I want the NBN - <AUTHOR> http://iwantthenbn.com/ <comment><USER3> The top of the page tells me nothing about what they're campaigning for. FTTN? NBN? FTTH?

English people. English! I'm not even sure if this is a parody.

 _The Liberal Party of Australia: Reconsider your plan for a 'FTTN' NBN in favour of a superior 'FTTH' NBN_

 _Australia needs the right NBN._

 _Vote at change.org if you agree!_

<comment><USER3> And yes, I realize the change.org site has more details. But once again, the whole top of that page has no actual info in the title except a bunch of acronyms.

<comment><USER4> In Australia, where this petition is relevant, these acronyms are well understood by the public and don't need further explanation.

<comment><USER5> I am in Australia and these acronyms are not well understood by the public. Luckily jdaley explained these well in his comments above.

<comment><USER6> This is exactly the problem. Also, the vox populi interviews in newspaper from older people saying "25 mbps is fast enough" makes me rage so hard.

Oh, 25 Mbps is fast enough? So if I were to offer you $25 or $1000 which would you take?

Ugh. The NBN is a good idea, but poorly sold to the older generation who cannot seem to grasp the idea of its importance,

<comment><USER7> _> 25 mbps is fast enough_

Of course it's fast enough! You can fill your entire 640 kB of RAM (who needs that much anyway?) in 200ms with that raw speed.

<comment><USER8> What's a kB? :p

<comment><USER9> [http://xkcd.com/394/](http://xkcd.com/394/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I _do_ really want the NBN to be the best it can be, but I really _really really_ want a proper debate about the issue.

Arguments should not be as one-sided as either "the Coalition's plan is crap, because it's slower" or "Labor's plan is crap, because it costs more". Instead, the debate needs to be about whether or not the extra speed is worth the cost.

We aren't currently seeing this sort of debate. The Coalition says "give us some benefits to quantify". Labor says "giving all of the benefits would be impossible". I believe Labor should at least _try_. If they fail, they can fall back to their current position; no ground lost. At this point, Labor need only give benefits from the speed difference to support the cost difference - not the entire project cost.

P.s., the change.org petition is full of flaws. For example: "Broadband internet is an 'infrastructure' and should be considered in the same light as highways, water management, electricity and so forth; it should be a 'right' available 'equally' to all Australians."

But surely, better roads exist where they are needed more- where the cost justifies such? My parent's farm runs off of tank water and a self-sufficient sewerage system, not town water. The cost to provide the same service I receive at my apartment building as to their farm would be ludicrous.

Why are we not seeing a proper debate on this issue?

<comment><USER11> "Instead, the debate needs to be about whether or not the extra speed is worth the cost."

How about this: the coalitions plan is crap because it provides less service and less future adaptability at almost three times the unit cost.

$44.1b/100mbps estimated FTTH = $0.441b/mbps $29.5b/25mbps estimated FTTN = $1.18b/mbps

The numbers get even worse for the coalition when you factor in an additional $2B to the NBN plan to move everyone from 100mbps to 1000mbps.

Your analogy of town water vs tank water is not relevant as the plan is not to provide the same service (ie fibre) to all areas. That debate happened 3-4 years ago and has been NBN policy for almost as long. Fibre in dense areas, Wimax in less dense areas and satellite in rural settings. Wider roads exist for more capacity but I guarantee your parents farm has at least one road around it. That is what the change.org petition is talking about.

The problem we're running in to is our physical plant (the copper) is antiquated in standard and age. The coalition has loved talking up how bad the plant is as a negative for the NBN plan (asbestos boxes and viaducts, tree roots, electrical shorts, flooding, etc).

The NBN has planned and has budgeted to replace this plant with newer, modern equipment and techniques.

The coalition plan attempts to bend reality and ignore the dilapidated state of most of the inner city/suburban Telstra equipment. Instead they are going to buy 60,000+ new DSLAMs and just magically integrate them without having to deal with 50 years of bad maintenance.

<comment><USER12> Those numbers seem wrong.

The Coalition plan likely involves VDSL2+, which is supposed to do 250 Mbps at the node, and 50 Mbps 1 km from the node, so likely 90%+ of the population would get 50-100 Mbps by 2016. 25 Mbps is the minimum, not the average.

And the NBN was supposed to do 1 Gbps within a few years. But the rollout might be slower.

Add to that that once FTTN is rolled out, it could be upgraded to FTTH/FTTP, for a lot less money, these numbers are really not as easy to compare.

Interesting point about the state of the existing exchanges, copper, etc..

The plan did make a brief comparison to other FTTN roll outs worldwide, e.g. AT&T uVerse. Wonder what problems they faced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Good to see this one up on HN.

I've been running [http://www.weneedthenbn.com/](http://www.weneedthenbn.com/) since Saturday night, and it's been getting a bit of traction, too.

My phone call to my local MP wasn't exactly promising - while I couldn't talk directly to the MP (although I didn't expect to), the person who answered seemed generally uninterested in anything that I had to say, and was unaware of the technical differences (other than "the LNP plan is cheaper").

