The History of the URL - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-history-of-the-url/ <comment><USER3> That is an excellent article and I learned a tremendous amount.

I do have one minor technical criticism though. It is so common for people to conjoin _parameter_ with the components of a query string that we don't give it a second thought. The specification, though, does delineate these terms. See: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#section-3.4](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#section-3.4) and the preceding paragraph.

Specifically parameters are trailing data components of the path section of the URI (URL). The query string is separated from the path section by the question mark. URI parameters are rarely used though so this is a common mistake.

Also encoding ampersands into a URI (URL) using HTML encoding schemes is also common, but that is incorrect. URI encoding uses percent coding as its only encoding scheme, such as %20 for a space. Using something like _& amp;_ will literally provide 5 characters in the address unencoded or may result in something like _%26amp;_ in software that auto-converts characters into the presumed encoding.

* [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#section-2.1](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#section-2.1)

* [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16622504/escaping-ampers...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16622504/escaping-ampersand-in-url)

<comment><USER4> >Also encoding ampersands into a URI (URL) using HTML encoding schemes is also common, but that is incorrect.

To encode any string (for example a URL) containing & in HTML, you must HTML- encode that &. Using & in the value of the href attribute for an a-tag must result in a URL containing just & in place of the entire entity. This is a property of HTML that has nothing to do with URLs or URL encodings.

<comment><USER3> So let's say you have a raw address with an ampersand that needs to be encoded (the second one) so as not to confuse a URI parser with into thinking there are 3 query string data segments when there are only 2 as the second ampersand is part of a value and not a separator:

        http://domain.com/?name=data&tag=c&t

You will need to encode that ampersand so that it is interpreted as something other than syntax:

        http://domain.com/?name=data&tag=c%26t

Now the first ampersand is not encoded but the second one is. You are correct that ampersands are also syntax characters in HTML/XML so if you wanted to place that address in HTML code it would need to be escaped in HTML:

        http://domain.com/?name=data&tag=c%26t

That address can now be inserted as the value of an HTML anchor tag as such:

        somewhere

The important point to distinguish is that addresses are often used in contexts outside of HTML, even in the browser. For example the address bar at the top of the browser is outside the context of the view port that displays HTML content, and so the appropriate text there is:

        http://domain.com/?name=data&tag=c%26t

This is so because URI only has one encoding scheme, which is percent encoding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love articles like this, in part because they remind me of the early 90s when I first started reading about this stuff and it all seemed arcane and magical. [1]

I remember dismissing the "World Wide Web" because my 80286-based IBM PC I used at college in 1993 couldn't run a graphical web browser (that I knew of) so I compared the terminal versions of a web browser to Gopher and determined the latter was far superior - it had more content and was much cleaner to use in a terminal.

The history of the Internet and Web definitely would have been soooo different had URLs been formatted like "http:com/example/foo/bar/baz" for sure. It's so much cleaner and sensical. Part of the mystique of "foo.com" is that it somehow seems completely different from "bar.org". Not sure why, but it just is.

Just a side note: DOS and Windows using \ instead of / is annoying and has been annoying for nearly 40 years and I don't ever think I'll ever find it not annoying. You'd think 4 decades would be enough time, but it still bugs me.

1\. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Internet_User's_Guide_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Internet_User's_Guide_and_Catalog)

<comment><USER6> You could have viewed images on a 286 (or even an 8086/8088) using NCSA Telnet for DOS, just for the record.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > In 1992 Tim Berners-Lee created three things, giving birth to what we > consider the Internet. The HTTP protocol, HTML, and the URL.

What we call the web, surely? I appreciate we conflate the two, but in this context I think that's what was meant.

And it's really the URL (URI, IRI, URN...) that makes the web. An amazing thing.

