Peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/38/noise/this-is-your-brain-on-silence-rp <comment><USER2> _In a remote and quiet place, Vikman says, she discovers thoughts and feelings that aren't audible in her busy daily life. "If you want to know yourself you have to be with yourself, and discuss with yourself, be able to talk with yourself."_

I was a homemaker for years. A lot of housework is fairly mindless, allowing for uninterrupted deep thought because most folks will not bother you while you are doing laundry. They don't want to be asked to help.

I have spent years cultivating a relatively quiet life by American standards. Since my ex moved out, I mostly have not had a TV. I gave up my car years ago, giving up its built in radio along with it. In my household, it is a common courtesy to announce "I am starting up a video (or game) with voices." so as to not startle anyone.

People complain a lot about the stress of our 24/7 always on lives in the US. They often lay the blame on computers, smart phones, email notifications and social media. I have a smart phone and computers. I don't feel harried and interrupted and like I can't get a break.

My life was quiet before sleeping in a tent for nearly 6 years, but doing that deepened the quiet. I am prone to ear infections. I can't wear headphones because of it. My days were spent in a library. My nights were spent trying to be quiet enough to go unnoticed and not have the cops called on me. Games were often played with the sound off.

Peace and quiet is necessary to be able to hear yourself think. I think the degree to which constant noise interferes with deep contemplation and self reflection goes largely unrecognized.

A lot of people could probably skip therapy entirely if they could just arrange to hear themselves think. But I think many people are intentionally avoiding that because the constant flak of noise obscuring their thoughts and feelings is critical to their ability to stay in a relationship that doesn't work or at a job they actually hate.

Hearing their own opinions about their own lives would likely compel many of them to make hard decisions and big changes and they would rather not know. That's scary. It's overwhelming. The noise that enables remaining stuck is like an anaesthetic.

<comment><USER3> > A lot of people could probably skip therapy entirely if they could just > arrange to hear themselves think.

I'm sure you aren't completely implying this but as someone who went through therapy and attended group classes where I encountered dozens of people with significantly worse forms of anxiety, there are a lot of people whose problem IS their thoughts.

Negative thoughts are capable of preventing people from doing even basic things like talking to a friendly stranger, washing dishes, or even getting out of bed to do a routine. It akin to having poor eye sight and being forced to wear a broken pair of glasses. Those thoughts completely change the perspective of the world, sap energy, and foster incredibly awful feelings. And I think without guidance, it's easy to get into a loop where thoughts can pull a person into a deeper darkness.

I personally find it much easier to be with my thoughts now that a lot of my life has changed for the better, but there's no way I think I could've done it without my therapist. I needed someone to be my champion, to be a voice that could counter my inner critic, to build my confidence before I had the capacity to challenge the beliefs that constantly prevented me from doing things that brought fulfillment.

<comment><USER4> Could you explain a bit more about your negative thought problems and how therapy helped? I'm in a similar situation and am looking at options to help myself. Thanks.

<comment><USER5> Woebot is a project out of Stanford which teaches you how to recognize and correct unhealthy thinking. It is also an interesting example of a chatbot based service. [https://woebot.io/](https://woebot.io/)

<comment><USER6> I'm quite disturbed by efforts like this. Perhaps because I __cannot __fathom how a chatbot can help replace human compassion and emotion from just simple human characteristics like facial expressions.

A major part of the solution will be to get together and try to understand each other. __Not __to delegate this to a bot that 'll spit out some random LSTM generated "words".

Our bots can help solve __some __problems in our communication, and can help us communicate when we __cannot __physically do so. Hawking will testify to this perhaps.

They should not communicate __instead __of us being able to do so.

<comment><USER7> To plagiarise myself from another, similar HN thread ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14504306](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14504306)):

That's not self-evidently a bad thing.

For example, here is an article about Ellie, a South-Carolina University virtual therapist used in the treatment of PTSD. It notes some explicit advantages which at least complement humans:

 _"One advantage of using Ellie to gather behaviour evidences is that people seem to open up quite easily to Ellie, given that she is a computer and is not designed to judge the person", Morency explains to news.com.au_

...

 _Morency stresses she is not a substitute for a human therapist. Rather, she is used in tandem with a doctor as a data-gatherer, able to break down walls which may exist due to a patient's unwillingness to disclose sensitive information to a human._

 _As Morency explains, "The behavioural indicators that Ellie identifies will be summarised to the doctor, who will integrate it as part of the treatment or therapy. Our vision is that Ellie will be a decision support tool that will help human doctors and clinicians during treatment and therapy."_

\- [http://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/meet-ellie- the-...](http://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/meet-ellie-the-robot- therapist-treating-soldiers-with-ptsd/news- story/0201fa7cf336c609182cffd637deef00)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> American culture of making noise and hyping is tiring and annoying at times.

Sports events are the most prominent example. Going to popular sports matches in the US: football, ice hockey, basketball, etc. and you'll be bombarded with ads, noise, hype from the loudspeakers and flashing lights from the huge screens -- every single second you're there. When you watch the Super Bowl, you watch more ads than you watch the game. Going to a soccer game which is the most popular sport outside of the US, the only sound you'll ever hear is when the fans actually make noise. And perhaps, the announcement when they substitute players. By the way, it's quite cool to be in a high-stakes soccer match: There are volunteering leaders emerging from the crowd that orchestrate the people naturally. Noise in sports events are great, but only when they are not from the stupid flashing screens.

It's not a surprise to me that the laugh tracks were invented in America. Their presence in modern American sitcoms is annoying at best. But now, I think the producers started to realize that.

I think we are happier when we're treated like adults who know how to feel and behave.

<comment><USER9> One thing I didn't understand when I visited the US is that people applaud in American cinemas. I don't understand why that's seen as appropriate.

<comment><USER10> having lived here 40+ years, and seen many movies, I think I've seen/heard applause or cheering maybe... 2 or 3x? At the end of a fantastic movie, there may be cheering. Massive stunt that fools everyone - maybe. But cheering/applause at the cinema in the US is certainly not common.

<comment><USER11> I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you have mostly lived in all white areas and or watched movies that appeal primarily to white audiences.

Go watch a Tyler Perry movie or the recent black panther if you want to hear lots of clapping or cheering during a movie.

<comment><USER10> In the last 15 years yeah. Before that probably somewhat more mixed area, but possibly so on movie choices. I don't go to many 'summer blockbuster' sort of movies any more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Another thing is advertisement pollution. Just notice it when going around in some bigger cities. Ads everywhere, shouting at you and not letting you to rest. Even if you don't look at them, they are still there, talking to you.

<comment><USER13> This article itself may be paid advertising, perhaps by the Finland marketing board. They even mention VisitFinland.com in the final paragraph.

"Science says quiet is good for you."

"Finland is a place that is quiet."

"You should go to Finland."

It's not even subtle but I didn't see it mentioned in these comments at all.

<comment><USER14> If it was a paid ad, it was successful, because now I want to go to Finland.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was in Salvador, Brazil this summer and was disgusted by how loud everything was, people on the streets carrying speakers playing music, street sellers screaming, cars honking, I prefer the relative quietness of my southern Chile.

<comment><USER16> Salvador is the capital of the Bahia a state of Brazil. The city has almost 3 millions of people, and it is know for its famous Carnaval parties in the summer. What were you hoping for? A silence place?

<comment><USER17> The comment did not imply the expectation for the city to be quiet. But once arrived, they discovered the city to be loud. It seems like you misunderstood the point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Kirste found that two hours of silence per day prompted cell development in the hippocampus."

This was in mice, but if silence turns out to grow neurons in humans too, that will be big news.

<comment><USER19> I could be far off base here, but I wonder if this could be tied to why humans are generally considered more capable of learning in adolescence - the older someone gets, the more noise they find around them. Lecturers' voices, phones ringing, music, cars and the like are all things you hear progressively more after age 3 or so.

<comment><USER20> There's a (loosely) related thread under today's article about John von Neumann's assistant[1] about von Neumann's alleged preference for working with loud music playing (something I've seen corroborated in places like _Turing 's Cathedral_, where it was also mentioned that he liked working with noise in general; to what degree any specific music was preferable, I can't discern, though that book mentioned loud marches). It seems there may be some individual (or, at least, situational) variability with how noise affects productivity and thought.

The perceived structure or unstructuredness of the noise in the mind of the listener seems like it also may be relevant, at least from my own experiences - similar to how looking at a wall of code can induce anxiety in novice programmers, but someone familiar with the language and systems employed can see forms and patterns, interpreting what the code actually does and reducing the level of cognitive dissonance that results from looking at it. FWIW, marches can be characterized by a strongly defined and relatively simple structure with a driving 1-2-3-4 pulse that carries the music along and frames our perception of it.

