Show HN: Twitter Unfollow notifications within Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://unfollow-notify.acroca.com <comment><USER2> Could you elaborate how this works? I imagine you're comparing your followers and then scanning for each, prev followers list and new one, so notifying when a diff detected.

How do you think a good digest could be made so a twitter user with a long list of followers can receive notifications not bothering too much?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a process to always follow my followers (and unfollow unfollowers) so I can DM them.

Regarding the checks, the initial free plan (just following my bot) comes with weekly checks. That means I'll fetch your followers once a week and compare with last week's, find out who is missing and sending you a DM with the list of all unfollowers. So you'll basically a weekly DM with unfollowers.

Daily, hourly and realtime plans work in the same way but with a higher frequency, but without any kind of digest, just one DM with the list of unfollowers in the time window.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cool! I created something similar for Twitch (and upcoming support for more platforms) @ [https://www.unfollow.io](https://www.unfollow.io).

I don't have a monetization model yet, but yours looks really fair.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice! I'm also planning to add more platforms if users show interest, but for now I'm focused on twitter for a long time.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author here. I build this to learn and ship something with Elixir. I know it's not a new idea, there are plenty of alternatives to track unfollowers, but couldn't find any that works inside twitter. I got the idea recently reading some political tweets about a situation in my region (Catalonia, Spain). I usually follow tech people and this days they're tweeting political stuff and I wondered how many people unfollow them after those tweets.

I'd appreciate any feedback :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice! I've been using it and it works perfectly.</comment>


Andy Rubin: I think I'm having a Gene Amdahl moment - <AUTHOR> http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/04/i-think-im-having-gene-amdahl-moment.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FhsDu+%28Android+Developers+Blog%29

<comment><USER2> Future seems pretty clear. Google pulled an Apple and forked Android into tablet only for 3.0 and will consolidated the OS for phones and tablets (and maybe Google TV) in 3.1. Most likely at Google I/O, possibly later. They are getting bitten in the ass with this coy shit, however. They should just come out what the future roadmap is and say what happened to this point. All this waffling and talk of rushing is hurting.

Of course, on a scale of a few years (possibly by fall, who knows), this will be like Apple banning the Flash complier. A tale, told by nerds, full of sound and fury, ultimately signifying nothing.

</comment><comment><USER3> "As I write this the Android team is still hard at work to bring all the new Honeycomb features to phones. As soon as this work is completed, we'll publish the code."

Does that mean the source to Honeycomb itself will be released, or just that they're essentially backporting Honeycomb features to the Android 2.x branch, and will open-source _that_ when it's done? The way that's worded makes me wonder.

<comment><USER4> Honeycomb was rushed so most likely there are probably a lot of ugly code in there. In the next release (Ice cream), it will support tablets and phones in one codeline. Most likely v3.5 or 4.0 so I don't think it's backport, it's really moving forward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Doesn't add up to me. If you don't want Honeycomb on phones then simply don't let anyone have Market, Gmail, Maps, and the other Google Apps if they are putting Honeycomb on phones.

If that's not good enough, and you just don't want Honeycomb on phones period... then you don't believe in open source.

<comment><USER6> That's nice in theory, but this isnt about manufacturers putting 3.0 on phones. It's about ROM developers doing it. You can get those Google apps pretty easily on your custom mod.

<comment><USER5> Do you think so? They are holding back Honeycomb because a few custom roms, used by a tiny portion of Android users, might port Honeycomb onto phones? I hope that's not what's holding things back.</comment></comment></comment>


Efficient CO2 – Ethanol conversion - <AUTHOR> http://newatlas.com/co2-ethanol-nanoparticle-conversion-ornl/45920/ <comment><AUTHOR> From the source article: Employing a catalyst made of copper nanoparticles embedded in spikes of carbon, the team found that electricity applied at just 1.2 volts was sufficient to convert CO2 suspended in water into ethanol.

From the abstract: Herein we report a common element, nanostructured catalyst for the direct electrochemical conversion of CO2 to ethanol with high Faradaic efficiency (63 % at −1.2 V vs RHE) and high selectivity (84 %) that operates in water and at ambient temperature and pressure.</comment>


Wicked problem - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem <comment><USER2> Alvin Weinberg published his "Science and Trans-Science" article on roughly this topic in 1972 [1].

He said: "Many of the issues that lie at the interface between science and politics involve questions that can be stated in scientific terms but that are in principle beyond the proficiency of science to answer."

"The protagonists often ask for the impossible: scientific answers to questions that are trans-scientific"

Pretty good stuff.

[1] [https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/177/4045/211.full...](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/177/4045/211.full.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Absolutely fantastic article.

The protagonists, in my experience, don't understand this nuance very well, and are quick to label you as "anti-science".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How is the AIDS pandemic an example of a wicked problem?

One of the definitions of a wicked problem is "Wicked problems have no stopping rule.". But the stopping rule for the AIDS pandemic seems to be creating a cure for AIDS / eliminating all cases of AIDS.

Am I missing something really obvious here??

<comment><USER5> If you are operating within the scope of a single country, eliminating all cases within that country would not be a stopping rule.

<comment><USER6> But that itself doesn't make it a wicked problem. It means the solution needs to involve broadening the scope of your operations. In case of AIDS, it would be an international cooperation.

A real-life example is the efforts to eradicate smallpox and polio; the first one succeeded, the second one was almost done but hit some serious problems with international cooperation - regardless, this demonstrates the problem, while hard, isn't wicked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Has recently been popularized by the book _Range_ , for which I'm grateful, because now I can talk about this stuff with my family.

There is also something of a "wicked problem of wicked problems," which is that wicked problems are very hard to talk about---one of their survival traits is that they're unappealing to talk about, because by definition you can't "solve" them easily.

</comment><comment><USER8> I work in the domain of these wicked problems, and they usually reduce to Taleb's no "skin in the game." The necessary condition for one is that someone has power from some exogenous source, but without accountability.

You can in fact identify wicked problems as an epi-phenomenon of the strategies of the players, who give away their intent in early rounds. The only solutions are an equilibrium of interests.

It's a condition of bureaucracies, politics, and anything outside markets and hierarchies where you can resolve things with a clear price or authority. They are a peculiar game form that has no winners.

</comment><comment> AA-BA-94-2A-56 The fact that a problem is a wicked problem does not justify inaction, in my opinion.

I've had (stupid) friends argue that because income inequality is a wicked problem, we should do away with a social safety net for the poor.

Obviously we can't this issue 100 per cent, but the difference in trying to solve it is better quality of life, lessened crime, happier populace, more people ready for work, and lower mortality rate.

It's great to identify something as a Wicked problem, but that should never stop you from attempting to solving it.

<comment><USER9> Everyone dies and we can't prevent that so we should do away with hospitals. Just bring up some issue that affects them and suddenly they will be disagreeing.

<comment><USER10> Then fine. Go with the Buddhist standard, and the goal is to reduce suffering.

I would say that's one of those simple rules with extraordinarily complex, but overall very good outcomes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In Boston, people call this type of of problem a "wicked bad problem".

<comment><USER12> not a "wicked hahd problem"?

<comment> munk-a Oh, and let's not forget the advanced form of this problem - the "supah wick'd hahd prahblem"... for general information "wicked" is usually a single syllable in Boston.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm really happy this topic is surfancing on HN as I've made it my mission to build experiments to try to tackle social wicked problems.

Dinnertable Chat is an online chatroulette-style conference matchmaking system based on mixing people based on same and different viewpoints. The same idea could be used to mix people on any category (by skill, field, etc): [https://www.dinnertable.chat/about](https://www.dinnertable.chat/about)

The Mix Opinions service matches people in physical spaces by dividing people up into groups, such that each group has maximized viewpoint diversity of each of the members. I could also adapt this to be applied to online conferencing and maximize on both diversity as well as interests (based on weights). [https://www.mixopinions.com/](https://www.mixopinions.com/)

Some of the philosophy of why I was focusing on 'mixed viewpoint' conference software: [https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Q5KWhxhBMLWSvrYoEoWP...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Q5KWhxhBMLWSvrYoEoWPWAO- YqgPwGRakvRNUnxtz1M/edit?usp=sharing)

</comment><comment><USER14> Just this week I was reading "Notes on the Synthesis of Form" by Christopher Alexander (CA), which in someways kickstarted the "design thinking" craze. Later on, CA recanted many of his ideas about the systematization of design, and converged with Rittel regarding "wicked problems". That said, the first half of the above book is still a fantastic read on why wicked problems tend to be hard when attempted in "self conscious mode". One of the most thoughtful pieces I've read in a while... and it's an intuitive, breezy and relatively short (for a book) read.

Here's Rittel's seminal paper on problems with the "planning/design" approach towards wicked problems: [https://archive.epa.gov/reg3esd1/data/web/pdf/rittel%2bwebbe...](https://archive.epa.gov/reg3esd1/data/web/pdf/rittel%2bwebber%2bdilemmas%2bgeneral_theory_of_planning.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER15> It's a great example because of a totally stupid name, a really important concept isn't being adequately explained or understood.

Meaningless garbage like "Black Swan" is spouted all the time and sets people back, just because it's a cool name with a cool story

Yet Wicked problems are our most important issues at Micro and Macro levels, you will have this problem, but people can't tackle them properly because we haven't abstracted the framework in a cool way.

I also think the definition needs to be tightened. But I honestly think no one wants to work in a meta field called 'Wicked problems'

I wonder if in other languages this is tackled better?

<comment><USER16> I swore these were called "hard problems" based on the rough definition: it's a problem whose solution only becomes obvious after a failed attempt at finding the solution.

