Whither Speech Recognition? (1969) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0155/01c4d26a92993332ada795e27b126ae3028a.pdf <comment><USER2> This quote by William James from 1899 struck me as important:

> How little we actually hear, when we listen to speech, we realize when we go > to a foreign theatre - for there what troubles us is not so much that we > cannot understand what the actors say as that we cannot hear their words.

As a non-native speaker of English, I started watching English movies with subtitles when I was a teenager. This had an interesting effect: after a few years of doing this, I am now used to knowing each word that is spoken in a movie exactly, on its own - after all, it is clearly printed on the screen.

I now get nervous watching movies in my native language (German) without subtitles, simply because I am not able to extract each word precisely. Somehow I trained myself to expect an exact "acoustic" understanding from movies, as opposed to a "semantic" understanding. It is incredibly how the human brain is able to extract the meaning of a spoken sentence by context, facial expressions and gesture, even if we only understand half of the sentence acoustically.

</comment><comment><USER3> This note from 1969 implies that speech-recognition researchers were hardly more than charlatans. [http://www.dragon-medical- transcription.com/history_speech_r...](http://www.dragon-medical- transcription.com/history_speech_recognition.html) says that the founders of Dragon Systems (iirc the first successful speech-recognition company) started in 1970. (Though they didn't start the company until 1982.)

So in retrospect I'd guess the level of funding at the time was closer to right than this critique, even if most of the work was flimflam. (The author wrote a popular book about information theory which I liked, so this is disappointing.)

</comment><comment><USER4> Speech recognition is great (when it works) for when you need hands-free control of a machine. The big issue with it, though, is that no-one seems to want to publish any reference as to exactly what commands you can use. It's not a natural language interface (and I'd argue that we don't yet have the technical capability for a real natural language interface) so you're left with the equivalent of a command line without any way to discover ccommands. Touchscreen gesture interfaces have the same problem, implementers are too busy trying to maintain the illusion that it's "intuitive" to actually explain the secret handshakes you're meant to use with them.

</comment><comment><USER5> They claimed 95% correctness 50 years ago.

When am I going to wake up and be able to dictate into my phone and make corrections with my voice? We must be close.

I don't mind the mistakes made when dictating but having to pull up the keyboard takes away from the "magic".

<comment><USER6> 95% on a tiny vocabulary (like the digits) spoken clearly and distinctly by a single speaker. The author's point was that this is very nearly useless.

Dictating with corrections is a UI issue. I already dictate messages to my phone running Android Auto, and it confirms the entire message. To make corrections, I have to say the entire message again. It would be better if I could just restate the part that was heard wrong and let the application figure out which part to replace, and this is entirely doable today with the available building blocks. Just don't expect a Google product manager to figure that out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> We can do "sound pressure wave to phoneme stream" pretty darn well, and in way that generalizes to anything you have a phonetic mapping for. (cf DeepSpeech, etc)

Going from text stream of phonemes ("mmaaaayyynaammeezzzbahhhb") to text stream of sequence of words ("my name is bob")is vastly more limited.

One of them is speech recognition, the other is language modeling.

language _comprehension_? From experience, it's cheaper and faster to get results by making a new human :)</comment>


Show HN: Simple PRNG from Btoa() and Xor - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/crislin2046/tarobox <comment><USER2> Is non-compressability a proper test for prng algorithms?

One method I know of is to seed 0x00h (binary all zero) or 0x00h - 1 (binary all 1 bits), and then mapcar every sequential set of 3 pseudo random numbers to a function that plots them onto a 3D graph as XYZ coordinates. Then count how many of those triplets have to be generated before it produces a solid 3d cube with no holes.

This often produces really interesting visual patterns for prngs that fail, and also directly tells you how efficient the algorithm is (or isn't, as the case may be).</comment>


What are your rabbit holes on the internet? (For instance, HN one we all share) - <AUTHOR> If some of yours are controversial, please don't sit tight - make a throwaway account <comment><USER2> For me it's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics)

I'm an engineer by schooling but I've worked as a quant for the past 10 years. This means that I know a whole lot of "applied" math but will get tripped up by the formal terminology used.

This usually means I google a term and end up on wikipedia, where learning that term leads me to realized I need to look up the formal definition of another term, rinse and repeat.

As an example from my browser history, I was just reading

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

for fun which lead to:

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

which lead to:

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

which lead to:

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

<comment><USER3> My complaint about mathematics (and similar) articles is that they seem to be written for technical correctness, but not for instructional purposes.

So people who already understand the concepts can nod and agree "I find nothing (further) wrong with that," while learners definitely fall down a rabbit hole of successive links. At times it seems more like lawyering than teaching.

I've considered the argument that Wikipedia isn't meant for that purpose, that it's simply a repository for formulas and such, but I don't believe that agrees with any idea of human advancement and learning, and the site's own mission statement reads "to collect and develop educational content."

<comment><USER4> I for one, would find a lot of value in a mathematics encyclopedia slanted towards learning instead of mere technical correctness.

Wikipedia's physics articles suffer from the same problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://tvtropes.org/](http://tvtropes.org/) As an fiction writer wannabe, this site is both inspirational and disheartening. There are no new ideas under the sun but the variety and potential for new combinations is dizzying!

[https://boardgamegeek.com/](https://boardgamegeek.com/) All the information about boardgames you could consume in about four thousand lifetimes.

</comment><comment><USER6> Not 100% sure what you mean by rabbit hole tbh. But here goes:

[http://pastebin.com/trends](http://pastebin.com/trends)

[https://github.com/trending](https://github.com/trending)

[https://security.stackexchange.com/](https://security.stackexchange.com/)

/r/datahoarder /r/stallmanwasright

IRC _

</comment><comment><USER7> [http://lesswrong.com](http://lesswrong.com) [http://www.semanticscholar.org](http://www.semanticscholar.org)

And more recently, the homepage of some researchers, including:

[http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~rsalakhu/publications.html](http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~rsalakhu/publications.html)

[http://web.mit.edu/cocosci/josh.html](http://web.mit.edu/cocosci/josh.html)

[http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/](http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/)

[http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/](http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/)

So much good stuff

</comment><comment><USER8> [http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/](http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/) Economics/politics/finance blog by yves smith [http://www.zerohedge.com/](http://www.zerohedge.com/) Anti-establishment finance/economics/politics

<comment><USER9> I used to love ZeroHedge, but their signal:noise seems to have gone way downhill in the last year or two. There was always more than a healthy dose of paranoia and unconfirmed news, but it's gotten harder and harder to find the "good stuff".

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The question isn't restricted to technology sites, but I'll restrict the context of my answer that way. I've struggled to find sites that are similar to HN. Subreddits are about the closest thing:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/coding](https://www.reddit.com/r/coding)

\+ Numerous other subreddits for every language/technology.

I really wish there was something just like HN, but for videos (like hour long talks). Does anyone know of any?

<comment><USER11> You might like the Lectures subreddit.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/lectures/](https://www.reddit.com/r/lectures/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> [https://www.quora.com/](https://www.quora.com/)

</comment><comment><USER13> [http://waitbutwhy.com/](http://waitbutwhy.com/)

Gives great insights in various matters for simpletons like myself.

</comment><comment><USER14> On a more lighthearted note, I've given more time to slither.io than I would like to admit...

<comment><USER15> It's a great game to play locally on my phone, but I find the online version usually lags so much as to be unplayable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Matt Levine's Money Stuff: The further down the link stack you go the weirder it gets.

Slate Star Codex: A bit out of the mainstream, and he clearly has much more contact with people far, far outside of it.

<comment><USER17> I really enjoy Matt Levine's work. His articles on insider trading are simply some of the most enjoyable stuff I've read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wikipedia. I will often get there looking for something specific, and end up following multiple links, opening dozens of tabs and spending several hours reading about various topics.

</comment><comment><USER19> I like to read the major online news sources from different countries and compare:

[http://www.liberation.fr/](http://www.liberation.fr/)

[http://www.lemonde.fr/](http://www.lemonde.fr/)

[http://elpais.com/](http://elpais.com/)

[http://www.bbc.com/news](http://www.bbc.com/news)

[http://www.npr.org/](http://www.npr.org/)

[http://tass.ru/en/world](http://tass.ru/en/world)

It's really quite surprising the differences you'll see as far as what is covered, how it's covered, and the placement & size of the articles. Not to mention of course the content & bias of the articles.

By combining the different views, I like to think I'm able to get a more complete picture of the "truth", although as you can see I read relatively left-leaning publications (apart from TASS, obviously) so that is not to say my worldview is completely fair and unbiased.

Other than that the usual techie stuff: ars technica, phoronix, nautilus, etc

</comment><comment><USER9> My biggest one is "Arfcom" \- ar15.com.

The General Discussion forum (www.ar15.com/forums/f_1/5_General_Discussion.html) there is my primary source for breaking news. The community is big enough there's almost always someone involved in whatever is going on, but small and targeted enough that there isn't a lot of arguments and tangents in those threads.