I hope we can make a difference here, and there seems to be a lot of support for it. Even if 1% of the people who signed the petition called/emailed/wrote to their local member, we might have a chance of making a difference.

<comment><USER7> _> the LNP plan is cheaper_

I've _heard_ that it's cheaper to build, but significantly more complicated and expensive to run because of the maintenance of the copper network and the fact that the nodes require power under the LNP NBN, but not the ALP NBN.

(I'd like confirmation/anti-confirmation of this if anyone happens to know more.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am an expat Australian living in London.

Here in Belsize Park I have access to Virgin Media, which is fibre to a closeby yet remote center nearby (FTTN).

This is easily good enough for me on the 120Mbit plan. I often get 12 MB/s with suitably fast peers.

So I reckon that FTTN would be just fine.

<comment><USER15> What is the physical wiring coming into your house made of?

Because there is _no way_ you are getting 120 mbit's through telephone copper. If it's not fiber then you're on HFC which means shared coax. In which case, well, that's not happening here because you'd _still_ have to run coax to millions of premises. The type of wiring is not the expensive part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I guess this means well and I hate to say it -- but this is largely pointless. Even this were as persuasive as hell, the Liberals just gained government by bashing the NBN plans (amongst other things). They're not going to change.

</comment><comment><USER17> Step 1 (now): Fibre to the node

Step 2 (later, on an incremental basis): Fibre to the home

Why do we need to do both steps at the same time? The last mile is incredibly expensive and difficult (as the slow rollout of Labour's scheme has demonstrated). Doing fibre to the node now doesn't stop us from having it to the home at a later point in time, as demands increase.

<comment><USER18> Please do not be misinformed. The last mile is a very contentious issue. What incentive does Telstra have to share the infrastructure to the last mile with some scrappy upstart?

<comment><USER19> Telstra won't be sharing it, NBN Co. will be purchasing the copper network.

One of the benefits of having an NBN Co. is you don't have the retailer/wholesaler conflict of interest as we did with Telstra and as the UK did with BT

The solution in the UK was to mandate open access in regulation with BT OpenReach. The solution in Australia is NBN Co.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The petition grossly oversimplifies the difference in approach between the major parties. The NBN will still be built under the new government, NBN Co. will still exist, the debate isn't so much about FTTN vs FTTH (terms that most Australian's aren't familiar with) nor about copper vs fiber.

It is about the tradeoff between delivering higher speeds and the time taken to implement. The coalition plan is prominently technology agnostic[0]. The reason why Australia ranks 40th[1] globally with an average broadband speed of 4.1Mbit is not because we haven't rolled out fiber to every home, but rather because of mistakes made during deregulation and the delays in implementing a new plan have meant that large sections of the population have fallen behind international standards and are unable to access even a decent ADSL service, let alone a better VDSL or fiber based service.

This has left the country in a situation where because of a lack of basic service, 47% of the country currently access the internet using mobile broadband[2]. This is beyond unacceptable.

The two approaches to solving this problems are 1) build a nation wide network that delivers a satellite and wireless service to 7% of the population and a fiber to the home service to the other 93% of the population. ETA 2021. or 2) set a bandwidth target of delivering _at least_ 25Mbit and up to 100Mbit to all households by 2016 and then upgrade to 100Mbit by 2019 using a mix of technologies

The 25-100Mbit by 2016 plan would bring Australia into the top 3 or 4 nations worldwide for internet access speeds, where we belong (neither plan would solve high bandwidth prices - the NBN only reaches from your home to your nearest point of interconnect, it does nothing to resolve the current poor state of internet bandwidth/backhaul access in Aus which has a lot of existing broadband connections struggling with international speeds).

The new approach is about applying the best technology to fit the situation and to get more bandwidth out sooner. This means that in new housing areas (known as greenfields) where new trenches have to be dug fiber to the home will be deployed (this doesn't change). In remote areas it will be a mix of satellite and wireless service (this doesn't change). In existing suburbs (brownfields) there will be a mix of fiber to the home, fiber to the basement, and fiber to the node with VDSL (and later GFast) delivering the last hundreds of meters.

There is yet another rollout case that is the most complicated and that is multi-dwelling unit's (or MDU's) - apartments, town houses, retirement villages, office buildings etc. The old plan was that in these instances the existing copper within a building would be pulled out and replaced with fiber. The problem is that co-ordinated the millions of residents, strata bodies, building co-ops, owners, etc. is a bureaucratic nightmare. When Optus and Telstra rolled out their HFC networks in the 90s they bypassed many of these residences because of the problems it involves. I think even the most strident Labor NBN supporter would concede that MDU's require a new plan and a different approach (not coincidently a report by NBN Co. on the MDU problem was due out a couple of months ago but its release was delayed until after the election).

This is why technological decisions should not be dictated by online petitions that at best oversimplify the situation and at worse misrepresent it. I was hoping that with the election now behind us that the toxic partizan debate surrounding the NBN would be over and that people that are best suited to finding a solution - engineers, network architects etc. could set about working out how to achieve the aim of delivering 25-100Mbit to Australian by the end of the first term of this new government.