<comment><USER8> > _And it 's really the URL (URI, IRI, URN...) that makes the web._

Well Chrome devs seem to disagree, with the recent push to hide URLs, and so do SPA devs. Is the article meant to save the URL, or rather a fairwell? Anyway, URLs aren't particularly well-designed IMO, for their use of the ampersand char as separator in the query part alone, since these conflict with ampersand as used for starting entity references in HTML and other SGML docs.

<comment><USER9> > and so do SPA devs

??? - those usually use the URL bar in my experience.

<comment><USER10> In most SPAs, however, URLs aren't used like conventional URLs; they're treated as routes. I think that's more the point here.

They aren't conventionally "shareable", first off, which violates more or less the spirit of what a URL is supposed to represent on the Web.

<comment><USER11> This is pretty much untrue. Gmail is an SPA for example, and I can share "[https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#spam"](https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#spam") with you, or "[https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgxwGDWqXKSSfXBDQ...](https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgxwGDWqXKSSfXBDQMrkGlcFVBlzk") (of course you can't access the latter because you don't have the appropriate permissions for it … but point still stands: I can open that URL in a new tab and it'll open the same email).

I've written plenty of SPAs myself that use the URL and you couldn't actually tell it's an SPA unless you have the technical experience to know what to look for.

If what you're saying is "this infinite-scrolling page sucks at respecting URLs", that's something else, and it's not specific to SPAs. Infinite scrolling predates SPAs (Here is one for jQuery! [https://infinite- scroll.com/#initialize-with-jquery](https://infinite-scroll.com/#initialize- with-jquery)), and doesn't _have_ to break URLs if you don't write your code like an uncivilized brute.

<comment><USER12> Breaking the back button and not using propers URLs are two cardinal sins in SPA development.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here's the original, classic "Cool URIs Don't Change" post by TBL himself: [https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html](https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html)

<comment><USER14> Interestingly, the canonical link to that page is actually: [https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI](https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI)

"You may not be using HTML for that page in 20 years time, but you might want today's links to it to still be valid. The canonical way of making links to the W3C site doesn't use the extension."

I am constantly surprised by how difficult many static site generators make it to create URLs of this format (notice no trailing slash, before you tell me about the "Pretty URLs" options in most software).

<comment><USER13> Ha! How ironic that (in part bc on phone and hasty) I grabbed the wrong URL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Anyone interested in the development of the ARPANET and its transformation into the Internet we know today owes it to themselves to read Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Hafner and Lyon - it's a great read and the audiobook isn't bad either.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you're going to write a mile-long article about the URL, at least get the details correct. The leftmost part of a URL is not the "protocol". It is called the "scheme". The scheme doesn't tell you "the protocol which should be used to access it", it tells you how to interpret the remainder of the URL.

<comment><USER16> Except HTTP stands for "HyperText Transfer _Protocol_ "

<comment><USER6> There's nothing in "data" or "file" that stands for /Protocol/.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> You suddenly realize you are very old when an article tries to impress with ancient photos of PDP11 and cradle-type dial-up modems and it's startling that I've used all of that in my lifetime, extensively.

</comment><comment><USER18> > Root DNS servers operate in safes, inside locked cages. A clock sits on the > safe to ensure the camera feed hasn't been looped.

That is cool. Does anyone have any more info? Perhaps a picture?

<comment><USER19> I saw one at a data center in El Segundo once. It was 2011 and about 60% of the DC was a single guy sitting on the floor quietly packing up MySpace servers.

<comment><USER20> Was it Tom Anderson?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What are the available solutions to the problem of locating other copies of webpages or documents online? (Let's assume that the page of interest is not on the Internet Archive.) This article mentions a few:

> I was able to find these pages through Google, which has functionally made > page titles the URN of today.

> Given the power of search engines, it's possible the best URN format today > would be a simple way for files to point to their former URLs.

Daniel Bernstein proposes a document ID that can be found in search engines: [https://cr.yp.to/bib/documentid.html](https://cr.yp.to/bib/documentid.html)

I actually started using this before, but found it to be clumsy and stopped using it.