Stanislaw Ulam wrote of von Neumann: "If one has to divide mathematicians, as Poincaré proposed, into two types—those with visual and those with auditory intuition—Johnny perhaps belonged to the latter. In him, the 'auditory sense,' however, probably was very abstract. It involved, rather, a complementarity between the formal appearance of a collection of symbols and the game played with them on the one hand, and an interpretation of their meanings on the other. The foregoing distinction is somewhat like that between a mental picture of the physical chess board and a mental picture of a sequence of moves on it, written down in algebraic notation." [2]

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16411799](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16411799)

[2] [http://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1958-64-03/S0002-9904-1958-...](http://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1958-64-03/S0002-9904-1958-10189-5/S0002-9904-1958-10189-5.pdf)

<comment><USER21> I'm nowhere near as cool as Von Neumann, but I find that loud noisy music helps me work. The noisier the better. It helps to drown out background sounds that catch the attention.

If you hear a door creak or a person speak, that's attention grabbing. Are they speaking to me? Is someone looking for me? Can I add to the conversation?

But with noise you are isolated. The attention grabbing sounds don't come through.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Anyone reading this Nautilus article should also read the counter-point article from 2016

[http://nautil.us/issue/38/noise/noise-is-a-drug-and-new- york...](http://nautil.us/issue/38/noise/noise-is-a-drug-and-new-york-is-full- of-addicts)

Lewis Black, a comedian, couches his praise of noise in a cynical one-liner, noting dryly, "The reason I live in New York City is because it's the loudest city on the planet Earth. It's so loud I never have to listen to any of the shit that's going on in my own head."

</comment><comment><USER23> _> Here's how Kirste made sense of the results. She knew that "environmental enrichment," like the introduction of toys or fellow mice, encouraged the development of neurons because they challenged the brains of mice. Perhaps the total absence of sound may have been so artificial, she reasoned—so alarming, even—that it prompted a higher level of sensitivity or alertness in the mice. Neurogenesis could be an adaptive response to uncanny quiet._

Just a word of caution: Experiments that work in mice don't necessarily work in humans [1]. These findings are very preliminary, although interesting.

[1] [http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2016/11/01/the- troubl...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2016/11/01/the-trouble-with- lab-mice/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Taking this another level, and, where I thought the article was originally going, there is an internal dialog going on even with external silence. An aspect of vipassana meditation (and probably others) is when that internal noise silences.

<comment><USER25> That's what I was expecting as well. What Landmark folk call the voice in your head. Which is always interpreting, telling stories, and so on. It's often hard to hear what other people are saying, because that inner voice is so loud. But with practice, it eventually shuts up, most of the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> During silence, the brain consolidates, much as muscles strengthen after exertion, not during.

This consolidation consists in making information fit together "better", by seeking patterns and other redundancies - resulting in both compression and insight. A role also assigned to sleep.

It's more basic than intellectual consolidation, but things like the concept of a chair. (Not _the_ philosphical concept of a chair, but some particular person's actual concept).

But it also explains why we have spontaneous insight when disengaged, e.g. in the shower.

</comment><comment><USER27> Attention has now been made a commodity, so good luck finding peace and quiet if you don't have the money to buy it

<comment><USER28> I feel like this can't be said enough. Various kinds of minimalism, which are really just different ways of being left in peace, are now pleasures that are only reachable by the privileged classes. So of course these pleasures find a lot of enthusiasm here. Not that I'm any less enthusiastic than most here, but we shouldn't forget that out industry contains some of the worst offenders when it comes to distraction and interruption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wish hotels would be graded on how quiet they are.

</comment><comment><USER30> "...and a vibrant cultural capital the size of Nashville, Tennessee..." ahh yes, as a finn, I know all the us cities/states and their size and instantly compare finnish cities to us counterparts. Indeed I do sir.

</comment><comment><USER31> I do a lot of meditation and trance work, and I can say that trance is all about training yourself to ignore things that demand your attention. Both the body and the mind will issue such demands.

Stimulation becomes a "resource," one that you want to get rid of as fast as you gather it. But the easiest way to get rid of it is to not gather it in the first place.

As you get deeper into trance, other things you're not so skilled at ignoring start to make themselves known. You need to learn how to ignore those too. Otherwise you just don't have a whole lot of fun.

The brain can ignore practically anything. Many psychological disorders involve the brain not being able to ignore things that most people can ignore, such as OCD or tinnitus. If I'm in a weird state, tinnitus can become really awful. But most of the time it's not a thing. I submit that 90% of tinnitus cases could be solved with some guided meditation, and 9% of the other 10% needs the attention of a TMJ specialist. Maybe 10% of 10%.

</comment><comment><USER32> I went to Target when they (briefly) came to Canada and was surprised and delighted by the absence of music in the store. I'm sure some people were weirded out by that, but I found it refreshing and peaceful.

<comment><USER33> They were also a forerunner in not using the loudspeaker system to page various employees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Wait, this is a joke, right?? : [https://i.imgur.com/LsjFa8O.png](https://i.imgur.com/LsjFa8O.png)

(Ad tossed up immediately upon opening the article)

</comment><comment><USER35> Protect your ears and don't get tinnitus. Some people ruin their futures (aspiring musician or audio engineer).

</comment><comment><USER36> The voices in my head may or may not agree with the voices in your head.

</comment><comment><USER37> For some reason I intensely I dislike that "Silence, please" slogan. Maybe it's lost in translation, but to me it comes across as scolding.

I actually want to go to Finland and make a lot of noise right now. Maybe I've been browsing [https://reddit.com/r/firstworldanarchists](https://reddit.com/r/firstworldanarchists) too much lately.</comment>


'The Restaurant of Order Mistakes' Employs Waiters With Dementia (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2017/06/05/the-restaurant-of-order-mistakes-employs-waiters-with-dementia/ <comment><USER2> Somewhat related though very different, there are restaurants called Dans Le Noir ("in the dark") - founded in Paris but now in several countries, though so far I've only been to the one in London.

You choose one of a few set menus without knowing what's in it (IIRC, roughly "meat eater", "fish eater", "vegetarian") and give any specific allergies or really hated food types. You are then led into a pitch black room with absolutely no light leakage (no phones/etc. allowed) where you'll be served and eat your food without being able to see a single thing.

I believe the kitchen staff are hired purely on their cooking, but the waiters are visually impaired people who can lead you to your table and serve your food flawlessly without sight.

Their sales pitch is more about the uniqueness of the experience than about supporting blind people, but the fact that it does create this unique job that they're better qualified to do than people with normal vision is nice.

And it's a really great experience, although not particularly cheap.

[https://london.danslenoir.com/en/home/](https://london.danslenoir.com/en/home/)

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately the food is rather bad for the price (at least in the Paris branch). So it's a fun experience but you end up eating food that's barely better than cafeteria food at the price of a fine dining restaurant...

I was really disappointed...

<comment><USER4> Noir Saigon is pretty good [https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g293925-d715...](https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g293925-d7157553-Reviews- Noir-Ho_Chi_Minh_City.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems like a well-meant idea but how do you prevent it becoming exploitative? Exposing dementia patients to random members of the public in a service role with no understanding of the state of their condition seems like a pretty good way of frequently upsetting them. And how does employment by consent work when you can't actually quite remember why you're in a situation and how you got there?

It sounds like - probably to address these concerns - this is a short-lived 'activity' rather than a going concern, potentially with hand-selected and well-briefed guests rather than arbitrary customers off the street.

<comment><USER6> It was put together by Maggie's a dementia charity which in the UK has a very good reputation.

<comment><USER5> I was a bit surprised by this too because Maggie's is actually a cancer charity in the UK. [1]

As I say I imagine it's being handled fairly sensitively in reality. I'm more objecting to the whimsical feel-good description in the article which sort of denies agency to the dementia patients and treats them as funny props.

[1] [https://www.maggiescentres.org/about- maggies/](https://www.maggiescentres.org/about-maggies/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In the US there is a trend to not write orders down (the reason is unclear to me:it's saves paper and makes it mor personal?), short term memorize them and run to the computer and type them in.

This tends to lead to a fair number of mistakes, and makes those with allergies ver nervous.

<comment><USER8> It's a midguided attempted at showing off how smart and talented and sociable the staff are.

<comment><USER9> I don't know why you're being down-voted - this is the answer. It's a ploy, in most cases outside of long-time career waiters/waitresses, by many chains to make their staff seem more professional. It's a literal marketing tool that is taught to staff in many chain restaurants which employ younger, non-'career' staff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> GuB-42 The article focuses on the mistake of not getting the dish you ordered. Which can indeed be fun if you are open when it comes to food.

But other kinds of mistakes can be a lot less fun. For example not getting any service at all, or having to pay more than expected.

I wonder how that restaurant deals with that.

<comment><USER10> > The article focuses on the mistake of not getting the dish you ordered. > Which can indeed be fun if you are open when it comes to food.

As long as you don't have allergies...

