5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk - <AUTHOR> https://hackaday.com/2019/04/16/5g-buildout-likely-to-put-weather-forecasting-at-risk/ <comment><USER2> While 5G Will be a great boon, especially the beam-forming satellite version, another unintended consequence besides weather remote sensing is nuking the extremely important 24 GHz range (K Band) for radio astronomy. There are a few narrow protected windows for absolutely critical spectral lines, but the truth is that nature doesn't play by the spectrum allocations rules, and there are hundreds if not thousands of lines that are observed routinely outside of the protected bands. It is also remarkably free and clear of radio frequency interference (RFI), in part because industry has chosen other frequencies not attenuated by atmospheric water vapor. This isn't to say we should halt global human progress to save a local river bait fish, but that threat to forecasting is only one of the serious consequences major spectrum reallocation can have. This is especially true for _passive use_ in the sciences, which has a weaker lobby than the private sector.

<comment><USER3> > While 5G Will be a great boon

This is something I've been having trouble with.

Lately I've become more aware of the secondary effects of 5G- on weather forecasting, on the radio spectrum, possibly on bees- and it's got me wondering why we need it for telecom. I just don't see the value added. I can already communicate with anyone in the world, access any information, and find my way anywhere with 4G. A significantly higher rate of data transfer just doesn't seem to add any new functionality to my phone. Can anyone give me a good rationale for 5G? Entertainment doesn't count.

I'll grant right-off-the-bat that it'll have some fantastic industrial applications; my issue is with personal telecom. It just feels like a new planned obsolescence vector.

<comment><USER4> Parkinson's Law. Increase in 5G bandwidth will be filled with next-gen media.

Cable boxes will be replaced by subsidized free smartphones in exchange for "always on" subscriptions. No more home WiFi for low-end market.

Personally, the industrial 5G IoT applications are far more interesting.

<comment><USER5> > next-gen media

What does this mean? Something beyond video? VR?

<comment><USER6> If the bandwidth is available then people will find a way to fill it. Streaming games, higher res video, remote terminals replacing low end PC hardware, who knows?

<comment><USER5> Good point, though I'll note that streaming games, high-res video, and remote terminals are already available (at least via high-speed ethernet connections), so the "next generation" would be higher quality or wider availability rather than genuinely new forms of media.

My instinct is that there are diminishing returns past a certain point. We're certainly not there yet, but once cellular networks allow you to stream high- definition VR content and upload data at the same rate, it seems like there's nothing more that additional bandwidth could add.

I see it as a philosophical issue... bandwidth is for the transmission of information, and there's only so much information that a human being can receive and provide at a given moment. At some point you're running up against the maximum bandwidth of the human user.

<comment><USER7> So here's an example of "next gen" media streaming in action. I was recently at a MotoGP race. MotoGP has a streaming media app that allows for you to stream cams from your favorite racers on your mobile device in very high quality. This would be really cool to use for the many hours of racing throughout the day at the race track, but while its technically possible with current technology for me to do it the cost is prohibitive. With significantly higher throughput per tower, the cost of data _should_ significantly be reduced, making it really cheap to have a crowd of people at the race track have a few 1080p each.

<comment><USER8> On-demand streaming of identical content to hundreds of users at the same time is not an efficient use of bandwidth.

It's like Netflix versus cable television - you can push the equivalent of hundreds of 1080p streams through a broadcast cable television, but attempting to push on-demand IP packets to an equivalent number of subscribers would bog down horrifically if they even attempted to stream a single show (let alone how you have cable tuners that can tune multiple shows at once).

What you need there is something much more akin to broadcast television - either a digital OTA video broadcast (good ol' digital television), or a microcell using multicast to broadcast a stream to any interested party.

(of course your phone probably doesn't have a DTV tuner, but when a RTL-SDR dongle is like $20, you should probably be asking why your phone isn't integrating that functionality. These days they don't even have FM tuners on phones anymore... despite the fact that in virtually all cases those are already built into the cellular chipset. IP-based singlecast is not a good paradigm for a lot of the use-cases that people come up with, it's just that it's the most profitable one for carriers, so it's the only one they'll support.)

<comment><USER7> In this instance its not all identical content though. In this example, each bike has three cameras, along with a dozen or so camera angles around the track. Users can pick and choose a lot of those different views and combine a hybrid view of their own personal choosing.

Of course, this could also be accomplished with DTV tuners, but there's a much higher probability of users having a 5G chipset on their phone than having a DTV tuner capable of tuning to multiple channels and an antenna.

<comment><USER8> So essentially you want you want an app that lets you pick a couple multicast groups to add yourself to, and then displays them in this "hybrid view of their choosing".

It's the same as what the app is currently doing, just with multicast groups instead of singlecast. And by doing so, you reduce the network load by N/M, where N is the number of users and M is the number of streams each user runs on average.

Don't get me wrong, I understand that this probably isn't currently implemented, but that's the kind of thing we should be looking at, before we decide to screw up weather forecasting and radioastronomy so that you can see your NAAAYYSSSCARR.

Even 5G is going to get eaten up under certain types of load, so it makes much more sense to look at ways to reduce traffic, the easiest of which is broadcasting rather than singlecast.

<comment><USER6> "...before we decide to screw up weather forecasting and radioastronomy so that you can see your NAAAYYSSSCARR."

This isn't the place for cheap comments like that.

Even if you have a point ideologically speaking we live in the real world where consumer money talks louder than forum comments. 5G is coming whether we like it or not because of people wanting to stream data for entertainment.

<comment><USER9> I guess that we can revisit that if weather forecasting does become substantially less reliable. And with global climate change, maybe we'll need reliable weather forecasting. But me, I'll be dead before it gets too bad, dog willing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Has anyone done a deep dive on 5g health concerns? E.g., 240-some scientists and 40 doctors signed a letter of discouragement (or something), claims research indicates 5g interacts with human biology in poorly understood ways: [https://ehtrust.org/key-issues/cell- phoneswireless/5g-networ...](https://ehtrust.org/key-issues/cell- phoneswireless/5g-networks-iot-scientific-overview-human-health-risks/)

<comment><USER11> It's all nonsense. The higher frequencies are non-ionizing and in common use today. See all of those microwave antennas on buildings and towers? A lot of them transmit around there.

Your neighbor can blast 24 ghz right at your house with a free licence:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1.2-centimeter_band](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1.2-centimeter_band)

The reason microwaves (like from a microwave oven) are dangerous are because of their power levels. Like, they'd cook you if they leaked out. Not because of ionizing radiation.