The solution is using a mix of technologies - FTTH in new areas, FTTN in existing areas, an option to upgrade to fiber for businesses, fiber to the basement in MDU's, satellite and wireless in remote areas, etc. Whatever works, just get more bandwidth out there sooner.

As a technologist I can only support using a practical approach to finding the best solutions to hitting targets.

Off course we all want fiber to the home, off course we all want gigabit speeds, but there is a much more immediate problem of solving the blackspots in existing services. It is about taking smaller steps and delivering more bandwidth to more people sooner rather than a clean slate approach of an entirely new network, and all the risks that involves.

I personally know many people who are stuck using 3G modems to access the web and who not only have terrible data speeds but also have usage caps that are a few gigabytes a month. I struggle to explain to them why my area, where I already have an ADSL2+ service at 16Mbit+, is on the roadmap to receive an NBN service this year while their area, closer to the city than I live, is scheduled to start construction of the NBN in 3 years time.

I think it is much more important to get at least 25Mbit to those 47% of households before I get my connection upgraded from 16Mbit to 50 or 100Mbit.

There are no doubt still a lot of problems with the new plan. I wouldn't count myself as an ardent supporter of the coalition plan (I don't think I even like the very idea of there being an NBN and an NBN Co., but I digress), but I do believe that taking immediate small steps to solve the most critical problem is much more important than rolling out fiber to every home. What is certainly the case is that many, many people are overreacting to the change in government and the new broadband plan. The sky definitely isn't falling and we aren't tearing out what was built and dissolving NBN co. I wish more and more Australians would take a more pragmatic and less partizan approach to the problem.

As an aside, the coalition policy document [3], at 37 pages, is definitely worth a read. It goes into all of the background into how they made their decision, their research, etc. It is articulated, thought out, thoroughly referenced and well researched - I recommend everybody with an interest in the NBN read it and contrast to how this petition is presenting the 'problem'.

see also: "Will FTTN advances delay FTTH?": [http://www.lightwaveonline.com/articles/print/volume-30/issu...](http://www.lightwaveonline.com/articles/print/volume-30/issue-4/cover- story/will-fttn-advances-delay-ftth.html)

on how advances in squeezing more bandwidth out of copper (a technology that is far from dead or antiquated) is causing more telco's to forgoe ambitious FTTH plans in favor of FTTN.

[0] [http://www.afr.com/p/technology/turnbull_cut_price_broadband...](http://www.afr.com/p/technology/turnbull_cut_price_broadband_plan_cyno2UoMeEYk6G1E5KrCDM)

[1] [http://www.news.com.au/technology/state-of-the-internet- aust...](http://www.news.com.au/technology/state-of-the-internet-australia- web-speeds-ranking-dwindles-to-40th-place- globally/story-e6frfro0-1226560992748)

[2] [http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2012/03/aussies-nuts-for-mobile- br...](http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2012/03/aussies-nuts-for-mobile-broadband- also-downloading-more-data-every-year/)

[3] [http://www.malcolmturnbull.com.au/assets/Coalition_NBN_polic...](http://www.malcolmturnbull.com.au/assets/Coalition_NBN_policy_- _Background_Paper.pdf)

<comment> another-one-off Hurrah, someone who cares about the actual policies. Nikcub has provided an excellent summary of the technical detail of the situation (which I will be relaying to many of my friends).

There is a huge amount of ignorance in Australia regarding broadband policy. I enjoy talking to people about the NBN, and I came to suspect that no-one in my sample payed any tax. Or they are just really bad at accounting.

Very, very few Australians would/should actually trade the cost of connecting their premise for the speed upgrade from ADSL2+ to fiber (edit: which is in the range of about $2k/person or $8k for a 4 person family unit according to the back of my nearest envelope). There aren't enough uses for speeds >=1MBps. A typical household is YouTube, Skype, gaming (and I don't think a fibre has any special implications on gaming that ADSL2+ doesn't have) and downloading stuff illegally.

There are more important research/infrastructure projects than a broadband network. Basically anything transit related for a country like Australia - <USER2> money could easily have gone into public transport.

I was stuck in a situation where I could only get dial-up speeds in a rental property. My theory was that Telstra (the local owner of all the network infrastructure) weren't going to invest in any upgrades that would be wiped out by federal spending - but the upgrade wasn't going to be for years. 12 months on mobile broadband is very, very unpleasant if you are a heavy Internet user. Speed of rollout is much more important, and the new policy can be enacted very, very quickly.

I live in a MDU now, as it happens, so the liberal policy is great news for me.

<comment><USER15> Here's the problem: That $2000 is per house. But its not about the people living in the house, it's about the physical premises being connected to the wider network, just divided up on a "per house" level.

That's a piece of infrastructure which will exist 50 years from now. In fact, if technology is any guide, even with upgrades it'll likely exist 200 years from now even if the light going through it is used for very different purposes.

So take that $2k, divide by, let's say the life of the cable until some idiot hacks it with a backhoe, which is about 20 years: so it's a $100, per house, for 20 years - transferring seamlessly to future occupants from old occupants.

"typical" always fails to describe the point of things like this. Typical is the broadest conceivable average of use cases, and ignores the fact that it's typical because across a country everyone does different specific things in smaller conceivable groups.