This fits nicely with the PDF text post also currently on the front page. The best solution for exporting the output text is simply to OCR what is visually seen as an image even though the text is present in the data (because white text on a white background wouldn't be wanted by most users) Therin: The solution also changes based on use case!

<comment><USER15> > it's a problem whose solution only becomes obvious after a failed attempt

I think if the solution ever become obvious it's not a wicked problem.

You can solve them sometimes, but they involve large amounts of waste and time. And you never know how to have done them better.

That's my understanding.

My starting solution to the PDF is to give the user both OCR and text and let them chose. I don't think it's Wicked, but I do think no one is solving it properly along clearly viable lines.

I also think there is a clear solution to force companies to convert PDF's to text properly. So even at a higher level I don't think it's Wicked, just the culture is not correct.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This seemed like an interesting concept, but the list of examples was underwhelming. It can be boiled down to "problems that can be mitigated, but not solved." Which is just kind of a dull thing to name. Given the description, it sounded like this was an article about paradoxical problems in optimization, or sort of real-life examples of the liars paradox. Instead, it's a class of problems that may be interesting in their own right, but the part they have in common isn't.

</comment><comment><USER18> Wickedness in a problem domain is an argument for a competitive, decentralized approach, in order to more rapidly search a larger solution space. Yet instead we seem to demand gordian or manichean solutions and strong centralized institutions to implement them. When the trains don't run on time, instead of seeking out a fray of Dagny Taggarts, we look for one Mussolini. And so wicked (hard) social problems beget disproportionately wicked (counter productive) answers.

<comment><USER19> You are framing this as an either-or situation but, if you read the wiki page, there are _3_ strategies to dealing with wicked problems and you missed the "collaborative" category.

It's clear the authoritative "mussolini" solution is undesirable from a liberal perspective in which we prefer to have a shared say over how we organise things. However, it's also increasingly clear that the way we implement the competitive strategy -- you so aptly suggest the Ayn Rand protagonist as the better option -- is also flawed and incapable of solving these difficult problems. The nature of modern capitalism is to tend toward monopolistic/oligopolistic dynamics in the market, which ultimately leads to a concentration of power and a lack of shared control over such issues. Our economy has only ever made our impact on the environment worse and worse, and is driving us ever closer to catastrophic climate change. Not to mention other examples, such as healthcare, etc.

Why not try something "collaborative", where instead of hoping for either a top-down governmental, or top-down corporate solution to problems, we truly decentralise power and give all people agency and freedom to live in this world? For instance, if we stopped letting the profit motive squeeze us for every possible thing, people would have more free time with lower living expenses and less demanding jobs, and could spend more time repairing/restoring possessions, rather than buying new, or gardening and cooking, rather than eating out, or cycling everywhere, rather than taking cars.

<comment><USER18> Because private property is the sin qua non of decentralized decision making. It is in fact a bundle of rights to make your own decisions about the disposition of things. Anything short of it is also less decentralized. Collaboration with less competition has fewer independent decision makers, and therefore searches the solution space more slowly.

Creative destruction is ugly as hell. It incorporates all of evil. But it is also the engine of adaptation; the inverse of lithification. To the extent that we limit it, we limit the parallelism of adaptation. The fact that businesses can be so easily destroyed outweighs all of their manifest ugliness. Very few noncompetitive institutions have that feature. Fast search means rapid destruction and creation.

There is a very real human cost to that, and many, maybe most people will never be convinced that it's worth it.

<comment><USER6> Talking about minutiae of capitalism here is sort of detracting from the core issue (that also underlies the problems of capitalism).

The core problem is: humans can't coordinate at scale. Working together towards a shared goal comes naturally to us when we're in small, tightly-knit groups. The larger the group, the harder it gets. Once the group reaches ~hundred members[0], coordination generally collapses, and the group succumbs to the usual breed of prisonner-dilemma's-like problems. Or, it develops a governance structure.

If you look at history of civilization through the lens of coordination, you'll notice that all the governance structures, all the economies, up to and including democracy and the free market, are essentially a mechanism of coordinating larger and larger amounts of people. A government cuts trough prisonner-dilemma's-like problems. Its hierarchical nature lets direct coordination costs scale as O(n log n) instead of O(n^2) - but that's still not efficient enough for smaller and more localized problems. There, markets come to the rescue: they let people coordinate on smaller and more local issues, often without even explicitly noticing them - all gets handled by the feedback loops around prices.

The core observation here being: the market works at efficiently coordinating groups of people with diverse interests and smaller, more localized problems. It _absolutely sucks_ at responding to a problem requiring to coordinate large groups of people. That's where you want the top-down solution. It's reasonable to look up to the government to solve a coordination problem below its level[1], _that 's what governments are for_.

\--

(And you do need both a government and a market to limit each other's power. For instance, you mention that "businesses can be so easily destroyed". That only holds true in a spherical-cow free market that never existed. One of the features of capitalism is that profit compounds; a successful company has more resources to protect itself from its competition, ensuring further success. A successful company can't be easily destroyed.

The end-goal of competing businesses is monopoly, but society needs the competition, not the victory - so you need the government to ensure the victors get struck down and competition continues.)

\--

[0] - Dunbar number is ~150, which may or may not be a coincident. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number)

[1] - Governments have their own coordination problems at the international level; geopolitics is essentially a completely unregulated free market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is telling whether something is a wicked problem a wicked problem?

<comment><USER21> Based on this Wikipedia article, yes and no. It has multiple conflicting and vague definitions for whatever the hell a "wicked problem" is. It's like they read the definition of REST and thought "I think we can go vaguer".

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I imagine in many cases, if you solved it, you wouldn't really get credit and history would just sort of shrug and forget it was ever an issue.

</comment><comment><USER23> Which cynefin (domain) would this belong to? Does it describe a class of problems that is not easily categorized within the Cynefin framework?

<comment><USER24> As per Dave Snowden, Wicked Problems lie in the Unordered side of Cynefin and mainly in the Complex domain (if they come from sociology).

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I really get irritated by the use of the term. I've heard it too much in the wrong situations. Use with caution.

<comment> munk-a As a person who grew up in Boston, it is a really confusing term due to just sounding like a generally hard problem... which appears to be a pretty decent approximation of the term. The examples given in this article provide both clarity and additional confusion with a focus on being large uncertain (and thus generally hard to solve) problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> As I have gotten older I try to recognize these when they present themselves, and proceed to avoid them at all costs.</comment>


Show HN: AI lifecoach - <AUTHOR> http://www.jibly.com/8?hn <comment><USER2> Skipping the queue for $25 for a thing that I have no idea how it works, if it works (for me)? Why?

<comment><AUTHOR> still testing pricing, will update with examples asap.</comment></comment>


Samsung's War at Home - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-04-10/deaths-at-samsung-alter-south-koreas-corporate-is-king-mindset

<comment><USER2> Who Pays the Price? The Human Cost of Electronics

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns- kJ5Podjw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns-kJ5Podjw)

</comment><comment><USER3> Heavy duty article!</comment>


Ask HN: How do you sync and share data from your smartphone? - <AUTHOR> I have many use-cases where I sync data like text, messages, photos, contacts or notes from my smartphone to my computer.
- What are your setups / solutions to sync your data to your own PC? - What are your solution to send it to a friends oc or smartphone?
I am not using google photos or other google cloud services, hence I may have more use cases than others.
What I do: - Syncthing ( https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing ) for particular folders and photos to my laptop / PC. - Share via http ( https://github.com/marcosdiez/shareviahttp ) to share files from my smartphone to someone else in the network. - etesync ( https://github.com/etesync/server ) for private calendars and contacts
I do not have a process for sharing to someone directly through the internet. Firefox send comes to.my mind here?! <comment><USER2> To get your files from your phone backed up to your home server, SyncThing works, but if it gives you any attitude, try Resilio Sync.

If you need a self-hosted photo management solution, you're welcome to try PhotoStructure. Here's why I'm writing it: [https://photostructure.com/about/introducing- photostructure/](https://photostructure.com/about/introducing-photostructure/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Viber works well for sending one or two things across the net. It's cross platform and works on both mobile and desktop. We use it often to move things spontaneously from PC to phone or vice versa.</comment>


The Nucleus of Atom - <AUTHOR> http://blog.atom.io/2014/02/26/the-nucleus-of-atom.html

<comment><USER2> GUI frameworks come and go? Some are still around. Look at Qt, development started in 1991 and and is still around.

Maybe someone will implement a free software version of atom core which the free software parts of atom can run. Considering that most of atom core seems to be based on free or open source software, it should be possible to reverse engineer it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Some people are saying that it will be all open source soon.</comment></comment>


Ray Kurzweil's Mind-Boggling Predictions for the Next 25 Years - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2015/01/26/ray-kurzweils-mind-boggling-predictions-for-the-next-25-years/

<comment><USER2> "I often talk about the 6D's of exponential thinking ..."

[turns off computer for the day]

</comment><comment><USER3> > Ten terabytes of computing power (roughly the same as the human brain) will > cost about $1,000.

What does "ten terabytes of computing power" mean?

<comment><USER2> My back of the envelope calculation is that it is equivalent to 5 GHz of wrongness

<comment><USER4> No, no it will be %100 correct when, in the future, you want to compare it to some then present day technology and claim he predicted it.

I feel that way about all of the things the article claims he predicted. I was reading him in the 1990s and he wasn't exactly precise in his predictions in my opinion.

I think he's a self promoter of the highest order.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: I wrote a very niche ebook about GTFS public transit data - <AUTHOR> http://gtfsbook.com

<comment><USER2> Congrats on getting it out there! My only quick feedback is that 80 pages split into 20 chapters feels off to me. A 4 page "chapter" is something more akin to a "section" or some other unit. The sample PDF has the first two chapters, each of which are basically a page each (plus a large image). I'd recommend redefining your definition of "chapter" and restructuring into fewer/longer chapters. As it is it doesn't feel like there's actually much meat there, particularly for a $30 PDF.