<comment><USER12> Why is it that you can just dismiss the hesitancy of more than a hundred researchers with PhD's in a wide range of relevant disciplines who have made careers out of studying this kind of thing by simply posting a comment saying "it's all nonsense"?

[https://emfscientist.org/index.php/emf-scientist- appeal](https://emfscientist.org/index.php/emf-scientist-appeal)

ctrl-f for "PhD" shows 126 results on the page.

Electromagnetic radiation is used as a signaling medium for countless lifeforms on earth, including the cells and microbes in our own bodies.

Imagine if some alien creature decided they wanted to flash relatively bright blue light across the entire surface planet, day and night at frequencies that known to induce epileptic seizures. It'd affect your quality of life and mine. For some people, it'd be devastating.

Just because we can't _see it_ , doesn't mean it's not there.

I fail to see how a blanket dismissal of peoples concerns, however uninformed many of them may be, counts as "rational"!

<comment><USER13> I can find 100 crackpot scientists as easily as I can find 100 crackpot doctors or mathematicians.

Instead of appeals to authority, why can't we work with the facts and evidence that we have already (those overwhelmingly disproving the health hazards of 5G)?

"Peoples concerns" equate to the desire to halt all human progress out of some bizarre mix of paranoia and Neo-Luddism.

<comment><USER14> That's an ad hominem attack.

It's an inconvenient possibility (not going to call it truth) that our technology might be hurting us. We're addicted to technology the same way smokers are addicted to nicotine.

Smoking was at one time considered healthy and promoted by doctors, and now where are we?

<comment><USER15> Technology is a religion to this forum, so good luck convincing others that electromagnetic radiation might have an impact on human biology that is not well understood.

If it doesn't cook you like microwaves or causes radiation sickness 3 hours after exposure it is immediately declared universally safe.

Of course that's negligent at best. Looks like we will live through in vivo testing for those questions, I suppose.

<comment><USER14> Yep, totally get it. That's why I'm using a throwaway, I'm a heretic to the highest, on the level of an anti-vaxxer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I was wondering, what exactly 5G will bring us. For the most part, all the tasks I need to do on a phone (pocket computer / communicator) can be done even with 3G (video, streaming music, and any website's loading time is more than acceptable at 3G speeds).

The only thing I can think of is 5G will allow for more overall network bandwidth, so the data caps on "unlimited" plans wouldn't be needed. But compared to how we use our phones today, what new items will be be able to do with 5G that we can't do with current 4G/LTE?

<comment><USER17> > I was wondering, what exactly 5G will bring us.

WISP internet service to the home.

<comment><USER18> WISP is very useful in rural areas. It's less compelling as an alternative to wired services in the dense urban environments where we'll see 5G deployments. You're going to have to run all that fiber, anyway.

<comment><USER19> That all depends on how rural it is. Rural enough that a tower can cover enough houses to make it worth it or so rural enough you have almost as many towers as houses?

I spent a decade on various WISPs, even had one of their towers on my house (free connection + cash = very yes). It was a city with a mix of single family homes on small lots and townhomes/condos. Cable doesn't exist there, so WISP was the way to go. It was pretty good until Netfix got popular. It was bad in the evenings when everyone would sit down and turn on a show.

Now I'm in a very rural place, lots of hills, thick trees. Luckily there is a telephone/internet co-op who put in fiber. I think they realized with the distances they have to cover that WISP and copper were out. I've never seen fiber to such remote locations.

We only have one cell tower that covers us now, so I won't hold my breath for 5G.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Does this also mean that 5G will suck, when it's raining? [from a comment > below the article]

If 5G uses almost the same frequency where microwaves detect water vapour (around 24 GHz), won't the weather have a great impact on it?

Also, I always thought that such small waves would have problems with obstacles, with good signal just when your phone is in line-of-sight with antennas.

<comment><USER21> That's all correct, the higher frequency suffers from worse object penetration. Solutions I've heard was that 5G would likely involve neighborhood or even building repeaters.

IMO 5G is massively overhyped. My iPhone 7+ isn't limited by 4G LTE, it's limited by Verizon deciding to only allow it 10mbps down (with great signal). 5G won't matter one bit if the current bottleneck isn't 4G LTE in the first place.

<comment><USER22> > My iPhone 7+ isn't limited by 4G LTE, it's limited by Verizon deciding to > only allow it 10mbps down (with great signal)

This is in fact a limitation of 4G.

A single device is fine, but there is only so much bandwidth available. When you get lots of devices in the same area, something has to be limited.

<comment><USER23> That seems to be american thing. Most countries I've lived easily get 100mbps.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, in especially good conditions you can get over 800Mbps on a Galaxy S10 over here (e.g. [https://bbs.io-tech.fi/threads/nettiliittymaesi- taemaenhetki...](https://bbs.io-tech.fi/threads/nettiliittymaesi- taemaenhetkinen-nopeus-keskustelua.2994/page-40#post-4773590)), and over 100Mbps is normal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think the main point of 5g keeps getting missed when people are asking about cell phones and their broadband speed vs capacity etc etc. The only reason telcos are going to put in 5g is for IOT coverage. Low powered trickle data from billions of devices.

Stuff for your personal cellular use would never come close to covering the costs involved. And 4g will still be used for many years to come for that.

<comment><USER26> The focus today for 5G is fixed wireless access and smartphones, not IoT.

5G covers 3 variants: 1) massive broadband (with mmWave in particular); 2) URLLC - Ultra Reliable and Low Latency Communications; 3) massive IoT. The current focus is on (1). Lot's of talk on (2), but nothing much concrete yet. (3) is moving along, but it's actually based on... LTE.

Strictly speaking, 5G is a set of requirements defined by the ITU-T, not a technology. The actual technologies are developed by another organization, 3GPP. And there are 2 technologies to cover 5G: 1) NR, or "New Radio". This is what most people mean by 5G. It's for massive broadband and URLLC; 2) LTE (release 15 and later) for massive IoT!

Yes, the IoT variant of LTE (LTE-M and NB-IoT) will be the 5G implementations for a while. Eventually there will be new NR versions for IoT, but nobody is in a hurry there. LTE-M and NB-IoT evolutions will be just fine for a long time, as far as massive IoT is concerned.

When you hear about 5G deployment today, it really mean "NR" and not LTE based IoT. The concern for smartphone is really capacity during peak time in the busiest cells.