And then of course there's the other important issue: if you spend $20-40 billion rather then $60 billion, and at the end wind up with just ADSL2+ but no RIMs or other bollocks, have we really gotten ourselves a good deal?

<comment> another-one-off (edits: clarity) I divided $43 billion [1] by a population of 22 million, although now I see now that $1,500 would have been better (I read the wrong cost :[). Anyway, it was meant to be a per person, not per house, figure.

The NBN would be a good piece of long-term infrastructure, no argument there. It is better than a cash handout.

I don't think it is sensible to divide up-front cost by years of service. $100/year for 20 years is much cheaper than $2k up front (as a Net Present Value).

If we save the taxpayer $20 billion? Yes, that is a much better deal. Everyone gets 25 Mbps ADSL2+, and people who want fibre (happens to include me, but not the rest of my family) can pay for the last bit of cable work themselves if it makes sense.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network#Expe...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network#Expected_cost)

<comment><USER15> Except the project is deployed over a span of 10 years anyway, so the upfront cost is already divided by that. You mention "you want fiber, but not your family" \- but again, you're ignoring the fact that you and your family likely won't live in that house, with what opinion, for the next 40 years.

It's saving $20 billion, but still spending $20 billion and possibly more. Spending 2/3rd's the cost, with no upgrade path (FTTN does not upgrade to FTTP easily) is a _terrible_ deal. We're keeping power and maintenance costs of the old copper network, you're splitting the type of plant you need to keep (since you have fiber, copper and coax all over the place), and you still haven't escaped the need to trench cable (since a huge amount of that copper needs to come out of the ducts to ever support 25mbit ADSL2, or needs to be completely rerouted to get the distance to the exchange to under 1.5km).

One huge benefit of fiber is that we don't need to worry about distances from exchange to premise - as long as it's under about 60km it'll work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Too late!

<comment><USER21> Read the message at the top of the site, it is a petition to the libs.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, I know. I even signed it. They won't ever do it. That would involve logic and a basic grasp of technology.

<comment><USER22> Given they mostly have business / law / academic backgrounds, I am not sure that anybody has ever put the case for fibre speeds to the Libs in terms other than 'this is what people want, and it is good.' The use cases used in Labor promotions were patronising to the extreme. Don't be surprised that they've concluded it is simply a 'nice thing' that people want but will loathe paying for.

To be honest with you, the things I am planning to do when I get a gigabit line are not exactly in the 'nation-building' category, either. I'm not sure how to fix that PR problem.

<comment><USER23> > _Given they mostly have business / law / academic backgrounds_

Lawyers or former law students are the most numerous profession in Parliament. Gillard was a lawyer. Abbott studied Law as an undergraduate, as did Howard and Hawke.

The professional training of a lawyer equips them to vigorously argue a case they may not themselves agree with, and to do so in forensic detail. The skillset and subject matter has a strong overlap with the work of politics.

That doesn't mean we couldn't do with some more professional diversity in Parliament and the Cabinet. It'd be nice to see some more scientists, engineers and the like on both sides of the chamber.

<comment><USER24> I'm thinking the Mad Scientists Party might stand a chance of a seat in the senate next time around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'll just leave Shaun Micallef's segment on Tony Abbott's NBN here: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-6E5yX1E0U](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-6E5yX1E0U)</comment>


Show HN: A game that pits your sanity against JavaScript's == operator - <AUTHOR> https://slikts.github.io/js-equality-game/ <comment><USER2> Why does the page play audio?

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice! Really enjoyed the Minesweeper feel to it :-)</comment>


Sleep Flushes Toxins from the Brain - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-24567412 <comment><USER3> Science Now, the news service affiliated with the journal Science, has a write-up on this report,

[http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2013/10/sleep- ulti...](http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2013/10/sleep-ultimate- brainwasher)

and that links to the abstract

[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6156/373](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6156/373)

of the published study itself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for these links, I wish the BBC article included them. Here's the press release from the University of Rochester, where the study was conducted:

[http://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/index.cfm?id=3956](http://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/index.cfm?id=3956)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This appears to have an interesting implication for FFI [1], a mysterious genetic disease that causes complete insomnia in adults and results in death. The final stage of FFI is dementia.

It turns out that the β-amyloids that are cleared during sleep according to this paper, are associated with certain types of dementia in the general population [2].

It also turns out that certain sleep disorders are dementia predictor [3].

This is just a laymen's speculation, but this is suggestive that dementia may be a type of sleep disorder, that it could be caused by some interruption in the process demonstrated in this paper.

And this is a stretch, but it is known that FFI is caused by a malformed prion protein, which is a protein that is deeply involved in various neuron-related functions. It seems possible that this protein is involved in the cleansing process in some way. If so, that would be a HUGE deal, because abnormal prion proteins are associated with a huge variety of neurodegenerative diseases.

Basically, I have high hopes for future research.

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

[2] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17502554](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17502554)

[3] [http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/781136](http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/781136)

<comment><USER5> Is it known if there are ways to support the cleanup process?

I ask because due to allergies I have constant sinus congestions and as a result a very light sleep. On average I wake up (to the point where I'm consciously aware that I'm awake) 2 to 4 times per night, persumably due to lack of oxygen.