As I think about it more, a simple restructuring might not be enough for that kind of price. $30 is more than the retail price for a lot of 300+ page technical books (years ago I wrote a 400 page book with a print version that retailed for $30).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback - this had crossed my mind also, but I ultimately called them chapters as they are logical places to split the content.

As far as the pricing goes, my rationale was to price based on the value it can provide and then take into account how niche the topic.

Some of the content in there took me many many hours to figure out for myself (so thousands of dollars at an hourly rate).

Offset this with (in my opinion) a fairly small pool of potential buyers, this seemed about the break-even point on the project.

On a side note, you can get $5 using the offer code 'metro'

<comment><USER3> > _On a side note, you can get $5 using the offer code 'metro'_

Damn, I read this after I'd already bought the book!! ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for buying! Sorry about that, but I'm unable to issue a partial refund unfortunately

<comment><USER3> Yeah, no problem ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For anyone else also unaware, GTFS is General Transit Feed Specification -

"The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) defines a common format for public transportation schedules and associated geographic information. GTFS "feeds" allow public transit agencies to publish their transit data and developers to write applications that consume that data in an interoperable way."

[https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs/](https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow. I'm building an app for route planning / public transport in France, the first version of which was in full-JS and won a competition from RATP:

[http://data.ratp.fr/fr/actualites/article/finale-de- lopendat...](http://data.ratp.fr/fr/actualites/article/finale-de-lopendatalab- la-ratp-recompense-2-ap.html)

We have now moved the route-planning part to a server in C++ but we want to move it back to the client using something like Xamarin/C#. Any thougths on this?

Will definitely buy the book! (No Paypal, though?)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds awesome if you can get a trip planner working in JS! The usual go-to is OTP ([http://www.opentripplanner.org/](http://www.opentripplanner.org/)), but you should also check the relatively new RRRR. More info here: [https://github.com/bliksemlabs/rrrr](https://github.com/bliksemlabs/rrrr)

As for my book, I'm selling through Gumroad, which I believe only allows credit card payments.

<comment><USER3> > _Sounds awesome if you can get a trip planner working in JS_

It was really a horrible hack that took into account only lines and stops (no trip times, transfer times, schedule, etc.) but as a simple visual app, and in the context of a hackathon, it worked.

It was even featured as "Google Map of the week" on the Google Geo blog before it was even showed to RATP

[http://googlegeodevelopers.blogspot.fr/2013/08/interactive-m...](http://googlegeodevelopers.blogspot.fr/2013/08/interactive- map-of-paris-metro.html)

But now we need to "muscle up" the routing part and so are leaving JS completely (however if the data can be reduced significantly it would be interesting to go back to it someday).

OTP is much too big to ever migrate on a mobile device; will definitely check out rrrr; what do you use yourself?

<comment><AUTHOR> I play around a lot with OTP. I'm really interested in rrrr. I'd really like to code something super-easy to configure and run in Go though

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I did an internship in a bus company several years ago and we finally abandoned the idea of GTFS because they (Google) were so uptight about the correctness of the data.

We had a few trips that were non consistent (the average speed was something like 150 km/h - 93 mp/h) that we couldn't do anything about and they refused to integrate those data.

Several bus stops were also too close (they were apart of a narrow street) and were generating warnings every time.

I wish I had this book back then.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, I've heard similar stories of agencies having trouble with Google Transit compatibility. Aside from the edge cases, it is a very robust specification that is able to handle a majority of situations.

Side note: my book is about consumption of GTFS feeds rather than generation of them

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is great...wish I had it a year ago when I started working with GTFS. My latest project at [http://yrtbustracker.com](http://yrtbustracker.com) (Canada)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Looks good, have you thought about overlaying the shapes when you select a bus?

<comment><USER6> Thanks...I'll consider adding it in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As someone who does nothing but hack GTFS all day, your book brought a smile to my face :) Amazing how far GTFS has come.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad to hear! I know how you feel, seems like all I do is look at GTFS feeds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder when they'll release their flight data. I'm very interested in this as my work for a travel company has recently included building dynamic packages. Having flight availability on the scale that Google has would be of most use to us!

</comment><comment><USER9> Well done qzervaas! Please keep us updated on your success. I would be very interested to hear how many copies of this book you managed to sold - and your margins. I wonder whether writing in such a niche is profitable.

<comment><AUTHOR> This post on HN generated about 2,700 views on the product page, and low double-digit sales.

Sales have so far covered my direct expenses (domain registration, cover design, copy editing), although I kept these costs as low as possible.

Profit margin can only be determined by the value I put on my time. It will take a little while to cover this but the GTFS spec isn't going anywhere so I'm confident this book will be relevant for quite some time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What differentiates your book from the reference?

[https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs/reference](https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs/reference)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for asking: it does include the GTFS, but then provides additional discussion over aspects that are not necessarily clear or potentially confusing for newcomers.

It also covers the fact that many agencies interpret the spec differently and explains things to look out for.

The final half of the book shows how to optimize the data from a feed so it will perform more efficiently in an SQL database (for instance, showing how to reduce the number of points in a shape)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like how you've included an index in the sample chapter. It shows what else is in the book. How did you generate that? What tools did you use to write the book?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for asking - I wrote the book using LibreOffice and used the Table of Contents, Indexing, and cross-referencing functionality.

In actual fact: \- I wrote the first half of the page in Apple pages \- I couldn't cross-reference so I moved to Word for Mac \- This worked well, but I couldn't export the PDF with internal links \- I converted to LibreOffice \- This exported with external links

To create the sample, I then opened in Preview, deleted all the internal pages, dragged in the "call to action" page, then saved.

LibreOffice worked well for the most part, although there were a few little funky things that didn't work how I wanted them to (e.g. justified text puts extra spacing between letters as well as words. Also, indexing a word sometimes makes the alignment go all screwy, for some unknown reason)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Although it's not my niche, it looks quite interesting and the sample chapter is very clear. Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER13> This is perfect now when I just started importing timetables to SQL :) Will give the book a try

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad to hear - hope you find it useful!</comment></comment>


An interpretation of art for the analytical mind - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/kiranw/www/HackingArts-2015/hackingarts.html <comment><USER2> So someone has a database of art phrases and madlibs them together next to pieces of art? Are we supposed to feel superior to people who create art now? I don't. Why is it that people who claim to be 'analytical' always just use it as an excuse to claim anything they don't understand is meaningless?

<comment><USER3> Well, obviously us tech people are the only ones who can understand things. Everyone else is just banging rocks together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "This is another piece of art" would be as useful as the interpretations in this site.

</comment><comment><USER5> I spent my first minute trying to click everything and anything to no avail.

It's worth mentioning that refreshing the page loads another image and description in a random combination.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's just randomized, right?

Or have I been misreading Caillebotte's "Paris Street; Rainy Day" (1876-1877)[1] as "High Impressionism" when all along it's really been "An Abstraction of Classicism" ;)

[1] [http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/citi/images/standard/We...](http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/citi/images/standard/WebLarge/WebImg_000281/215300_3365286.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER7> How does this work? It doesn't appear interactive, the title doesn't match the painting (though has similarities to the actual piece), and the text on the right seems like a total joke based on the painting industry's practice of teaching artists how to use impressive-sounding gibberish so rich patrons look smart and the uninitiated feel unintelligent.

<comment><USER8> The exact same criticism applies to software engineering or the startup community. It's only "impressive-sounding gibberish" if you don't understand what it means.

Or, as someone once eloquently described modern physics, "It looks like ancient Greek to anyone but another physicist or an ancient Greek".

The interesting part, to me, isn't the "gibberish", but rather the hostile, arrogant reaction to its existence. Rather than saying "Huh, I really don't understand the inner language of this sophisticated subject with a deep history", people react with "Wow, those jerks with their inner language are just faking it to act better than us". And it's not just fine art - it's true of just about any complex ideas with deep communities. You'll see outsiders say the same about startups, rap, poetry, whatever.

<comment><USER9> I assume the point of physics is to understand nature and communicate that understanding to others, who will need sufficient interest and background knowledge to understand what is being communicated. I don't personally understand physics beyond the basics, but I'm prepared to believe physicists are not talking bollocks to each other. I can see the concrete results of their applied knowledge in my everyday life.

On the other hand, I can't help feeling that art language is deliberately obscure and elitist and its purpose is not designed to communicate objective truth because there is no objective truth to communicate. Perhaps the emperor does have clothes and I'm just too ignorant to see them.

<comment><USER8> As someone who speaks both art and computers, I can assure you that it's at least as rigorous and significant as, say, the startup community's language. The problem with trying to make a counterexample of hard science is that you're opening up to excluding _every_ subject that isn't hard science to the same criticism.

The purpose of the language of art theory and criticism isn't to communicate objective truth, because it's _subjective_ truth. But just because a truth is subjective does not make it less real, or less meaningful. Generally, we are limited to the subjective reality of our perceptions. Art theory is the study of perceptions, and a great deal of modern art is more or less experimenting with perception itself. Knocking it as "bollocks" because it's not expressed in formal logic or mathematics is both subjective and non-rigorous. Or, as the Dude would say, "That's just, like, your opinion, man." If you don't understand the language, that's fine, and if you don't care to understand it, that's fine too, but calling it bollocks without understanding or caring to understand it is itself bollocks.

If you start digging around in philosophy, there's a strong argument within phenomenology that physics itself is subjective. Rigorous language doesn't mean the subject of the language is objective. Godel demonstrated the limits of language against objective nature in his incompleteness theorem as well (basically, Godel proved that, within any system, there are statements that are true that cannot be proven). But I digress.