I work in the field BTW, as you may have guessed ;)

<comment><USER27> I work in the mesh network IoT space, primarily Wi-SUN. Since we view NB-IoT and LTE-M as competition, I encourage you cellular guys to really take your time :) we're happy for the head start while we keep deploying our networks in the millions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm somewhat confused. I'll admit that I'm not very familiar with super high frequency radio, but isn't the difference at least 200 MHz, approximately 10 times larger than the entire FM radio spectrum? Doesn't out-of-band emission stop being a problem at that much separation? Or should we look at it relative to the base frequency?

edit: For what it's worth, I found this paragraph from the FCC last year: [https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2018-14806/p-20](https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2018-14806/p-20) It sounds like they're saying "we don't know if this will be a problem yet, but be prepared to limit emissions in 23.6-24ghz range because we might require it at some point".

Also, paragraph 9 of the same document has the actual band limits (with a special requirement) if anybody is interested:

> The 24 GHz band consists of two band segments: The lower segment, from > 24.25-24.45 GHz, and the upper segment, from 24.75-25.25 GHz

> any mobile or transportable equipment capable of operating in any portion of > the 24 GHz band must be capable of operating at all frequencies within the > 24 GHz band, in both band segments

<comment><USER29> "At the high end of the electromagnetic spectrum, signals travel over a band of 10 million trillion Hz (that is, 10^22Hz). This end of the spectrum has phenomenal bandwidth, but it has its own set of problems. The wave forms are so miniscule that they're highly distorted by any type of interference, particularly environmental interference such as precipitation. Furthermore, higher-frequency wave forms such as x-rays, gamma rays, and cosmic rays are not very good to human physiology and therefore aren't available for us to use for communication at this point."

Not the best analysis but I'm working. Basically like any other metric, as the frequency increases the space between peaks and valleys decreases and it becomes harder to determine/separate from others 30hz to 230hz is much easier to tell the difference than 15khz to 15.2khz if you want to listen to audio tones. Once you get to microwaves this becomes of course much more difficult.

[http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=24687&seqNum...](http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=24687&seqNum=4)

<comment><USER28> To me, this analysis sounds more about the interference with physical objects (like how 2.4ghz can pass through walls easier than 5ghz). It doesn't seem to be about interference with other radio emissions?

> 30hz to 230hz is much easier to tell the difference than 15khz to 15.2khz if > you want to listen to audio tones

That's definitely true for humans, but I don't think it necessarily applies to radio signals in general (though it does make sense at first glance).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Rejecting on the grounds of no technical basis? I'd like to see more on that. I would hope when NASA raises a flag with the FCC it's taken with sincerity.

<comment><USER31> There are a lot of things one would hope the FCC would do that have not been happening under Ajit Pai. He's an industry shill, plain and simple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Human fallacy, we all want it faster and more.

Bur for 99% of the cases, why would we need it?

IoT doesn't need 5G, it needs LiRa.

Streaming applications, I can stream with 4G.

50 ms latency with 4G, so what. Except for competitive multiplayer gaming perhaps, I don't see the issue. But I think they want everything wired ;)

Industrial applications, outside of IoT? Give me a valid example that needs countrywide coverage.

I hardly notice difference with 4G and my WiFi. Increase coverage for 4G, before implementing 5G.

Fyi: 4G offers maximum real-world download speeds up to 60Mbps. Currently, that is more than enough.

<comment><USER33> you still need more capacity, as the population grows more number of devices will compete for same 4g bandwidth and unlike optical fibre you cannot increase the bandwidth by adding new wire.

<comment><USER34> Well, the FCC could coordinate a move to a new standard that uses smaller cells for the same 4G frequencies, after all big parts of 5G is about handling increased density.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Pilot here - they used the example of a hurricane, however, I think it would have a daily impact on thousands of flights (general aviation and commercial) which all rely on on accurate weather forecasting. Weather is no joke in aviation; even if you're flying a 747.

</comment><comment><USER36> > ... a letter from NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and Secretary of > Commerce Wilbur Ross requesting that it be delayed. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai > rejected the request ...

Ajit Pai strikes again!

</comment><comment><USER37> I also do not really see the benefits of 5G.

I would be much more happy to have reliable 4G or 3G at least, first.

I suppose quite some support comes from people who have connection issues with weak 4G and assumes 5G will solve them.

But since 5G will consume apparently 3G towers and has much less range, quite the opposite could happen. Even less connection for people not in the city.

</comment><comment><USER38> Slightly OT or meta. I keep bumping up against these nutty conspiracy theories about 5G being dangerous in various forums. Has anyone done a study of the effects of certain frequencies and energy levels on the human body that I can use to refute these fools? Also, what is the canonical source on 5g spectrum and power levels?

<comment><USER34> [https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1503/1503.05944.pdf](https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1503/1503.05944.pdf) this basically found that 90% of the energy is absorbed on/at/around the skin.

if neurons were directly exposed they would heat up and their firing rate would be altered significantly [look at fig2 / D ] ( [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4233276/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4233276/) )

this study did a direct exposure testing on a human's arm (and on rats and monkeys) at 94GHz for 3s at 1W/cm^2: [https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a628296.pdf](https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a628296.pdf)

this did 24h low power 1mW/cm^2 exposure of human eye like cells and detected no significant difference in micronucleus expression, DNA strand breaks, and heat stress protein expression: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4997488/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4997488/)

this used 42GHz on rats for 30min/day for 3 days, and tried to look for tumors/cancer and found no significant difference: [https://www.rrjournal.org/doi/abs/10.1667/RR3121](https://www.rrjournal.org/doi/abs/10.1667/RR3121)

so. it seems there's no immediate and known adverse effect (other than the heating and maybe some interference with the electro-biochemistry of cells, particularly with neurons).

and luckily people usually don't use phones near their heads anymore (when doing large data transfers), so we don't really have to worry about concentrated absorption on the head due to being at best a centimeter from the emitter.

> Also, what is the canonical source on 5g spectrum and power levels?

maximum permissible exposure is defined as 10W/m^2 power density (for 6GHz between 100GHz) by the FCC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> While most of the promise of 5g feels like overhype, this article has a bit of flat earth feel to it. For example, we've been trying to convert obsolete UHF frequencies to usable bandwidth for years only to find all sorts of reasons why it can't be killed off. If 5g really threatened weather forecasting and radio astronomy I would think at minimum there would some sort of initiative to address it prior to a cutover - and yet, this article doesn't seem to acknowledge such a thing exists so I'm left to conclude maybe the article is nothing more than a hypothetical what if that likely won't have much impact in the real world. This is just my gut feel...