I'm noticing memory issues; and while the process may not be reversable, I would like to halt it or at least slow it down as much as possible.

<comment><USER6> My dad and I are in a similar situation to you- terrible nasal congestion constantly interfering with sleep.

The quick and dirty solution is decongestants. However, vasoconstrictors (pseudoephedrine, oxymetazoline, phenylepherine, etc.) often have a "rebound effect", i.e. when they wear off you find you're actually more congested than you were before you took the drug. In this sense they can be quite addictive. I try not to use any unless it's absolutely necessary, and only once every few days at that.

One thing that helps a little bit is Breathe Right nasal strips. They will often open up the nasal passages enough that I no longer have to struggle to breathe through my nose. If I'm only slightly congested, I use these. I don't know if the increased air flow would be enough to keep you asleep or not, but it's probably worth a try.

For the most part, I have pretty much adapted to function on a few hours' worth of sleep. I can go on a three hour nap twice a day for an indefinite length of time. I don't know if that is enough rest to fully clean up the brain, but I don't feel crappy all the time so I suppose it's good enough. It definitely works better for me than sleeping for 6 hours once a day. I typically sleep in on the weekends, but I recently saw an article claiming that isn't enough to erase slept debt accumulated during the week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Same old story, primitive stop-the-world GC ;)

<comment><USER8> Have you tried the new polyphasic garbage collector?

<comment><USER9> It is very toxic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _" The brain only has limited energy at its disposal and it appears that it must choose between two different functional states - awake and aware or asleep and cleaning up,"_

Sure sounds like part of the wake-sleep algorithm, which is impressive given that the wake-sleep algorithm was named in the mid-90s.

<comment><USER11> > "The brain ... must choose between two different functional states - <USER2> > and aware or asleep and cleaning up"

As any lucid dreamer can tell you, there's also a third option--asleep and aware.

<comment><USER12> Not to mention hypnagogic / sleep paralysis - mind awake, body asleep.

<comment><USER13> Except both of these are rare occurences that last a short while - it would probably be very detrimental to have lucid dreams or sleep paralysis every night for months/years.

<comment><USER12> Oh I find sleep paralysis very unrestful. The point is though, there are more mental states than "awake/asleep".

And let me tell you, sleep paralysis is not always rare...

<comment><USER14> I'm narcoleptic. Sleep paralysis happens pretty often to me and it still causes me distress almost every time until I "boot up" enough to realize what is going on.

Hypnagogic hallucinations (at least that I remember) are quite a bit rarer and much more terrifying, since my brain pretty much dreams up the worst possible scenarios possible (burning building, demons, reapers, Sasquatch, being dead in a morgue drawer, and even evil leprechauns have made appearances).

<comment><USER12> Don't forget the alien strobe lights. Sorry now you are gonna see that too.

In all seriousness, wiggle your big toe. For some reason your fine motor controls are probably still online, and it will break you out of the hypnagogic state. Kill bill wasn't lying.

But... if you wanna real trip, try to remain calm, still and breathe deeply through the hallucinations and keep in mind that nothing can hurt you (I like to repeat the mantra, "there is nothing to fear but fear itself").

You will reach a state of blissful calm. Congratulations, you just achieved a meditative state that people strive for years to reach. From there you can have out of body experiences, transcendental meditation, etc. Seriously it's some spooky business.

<comment><USER14> For some odd reason, I don't really see flashing lights or anything extraterrestrial. I don't know why.

And wiggling my toes or fingers doesn't seem to ever work for me, but my phone buzzing or someone touching me breaks me out almost instantly.

As for the calm, "astral projecting" thing, I used to do some things like that and really enjoyed it, until I ended up "seeing" some jackal-headed monstrosity battling shadow people and something that looked like smoke with diamond shaped blazing yellow eyes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why does everyone in this thread want to get rid of sleep? I like sleeping, and dreaming. 24-7 consciousness in the name of increased productivity sounds like a nightmare, no pun intended.

<comment><USER16> How can you enjoy something you're not conscious of? What you likely enjoy is the 5-30 minutes as you're falling asleep, and the 5-60 minutes as you're waking up.

If we could get the actual sleeping time to 1 minute, but keep the rest the same, surely that would be strictly better in terms of human utility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Can anyone with better knowledge of such things explain why this has to occur during sleep? Is there just too much going on during the day to dedicate physical and mental resources to this type of cleaning?

<comment><USER18> > [Dr Nedergaard] told the BBC: "This is purely speculation, but it looks like > the brain is losing a lot of energy when pumping water across the brain and > that is probably incompatible with processing information."

<comment><USER19> The question on everyone's mind now is, can you bypass that need?

<comment><USER20> I have a sneaking suspicion that would be like pumping oxygen directly into the blood and then trying to hold your breath - even though you technically don't need to breathe, millions of years of evolutionary tricks will make sure you do. Try telling your brain that it does not need to sleep after 72 hours just because you have cleared up the toxins

<comment><USER21> Actually, this would work. But O2 isn't the problem, the CO2 is. You'll need a process to filter the CO2 out of your blood, as that's what causes your body's breathing reflex to occur. If you could filter the CO2 from the blood stream, while also providing O2, you would literally not need to breath.