<comment><USER11> If you have allergies I can imagine you'd just avoid this restaurant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In the UK we also have the National Star College (an educational establishment for people with disabilities and ABI) which runs two bistros in and near Cheltenham. These have a good reputation, mostly because the quality of the food is really important to them.

[https://www.nationalstar.org/](https://www.nationalstar.org/)

[https://www.nationalstar.org/products-services- facilities/st...](https://www.nationalstar.org/products-services- facilities/star-bistro-ullenwood/)

There's also Wriggly Worm, which has links to Star Bistro.

[https://www.thewigglyworm.org.uk/](https://www.thewigglyworm.org.uk/)

<comment><USER13> In the Netherlands there is a chain called Brownies and Downies staffed by folks with Down Syndrome. The Dutch are v pragmatic. I went and was humbled - the staff spoke way more English than I spoke Dutch after living there (I'm Canadian) for months. [https://www.browniesanddownies.nl](https://www.browniesanddownies.nl)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Essentially the same idea was covered in a recent UK tv show: [https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-restaurant-that- make...](https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-restaurant-that-makes- mistakes)

</comment><comment><USER15> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirchi_and_Mime](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirchi_and_Mime) ,along similar lines in Mumbai (IN)

</comment><comment><USER16> For reference, it still seems to popup every now and then, not just in 2017: [http://www.mistakenorders.com/en/home.html](http://www.mistakenorders.com/en/home.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> I love this. I wonder: would something wonderful like this actually be illegal the US due to the fact that you'd technically be discriminating by hiring only those with dementia?

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure why you're being downvoted - it's an interesting question.

My understanding is that this is would not be illegal because of how discrimination laws work in the US. We have protected classes that can't be descriminated against, but we don't have a generic "no discrimination" employment law.

For example, it's illegal to discriminate against old people, colored people, gay people, disabled people, etc when hiring. It would not necessarily be illegal to discriminate against neurotypical people because they are not a protected class.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I remember they also tried something like this where fully paralyzed people controlled robot waiters with their eyes from a bed.

</comment><comment><USER20> Ask for your bill, they forget. So you need to ask again, they forget.

</comment><comment><USER21> Sounds fantastically Japanese.

</comment><comment><USER22> Url changed from [https://mymodernmet.com/waiters-dementia-restaurant- tokyo/](https://mymodernmet.com/waiters-dementia-restaurant-tokyo/), which points to this.

<comment><USER23> The original URL has way more information than the new source. More pictures and more text.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you handle/manage/record requirements? - <AUTHOR>

I realize that many HN users are using some kind of agile methodology and likely do very little as far as formal requirements. I'm interested in learning about how various companies deal with requirements for different types of software. Do you do separate user and functional/system requirements? Do you use requirements management software? What are your arguments for/against various requirements practices? <comment><USER2> 1\. Open up requirements from the last project. 2\. Rejig them a bit. 3\. Send them off and get back to building things.

...we also use backpack</comment>


Getting your Facebook News Feed in PHP – The Basic Sauce - <AUTHOR> http://philippeharewood.com/facebook/getting-your-facebook-news-feed-in-php-the-basic-sauce/

<comment><USER2> Good to hear!</comment>


Turing Test Success - <AUTHOR> http://www.reading.ac.uk/news-and-events/releases/PR583836.aspx <comment><USER3> Where did the 30% requirement come from? Sounds like something the contest organizers added to make it possible to "pass" without fooling 2/3 of the judges. Using a young teenager as a character also seems like a cheat unless they had other 13-year olds to be the judges. The character needs to be a peer to the judges. Most 13 year olds behave oddly enough in the opinion of most adults that it's got to be easier to credit weird behavior to generational or cultural differences. So kudos to the winners on strategy, and boo to the contest organizers for having such poor rules.

<comment><USER4> 30% of the time, five minute conversations, a "simulated" 13-year old? At least "the conversations were unrestricted".

The Turing test is not a _test_. Instead, it is an operational definition of "intelligence", a very slight formalization of the idea that something is intelligent if it _seems to be intelligent_.

As a test, it obviously has to have some kind of limits like this "competition", but as soon as you put limits on it then it stops being useful and becomes both gameable and meaningless. The Turing test has already been passed, long ago, if you have limits suitable to the Doctor or Parry.

<comment><USER5> > Instead, it is an operational definition of "intelligence"

Exactly. It's a straightforward formulation of what a strong AI would be capable of. It makes no sense to have a restricted Turing test that can be passed by a useless chatbot. It means absolutely nothing.

<comment><USER6> I assume you mean weak AI. And I don't see how you can dismiss the meaning of passing this test so easily. Although it's a trivial example, I can definitely see such chatbots being applied for spamming purposes, which by definition exploits hapless victims.

<comment><USER4> No, I think that's a correct use of strong AI.[1] "Strong AI" is work towards general-purpose intelligence, at least as sentient, conscious, intelligent, or whatever term you prefer to use as you are. "Weak AI" is work towards usefully solving problems that would previously have been thought to require general intelligence, such as chess programs or self-driving cars.

[1] Although usage may be changing. Pity.

<comment><USER6> Weak AI is when a computer can (appear to) act intelligently, strong AI is when a computer can actually think (Russell & Norvig). Therefore, passing a Turing test would be a textbook example of weak AI, because you only need to simulate intelligence well enough to fool the judge.

<comment><USER4> Like I said, usage is changing.

I studied AI shortly after the "AI Winter", which is where I got my definition. Strong AI---working towards a general intelligence---was strongly out of favor, especially with funding agencies. It still remains so (but see Watson). But solving limited problems heuristically (or statistically) that are not otherwise algorithmically tractable (a loose translation of "would appear to require general intelligence") has always been a fertile field.

Turing's argument, which is a philosophical argument, is not meaningful if you put any limits on it---time, topic, behavior (really, Parry is better than the Doctor), which is why it is better thought of as a thought experiment. If you have limits such that it can be gamed, then yes, it is fair to say "you only need to simulate intelligence well enough to fool the judge." Which makes it uninteresting.

But the question is, if you can "simulate intelligence" well enough under any conceivable circumstance (and yes, all actual human beans will fail here), how can you say that it cannot "actually think"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Turing Test is a terrible measure of sapience. Generally it involves using "average people", who have been shown time and again to be overly credulous when talking to these bots. If the test is to be used at all, it should consist of computer science experts instead--people familiar with the technology and bot tricks of the trade.

That the Turing Test is still used is proof that we still don't understand how to even define sapience. Without a definition and concrete, testable qualities, how can we possibly hope to ever build artificial sapience. As a result, we continue to see these toys that are little more than parlor tricks.

Any true test should include looking behind the curtain. "I _know_ you're artificial--I can see the processes working--yet I have doubts that what I'm seeing is real."

In other words, real success is the tester believing he is being fooled when he is not, rather than fooling the tester into believing it is real.

<comment><USER4> That we don't understand how to define intelligence is exactly the point. That's why the Turing test is interesting.

The problem with "looking behind the curtain" is that it traditionally boils down to what I like to think of as the subtle fluid model of intelligence. If you know what is behind the curtain, then obviously it can't be intelligent, because it is not running on the right hardware, for gooey definitions of hardware, or because it doesn't have some Homunculus of Definite Understanding (Hi, Serle!), or because _we can see behind the curtain_ and know what it is doing. Obviously, if we know what it is doing, it is not intelligent, right?

<comment><USER8> I was fortunate enough to take a philosophy of mind class from Searle during my Computer Science undergrad. Very interesting experience.

<comment><USER4> It has been a while since I read him, and I don't think I ever got a satisfactory answer: how _does_ he get around the unbounded recursion of the Chinese room argument?

<comment><USER8> I never agreed with him completely on his views in this regard, but his main point is if you have a system that's governed by rules on input (Like someone looking up the answer in the Chinese room), there's no subjective understanding. So even if you had such a device(room) that behaved flawlessly, there's nothing in there that actually "understands" what's going on. The paper that the Chinese characters are written on doesn't understand, they're paper. And the person carrying out the instructions doesn't understand either, they're just following orders. So what's having the subjective experience/understanding?

The main point I took away is that he feels that consciences is an ordinary biological process, and a simulation of that process is not the same as the process. In the same way that a computer simulation of a stomach digesting food isn't the same as an actually stomach digesting food. No matter how good the simulation is, it doesn't actually digest food. So a simulation of consciences, isn't actually consciences, and doesn't have a personal subjective experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Perhaps I just asked the right questions, but I just had a lovely conversation with 'Eugene'.

I asked him a few questions like where he lived, his name, if he has brothers or sisters, if he wears glasses, etc. Eventually he started asking me questions like what I did for a living and where I lived. He also managed to form questions based on my answers.

It almost _felt_ like a conversation. I can honestly say, I've never thought that before while talking to an AI. So far I am pretty impressed.

<comment><USER10> Is there somewhere online you can talk to him?