<comment><USER9> I do have that hostility to art criticism of which you speak, which is what prompted me to post. I know nothing about art, so I should have kept my mouth shut, or at least been less insulting. Sorry.

When I read a story, hear a song or watch a movie and I might _feel_ something or my world-view may have been moved. But I look at a painting or sculpture and I feel nothing. It doesn't feel right that a critic has to explain to me that my perception is being experimented with.

<comment><USER8> The need to explain it is one of the curses of modern art. I'm in the camp where I think it should be able to move you without explanation. But there's nothing wrong with not feeling moved by a particular kind of art, or by being irritated when it has to be explained to you.

Art is also cultural, in the sense that only members of the culture really grok a piece of art. If you're an American, you naturally understand cowboy movies. But samurai films, which are in many ways the same thing, may feel strange to you. Most art is made only for people culturally similar to the artist. This includes fine art and modern art. If you aren't part of the modern art culture, you'll never get it, any more than if you're not Japanese you'll never understand eating natto (ugh, disgusting stuff, to even my openminded and educated American palate).

Ultimately, though, we're all moved by things that feel personal to us. I've spent probably several hours in total just staring at a particular Jackson Pollock painting (Mural, University of Iowa collection). It's a profoundly emotional experience for me. You'd probably see a bunch of green, yellow, and black stripes and blobs. That's okay. That's how most people feel about it. That doesn't mean you're dumb, and it doesn't mean I'm pretentious. It just means we're different people, with different motivations.

Universal art is usually dull art.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A portrait of Jesus being crucified from the 16th century is apparently a contemplation for kitsch and fetishism and Olympia is a cogitation for evocative postmodernism?

</comment><comment><USER11> This is a reflection for priggishness and humorlessness.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The code to this is [https://github.com/kiranw/HackingArts-2015](https://github.com/kiranw/HackingArts-2015)

</comment><comment><USER12> Why can't folks take a joke anymore?</comment>


Where to find a good mentor? - <AUTHOR> Hello .hackernews community;i am a long time lurker,procastinator.i always wanted to code.but,always found a way to do something else. Anyway,I made my mind to learn webdevelopement.i am currently learning on the freecodecamp.com plateform + eloquent javascript+ some courses by David j.malan from cs50.I am enjoying it ,i cant believe myself that i spend the whole day learning to code. So,To clarify i am a total beguinner to code, i sometimes observe myself with theses learning wholes.or where to go next. i am looking for some kind of guidance. where  to find good mentors online?
how do you track you progress while learning? <comment><USER2> Interesting, I also am learning to code through freeCodeCamp and EloquentJS; and I was considering and looking for mentors just now (there is this paid solution if you want: [https://www.codementor.io/](https://www.codementor.io/)). Ultimately I decided it is not the time, meanwhile, I am cultivating more organic relations with experienced developers that I know (even if not exactly close friends). Asking for small tips and suggestions.

I track progression through the projects I develop.

There are all the projects from FCC. But then I moved on to create:

* [http://www.gittutorial.online/](http://www.gittutorial.online/)

* [http://www.opusnota.com/](http://www.opusnota.com/)

* [http://www.opusnota.com/hnbc](http://www.opusnota.com/hnbc)

* [https://personaldev.gomix.me/](https://personaldev.gomix.me/)

Now I am working on a Facebook Messenger Bot.

My suggestion is to create these projects to track progression. And keep meeting people (on and offline) that might one day possible act as a mentor.

<comment><AUTHOR> that's very good progress,please continue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Without you having the willingness to succeed in coding it will be really hard to get to a point of productivity.

You could start by learning basics through online courses and tutorials. But this path lacks of passion. Why don't you think of a small project you could use by yourself. Just start coding your own website with a small CMS. And then, your best friend is Google. Whenever you don't know how to start, how to get further or how to solve a problem. Use specific forums or Google it. Stackoverflow is a very good address.

The most important part is to start and to get going. You can do this by setting a high goal and break it down into small subgoals and milestones. Then just try to stick with it... at least until you have an idea you're more excited about - just switch and you will learn something new. But be careful - getting things done/finished is an important habit. So perhaps you should just start by writing really small scripts and project. Just try to accomplish something and the rest will come.

<comment><AUTHOR> You have a very good point here.Believe or not,the one thing that totally changed me mentally was playing Chess.It was a total enlightement. # I learnt that we make tons of Mistakes. why do we make mistakes? >most of the time our minds run on auto-mode. >we play with emotions;emotions block our minds To really improve you start by accepting failure, reflecting on your own mistakes which is very painful .you have got to tame your ego! and this is very important at least to me :you have to forgive yourself,and give yourself time.

# having a worst plan ;is better than no plan.always aim at something,and be flexible with you plan.

# never resign,swallow you ego and make it hard to your opponent to win.if he is better than you,try to learn his finishing technique.

# if you're wining pay extra attention,get it done with.

#Enjoy it;or learn to :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For the mentors, you should join an Open Source project where people will die to have you contribute, and if you have questions and problems, you should ask. They're more than likely to help you, free of charge. But you must contribute and show the willingness to work hard.

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds like a great idea.but;where to start.if you have any idea where a beguinner could be useful right away.please let me know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Shoot me a message. Email is in my profile.</comment>


The Everyday Inspiration for Anna Karenina - <AUTHOR> https://newrepublic.com/article/158973/everyday-inspiration-anna-karenina <comment><USER2> Kumis really could be a good Idea for productivity-enhancing drink. Also Kefir, Tan, and other semi-alcoholic milk-based brews

<comment><USER3> Are you Persian?</comment></comment>


Atomic launches free iOS Kit to speed up prototyping and designing in Atomic - <AUTHOR> https://atomic.io/resources/iphone-ios-kit/?utm_source=friends&utm_medium=ref&utm_term=v1&utm_content=uikit&utm_campaign=uikit_launch <comment><USER2> Hi, we wanted to help you get started with the design of your next iPhone app, so we've put this kit together to give you a kick start when designing for iOS in Atomic. If you haven't tried Atomic before, it lets you design and prototype products for a range of platforms with speed, and has a free 30 day trial. Check it out: [https://atomic.io](https://atomic.io)

Read an intro to this kit on the Atomic blog: [http://blog.atomic.io/features/i..](http://blog.atomic.io/features/i..). Learn more about how to use it in the Atomic help center: [http://help.atomic.io/hc/en-us/a..](http://help.atomic.io/hc/en-us/a..).

Let me know how you get on, or if you have any suggestions for improvements.</comment>


Wolfram Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/08/wolframalpha-personal-analytics-for-facebook/ <comment><USER2> > all you have to do is type "facebook report" into the standard Wolfram|Alpha > website.

.. and connect with your Facebook account, grant extended permissions, signup for a Wolfram account, go to your mail inbox, validate your Wolfram ID, hit a dead end, sign into Wolfram with your Wolfram account, type "facebook report" in the searchbox again, wait 10 minutes for the page to load and finally.. get to see the report (which is nice by the way).

<comment><USER3> I also had to switch from Chrome to Firefox to get it to work (in addition to all of the above).

<comment><USER4> I also had to switch to Firefox (after seeing your post here). I tried with Chrome for hours before seeing this, switching, and it worked right away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do you know that feeling when a project/idea you have been working on a long time gets implemented almost exactly as you imagined it, only by someone else?

Well I do now. I'm not sure if I should be excited, or listen to the sick feeling in my stomach.

Edit: Thanks for the positive support! I'll keep working on the project.

<comment><USER6> Yup, it sucks. That happened to me with Light Table, though I had only been developing very rough prototypes rather than any kind of polished demo.

On the positive side, there is a sense in which it is still overall a good thing. You might have had your thunder stolen, but at least more people are now looking up at the sky, and you've had the opportunity to think deeply about where the winds are blowing.

<comment><USER7> Write an Eclipse or Vim plugin instead, and have a greater impact.

<comment><USER6> I'd like to, but I suspect this kind of thing: <http://imgur.com/ZIVd4> is best done in an HTML-based IDE like Light Table where you can take advantage of SVG.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's the direct link to try it out: <http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=facebook+report>

As someone with a long history of incomplete self-tracking projects, this kind of automated collection and analysis is great. (If only I could get the rest of my data in the same place!) What I'd really like to see is a tool like IFTTT for self-trackers.

<comment><USER8> Can you name some self-trackers that you use?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. I use CRON-O-Meter (<http://cronometer.com/>) to track my diet and weight, RunKeeper (<http://runkeeper.com/home>) and Fitocracy (<https://www.fitocracy.com/>) to track exercise, Moodscope (<http://www.moodscope.com/login>) to track my mood, and YourFlowingData (<http://your.flowingdata.com/>) to track anything else I want to measure. My favorite self-tracking service was an MIT Media Lab project called Mycrocosm (<http://mycro.media.mit.edu/>), but it's pretty much dead. (I wrote a Python script to extract my old data. I'll clean it up and publish it).

Some of these services are completely siloed, some of them export data as .csv or XML, and some of them actively interact with one another (e.g. Fitocracy imports Runkeeper data, CRONometer can connect to a Withings scale). Each tool works well in its niche, but there's no easy way (yet!) to get all the data in one machine-readable place.

<comment><USER7> What do you use to track your trackers?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks really cool, but it keeps timing out on me. Been longing for this kind of information, so here's hoping it will work soon!

</comment><comment><USER10> This is the kind of thing they need to get into. Data that lots of people care about, data for the masses, rather than obscure details on bolt sizes or ancient currencies. "Compute things people want".

I could only imagine what they could do with celebrity gossip. Or product comparisons.

