a_p

His username here is rtm: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rtm

I don't think the original got enough attention for this one to merit a flag. Also, the guidelines here say that "when you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."

There are methods of handwriting that allow you to avoid hand cramps. The Palmer method of handwriting, which was popular in America at the turn of the 20th century, emphasized using the whole arm and shoulder to make marks on the page. In order for this method to be effective your wrists must be limp in order for your arms to slide quickly across the page. Instead of consciously "drawing" letters, you build up and use muscle memory to create letters, in the same way you naturally build and use muscle memory when you throw a ball. If you master this method of handwriting, you can write at 60 words per minute, for hours at a time without your hand cramping. Unfortunately, the Palmer Method was abandoned when education reformers in the U.S found it too "difficult", because it requires months of training and practice to become proficient. It also required left-handed students to write with their right hand, because English runs from right to left and this method requires your other hand to manipulate the paper. As a result, generations of Americans have grown up using an inefficient, painful method of writing.

Of course, the manuscript writers needed to draw the letters in a calligraphic style, which necessitated precise wrist motions. So a writing method designed for brisk mark making wouldn't have helped them.

EDIT: I'm not saying that I support forcing left-handed people to write with their right hands. It may be true that the Palmer method (or any right-hand only method) has a history of teachers using corporal punishment to punish mistakes, but corporal punishment is of course not necessary to become proficient.

Eksith, you're right that "drawing" the letters doesn't have anything to do with the speed at which letters are made. The "drawing" comment was made about why many people's cursive handwriting is so poor. When students learn cursive now, too often they are simply copying letters from a book or blackboard ("drawing the letters"), instead of practicing the physical motion. So when students need to write cursive script quickly, they don't have enough time to render each letter correctly and consequently they develop their own methods muscle movements, which usually leads to sloppy handwriting. The same kind of thing can happen when you are taught to type. Correct touch typing teaches you to let your finger return to the home row after pressing a key before you reach for another key. If you aren't taught to do this, you will develop your own muscle movements that are suitable for typing some words, but lead to mistakes in others.

A common error is letting your finger hover near the letter you typed when the same letter is repeated in the word that you are typing. This seems like an "optimization", but it isn't, and causes lots of spelling errors because it can easily mess up your key press timing. Using your own "optimizations" might be able to type as quickly as a touch typist in short stretches, but it is far more likely that you will make more errors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Method

The real scandal here happened in 1959. When Congress passed created 501(c)(4)s, the law said that (emphasis is mine): "Civic leagues or organizations not organized for profit but operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare".

In other words, 501(c)(4)s were intended to be allowed to spend NO MONEY on politics. However, a 1959 IRS regulation decided that "exclusively" (0%) really meant "primarily"(up to 49%), and in doing so they completely changed the spirit of law, which was not only illegal, but made the new law a nightmare difficult to enforce. Every single 501(c)(4) that has spent money on politics since 1959 has been in violation of the law passed by Congress — which means that the real law is almost guaranteed not to be enforced.

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/06/17/the-real-ir...

> We were once great at innovating in the physical world...But recently, software (and mostly Internet software) has been the focus of innovation, and its importance is probably still underestimated—there are compounding effects to how it’s changing the world that we’re only now beginning to see...But innovation in the physical world (besides phones and computers) over the same time period has been less impressive.

Actually, I would argue that the opposite is true. Software hasn't really had any important innovations (using David Wheeler's definition, which is from a CS/EE perspective, and which is linked to every couple of months on HN[1]). The software required to run a smartphone isn't significantly different than the software needed to run a similar application on a desktop. On the other hand, the hardware on a smartphone now and a desktop from the 90s is different. We take hardware advances like reliable capacitive touchscreens and maybe this storage advance linked to on HN today [2], and Moore's "Law" for granted, but "putting more transistors in a circuit" and increased hardware capabilities were the bottleneck to producing today's technology, not new software techniques.

The reason that people associate software with innovation is because it has become the latest tech buzzword. When a word is overused in this manner, it is hard to have a conversation about it because the definition has been degraded to include pretty much anything. The granting of patents to trivial software ideas gives companies a claim to innovation that they do not deserve.

Rayiner's comment on this thread:

> The long-hanging fruit is gone, and all that's left is hard engineering.

will soon be true for computer hardware, and eventually "Moore's Law" will be broken. When software does not become significantly faster each release cycle, it will be more apparent that hardware is responsible for today's advances as opposed to software.

[1] http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5911347

I posted this comment about obscenities on another thread recently, but I think it is relevant to this thread as well.