While it is a US-centric gun forum and very heavily conservative/libertarian, the community is far more tolerant of differing views than you would think. It's been interesting watching the older members adjust as niche groups have formed and made their presence known - LGBTQ people, bronies, furries, and anarchists off the top of my head. Finally, while you may get piled on if you post anti-gun views, you're not going to be banned for not agreeing with them. It's honestly one of the more tolerant and valuable forums on the net in my opinion.

<comment><USER20> Somehow, I am unable to picture an AR15-toting furry. Not that I'm trying very hard, mind you, but still, the concept boggles my mind.

Also, AR15-toting bronies (although, my naive mind is thinking fathers with daughters).

<comment><USER9> > Also, AR15-toting bronies (although, my naive mind is thinking fathers with > daughters).

Note the avatars and usernames: [http://www.ar15.com/forums/t_1_5/1887509_Score___.html](http://www.ar15.com/forums/t_1_5/1887509_Score___.html)

Come to think of it, the only bronies I know I met through that forum - so I can honestly say that all the bronies I know own AR-15s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Well, people have already mentioned TV Tropes and Reddit, but they're definitely two places I can spend hours on end browsing for content.

Other than that:

[http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/](http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/) \- If you like obscure games, this will keep you reading for hours. The amount of Japan only arcade games you probably never knew you wanted is insane.

[http://www.spriters-resource.com/](http://www.spriters-resource.com/) \- And its various associates for 3D models, textures and sounds. I can easily get sidetracked just looking for examples of strange games, tilesets or enemy sprites. If you're making a fan game or game mod... you'll probably spend more time here than actually making the game.

Various Wikis in general. Super Mario Wiki, Zelda Wiki and Bulbapedia can keep you reading for weeks if you're a fan of those franchises.

[https://tcrf.net/The_Cutting_Room_Floor](https://tcrf.net/The_Cutting_Room_Floor) \- A very large wiki for unused content in games. There's a lot of fascinating stuff there, and just looking for ridiculous developer rants can take up a fair amount of my time.

For example, this rather amusing rant about warez teams and the demoscene:

[https://tcrf.net/Final_Fight_(Amiga)](https://tcrf.net/Final_Fight_\(Amiga\))

Forums in general. If I find a new forum, I'm probably not doing anything else for the next weekend or so while I try (and sometimes fail) at catching up on what happened over the last ten years.

[http://www.suppermariobroth.com/](http://www.suppermariobroth.com/) \- Yeah, it's pretty obvious what my focus is when it comes to the internet. But it's basically one very long feed of Mario tech gimmickry and randomness and it makes for one hell of a trivia source.

</comment><comment> lloyd-christmas Compulsively reloading SO tags that I follow. Usually I can find questions I can't answer, which leads down the rabbit hole of learning it. Maybe I can even end up answering it by the end. win/win.

</comment><comment><USER22> The setup at [https://usesthis.com/](https://usesthis.com/) What do people use to get stuff done

</comment><comment><USER23> A few times each year I come back to Randal Munroe's "What If" [1]. By then I've forgotten where I left off last time and just kinda binge-read them over the course of a few days. If anyone here hasn't seen them yet (or, like me, hasn't checked in for some time), do yourself a favour and do it.

[1] [https://what-if.xkcd.com](https://what-if.xkcd.com)

</comment><comment><USER24> [http://fanlore.org/wiki/](http://fanlore.org/wiki/)

A wiki of nerd fandom stretching back to the 50s. I can spend hours just hitting "Random Article" and seeing the minutes of a meeting on Starsky and Hutch slashfiction in some hotel in 1978.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm surprised no one has mentioned the Drudge Report. I'ts like Hacker News minus the comments, but for politics and also odd/unusual stories. [http://www.drudgereport.com/](http://www.drudgereport.com/)

<comment><USER26> His ad networks have historically delivered too much malware.

We blocked it at work during one such episode many, many years ago, and got crazy complaints from the call centers about IT being part of a vast left wing conspiracy. Funny thing is that our boss was a county conservative party chairperson.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Twitter is a big one. Sometimes you just find that someone retweeted somebody else or that someone replied to them so you just peek into their page and you scroll down and occasionally find something interesting or funny; repeat until I'm tired of it.

</comment><comment><USER28> [http://tvtropes.org/](http://tvtropes.org/) – click on the blue «Random Trope» button (or it is a pill? — a trope!) and get bogged down in interesting stuff about how stories are made.

</comment><comment><USER29> Being and Time by Heidegger, a never-ending book; the same for [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach)

</comment><comment><USER30> Currently, most of the links within this thread are becoming rabbit holes for me.

</comment><comment><USER31> [http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?DougMerritt](http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?DougMerritt) used to be (not that particular page, even though it could)

</comment><comment><USER32> Software Engineering Daily www.softwareengineeringdaily.com

</comment><comment><USER33> About once a month I start watching Larry Bird clips on Youtube, which sends me down a rabbit hole of 80s and on NBA.

</comment><comment><USER34> Internet Archive's texts collection.

</comment><comment><USER35> englishrussia.com - some rather fascinating images from across the former Soviet Union. From "Lugansk 2016" to "Famous Soviet Salads" and everything inbetween.

</comment><comment><USER36> imgur.com for random entertainment

Wikipedia about random subjects I come up with

reddit.com/r/arduino and related for project ideas

hackaday.com

Edmunds.com car reviews, at least when car shopping

Random sites on Wikia about TV shows or video games.

</comment><comment><USER37> For bizarre non-fiction I peruse the DI archives.

damninteresting.com

</comment><comment><USER38> news.rollc.at, my personal feed aggregator. It pulls most content from HN & Reddit, but there's also a bunch of random blogs.

</comment><comment><USER39> marginalrevolution.com, a blog maintained by two Economics professors at GMU (more interesting than it sounds).</comment>


Seth's Blog: The big drop off - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/09/the-big-drop-off.html <comment><USER2> Seth writes something and it get's up-voted because it's Seth. Pretty standard.

<comment><USER3> Every time Seth is the author of an article, someone complains. Pretty standard.

<comment><USER2> Witty, but untrue. Seth has some very good articles; I have several bookmarked. However, sometimes Seth just can't resist stating the obvious. He can get away with it because of his reputation.

<comment><USER3> I hear where you're coming from, and in all likelihood you're probably right - but I couldn't resist ;)

However, upvotes and insightful commentary are actions (in aggregate) that would encourage quality articles to rise above a so-so article driven (mostly) by celebrity

<comment><USER2> By that reasoning, my complaint was actually useful because in decreased the value of the aggregate. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I liked this. I never thought about it this way. Short. To the point. Seems interesting and useful.

</comment><comment><USER5> What he says is very true, but let me take it one step further. Great marketers spend their time developing products/services/stories that don't drop off, but they also spend their time encouraging their first circle to talk to their second circle.

</comment><comment><USER6> Translation?

<comment><USER4> I think part of the cause of the big drop off may be the "release early philosophy". Sure, release early, but I think your early release needs to have a critical mass of utility to inspire the first circle to tell the second circle.

<comment><USER7> Well, the philosophy is release early and -often-

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Build retweetable content.</comment>


Private Spaceship Factory Opens for Business in Calif. Desert - <AUTHOR> http://www.space.com/13260-virgin-galactic-spaceship-factory-opens.html

<comment><USER2> Website is not loading for me. Cached version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?gcx=c&sourc...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?gcx=c&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.space.com%2F13260-virgin- galactic-spaceship-factory-opens.html)</comment>


A look at the J language: the fine line between genius and insanity - <AUTHOR> http://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2012/09/18/a-look-at-the-j-language-the-fine-line-between-genius-and-insanity/

<comment><USER2> FTA:

> The C source code for this is intensely beautiful, and very concise. Go look > at it!

Which links to <https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona>

This has to be a joke - just pick a random file and tell me what is beautiful about that. LoseThos looks saner than this code.

<comment><USER3> They are just writing the C interpreter in a style that reassembles the target language as much as it is possible, I guess you would have to understand some K to better understand what they are up to in the C code.

<comment><AUTHOR> It brought up memories of the original Bourne shell source code which used a plethora of CPP magic to make the code look more Algol-ish, and thus similar to its final product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> On a related note, have a look at the one page prototype interpreter by Arthur Whitney that later became J, a true work of art:

<http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Essays/Incunabulum>

<comment><USER4> Like art is also isn't terribly practical.

<comment><USER5> That page of code is a known classic that gave rise to two brilliant language implementations (J and K). It is highly practical. It's just unfamiliar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ah, I love (at least the idea) of the APL languages. My go-to programming syntax mindbender is this video of programming Conway's Game of Life in APL:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4>

J is like that but without the special keyboard. I haven't played around with J much, but I know that whenever I've finished a Project Euler problem and checked the forum afterwards for other solutions, the J folks have reduced my 100 line solution to one or two lines...