<comment><USER11> I am genuinely surprised we have not seen any "big data" articles about celebrity gossip rags. That _has_ to be a market you could data-mine the crap out of for fun and profit.

I can imagine split testing Tom Cruise vs George Clooney to see who generates more revenue.

You could call it quantitative gossip.

<comment><USER12> I'm pretty sure media companies do that already. They just won't publish it because of competition and PR reasons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nice viral way to data mine personal data here.

<comment><USER7> That's against FB developer terms of servoce, so would never happen.

<comment><USER14> Do you think FB would care about that if it were the other way around?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ah, where did I see the word 'knowledge domain' before? Here: [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national- secur...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-security- agencys-domestic-spying-program.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> I can't access it now, alpha is very being slow.

The concept reminds me a bit of this chrome extension: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nangghhladpnhlllol...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nangghhladpnhlllolmdbdgeggionole)

<comment><USER17> I expected this to be very slow. Access to Facebook's API is slow. My Facebook app that analyzes mutual likes is very simple and has just one stat, but it could take a second to query data for every 10 friends. The more friends you have the slower it is. You can't use just one query for all your friends either. You have split queries and wait for each before querying for the next batch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Like the author I'm also not really active on Facebook, but I found the clustering of friends particularly insightful.

I can see this extending to Twitter, Linked in and so on, combining everything into a dynamic scorecard. This is what Klout should have been.

(Personal blog post showing clustering: [http://lancewiggs.com/2012/08/31/mapping-your-social- network...](http://lancewiggs.com/2012/08/31/mapping-your-social-network/))

<comment><USER19> The clustering is so good it's almost scarily good. I wish there was an option for creating friends list automatically from it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Like Wolfram, I've been doing some personal analytics for a while, but only with email (<http://sluggish.dyndns.org/wiki/Emailgraph>). Potentially it would be possible to build a Friendica addon which does similar things to the Facebook Report.

<comment><USER6> That's pretty cool -- I always suspected people out there had done this kind of thing. Nice work!

P.S. You should try out Mathematica sometime, it is a better fit for doing cool things with rich data than C or even Python (disclosure: I work at Wolfram).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Just... wow.

I love what Wolfram Alpha is doing with data-based search results. So innovative and a natural search space that Google is only dipping their toes into.

<comment><USER22> Google is doing all of this, but not publicly. Through Google accounts, Google+ and even just search cookies, Google has most of the same or similar information, but their goal isn't to provide it to you in a data analysis, but to use it for ad targeting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It seems concerning that my personal information can be so easily summed up and displayed in easily digestible format. I'm not sure if you can view other people's Wolfram Alpha Facebook summaries, or what data they could be collecting about me... However, here is one study that demonstrates that your sexual orientation can be determined just by analyzing your Facebook friends.

[http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/ar...](http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2611/2302)

</comment><comment><USER24> Wow, the coolest part (in my opinion) is the Friend Network section at the bottom. It accurately mapped and clustered every section of my life, including my first high school, the high school I moved to after that, my college, my family, various work groups and social groups, etc. Very interesting to see visually.

<comment><USER25> All collected in neat little circles.

Maybe Google+ was onto something after all...

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is interestingly non-viral. Although it's one of the coolest links I've seen in a while, it takes much longer to "consume" this, and sharing doesn't have until after consumption. Interesting to note how much less frequently this was shared than some much interesting "popular links".

<comment><USER27> Yeah, stuff with a scientific bend doesn't get shared, although it has impact. It creates its own niche, with considerably less noise.

Sorry to broaden the scope, but this made me think...

In stock markets, you have the concept of "noise traders", less well-informed traders. They sort of create their own dynamics, sometimes even generating good return on investments, where better informed traders stay out of the market.

Social dynamics... not sure if it's possible to derive some new fundamental laws, because human behavior is too fluid. Maybe in the end (after years of "big data" number crunching) all we get is some empirical observations and weak correlations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I really liked the Facebook report from Wolfram Alpha. Logging in was pretty easy for me because I already have a Wolfram log-in. I started the process just before a family meeting and walk with my wife, and less than an hour after I started, I see on screen a DETAILED analysis of my heavy use of Facebook, with a lot of information I've been looking for--for example who is the person who comments the most on my wall, or which post that I ever posted has had the most comments. (Hmm, the link referred to in that post belongs HN if it hasn't been posted before.)

On the whole, it is more user-friendly than Facebook itself for telling me about my activity and connections on Facebook, so I'm glad I signed up for the Facebook report on Wolfram Alpha.

</comment><comment><USER29> Very soon, Facebook needs to get to a point where when you log in it would ask you "what is your target mood: happy, stimulated to do more work, disturbed, relax,happy" and would tailor what you see and do based on past analytics.

</comment><comment><USER30> This just made personal search a very interesting space.

Put aside for a moment the fact that you're giving your personal data to (yet another) third party. Imagine you tie all your social online stuff to a service that's good at aggregating/displaying the data from each one. Now I could have a 'dashboard' of my online life as well as being able to query it (e.g when/how did I last interact with Alice or Bob?).

I don't know how good Alpha actually is but if I take the visualisations on faith, then I'm interested to know where they're headed. If I were a startup in the personal data/aggregation space, I'd be paying very close attention.

<comment><USER5> It's hard to ignore that I've just granted someone most of the permissions available to my facebook, but I totally agree that if I could get an aggregation of all my social data in one place and pipe it into some visualizations to create a dashboard it would be pretty formidable.

I just wish I could have that without having to sacrifice my privacy. Why not have a standalone app like the days of old?

<comment><USER30> > _"... if I could get an aggregation of all my social data in one place and > pipe it into some visualizations to create a dashboard it would be pretty > formidable."_

You mean something like this? (or at least enabled by it). <http://perscon.net/overview/dataware.html>

It's one of the research topics I'm involved with. Any feedback/opinions appreciated (I can pass it on to the folks actually working on it).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> _This_ is what I always wanted out of FB.

</comment><comment><USER32> I look forward to trying this, Wolfram's site is a little slow right now though.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not bad, the friend network clustering was pretty good (clustered using mutual friends). You can clearly see clusters of people from each place I've worked, the neighborhood I live in, my school friends etc. each in almost their own cluster (and when they aren't neatly organized, there's a very good reason why, like people who moved between jobs with me...aggregating both clusters together).

Strangely, it gets my place of residence wrong.

</comment><comment><USER33> I really want to use this service and check out the interesting data it generates. But I don't really want to give away all my data to WolframAlpha. It says 'Your information is only stored for one hour, so each time you return, we'll run fresh analytics on your Facebook data.' but I am not really sure. It's encouraging me to come back and let it continuously mine it? I am conflicted.

<comment><USER7> It pretty clearly says they are deleting your data after one hour.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I am not sure how many have seen <http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com> by Linkedin Labs. The graph is much more neater, zoomable, and shows quirky insights about your network.

</comment><comment><USER35> I have a small bug with it: I set my city in my Facebook profile and Wolfram Alpha says I'm in a city with the same name but in France. But the map shows the right city.

</comment><comment><USER36> Not only is the analytical part super neat, but this is an absolutely brilliant way to get people to find out about Wolfram Alpha and create an account.

</comment><comment><USER37> Times out on me! :(

<comment><USER38> same here :(

<comment><USER39> It timed out on me too, then I just hit the "Submit-button" again and all the data appeared

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Have to love those people with ages of 99 years.

(At least they deal with the "hide my birth year" people correctly instead of saying they are 1-year-old.)

</comment><comment><USER41> This was the first time I have ever seen a loading bar go down both percentage and visually. Why on earth would they do that?

</comment><comment><USER42> The screenshots look great but I can't access the feature at all, the page just times out.

</comment><comment><USER27> Wow. That's impressive. Big step forward in social analytics.

</comment><comment><USER43> related: anyone know any good platforms for collecting personal data so you can make cool graphs like this? i use google spreadsheet right now, but im not a fan.

<comment><USER44> Have you tried Wolfram|Alpha Pro data input features themselves for the analysis?

<comment><USER6> Funnily enough, many of the visualizations you see in the Facebook scanner have their origin in Wolfram|Alpha Pro scanners (especially the network analysis and visualization stuff), although they've been heavily adapted and tweaked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> getting this { "result" : "failure", "action" : "", "url" : "" }</comment>


Bunnyhopping from the Programmer's Perspective - <AUTHOR> https://flafla2.github.io/2015/02/14/bunnyhop.html <comment><USER3> Cross-posting my comment from reddit (had the article first):

Asheron's Call had a similar bug, although it took a while to be discovered. There was a buried feature that allowed you to turn/rotate, your character by clicking your mouse on the screen in certain locations. Your rotation speed was controlled by how far from the origin the mouse was located and ramped up to a capped rotation speed after a certain distance. The closer you were to the origin, the slower your rotation speed. The game came out around 1998 when most people were playing on 800x600 or maybe 1024x768 screens and since the possible rotation speeds you could achieve were directly related to the pixel width of the viewport, there was effectively a limit to the slowness of your rotation. Fast forward half a decade and people are playing on dual 1600x1200 screens and you can now turn reeeally slow if you get your cursor in the right position (and enabled the rarely used feature). Well, you could combine this slow rotation with strafe-running to make your velocity vector scale out many multiples of your normal run speed. In-game, other people viewed you as essentially teleporting (game had slow updates and basic client-side prediction) huge distances at a time. Not too long after this exploit was found, they introduced a new game client (for other reasons) that didn't have the mouse turn feature (I don't think anyone ever really used it in the previous ~7 years), so it was no longer possible to use. My friend and I had some fun nights on the PK server being able to just 'disappear' from a fight at will.