According to Paul Fussell's Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, aversion to profanity is a middle class thing. The upper class[1] do not use euphemisms for profanity or obscenity. Fussell wrote that Jilly Cooper reported "I once overheard my son regaling his friends: 'Mummy says pardon is a much worse word than fuck.'"

I doubt that many members of the upper class (see Fussell's book for a definition of upper class, it is roughly the tastes of "old money" but not dependent upon actual wealth) read Hacker News. It is likely that those who do not object to obscenities such as the word "fuck" are more socially liberal freethinkers who dislike formality. Those who do object are likely to be members of the middle class who believe (foolishly) that in censoring profanities and vulgarities, they are emulating the upper class. The phenomenon of "professionalism" is also a product of the middle class — to the upper class, selling things for a living is distasteful and déclassé. "Professional" language is usually very timid and full of circumlocutions as the primary goal is to not say anything that anyone may find offensive.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/d...

My favorite story about how Ernst Kummer [1] did arithmetic, from Hoffman's The Man Who Loved Only Numbers[2]:

"One story has him standing before a blackboard, trying to compute 7 times 9. "Ah," Kummer said to his high school class, "7 times 9 is eh, uh, is uh...." "61," one of his students volunteered. "Good," said Kummer, and wrote 61 on the board. "No," said another student, "it's 69." "Come, come, gentlemen," said Kummer, "it can't be both. It must be one or the other." (Erdos liked to tell another version of how Kummer computed 7 times 9: "Kummer said to himself, 'Hmmm, the product can't be 61 because 61 is a prime, it can't be 65 because that's a multiple of 5, 67 is a prime, 69 is too big-that leaves only 63.' ") "

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Kummer

[2] http://www.amazon.com/The-Man-Loved-Only-Numbers/dp/B004R6HX...

The only thing as breathtaking as the amount of information the Chinese military has stolen is how dysfunctional their military is. Here [1] is an excellent article about corruption in the Chinese military. The Chinese government is a bizarre mix of authoritarianism, greed, patronage and nationalism, and it has no clear structure. The military is no different. It doesn't matter how much technology they have; as long as the military has no internal cohesion and accountability, they will never overtake the United States.

Here's a quote from the article, citing a 'princeling':

" "China no longer has a paramount leader who can hammer down authority at crucial junctures. "Gangs" of patronage and bribery are congealing together, he said, adding that "Corruption is the glue that keeps the whole system together, after the age of idealism." "

And another:

" A third princeling, whose father once ran China's security apparatus, blames Jiang for sabotaging the last leadership transition in 2002 by refusing to relinquish control of the military. He said Jiang promoted dozens of generals who are, as he put it, either "henchmen" or "morons." The result is that nobody is really in control, he said. "

[1] http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04/16/rotting_fro...

Note: You don't have to sign up for foreignpolicy.com to read the article. Just disable JS or stop the page from loading before the popup shows up.

>What if the Web had been patented?

Then it would have ended up like Gopher[1]. In 1993, the University of Minnesota announced that it would start to charge license fees to use its implementation of the Gopher server. By 2000, when the university GPLed it, it was too late.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29

The U.S has an enormous amount of rare earth metals. [1] But the processes of extracting the ore have such a horrendous effect on the environment that the only country willing to mine the metals in significant quantities is China, and the villages in China near the mining sites have suffered as a result [2]. The U.S is rife with abuses of the environment — mountaintop removal mining, anyone? — but so far no one has been willing to match the rare earth metal production levels of China.

[1] http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=2642&from=rs...

[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/aug/07/china-rare...

I'm surprised this post doesn't mention Markov chains. The author seems to think that finding and implementing a grammar quality checker will help stop spam. Aside from provides endless hours of entertainment viz. DissociatedPress, Markov chains are abused by spammers to generate grammatically correct nonsense. You can easily add meaning to the "nonsense" by adding formatting to certain words to add a secondary message. Does anyone know of a way to stop this?

In 2010, the Sienna Presidential poll — which is very well respected — ranked George W. Bush as the 42 most intelligent president (only Harding ranked lower). [1, pdf file]. 14 of the 19 categories have W. in the bottom 5. These categories are: Communication ability, Court Appointments, Handling of U.S Economy, Ability to Compromise, Executive Appointments, Overall Ability, Imagination, Domestic Accomplishments, Integrity, Executive Ability, Foreign Policy Accomplishments, Leadership Ability, Intelligence, and Avoid Crucial Mistakes. The 4 categories that he is not in the bottom 5 of are: Background (he is the 7th worst), Party Leadership, Luck, and "Willing to Take Risks". Luck is the only category in which he is in the second quartile.