</comment><comment><USER40> Can someone help me understand this better? What is "very close" to 23.8-GHz frequencies? I don't know which bands 5G operates on, but it seems [1] that the closest they get, at least in the US, is ~27 GHz. If the FCC is auctioning 3000 licenses for the 24 GHz space, is that the space that can potentially interfere more? Can 5G operate on just any frequencies, then?

[1]: [https://www.cablefree.net/wirelesstechnology/4glte/5g-freque...](https://www.cablefree.net/wirelesstechnology/4glte/5g-frequency- bands-lte/)

<comment><USER41> The carrier signal of a new technology could potentially use any frequency that isn't already in use. A lot of the frequency spectrum is already accounted for and generally parts of the spectrum that are important to scientific research are internationally protected (Such as the resonant frequency of hydrogen which is used extensively in radio astronomy).

That being said it is more technically difficult to go "up" in frequency. Lower frequencies have less bandwidth, but are easier to generate, can go through physical objects better and for longer distances.

This fight to me looks like the industry wants to use a cheaper frequency that meets their minimum technical goals (in terms of development costs not necessarily licensing costs) science and other applications be damned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> So how hard is it to limit the 5G signal to bandwidths that don't interfere with weather forecasting, and how hard is it to detect and enforce laws against such bandwidth spillover?

<comment><USER43> > detect and enforce laws against such bandwidth spillover?

This phenomenon is called adjacent-channel interference and violations can and would be enforced by the FCC. The challenge isn't detection or enforcement, it's the challenge of the different government agencies to balance the people's needs properly.

FCC wants to auction off the spectrum to benefit telcos and their customers. NOAA wants to protect people with accurate predictions of hazardous weather. Your question presumes that the weather prediction function is more valuable, but the government may not reach that same conclusion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> This seems like a failure on the FCC's part. If it was going to be a problem these frequencies should never have been licensed out to cell companies.

</comment><comment><USER45> Stupid question. I was under the impression that one of the limits of 5g was that it was a short-distance signal, easily blocked by a wall or any obstacle. Is it really going to create interferences all the way to space? I thought satellites measured the temperature of the top of the atmosphere, not of stuff on the ground.

<comment><USER46> They actually measure a lot of parameters, not only temperatures, and in all the layers of the atmosphere. And they're _very_ sensitive. For some forecast needs (short term forecast, storms, etc.), the conditions under the atmospheric boundary layer ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundary_layer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundary_layer)) is what matters most, so the microwave noise near the ground is definitely an issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Why do we actually need 5g? Wired with last meter wifi is a lot better option imo for high bandwidth transfer

</comment><comment><USER48> Any assurances that this won't seriously disturb the earth's ecology and human health, or do we no longer bother with that when manipulating the whole planet?

<comment><USER49> Given the whole thing with Global Warming, I think this question already has an answer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> They are putting up "DAS" nodes all over my city. Nearly every block. Wonder if these will be hooked up with UHF 5G and what the ramifications may be.

</comment><comment><USER51> Equally important but often overlooked concern is the risks it will pose to our health given 5G relies on much higher energy radio signals than 4G.

</comment><comment><USER52> Wouldn't it be possible to reuse the 3G frequencies with an updated technology in order to obtain higher bandwidths?

<comment><USER53> It is. Denmark is allowing the phone companies to use their existing 2G/3G and 4G frequencies for 5G. The 700MHz spectrum is also being opened up for use with 5G.

I'm not sure if it will result in dramatically more bandwidth though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Seems striking especially topic not touched like radio astronomy.

</comment><comment><USER55> A network of well-calibrated surface and marine weather stations and atmospheric probes is probably enough to produce reliable and precise weather forecasts in the today age of ML.

<comment><USER43> You can't calibrate away the RF noise introduced by transmitters that change frequently in time and space.

That's not to suggest that you cannot find a way to discriminate between the water vapor and the 5G transmissions, but you can't just take a sample on a low-humidity day and subtract that from new samples. If the metrics are below the new noise floor, merely throwing machine learning at the problem will not solve it.

<comment><USER55> I don't mean taking RF data in account at all. I mean just collecting temperature, air pressure, humidity and wind speed data from many points in time-space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> tl;dr

We get Water vapour readings (which feed into our weather forecasting models) from the ~24ghz range which 5G is going to blast away.

</comment><comment><USER57> That's interesting - I'm working on using cell signal strength as an indicator for live weather features! There's a simple relationship between signal strength and clearness of weather - light rain has a distortion signal, heavier rain a heavier distortion, etc.

I'm betting that when all is said and done, the cell phones will help the weather forecast more than hurt it - but this may take some years if the cell companies are too greedy about it.

I'm working on detecting weather using all kinds of phone sensors like barometers and cameras in All Clear if you're interested: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.allclearwe...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.allclearweather.android)

and the open source sensor package: [https://github.com/JacobSheehy/AllClearSensorLibrary](https://github.com/JacobSheehy/AllClearSensorLibrary)

<comment><USER58> But that approach, at best, only tells you about the weather near the ground. That can be useful, but is woefully incomplete. You also need to be able to see weather high in the atmosphere.

<comment><USER57> Well, signal strength yes - it does have those limits. But pressure data from the barometers can describe some higher altitude conditions (if you can map pressure at the surface over a large geography with decent density, you can infer metrics about the higher atmosphere).

And I do agree that other instruments are required for a complete picture of the weather, not just phones! But a remarkable amount can be done from phones. GPS attenuation for example, can also be read from some Android phones and can inform about high-altitude conditions.

<comment><USER46> But surely you miss the anomalies that might exist high in the atmosphere and which are actually responsible for the violent meteorological events (such as temperature inversions).

<comment><USER57> Definitely phones can't replace all weather satellites and things - not yet anyway! But for many severe weather events that actively harm property and life, such as severe thunderstorms, can be aided with smartphone sensors. For example, barometers in phones can detect initiation of rapid convection that may lead to severe thunderstorms. In many places this rapid convection may start where there are no weather stations, and cannot (yet?) be detected by satellite.

<comment><USER59> >! But for many severe weather events that actively harm property and life,

Fuck planes amirite?

<comment><USER57> No? I am not saying those weather events don't exist - I am saying that there is a very large class of weather events that happen with high frequency, and affect life on the ground significantly, and those include severe thunderstorms that could have early detection through smartphones.

Planes and aviation could have major assistance in planning and adjusting to weather events if a phone network were actively in use as well.