</comment><comment><USER7> Dear language creators

Stop creating non-googlable language names

R already is trouble enough, at least C is more known but still confusing

<comment><USER8> J the programming language is the first and third hit on Google.

I never get this criticism anyway, just add some context ("programming", "language", "snippets", "libs" or whatever) and just about anything will be easy to find. Surely beats those ugly unique names that people come up with, give me Go over Clojure any day.

<comment><USER9> 1 and 2 letter names cause trouble in other areas than pure Google search, mainly in search on specific web sites and forums.

For example searching for "Clojure" on Amazon is likely to find every book related to using Clojure. Searching for "Go" will come up with a lot of junk and searching for "Go programming" would not find any book with say "Go Development" or "Go Recipes". This leads to multiple searches with no guarantee you aren't missing a lot more.

How about trying to find a comparison of say Java and Go in a programming/technology forum, better hope that the forum supports 1 or 2 character searches and the threads have sensible labelling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A relevant question on the Quantitative Finance StackExchange as to whether J/JDB can be used as an effective replacement for Q/KDB+ can be read here: [http://quant.stackexchange.com/questions/1870/can-the-j- lang...](http://quant.stackexchange.com/questions/1870/can-the-j-language-be- used-as-an-effective-alternative-to-q-kdb)

<comment><USER11> From what I understand, J has a lot of problems with efficient implementation because array ranks (multi-dimensional arrays) influence how operations are carried out (<http://jsoftware.com/help/learning/07.htm>), and the ranks are not known in advance. [ranks also have horribly complicated semantics: <http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/rank1.htm>]

K doesn't have this problem because it only has vectors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have never failed to have fun when I hacked anything at all in J (or in Q/KDB+).

But I have also never done any hacking in J except in the context of little bits of code for personal amusement.

Once interesting observation - despite not really knowing J well (or Clojure or Common Lisp, other languages I hack around in on a limited basis), I somehow spend more time thinking about what I want to accomplish rather than how to do it . . .

</comment><comment><USER13> I found the codemonk series on J very entertaining as well: <http://drj11.wordpress.com/category/j/>

Does anyone on the board use J / K daily? What for?

<comment><USER14> I used Q (the 'friendly' version of K) heavily in my previous job. It was in a high frequency team at an investment bank. All of our tick data was stored in kdb databases. I was in research at the time. You could load the data into whatever your research environment was (R or Matlab for most people) but it was much faster to boot up a Q session and work with everything in-memory, 'closer to the metal'. To that end I wrote

* An order-book builder (which takes quote data and builds it into a data structure suitable for doing research). As I remember, it was one call to 'scan' with a very complicated scanning function.

* An event analysis tool, to let you ask questions like "what's the average response of this asset when event X happens". Used for anything from testing your trading strategies (how does this asset perform when I put a trade on) to news impact (how does this asset react around US employment data).

* Lots and lots of plotting functions. Q actually has some really nice in-built visualization tools (as long as you only want to visualize time series...)

And a bunch of other stuff I've now forgotten about. It's a fun language. I miss it a bit now I do all my work in Matlab.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's just mathematical notation. Why is that insane?

What is computing at its most basic level but maths?

If you can handle working with symbols, more power to you. If you can't, move on. It's like calling mathematicians insane because you cannot understand the symbols they use.

I'm never sure if the conditioning of programmers toward certain styles has been good or bad for computing overall. It's troubling when this conditioning causes us to reject what is obviously excellent and useful work. (_if_ we learn how to make use of it)

</comment><comment><USER15> "The problem is the price is not right for me at this stage."

Well, I'm pretty sure Whitney's enlightened path to k went through LISP, so maybe the author will get there one day. And LUSH seems a pretty nice choice of LISP's to work with - extendable, but not too big out of the box.

</comment><comment><USER16> Thanks for the nice intro to j. I've bookmarked it, and have put it on my list of things to explore.

Edit: Downloaded J and took a tour. It does look very compelling and I'm pretty sure I'll be back for more.

</comment><comment><USER17> Great article! Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER18> oh cool, j

</comment><comment><USER19> i'd rather code in brainfuck than this</comment>


The websites of all the YC companies look similar. Have they all been worked on by the same designer? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> No, but they've all been nagged to fix the same things, which tends to produce a certain similarity.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is encouraging. If folks with no previous design experience (assuming) can dish out beautiful html and css, that is indeed encouraging to the rest of us :) Any pointers to templates or design guides?

<comment><USER2> Our general rule is, if you don't have any graphic design sense (and only about 10% of founders do), just make the site as sparse as possible. Worked for Google.

In at least one case (reddit), the founders had a great sense of design and yet chose to make the site sparse anyway. This was because as a news site they wanted to emphasize the information on the page and make the site itself fade into the background.

<comment><USER3> I want to amplify the point about emphasizing user-supplied information. About a year ago when my alumni class started using ourdoings.com for class notes, I knew graphic design was lacking. I was surprised by comments like "the new format looks great." Then I figured out that by making the information/photos people wanted more accessible, they were more pleased by what they saw.

The design of ourdoings.com is relatively subtle, as most picture frames are, but back then it was even uglier than it is now. Nevertheless, people look at what they're interested in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think it's just a matter of following a few core design principles in the early stages. Many of the founders aren't designers and the sites were somewhat built learning from each other.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's the "Web 2.0" fashion, kind of like punk kids all making the same kind of skinny jeans.

<comment><USER6> There's probably some truth to this, but on the other hand, there are some good UI reasons for following conventions. Graphical conventions can make your application easier to use, because people already know them. The world of UI design is fulll of such conventions: red: stop, green: go, squares: check multiple, circles: check one. US light switches are easier to use than the European kind because they are more consistently mounted in the same direction. Designing UIs is all about finding metaphors that already make sense to people, either because they are used in the real world, or because they are used in some very popular systems people are already familiar with. (E.g., most desktop applications put "find" in the "edit" menu. Does it make sense? Not really. But by now, that's where people look, so that's where you should stick it.)

That said, there are some conventions in recently fashionable web applications that seem to be nothing but fashion. That's less of a UI design thing, and more of a marketing thing. Presumably, there is some sweet spot between total conformism and utter disregard for the contemporary norm that strikes the balance between attention-grabbing and comfort-instilling. Personally, I would say: when in doubt, keep it simple. (That's my personal taste speaking, not any kind of business experience.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd be curious if you think that of our new site at <http://www.virtualmin.com>

We were in WFP07, and just launched the new site this past weekend...it was designed during the time when we were talking to YC companies every week...I wonder if those discussions bred conformity.

<comment><USER8> It does look very similar to the YC sites, but that's not a bad thing at all - it looks very good, intuitive and beautiful.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Productive Alternatives to Slack? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking at https://twist.com right now.
Any options on that or other Slack alternatives?
I'd like something better than the Slack vomit of reading 10 interleaved conversations, no good list of unread threads, etc. <comment><USER2> Perhaps Basecamp is a viable alternative? [https://basecamp.com](https://basecamp.com)

At many of my projects I do have to use Slack, and for really big companies, it might be a good thing to have several announcement and talk-by-the-water- cooler channels. But once you get to several hundred channels and you subscribe to like 20 or 30 of them, you kind of lose track what you need to know and what now. Maybe a Slack-type chat isn't the most productive.

I like Basecamp because there's a talk-by-the-water-cooler tool (campfire), announcement and idea feedback tool (message board), some basic planning (to- dos). Though for detailed planning and coordination I use something else.

</comment><comment><USER3> Zulip is another option. [https://zulipchat.com/](https://zulipchat.com/)

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://twist.com](https://twist.com)

</comment><comment><USER5> Sounds like you want email.

</comment><comment><USER6> spectrum.chat or discordapp.com could be an alternative for you</comment>


Libra – a tool to browse and download more than 275 TB of open Landsat imagery - <AUTHOR> https://libra.developmentseed.org/ <comment><USER2> Is there a trick? I played around with all UI elements and just saw the schematic map, no hints of any imagery.

Update: 503 and CORS error on [https://vast- coast-1838.herokuapp.com/location](https://vast- coast-1838.herokuapp.com/location) "Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at [https://vast- coast-1838.herokuapp.com/location](https://vast- coast-1838.herokuapp.com/location). (Reason: CORS header 'Access-Control- Allow-Origin' missing)." I'm on Firefox 80. Maybe this helps.

</comment><comment><USER3> I do not understand why the list of available imagery disappears when I zoom in. I would expect it to show images that include the area I am looking at.

I checked to make sure that the small area I was looking at was covered by at least some available imagery.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not showing any results. In the browser console there is a CORS error, maybe related?

<comment><USER5> You have to adjust the timeline - top left calendar icon. Select some period between 2018 and 2019.

<comment><USER4> I've set it to 2013-2020 and still see nothing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This tool has been broken for a while, the API it uses has been deprecated.</comment>


"We Have Passed the Stage of Amateur Evil:" Scientists on the Atomic Bomb, 1945 - <AUTHOR> http://werehistory.org/atomic-bomb/ <comment><USER2> Picking out one random letter from one person who had a bad premonition around when the atomic bomb was dropped is pretty much the _exact opposite_ of evidence for anything at all.