Someone else has suggested a UUID instead: [https://lobste.rs/s/xltmol/this_page_is_designed_last#c_nis6...](https://lobste.rs/s/xltmol/this_page_is_designed_last#c_nis6no)

But that's still clumsy. I'd prefer something shorter.

Perhaps the title of the page is the best option, as people are more likely to have that saved than the UUID: [https://lobste.rs/s/xltmol/this_page_is_designed_last#c_0snr...](https://lobste.rs/s/xltmol/this_page_is_designed_last#c_0snrhr)

> I imagine it'd be uncommon for someone has the UUID but not the website > saved.

<comment><USER22> If a page is available on IPFS, then the page would be accessible under a URL based on the page's hash, and anyone with a cached/saved copy of the page would be able to help host it at that URL. (IPFS works very similar to torrents with magnet links.)

<comment><USER21> Interesting. How would IPFS handle updates to a page? I assume that the updated page would have to be hosted separately.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, that generally applies to content-addressable systems like it (and torrents). An updated version of the page would have a new hash and a separate IPFS link.

To make a URL for content that can change, you would need to use a system that lets you create a mutable URL, and then you can make that point to an IPFS link. DNS works well for that. You can add a "_dnslink" TXT DNS record to a domain, and then when anyone with an IPFS-supporting browser (or browser add- on) accesses the domain, their browser can fetch the content over IPFS from anyone seeding it, and help seed it if the user wants. (Yes, this wouldn't work well at all for domains with dynamic content. Works great for domains that have static content, including sites made by static site generators, etc.)

I personally serve my blog with IPFS by making its files accessible over IPFS, putting a _dnslink TXT record on my domain pointing to the directory's current IPFS link, and then my domain's A record is pointing to a service (cloudflare- ipfs.com) that responds to HTTP requests by serving contents from the IPFS link that my _dnslink record points to. I'm using multiple free IPFS pinning services to keep my blog's files seeded on IPFS. I like that I'm not tied down to any of them, and I could easily replace them with other services or my own server without changing any of the rest of the setup. Additionally, anyone that liked my blog could help seed it themselves, so it could outlast the pinning services and me.

Assuming a world where IPFS was commonly-supported and my content was well- liked enough to get seeded by others, the only point of failure for keeping my site up is the domain name staying staying renewed and the DNS service I'm using staying up. Though if those went down, as long as someone still had the last IPFS link to my site, my site would still be accessible through that as long as people seeded it.

I believe the Ethereum Name Service would also be a good decentralized alternative to using DNS for keeping update-able URLs pointing to IPFS content, but I haven't personally used it and I don't know if there are good integrations that make it usable for that today. IPFS also has a feature called IPNS for creating mutable links to content that can be updated by whoever owns the private key, which sounds perfect on paper, but it doesn't work well in my experience for a few reasons (latency, timeouts, etc), so I wouldn't recommend it.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for all this information! I think I might do the _dnslink TXT record approach you mention for my own website (just a static site), though I'll first need to learn more about DNS and IPFS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I remember when the hosts.txt file crossed a half page. I thought this network is taking off. :)

</comment><comment><USER24> This is a masterful history and a reminder that what we have now is just a quasi-frozen snapshot of evolving solutions. Is there any chance that an alternative (URN? IPFS? Dat?) will gain traction and resolve some of the shortcomings of the URL?

<comment><USER25> When google first moved search to the address bar they started the transition to using page titles as addresses. This is a somewhat sloppy way to go about things, but when I visit this site, I just type "hacker news" not the FQDN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> bah, believe this was adapted from an article from 2016, commentary here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12117540](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12117540)

</comment><comment><USER27> I started reading the article with much interest... up until the bit about the Semantic Web. Then I felt things went downhill.