"Intravenous Oxygen Injection For Patients Who Cannot Breathe" [http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/247295.php](http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/247295.php)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Fascinating. An average 60 year old man sleeps for 20 years (considering a normal 8 hr a day sleep) that is 1/3 of his life. A polar bear and some other hibernating animals sleep for half of their lives. Amazingly polar bear is cognizant enough to feed her baby while she is sleeping.

Sleep also lowers the heart beat. It is generally accepted that all mammals have the same life span in number of hear beats. An elephant lives longer than a mouse because it's heart beats slower. Could that mean that people who live longer generally sleep more.

Whales are known to live for a long time. Wonder how much they sleep.

<comment><USER23> > It is generally accepted that all mammals have the same life span in number > of heart beats.

Please note that while there is some correlation it may not be strict enough to suggest that lowering your own heart rate will help you live longer.

[http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/5701/does- every-...](http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/5701/does-every- species-get-around-a-billion-heartbeats-on-average)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I always wondered about how split-brain theory would work into this...

I mean there are stories of people with half their brain removed who are fully functional (I think? I can't find a source atm).

I wonder what would happen if half your brain could be on/off and switch?

Also you'd think that any mutation optimizing for time awake would have decimated the other creatures? I don't get how evolution has conquered everything but sleep.

<comment><USER25> On that post about a bird that fly for 6 months in a row there were a discussion about the sleep in animals. Some of them are able to sleep alternating one half sleeping and the other aware of the environment. And there is speculation if that bird could sleep while flying.

I think half brain awake is not enough to have a fully functional life. I also heard about people losing part of their brain and adapting to deal with it. But that doesn't mean a brain doesn't need that part. It is like the fallacy of using only 10% of the brain. The brain is very well used and optmized for performance, if you lose part of it, it would adapt to compensate what is missing, but it will not be optimized anymore.

Disclosure: just guessing here, I have no scientific knowledge or background at all to support these claims of mine.

<comment><USER26> In the case of the bird, it may not need fully optimized brain to fly. So it might be acceptable to have reduced brain performance as a tradeoff for longer awakeness, especially if you could _recharge_ under reduced performance and then go back to fully awake (and rested).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Wikipedia has a decent article on the glymphatic system, which clears waste products from the brain:

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

The brain and spinal cord have no lymphatic circulation, which handles waste removal for the rest of the body.

</comment><comment><USER28> Awesome. One very (very very) small step closer to creating a pill to help the flushing process so we may sleep less, or not at all.

<comment><USER29> Seems unlikely. Essentially _all_ animals with a brain sleep, even flies. You'd need to find a pill that could do something that not one animal was able to evolve to do over hundreds of millions of years. Something that was extremely calorie intensive is all I can imagine.

<comment><USER30> I appreciate your logic, but there is a wide variety of needed levels of sleep among different animals, and even among different individual humans which tells me that some are more efficient than others at sleeping (maybe clearing toxins?).

As efficient as evolution is, the ability not to sleep as much may not be a huge determinant in reproduction. Just 100 years ago, people worked all day, then relaxed and slept. There was little to no demand for not sleeping at all from a survival standpoint.

The main reason people want to stay awake all night now is to work more and advance their careers. You don't need that for survival.

Further, Pharma companies have done some amazing things. While I agree that it is unlikely soon, I am confident that if humans are around in 200 years, it becomes much, much more likely.

<comment><USER31> What is likely to be true is the pharmaceuticals will allow a conscious choice among a menu of tradeoffs, on a daily basis.

Such tradeoffs might be possible now, for those with sufficient discipline, but switching between very different ones is too hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It would be nice if my computer did all scan/cleanup defrag ops after I shut it down and go to sleep

</comment><comment><USER33> A "toxin" is something which is toxic to a system. But our knowledge of the brain is so primitive that we can't reasonably claim to know which chemicals are toxic at tiny, long-term dosage levels, unless it leads to death. There is no evidence that it's possible to die directly from sleep deprivation. Therefore this seems a dubious headline.

<comment><USER34> If you don't sleep for long enough (about 7 days), you'll start to have visual and auditory hallucinations and also delusional thinking. You'll also experience severely reduced effectiveness of just about every system in your body. You might not die if you don't sleep for a year (say), but you'll probably get permanent brain damage.

<comment><USER33> The point of science is to never fall back on claims like "you'll probably get permanent brain damage" unless it's known what brain damage you may get, along with bounds on a confidence interval. Otherwise we're just philosophizing.

<comment><USER34> Well, it's a testable hypothesis. We will probably never test it in humans or higher mammals due to ethical concerns.

<comment><USER35> may be we willn't as we already did. Google "sleep deprivation experiment".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> As someone in their early 20s with a sleep disorder this freaks me out!

</comment><comment><USER37> Does it flush the toxins if you take sleeping pills?

</comment><comment><USER38> Any implications for napping?