The article states:

"And while my job involved juggling a lot of balls, I only had to worry about economic issues. In addition to all of those, at any given point in time he was making enormous decisions on Iraq and Afghanistan, on hunting al Qaeda and keeping America safe. He was making choices not just on taxes and spending and trade and energy and climate and health care and agriculture and Social Security and Medicare, but also on education and immigration, on crime and justice issues, on environmental policy and social policy and politics. Being able to handle such substantive breadth and depth, on such huge decisions, in parallel, requires not just enormous strength of character but tremendous intellectual power. President Bush has both."

Important criticisms of his presidency are not about his lambdacisms or rhotacisms. The criticisms of his presidency are not that he couldn't make decisions but that the decisions that he made were wrong, harmful, or showed a stubbornness to consider the fact that he was wrong. His presidency was marked by decisions to ignore nonpartisan reports contrary to the party line: when a international terrorism report that had been published annually for 19 years said that terror was increasing, not decreasing, his administration cancelled the reports. [2]

[1] http://siena.edu/uploadedfiles/home/parents_and_community/co...

[2] http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2002243262_terror16...

This article was published in 2004. It was still causing problems in 2012 [1], when a paper published in the prestigious journal Cell had a few gene names written as dates [2]. Even the GEO [3] had problems with this , according to [1]. The culprit is automatic type conversion, which the user has to understand in order to avoid it. Usually, the way around this problem is to format the columns as text before the data is entered. But it is much harder to work with someone else's munged data or spreadsheet, especially when it is in the form of a .csv file. Even though there is an RFC standard for CSV files, RFC 4180 [4], it is a description of how different editors handle CSV files, and not a prescriptive definition.

[1] https://dontuseexcel.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/dont-use-excel...

[2] https://dontuseexcel.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/dont-use-excel...

[3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/query/acc.cgi?acc=GPL13667

[4] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180

You can record the playback of a vinyl record and transfer it to a digital record without losing any information. The clicks and pops were consciously removed from some vinyl records when they were remastered. If you wanted to, you could transfer your own vinyl records to a digital format. I'm not sure what you mean by the "color" of recording, because color can refer to either noise color or tone color. You might be thinking of effects that a valve amplifier adds to the sound being played through it (distortions, not clicks and pops). In this case, you can get the same effects by using an file that has been transferred to a digital format from vinyl.

The patents that have his name on them are design patents, not software or hardware patents. If he does have his name on a software or hardware patent, it is for legal purposes only.

I'm using the Jargon file's definition of hacker [1], which is :

"HACKER [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] n. 1. A person who enjoys learning the details of programming systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically, or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. 3. A person capable of appreciating hack value (q.v.). 4. A person who is good at programming quickly. Not everything a hacker produces is a hack. 5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; example: "A SAIL hacker". (Definitions 1 to 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.) 6. A malicious or inquisitive meddler who tries to discover information by poking around. Hence "password hacker", "network hacker".

[1] http://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html

Steve Jobs was not a "hacker". [‡] He knew almost nothing about computer languages, computer architecture, and according to Neil Young, he listened to vinyl records at home [1] — which shows that he was ignorant of how audio quality works (see [2]). Steve did not contribute any original ideas or any important technological innovations. He claimed during his Stanford commencement speech that if Macintosh had not included eye pleasing typography, then computers would never have had typographically pleasing typefaces (because "Microsoft just copied Apple); this is ludicrous. In fact, Apple's software patents for digital typography added unnecessary difficulties. [3] Many people are unhappy about Apple culture of paranoia, litigation, and features that restrict user's freedoms that Steve created.

Steve is known for having a great sense of design, but it seems that he only had taste in choosing among the good designs of others. Just look at the yacht he designed without Jonathan Ive's collaboration. [4]

Many of you may say that I'm missing the point; that his ability to convince others of what was important and his "vision" is what made him great. My contention is that he appropriated other people's original ideas, and other people implemented his modifications. I'll admit that directing such efforts is not an easy thing to do, and most breakthroughs are improvements upon others' ideas. But it is very rare for the original creators to be alive and ignored while the modifier is celebrated with maudlin elegies.

EDIT: The media's treatment of his death, President Obama's statement that he was a great "inventor", etc. was not his fault. But I think that when the deaths of people like Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy in the same month as Steve are ignored, then the world is suffering from a serious case of myopia. Ignoring Dennis and John while celebrating Steve is like fawning over the interior decorator with praise about the warmth of a house while ignoring the carpenter and contractor.