> One such effort was the Semantic Web. The dream was to create a Resource > Description Framework (editorial note: run away from any team which seeks to > create a framework), which would allow metadata about content to be > universally expressed. For example, rather than creating a nice web page > about my Corvette Stingray, I could make an RDF document describing its > size, color, and the number of speeding tickets I had gotten while driving > it.

> This is, of course, in no way a bad idea. But the format was XML based, and > there was a big chicken-and-egg problem between having the entire world > documented, and having the browsers do anything useful with that > documentation.

The author completely falls short to describe the evolution of the SemWeb over the past 10 years. Tons of specs, several declarative languages and technologies have been grown to not just get beyond the verbosity of a serialization format such as XML, but also move away from the classic relational data model.

Turtle, JSON-LD, SPARQL, Neo4J, Linked Data Fragments,... come to mind. And then there are the emerging applications of linked data. If anything, the Federated Web is exactly about URLs and semantic web technologies based on linking and contextualizing data.

The entire premise of Tim Berner Lee's Solid/Inrupt is based on these standards including URI's.

Linked data and federation isn't just about challenging social media, it's also about creating knowledge graphs - such as wikidata.org - and creating opportunities for things such as open access and open science.

Then there's this:

> httpRange-14 sought to answer the fundamental question of what a URL is. > Does a URL always refer to a document, or can it refer to anything? Can I > have a URL which points to my car?

> They didn't attempt to answer that question in any satisfying manner. > Instead they focused on how and when we can use 303 redirects to point users > from links which aren't documents to ones which are, and when we can use URL > fragments (the bit after the '#') to point users to linked data.

Err. They did.

That's what the Resource Description Framework is all about. It gives you a few foundational building blocks for describing the world. Even more so, URI's have absolutely NOTHING to do with HTTP status codes. It just so happens that HTTP leverages URI's and creates a subset called HTTP URL's that allows the identification and dereference of webbased resources.

You can use URI's as globally unique identifiers in a database. You could use URN's to identify books. For instance urn:isbn:0451450523 is an identifier for the 1968 novel The Last Unicorn.

So, this is a false claim. I could forgive them for inadvertently not looking beyond URL's as a mechanism used within the context of HTTP communication.

> In the world of web applications, it can be a little odd to think of the > basis for the web being the hyperlink. It is a method of linking one > document to another, which was gradually augmented with styling, code > execution, sessions, authentication, and ultimately became the social shared > computing experience so many 70s researchers were trying (and failing) to > create. Ultimately, the conclusion is just as true for any project or > startup today as it was then: all that matters is adoption. If you can get > people to use it, however slipshod it might be, they will help you craft it > into what they need. The corollary is, of course, no one is using it, it > doesn't matter how technically sound it might be. There are countless tools > which millions of hours of work went into which precisely no one uses today.

I'm not even sure what the conclusion is here. Did the 'hyperlink' fail? did the concept of a 'URI' fail? (both are different things!) Because neither failed, on the contrary!

Then there's this wonky comparison of the origin of the Web with a single project or a startup. The author did the entire research on the history of the URI but they still failed to see that the Internet and the Web were invented by committee and by coincidence. Pioneers all over the place had good ideas, some coalesced and succeeded, others didn't. Some were adapted to work together in a piece-meal fashion such as Basic Auth.

And that's totally normal. Organic growth and distribute development is the baseline. Yes, the Web as we know it today is the result of many competing voices, but at the same time it could only work if everyone ended up agreeing over the basics.

The fact of the matter is that some companies - looking at you FAANG - <USER2> rather have us all locked in a closed, black-box ecosystems, rather then having open standards around that allow for interoperability, and thus create opportunities for new threats to challenge their business interests.

I understand that the article is written by CloudFlare, a CDN company with its own interests. But I'm trying to wrap my ahead around how the author failed in addressing exactly future opportunities and threats, after this entire exposé.