</comment><comment> _-_-_- When I hear "toxins", I think of a developer on a project I helped manage. He was having health problems so he had to take a 1-1.5 month sabbatical to India to be cleansed of toxins. If I remember correctly the end result was that he quit.

While I do believe there that the body cleanses itself from toxins, and I can't say for certain whether the developer that left us got his toxins cleansed or not, this article and study smells of B.S.

The second tip off is the quoted doctor's name: Dr. Nedergaard

Scientists with Dutch/Scandinavian names always seem to produce the most crap science on average in my experience. I have no idea why, but I've noticed it. Especially when it comes to the "positive affects" of pot. I know that is an over-generalization, but someone should do a study on that to see if it's true. Preferably one without as many A's in his/her last name.

<comment><USER39> Well the trophy for most BS per capita definitely goes to the Chinese.Unfortunately If I see a chinese name on an IEEE article and it's not from a reputable university, I skip it.

As for clearing out toxins. It's been known for years that sleep clears free radicals from the brain. That's why very long term sleep deprivation can led to brain damage, and why if you take modafinil you aren't shielded from the physiological adverse effects of sleep deprivations (though mentally you'll be fine).</comment></comment>


OpenHMD 0.3.0 'Djungelvral' Released - <AUTHOR> http://www.openhmd.net/index.php/2019/07/12/openhmd-0-3-0-djungelvral-released/ <comment><AUTHOR> > OpenHMD aims to provide a Free and Open Source API and drivers for immersive > technology, such as head mounted displays with built in head tracking. Our > aim is to implement support for as many devices as possible in a portable, > cross-platform package.

> OpenHMD supports a wide range of devices such as Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Sony > PSVR, Deepoon E2 and others. We also support a Generic Android driver and a > External Sensor data driver to allow the use of our Sensor Fusion and > features, while providing your own data.</comment>


Funding the Web with Brendan Eich [audio] - <AUTHOR> https://changelog.com/rfc/11 <comment><USER2> I regret I named Giorgios Kontaxis when I meant Constantine Dovrolis ([http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~dovrolis/Papers/evoarch- extended.p...](http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~dovrolis/Papers/evoarch- extended.pdf)) at one point. I usually keep Greek names as well memorized as any others!

<comment><USER3> While you're here... did you that know brave.com has an invalid TLS certificate? The trust chain goes up to a GlobalSign intermediate CA cert (SHA1 fingerprint B4 18 B3 2D B3 B8 CF 9F DF A1 9C C3 12 16 85 2F CC 82 86 E3) which has been revoked.

<comment><USER4> Are you suffering from this?

[https://www.globalsign.com/en/customer-revocation- error/](https://www.globalsign.com/en/customer-revocation-error/)

<comment><USER3> Nice link but I think it's something beyond what they describe, because they say:

"The problem will correct itself in 4 days as the cached responses expire..."

when in fact it has been way more than 4 days. So possibly my particular client has an issue that this help page doesn't address.

Edit: and now reading more closely this page is clearly aimed at GlobalSign customers, not at end users like me who are trying to access sites of GlobalSign customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a great podcast episode. I recommend listening to it with zero distractions though, because Eich speaks at a pretty brisk clip and assumes listeners know what he's referring to. I like that, because sometimes I have to speed up the audio a bit on other podcasts.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have worked at cloudera, intel and a few other firms in the valley. I now do a bit of work for brave and I will have to say they are the real deal. Total badasses led by the king of the nerds (IMHO) eich themselves.

</comment><comment><USER7> As always with the RFC podcast I really enjoyed the episode, and Brave sounds intriguIng, so I've downloaded it. That being said, I missed the usual back- and-forth of the podcast. What I like about the show is that the hosts usually add a lot of value to the conversation, but this was mostly Brendan talking about Brave. I had hoped for a broader look at "how to fund the web", taking into account other experiments such as paywalls, the Acceptable Ads initiative, Blendle or whatever is on your collective radar.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you think brave is cool now just wait for 1.0 . Some of the features are going to be mind boggling.

<comment><USER8> But what's the point of doing 'mind boggling' features for a browser that's only going to have 0.00000000001% market share?

Even Mozilla is fighting a HUGE uphill battle to stay current and they have enormous funding and mind / market share compared to Brave.

Then there are Edge and Chrome, both of which are supported by multi-national corporations with infinite resources.

It's certainly not impossible for Brave to succeed, but its chances of ever gathering any significant market share are vanishingly small. If for no other reason than Brave will have to get tens / hundreds of millions of people to change their behavior in order for them to gain any significant share.

I feel like it's game over for any new browser that doesn't have some utterly astonishing new value proposition.

<comment><USER9> That reasoning applies to many startups. You should give motivational speeches in SV.

What were Mozilla's odds when they took on IE and Microsoft? What were Facebook's chances against MySpace, backed by multinational News Corp? Airbnb against the entire hotel industry, which has a few multinationals in it?

<comment><USER10> > What were Mozilla's odds when they took on IE and Microsoft?

Pretty good given they had the backing of Netscape. (Even if AOL messed them around at the time.) I recall that Mozilla 1.0's value proposition to naive users at the time was "No popups" \- even in 2002, adblock-like behaviour was a selling point. (The value proposition to geeks was vastly different and more elaborate, but "Mozilla blocks popups" was radical enough to make it into web comics.)