Perhaps I should add that I am being critical of Steve because of an abundance of articles that did not focus on what he actually contributed, or criticized only his behavior towards others. Steve did seem to be able to hire, attract, or motivate as many talented engineers as he did drive away. This is a very hard thing for a CEO to do, and he deserves a large amount of credit for doing this. The talent that he helped attract and the products they create are responsible for Apple's stock price rise and continued profitability since his death.

[‡] http://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html (see definition of "hacker")

[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/02/01/146206585/ste...

[2] http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

[3] http://www.freetype.org/patents.html

[4] http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/21/tech/innovation/steve-jobs-yac...

WCVB is reporting that [NAME 1] has died from his wounds [1]. [NAME 2] is still at large — the police are setting up a perimeter and the search will become much easier in several hours when the sun rises.

[1] http://www.wcvb.com/news/local/metro/Boston-Marathon-suspect...

EDIT: As I follow the news, it becomes clearer that a large majority of the information is coming from the police scanner. It is interesting to see the way old and new technologies are mixing in the coverage. The reddit thread is essentially a scraper of the scanner; it is very useful to have access to the transcription of important audio because you can take breaks without worrying about missing something.

EDIT 2: Because the names haven't been confirmed yet (Pete Williams says that Tripathi is not suspect #2), and have been removed from the original article, I thought I would change my post accordingly. The names were picked up from the BPD scanner.

[NAME 1: Mike Mulugeta]

[NAME 2: Sunil Tripathi]

The most accurate information may be gleaned from police scanners. News cameras may give you pictures of the amount of police officers at the scene, but they cannot get close enough to give you video of what's actually happening. The irony is that of those three sources of information (Web site, radio, news camera), the best source of "real time" information is the oldest. Yes, it's true that the scanner is being broadcast over the internet, but you could listen to the police scanner with amateur radio equipment decades ago.

EDIT: I find that it is much easier to listen to the police scanner than a news station, because the SNR ratio is much higher. When there is a break in the action, news reporters fill the air time with speculation or repeat the same old information. On the police scanner, when they have no new information, they are silent.

Having said that, I still find it cool to hear an officer ask the dispatcher (on the radio) to tell an overhead helicopter to point a searchlight at a certain location, and moments later see on television a helicopter flying overhead with its searchlight on.

The rest of George Hart's site is interesting as well, especially his encyclopedia of virtual polyhedra [1]. There is also a part 2 of "Mathematically Correct Breakfast" (this time a trefoil knot) [2], and his sculptures are worth looking at as well [3].

[1] http://www.georgehart.com/virtual-polyhedra/vp.html

[2] http://www.georgehart.com/bagel/knot.html

[3] http://www.georgehart.com/sculpture/sculpture.html

Body language experts are trained to look for groups of behaviors. Often, certain behaviors such as crossed arms could just mean the subject is cold. It is also hard to judge someone's body language after you have just met them; it is much better to compare their behavior to the "baseline" of their normal behavior. That is because certain behaviors are not innate but learned unconsciously from parents, relatives, close friends, and is also dependent upon regional culture. If you want to learn about body language, you should spend a lot of time practicing watching several different people and finding groups of behaviors that signal their respective moods before you start to start to make inferences with confidence. It is helpful to watch people from different cultures or different classes so that you may see how much variation there is. Otherwise, decisions made with little knowledge and practice is actually harmful because your inferences will likely be wrong. "You should never cross your arms again" may be good advice, but only because you can then guard yourself from people that overestimate their powers of observation.

This seems to be a harmless case of erroneous old information slipping in because it was not stricken from all maps many years ago. However, it is not unusual for many maps to all contain the same mistake. Cartographers have been known to include small mistakes in their maps to catch people who copy their work. In the past, even if another cartographer found information on a map to be inaccurate, they would not always correct it completely, for similar reasons to why the value of the charge of an electron in Millikan oil drop experiment took years to correct.

The author of this article should be ashamed of himself. He failed to do basic research about how money is actually distributed. If he did, he would have found out about the Federal Reserve distribution system, the structure of which is based upon population distribution. Then he links this map to cell phone data, and then ignores the fact that cell phone towers are placed where people live — it should not be a surprise that people place local calls far more often then they do long distance calls. Then at the end of the article, he has the nerve to say "These are the first maps that are trying to paint us the way we actually are." This ignores the fact that there have been several proposals for alternative states for many years. See ‭[1] [2][3][4] (in 3, someone asks the author of one such proposal about the similarity of his plan to Federal Reserve system.)