<comment><USER11> [http://www.princetonai.com/bot/bot.jsp](http://www.princetonai.com/bot/bot.jsp)

<comment><USER12> Realize that this version is from 2001 and is not the version that was in the recent test.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Awesome job of putting un-followable links in the press release, Reading University.

I'm going to take this with a hug pinch of salt until I've read the transcripts, due to the involvement of famous publicity-hound Kevin Warwick.

<comment><USER14> Yes, at this stage any time I read his name involved with something I cringe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Managing to successfully imitate an ignorant, immature child 1/3 of the time is _not_ what I would call a _success_ , but rather a subversion of the entire intent behind the Turing Test in the first place.

<comment><USER16> I think you're probably expecting to see a 50/50 chance (or higher) of guessing it was a computer. But if you think about it, anything better than 50% would make it more human than a human. So is why the target is lower than 50%

<comment><USER17> Wait, could you explain how a program that is capable of being mistaken for a human more than 50% of the time is more human than human?

I'm pretty sure you're human, with a high degree of confidence, much higher than 50%.

So to are you more human than human?

<comment> qu4z-2 I believe that in the original formulation of the Turing Test the judges were asked to hold two conversations: one with a computer and one with a human. Afterwards they chose which of the two they believed to be the human. In that scenario, being identified as "human" more than 50% of the time would indeed make you "more human than human"; with a "perfectly human" program the test becomes essentially a coin-toss. In that context the 30% threshold makes a good deal of sense.

But in this variant, "Do you believe the entity you spoke with to be a human or a program?", a 100% threshold is theoretically achievable. That means you're entirely correct: a 51% vote of confidence is decidedly less human than human. Additionally the 30% threshold they've used is laughably low in this context. Without a control group, even an 100%-confidence outcome probably says more about the beliefs of the judges than the ability of the program to simulate a human.

I don't mean to take away from the no-doubt impressive achievement by the team behind Eugene. I just take issue with the hyperbole in its reporting. But, ya know, the media will be the media, and academics gotta get research grants.

<comment><USER17> ahh. That's almost certainly what splike meant. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I remember reading the first chapter on an AI book during college which laid out the objectives of AI research into two schools of thought.The first school of thought believes that AI can be achieved by mimicking real conscious beings. Remember when man first tried to fly, most devices mimicked birds and failed horribly. The other school of thought believes that intelligence has well-defined principles, when discovered, would produce real intelligence (not mimicry), having the effect that the final product may not resemble what we see on day to day basis. Compare planes, which use the principles of flight, to the early flapping machines. A bird and plane both fly but they are very different in the way they do it. Approaching flight from the mimicry angle is hard, it's only recently in the last 10 years we have made light-weight flapping machines that fly well;yet we have had planes for over a hundred years once we knew the principles.

Transcripts would be handy. I doubt a conversation with a 13 year old boy is a good way to measure AI? It's not the best metric to have but it is the most universal and most widely agreed on that we have. It seems like we are happier with small gains in mimicry for now, since real intelligence is hard. Really hard.

<comment><USER19> > The first school of thought believes that AI can be achieved by mimicking > real conscious beings

It's important to note the true meaning behind this school of thought - <USER2> mimicry and "true" intelligence are actually equivalent. Behaviorists believe this, and the validity of the Turing Test along with it.

<comment><USER20> I think it might actually be in Civ5 that I first heard the following quote:

"Asking whether a computer can think is about as useful as asking whether a submarine can swim."

I think this is fairly insightful and relevant.

<comment><USER21> That's from Djigstra.

I digress. Most of the times, mimicking Nature works very well. We tend to always remember our most spectacular failure, but that's a selection bias.

<comment><USER6> His name is Dijkstra. I'm curious how you arrive at the conclusion that mimicking nature works most of the time, do you have some examples?

<comment><USER21> Looks like the post is too old, and I can't correct it anymore. On my defense, I was quite tired when I wrote it.

You don't have to go very far looking for examples. The fictional Nautilus submarine was named after the animal Julio Verne copied its depth control system (the same one all real submarines use till today). Also, the first submarines' shape copied whales, a design that was adapted (but not completely replaced) because it does not work as well witout also copying their propulsion system.

By the way, birds wings are better than planes ones in several important ways (but worse in a few others). We don't copy them because we don't have good enough materials, not because it's not a good idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The Turing test is to our understanding of intelligence what sleight of hand is to our understanding of physics. Tricking people, as a goal, is not conductive to science.

A researcher claiming to have passed the Turing test instantly discredits himself as a prestidigitator looking for PR buzz. The present article is a textbook example of this.

As a side note, if you are focusing on disembodied, language-based human-like intelligence, then the paradigm you operate in is many decades behind. The Turing test was conceived at a time when the notion of thinking machines had just started to emerge --a very different time from today, where we have 60 years of AI research behind us. The Turing test has been irrelevant for longer than most AI researchers have been alive. I have never seen it used for anything else than smoke-and-mirrors PR operations.

<comment><USER19> Your opinion is not universally accepted. (Perhaps not even mainstream?).

There's an element of behaviorism which stretches back to Descartes - how can you know that I exist? That I think? You can only observe through my behavior; that my behavior mimics yours.

How then can we judge machines any other way?

<comment><USER22> The Turing test only tests for mimicry in human conversation, not "intelligence" as measured through a behavioral framework.

A better "Turing test" proposed a few years ago was, "develop a team of robots that play soccer so well they can win the World Cup". While not the best possible driver of AI research, the quest for such a goal would still drive AI research orders or magnitude better than "trick random people to mistake a chatbot for a human".

<comment><USER23> Is it really better? It sounds completely within capabilities of current robotics and algorithms. Mix up DARPA robots and AI from FIFA and you'll likely have a winning team.

<comment><USER22> Please. That is many decades away, and the hard part about it is definitely not the soccer strategy AI...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Surly they did not talk to this one [1] - it is light-years away from being convincing.

[1] [http://www.princetonai.com/bot/](http://www.princetonai.com/bot/)

<comment><USER25> I was impressed it could write grammatically sound sentences, but it's not even close to human-level conversation...

<comment><USER26> I would be impressed if it didn't. If it made common mistakes a human would make, it would seem more human.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Bold claim, but without any transcripts it's impossible to verify just how close to the truth the claim comes.

<comment><USER17> That's true. I want to talk to Eugine. Your suggestion seems to be the very minimum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> When people imagine what a Turing Test conversation would look like, they frequently underestimate the conversation. I find Dennet's example of an imaginary Turing Test from Consciousness Explained to be a good counterexample:

 _Judge: Did you hear about the Irishman who found a magic lamp? When he rubbed it a genie appeared and granted him three wishes. "I'll have a pint of Guiness!" the Irishman replied and immediately it appeared. The Irishman eagerly set to sipping and then gulping, but the level of Guiness in the glass was always magically restored. After a while the genie became impatient. "Well, what about your second wish?" he asked. Replied the Irishman between gulps, "Oh well, I guess I'll have another one of these."

CHINESE ROOM: Very funny. No, I hadn't heard it– but you know I find ethnic jokes in bad taste. I laughed in spite of myself, but really, I think you should find other topics for us to discuss.

J: Fair enough but I told you the joke because I want you to explain it to me.

CR: Boring! You should never explain jokes.

J: Nevertheless, this is my test question. Can you explain to me how and why the joke "works"?

CR: If you insist. You see, it depends on the assumption that the magically refilling glass will go on refilling forever, so the Irishman has all the stout he can ever drink. So he hardly has a reason for wanting a duplicate but he is so stupid (that's the part I object to) or so besotted by the alcohol that he doesn't recognize this, and so, unthinkingly endorsing his delight with his first wish come true, he asks for seconds. These background assumptions aren't true, of course, but just part of the ambient lore of joke- telling, in which we suspend our disbelief in magic and so forth. By the way we could imagine a somewhat labored continuation in which the Irishman turned out to be "right" in his second wish after all, perhaps he's planning to throw a big party and one glass won't refill fast enough to satisfy all his thirsty guests (and it's no use saving it up in advance– we all know how stale stout loses its taste). We tend not to think of such complications which is part of the explanation of why jokes work. Is that enough? _

Dennett: "The fact is that any program that could actually hold up its end in the conversation depicted would have to be an extraordinary supple, sophisticated, and multilayered system, brimming with "world knowledge" and meta-knowledge and meta-meta-knowledge about its own responses, the likely responses of its interlocutor, and much, much more…. Maybe the billions of actions of all those highly structured parts produce genuine understanding in the system after all."

I'm sure they didn't get anywhere near this with their 13-yr-old simulation. But this gives an idea of the heights AI has to scale before it can regularly pass the Turing Test.

<comment><USER29> That excerpt reads to me like writing, not conversation. Someone spent some time polishing it. I know people who can talk like that extemporaneously, but I'd wager 99% of native English speakers wouldn't pass if that's the bar.

<comment><USER30> I thought that was an obvious example of a computer system, as it was a labored and overly detailed description. I would have immediately flagged it as a computer system, and not a human.