<comment><USER3> This isn't about evidence. Eugene Cotton was right: "Man has openly begun to lay plans for his own destruction."</comment></comment>


Jekyll, the blog engine of kings - <AUTHOR> http://chrismdp.github.com/2009/12/jekyll/ <comment><USER2> There is a wonderful ruby/rake based static website generator <http://webby.rubyforge.org>. It offers a choice of templating languages (ERB, Textile, Markdown, HAML, SASS), and doesn't force you to use Liquid.

Jekyll is a spin-off of a server-side application. Safety features of Liquid templates make sense on the server, but for a desktop application using Liquid is completely pointless. In Webby you are free to do whatever you want with ruby using erb or haml.

Another killer feature is ability to write plugins for Webby in a snap. For example, Webby can process LaTeX snippets and generate formula images for your web page. There is even a gnuplot plugin that lets you plot data that you save alongside your document.

<comment><USER3> I tried Webby before and liked it. I'm now using Nanoc3[1], which has tagging and a lot of other nice features, especially for blogs, right out of the box.

[1] <http://nanoc.stoneship.org/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am thinking of switching my purely Jekyll based blog to using Octopress which is a blogging framework based on Jekyll and has these features :

* A nice, easy to configure theme that focuses on readability.

* Built in support for Twitter, Delicious, Disqus Comments, Google Analytics, and Custom Search.

* Rake tasks that make development fast, and deploying easy.

Github repo : <http://github.com/imathis/octopress>

</comment><comment><USER5> Jekyll is absolutely brilliant. There are a lot of static blog generation tools out there but this seems to work best for me. I dont use the github integration much (automatic publishing by pushing to github) but do store my site on a github repo.

The only downside as with any static site solution is comments. I currently use Disqus - I have no complaints with them except that I like to own my comments rather than hosting them with a 3rd party.

<comment><USER6> another downside is that you have to regenerate your whole site manually every time you make a small design change.

<comment><USER7> The more semantic you make your HTML, the less that this tends to matter. Right now I'm actually
ing and
ing my way around my site, so when I want to change the design, I head straight for the one place it's actually described: the CSS.

<comment> loup-vaillant Not to mention the template mechanism. With my (home made) site generation tool, I changed the whole design of my site by changing exactly 2 files : the template, and the css.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For the more adventurous, here a Haskell port. <http://github.com/jaspervdj/Hakyll>

</comment><comment><USER9> I played around with Jekyll a bit and while it's cool, there were a few things I didn't like, such as the fact that you're limited to one "posts" feed, rather than being able to easily publish arbitrary content and have multiple feeds. I also wanted to be able to use Haml instead of Liquid, and dump the configuration into my primary layout rather than in a separate file.

So I grabbed my yak-shaving kit, and rolled my own library in Lua. It's not entirely done, but I'm using it and it may be interesting to you if you like to work with Lua.

<http://github.com/norman/grackle>

</comment><comment><USER10> I had to use Jekyll the other day for something relatively small and it frustrated me, but that's because I've been using StaticMatic (<http://staticmatic.rubyforge.org/>) for about a year and, let me tell you, it's the bees' knees. The cat's pajamas, if you will. Haml, Sass, Rails-like templates, generates the html and css to upload to your site. I added a deploy script that minifies my css and js, and it's been a thrill to work with.

</comment><comment><USER11> I wish Hyde (the python equiv) had this much support/momentum.

<http://github.com/lakshmivyas/hyde>

<comment><USER12> There is also another Python one called Igor: <http://github.com/aconbere/igor>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> you might also try out utterson, a unix based variant (make, zsh, ksh, awk, m4, etc): <http://github.com/stef/utterson>

<comment><USER14> Does it really use both zsh and ksh? If you have to install two different shells for their functions, why not just use a real scripting language like Perl or Python?

<comment><USER13> unfortunately currently yes, but it is high on my list to reduce this to ksh only. but anyway everyone should have ksh for scripting and zsh for interactive shelling if you ask me. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Jekyll is a promising tool, but not having tags is a pain. Also, markup errors are silently swallowed when running jekyll --server --auto.

<comment><USER16> you can use categories as a yaml listing and that works.. just means the url for the post will become /cat1/cat2/date-title.html</comment></comment>


AI may be better than natural intelligence at coping with battlefield chaos - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/17572232?story_id=17572232?fsrc=spblg/251110

<comment><USER4> In an interview with Andy McNab (former member of the SAS and now a fairly successful author) in the Scotsman at the weekend I was rather surprised that he has been taking part in a UK research program to develop technology to suppress the parts of the brain that "implement" fear and empathy - <USER2> making a person more machine like. He was being studied as he clearly doesn't do much in the line of fear or empathy!

The interview is here:

[http://www.scotsman.com/spectrum/Interview-Andy-McNab- soldie...](http://www.scotsman.com/spectrum/Interview-Andy-McNab-soldier- and.6642566.jp)

The bit about the brain scans is on page 5:

[http://www.scotsman.com/spectrum/Interview-Andy-McNab- soldie...](http://www.scotsman.com/spectrum/Interview-Andy-McNab-soldier- and.6642566.jp?articlepage=5)

<comment><USER5> Sounds like the first step towards the Cybermen.

<comment><USER4> Or the neural "priming" mods from Greg Egan's _Quarantine_ \- or even, perhaps more alarmingly if the changes can be made semi-permanent, _focus_ from Vinge's _A Deepness in the Sky_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Autonomous battle robots making their own tactical and possibly strategic decisions? I see no way this could go wrong.

<comment><USER7> As opposed to tired, stressed and easily overwhelmed humans making tactical and strategic decisions? I share your concern but I don't think its impossible for an AI to get to the point where it makes less mistakes than a human.

<comment><USER6> The stereotypical danger isn't that they'll make fewer mistakes than a human, it's that the mistakes they do make will be much bigger--continually offloading decisionmaking and decision enforcement to AI without a coherent theory of friendliness is like using Martingale betting: You don't lose often, but it only takes one to wipe you out.

<comment><USER7> True. I would imagine that the way to use AI in the context of managing information overload on the battlefield is to have AIs prioritise information and propose options and have humans review the options and take decisions. By having the AI deal with incoming information and humans making the decisions you get the best of both worlds, at least with current technolody. Taking humans out of the loop entirely won't be a good idea for a long time yet.

<comment><USER8> Keeping humans in the loop doesn't do as much as we think, because humans have a natural inclination to trust computers. In a high-stress situation, such as a battlefield, a human will defer to a computer even if the computer reports information that, under normal circumstances, would be obviously false. In 1988, for example, the USS Vincennes shot down a civilian airliner because its AI targeting system had misidentified it as an enemy aircraft. Giving individual humans access to an off-switch is a pretty suboptimal way to prevent AIpocalypse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is a point to warfare. It is to make things so unpleasant for the other side that they have no choice but to submit.

The more we try to computerize warfare and make it antiseptic, the easier it becomes for us to ignore that fact. Admittedly this is effective - when we don't feel the pain of war we are able to inflict more of it - <USER3> fundamentally I think it is wrong.

<comment><USER10> Maybe war will evolve into an expensive, highly roboticised, chess game?

<comment><USER11> Maybe all war will condense to genocide.

<comment><USER10> I prefer my version, but I think you might have the edge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For more information, here is the project webpage: <http://www.aladdinproject.org/>

</comment><comment><USER12> The future of warfare is in robots making war time strategic decisions, guys, can't we just take this to its logical conclusion and settle matters over a nice game of chess.... Best 2 out of 3?

Ultimately war will exist entirely online, because all of the most important things will be in cyberspace. Once reality as we know it has been reduced to simply hosting the processors that host our made up worlds, then maybe we can permanently keep war where it should be, inside video games.

<comment><USER5> "The future of warfare is in robots making war time strategic decisions, guys, can't we just take this to its logical conclusion and settle matters over a nice game of chess.... Best 2 out of 3?"

This was the plot of a Star Trek episode, where the losers had to docilely line up to be incinerated when the computer determined that they had been "killed" in the simulated battles. It was all much less messy that way.

Of course, when Kirk destroyed the incinerators (or was it the master computer?) they had to decide whether to fight the messy way, or maybe just not fight at all.</comment></comment>


German State Secretary Warns of "Megabit-Bombs" (Translated from German) - chupa-chups https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Fnewsticker%2Fmeldung%2FMaas-warnt-vor-Killer-Robotern-und-Bomben-mit-Megabits-4339339.html <comment><AUTHOR> That's pure clickbait. Here one can find the original speech of Maas:

[https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/de/newsroom/maas- konferenz-2...](https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/de/newsroom/maas- konferenz-2019-capturing-technology-rethinking-arms-control/2199790)

He actually said, he "dares to predict the next war will be fought not only by means of megabombs, but also by means of megabits and megabytes, as already done with [smart] bombs today". He explicitly refers to electronic warfare. However, this reference is peculated and distorted by the linked article. I'm not a fan of Maas, but that's nevertheless another example of journalistic degradation of Heise Online.</comment>


A Huge Leap Forward Graphics on the iPhone 3GS - <AUTHOR> http://www.mobileorchard.com/a-huge-leap-forward-graphics-on-the-iphone-3gs/

<comment><USER2> Are there any iPhone game developers here that want to share how they're going to make use of the 3GS? What's your plan? Dump the older models, only use the older API's or hack something together for both?