If he wanted to do some interesting research, he would have asked to man who tracked dollar bills to ignore bills that were spent locally and instead track bills that traveled a considerable distance outside of their Federal Reserve District, because long distance cash transactions have become increasingly rare in the age of credit cards. Furthermore, that are the most likely to use cash are usually the poor, who are the least likely (except for the very rich, who don't carry cash on them at all) to use a computer and spend their time tracking where their cash has been.

[1] http://www.tjc.com/38states/

[2] http://www.rev.net/~aloe/boundary/bibliography.html#16-state

[3] http://www.rev.net/~aloe/region/question.html

[4] http://www.rev.net/~aloe/boundary/

EDIT: Added information about alternative state suggestions.

No. The "tortured souls" are the programmers that worked on Excel[1]. Look at this page [2] for videos of the game in action.

[1] http://everything2.com/title/The+Hall+of+Tortured+Souls

[2] http://www.eeggs.com/items/719.html

VBA doesn't handle files larger than 2gb, which is one of the reasons people don't recommend using Excel and Access for your business. There are some ways to deal with the 2gb limit[1], but it is better to use other software.

[1] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/189981

Microsoft used to include easter eggs in their programs, but stopped in 2002 as part of the "trusted computer initiative". [1] Excel 97 had a hidden flight simulator, Word 97 had a hidden pinball game, Access 97 and 00 had a magic 8 ball simulator. Office 4.3/95/97 had a hidden Doom-like gamed called "The Hall of Tortured Souls". There is also a car driving game in Excel 2000.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_eggs_in_Microsoft_produ...

Investment bankers make money because they are allowed to borrow enormous sums of money (leverage) to invest. In other words, they are allowed to gamble with the money of others with very little consequences. There is no other industry where a company would be allowed to take on that much debt. It's like the old joke: How do you make a million dollars? Start with n million dollars! Even if you do make money in finance, your contribution to shareholders is probably a lot less than it would be in another line of work. Here [1] is an excellent write up about it.

In 2008, Barclays had over 43 times as much assets as they had equity (leverage ratio) while GlaxoSmithKline had a leverage ratio of 5. In 2011, GSK had a return on assets (money made from assets at its disposal) of 15%. Barclays had a ROA of 0.25%. GSK had a return on equity (ROE) of 67.2%, while Barclays had a ROE of 6.1%. In the same year, Barclays Capital (investment bank part of Barclays PLC) had a ROE of 10.3%, but had a leverage ratio of 55 and a ROA of just 0.18%. If you paid Barclays Capital employees the same salary as GSK employees, the pre-tax profits of BarCap would have doubled. That is why bankers pay should be limited — their ROE would be better although their leverage ratios are still way too high.

TL;DR version: If you want to work in a field where you generate real value instead of gambling with someone else's money, find a job where you make things. The world doesn't need more inappropriate math models of finance (no, the market is not always rational and large volatility is more common than you think) — it needs real research.

[1] http://www.moneyweek.com/news-and-charts/economics/uk/banker...

If you cannot understand how people could possible think that software patents are acceptable, I recommend reading this article. [1] Not because it will convince you that software patents are good — it won't. But it will help you understand the thought process of lawyers who do think that there should be some software patents. For example, Goetz writes that he supports "patents where the preferred implementation of an inventive machine process is in software (via a computer program), hardware (via circuitry), or a combination of both software and hardware."

[1] http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2010/09/in-defense-of-softwa...

Color is something that people take for granted or think of as trivial but it's actually rather complicated. There are some colors that can't be represented in print and some colors that can't be represented on a monitor. There are several different color spaces (RGB cube,  L ＊a ＊b ＊, etc.) It doesn't help that CSS3 and HTML4 color modules are terrible (the darkest octant of the sRGB cube is empty and most of the colors are too saturated or and too light). [1]

[1]http://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/Color/Dictionaries#CSS3

EDIT: I used full width asterisks (U+FF0A) because I wanted to write  L ＊a ＊b ＊ without inserting white space after regular asterisks (U+002A).

THe RSS button is still available. Just click Nightly -> Options -> Toolbar Layout and drag the RSS button onto the toolbar.

ProPublica recently published an article (with an unseemly title) about the nightmare of scraping data from pdfs and putting it into tables. [1] They wrote some custom software to do the scraping. At the end of the article they mention some software released recently by a Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Fellow, Manuel Aristarán, called Tabula, which is a PDF data table scaper.[2] I haven't tested it yet.

[1] http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/heart-of-nerd-darkness-...

[2] http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/articles/introducing...