<comment><USER28> Well OK, but if you had a conversation like that with a bot, would you be prepared to consider the bot as being conscious? Thats the deeper question that the Turing Test is really about, rather than human/not human.

<comment><USER30> You know - Marc Andreessen was tweeting about this today - and he held the same view as you. But, every book I've read on Turing, and every article I've read on the Turing tests suggests that the _entire idea_ behind the turing test was to _not_ get caught up on concepts such as "thinking" or "intelligence" \- but to just posit a test to see if a machine could imitate thinking behavior. This then, provides a nice unambiguous target for research and development, without worrying about being caught up in the semantics of the conversation.

<comment><USER31> Perhaps the lesson is that no matter what your starting intention, the rules of a competitive game are going to be optimized for. You might start out with the goal of creating a general test of physical prowess. A 50m sprint, weight lifting contest or even a wrestling match is too specific so you invent a general game where strength, speed, endurance, etc. matter and you call it rugby.

If no one had heard of the rules in advance, rugby would be a pretty decent test of general physical prowess. Maybe not 100% perfect, but out of a population of 1000, the 50 best rugby players would probably match most people's top 50 list of physical specimens well enough.

But, once you have people training and optimizing for it, you find that (a) training for rugby specifically matters. (b) Rugby is optimizing for a particular set of physical characteristics.

Chat bots designed to win the game are basically designed to fool people into thinking that they're human because that's the game. It isn't really a good proxy for consciousness.

<comment><USER28> But if I was talking to a bot and it was able to hold a conversation as complex as the one above, for a long time and without glitches etc, I'd be prepared to consider it 'conscious'. You have to consider how difficult it would be to pass a Turing Test _reliably_ with a decent judge who took the conversation in interesting directions.

re: Chat bots designed to win games: Some say that's exactly what we are! - The Social Brain Hypothesis of the evolution of human intelligence suggests that the reason our brains grew so big was that intelligence (via ability to deal with social groups) became a large factor in reproductive success.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_human_intelligence...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_human_intelligence#Social_brain_hypothesis)

<comment><USER31> I guess what I am saying is that I think the Turing test was a way to demonstrate an idea without being able to define it specifically.

I think the focus on Turing tests is interesting and has definitely expanded knowledge in this area. But, it is now an area within the search for artificial consciousness. It no longer works as a test for it as it would if a computer just happened to stumble on the test and pass it.

That said, I do thing that where we are visa a vis the Test is a cool benchamark. I would be over the moon if one of the Turing bots got to the point where it could do a job, like being a customer support bot.

Hopefully someplace slightly north of the Turing test goal post there will be commercial goal posts to encourage development, hopefully a conversational user interface. A convincing chatbot as a user interface would present lot of very interesting challenges.

<comment><USER28> Well yes there's kinda two different views of the Turing Test:

1) Consciousness is really hard to define so the Turing Test is a handy workable yardstick that AI can use as a milestone until we get a proper working definition of consciousness

2) (Hard-AI, behaviourist position) Appearing to be conscious and being conscious are the same thing. Hence the Turing Test is about as good a definition of consciousness as we are ever likely to get. Perhaps it could be tightened up a little - insisting on really long conversations with lots of complexity etc. But a good judge running a test over a longish time period would see to that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The point missed is the Turing test was an abstract thought experiment into how we perceive the presence of intelligence.

If a decade or so of social media (whatever that means) has proven anything, its that very little intelligence occurs in virtually all conversations.

The meta Turing test is being failed by many people who think it (a concrete implementation of it) means something. Much like actually building a well sealed box with a cat, a radioisotope source, and a geiger counter wouldn't actually be a "great step forward for Quantum Physics" in 2014. Any more than making a little anthropomorphic horned robot and having him divert fast "hot" molecules one direction or slow "cold" molecules another would be a great step forward for thermodynamics in 2014.

The value of a thought experiment is realized when its proposed, not when someone makes a science fair demonstration of the abstract idea.

</comment><comment><USER33> Lots of self-congratulation all round with no sample questions to provide the merest smidgeon of 'reason to believe that this is that significant'.

</comment><comment><USER34> > If a computer is mistaken for a human more than 30% of the time during a > series of five minute keyboard conversations it passes the test. No computer > has ever achieved this, until now. Eugene managed to convince 33% of the > human judges that it was human.

Surely it depends on who the human judges are. It seems a bit unfair that the judges normally have IQ > 100 and the other humans have IQ > 100.

I strongly suspect that some simplistic AI (alicebots, for example) would beat the Turing test if the human judges had IQ between 90 and 105. (Especially if we're using the limited 30% rule above).

Getting bots running on some Facebook groups might be interesting.

</comment><comment><USER35> "a computer programme that simulates a 13 year old boy [...] If a computer is mistaken for a human more than 30% of the time during a series of five minute keyboard conversations it passes the test."

In short they did nothing.

</comment><comment><USER36> I don't know exactly how Eugene works, but I am quite sure like most chat bots it simply reacts to keywords or preprogrammed patterns. Basically it's Eliza [0], but with more scripts. I believe most people here would not give it credit for winning an intelligence test.

There is actually more than one bot, which has been claimed to have passed the Turing Test before. Cleverbot is one of them [1]. There are also several competitions, but I believe the most reputable and long standing one is the Loebner Prize [2]. The bot that currently holds the Loeber Prize is Mitsuku [3].

Anyway, you can chat with Eugene at [4], I gave it a try. I believe there is one thing that the creators of Eugene got right. When chatting with other chat bots, I usually in a situation where the bot says something, I ask I followup question (like "Why?"), and it gives a generic answer like "Because I say so" or "I don't know". Eugene does the same but will ask a unrelated followup question right together with the response. That way at least there is not a weird pause in the conversation.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA)

[1] [http://www.geekosystem.com/cleverbot-passes-turing- test/](http://www.geekosystem.com/cleverbot-passes-turing-test/)

[2] [http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner- prize.html](http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html)

[3] [http://www.mitsuku.com](http://www.mitsuku.com)

[4] [http://www.princetonai.com/bot/bot.jsp](http://www.princetonai.com/bot/bot.jsp)

</comment><comment><USER37> Any chance of seeing conversation logs?

</comment><comment><USER38> Although the Turing Test is interesting, it is not, in my opinion, all that useful. I would much rather see chess program level of performance in the domain of medical diagnosis, for example.

There are lots of other domains where I would be entirely happy to know that I was talking to an AI, if the answers I was getting were significantly better than most human experts in that domain.

</comment><comment><USER39> "If a computer is mistaken for a human more than 30% of the time during a series of five minute keyboard conversations it passes the test. No computer has ever achieved this, until now. Eugene managed to convince 33% of the human judges that it was human."

SO the result can very depending on different conditions. :) Highly non deterministic

</comment><comment><USER40> Me: Do you have more hair on your head or on your eyelash? Goostman: If I say that I haven't more hair on my head or on my eye lash - will it satisfy your inquisitive mind? By the way, what's your occupation? I mean - could you tell me about your work?

This is not passing the Turing test by any stretch of the imagination.

</comment><comment><USER41> I've often wondered if the Turing Test has been decoupled from signifying its original goal due to an instance of Goodhart's Law; namely, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Surely the ability to trick a human into believing an AI is a human is a milestone, but it was with an AI specifically optimized for this task. The deeper question is if the passing of the Turing Test in this case means we should ascribe consciousness to the bot, and I think none of us are willing to affirm it yet. I would suggest that this discrepancy is caused by the "measure becoming a target" and losing its ability to be a "good measure." I guess this is why there is such a critical distinction between Artificial Intelligence and Artificial General Intelligence, which is where the Turing Test would have more weight.

</comment><comment><USER42> Between this and the Ars Technica article[1], I'm still confused: Was this a regular Turing test? Who was the humans that the machines tested against? As far as I recall, the model is two participants, one human, one machine -- the judges communicate with each through writing -- and if the machine "tests" as human more than 30% of the time, it's considered a "win" at the imitation game (the machine has successfully imitated being human). Both the machine and the human are supposed to try to appear human.

(And this is extended from another form of the imitation game, where the goal is to imitate being male, where participants are male and female)

Have anyone been able to find any more concrete information (and perhaps some transcripts)? If not I hope someone will set up a new test, and invite "Eugene" to participate.