Last second info re: waiting for planes to take off due to weather delays is one of my primary frustrations. It hurts a lot of people and companies to have last-second changes to forecasts and I would like to reduce that pain point by providing further advance notice of likelihood of severe weather in an area. This can be done (partially) with phone sensors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ajit Pai makes me so angry.

</comment><comment><USER60> As if mainstreaming weaponized radiation poisoning weren't enough, let's unemploy weather-girls in the same swing. It's like Rod Serling took the brown acid.</comment>


Isn't this article from The Sun plain wrong about our future? - <AUTHOR>

  "You'll have smaller brains, more wrinkles and fewer teeth"
 http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/4575024/Youll-have-smaller-brains-more-wrinkles-and-fewer-teeth.html
This piece basically says that our needs being different than before because of modern medicine and new technologies (among others), our bodies will adapt to these very same needs.
I'm no expert in evolution, but from what I understand:
- In the past, we evolved thanks to natural selection
- We're still evolving (random mutations haven't stopped appearing), but no more natural selection
- Most mutations thus get passed along generations
So yes, we will keep evolving, but we won't "adapt" to this new lifestyle; our evolution is, has always been and always will be tied to "chance".
At least that's my (again, limited) understanding. What's yours? <comment><USER2> Yes, they're talking bollocks.</comment>


Why Hiring for "Culture Fit" Hurts Your Culture - <AUTHOR> http://www.paperplanes.de/2015/6/11/why-hiring-for-culture-fit-hurts-your-culture.html

<comment><AUTHOR> _" Culture is how you write and phrase your job ads. Culture is whether you're looking for rock stars or want to build a great team and help people grow. Culture is how you pay your people. Culture is how a CEO behaves towards their team and in public. Culture is how leadership fosters and drives change. Culture is how you treat your customers. Culture is how you treat your team. Culture is how open you are to changing the status quo. Culture is a team that only consists of white dudes in their late twenties."_

Worth reading, for a definition of what culture shouldn't be.</comment>


Show HN: Golang Throttler – smart WaitGroups to easily manage worker goroutines - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nozzle/throttler

<comment><AUTHOR> This is my first time posting code to Hacker News. I'd love to get any feedback on the quality and usefulness of the code as a package.

Throttler fills the gap between sync.WaitGroup and manually monitoring your goroutines with channels. The API is almost identical to Wait Groups, but it allows you to set a max number of workers that can be running simultaneously. It uses channels internally to block until a job completes by calling Done() or until all jobs have been completed.

See a fully functional example on the playground at [http://bit.ly/throttler- docs](http://bit.ly/throttler-docs)

</comment><comment><USER2> camlistore has a syncutil package (godoc.org/camlistore.org/pkg/syncutil) that has similar features, albeit in different structures:

\- Gate is used to limit the number of parallel workers

\- Group is used where sync.WaitGroup would be used. The most important thing: you have access to the error that happened in your goroutines.

Here's how to use it:

      var g = syncutil.NewGate(num_parallel_workers)

      for _, job := range jobs {
        wg.Go(func() error {
          defer g.Done()
          // do some long-running job

          // the job may fail
          return errJob
        })
      }

      return wg.Err()

      // You also have access to failing goroutines through wg.Errs()

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, I hadn't seen that package. Gate does look very similar to Throttler, though it isn't very well documented.

The main difference appears to be that Throttler wants to know the total number of jobs up front and so doesn't need to be told that a new job is starting, where Gate more closely follows the WaitGroup concept of incrementing and decrementing the counters manually.

Group is also interesting, but I don't mind running my own error channels and executing my own routines so that I have a little more control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> looks useful, just my 2 cents</comment>


250,000 people protest against TTIP in Berlin - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/10/berlin-anti-ttip-trade-deal-rally-hundreds-thousands-protesters <comment><USER2> > The European commission reckons that the TTIP could boost the size of the EU > economy by €120bn (£85bn) – equal to 0.5% of GDP – and the US economy by > €95bn, or 0.4% of GDP, while the UK could be £10bn better off.

According to this article, that 0.5% increase in GDP is actually a _cumulative gain over a 10 years period_. That's the "big result" from this "free trade" agreement. It almost seems like a rounding error. By 2027, a 0.5% GDP increase could come from anywhere.

[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140625/04305727679/why-t...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140625/04305727679/why- taftattip-isnt-worth-it-economically-how-we-can-do-much-better.shtml)

I think this just shows that whatever tariffs are left between the EU and the US, they are not a large impediment in the EU-US economy. The deal is more about increasing IP protection, killing generics, both for pharma and seeds, and other stuff like that - generally about protecting corporations against local laws and small competitors.</comment>


Trump Visa Changes Toughen Hiring of Foreign Programmers - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-03/new-h-1b-guidelines-crack-down-on-computer-programmer-jobs <comment><USER2> Already discussed here [1], I'm very disappointed in this Bloomberg's article, they manage to write more than 500 words of fake news, the only true sentence lies at the end of the article :

>"This is not a change in policy on H-1B and H-1B1 eligibility in computer- related fields," CeCe Gwathmey, a spokeswoman for the immigration agency, said in an email

It's literally making sure the Nebraska Service Center guidelines are synced with the California Service Center and Vermont Service Center since NSC hasn't processed H-1B for a while, there was no need to update that 17 year old guideline. CSC and VSC were the only centers processing H-1B

No changes, yet Bloomberg claims _New H-1B Visa Guidelines Crack Down on Computer Programmer Jobs_

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14023413](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14023413)

</comment><comment><USER3> Tech wanted cheap labor and Trump was for fairness which is one reason why tech leadership was against Trump. President Obama could have fixed this years ago, but after all he was big buddies with tech.

Check out the photo in this picture of Obama and Zuckerberg who even has an entire organization to drive tech labor costs and hire non-Americans, Fwd.us [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/19/reveng...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/19/revenge- against-elites-americas-wake-up)

Many tech leaders, themselves worth many, many billions of dollars want to deprive Americans that worked hard to go to college and get degrees in engineering and software from getting their appropriate wages.

Hilary Clinton also didn't seem too interested in regulating H1-B because the Democratic elites (as well as many Republican elites) are in Tech leadership's pockets.

