maintained.

This is what Minilock uses. It is a perfect fit for this kind of applications.

<comment><USER6> I've actually been looking for a small crypto library for javascript, I'm in the process of building a desktop cross-platform app using node-webkit, and this seems quite interesting!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> We ended up using tweetnacl for Stellar after switching to Ed25519. We forked it to implement generating keys from a seed.

[https://github.com/stellar/tweetnacl- js/commit/063e072](https://github.com/stellar/tweetnacl-js/commit/063e072)

<comment><USER8> Nice! I've added nacl.sign.keyPair.fromSeed in v0.11.0, though I see that I didn't define seedLength. Will do!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The goal of TweetNaCl is to make an auditable crypto library, and this is a JavaScript port of the original C library.

Its goal is not to offer every cipher or algorthim, but its small size allows it to be easily included in unhosted apps like miniLock.

</comment><comment><USER10> How does this differ from the other javascript NaCl implementations?

[https://www.npmjs.org/search?q=nacl](https://www.npmjs.org/search?q=nacl)

<comment><USER11> For one the fact that (the author of NaCL) Daniel Bernstein is backing it.

<comment><USER8> DJB wrote the original tweetnacl.c, from which this JavaScript implementation is derived. He doesn't have anything to do with the port.

<comment><USER11> You guys are right of course; I was looking at the C version.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Chase bank's anti-fraud system has been compromised - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/stephenhuey/status/1019594930279342080 <comment><AUTHOR> Anyone else noticing fraud with their Chase accounts?

An account rep implied they're having unusually high wait times when he put me on hold with the anti-fraud team for close to 10 minutes. As soon as the anti- fraud person came on the line, he cut me off by saying their system is down and I'd have to call back in 24-48 hours because there's nothing they can do right now.

It seems like the fraudulent charge on my account is timed with an attack on their system, so I'm wondering if anyone else is seeing this too.</comment>


The chosen research areas of mad scientists, 1810-2010 - <AUTHOR> http://io9.com/5646481/ <comment><USER2> Interesting that there is a distinction between (in film) pseudoscience and (in film) psychology, or nuclear and (generic) physics - 99% of anything that is used by a "mad scientist" character is safely grounded in the pseudoscience side of things, as in "all of this is made-up" against the "20% of the claims of this paper may hold up to the next 50 years of research" of actual science.

The only difference is that we as a public, don't know most of the actual sciences and cannot distinguish between, e.g., biotech psychobabble and actual biotech. But it's interesting -- would parapsychology (or alchimy, or other not-science-anymore) be counted towards psychology/chemistry if we were to adopt a nomenclature that allows made-up stuff to be (nominally) part of an established discipline because it uses the scientific terms and - loosely - suspected way of thinking of that discipline?

<comment><USER3> If it were based on real science, it wouldn't be research, it would be simple engineering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They claim the appendix is available for download but all I can find are JPG's.</comment>


Anyone in path of Hurricane Michael? - <AUTHOR> Anyone in path of Hurricane Michael?
If so please feel free to use our Call for Code entry: SandySearch.
It is a tool that can find gas stations that actually have gas, around you now.
Go here to use it: https://plu.sh/sandys
It is also available on the Google Play store:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.ionic.sandysearch
More information on the app, entry and how it works here:
https://devpost.com/software/sandy-search
All comments and feedback welcome. <comment><AUTHOR> SandySearch is now on the Apple App Store too:

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sandysearch/id1438425201?ls=...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sandysearch/id1438425201?ls=1&mt=8)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Now on Google Play (not beta) here:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.ionic.sandy...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.ionic.sandysearch)</comment>


CompUSA Comes Back From the Dead - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/04/compusa-back-fr.html <comment><USER2> Why can't they just stay dead?</comment>


Learning to Code and Speak a New Language Simultaneously - <AUTHOR> http://babelmatch.tumblr.com/post/51176451481/learning-to-code-and-speak-a-new-language

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a link to the app discussed in the article for those who are interested [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/babelmatch/id646606322?mt=8&...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/babelmatch/id646606322?mt=8&ign- mpt=uo%3D4)</comment>


In Nova Scotia, Homes as Wild as the Landscape Around Them - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/t-magazine/nova-scotia-architecture.html <comment><USER2> The traditional architecture seems much more practical and better suited to the challenging environment. Winters there can be extreme.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nova Scotia is easily of the most beautiful places in North America. If you are able, please make it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Would've visited this summer if the pandemic hadn't ruined plans.