<comment><USER3> Multiple versions of the same application? Is the market large enough for 3GS exclusive titles? I hope to see continued support for 2/3G.</comment></comment>


Alternative to Evernote and Springpadit? - <AUTHOR>

Has anyone found a good alternative to Evernote and Springpadit? Something that's not so bloated but more than a to-do-list? Simple categories and basic tagging is all I'm looking for - photos and attachements aren't necessary. A mobile app is a plus. <comment><USER2> Here are a few to take a look at:

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/awesome-note- todo/id32020339...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/awesome-note- todo/id320203391?mt=8)

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/photomind-picture- reminders/...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/photomind-picture- reminders/id412456413?mt=8)

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lifetopix-calendars-to- do/id...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lifetopix-calendars-to- do/id399076264?mt=8)

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/awesome-note- todo/id32020339...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/awesome-note- todo/id320203391?mt=8)

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/2do-tasks-done-in- style/id30...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/2do-tasks-done-in- style/id303656546?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4)

<https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/clear/id493136154?mt=8>

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wunderlist-task- manager/id40...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wunderlist-task- manager/id406644151?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4)

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/toodledo-to-do- list/id292755...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/toodledo-to-do- list/id292755387?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4)

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/teuxdeux/id384291782?mt=8...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/teuxdeux/id384291782?mt=8&ign- mpt=uo%3D4)

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/orchestra-to- do/id459356540?...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/orchestra-to- do/id459356540?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4)

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/air-to-do-attractive- intuiti...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/air-to-do-attractive- intuitive/id407948043?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4)

Hope that helps!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I should add that I'd prefer a web app. And I'm on Windows Phone - an in browser app is fine too.</comment>


Ask HN: Worker queue with multi-dimensional rate limiting - <AUTHOR> I want to distribute tasks to worker nodes using a queue. The work depends on external resources.
The access to those needs to be rate limited across multiple dimensions (i.e. customer id, city, phone provider, there may be only 1 per customer id / second, 1000/city second and 20 / phone provider/second). The rate limit needs to apply to all worker nodes. My worker nodes share the same network.
How can I achieve that while maintaining a reasonable throughput? Any experience?
My naive attempt would be to use one leaky bucket per dimension implemented in Redis and check those prior accessing the resource. If there's no token in all the necessary buckets available, I would put the request back at the end of the queue.
Are there better ways to implement this? <comment><USER2> I'd do it in Postgres and use sql columns for all your qualifiers.

Refer SKIP LOCKED

</comment><comment><USER3> What _business_ problem are you trying to solve?</comment>


SpaceX will launch Masten's first lander to the moon in 2022 - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/26/spacex-will-launch-mastens-first-lander-to-the-moon-in-2022/ <comment><USER2> Potentially also of interest: Rocket Lab is planning to launch a cubesat to lunar orbit soon as well [https://www.rocketlabusa.com/lunar/](https://www.rocketlabusa.com/lunar/)

Then to Venus in 2023! [https://www.space.com/rocket-lab-private-venus- mission-2023....](https://www.space.com/rocket-lab-private-venus- mission-2023.html)</comment>


Eulisp, lisp dialect: lightweight and carefully designed like scheme, with object system like CL - <AUTHOR> http://people.bath.ac.uk/masjap/EuLisp/eulisp.html

<comment><USER2> Not _that_ new... from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EuLisp>

"Language definition process first began in a meeting in 1985 in Paris and took a long time. The complete specification and a first implementation (interpreted-only) was available in 1990."

Anyone care to speculate on why it didn't take off?</comment>


Ask HN: What do you want in the cloud? - <AUTHOR>

Following this presentation by Adam of Heroku, what do you think that is missing in the cloud?<p>http://www.slideshare.net/adamwiggins/cloud-services?from=ss_embed <comment><AUTHOR> He points out (quoting):

Database * Redis * Casandra * MySQL (RDS, while nice, isn't quite agile enough) * PostgreSQL

Queueing * RabbitMQ * Beanstalkd * Gearman

Other * Thinking Sphinx</comment>


How intellectual pollution has crippled America's children - <AUTHOR> http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2009/06/how-intellectual-pollution-has-crippled-americas-children.html

<comment><USER2> The article itself is intellectual garbage: a hodge-podge of guesses, social fables and random facts assembled on a web page.

He far overestimates parents' influence on children. Judith Rich Harris' work has proven that (for normal families, where parents don't traumatise their children) the peer group is far more important than parents in the child's development.

<comment><AUTHOR> "the peer group is far more important than parents in the child's development."

That's during the school years. I'm only talking about kids younger than four. Also, I'm talking about the cognitive development of structures which become relatively fixed after age five. (Like extraversion and executive function.) The peer group is more important than parenting, but only for predicting the trajectory of further academic achievement, which is completely different from the ways in which parenting styles affect cognitive, emotional, and physiological development.

EDIT: Also, speaking of peer groups, one of the reasons good parenting is critical is because schools sort children into different tracks as early as age six. In principle, track placement is temporary. In practice, it is quite permanent. To quote one researcher, "We found that first-grade ability-group placement can have persistent effects on children's achievement in school over a period of several years and may shape the expectations of children's performance held by significant others, such as parents and teachers. Whether these effects are instructional, social, or institutional, they are real, and they have implications for children's future schooling trajectories. […] Instructional grouping may have the unintended effect of increasing inequalities in educational outcomes, largely by creating inequalities in educational resources and rewards."

(This comes from Equality and Achievement, and also from Pallas et al. "Ability Group Effects: Instructional, Social, or Institutional?" Sociology of Education 67 (1994).)

<comment><USER3> A few semi-questions. Structures that become relatively fixed after five? This seems suspect. There are two major prunings of overgrowth of neurons: once soon after birth (where your case stands), once in puberty (where your case falls). I'm not the best at sources but without evidence in my face my guess would put post-puberty for the "relatively fixed" threshold, and common sense confirms this: "identity formation" = puberty. And identity formation basically means habits, which are also manifested in parenthood. As for executive functions, we're probably talking about white matter growth, which is mostly genetic. There could be swing cases, but if your white matter puts you firmly above or below your peers, there's no way in hell you will not perceive it and act on this knowledge -- unless there is some crazy conscious brainwashing going on, which doesn't apply in this case.

Amount of father time vs mother time, and type of father time vs mother time is unaddressed in your post but potentially a critical difference. Role models are important in gender role formation (and, no, we aren't all equal): a negligent father would imply less play-ball, a negligent mother would imply no breastfeeding... for whereever those lead. (I recall breadfed children grow to be less anxious)

Finally, I see a chicken and egg here -- what is your opinion about that? Suppose a borderline autist has a child. They turn out to be an aloof parent. Their child ends up being aloof as well, etc. Okay, that was a convenient example -- but really, how convenient? The kid with a submissive employee for a parent imbibes submissiveness through how they are reared; is this a learned and transferred behavior, or a preexisting tendency, a phenotype observed externally and possibly mistakenly over-credited to the environment?

/i make no reservations in stating my affinity to nature > nurture and determinism > free will

But, I totally agree that good parenting is important, overlooked, and underestimated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The terrible title and blaming Dr Spock for our cultural woes almost put me off the article. Below the fold he starts to make some interesting points. By age 4, higher income children have been talked to nearly 4 times as much as poor children. The encouragement/discouragement ratio is 2 to 1 whereas for poor children it is 1 to 2. He talks about the soccer mom phenomenon where every minute of a child's day is scheduled with some activity. He thinks that with the move to white collar work, there is too much emphasis on status and social climbing.

I agree with the over scheduling criticism. Kids now have too many formal activities and too much homework. I also wonder if two income families and early day care adversely affect the kids.

<comment><USER5> The language difference might not be as significant as Alex thinks. Steven Pinker criticizes studies of the kind that Hart and Risley did, where they measured language used with children and assumed that affected development. He says that causation is not established, and points to twin adoption studies that indicate that the causal factor affecting IQ is genetic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I thought the most interesting point was the one about what happens when you bring in a big, flat-screen TV -- you are introducing a highly culturally influential meme-blaster into your environment. I think it's debatable whether to call it pollution, but I have noticed that not having a TV leaves me naive to all sorts of time wasting thoughts.