I welcome others to research this if they feel this isn't true and post appropriate links.</comment>


Ask HN: How would you qualify animal instincts - <AUTHOR>

I've read this article of PG's: http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html
However, when it comes down to describing folks as "animals," I still don't understand the tests aside from understanding them as being obsessive with what they do. How would you test if someone is an "animal" and why that specific metric?
Thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> I think basically these people are a tad too aggressive, to the point it could be viewed as bad manners and poor boundaries. But, as the army would say, you have to break some eggs to make an omelette. By that I mean that if you are going to break new ground, you are highly likely to step on some toes.

Does that make a little more sense?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes it does now. Thanks for your insight.

<comment><USER2> No problem.</comment></comment></comment>


iPads And Digital Textbooks Do Not Belong In Classrooms Yet - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/19/ipads-and-digital-textbooks-do-not-belong-in-classrooms-yet/

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with some of the points at the lower grade levels. A strategy for effectively utilizing iPads/iBooks in schools needs to be well thought-out before jumping on-board. The learning opportunities need to be leveraged while balancing the risk for distraction.

I'm sure there will be some very interesting pilot studies launched shortly, just as there are now for Khan Academy in the classroom.</comment>


My Technical Co-Founder Quit the Day Before I Got My Y Combinator Interview - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-f-suite/my-technical-co-founder-quit-the-day-before-i-got-my-y-combinator-interview-759482562fcc#.k1n1ig5qw <comment><USER2> previous hn discussion with the author, emmiechang

96 points, by emmiechang, 481 days ago, 12 comments

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8609398](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8609398)</comment>


Multics Simulator - <AUTHOR> https://www.multicians.org/simulator.html <comment><USER2> I've been running multics on simh for a while - it's amazing and a revelation to experience some of the ways that it surpasses UNIX (memory safe implementation in PL/I -> no stack and buffer overflows, unified storage model, nested ring security and system call architecture, long command forms, etc.) while also trying out ancient forms of email, emacs, lisp, BASIC, C and Fortran as well as weird and obsolete, but historically interesting, languages like BCPL (predecessor of C) and PL/I (predecessor of... nothing, probably, except maybe Ada in some sense.)

If modern UNIX/Linux distros were to adopt three features from Multics, I'd love to see memory safe compilation, long-form commands (e.g. in multics, "ls" is a shortcut for "list-segments"), and ring security (which is basically flexible nested paravirtualization, enabling many of the things we currently do with VMs, containers, and user mode drivers.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Also advisable is to spend a couple of minutes going through [https://www.multicians.org/myths.html](https://www.multicians.org/myths.html)

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h There's some useful perspective in there, but they're not exactly unbiased.

> Myth: Multics was closed source

> Bull HN has made the entire source available "for any purpose and without > fee" at MIT as of November 2007.

So it was only proprietary (shared source, looks like) for the first 4 decades. Right.

<comment><USER4> I believe UNIX source code was proprietary as well

> Until then, all versions of BSD used proprietary AT&T Unix code, and were > therefore subject to an AT&T software license. ... This led to Networking > Release 1 (Net/1), which was made available to non-licensees of AT&T code > and was freely redistributable under the terms of the BSD license. It was > released in June 1989. > Within eighteen months, all of the AT&T utilities > had been replaced, and it was determined that only a few AT&T files remained > in the kernel. These files were removed, and the result was the June 1991 > release of Networking Release 2 (Net/2), a nearly complete operating system > that was freely distributable.

Still

> The USL v. BSDi lawsuit was filed in 1992

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution)

<comment><USER5> We should also consider that the current mainstream definition of "open source software" only dates from the 1998 founding of the Open Source Initiative; yet debates about "open"-vs-"closed" source code have been going on in the industry since at least the early 1980s, and I'm sure someone at some point would have used the phrase "open source" prior to 1998, but not in the exact same sense it is currently used.

IBM caused immense controversy in 1983 with their "Object Code Only" (OCO) announcement–they were no longer going to ship the source code to customers with new versions of their mainframe operating systems. Might it make sense to describe that as a shift from "open source" to "closed source"? Even though, most of that software was copyright by IBM and required paying IBM license fees to legally use, and hence isn't "open source" by the contemporary meaning of the phrase.

IBM's "closed source" decision upset a lot of their customers, who found source code availability very useful in debugging problems and also implementing local customisations/extensions. And I'm sure competing mainframe vendors who had an "open source" policy instead (including Honeywell, owner of Multics) would have emphasised that differential to their customers.

<comment><USER6> But open source existed _long_ before 1998.

<comment><USER5> What we now call "open source software" existed before 1998, but _the phrase_ "open source software" wasn't in widespread use prior to 1998, and any pre-1998 uses of the phrase don't have the current quite specific meaning.

The FSF promoted the phrase "free software". The "open source" term was chosen as an alternative because (1) English "free" is ambiguous (price vs liberty) (2) the FSF's strict ethical stances weren't very corporate-friendly and so "open source" avoided the association with FSF which was seen as alienating many corporate executives (3) it represented a broader range of acceptable licensing conditions than the FSF's strict ethics would allow

<comment><USER6> There's no need to pick such nits. The point was clear: "open source" -even with very loose definitions of "open source"\- was one key to Unix's triumph over Multics. BSD was "open source" even in 1978 because Bill Joy did nothing to verify that recipients of BSD source had AT&T Unix source licenses. Eventually BSD became truly open source when the AT&T-Berkeley lawsuit was settled -- truly open source by the standard you mention, even though that was before 1998. That no one spoke of "open source" in 1978 is neither here nor there. Multics is practically unused by comparison to Unix. The End.

<comment><USER5> UNIX was proprietary licensed code developed and owned by AT&T / Bell Labs. You had to pay for a license. The source was distributed to academic institutions and OEMs/VARs–but not always the customers of those OEMs/VARs. As such, in some ways it was less "open source" than Multics was–every Multics customer got the source, but not all end-users of UNIX (buying it through an OEM/VAR) did.

The first freely available (without paying for an AT&T license) distribution of BSD was Net/1 in 1989. (And even that was under a legal cloud which was not resolved until the USL vs. BSDi lawsuit was settled in 1994.) Active development and marketing of Multics was terminated in 1987, although bug fixes continued to be made for existing customers until the last customer site shut down in 2000. So the statement that "UNIX is open source but Multics is not" wasn't true in the relevant timeframe, and differences in source model aren't a good explanation of the failure of Multics vs. UNIX's success.

> BSD was "open source" even in 1978 because Bill Joy did nothing to verify > that recipients of BSD source had AT&T Unix source licenses.