<comment><USER28> _I understand that the article is written by CloudFlare, a CDN company with its own interests._

Not sure what you mean by that, but Zack wasn't writing something to further some secret interest Cloudflare has in the structure of URLs.

<comment><USER7> I think the operative phrase is 'a CDN company'.

URLs are names for things (companies, mailboxes, pictures of cats), but they're also (encoded) directions to get representations of those named things.

CloudFlare is concerned with the mechanics mostly, the latter. Things like Wikidata, knowledge bases, schema.org are interested in the former perspective.

<comment><USER29> Cloudflare has Edge Workers and lots of other technologies that would be helpful to the semantic web.

Anything that is URL addressable is great for Cloudflare.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lamphone: Real-Time Passive Sound Recovery from Light Bulb Vibrations - <AUTHOR> https://www.nassiben.com/lamphone <comment><USER2> The graphs they present show the largest response with 110db audio, which is about as loud as a car honking right in front of you[1], but even still, to eavesdrop on corner offices from tens of meters away with nothing but a telescope and a video recorder is a huge feat.

[1] [https://www.chem.purdue.edu/chemsafety/Training/PPETrain/dbl...](https://www.chem.purdue.edu/chemsafety/Training/PPETrain/dblevels.htm)

<comment><USER3> Pointing a telescope at tens of meters away will get you noticed pretty quick. Now one can sell lightbulbs with noise modulation to defeat it.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, not sure why they patented the attack, and not the defense.

It seems much easier to enforce a patent against technologies that defeat the attack.

From the article, it looks like one can build the surveillance device from a few readily available parts, and then hack together the signal processing software. That's not even in violation of the patent if you don't sell / distribute it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> HN has a real weakness for cool surveillance technology.

<comment><USER6> Sure. I for one have a huge weakness for this kind of tech, because it's an archetypal hack - a clever trick to pull something out of a system, whether the system likes it or not.

It's also interesting because it's deeply grounded in reality. It's no gluing crappy APIs together to solve a "problem" twenty layers deep in someone's convoluted business shenanigans. It's using reflected light to learn about mechanical vibrations at a distance, to show that the information _is_ there, despite what you'd hear from people who don't comprehend how reality works. It's a nice reminder that everything that happens interacts with everything around it, and information about it spreads out at the speed of light. Most side channel attack are like this, which is why I find them interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have the impression (not least based on the original spectrograms) that the sound sources were quite loud and would have been annoyingly loud in the room, so your whispered conversations are probably safe for a while yet. But it's very impressive work nevertheless. I look forward to trying it out.

<comment><USER8> So what's the gold standard of whispered convos these days? Last I'd been paying attention it was standing in the surf.

<comment><USER9> I believe what you do is you record an hour of normal conversation and then play back dozens of timeshifted copies simultaneously. Any system is going to have a very hard time filtering out noise with the same statistical properties as the signal - including you. You might have to stand quite close together...

<comment><USER10> If I'm remembering the right book, I believe something like this was described in Anathem by Neal Stephenson (not crucial to major plot).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Data Mining Reveals a Global Link Between Corruption and Wealth - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/view/535081/data-mining-reveals-a-global-link-between-corruption-and-wealth/

<comment><USER2> "No shit, Sherlock."

Or rather, "Money is the root of all evil."</comment>


Apple or Google? - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2012/10/02/apple-or-google/

<comment><USER2> "Apple is spending too much time fighting legal battles instead of market battles" ...all of which are proxy battles with Google.</comment>


Global Warming vs. Clojure - <AUTHOR> http://www.bestinclass.dk/index.php/2010/01/global-warming/

<comment><USER2> _So all we need to do in order to follow these stations, is filter out those in the northern hemisphere and re-run the job._

Isn't this the same sort of thing that the tree ring people did? There were some statistical points that looked like they were going to mess with the results so they threw them out? They only threw out a few outliers, which is standard practice, but here we're throwing out a whole class of data.