<comment><USER2> Where were you in 2002 (when Mozilla 1.0 came out, four years after mozilla.org was founded, two years before Firefox 1.0)? The conventional wisdom then was the same as the comment up two from yours in this thread -- that we had zero chance against IE, which had monopolized the browser market. No one had ever beaten Microsoft then in any market it had taken over.

It would help if you were on the record way back then, as opposed to now, about how good our odds were. Because everyone from VCs to bigcos (IBM, Sun) to many of our own people saw very long odds against us retaking any browser market share, let alone enough to restart browser competition.

Lots of people leave comments years later about how stuff I did was easy. I expect the same will go for Brave's success. I'll do my best to make history repeat.

<comment><USER11> I think he was working on the start page for Mozilla 1.0 in 2002. The credits page [0] for the 1.5 start page lists him among the contributors to 1.0's.

I couldn't find any remarks from him in 2002 about Mozilla's chances, but in 2001 he said "I think not. In a world of free browsers, the flavour of the month can change like _that_." [1] in response to a mailing list message saying that Mozilla would not be viable competition on Windows due to bugs, which is somewhat less optimistic than the "pretty good" odds in hindsight, but it's much more so than "very long odds against us retaking any browser market share".

[0]: [http://www-archive.mozilla.org/start/1.5/credits.html](http://www- archive.mozilla.org/start/1.5/credits.html) [1]: [http://marc.info/?l=mozilla- ui&m=100168107415632&q=raw](http://marc.info/?l=mozilla- ui&m=100168107415632&q=raw)

<comment><USER10> I was working on the documentation for 1.0 [http://www- archive.mozilla.org/start/1.0/](http://www-archive.mozilla.org/start/1.0/)

Specifically I co-wrote the 1.0 FAQ [http://www- archive.mozilla.org/start/1.0/faq/](http://www- archive.mozilla.org/start/1.0/faq/)

I also wrote (and Gerv hacked right down) the page explaining Open Source/Free Software (while trying to keep both camps happy) [http://www- archive.mozilla.org/start/1.0/opensource.html](http://www- archive.mozilla.org/start/1.0/opensource.html)

I'd basically been a volunteer tester and bug reporter through 2000 and 2001. Mozilla wasn't a good browser then, it was rubbish and it crashed _even more_ than IE5. But it was _important_ to keep testing it and crashing it and sending in the talkback crash dumps and so on.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, sorry I didn't remember you or check about:credits.

Now the part you didn't answer: did you lay good odds at the time?

Not putting you down at all if you did not. If you had, my hat would be off to you -- and you should try predicting other stuff, and betting large if you are accurate!

Again, the notion of Mozilla succeeding in any restart-the-browser gambit was considered long odds by all pundits and almost everyone involved in Mozilla at the time. Phoenix (née mozilla/browser) was a pirate ship in 2002.

<comment><USER10> I must say I didn't quite :-) I figured it was an uphill battle, but I _did_ figure we were in with a chance. That even with a big fat Netscaped Mozilla, it was not hopeless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is an absolutely terrific podcast. Two other great ones from the Changelog guys:

\- Andrew Godwin on Django / Django Channels / Python - [https://changelog.com/podcast/229](https://changelog.com/podcast/229)

\- Eli Bixby on Tensorflow / Deep Learning -[https://changelog.com/podcast/219](https://changelog.com/podcast/219)

Would love to hear other podcasts people enjoy.

<comment><USER13> _" Wrath of the Khans"_ series from Hardcore History.

[http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore- history-43-wrath-o...](http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore- history-43-wrath-of-the-khans-i/)

<comment><USER14> Blueprint for Armageddon was also fantastic. Still recent enough that you can download it for free, by the way.

[http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore- history-50-bluepri...](http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore- history-50-blueprint-for-armageddon-i/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is there any good tool to turn Audio into transcript? It took longer for me to listen than read.

<comment><USER16> I'd be interested as well. Youtube apparently has some thing, but I don't know of anything standalone.

<comment><USER17> See my adjacent comment. Also, to add some more info here; the site will soon allow you to share the transcripts, so we don't all have to upload a copy for ourselves. We're also building editing / revision tools.

<comment><USER16> Cheers!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Transcript / summary?

<comment><AUTHOR> A lot of interesting stuff: search revenue tapering off because of rising mobile usage, ransomware being spread through ad exchanges, owning your own data and privacy, using zero knowledge proofs for distributing revenue to publishers through brave, tiers of privacy and monetization strategies around it, sustainability issues around browser development and open source software in general, shared costs of platform code and how open source fits into that, etc.

You really should listen to it. Brendan Eich is a really smart person.

<comment><USER19> Anything concrete I can do today as a (web) app developer?

<comment><AUTHOR> Respect user privacy. Read up on zero-knowledge proofs and how they can be used to validate client claims without leaking their data. Those are the two that come to mind first. I'm sure there is plenty more to be gleaned from the interview.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I love how you used the "[audio]" tag in your title.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't. It was done on my behalf by the moderators.</comment></comment>