I haven't heard before the claim that Bill Joy distributed BSD to non- licensees–which, if true, probably violated the license agreement his employer signed with AT&T. (Prior to Net/1, BSD lacked a clean separation between code originally developed by Berkeley, and modified AT&T code). If a person distributes source code in violation of license agreements, does that make the source code "open source"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love that one of the main goals of that system was to provide a computing utility, very similar to what AWS and friends have become.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why?

<comment><USER3> To gain an understanding on how it actually looked like, instead of just listening to UNIX marketing.

<comment><USER6> It's not marketing, is it. Unix, then Linux, won all the mindshare. No company is advertising Unix or Linux as better than Multics. Multics is culturally not a thing. It wasn't AT&T who dun it. It was Berkeley.

<comment><USER3> Free beer has lots of power.

<comment><USER6> Doesn't have to be free to get mindshare, though it helps.

Multics lost the mindshare battle when Berkeley started distributing BSD. They would have had to go open source / free way back then, in 1978 or so.

Mindshare, mindshare, mindshare. That's the key for this sort of thing.

Oracle, for example, locked in SQL mindshare long ago. I'm not sure that Larry Ellison understands this -- after all, he (well, Safra Katz) killed OpenSolaris when that was a vehicle for gaining mindshare. But then again, maybe it was too late for Solaris anyways.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft Office Mobile now Free for iPhone and Android - <AUTHOR> http://www.cultofandroid.com/60210/microsoft-office-goes-free-android-iphone/

<comment><USER2> Overall, not good. While it may seem nice that microsoft is adopting other platforms its only doing so that it will remain the defacto standard for business.

In the 90's the argument was, "I use windows at work, so I should use (buy) it at home." Now in 10's it'll become, "I use windows at home, why should I stop using it work?"</comment>


Modern American Works Longer with Less Vacation Than Medieval Peasants - <AUTHOR> https://www.thevintagenews.com/2019/07/22/modern-american-medieval-peasants/ <comment><USER2> I think the key figures are that the average worker today does 300hrs more a year than medieval peasants, but peasants had months of down time. Apparently, they worked longer days, but less of them.

I feel that most of the jobs around are mostly bullshit. I'd think many people could work half the hours for double the pay and productivity in many places would not diminish much. I envy the Jetsons; while I don't expect to get away with George's two hours a week, I would think 4 half days a week would be totally in order (or similar).

</comment><comment><USER3> Modern Americans live better than any king or potentate did in medieval times. Far better. We have fruits and vegetables out of season. We spices from around the world. We have miracle cures to disease and vaccines.

And what does being on the clock mean when you're a serf? You're always on the clock.

<comment><USER4> One idea I think conveyed on the political grounds is that others are quick to pass policy that benefit others regardless of meritocracy, hence you get fiscal repulsion towards welfares. I take the information from the article as suggesting that fiscal repulsion while not wholly, a certain amount looks at any collectively refinanced aid as being non-meritorious and hence the idea that liberal policy no matter the mildness is at the cusp of giving money irresponsibly despite the fact modern workers across the fields and competencies still do work consistently, deserving of aids.</comment></comment>


What to Expect as an International Founder at Y Combinator - <AUTHOR> http://www.themacro.com/articles/2016/09/yc-international-founder/ <comment><AUTHOR> These are worthwhile lessons whether you are International or not, and whether you get in to YC or not. Following these as much as you can prior to applying would probably improve your chances of being accepted.</comment>


Australia Powers Up the World's Biggest Battery – Courtesy of Elon Musk - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/world/australia/elon-musk-south-australia-battery.html <comment><USER2> I intended to say this here, but accidentally put it in one of the other submissions, so I'll copy it here ...

In case you're wondering why this isn't apparently getting any attention or discussion, it has been submitted before, and the story has certainly been discussed before:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14723853](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14723853) (166 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14715679](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14715679) (76 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15764449](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15764449) (53 comments)

The first of those was nearly six months ago, the last just 9 days ago, so the story is "live" and getting discussion.

You can see submissions of the story from other sources here:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Australia%20Battery&sort=byDat...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Australia%20Battery&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)</comment>


The Pirate Party is now measured as the biggest political party in Iceland - <AUTHOR> http://www.visir.is/the-pirate-party-is-now-measured-as-the-biggest-party-in-iceland/article/2015150318848 <comment><USER2> So a little background, this looks like backlash from a few very controversial decisions the government has made recently and recent corruption allegations.

The biggest one being; Stopping the nations talks with the EU and a few days ago withdrawing* the application without discussing it in the parliament and putting it to a national vote as both parties promised would be done before the elections.

This backlash agains the 'old block' and what is called 'traditional politics' started when comedians, artists and musicians (among others) started the 'Besti flokkurinn' (Best Party) and won the elections for city council in Reykjavík ?five? years ago.

People saw that new people and new parties could do a better job then those 'professional' politicians and I think the Pirate Party is riding on that wave and every controversial decision and corruption allegations just strengthens people's believes that politics must change. It won't happen in 2 years or 6 years but we might start to see some big changes in 10 years time!

*The foreign minister wrote a letter to the EU to withdraw the application but the EU don't take it as a withdrawal. It's very strange.

<comment><USER3> > This backlash agains the 'old block' and what is called 'traditional > politics'

It's great that Islanders express their dissatisfaction by reporting their votes on "the pirate party" instead of extreme right parties as we see it happening in some European countries.

<comment><USER2> Well I'm afraid that we will see a extreme right party in the next elections and I wouldn't be surprised if they got 1 seat in parliament. The progress party made some vague statements which were interpreted (and rightly so) as islamophobic in the last city council elections and that brought them two seats in the council. Before they made those statements they were looking at no seats so there definitely are people that will vote for extreme right ideals.

<comment><USER4> Well, but that result can be considered a good thing - okay, you have a block of voters with opinions that you despise; but now instead of being outside the estabilishment they now have a seat or two to voice their concerns, but everyone knows exactly how small that minority is and the mainstream parties can finally start ignoring that block of voters since they'll vote for that extreme right party anyways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is very interesting. I hope they can implement some of their ideas in the areas of an online democracy, where voting becomes more informed, and decisions more transparent [1,2]

Iceland could be the first country with a "liquid democracy" [2]

[1] [http://liquidfeedback.org/](http://liquidfeedback.org/)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg0_Vhldz-8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg0_Vhldz-8)

<comment><USER6> With online democracy, would this make it extremely easy for NSA/GCHQ to manipulate the votes? GCHQ is already known to manipulate online voting and mass install malware.