I also liked the point about trying to be "chosen". I think there is some truth to it. But isn't pretty much any job about being chosen -- entrepreneurs get chosen by VCs and customers, new lawyers by the partners, mcdonalds employees by the regional manager, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> "But isn't pretty much any job about being chosen -- entrepreneurs get chosen by VCs and customers, new lawyers by the partners, mcdonalds employees by the regional manager, etc."

Well for an entrepreneur it's your product or service that's being chosen, not you yourself. It's pretty clear when you talk with entrepreneurs that they see the world very differently because of this.

At the end of the day there are two economies, the economy of those who do and the economy of those who do what they're told. And both the children of white- collar and blue-collar workers are largely ending up in the latter economy. My point was that this isn't happening only because of the worldview that parents are transmitting, but rather because the way parents are raising kids is causing irreversible cognitive damage that puts kids at a huge handicap regardless of what worldviews they're later exposed to. I didn't bother to go into the statistics about how ECE stuff affects later outcomes like adult literacy and such because I thought it would be excessive. But it's all there if you're looking for it.

<comment><USER6> Interesting point.

I would be interested in any links you might have...

I wonder about this question now and then in the context of the thought experiment "describe a capitalist utopia". In my musings, such a utopia might eliminate the distinction between work and play, and possibly even between learning and play. If such a scenario came to exist, doing what one was told would surely be the lowest form of existence and would be viewed as outright subjugation.

Or would it -- maybe many people enjoy structure and thrive when being told what to do. In reading about Myers Briggs it seems that the "guardian" personality type enjoys structure and respects authority. Doesn't it follow that if one respects authority he will do what he is told by said authority? Guardians are over 10% of the population... Are these (often high functioning) people actually the victims of the cognitive damage you describe?

I know this comment is a bit out there :)

<comment><AUTHOR> "I would be interested in any links you might have..."

The Hart & Risley book is the best source for understanding how parenting styles affect language acquisition. If you then want to see what how high-SES and low-SES children diverge even more after age five, check out Equality and Achievement by Riordan. If you're interested in ECE stuff other than language then there are a ton of interesting academic papers, but it really depends what you're looking for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article seems to be missing the evidence to show that people treat their kids in a given manner as a result of where they work. Just as possible (although certainly less palatable) is the conclusion that parents who are capable of getting white collar jobs, or any job at all, are inherently more inclined to treat their children in the way that they do. This possible conclusion is not even considered, so the article pretty much amounts to guesswork.

</comment><comment><USER8> I agree that the piece would be much better without the baity title and the bizarre imputation to Spock.

<comment><USER9> Yes especially since he starts of bemoaning the difference in intellectual attitudes between Anglosaxons and other countries - failing to note that Dr Spock was widely translated and read worldwide. He also misrepresents what Dr Spock said, which given the social climate at the time was actually a useful addition to the childreading debate.

When the paediatricians were telling mothers to formula feed (and formula was awful in those days - sugar and soluble fat mostly, not like today) every 4 hours (no more often, no matter how the baby cries) instead of breastfeeding on demand (as is the current best practice), "ignore the authority and listen to your intuition" was not the worst advice in the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The author makes a several interesting points, but then many of his conclusions come out of nowhere. It is certainly of note that lower class children are admonished more than encouraged, it is certainly of note that America and Britain do not have intelligent political discourse.

But where does he justify the anti consumer sentiment thrown in at the end?

And what is the consequence of high SES children being overscheduled? Don't they end up in a higher economic class in the end?

What do the last two sentences even mean?

</comment><comment><USER11> A disappointing article. The 'intellectual pollution' consists of exactly one supposed change in the way we raise our children: following our intuition instead of some guidebook. This change was supposedly brought about by Dr. Spock in 1946, but I think it is obvious that doesn't make any sense: how on earth does the author think people were raising their children in the past few hundred years? Based on keen pedagogical insights, gathered from books on the subject? Given illiteracy rates, lack of education, availability of books, etc., I doubt even 10% was reading about 'how to raise children'. The others raised their children _as they saw fit_ , so there hasn't been a change at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> "It's not that parents weren't raising their children this way before. They were, but since the 40's the wealth of scientific best practices have been largely ignored thanks to Spock's influence."

In other words, if not for Spock less people would be making these mistakes today. I don't think Spock himself was a bad guy and his advice may or may not have been sound at the time, but the problem is that this book has taken on a life of its own to the point where people today use it as a justification to avoid learning anything about being a good parent. And of course most of these people haven't even read the book, but that's a whole other thing.

<comment><USER11> We don't have an alternate history without Spock to compare to, so I reserve the right to doubt that it would have made any difference whether Spock would have existed at all. If not this book, then they would've used other excuses. Everyone likes to do things 'their way'. Only those motivated to be _good_ or _better_ at something go out of their way to read, learn and change. Most people aren't motivated to be better at parenting, because they think they are already doing a good job. Isn't Johnny smiling, crawling, talking, walking, potty trained, ... when he should?

<comment><USER12> For a more everyday example of how everyone wants to do things their way, despite evidence, see this post by Robin Hanson, <http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/05/sweat-intuition.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "It's not that parents weren't raising their children this way before. They were, but since the 40's the wealth of scientific best practices have been largely ignored thanks to Spock's influence."

I stopped reading here.

You could always tell who read Dr. Spock because they were the ones with problem children. And the laughing stock of their community.

"largely ignored" != "mainstream acceptance"

<comment><AUTHOR> You don't think Spock is mainstream? Baby and Child Care alone sold over 50 million copies, which makes it one of the top 5 best-selling non-fiction books of all time. And that's not even counting his other three best sellers.

<comment><USER14> "Harry Potter" has sold over 400 million copies, and yet we don't all think we're wizards. Similarly, Ayn Rand sold over 25 million books, and yet outside of a few Internet-forum enclaves, Objectivism is still very much outside of the mainstream.

Many people buy a book to see what all the fuss is about, not because they personally are interested in making it their personal bible.

<comment><USER15> \---and yet we don't all think we're wizards.

Speak for yourself. I didnt believe in that "hogwash magick stuff"... well at first. I have a fiancé who I've been with for quite some time. We both met through our local Catholic church (no reformed church of satan here).

She's kept this little journal which she showed me a little while back. It has a list of dates and notes. The notes are about future events. Some happened years ago when she first wrote them down. Others happened differently because she changed them, and others have not happened yet. She accurately predicted a friend's ex-husband would get cancer (being treated for now), and other things.

Honestly, how many events would it take for you to believe in something like that? Personally, it would take 1 major event. There's been ~15 (major events) of them correct. (There's been about 100 minor predictions correct.)

Some would say that she has precognition. Older words for what gift she has is more accurately a Seer.

*edited for clarity, in parentheses</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Fading Of Silicon Valley Innovation - <AUTHOR> http://prudentbear.com/index.php/thebearslairview?art_id=10747

<comment><USER2> I don't buy it. The internet isn't the steam engine. The internet is electricity. And we haven't even seen the end of the _that_ revolution yet.

The key point is that the author is comparing decades in other industries to years in this industry. Which we're apt to accept because we see things moving so much faster now. But some things don't move that fast. The reason we see such rapid innovation in this industry is that the low barriers to entry facilitate massive parallelism: There are a million teams implementing a million ideas all at once.

But parallelism doesn't resolve dependencies. You can't invent something until its time has come, all the prerequisites have to be there first. And the big things tend to have a lot of dependencies -- because otherwise they would have been done twenty years ago. This party is just getting started.

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess that people who are living with change can't see it clearly. Whenever someone tells me "we're not innovating any more" I suggest they try a simple exercise;

Revert your life to the standard it had at the 'end' of the innovation period (this guy would have to go back to 2000). Remove all of the things you couldn't do then, today. Convert your utilities to the same that you had then (for many that would mean going back to dial up Internet but I digress). Now spend a week in that life, come back and tell me that innovation has stopped since then.

Fundamentally, people seem to start 'seeing' innovation in their teens, which seems to be coming out of everything, and then by the time they hit their 30's they stop seeing it. My thesis is that it isn't because innovation and change has stopped happening, it is because they have become accustomed to it. Hence the exercise to 'see' what you couldn't see because you were in the middle of it.

<comment><USER4> I don't know if that thought experiment really understands what "innovation" means, though. An alternative thought experiment, proposed by economist Robert Gordon (see [http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/28/is-economic- grow...](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/28/is-economic-growth-going- down-the-drain/)), gets closer to the heart of the matter:

 _You are required to make a choice between option A and option B. With option A you are allowed to keep 2002 electronic technology, including your Windows 98 laptop accessing Amazon, and you can keep running water and indoor toilets; but you can't use anything invented since 2002._

 _Option B is that you get everything invented in the past decade right up to Facebook, Twitter, and the iPad, but you have to give up running water and indoor toilets. You have to haul the water into your dwelling and carry out the waste. Even at 3am on a rainy night, your only toilet option is a wet and perhaps muddy walk to the outhouse. Which option do you choose?_

<comment><USER5> Frankly, that's an absurd comparison. Has anyone ever asserted that the iPad is on par with _sanitation_ , running water and indoor toilets? Why not throw in the wheel for good measure?

