321abc

http://exploits.astalavista.com they have a new section that accepts submissions

John von Neumann

Gottfried Leibniz

Helen Keller

Kyle Maynard

Brooke Ellison

It's the difference between describing how something works and describing what something's like to the person doing whatever it is you're describing. Science can (arguably) get at how something works, or at least make some predictions and models concerning these things, but that's not the same as getting at what something's like, from a "subjective" standpoint.

Scientists can ask me about what the experience of "red" is like, and I can tell them that it's not quite like blue or green, and can point to it, but the experience itself (like all experience) remains a completely private matter for me.

Just think about it. Look at any red object and compare it with any "scientific" description regarding wavelengths and retinas, neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters, visual cortexes, atoms, molecules, or what have you. Clearly none of these thing are in any way related to what it's actually like for you to see that red object.

Now, you may well believe that what's going on when you look at a red object is "really" some interaction between what those scientific terms describe in some model of what's going on with your brain, sensory organs, etc. But this requires a sort of suspension of disbelief, as you have to set aside your actual "subjective" experience of the red object itself (an experience which lacks the mediation of all these scientific terms, models, or even what they refer to, as you don't experience the neurons, or retinas, or neurotransmitters, as such, you just see the red object).

The subjective experience is really where science is quite helpless. It's been this way for hundreds if not thousands of years, and there's no sign it's getting any closer now.

There's a difference between describing the brain receiving data and describing me seeing red. I don't experience myself as a brain, and I certainly don't experience "receiving data", so your description of these things would not be of things I experience when I see red.

Physics does not reduce to atomic physics, nor science to physics, nor life to science.

            -- Erwin Schrödinger

The question is, how much are the original Startup News users doing to keep the site pure? Clearly not enough, or this particular thread would have never been started.

The article space is flat right now, but that hasn't been enough to keep the site pure either.

I think the battle for purity has already been lost. Now it's just a question of whether the site is going to be rendered useless because the number of submissions is going to be too great to slog through with a flat article space, or if it's going to be made manageable with tags.

What of it?

This may be true, when "synethetic" and "psychedelic" are used as specialist jargon for describing films or various effects in film. But it's not true in the general, colloquial sense of these terms, which refer to either a type of sensation or to a type of drug.

Psychedelic literally means "mind-manifesting", while the etymology for synethesia comes from "sense" and "together".

The word "psychedelic" was specifically coined as a way to describe the drugs that were previously called "hallucinogens" and "psychotomimetics", and it was an attempt to remove the inaccurate and negative connotations that those other words had.

Synethesia, on the other hand, refers to a specific type of sensation, and not to a drug.

Also, psychedelic drugs have many, many other effects apart from synethesia (which isn't present in every trip or for everyone taking psychedelic drugs, anyway).

So in the usual sense of these terms (not in the sense a film critic might use them), these two words have quite different meanings.

I thought the points was just a rating for the comment or submission. I didn't realize those points were transferred to the user that made the comment/submission.

As for your down voting me, whatever. Enjoy. I don't even know what use karma can be on this website. Though at least now I know there is some.

I never even noticed there was a number in parenthesis next to my username. Thanks for pointing it out, though.

Synethesia is a very common (temporary) effect of psychedelic drugs. This means that most everyone has the ability to sense synethetically. It's just a matter of somehow triggering this experience in one's brain.

It's a pity that research on psychedelic drugs is so difficult to do legally in the US (where the overwhelming majority of research money is spent). Otherwise, it might have already been possible to develop drugs that target just the synesthetic experience without bringing on a full psychedelic trip (not to mention the many other benefits that scientific research in to psychedelics would very likely have had).

No. I had no idea it was. Even now I'm not sure I believe you.

So you propose we "be strict now". Could you elaborate on just what you mean by that?

If I could be so bold as to take a guess at what you mean, it seems you're suggesting that the HN community submit only topical links.

I think that suggestion will generally simply be ignored by those people who want to (for whatever reason) submit non-topical links because only a small fraction of HN submitters will even read your suggestion, and most of those that read it aren't going to care (or they wouldn't have submitted off-topic links in the first place).

In order to reach all submitters, we could have some sort of global notice reminding everyone to only submit topical links. Maybe a stern and clearly worded warning on the submission page itself.

But say we do that and people continue to submit and upvote off-topic links. In my opinion, this is precisely what's going to happen. So then what?