<comment><USER3> Hmm, looks like something ate my line breaks and editing/deleting isn't working...

<comment><USER4> You have to double them.

<comment><USER3> I tried that...about 10 times...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Isn't this... just a bug? Good on the players for finding it, of course; and I can even see the community agreeing to let everyone exploit bunnyhopping - <USER2> _intentionally_ programming in this behaviour seems really odd to me.

<comment><USER6> It is now considered a feature, and there are entire maps & games built with a focus on trick jumping. It's a fun thing to learn and it really opens up new possibilities, even in maps that weren't specifically designed with trick jumping in mind. For most games, it increases the skill cap, thus adding depth...

I am so used to bunny hopping that I feel handicapped in any FPS that doesn't let me do it. If I ever get my FPS project going, it'll sure as heck have this feature.

<comment><USER7> I really wish people perceived the bar to be higher than "well, it doesn't totally break the game, and it adds to the skill cap, so ship it!" for keeping any bug/feature in.

Literally anything that can impair you adds to the skill cap because it's another thing you have to learn to use/avoid.

We must also answer questions like "Is it credibility-destroyingly stupid to have players flying around at high speed in a semi-realistic military shooter" and "is this even fun" and "what effect does this have on the intended balance & map design". I don't know the answers for CS but in general I often see criticism of the status quo in games met with with knee-jerk "this increases the skill cap, learn to play" responses.

<comment><USER8> Realistic military shooters are niche. The average player wants fun, not believable. I personally attribute most of Counter-Strike's success to its completely unrealistic movement/weapon handling, creating a game that is arcade-y: you can replicate movements with almost 100% accuracy which means with enough practice you can master the game in incredible ways. This means the replay value is almost infinite: see for example, how the 1.6 competitive scene has used the same 15 original bomb defuse maps for more than a decade without it getting stale.

<comment><USER6> I would assume however that mainstream gamers (who would be "average" by definition, in terms of skill level) have no appreciation for non-obvious game mechanics that give highly skilled players an "unfair" advantage. In fact anything that increases the skill cap works against the "merely average" players on public servers. So there is an incentive for the companies behind big online shooters to strip their games of such features. It follows that modern shooters do not come with bunny hopping, and the players who've been primarily exposed to this new generation of games would find such tricks game- breaking and unfair.

So I guess bunny hopping and such will remain a thing for old timers who stick to the old classics. And boy do they have a ton of fun :) Although it would be nice to see some new players. Old players get old and tired...

To vehementi: bunny hopping and all the other stuff you can master to become better at a game really is a _ton of fun_. I don't think breaking balance is as big of an issue as some here make it out to be, though it obviously depends on the map and mode. But in general, if your foe can bunny hop, so can you. Sometimes they start in a position where it's way more advantageous to them. But in my experience it's just not very common. And thankfully, with the good games, we are not tied to the stock maps put out by the company behind the game.. instead there's a community of gamers and mappers, and the community will adapt.

Many stock maps suck anyway, whether you have bunny hopping or not. For example, many of the stock Q3A maps are regarded as crap, and aren't really played at all in competitive matches. Bunny hopping however is a core mechanic in these games and iD was well aware of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Source video for the gif: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYEyIGLRqW0&t=47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYEyIGLRqW0&t=47)

It really shows how much of an advantage it was if you knew how to bunny hop.

<comment><USER10> Here is another video showing a fuller explanation of bunny hopping and going into the history a bit

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1HowpVX- hU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1HowpVX-hU)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So games intentionally program support for bunnyhopping, or us it a math logic bug.

<comment><USER12> Both. It was originally a bug, has since turned into a feature.

<comment><USER13> Talking of other CS "bugs" that have turned into features, anyone who's never seen "surfing" should check that out.

Basically, you take the same air-strafing principles from this article, add a little bunny-hopping, and another "feature" of counterstrike where if you land on a steep enough slope you won't take falling damage or apply friction. Give this to some insane map makers and the end result is an incredibly skill- intensive obstacle course of sorts at tremendously high speeds.

Here's a good example of what I'm talking about: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0Xv00yJhjs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0Xv00yJhjs)

There's a really dedicated community behind this stuff, you can find 64-man servers full of people playing this type of map in CS:GO and CS:Source.

<comment><USER14> Here's an interesting bug/technique in HL2 called 'Accelerated Back Hopping' [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV- AWxqYAgc&t=41m43s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV-AWxqYAgc&t=41m43s)

It's used in speedruns, but I believe is fixed these days. Apprently if you're bunnyhopping backwards, the game tries to limit the speed, but since you're going backwards the player ends up accelerating essentially indefinitely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not bunnyhopping, but similar idea a game called Gunz: The Duel had many animation glitches where you could cancel animation lock with higher priority move. The action would execute, but the animation would be cut in short with a shorter animation which allowed you to perform a new longer animation move.

Commonly it was called kStyle or "korean style" in west since the game was korean and koreans came up with the bug. It made the game everyone was doing it flying through the map with swords swinging wildly it was a lot of fun and definitely raised the skill ceiling and someone how it didn't seem nearly as cheaty as the bunnyhopper in articles video.

<comment><USER16> That sounds like how certain types of combos work in games like Street Fighter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The good old-fashioned rocket jump is another example of this.

Quake 1 had a feature where if a player took damage, they'd get pushed in the direction the damage came from. This was originally intended to serve as a visual indicator.

Of course, this meant that if you aimed the rocket launcher at your feet, and jumped and fired simultaneously, the damage kick + the jump would launch you a good distance upward. This became a popular enough technique that it was retained in the Quake sequels, and even imitated in games like Half-Life (the Gauss Gun would push you backwards, allowing a "rocket jump" of sorts)...

<comment><USER18> This was also a common tactic in Tribes, which also had jet packs and 'skiing' (basically bunny hopping downhill while building up momentum). The game had vehicles, but after people figured out skiing, the vehicles were basically abandoned.

In the later years of the game, people even figured out disc jumping in midair off of their own grenade.

Edit: here's a quick Tribes 1 video where a guy skis around the enemy base, team kills his own flag carrier, catches the flag in midair, and disc jumps home to cap it.

[http://youtu.be/HF_htZRhbiQ](http://youtu.be/HF_htZRhbiQ)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Haha! This is awesome! Reminds me of the good days of CS 1.6 when newbs would to be totally flabbergasted on seeing others bunnyhopping. The best times were when a sniper would get knifed by some bunnyhopper! :D

Thanks for sharing :)

<comment><USER20> If I remember correctly so was bunnyjumping fixed in version 1.5, which also started a mod of CS called classic 1.3 or something like that.

<comment><USER21> It was 'fixed' in 1.3 but was still possible in 1.5 and 1.6, just much harder

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think it's extremely telling how people react to it. Some will get annoyed and demand for this to be disabled because others have the advantage on them. Others will try and learn to do it to get that advantage on other people. I wonder if you could use this to perform a similar test to the marshmallow experiment ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment)).

</comment><comment><USER23> Ha, I thought it was a `Skater Bunnyhop from the Physicist Perspective` article. Interesting nonetheless.</comment>


Some programming language theory in R - <AUTHOR> http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2016/01/some-programming-language-theory-in-r/ <comment><AUTHOR> We use R to do analysis, but it actually includes a very powerful programming language which can be used to conveniently teach (and execute) bits of the lambda calculus.</comment>


Show HN: My silly twist on the Facebook Like button - <AUTHOR> http://www.zuupy.com/ilikeon/

<comment><USER2> I made a site similar to this right after the like button was released. Grew to over 2 million visitors a day in 4 days.. then facebook started blocking sites that used the like button without any real content.. So if this grows don't expect it to last very long.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the heads-up. There's a similar website called Hey I Like, it's a Facebook app. They still seem to be around after months. What was your concept?

<comment><USER2> Yeah noticed that.. it was exactly the same as Hey I Like. My only thought as to why facebook is allowing Hey I Like to stay up is that they're getting a portion of the ad revenue (since it's a canvas app).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Either this is more complicated than it should be, or I am totally missing something... Is there anyway to actually "Like" what you submit (besides waiting for it to show up in the random stream)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, you should be redirected to the page that you created after you click the button. However, you have to manually click Like once you're at that page.

<comment><USER3> Oh, right. I see it now. But it doesn't seem to be posting to my facebook..?

<comment><AUTHOR> One weakness is that it wouldn't post it automatically. I believe that it's against Facebook's policy to auto-Like something for visitors. So, clicking create would create the entry, but not Like it yet.

<comment><USER3> I acknowledge that. I meant to say that it doesn't even post when I click the "like" button, even thought I am logged into facebook.

<comment><USER4> With a left, and then a right...

you were both Zuckerpunched.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> <http://www.zuupy.com/ilikeon/entry/717002/>

<comment><AUTHOR> So it's you who has been submitting posts of this nature?

<comment><USER5> "Of this nature", perhaps.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Good books on body inflammation - <AUTHOR> Hey guys,
Recently found out I have fistulas in my pelvis area. I'm looking for ways to reduce body inflammation and potentially fixing my immune system.
Any books on this sort of thing? <comment><USER2> No doubt books exist, but this is not settled research by any means, so I'd start with recent journal articles instead. I'd be interested in what you can find by searching at pubmed.com.

Meanwhile, here's an interesting start: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26029209](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26029209) This suggests that inflammation isn't an artifact - but compensatory. If so, one should be careful about palliatives such as histamine blockers or steroids that might prevent your body from fighting back. (Sunlight might help, too.)