<comment><USER6> Kevin Kelly mentioned a counterexample recently: [http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2013/01/the_post- prod...](http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2013/01/the_post-produc.php)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Oh golly, a PermaBear blog. That's going to be upbeat now isn't it?

The trouble with Eeyore's and Chicken Little's is they are always right. That is they become right if you wait long enough and then they are only right for a short time. That brief window is when they perk up all happy and smiling and point out, "Hey, you should've listened, I was right."

Never mind the opportunity cost of waiting for the right timing. It's a good thing the stock market charges interest on a short position so that there is a cost to not being right NOW.

With that aside, the Consumer Internet focus has resulted in tremendously less innovation in recent years. I've worked for 6 VC funded startups including 3 I founded. Not one of them could be funded today because they were all started with a slide show and a team.

The VC's of today want a product, happy customers, and even momentum before they put much in. It's literally harder to do much within that window. See my post:

[http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2012/09/13/you-cant-do- crp-w...](http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2012/09/13/you-cant-do-crp- with-a-750k-seed-round-in-enterprise-saas-so-dont-even-try/)

OTOH, it is possible to bootstrap like never before. Maybe there's innovation to be had there. And there is talk of the VC's going back to Enterprise. We'll see if anything big gets built or if they focus on the consumerization of IT (aka more Consumer Internet sold B2B).

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, they were warning of the dot com and the mortgage bubbles before they happened. Now they are warning of the gov bond bubble (seems like a good chance). 3 of 3 wont be bad avg. But I do say if capital isn't funneled to the valley (VC's) there will be less startups. (Do we need reckless money printing to get new ideas/companies?....maybe so

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's an obvious cause for that: blogger hipsters using only closed down iDevices , thus unable to see beyond the Apple walled garden and hipster geeks using only closed down iDevices only to get the rug swept from under their feet by Apple when they innovate too much.

As if nobody ever saw the numerous "Apple kicked me out of their store" sob stories on HN.

Switch to PC and Android, there's much to do.

</comment><comment><USER9> Contrary to most comments here I think it's a pretty interesting article, much better than the usual VC/blogger whining pieces we've been lately. There are some real parallels there.

I think where these analogies break down is the fact that computing has much wider applications even than something as fundamental as transportation. Well, necessarily so because computing can be applied to transportation and everything else. What "Silicon Valley" does is applicable everywhere for the foreseeable future. I mean software is certainly not a solved problem and it really won't be until the singularity is achieved.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think this article is looking at markets from the wrong perspective.

First of all the author discusses Silicon Valley innovation vs. the steam engine and the automobile. Assuming 'Silicon Valley' is being used to equal 'technology', the author is comparing a market to a product.

Now, if the author had compared innovation in transportation (automobile) to innovation in energy (steam power), to innovation in technology, they'd be on to something.

Except that the thesis falls down when making this comparison. Sure the automobile was a massive shift in transportation technology, but that was followed up by the airplane, high-speed trains, massive public rail systems, etc. etc.

There is still constant innovation in all of these fields, but could you imagine what the world would be like if we had a new form of transportation created every 10 years? I don't think the world would be able to keep up.

</comment><comment><USER11> The author seems to be mixing two concerns into one - the innovation in infrastructure and the innovation in products. While a breakthrough in infrastructure seems less likely( the hardware and the infrastructure of the information systems have stabilized at this point) there are more products and niches where addition of information processing capacity will lead to innovative results. In that sense the comparison of silicon valley to auto industry does not seem to be justified. Auto industry is producing a well defined product, while modern SV allows application of a commodity across all industries, just like electricity. Current generation of electric cars are as innovative as steam engines during industrial revolution.

</comment><comment><USER12> Wait, between 1869 and 1950 there was no innovation in steam? Between 1960 and today there has been no innovation in automobiles? What?

<comment><USER13> Yes, the _kaizen_ and just-in-time revolutions were centred in the post-'60s automobile industry, were they not?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The Valley today strikes me as more of a Hollywood North, a media and marketing center, rather than an innovation center. Most new Valley ventures I see (Pinterest anyone?) strike me more as "web media productions" than tech ventures. There's no new technology there.

Google seems to be the last tech innovator in the valley with the Goggles, self-driving cars, etc. I really see Google as the last actual _technology_ company to come out of the tech boom of the 1990s. There hasn't been much since, at least not in the Valley.

Further South you have Tesla and SpaceX, and you have some ventures elsewhere.

<comment><USER15> You're falling victim to a common mistake people make when they rely on anecdotal evidence to answer this question. Consumer apps by their nature are more popular, and you're thus more likely to have heard of them.

<comment><USER16> Any debate about "technology" will devolve into definitions, but here's a (possibly incomplete) list of top private IT for anyone that wants to draw their own conclusions: <http://www.businessinsider.com/2012-digital-100?op=1>

Since most of these are e-commerce, social networks, media, and advertising companies, I'm not convinced we're doing a good job making new technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> He's conflating an industry with a geographic location. In the 1960s, "Silicon Valley" was dominated by big companies. Now it's overrun with dipshit social media concerns that won't last 10 years. It was a different thing altogether in 1975 and in 1999. In 2030, two questions are:

* What will be the geographic center of innovation?

* What industry will the innovation be in?

These are orthogonal. I can't answer either of these. I honestly have no clue. I'll make one solid prediction, though:

I don't know what the Big Thing of 2030 will be, but it _will_ involve computation. It'll be far outside of traditional IT (the use of computers to implement 20th-century business ideas) and social media (same, but for 21st- century cultural experiments) but whatever is Big during 2030 will require a lot of skill when it comes to computation.

Of course, I have no idea whether this will happen in Northern California or some other corner of the world.

What I think is clear is that _VC-istan_ innovation is over. The problem is that the VCs talk to each other and collectively decide who's hot and who's not. So, instead of getting true risk-taking, you have selection by committee in the funding process. That is starting to fail.

<comment><USER18> Regarding computation, I respectfully disagree. I believe the shift from be from software back to hardware again.

Failures in Computation: 1) general artificial intelligence, this has been touted that it's just around the corner since 1970's; so far most practical AI has been just variants of expert systems. 2) Bioinformatics, this was touted in the early 2000's and by the Kurzeweil-crowd as the singularity moment that will bring advances to biotech; unfortunately, all of the mountains of data has not yielded any concrete results because it's too complex for simple statistical methods. 3) Quantitative finance: from the failure of stat arb funds in 2007 to the blind trust in BSM in derivatives risk management software, mathematical models have beautiful assumptions that the world is smooth whereas the real world is not.

Emergence of Hardware: Fab labs, 3D printers will enable delivery of real consumer products via CAD schema. Alternative energy research, medical robotics for remote surgical operations. Just look at the real trailblazers of Silicon Valley, SpaceX, Tesla and Google Driver-less cars. All hardward projects. Personally, I'd like to bone up EE, molecular biology lab protocols, CAD, MechE skills instead of RoR or Facebook APIz.

<comment><USER17> I think AI has achieved quite a lot. Consider Google and Amazon, much less Watson. AI is like "magic". Whenever we figure out how to do something, it's no longer AI. It's statistical learning or computer vision. However, the problem of general AI turned out to be a lot harder than we thought it would be. Moravec's Paradox deserves mention here.

Hardware and software will interact more in the 2010s to '30s. What will people design all this awesome hardware with? Software. Taking the other direction, I do agree that the hardware world is becoming more interesting to people who might, a generation ago, have thought of themselves as "pure software" people. In 1985, you could "do AI" and never go outside of a garbage-collected language (Lisp). In 2013, it's hard to do high-performance machine learning without having some knowledge of all the neat things people can do with hardware (e.g. GPU programming). Also, the existence of continuing education options like Coursera is making people more Y-shaped than T- or I-shaped.

I agree with you that a lot of the "hot" work in the social media world (learning a bunch of damn APIs) isn't very hard, deep, or interesting. However, don't rule out software entirely.

<comment><USER19> I understand T-shaped, but what are Y-shaped and I-shaped?

<comment><USER17> I-shaped: depth with no breadth (highly specialized, no cross-disciplinary knowledge).

Y-shaped: some breadth at intermediate levels. More depth in one's non- specialty areas than T-shaped. (The top of the T becomes a triangular funnel instead of a bar.)

<comment><USER19> Thanks!

One thing I've noticed is that many of the most successful people are multi- specialists, i.e., they have two (or more) "specialties" that combine in a rare and valuable way. Examples include the rise of the "growth hacker" or "data scientist", who are typically programmers applying their craft towards marketing or statistics respectively.

There's both a perception component and a real value component. If you're the best Marketer, other Marketers will frequently deny it, get jealous, or sabotage you. But if you're "the Marketer who also writes code", nobody feels threatened. You're competing in a different area, so people can support you and ask you for favors when they need help.