I think there is no solution to keeping HN pure short of having the site be moderated by people dedicated to keeping it pure. But clearly that's not the model HN wants to pursue.

As long as HN is self-moderating it will not stay pure, and the more popular it gets, the further away from purity it will drift (witness what happened to Slashdot and Kuro5hin).

So, given that HN is not and probably will not stay pure, how can we improve the situation? I think the solution is clear: tags. Tags will let each reader more easily focus on what they find interesting, no matter how "impure" the site gets. It's an easy solution and one that should scale pretty well.

Oh. I guess I never used that feature. I just either bookmark the link in my browser, keep a tab open with that article, or just keep the original link to the story in my RSS reader.

This article is spam

I hate uncommented code. When reading code I want to know what the programmer is trying to achieve (which is not infrequently different from what his code actually does).

I also often find myself wanting to just get a quick overview of what's going on instead of needing to dive in to the nitty-gritty of the implementation of a given block of code. Well-written comments help me get a bird's eye view of the code.

Certainly, uncommented code which is well written is better than uncommented code which is poorly written (and arguably better even than commented code which is poorly written), but good comments only improve code.

Still, despite my disagreement with the article, I'm upvoting it, because I think it's important to discuss issues such as this.

I didn't even know we had karma here. I just submit articles I find interesting in hopes that they'll be interesting to the community.

Also, I'm not quite clear on what you're having problems with. Why can't you "go the the new page and up-vote more interesting stories"?

Wow. That's so unique to indie music. I couldn't even imagine any other genre of music who's quality varies.

It's not tags which would turn HN in to Reddit. It's the community. If HN's community was identical to that of Reddit, HN would turn in to Reddit (minus the tags). But HN's community is not the same as Reddit, which is why the articles which are submitted and upvoted on HN generally differ from Reddit (with some overlap, of course).

I don't see how not having tags helps anything or anyone. It just keeps the article space flat instead of organized by topic.

Of course, the articles still have different topics. They're just not easily distinguishable from one another by automated means.

What solution do you propose? I don't think merely saying "let's keep things topical" is going to work. People are going to keep submitting articles they find interesting, and upvoting articles they find interesting, regardless of the topic.

In the interests of full disclosure, I was the one who submitted the "How to Sleep Comfortably on a Hot Night" article. Yes, it's not topical. However, I'm not ashamed! I thought it was interesting, and clearly so did the 44 other people who upvoted it.

I'm quite pleased with the community that's developed here, who are discriminating enough to pick out many articles I find interesting.

However, HN could definitely be improved, so that people who are only interested in certain topics (such as only computer/hacking related articles) or not interested in other topics (such as off-topic, or political, or venture capitalist articles) could more easily filter through what's becoming a firehydrant of links.

I think the best way to do this is by implementing tags.

I think there's definitely a lot of noise. Having categories (or tags) would be a good aid to sorting through it all.

"attempting suicide seems a rational choice, as long as the attempt isn't too successful"

What seems rational by economic standards may not be rational by other standards.

Unfortunately, at least France and Germany seem to want to start emulating the US in this regard. So they're increasing length of their work weeks:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124835745710975827.html

http://www.thelocal.de/national/20090731-20935.html

Also muddying the waters is that, by some measures, Americans have more leisure time than Europeans:

http://www.examiner.com/x-14795-Page-One-Examiner~y2009m8d13...

I'm not a military economist type, but I'll take a stab at this.

Apart from the costs you cite, which are certainly significant, there's the cost of replacing equipment, much of which dies quite quickly in the desert.

There's also the cost of oil (which the US buys, and doesn't just steal out of Iraq's oil wells, as far as I know). Believe it or not, the US military is the largest single consumer of oil in the world. Here's an interesting article about it:

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/13199

From the figures in that article, I'd estimate that the US military uses about $10 billion a year in oil, at today's prices.

Contractors are a huge expense. From what I've read, there are as many contractors in Iraq as there are US military personnel, each getting paid much, much more than a soldier.

According to the following article, the US spent about $100 billion on contractors between 2003 and 2008:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7557995.stm

Then there's all the money that's simply "lost". For example:

"How the US sent $12bn in cash to Iraq. And watched it vanish"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1

There are no doubt many other expenses, such as the new $600 million "embassy" in Iraq (which is going to cost $1.2 billion a year to operate).