Some treatment ideas to reduce inflammation. But note, "natural" doesn't mean it ain't acting like a drug. Ginger is a very powerful antihistamine, for example. [http://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/what-you- eat-c...](http://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/what-you-eat-can-fuel- or-cool-inflammation-a-key-driver-of-heart-disease-diabetes-and-other-chronic- conditions)

Note the causal arrow might go both ways, with fistulas causing inflammation www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17109067 as well as inflammation causing fistulas. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4428674/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4428674/) Mast cell responses can weaken collagen.

MCAS is a possiblility.

MCAS = Mast Cell Activation Syndrome

MCAD (Mast Cell Activation Disorder) = MCAS or mastocytosis

links here: [http://strengthflexibilityhealtheds.com/2016/02/04/diagnosin...](http://strengthflexibilityhealtheds.com/2016/02/04/diagnosing- mast-cell-activation-syndrome-mcas-update-and-diagnosis-confirmation/)

[http://www.mastattack.org/2014/10/mcad-general- information-p...](http://www.mastattack.org/2014/10/mcad-general-information- public/)

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

[http://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(14)02927-3/full...](http://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749\(14\)02927-3/fulltext)

Dr. Anne Maitland's presentation on Allergies & Mast Cell Activation Syndrome in EDS Patients. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktFdr-9rpIM&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktFdr-9rpIM&feature=youtu.be)

[https://mastcellblog.wordpress.com/mastcellguide/](https://mastcellblog.wordpress.com/mastcellguide/)</comment>


MIT Develops Fully Autonomous Indoor Helicopter [vid] - <AUTHOR> http://techtv.mit.edu/videos/4149-indoor-autonomous-helicopter

<comment><USER2> I think such vehicles have tremendous military potential, particularly in urban environments, depending on how well one can meet the challenges of energy storage. I also think there's tremendous potential in police work and search and rescue.

Also, given the success of shows like Battlebots, I think there's some good potential for video media. The requirements for flying platforms to be lightweight versus the need to to be durable would make a flying robot combat show very interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> The Air Force is also building similar aircrafts but ignoring the mechanics of flight and concentrating more now on detecting airborne things (smoke, chemicals, etc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Given the four rotor stability, this seems like more of an interesting perception problem than a control problem. See <http://heli.stanford.edu/> for examples of the latter.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder which machine learning algorithms they are using. It looks interesting for Reinforcement Learning or ANNs.</comment>


Someone Has Filmed Inside a 'Click Farm' and It's Weird AF - <AUTHOR> http://www.ladbible.com/technology/technology-someone-has-filmed-inside-a-click-farm-and-its-weird-af-20170513 <comment><USER2> I was surprised to see this is done with real hardware. I had expected VMs, or faking the user agent, or even reverse engineering the http requests and replaying them. Surely the economics is far better than buying 10s of thousands of phones. I guess theres a reason I haven't thought of.

<comment><USER3> My best guess is there needs to be a real SIM at the very least, so that the requests come from legitimately different and randomly distributed IPs.

So you need a system that can virtualize all that, but still go through separate SIMs. The cost of developing something like this probably doesn't outweigh the "ease" of just faking it with real phones.

(On top of this I have my doubts about how much "tens of thousands of phones" costs for someone who doesn't care about grey areas)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's Apple's version: [https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/13/facebook-lifts-the- veil-on...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/13/facebook-lifts-the-veil-on-its- mobile-device-lab/)

For testing apps :)

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder why likes, stars, retweets and similar counters are not weighted by a reputation in a user visible way. For the user a tweet with 1000 botnet retweets looks exactly like a tweet with 1000 retweets by experts in a given subject.

</comment><comment><USER6> Someone recycled garbage content with a clickbait title and it's Weird AF

<comment><USER7> I hope 'AF' doesn't become a journalistic trend.

It seems trends bubble up from clickbait groups and then become adopted by actual journalists lately.

Here's hoping this isn't one of the ones to become popular.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Huh i balked at that scene from silicon valley, thinking "surely this is all virtualized". But look at this! Too weird.</comment>


As Facebook stock sinks, how secure is Zuckerberg's job? - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/stocks/story/2012-08-18/facebook-pressures/57122450/1

<comment><USER2> Zuckerberg has 57% voting rights, which, unless I'm mistaken, effectively means that the board and shareholders are powerless to force a change.

So, the way I see it, it seems Zuckerberg will be CEO till he wants to be the CEO, and even if there is a change in CEO, with 57% control, Zuckerberg will have total control and the new CEO would be in name only.

</comment><comment><USER3> Facebook was overpriced from day one and their P/E shows it. Is Facebook going to make a lot of money and stay a very successful company? YEP! Is it worth 100x earnings at the moment? I don't know.

Right now, Apple's P/E is like 15, so FB is priced at a 6x growth premium over Apple. It's possible that FB is priced too high or Apple too low, or maybe both are priced sensibly, but if I were throwing money around on Facebook stock, I would have shorted it months ago too.

As for Zuckerburg, it's his company and he's going to run it, that much isn't going to change.</comment>


Joe Polchinski's Restless Pursuit of Quantum Gravity - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/joe-polchinski-santa-barbara-mover-and-shaker-20170807/ <comment><USER2> Shallow article not worth reading.

tl;dr: Quantum mechanics and general relativity don't play nice together in extreme circumstances, e.g. the "Big Bang" (if it exists) and Black Holes. No further information is given other than Joe's relationship to the field.

<comment><USER3> This article is part of a series called Thinking Places, described:

> _Grand ideas have a way of turning up in unusual settings, far from an > office or a chalkboard. Months ago, Quanta Magazine set out to photograph > some of the world's most accomplished scientists and mathematicians in their > favorite places to think, tinker and create. This series explores the role > of cherished spaces — public or private, spare or crowded, inside or out — > in clearing a path to inspiration._</comment></comment>


SpaceX's Starship Will Help Establish a Mars Base - <AUTHOR> https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-mars-transportation-plans.html <comment><USER2> How much law to take on the mission? And whose? marslegalcode.org</comment>


Show HN: Wanted business cards, tried to make a virtual business card instead - <AUTHOR> http://biz.selby.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Still kinda buggy and no idea what good it'll do, but it was fun to make. All the references and libraries used are listed in a Google Doc.

Originally wanted to use three.js, but it was going way too slowly: [http://biz.selby.io/wat](http://biz.selby.io/wat)</comment>


Using SVG For Flexible, Scalable, and Fun Backgrounds, Part I - <AUTHOR> http://www.alistapart.com/articles/using-svg-for-flexible-scalable-and-fun-backgrounds-part-i/ <comment><AUTHOR> Part 2: [http://www.alistapart.com/articles/using-svg-for-flexible- sc...](http://www.alistapart.com/articles/using-svg-for-flexible-scalable-and- fun-backgrounds-part-ii/)</comment>


Seeking feedback: embed a how-to guide on your blog or site - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ativiti.com/getting-the-most-value-out-of-conferences/ Hi folks - we're currently working on a "how-to guide" widget for blogs and websites. It lets evangelists/experts package their advice into an easy-to-view, actionable list. Users can then choose to track the completion of each task in our web app.<p>The link provides an initial example of what it would look like in action.  Would love to hear what everyone thinks of this idea. <comment><USER2> all the points there seemed obvious but the first one was a bit dodgy - "select presentations based on speaker, not topic". Even for networking purposes, if you were not interested in the topic (or atleast if it was not your highest priority), how would the speaker be of benefit to you? And wouldnt this imply a fake interest in the topic just to approach the speaker? And wouldnt this fake interest show sooner than later?</comment>


Laziness Does Not Exist - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dr_eprice/laziness-does-not-exist-3af27e312d01 <comment><USER2> This sounds like it may be useful advice for how to relate to others, but I'm not sure how it helps with relating to oneself.

Like, sure, there are cases where a particular barrier is clearly the reason that one isn't doing something that one intends to do, and in these cases it makes sense to acknowledge that even if the thing might look like laziness to other persons,

But, as for my own behaviors, I know that vice exists. I know that how I behave falls short of how I both can and ought to behave, laziness being a way in which I sometimes fall short.

I have been diagnosed with ADHD and the medication I take for it truly seems to work effectively for me (though of course different people respond to different medication differently), and for me, I feel like there is a reasonably clear distinction between symptom and vice.

If I am to regard "laziness" as "really" only being the result of an unacknowledged barrier, then this framing needs to come with applicable advice on how to resolve these behaviors.

Fear of shame and/or a sense of duty, can, I think, provide a great deal of motivation. Whatever "laziness" is, a source of motivation to 'do the thing' seems like it can sometimes overcome particular instances of laziness (though this may have costs associated with it that I am failing to consider).

It seems to me that being able to judge my own behavior as flawed, in addition to merely being unfortunate, is useful in order to improve my own behavior. And also, correct.

<comment><USER3> I think that what makes a lot more sense than the article as presented and also what most people view themselves as is the idea that one can make a great effort to push themselves, or not care at all about something, but that these parameters can only get you so far. What really works is trying to maintain a level of focus/wealth/social status slightly above what you have to slowly claw your way up.

Even if you really badly want to become a concert pianist, the best way is not to just push yourself and spend every waking hour on it. The best way is to play regularly and focus on finding bits you enjoy, which then enables you to practise more without getting fatigued.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is quality clickbait. The title grabs you with its absurdity, and then you get some ego-preserving justifications for a lack of industriousness, along with some of the now mandatory virtue signaling. The actual content is nonsensical, but the presentation is impressive.

<comment><USER5> I saw it as a somewhat hyperbolized reminder that the fundamental attribution error is a thing. 'Crazy people aren't necessarily crazy' -Elliot Aronson

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am going to prove this article wrong for the next thirty minutes.</comment>


Pyro: PyTorch-Based Deep Universal Probabilistic Programming - <AUTHOR> http://pyro.ai/ <comment><USER2> "Deep" probabilistic? A quick search & it seems the term "Deep Probabilistic" was coined by the package author. Which, hey, nice work and all, but "deep" in this context looks like pure marketing fluff.