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2014/06/eugene...](http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2014/06/eugene-the-supercomputer-not-13-year-old-first-to-beat-the- turing-test/)

[edit: We may be given some hints from the wikpedia article on the turing test: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test#Imitation_Game_vs....](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test#Imitation_Game_vs._Standard_Turing_Test)

"Huma Shah and Kevin Warwick, who organised the 2008 Loebner Prize at Reading University which staged simultaneous comparison tests (one judge-two hidden interlocutors), showed that knowing/not knowing did not make a significant difference in some judges' determination. Judges were not explicitly told about the nature of the pairs of hidden interlocutors they would interrogate. Judges were able to distinguish human from machine, including when they were faced with control pairs of two humans and two machines embedded among the machine-human set ups. Spelling errors gave away the hidden-humans; machines were identified by 'speed of response' and lengthier utterances." ]

<comment><USER42> Some more information from Gizmodo:

[http://gizmodo.com/5921698/what-its-like-to-judge-the- turing...](http://gizmodo.com/5921698/what-its-like-to-judge-the-turing-test)

(linked from [http://gizmodo.com/this-is-the-first-computer-in-history- to-...](http://gizmodo.com/this-is-the-first-computer-in-history-to-have- passed-th-1587780232) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> A real test of (Artificial) intelligence would be, must include that it is real capable of learning new things and developing and not trying to convince others that it has learned something (what in this case in my opinion is wrong, since it is just knowledge that is programmed into it -- meaning, not its own knowledge, but borrowed knowledge of the programmers).

I would also add, that the real prove must include a topic that the artificial person was not programmed for. (not like a Bayesian filter that "develops" by "learning" new facts about a fixed topic).

Learning, developing, evolving, that are the real marks of living and of intelligence (since, I would not part between intelligence and living).

</comment><comment><USER44> If it was hosted by the Royal Society, wouldn't it be on their website ([https://royalsociety.org/events/?type=all&direction=past](https://royalsociety.org/events/?type=all&direction=past))?

<comment><USER45> It was hosted _by_ the University of Reading _at_ the Royal Society.

[https://royalsociety.org/venue-hire/](https://royalsociety.org/venue-hire/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Spoken language is just a small part of overall communication. Today Turing Test should consist of not only speaking but simulating, perhaps by a streaming video, a professor in front of a class of wild students. He should strive to capture their attention, to gain their respect and interest, to understand their inner state of mind.

Speaking is only a way of getting into the stage. Once into the highlights you must prove you are a leader or, if you decide so, that you are able to gain the attention of your audience to emphasize something important that previously was not perceived as such. That is speaking is an art, is not about explaining a plot but about creating a story.

</comment><comment><USER47> That headline should read: "33% of human judges flunk the Turing Test".

</comment><comment><USER48> This looks awfully like a private event for Reading University that just happens to have been held at the Royal Society. I wonder whether they even had more than three non-"celebrity" judges.

</comment><comment><USER49> Ah, Reading University - the powerhouse of computer science...

Move on people, it's just a cheap PR stunt.

</comment><comment><USER50> Even though many AI researchers will agree that the Turing Test isn't a very good representation of "real" intelligence, this is still a huge milestone. Many, many researchers have tried and failed to pass the Turing Test.

But people will continue to dismiss the state of the art and deny that computers have "real" intelligence, the same way they did when the computer defeated Kasparov, the same way they did when we saw Googles self driving cars, the same way they did when a computer won on Jeopardy, and now with the Turing Test. Even when we have robots that look and act exactly like humans, many people will say that they are not "really" intelligent and dismiss the accomplishment. They will still be saying that when AIs twice as smart as people arrive and they have to figure out what to do with billions of what will then be, relatively speaking, mentally challenged people.

</comment><comment><USER51> >"I feel about beating the turing test in quite convenient way. Nothing original," said Goostman, when asked how he felt after his success.

So how long until the creator can pass the Turing Test?

(Normally I'd ignore that, but given the subject matter...)

</comment><comment><USER52> This doesn't seem like much of a milestone to me. If Ray Kurzweil wins this bet against Mitch Kapor, that will be a milestone: [http://longbets.org/1/](http://longbets.org/1/)

</comment><comment><USER53> Did they also run the experiment with an actual 13 yo kid?

<comment><USER34> ...Imagine someone releasing bots on XBOXLive. Your task is to guess which obscenity-screaming 13 year okd is real and which is a bot.

Some forms of Turing test are trivially passable with dumb enough humans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> How feasible is it to have hosted state of the art Turing bots available to the converse with anyone?

</comment><comment><USER54> Failed.. Just keep saying hello to it and imagine it is a real people.

</comment><comment><USER12> You can watch the goal posts shifting for "AI" as we speak. Great result nonetheless!

</comment><comment><USER55> I appreciate HN's rule about brief, non-sensational submission titles, but perhaps this one's taken it to the point of absurdism.

<comment><USER56> It was the submitter's title, not a mod edit, if that matters. The submitter did a good job, because the rest of the title ("marks milestone in computing history") is certainly linkbait and arguably misleading. Having it there would likely have made this thread a lower-quality controversy than it currently is. HN threads are surprisingly sensitive to initial conditions.

Edit: Oh, and considering how many fluff press articles are showing up about this [1], the submitter also showed exemplary taste in source selection. Yay, stevejalim!

1\. [https://hn.algolia.com/?q=turing+test#!/story/sort_by_date/0...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=turing+test#!/story/sort_by_date/0/turing%20test)

<comment><USER57> It seems the submitter has passed your Turing test. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> looks like some smegging marketing smeg for smeg-heads

</comment><comment><USER59> Stop bitching. Its passed. Get over it.</comment>


Creating a new web app: the first steps you should take - <AUTHOR> http://tbbuck.com/creating-a-new-web-app-the-first-steps-you-should-take/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone, blog post author here - if you have any questions or suggestions, I'm all ears :)</comment>


Why Warren Buffett Took Out an Ad on the Same Page as One for a Strip Club - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-22/buffett-plan-revealed-amid-ads-for-co-op-strippers-old-honda?cmpid=BBD052217_BIZ&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=170522&utm_campaign=bloombergdaily <comment><USER2> The "newspaper publication" requirement for legal notices has become a lifeline for small papers. They have a lobby trying to keep it from going away.[1] Of course, nobody reads those things; they look up the info online.

[1] [https://apnews.com/7c871e1cae4f481db7ca1326a729a38c/fight- ag...](https://apnews.com/7c871e1cae4f481db7ca1326a729a38c/fight-against- publishing-notices-newspapers-persists)

<comment><USER3> I can confirm this. It was/has been a major source of revenue since the recession around '07-'08.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> New York, don't fall into this scam trap. You don't need to publish unless you want your LLC to sue or defend itself in a suit. If you're bootstrapping, don't waste money publishing, you can always publish before suing or defending

<comment><AUTHOR> > _You don 't need to publish [in New York State] unless you want your LLC to > sue or defend itself in a suit_

"The Limited Liability Company Law and Partnership Law include provisions regarding the publication required upon the formation or authorization of domestic and foreign limited liability companies, limited partnerships and limited liability partnerships (hereinafter referred to as 'limited liability entities'). The applicable statutory provisions should be consulted prior to publishing.

...

Limited liability entities that are formed or authorized to do business in New York after June 1, 2006, which fail to comply with the publication requirements within 120 days after their formation or qualification will have their authority to carry on, conduct or transact any business suspended. [1]"

TL; DR Do not violate the publication requirement. When suing a New York LLC, a common tactic is to show this requirement was not met. That then retroactively dissolves the LLC and lets you pierce through to the owner's assets.

[1] [https://www.dos.ny.gov/corps/llcfaq.asp#pubreq](https://www.dos.ny.gov/corps/llcfaq.asp#pubreq)

 _Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. Do not take legal advice from my Internet comments._

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> TLDR: because the law says he has to announce some stock changes in a print paper. Lol, how vintage is that law.

<comment><USER2> Where do you put a notice that will be reliably available 20-30 years from now?

<comment> rm_-rf_slash I read in the Economist a while back that some historians speculate that the constant format changes of Information Age media could mean that historians of the 22nd century would have more primary and secondary source material from the early 20th century than the early 21st.

<comment><USER6> How much will we be able to trust archived digital materials? If I find a set of 100 year old handwritten letters, it's unlikely that anyone has tampered with them to change the message, although possible with a lot of effort. Digital messages could be compromised undetectably by some archiver.

Is it still "primary" if it has been downloaded from the internet, converted between formats, copied across various storage media...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Cronhooks – Schedule one time or recurring webhooks - <AUTHOR> https://cronhooks.io/ <comment><USER2> Have you tried posthook.io (launched here on HN [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17346616](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17346616)). How's cronhooks different/better? Best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi adeltoso,

Well posthook is promising but it lacks of repetitive schedules using cron expressions. While cronhooks enables you to schedule one time or recurring schedules.</comment></comment>


Combining event sourcing and stateful systems - <AUTHOR> https://stitcher.io/blog/combining-event-sourcing-and-stateful-systems <comment><USER2> I think to truly be an event-driven architecture you need to go a step or two further and be _data-driven_.

In other words, the appropriate way to describe your system would not be (subscribable) relationships between a set of components that describe your presumptive view of a division of responsibilities. (This is the non-event driven way of doing things, but with the arrows reversed.)

Instead, you track external input types, put them into a particular stream of events, transform those events to database updates or more events, etc. Your _entire system_ is this graph of event streams and transformations.