For more details see the Congressional Budget Office's report on the "Estimated Costs of U.S. Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan"

http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/86xx/doc8690/10-24-CostOfWar_Test...

and "The Three Trillion Dollar War":

http://www.amazon.com/Three-Trillion-Dollar-War-Conflict/dp/...

Unfortunately, as outrageous as the money wasted on the war is, the human cost has been much worse, and it may not be fully paid for generations to come.

Take a look at this MetaFilter thread about simple, useful skills that can be learned quickly:

http://ask.metafilter.com/125874/Simple-useful-skills

There's a metafilter thread about this here:

http://www.metafilter.com/83702/Cuz-Im-freefree-rangin

Primer is an excellent film, especially when you consider that it was made for a total of only $7,000. That's not a typo: only seven thousand dollars!

Hollywood could really learn a lot from this movie.

How is the FDA useful?

From http://fdaissues.blogspot.com/2008/03/upton-sinclair-book-ju...

In "The Jungle", Upton Sinclair, "wrote about how dead rats were shoveled into sausage grinding machines. He explained, in nauseating detail, how diseased cows were slaughtered for beef; how guts and garbage were swept off the floor and sold as "potted ham."

Upton Sinclair even described how the occasional worker would fall into a meat-processing tank and be ground, along with animal parts, into "Durham's Pure Leaf Lard."

The Chicago meat-packing industry was in deep trouble after Sinclair's landmark book, The Jungle, was published in 1906. It caused outrage in America and abroad and meat sales fell by half. The book forced the government to pass the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, which established the Food and Drug Administration."

That's one of the things the FDA does right. I, for one, am glad I'm not eating rat sausage and meatpacker lard.

Another thing it does right is requiring food and drugs have all their ingredients listed on them. I am appalled when I buy other products, such as various cleaners and other chemicals, which are not under the jurisdiction of the FDA and could have all sorts of carcinogenic and dangerous chemicals in them without my even being aware of them, because they are not required to list their ingredients on their labels. I am glad that at least the food and medicines I consume do require strict labeling.

While many people may have died waiting for various drugs and medical devices to get FDA approval, there are also no doubt countless thousands saved because this approval was required. All you have to do is look at the days before the FDA existed to see the mountains of snake oil garbage that was peddled to American consumers (things like these radioactive quack cures: http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/quackcures/quackcures.htm )

I am quite grateful to be living in the days of the FDA, and wouldn't want to go back to the pre-FDA era.

This is not to say the FDA is perfect, by any means. It's been affected by budget cuts and has a huge conflict of interest in its sometimes incestuous relationships with the corporations it is supposed to regulate.

These deficiencies are cause for reform (perhaps even radical reform) but not for elimination of the FDA altogether.

As for the complaints of your friend in the medical industry, I agree that the approval process takes too long. More funding of the FDA, and perhaps even requiring the FDA to conduct its own studies (eliminating the corporation from the loop, which have a conflict of interest in testing the safety of their own products anyway) would help.

I have a friend of my own, who worked as an internal safety inspector in a pharmaceutical plant owned by a major pharmaceutical company. He said that the plant should have gotten closed a decade ago because of its poor safety record (for which it had been sited by the FDA many times in the past), but it stayed open because the company's CEO had a lot of pull in the FDA.

This sort of thing calls for tougher regulation, not weaker regulation (much less the elimination of the FDA altogether).

As to your point about education vouchers, those are mainly used by right-wing religious fanatics, who are dissatisfied with the "liberal", desegregated education their kids would get in public school and want to get their kids in to religious schools and schools which are free to discriminate in ways public schools can't. I see no evidence that the voucher system would work for a wider segment of the population. Again, the people who would most benefit from this would be the rich, and religious, racist nuts.

See this report on vouchers from the Anti-Defamation League, http://www.adl.org/vouchers/vouchers_main.asp

which, among other things, notes that:

"Under a system of vouchers, it may be difficult to prevent schools run by extremist groups like the Nation of Islam or the Ku Klux Klan from receiving public funds to subsidize their racist and anti-Semitic agendas."

Finally, your point about libertarianism not suggesting concentration of power. On the face of it, this is true, since libertarians never actually come out and say they suggest concentration of power. However, it's not difficult to read between the lines and see that's exactly what will happen when the checks that the government keeps on corporations (the EPA and FDA being just two of many good examples) are removed.