It's also interesting that the northern hemisphere is warming up faster (if the methodology chosen by the author is correct). Since most of the earth's landmass is on the northern hemisphere (as well as most of the developed countries), doesn't that mean we're in trouble?

 _By looking at each station indiviually instead of compressing them to an unevenly weighted average, we will be able to clearly deduce how the weather has changed through the years recorded._

This still doesn't take into account the density of stations. Also, trying to compare stations like that, with the curves obscuring each other, is a crime of presentation. If you took the time to do a regression on the datapoints with the other data, it surely would not have took much longer to code for regression on each of the individual weather stations (incorrect as that may be).

On a different note, the use of clojure was enjoyable, which deserves an upmod.

<comment><USER3> As I understand it, the tree ring thing was that the more recent data is distorted by pollution. That is, the width of each year's ring should be dependent on how warm the year was, but the increase in pollution in recent times has caused a decrease in the width of the rings laid down.

<comment><USER4> There are a lot of problems with tree ring data, two of the most important are:

1\. It no longer corresponds to the temperatures we measure (last 50 years or so)

2\. It is based on very few trees,

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm torn on this article. I'm very appreciative of a real-world example of using clojure to manipulate data but at the same time it treats a trivial and entirely unscientific analysis of one data set as a complete, concrete and comprehensive summary of an entire field of science.

<comment><USER6> I agree, I just choose to enjoy the presentation of clojure and ignore the conclusion. :)

<comment><USER7> That's not a very reasoned approach to contradictory conclusions.

<comment><USER8> is a non sequitur an acceptable straw man?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, there's a few problems. Gore didn't actually use the Mann hockey stick that is presented, although the hockey stick in 'An Inconvenient Truth' is very simliar (in that it omits the Medieval Warming Period)

Those commenting on the start date fail to realise that the start date of the data set he uses is 1929. You can't blame the author for that.

The fact that it's part of the 'head' or 'blade' of the stick is irrelevant, all of the 'handle' is based on multi-proxy reconstruction, which has major data problems, as the endless to-and-fro on this issue says. One of the major problems highlighted has been the use of tree-rings as a proxy, and the tree rings do not agree with the instrumental record. This is the famous 'hide the decline', where the authors sought out statistical methods (the trick) in order to splice the tree ring proxies with the instrumental records, which they really shouldn't have done.

The field of coming up with global averages from temperature datasets is so complex I won't even try and make a comment on that. Plus I don't know any clojure.

</comment><comment><USER10> My first thought upon seeing the title to the post:

Q: What's the difference between Global Warming and Clojure?

A: Clojure is real.

<comment><USER11> By implication you're saying global warming is not real, and that's not true, global warming _is_ real.

The questions center around how much of it is due to our influence and if we are capable of doing something about it.

<comment><USER12> There is also the question of whether the net effect of the warming is a negative economic impact, and if so if "fixing" it is a greater cost to the economy than not fixing it.

<comment><USER11> That's very true. It may very well have a net positive economical effect.

But the problem with that kind of reasoning is that if it is going to have a net positive economic effect that we can rape & plunder mother nature to our hearts content and that simply isn't true.

Economic advantages are not all there is to look after, long term effects are important, and the absolute effect on economies is also important. In other words if our economy goes up because of doing something and some poor country loses all they've got then you could argue the net effect is positive because they didn't have much to begin with.

But that's definitely not how the world should work.

So we need to look past purely economic motives and at humanity (and to some extent the biosphere) as a whole.

Beancounters are bad stewards of ecologies.

<comment><USER13> >"But the problem with that kind of reasoning is that if it is going to have a net positive economic effect that we can rape & plunder mother nature to our hearts content and that simply isn't true."

I doubt that any serious environmental economist thinks this way. Economists do include non-monetary factors in cost/benefit analsyes, and the cost of environmental degradation which does NOT show up on profit/loss statements is one of the oldest topics in the field.