<comment><USER5> You can still drive!</comment></comment>


Tell HN: After the user, the most important thing is less code - <AUTHOR> In 2019, I'm surprised most programmers I see still completely underestimate the importance of having less code. Code is their friend and more code is the fix for most problems. I'll make a claim: after the user satisfaction, less code is the most important consideration you should have as a developer. Because less code is exponentially more customer satisfaction and money. It's simply more happiness for the developers (and the user).
When you have less code, you have less code to write, you have less code to read, you have less code to understand, you have less bugs, you have a smaller team, or, for the same budget, you have more time to do new features and bug fixes, you then have more customer satisfaction, you then have more money for even more features and bug fixes. All at the same time.
The way I see it, nothing beat that.
I would even stretch a bit: it seems to me, it makes judging programming skills very easy. Take a source, can you reduce it without impacting the user? if yes then bad coder else good coder. As simple as that.
How come this is completely disregarded? For example, does triplebyte tests applicants for their ability to do less code? It's not my recollection.. How come? I would even prefer a complete beginner that I'm sure do less code, than a senior who pisses lots.
Hopefully this will lead to an interesting discussion. I'd be interested to hear specifically people who disagree, I'd also be interested in ideas to make less code more known. <comment><USER2> _When you have less code, you have less code to write, you have less code to read, you have less code to understand, you have less bugs, you have a smaller team, or, for the same budget, you have more time to do new features and bug fixes, you then have more customer satisfaction, you then have more money for even more features and bug fixes. All at the same time._

I think blanket statements like this are short-sighted, dangerous, and just plain wrong.

Less code doesn't automatically make anything easier to understand. When my JavaScript is optimized, for instance, it's certainly less code than I wrote. But it's absolutely not understandable.

Less code doesn't automatically reduce your bug count. I can have as many bugs in 40 lines of code as I can in 400.

Less code doesn't give you more time to add new features or fix bugs. In fact, if your code is less understandable, you're going to have a lot of cognitive debt which will increase the amount of time it takes to understand and add new features.

Less code isn't useful. Understandable code is. Sometimes those ideas align. Sometimes, though, understandable code is more verbose.

Instead, you should write ENOUGH code to get your task done, and then refactor.

</comment><comment><USER3> Agree, we just wrote 500 LOC that reads data and a spec, interpolates, validates, and provides a nice error report. This is saving us many many thousands of LOC and hours of frustrations. We are only using it in one place, and will likely start using it in more. Probably want to OSS it first, so be on the lookout for a Show HN!</comment>


Why Vimeo Funded a Show About a Weed Dealer - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/11/vimeo-high-maintenance/

<comment><USER2> This is fantastic. Not the film, but the idea that Vimeo is funding film makers. I sincerely hope people are willing to pay for it. We've been spoiled by "Free", paying will be a tough change for some.

</comment><comment><USER3> High Maintenance is absolutely hilarious. I implore you guys give it a shot.</comment>


A Rust curiosity: pointers to zero-sized types - <AUTHOR> http://www.wabbo.org/blog/2014/03aug_09aug.html <comment><USER2> > In fact, it's not clear to me why this code insists on transmuting a non- > zero value, because doing this seems to work just fine:

Because it needs to compare nonequal to the null reference.

<comment><USER3> So 'kam' had a reply to this which is now dead, and I don't understand why because it looked informative to me. Could someone explain what was wrong with it?:

"To expand on that: Rust references are guaranteed to be non-null. This allows the compiler to optimize Option<&T> to be the same size as a pointer by encoding None as 0 and Some(p) as the pointer value. When unsafe code violates that guarantee by transmuting 0 to a reference, Some(p) becomes None! Example here: h t t p : / / i s . g d / S I o g w i" (link expanded in case that was the issue).

<comment><USER4> Link shorteners are frowned upon. There is no need to have a short URL because you have infinite characters and they can lead to bad behavior.

I know reddit filters them, apparently HN does too.

<comment><USER5> It's been awkward. The reason that is from a shortener is because the program is encoded in the url. The actual URL there is

[http://play.rust- lang.org/?code=fn%20main%28%29%20{%0A%20%20...](http://play.rust- lang.org/?code=fn%20main%28%29%20{%0A%20%20%20%20let%20unsafe_reference%3A%20%26%28%29%20%3D%20unsafe%20{%20%3A%3Astd%3A%3Amem%3A%3Atransmute%280u%29%20}%3B%0A%20%20%20%20let%20x%20%3D%20Some%28unsafe_reference%29%3B%0A%20%20%20%20println!%28%22{}%22%2C%20x%29%0A)}

HN displays that kinda okay, but if you don't have it looking like HN does, it can get to be almost two thousand characters.