In fact, we have already seen what this is like. It's happened in America during the days of the Robber Barrons, where child labor, an 80-hour work week, workers being literally chained to their desks in sweatshops, the abominable conditions described in Sinclair's "The Jungle", no worker safety regulations in the workplace, and no environmental regulations were quite common. I do not want to go back to those days.

Apart from increased concentration of power in corporations, which libertarianism is powerless against, there's also the concentration of power in individuals, which the US system as a whole does a piss-poor job at controlling. That definitely needs work, but libertarians have nothing to say on the matter. If Bill Gates managed to get his hands on all of the world's wealth (or even, say, all the world's water) and the rest of the people on Earth had none, libertarians would presumably not have any problem with that. But thankfully, many other people do have a problem with that kind of inequitable distribution of wealth and power and will work to prevent it.

Another example of the government doing good work is when it manages to break up monopolies. However, it doesn't do nearly as good a job at this as it should (else Microsoft would have been broken up decades ago, and the media consolidation that's happened in the last decade or so would never have been allowed to take place). But, again, I don't see why libertarians would have any problem with monopolies (unless they're government monopolies, in which case they'll raise a stink).

I believe that for most libertarians, the rhetoric of caring for liberty is a mask for not caring much about anyone who can't make it the rat race of the social darwinists. This is why it's really no suprise that many libertarians are wealthy, highly educated types that imagine themselves made in the mold of Randian heroes. Conversely, you're not going to find many libertarians in the projects (with the possible exception of the drug dealers). And the only libertarians you're likely to find out in the sticks are the militia members and gun nuts who believe in conspiracy theories featuring the UN taking over the US, and the like. Fortunately, the majority of Americans haven't bought in to this bleak vision (yet).

That might be a half-respectable position, if libertarians were against all concentrations of power. But they're not. They're more than happy to give corporations and individuals all the power their money can buy them. Also, libertarians have plenty of scorn for what the government does wrong, but little respect for what it does right.

The EPA, before the anti-EPA right wing nuts of the bush administration took it over, was doing good work, like trying to keep mercury out of our water. Of course, under the "pro business" bush administration, they've undermined such protections and declared that mercury and other toxins in our water aren't so bad after all and raised their acceptable limits in water (which is just a small sample of the outrageous "pro business" bullshit the bush administration was guilty of).

I happen to enjoy the National Parks in the US, as I think many Americans do; and I, for one, am glad that they're in public hands instead of the hands of the corporations. Yet Bush appointed people to head the National Park service who had explicitly expressed their opposition to even the existence of National Parks. And they've proceeded to sell off public lands and undermine the protections of the National Parks by granting more permissive logging rights to corporations and by watering down environmental regulations.

Now on to the FDA, which does a pretty good job of protecting the quality of the food and drugs it regulates (though in my opinion they are not nearly strict enough, because in many cases they in bed with the corporations and are underfunded, so consequently their regulation and enforcement is not nearly strong enough).

All the "pro-business", anti-environment, and anti-public-property abuses of the Bush administration would be increased a hundred fold if the libertarian vision ever came to pass. The libertarians would get rid of the EPA, the FDA, and sell of the National Parks. The corps would be free to pollute our air and water, kill off all endangered species, and the corps would be free to "self-regulate" the food and drugs they produce (meaning a free-for-all for a quick buck at the expense of public health).

And the above doesn't even begin to address the havoc libertarians would wreck on our education system (turning it in to even more of education for the wealthy than it already is), and destroy the few vestiges of a social safety net that America has managed to save despite many decades of assault from the "small government" crowd.

Basically, what libertarianism really amounts to is the attitude that there should be even more concentration of power in the hands of the wealthy, and the poor can go fuck themselves.

In my youth I was drawn to libertarianism (and I still agree with a few of their positions, such as their opposition to the War on Drugs), but as I've learned more about politics and history I see that the vast majority of those who will benefit from libertarianism are the wealthy, which is one reason (another is his racism) why Ron Paul could sneak in as a Republican candidate, where he wouldn't have stood a chance as a Democrat.

Not to mention the daily stories of Wall St hustlers stealing billions, trillions of taxpayer dollars being given away as welfare to corporations (which promptly pay out billions in bonuses) and trillions pissed away on murdering tens of thousands of people in other countries, but people are all up in arms when some single mother gets a $100 in food stamps, or a Mexican risks death in the desert to come mow your lawn. Or god forbid that health care suddenly becomes affordable. That would be a true outrage!

There's really very little sense of proportion in this country.