Dismissing the entire discipline of environmental economics as the work of "bean counters" is a really bad rhetorical start for any serious discussion of ecological policy, though unfortunately it happens often among the masses on internet message boards. I am really disappointed to see that these caricatures abound.

<comment><USER11> There are many examples of very precious resources being squandered because of profit motives, our stewardship of the planet could be _much_ better, I doubt it could be much worse.

In less than 300 years, basically since the time that we started to industrialize we have remade face of the planet.

Point me to all those efforts at sustained management that ought to be a counterexample to those examples of wanton destruction of habitats and ecosystems for profit.

Everywhere that money is brought in to the equation sooner or later the ecology will have to suffer. Running an ecology as a business is simply not an option.

I know it has been tried many times and I know that there are plenty of people that probably have the best interest of their environment at heart, but from what I've seen to date the best thing we have done is to simply _not_ mess with a large enough area and hope that it will recover.

Any attempt at large scale intervention, even from a positive viewpoint has sooner or later become a game of seeing how to use that resource within the letter of the law for maximum profit.

Rainforests, the Canadian forest management, wildlife preserves, the artic and the oceans.

The list really is endless.

Calling the people in charge bean counters is doing them a service, it means they're not actively involved in destruction on a planetwide scale that they are aware of.

I even leave open room for 'best intentions', but that doesn't mean their effects are positve. Not by a long shot.

Right now those places that are doing best in terms of species diversity and other parameters indicating relatively healthy ecosystems are those that we haven't gotten around to yet and those that we have utterly abandoned.

Environmental economics is a complete contradiction, you can not manage a tract of rainforest or a volume of ocean in a way that is at the same time good for the environment and ecologically sound.

We have basically taken out an environmental mortgage and have spent that mortgage on stuff that harms the environment, it will be a long long time before we are in a position to pay it back.

I realize this is not a happy picture, but sometimes it is better to open your eyes to what's really going on than to put on your rosy sunglasses and to hope that it will all go away.

There are lots of very uncomfortable conclusions that we may one day have to draw, there is a small chance that we will be in a position to guide those decisions if we start acting long enough in advance.

<comment><USER13> >"There are many examples of very precious resources being squandered because of profit motives"

Ah, yes, the Tragedy of the Commons:

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

You are right that people have damaged the environment for personal gain in the past, but I still think that you are missing the point on what economics is about. In environmental economics researchers study why people use resources the way they do, how to design environmental regulation so that people will actually stick to it, and what resource use is likely to be in the future. "How to rape the environment more efficiently" is not a common topic of study.

Sorry, environmental economics was probably the wrong field to bring up. What we really want to know is whether or not these macroeconomic modelers take into account the value of ecological resources in their models. Tell you what, I'll scribble off a note to William Nordhaus and ask him. In my experience most academic economists have been very approachable.

Here's my letter:

" Hello Dr. Nordhaus,

I have a question about the economic modeling of climate change. Do economists take into account the cost of ecological damage in their models?

I ask because this question came up in conversation a few days ago. A friend of mine claimed economic models were invalid because they only took into effect the monetary profit-and-loss effects of climate change and not the value of nature itself, but I wasn't sure if that was true. How does a resource like the Brazilian Rainforest enter into the model?

Thanks,

Jacob"

<comment><USER13> Hi,

I got a reply back from Dr. Nordhaus today:

"The answer is that these are included conceptually in serious studies. The problem is that measurement has proven extremely difficult, so it is hard to judge whether the actual magnitudes are correct. WN"

I think it makes the case that economists do not consider ecological damage to be cost zero. However, it is hard to assign a hard objective value to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I just tagged this excellent article on delicio.us - description: "Awesome example of using Clojure for data manipulation!"

A good read, and I bet that a few of the code snippets in the article will save me coding time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally.

The article is a good read regarding data crunching, but I take exception to some of his methodology.