These streams may cut across what you thought were the different responsibilities, and you will have either saved yourself headaches or removed a fatal flaw in your design.

If you're thinking about doing work in this area, don't just reverse the arrows in your component design!

<comment><USER3> I'm really interested to understand your comment better.

Can you give an example for "presumptive view of a division of responsibilities" and generally the whole comment? Something like "bad way" vs "good way"? Thanks!

<comment><USER2> It's abstract, but I'll try to get something down.

First, look at what happens to the system from the outside, say a web request that leads to a web response. In between, information is gathered from other areas (databases, program logic) and combined with the request data. There are also possibly other effects generated (writes to database state, messages to other users, etc.).

Now take all of those "effects"--the web response, but also the database updates, logs, messages, etc.--and look at each of them as a tree (going left to right, with the root, the result, on the right) where different kinds of information were combined and transformations were performed in order to get the result.

We're being conceptual here, so imagine we're not simplifying or squashing things together--the tree can be big and complicated. Also temporarily ignore any ideas you may have that there's a difference between information coming from the "user" area versus the "admin" area versus the "domain object #1" area. In this world, those stores of information only exist to the extent they enable the flow that produces our results.

Now notice that there are many different requests and many different effects and responses. Thankfully, some number of the inputs are shared and reusable. Further, entire spans of nodes are in common (an event type) or entire subtrees are in common (a subsystem). These are your data streams and your modules. You didn't add them in because you felt like there had to be a "user service" or an "object #1 service"--those commonalities factored out (to the extent they did) of the requirements of the data flows.

Often, there isn't an "object #1" at all--that was a presumption used to put stakes down so you had somewhere to start. And our systems that are made of up of things like "object #1 service" and "object #2 service" very frequently end up with problems of the form: "we can't do that because object #1s don't know about [aspect of object #2s]! Everyone knows that! We need a whole new sub- system!". In the data-driven world the question is always the same: what data do you need to combine in order to get your result?

This isn't to say all modules we usually come up with will turn out to be false ones (especially since a lot of the time we're basing our architectures on past experience). For instance, that there is some kind of "user" management system is probably made inevitable by the common paths user-related data take to enter the system.

Now for the reverse argument: imagine you have a system that was done with the sort of modeling where there is an "object #1 service" that must get info from the "user service" and work with the "object #2 service" through the "object set mediator service". You're tracing through all the code that goes into formulating a response to requests, from start to finish, but someone has played a trick on you: they've put one of those censoring black bars over deployment artifacts, package names, and class names. The punchline is that your architecture _inevitably is_ one of the trees described above--it's just a question of how badly things are distorted because someone presumed the system comes from the behavior of "object #1"s and "object #2"s and not the other way around.

<comment><USER4> It is the same as arguing whether lambda calculus is better than pi-calculus or a Turing machine.

These are all isomorphic structures. Neither of them can do more than the other.

For example - you're speaking of dependencies, etc - but any language based on statements can be reduced to a dependency graph defined by it's single- assignment form.

Event sourcing is not a panacea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Fire-Dragon-DoL I'm working with an event sourced system and we did some mistakes in the process of the design, so some areas that didn't need event sourcing do have it.

The biggest downside has been the UI: events are not real time and these objects are just CRUD stuff, so the user wants to see that you saved what he has just written. You might not have this information yet, so you need to mitigate it, for example updating the UI through sockets (lot of additional work).

On the upside, we are acquiring a lot more insights in what business processes bring value and are meaningful, versus what I call "just configuration".

We figured out quite a few rules of thumb over time that are helpful though.

One thing I noticed over time is that on average there is no need for "created" and "updated" event, usually there is one meaningful business event that would encompass both (not always the case), e. g. "product listed", or something along those lines. This not only saves lines, but some code reacting to this event has a reduced interaction surface (less bugs and coupling), as well as being more expressive.

If you might be interested, we chat a lot about event sourcing in the Eventide Slack channel: [https://eventide-project.org/#community- section](https://eventide-project.org/#community-section)

<comment><USER5> This is super important and I cannot stress it enough! If your events contain words like, "create, update, delete, associate, disassociate," then you're building a weak domain model that won't benefit from the added complexity of deriving state from the source of events.

Your events should use the same words your customer would actually use to describe their business process. For example, a system to manage intake of patients in an ER would have events such as _Patient Arrived_ , _Patient Screen Completed_ , _Patient Admitted_ , etc.

If you don't have such a vocabulary then you're not capturing interesting events so don't store them. You probably want something that is _event driven_ instead or perhaps simply to log actions to an audit table.

<comment> Fire-Dragon-DoL Indeed! It became pretty evident at some point, we had 4 models that had just "created, updated and deleted" and felt weak, suddenly we arrived at one model that had only a "configured" event, that needed all the information from the previous 4.

That's when we figured out that the other 4 were pointless, just "UI gimmicks to make the life of the user easier", the only event that was relevant was that "Configured", with all the related information in there.

The event modeling is the key part. It also help gaining a much deeper understanding of the business problem the software is trying to solve

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You should take a look at Microsoft's Durable Functions which pairs event sourcing + (optional) actor model + serverless. It's some pretty neat tech.

I tried doing something similar to this several years ago, and here's a few issues I ran into:

1\. Pub/sub in Event Sourcing is a bad idea. It's really hard to get right. (what to do if sub happens after pub due to scaling issues/infrastructure, etc?) Instead it's better to push commands deliberately to a process manager that handles the inter-domain communication and orchestration.

2\. Concurrency. Ensuring aggregates are essentially single-threaded entities is a must. Having the same aggregate id running in multiple places can cause some really fun bugs. This usually requires a distributed lock of some sort.

3\. Error handling. I ended up never sending a command to a domain directly, instead I sent it to a process manager that could handle all the potential failure cases.

<comment><USER7> > Pub/sub in Event Sourcing is a bad idea

I find this point surprising. I would say the exact opposite. I would say that pub/sub and event sourcing are two sides of the same coin: events.

> what to do if sub happens after pub

That should only ever be a problem with a non-durable transport that doesn't have serialized writes per topic. Which, admittedly, can be pretty common. But it's not so much an event sourcing or pub/sub issue as much as a choice of message transport issue.

> Concurrency. Ensuring aggregates are essentially single-threaded entities is > a must. Having the same aggregate id running in multiple places can cause > some really fun bugs. This usually requires a distributed lock of some sort.

Or it requires partitioning the queues and using an optimistic lock when writing (just to be on the safe side).

<comment><USER6> > I find this point surprising. I would say the exact opposite. I would say > that pub/sub and event sourcing are two sides of the same coin: events.

I meant in the context of getting it right. I didn't experiment with all the pub/sub systems at the time, but most I experimented with would lose data in a catastrophic event and cause inconsistencies. This was several years ago though.

<comment><USER7> > most I experimented with would lose data in a catastrophic event and cause > inconsistencies

Fair enough. Those are probably message buses or message queues that are ephemeral transports. Since event sourcing is predicated upon permanent storage of events, there's no way to lose events that have already been committed (unless someone actually physically deletes the events).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I did a formal model of an event source system used in production and it was quite illuminating. It turns out that concurrency is something one should take into account when designing these systems. _Versioning_ often refers to two things:

1\. The event data itself; when business cases change or understanding grows we wish to add, remove, or change the type of different fields in an event record.

2\. The current _state_ of a projected model

The latter is what requires some form of co-ordination otherwise you can end up with events being written in an incorrect order and produce the wrong state.

It is a good idea though to avoid event sourcing all of your models. Microsoft wrote about their experiences implementing an event-sourced application and how they reached that conclusion [0]. In my experience it's because of temporal properties: event sourced systems are inherently _eventually consistent_ systems. When you have domain models that depend on one another you will need to be quite certain that A _eventually_ leads to B which _eventually_ leads to C and that if a failure happens along the way that nothing is lost or irrecoverable.

[0] [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/msp- n-p/j...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/msp- n-p/jj554200\(v=pandp.10\)?redirectedfrom=MSDN)

</comment><comment><USER8> We encounter a similar problem at my current job (mixing systems that we want to keep stateful with systems that we want to make "real-time"/stream-based).

I think you've covered most of the problems you'll encounter. One thing that sticks out to me is downtime: how will your order subscriber handle a product publisher that's down or otherwise delayed? Then, the events will be potentially out of order, is that a problem for you?

On another note, we follow the same bounded context principles, but we implemented it with Kafka+confluent, since that infrastructure and those libraries were already available. Teams make their data accessible via a mix of "raw" Kafka topics and very refined gRPC services. Your subscriber is implemented as a cron job that reads from N stream and "reduces" them to 1 stream.

FWIW, we also store a transaction log in each of our databases, so we can generate a stream of object states relatively easily later on. This has helped a lot with converting old tables into streams, and vice versa.