Maybe it's not, I'm no longer cutting edge on this stuff-- my grad school days were a decade ago and the day job ::sigh:: doesn't require the more interesting stuff.

But I'm gonna get a bit "get off my lawn" on this one and say that, in my day (woohoo!), neural nets could be deep; they had hidden depths (& layers). Belief networks could be deep, and they were adding depth to learning too; Much of the "deep" stuff today seems to use that word the same way Tide & OxyClean have "deep" cleaning technology in their laundry detergent.

All of which is to say, this is a question from someone in the early stages of cruftiness, meant in good humor, to ask "What makes them there probablistics 'deep' ?" :)

<comment><USER3> Deep Probabilistic Programming

Dustin Tran, Matthew D. Hoffman, Rif A. Saurous, Eugene Brevdo, Kevin Murphy, David M. Blei

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.03757](https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.03757)

<comment><USER2> That's very recent, and authored by d.tran, package maintainer for this project on github. Before that paper I see no other reference to it. Makes me think itwas coined in the paper and this package as part for trendy "deep" buzzword value. An impression bolstered by pyro's "about" section, which gives a vague generality and not much else.

This isn't a criticism of the work done which, on looking at the details, is useful and interesting. This is a comment on the difficulty of finding out what the actual interesting bits are.

I looked further: Uber's more detailed writeup has a statement for "why deep probablistic?", but it too is vague, about learning generative knowledge from data. And that a claim about generative knowledge is extremely ambitious for any learning method to make without still more explanation.

EDIT: I'll be honest, it was really this project's connection to Uber, and Uber's corporate culture, that prodded me to think a bit more about the project claims & terminology use. Maybe I'm being unfair.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for being honest :)

> ...difficulty of finding out what the actual interesting bits are. > Uber's > more detailed writeup ... is vague

We indeed struggled to balance accessibility and depth that blog post. One place to go deeper is the Pyro tutorials [http://pyro.ai/examples](http://pyro.ai/examples) For more technical framing, take a look at Noah's paper [1]. Broadly I think the "interesting bits" are the integration of newer deep neural net methods with older Bayesian methods of flexible probabilistic modeling.

[1] Deep Amortized Inference for Probabilistic Programs Daniel Ritchie, Paul Horsfall, Noah D. Goodman [https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.05735](https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.05735)

<comment><USER2> The paper clarifies a lot, and makes me think you meant something like "generative model" instead of "generative intelligence"

The problem with using the later is that it only rarely (maybe a couple dozen over the last few years) appears in conjunction with ML in rigorous research publications. When it does, it is used with extremely precise and well-defined parameters (see GPRS from M.Golumbic) or used in reference to the traditional "home" of generative intelligence at the cross roads of cognitive science and pedagogical theory & methods. There, it is a close cousin and necessary component of "general intelligence."

That's why its use here set off alarm bells of "Alert! Marketing speak at work! Gross overstatement of capabilities have been detected!" Because it doesn't fall much short of claiming "general intelligence" as a practical result of & use for Pyro.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How does this compare to Edward, PyMC, Stan, et al? Is the primary distinction due to PyTorch's imperative, dynamic programming?

<comment><USER3> Edward: like Edward, Pyro is a deep probabilistic programming language that focuses on variational inference but supports composable inference algorithms. Pyro aims to be more dynamic (by using PyTorch) and universal (allowing recursion).

PyMC, Stan: Pyro embraces deep neural nets and currently focuses on variational inference. Pyro doesn't do MCMC yet. Whereas Stan models are written in the Stan language, Pyro models are just python programs with pyro.sample() statements.

One unique feature of Pyro is the probabilistic effect library that we use to build inference algorithms: [http://docs.pyro.ai/advanced.html](http://docs.pyro.ai/advanced.html)

<comment><USER5> This still doesn't really explain the dfifference to PyMC. What is the advantage of using Pyro over PyMC which supports a multitude of inference algorithms as well as mini-batch advi.

<comment><USER6> 0.1.0 definitely not feature full, but Pyro seems promising.

PyMC3 is fine, but it uses Theano on the backend. Theano will stop being actively maintained in 1 year, and no future features in the mean time. That was announced about a month ago, it seems like a good opportunity to get out something that filled a niche: Probablistic Programming language in python backed by PyTorch. They are taking cues from edward and webppl, which from a casual glance seem to be the best libraries for python and javascript respectively [http://edwardlib.org/](http://edwardlib.org/) [http://webppl.org/](http://webppl.org/)

But Edward is backed by TensorFlow

That announcement by Theano's main developer Pascal Lamblin and Yoshua Bengio: [https://syncedreview.com/2017/09/29/rip- theano/](https://syncedreview.com/2017/09/29/rip-theano/) [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/theano- users/7Poq8BZ...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/theano- users/7Poq8BZutbY)

"Dear users and developers,

After almost ten years of development, we have the regret to announce that we will put an end to our Theano development after the 1.0 release, which is due in the next few weeks. We will continue minimal maintenance to keep it working for one year, but we will stop actively implementing new features. Theano will continue to be available afterwards, as per our engagement towards open source software, but MILA does not commit to spend time on maintenance or support after that time frame. "

[https://www.wired.com/2016/12/uber-buys-mysterious- startup-m...](https://www.wired.com/2016/12/uber-buys-mysterious-startup-make- ai-company/)

Uber acquired Geometric Intelligence and renamed it Uber AI. From this article:

"But it hasn't published research or offered a product. What is has done is assemble a team of fifteen researchers who can be very useful to Uber, including Stanford professor Noah Goodman, who specializes in cognitive science and a field called probabilistic programming, and University of Wyoming's Jeff Clune, an expert in deep neural networks who has also explored robots that can "heal" themselves."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can someone eli5 probabilistic programming?

<comment><USER8> I honestly don't think it would be possible for a 5 year old to learn or even grasp the concept of probabilistic programming. So maybe wait until high school or if very gifted middle school where you have a more solid mathematical foundation. It's the process of inferring the parameters of a Bayesian probabilistic model from data and then making predictions with that model.

A probabilistic programming language lets you express the model in code, and then it performs inference automatically using various methods. Note doing it manually may produce better results but it is a very involved and time consuming process.

<comment><USER9> eli5 usually just means simplest terms that make sense for the answer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How flexible is this compared to Church/Venture, Webppl, Anglican, etc? Does it support recursively-defined generative processes?

Edit: nvm, Noah Goodman is behind this, who created Webppl. This looks super flexible and awesome, congrats all!

</comment><comment><USER11> The combination of probalistic programming and deep learning is pretty interesting to me because that's what I have going on in two of my work projects.

What we do is have features built using deep learning models, then use that extract simple linear or categorical features which we condition our probalistic model on.

We've found it quite hard to use very high numbers of variables in the probalistic model.

Has anyone found a better way of doing this?

<comment><USER12> Do you have a recommended resource on how to feature engineer with DNNs for use as inputs in other models?

<comment><USER11> I don't really understand the question.

For classification we just use the softmax over the classes. We had a long discussion about if this was close enough to probability to use and I think the conclusion was that it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It was bound to happen, the dynamic control flow of pytorch makes this really interesting compared to Edward.

</comment><comment><USER14> Blocked on our corporate network at CapitalOne as "suspicious"

<comment><USER15> Pyro is a universal probabilistic programming language (PPL) written in Python and supported by PyTorch on the backend. Pyro enables flexible and expressive deep probabilistic modeling, unifying the best of modern deep learning and Bayesian modeling. It was designed with these key principles:

Universal: Pyro can represent any computable probability distribution. Scalable: Pyro scales to large data sets with little overhead. Minimal: Pyro is implemented with a small core of powerful, composable abstractions. Flexible: Pyro aims for automation when you want it, control when you need it.

Check out the blog post for more background or dive into the tutorials.

[https://eng.uber.com/pyro/](https://eng.uber.com/pyro/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> How does it compare to Pyro, the python-remote-objects library?

<comment><USER17> They are similar like java and javascript are similar

<comment><USER16> I mean, clearly they're a bit more similar than that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Anyone have a qualified opinion on how Pytorch compares to Tensorflow?

<comment><USER19> Siraj Raval covers PyTorch very well in a 5 min video ([https://youtu.be/nbJ-2G2GXL0](https://youtu.be/nbJ-2G2GXL0)).

It comes down to design decisions, of which I'm not qualified to go into. This article made the front page last week, about the downsides to Tensorflow which people rarely talk about: [http://nicodjimenez.github.io/2017/10/08/tensorflow.html](http://nicodjimenez.github.io/2017/10/08/tensorflow.html)

And this interview with a Tensorflow engineer (10 mins) explains a little bit about those design decisions ([https://youtu.be/axRHotkkTVI](https://youtu.be/axRHotkkTVI)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is there a tensorflow based equivalent?

<comment><USER21> Maybe [http://edwardlib.org/](http://edwardlib.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> There's already a really cool python project called Pyro (python remote objects): [https://pyro4.readthedocs.io/en/stable/intro.html](https://pyro4.readthedocs.io/en/stable/intro.html)

I haven't used it since I was in undergrad (>10 years) where I used it to communicate between nodes on a small cluster, but it made RPC really easy.

<comment><USER23> Indeed. It was (is?) pretty well known, but I've not heard it mentioned for a long time. With all the fashionable modern RPC and serialisations around nowadays, perhaps the original Pyro is now obscure enough that the name can be reused? Ideally, though, it would be nice to know for sure that an existing project is considered obsolete before causing any confusion.

<comment><USER24> Or it is just Uber being Uber and not caring.</comment></comment></comment>