In terms of real value, a junior programmer with strong business skills in a company with no other programmers can contribute millions of dollars of value through basic automation-I've actually done this. The same programmer will have a much lower dollar value when surrounded by better programmers, at least initially, because all the low-hanging fruit has been taken.

<comment><USER17> Excellent observation. This relates to my observation that it's better to be an "X Who Programs" than a "J.A.P." (Just A Programmer) in most cases. Unfortunately, corporate HR systems are built on the idea that people need to be reduced to a single, specific role.

Dimensionality is the rule, here. We suffer from it in hiring, where it's literally impossible to meet perfectly the requirement lists many companies put out (demanding 5 years of experience in a 3-year-old NoSQL database). This seems to be a part of why hiring is so hard on both sides.

Yet, once people are working together, if people aren't careful, they forget dimensionality altogether and attempt to form a total order, and it's this process that leads to the insecurity and sabotage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think we are seeing the beginning of innovation from Silicon Valley. We are just starting to apply computers to everyday life. We've largely tackled communications. The next things seem to be more interactions between the real and digital worlds (which self-driving cars seem to be an early example of). 3D printing (and the things it enables) and more widespread robotics seem like obvious next innovations.

</comment><comment><USER21> This article could just as easily have been written in the late 1990s, and would have been just as accurate.

Technology becomes commoditized. It happened to steam engines, it happened to cars, it happened to PCs and it's happening to phones and tablets today. But it's a huge leap of faith to take that process and boldly state "Silicon Valley innovation will fade like the steam engine."

<comment><AUTHOR> Innovation will continue but what? How about biotech having the most potential? Where? in the valley or asia (where there's a growing mass of scientists)

As things commoditize it seems design would shift to less costly areas.

<comment><USER22> Biotech's big area is Boston.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Just because people are continuing to commercialize mobile and internet doesn't mean that groundbreaking innovation has stopped in other places... it just means that the internet and mobile will not be the location of an unexpected groundbreaking innovation. We were't printing DNA or 3D models in our homes 10 years ago. Expect something from those in the next 10.

</comment><comment><USER24> Hey, I live in San Rafael and I invent stuff :P see my robots, they're everywhere. there's still some hardware being designed over there, in addition to us there's Inertia Labs and Calbay only in a 10 mile radius from my place. Although that's the north bay I guess... maybe you have a point.

</comment><comment><USER25> Interesting article.

Or related topic, are there any SV startups working on quantum computers (or just something which that has some of the quantum mechanical properties needed for quantum computing)?

<comment><USER26> Groups like Toshiba at cambridge and EPN at Tyndall are doing a lot into quantum key distribution and generating suitable photons for quantum based logic ([https://www.toshiba- europe.com/research/crl/qig/quantumkeyse...](https://www.toshiba- europe.com/research/crl/qig/quantumkeyserver.html), <http://www.tyndall.ie/content/research-4>), but commercial quantum computing is still a way of, currently the most promising methods for doing quantum logic are still at the optical lab bench stage, that being said a lot is known about the problems ahead and how to solve them, I don't know much about non- photonic approaches like Isaac Chaungs group at MIT which seem to have a lot of merit (<http://web.mit.edu/~cua/www/quanta/>).</comment></comment>


A collection of sysadmin test questions and answers for interviews/exams - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/trimstray/test-your-sysadmin-skills <comment><USER2> "what happens when you type api.example.com and press enter?"

This has been one of my interview questions for years. Take a minute to speak your answer aloud. Do it now, I'll wait.

It requires walking through several layers and subsystems. Really a great question for exposing how the candidate models a complex system. The best part, as an interviewer, is seeing how deep the candidate goes down the potentially infinite rabbit hole.

The most entertaining answer I've received started with the electrical contact in your ENTER key sending the key code through USB. He briefly digressed into the pinout of PS/2 vs USB, and continued in that fashion.

<comment><USER3> there's at least one collaboratively edited doc about this standard interview Q; see [https://github.com/alex/what-happens- when](https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when)

<comment><USER4> Interestingly enough this only ever attempts to answer the technical part but doesn't consider the electrophysiology and psychology of it. What happens in your brain when you start typing each letter? And in your arms and fingers? And your memory? What if you have dyslexia? Or Parkinson's? Or dementia? What if your primary language is Swahili? And so on.

This question can truly be incredibly interesting.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I could have sworn I saw an alternate version of this what-happens-when wiki which spent more time describing "your brain sends signals which are interpreted as follows …"

But I didn't come up with it in a quick Web search and thought maybe I had dreamed it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Funny, I don't see the immutable file question, or questions on capabilities, systemd, selinux, etc. Also, there are "big traffic" questions missing, like how to tune a kernel to perform lots of network ops, how to design a system for high-performance and high-availability, network attached storage, firewalls, replication, etc. Basically, how do I build a system that I know can deliver X traffic at Y rate, and scale it?

Then there are the process questions, which always seem missing. How do you prioritize work? How do you balance projects and toil? How do you manage working on the same set of services with multiple team members on multiple platforms? How do you handle incidents? What is your typical postmortem like? What do you do when a customer asks you to do something? When a manager does? How do you manage your automated tasks? Give me an example of implementing auto-healing. Give me two examples of how you have migrated or upgraded a running service. Multiple customers have reported that the production site is down; what do you do?

Then there's more modern stuff which should be standard by now, like talking about using Docker, job schedulers, CI/CD, monitoring, configuration management, inventory management, secret management, deployment, HP/HA, distributed computing, etc. Even using the cloud should be standard now, as virtually every company that isn't using it wants to.

<comment><USER6> Isn't that the magic of GitHub? Put in a PR

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "What do you understand by CLI?".. Something about this question makes me question what they are expecting you to answer. Last sentance: "CLI is very easy to use, but it should be typed very precisely.".. First of CLI includes sh,ash,bash,ksh and all other command lines, all with a variaty of difficulty and their own querks. "CLI is very easy" depends on how well you know it, master it and obfuscate an operation in it. I am not sure what that question, or whatever answer you get out of it, would help you determain what a person actually know beside knowing the abriviation?

</comment><comment><USER8> I'll never get any job again:/

</comment><comment><USER9> Hey, it lists answers too. And it's concise. That makes it immediately useful. I was expecting a list of questions, and the interviewer is expected to just muddle through picking the ones for which they knew the answer.

Not only is it immediately useful, it's actually educational. That's nice. I'd say it's well done, even if some people are saying that the questions are too junior. It's well-organized, well-structured, and well-written.

</comment><comment><USER10> The title should start with "Show HN:", followed by something more readable than the repo path. E.g. "Show HN: Test your sysadmin skills"

</comment><comment><USER11> For some reason, sorting algorithms and whiteboarding snuck their way in a few years ago. Here's hoping that fad came and went for 95% of roles which don't require extreme scaling.

</comment><comment><USER12> Nice try, but ... Many of the questions in the Regular and Senior categories I would put into Junior. It's not clear to me who the audience is for this. It's not comprehensive enough for a test-giver, test-taker or self-studier. Having it be a single MarkDown document makes it hard to munge. I would guess that there is a better vefsion already written elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER13> I was hoping to get a printable version using gitprint, but it seems to create a corrupt PDF :-(

[https://gitprint.com/trimstray/test-your-sysadmin- skills/blo...](https://gitprint.com/trimstray/test-your-sysadmin- skills/blob/master/README.md)

</comment><comment><USER14> I really want to contribute to this, but it seems like it is so incomplete and full of Opinion instead of fact that doing so would be more like me doing your homework for you, instead of showing you how to do it yourself.

</comment><comment><USER15> I haven't seen mention of the fork bomb in a long time. I'm impressed that it was included here; gives me hope for the next batch of sysadmins.

<comment><USER16> why would this "give you hope for the next batch of sysadmins"?

Most sysadmins/SRE's i have met (especially on *nix), are very capable in their craft.

<comment><USER17> I don't agree with there being "a next batch of sysadmins" because the layers are so abstracted now. I have still seen systems that don't protect against fork bombs. I love taking advantage of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There are apparently only seven Linux distributions.

Sorry ARCH people, you're not one of them.

(I'd think twice about admitting to knowing of Kali at most interviews too, I guess...)

(Note, they do admit: "The answers are only examples and do not exhaust the whole topic.")

<comment><USER19> Looks like all the enterprise Linux distros to me? I wouldn't qualify Arch for that purpose.

<comment><USER20> Linux xxxxx 4.17.11-arch1 #1 SMP PREEMPT Sun Jul 29 10:11:16 UTC 2018 x86_64 GNU/Linux</comment></comment></comment>


The Last Conversation You'll Ever Need to Have About Eating Right - <AUTHOR> http://www.grubstreet.com/2018/03/ultimate-conversation-on-healthy-eating-and-nutrition.html <comment><USER2> This is basically how I eat, and what's surprising is how much it seems to annoy other people. (I'm not a prosthelytizer, btw, just try to eat a plant based diet avoiding refined flour and processed food). But indicating that preference seems to raise hackles everywhere outside of hippy raw type places).</comment>