The only thing that's a persistent issue is schema changes. My only recommendation there is to never make them... In all seriousness, keep your data models small, and whenever you want to experiment with a schema change, add the new data as a FK'd table with its own transaction log, rather than a schema mutation to your core table. It's never worth the headache if you take data integrity seriously.

</comment><comment><USER9> How long did it take you to come up with this approach? How many meetings etc? As a lone developer I always wonder this stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> It took several hours of individual research, watching talks, reading blog posts; and took several pair-programming sessions of several hours over the span of four weeks to come up with a solution we liked.

We informed our client that this was a new area for us and that we didn't have hands-on experience with, but that we believed it would be beneficial to spend time to explore it, as it would be an elegant solution to several of their business problems. They agreed and we kept them in the loop with weekly meetings.

We're now in the phase of actually implementing real-life processes, the project will probably be in active development for another year or two.

<comment><USER10> How do you approach estimating effort for this sort of thing? I find it awkward enough in Scrum to guess up front how many days of effort research will take and commit to delivering a plan or design by the end. If you have clients and aren't strictly bound by someone else's framework, they still want some rough idea how long research will take. Especially if the client is footing the bill. If the research is un-billed time, then the estimate is critical to _you_. What do you do?

<comment><USER11> If you are perceived as just a cog delivering software patches, you've already lost. If you're presenting business proposals and designs, you've already provided research, analysis and business cases. Often this is alot of extra unrewarded work. Though, if a vendor has proven themselves already, they're in position to ask for billable time for more different types of roles. This upfront work is an investment in own business and can be used to attract other clients, but sure, most of it goes down the toilet unless a good outlet is found for all that creative work. A bigger consultancy can have many people cooperating on such work in order to add that extra value to hiring companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12>
        Events + state = state machine

I was working (briefly) at a startup once and we were having a meeting and the CTO sketched out his idea for our internal architecture and I looked at it and thought, "That's ethernet." I quit that job.

(Technically, I was let go. Friday I went to head of HR and said, "I think I'm gonna quit." Monday morning I was laid off. * _shrug_ *)

<comment><USER13> I don't get what this has to do with ethernet.

<comment><USER14> They're both reinventing the wheel...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would be interested in knowing how the reactors are handling side-effect which should never be replayed. Is there some well established pattern for doing this?

<comment><USER5> Reactors can keep their own state including their current position in the event stream. When a replay is initiated it ignores events older than it's current "head."

<comment><USER7> What happens when the server that holds the thing that holds that state is restarted?

<comment><USER5> That's an important question to ask!

Can you assume the reactor has durable, local storage with atomic transactions?

The answer is to model your design and use a sufficient level of rigour in validating that your system meets your requirements.

Maybe you could use a database server that has the right properties to ensure your reactor could survive a restart.

What if you want to add multiple reactors so that you can process an event stream with a high volume of events, faster?

<comment><USER7> What happens when the write of the current position fails?

It's the same problem as presuming that ACK messages in message brokers/queues are guaranteed to not fail.

Since the message transport and other durable resources are rarely able to be enlisted in the same atomic transaction, and since distributed transactions would largely be an antipattern, it would seem that a reactor that records its current position can't be presumed to be an infallible way of ensuring that messages aren't processed more than once.

In the end, it always comes back to ensuring that handlers are idempotent, having something that can be used as a stable and consistent idempotence key, and accepting that the idempotence logic is the responsibility of the handler coders rather than something we can count on generalized infrastructure for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How were the diagrams made?

<comment><AUTHOR> With [https://excalidraw.com/](https://excalidraw.com/)

Believe me: a whole new world will open once you've discovered it.

<comment><USER17> Pretty cool! I like the idea of edit a file -> save in your repo -> edit -> save. Export as needed.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are you running a web crawler off the following IPs? It's broken - <AUTHOR>

Fellas,
Whoever is running a web crawler on one of the following IPs, check your code. It is sending some garbage as the User-Agent string, e.g.

   RMID=007f010001c2513733c300ea;
   SERVERID=w2;
   SS_MID=672bfcf3-7c0e-492c-b4f5-c4006e444f5chdygi1wn;
   ss_lastvisit=1362572526119;
   hbfec=OePK5KX7vFq7S0Uk-9GxBTrsv9aAR0LR8BxQl+rkdBh+nV56OyysSNYKFbLQ-;
   gae_b_id=X2dhZV9iaW5nb19yYW5kb206NjFDcDJxVzZNRGxadHNGdEFmaTVOZ25...
   GOOGAPPUID=582;
   BBC-UID=556113279384de3e4f43d838f1fec2a6700c2f5db484512e9aa1244e...
   ...
 Over 4KB of what appears to be some internal crawler's state or data. Involved IPs are:

   220.127.116.11        (amazonaws.com)
   220.127.116.11       (aux1-ext.rs.github.com)
   22.214.171.124        (amazonaws.com)
   188.8.131.52        (amazonaws.com)
   220.127.116.11        (amazonaws.com)
 The crawler is accessing only one page on my server, the one linked from the HN's front page, so I think it's someone from here. <comment><AUTHOR> Mods, stop it with the overzealous title editing, will you? Compare:

      HN: Are you running a web crawler off the following IPs? Fix it, it's broken.

to

      Ask HN: Are you running a web crawler off the following IPs? It's broken

This is _not_ "Ask HN", I wasn't asking and I don't want it to come across as a question. If you feel like fixing capitalization, typos and punctuation - fine, but then _stop_. If you edit in a way that affects the tone and style of the title, then change the submitter name to your own! Because that title is certainly no longer mine.

<comment><USER2> Grammatically, "Fix it, it's broken" is incorrect. The correct punctuation is a semi-colon, not a comma (splice). Alternatively, you could use a colon ("Fix it: it's broken") or conjunction (e.g., "Fix it, as it's broken"). Anyhow, for hackers, "broken" and "fix it" are redundant.

Also, people occasionally use "Tell HN:" but almost never "HN:".

That's probably why it was edited.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> From first glace it looks like whatever it is it's dumping it's cookies into the user agent. The "SS_" are squarespace cookies, hbfec the humble bundle cookie and BBC-UID the BBC cookie.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's not the Nuuton crawler.</comment>


The inside story of how 382 recruiters pursued an imaginary engineer - <AUTHOR> http://firstround.com/article/The-inside-story-of-how-382-recruiters-pursued-an-imaginary-engineer <comment><USER2> Or, how about instead of trying to find the bestest Javascript ninja, you take a promising engineer and, I don't know, teach them? Whatever you might think, web technologies are NOT very difficult to learn. Most start-ups work on pretty trivial problems. People in the start-up crowd seem to believe that the smartest people on the planet are building web start-ups. Think again.

<comment><USER3> This has always been the weird thing for me. I'm ex-facebook so when I get hired companies will often say "wow you know a bunch of facebook people, lets hire them" not realizing they are both insanely expensive and insanely in demand.

I've always said, why not instead of hiring engineers who work at Facebook or Google, maybe beat them at their own game and instead go for the same crop of people they are hiring? Brilliant college kids who are excited to work for you and can learn from your team and develop into the great engineer you want.

<comment><USER4> _Wow you know a lot of CMU/MIT/stanford kids, lets hire them_

Not that easy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wherry's original blog post was better. She has a nice graph of where she sourced all of her Javascript dev recruits.

<http://www.ewherry.com/2012/06/the-recruiter-honeypot/>

<comment><USER6> I also found this blog post hard to read, random missing punctuation and grammar mistakes made it hard to follow. I don't see much new in this one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder what kind of insights could be gained by configuring a few Linkedin profiles with these characteristics:

\- C++ developer

\- Ruby developer

\- Java developer

\- COBOL developer

Feed in similar backgrounds, experiences, ages, and see which one picks up the most interest, and what _kind_ of interest.

It'd be a bit mean to the recruiters out there, but, hmm... :-)

<comment><USER8> The degree from Stanford and the job at Meebo were definitely what got the attention - not the skills listed.

Recruiters are heavily biased on what school you went to and which companies you have worked for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How hard would it be to create an "imaginary engineer" generator?

I would like to have a million fake engineers out there.

I just want to see the industry burn.

</comment><comment><USER10> Would this be as laugh-riot funny if somebody posted a fake job offering just to watch people squirm?

<comment><USER11> That's not a valid comparison. As I understand it, the Pete London persona didn't advertise himself as looking for work - recruiters effectively started spamming him.

If someone created an entire fake company, and then laughed at engineers who tried to contact them to find out if they were hiring or not, that would probably not be very funny.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Do not do what I did". Sure. Whatever you say boss.</comment>


Ask HN: What are some resources to learn how to get your first n users? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> HN search is a great one.</comment>


Michael Cohen paid a tech company $50,000 'in connection with' Trump's campaign - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/22/michael-cohen-paid-a-mysterious-tech-company-50000-in-connection-with-trumps-campaign.html <comment><USER2> Where do I sign up?

\- Struggling Founder</comment>