<comment><USER6> Not only that, but HN parses the full link incorrectly (the last } isn't included in the link) such that the only way for the link to have worked is to use some indirection.

Like you know, a url shortener.

<comment><USER7> Well, you can %-escape the '}'...

[http://play.rust- lang.org/?code=fn%20main%28%29%20{%0A%20%20...](http://play.rust- lang.org/?code=fn%20main%28%29%20{%0A%20%20%20%20let%20unsafe_reference%3A%20%26%28%29%20%3D%20unsafe%20{%20%3A%3Astd%3A%3Amem%3A%3Atransmute%280u%29%20}%3B%0A%20%20%20%20let%20x%20%3D%20Some%28unsafe_reference%29%3B%0A%20%20%20%20println!%28%22{}%22%2C%20x%29%0A%7D)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd like to mention that we've been recently discussing ways of getting rid of the `::<>` syntax. Then

       mem::size_of::<T>()

would be

       mem::size_of<T>()

which is less visually noisy. This syntax is probably the noisiest thing we haven't cleaned up yet.

<comment><USER8> For a constant like size_of, can you not eliminate the function call and make it a value? Just mem::size_of<T> ?

<comment><USER2> Not without associated constants, which Rust does not yet support (and likely will not until after 1.0).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Cool. Somewhat different but similar... In Julia, types with no fields are automatically singletons and an array size-zero immutable values takes no storage:

        julia> sweet_nothings = Array(Nothing,typemax(Int))
        9223372036854775807-element Array{Nothing,1}:
         nothing
         nothing
         ⋮
         nothing
         nothing

        julia> sizeof(sweet_nothings)
        0

This seems like a cute, useless trick but sometimes it's quite useful. For example, the Set{T} is implemented by wrapping a Dict{T,Nothing} and the array of values in the Dict object takes no storage and of course all access is optimized away.

</comment><comment><USER10> I actually like that C++ enforces a struct to be at least a byte long because it means you can have pointers to them and they will compare as non equal even if you do not know the type. That is actually quite handy sometimes.

I wonder why Rust does not do that.

<comment><USER11> IIRC, C says that you get a real pointer back from malloc(0). Repeated calls return distinct pointers.

For whatever that's worth...

<comment><USER12> Not exactly; from §7.20.3 in C99:

        If the size of the space requested is zero, the behavior is implementation-
        defined: either a null pointer is returned, or the behavior is as if the size were some
        nonzero value, except that the returned pointer shall not be used to access an object.

<comment><USER13> " _or the behavior is as if the size were some nonzero value, except that the returned pointer shall not be used to access an object_ "

I love the C standards. Is that defining the behavior of malloc or the behavior of the code calling malloc?

<comment><USER12> The caller code. It is saying that the caller cannot dereference the returned pointer, under pain of undefined behavior.

<comment><USER11> In particular, you can't access (read _or_ write) off either end of an allocated block. Well, if the block is of (nominal) length 0, there is nowhere to access safely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's interesting that this is one of the things that Go and Rust have agreed upon: that the addresses of zero-sized values are the same (in Go we spell a zero-sized type as "struct{}").

It has some unexpected surprises though. If you write `var key struct{}` in a package and then try to use &key as a map key (c.f. [http://blog.golang.org/context](http://blog.golang.org/context)) then you'll collide with other packages. You've got to use a non-zero type instead.

<comment><USER2> I don't think we actually defined the addresses of zero-sized values to be equal; I believe it's actually unspecified. I don't think this has ever come up in practice, though; we could define them to be equal if we wanted to.

That issue hasn't come up in Rust, probably because equality and hashing look through references (per the definitions of Hash and Eq in the standard library), so you'd really have to go out of your way to try to use unit as a way to make package-specific keys like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > As you might imagine, this operation is HIGHLY DANGEROUS.There's nothing to > stop you from transmuting 0 into a borrow, &T and then trying to dereference > it. Voila, null pointer dereferencing in Rust!

Is this right? Why doesn't this function need to be marked unsafe?

<comment><USER16> transmute is marked as unsafe, so it can only be used in unsafe blocks or functions.

<comment><USER15> My mistake. I clicked through to the docs, and didn't see any annotation.

[http://static.rust- lang.org/doc/master/std/mem/fn.transmute....](http://static.rust- lang.org/doc/master/std/mem/fn.transmute.html)

<comment><USER17> Erk—that's a bug.</comment></comment></comment></comment>