Specifically, he's only using data from 1929 and on -- this is all part of the hockey stick's head. The 1920s are supposedly the start of the dramatic temperature increase. So of course the graphs don't show a dramatic slope change; there's no pre-1929, lesser-slope data included.

Edit: I'm _not_ implying intentional omission on his part; 1929 is the earliest year available from NOAA (ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/gsod).

<comment><USER11> Exactly. That's about as selective as you can get.

No way of saying that hockey stick will appear if he includes all the data but the way he filtered out the end part and then stretched it is just being very selective with the data provided.

The reason why there is so much room for interpretation in all this data crunching in part is because of the troublesome normalization issues faced when consolidating data from so many different sources.

If there had been reliable weather stations in the last two millennia this would be completely different. But obviously that's not the case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have a project based on the Global Historical Climatology Network data, going back 300 years. This is based upon readings from actual thermometers on ground based weather stations, rather than tree rings or ice cores which are far more difficult to decypher.

<http://code.google.com/p/tempgraph/>

You can graph the data in various ways, all the way down to individual weather stations.

<comment><USER16> We (humanity) have reliable temperature data as measured by a thermometer and at fixed locations going back 300 years?

<comment><USER5> We don't have temperature data measured by a thermometer at fixed locations for _50_ years. There are many other sources of temperature data.

<comment><USER15> The thing is that when you look at the data at the lowest level (individual stations) what you're getting is small snippets of temperature information. Some stations have been around for as long as 100 years, but I don't think that there are any single stations which span the full 300 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Excellent read! Does anyone know of any study that extrapolates global temperatures from Landsat images?

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't get this title. (In "1 line" of plain text) ;-)

[edit] jokes aside, its actually a good read.</comment>


World's First Human Head Transplant All Set in December - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/11181/20170328/worlds-first-human-head-transplant-all-set-in-december-man-from-russia-volunteered.htm <comment><USER2> April 1 is four days away, please get the date right.</comment>


World's Toughest Test? The Master Sommelier Diploma Exam - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/katiebell/2013/06/24/worlds-toughest-test-the-master-sommelier-diploma-exam/?google_editors_picks=true <comment><AUTHOR> _It's not enough to know every wine region, village and district in the world, candidates also need to know which years were better than others for each region. The blind tasting of six wines requires not only identifying the grape varietal, but the region it came from and the year it was made. That's merely scratching the testing surface though; during the service portion examinees have to recall facts about sake, spirits, distilling methods, apertifs and of course ideal food pairings._</comment>


Ask HN: What are some good introductory datasets I can use to practice ML? - <AUTHOR> Hi! I'm getting started with AI/ML, and I'm looking for some interesting but simple datasets I can use as exercises to practice doing data analysis and basic ML algorithms.<p>Can you share some good examples? <comment><USER2> Kaggle.com has what you need</comment>


Beats Will Shut Down. Founder Joins Stealth Startup Chosen.fm - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/20/beats-mog-hyman-chosenfm/

<comment><USER2> This headline is wrong. Beats, which went live today, is not shutting down. Rather, it is going to shutdown MOG, a company it acquired.</comment>


How Gaming Companies Are Trying To Be The Next Draw Something - <AUTHOR> http://betakit.com/2012/05/07/how-gaming-companies-are-trying-to-be-the-next-draw-something

<comment><USER2> So this is an ad about Trivi.al...

</comment><comment><USER3> What ever happened to just building great games -- rather than trying to cash out with some viral flash in the pan?

You don't see "normal" mobile game studios doing this because it's not sustainable. It's the dark side. The quick and easy path.

<comment><USER4> Your right and we're doing that at the heart of what we're building. Obviously the article was a spin on the market of social games but Trivi.al is about building a great game for the millions of people that actually like trivia and play in any bar across the country. We hope you download the app and check it out I think you'll enjoy and have lots of fun. Cheers

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks Rob for writing a great article about Trivi.al!</comment>