<comment> bjelkeman-again Do you have a link to that? Would be interested in reading about online vote manipulation.

<comment><USER6> I don't have the exact link, look through firstlook.org's documents. There was a leaked slideshow about it. As to avoid confusion, it's worth noting that it was social media vote manipulation, not general election manipulation.

I think it's in the same document as the "Mass propaganda" / "Discredit an company/individual" slides.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Meanwhile in Germany the pirate party is once again completely irrelevant. Thanks to the debate culture of mailing lists and twitter, fractionism, us-vs- them thinking and the refusal to throw trolls/idiots out of the party. And a hole lot of feminism drama helped.

<comment><USER8> The German pirate party is in the peculiar spot where communists, nazis, feminists, men's rights activists, liberals and conservatives are _all_ convinced they're too radical.

That does not leave many potential voters.

<comment><USER7> No, it's the exact opposite. It's a place where all these are welcome. Denie the holocaust, fine you can stay in the party. On the left side, celebrate war crimes? Fine. Which does not leave any potential for voters either.

<comment><USER9> Denying the holocaust is - literally - a crime in Germany and other European countries.

<comment><USER7> Yes. Stresses the point it was almost impossbile to get thrown out. IMO the failure of the pirate party was the result of the refusal to excude anybody. Absolutely no standard of decency or adherence to any kind of policy or political agenda was required. For Mailinglist or webforums that works quite well. But not for a political party, these require some kind of shared values. Not feeding the trolls is pointless if the newspapers are feeding them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if a "transparency" or "anti-corruption" party would be successful in the U.S. I'm writing a thesis now that delves pretty heavily into the financial crisis of 2008 and the level of carelessness, corruption, and trickery on the part of the captains of finance and the leaders of this country is appalling and disheartening.

The thing that really gets me though is that, as a 22 year old, I (and all the other members of my generation) are inheriting the current system with no input on how we got to the point we are at now and little to no say on how it works. I wonder if we will be able to fix things.

<comment><USER11> > party would be successful in the U.S

No party besides the democrat or republican party will be successful in the US because first past the post is a fundamentally broken model of democracy that always reduces into a base case of two parties. Combine that with the power of money in politics and gerrymandering and there is no way to fathom competition at the federal level.

> is appalling and disheartening.

For the most part American voters have demonstrated a lack of care for the aftermath of the financial crisis, given how they brought back a Republican majority in congress only four years after realizing how well that worked in the decade prior.

Which is mostly disingenuous, given how politicians in America are all consistently cut from the same cloth and serving the same (private) interests.

> are inheriting the current system

You actually aren't inheriting anything. Youth unemployment at an all time high, average income of bachelors graduates being around 26k a year, the lowest rates of property ownership in half a century, wealth concentration as high as the roaring twenties. The aging with power and money are holding onto it to their grave, and then only their blessed decedents will inherit the means of production. There is no mechanism to disseminate concentrated wealth back into the masses, especially the youth, anymore. Economics used to promote that, and policy used to enable that, but as we approach post-scarcity both have been sabotaged by generations that want to maintain control and power perpetually.

<comment><USER12> > because first past the post is a fundamentally broken model of democracy > that always reduces into a base case of two parties

You've ran the experiment so many times that you know that it's "always"?

<comment><USER13> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the- post_voting#Tac...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the- post_voting#Tactical_voting)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is incredibly interesting. I wonder what their support was in the last election? Or how long it is until the next election.

I know very little about Iceland's political system but suspect some translation problems with the language in that article.

Biggest would really only apply to seats won, while this reads to me as being 'most popular'

Still, really interesting.

I also suspect that the 'shun corruption' just means they havent been caught yet.

<comment><USER15> > I also suspect that the 'shun corruption' just means they havent been caught > yet.

No, they are actually quite decent people. Birgitta has been an advocate of term limits and intends to not run again (even if term limits are not imposed). She is an artist and has been a consistent defender of the average citizen. Jón Þór is in his first term and has decided to step down mid-term to allow his replacement time to acclimate to Parliament before the next election (which is in 2017, barring public uprising). Helgi Hrafn has indicated he intends not to run again. All of them are passionate about the outcome of the next election and intend to give support to the running candidates.

Corruption of the sort you see in USA does not happen as much in Alþingi, it's more nepotism by the executive (parliamentary rule, which is problematic) than blatant bribery by funding campaigns.

Grassroots for the Pirates is very active and these public servants, truly are serving the public, not the party.

<comment><USER8> > No, they are actually quite decent people.

For now. They wouldn't be the first people to be corrupted by power.

<comment><USER15> I think you aren't reading what I wrote. Let me rephrase: When the party is peaking and could be on the cusp of being one of the majority parties, the elected officials are turning the reins over to other people. This is as antithetical to institutional corruption as is possible.

<comment><USER4> If the good people turn the reins over to other people, then it's a cycle that goes on happily until the reins have been passed over to people who'll do anything to stay in power - it's nice but not sustainable in the long term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have had the privilege of meeting many of the people in the Icelandic pirate party. They are great people, have very solid ideas for improving internet law in Iceland where there are still some big issues that need reform, and I congratulate them for their success in gaining support of their fellow viking brethren.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think the biggest catalyst for government reform in the internet era would be bringing voting online.

I'm 23 years old. My generation doesn't have the time or patience to wait in line to vote and fill out legal documents. We're used to apps that let us order delivery and message friends in a button tap.

The reason big money keeps winning is because our generation doesn't vote enough. If we make local and federal voting deadlines as simple as phone notifications, we're going to start seeing a a huge array of intelligent decisions injected into the political system.

The Pirate Party offers liquid democracy through online voting. I'm all for it, I hope Iceland sets an example for the rest of the world.

<comment><USER18> I think you have a very idealistic and naive opinion about your generation (I'm 30 years old, I don't know if that makes it my generation too). Liquid democracy might increase vote turnout, which is good anyway, but in my opinion that will have little impact on the rule of "big money". You have yourself as frame of reference, but try to think about the average 23 years old (and no, very likely your immediate circle of friends does not count very much as the average). But even if it does replace the "big money" rule, it might not be for the good. I cannot find a reference right now, but I seem to remember that young people place usually at the extreme right and left parts of the political spectrum.

<comment><USER17> Do you think President Obama is naive and idealistic as well? He's started to argue for the same. ([http://www.infowars.com/obama-calls-for-mandatory- voting/](http://www.infowars.com/obama-calls-for-mandatory-voting/)) Since his term is nearing its end, he's becoming more fearless in talking about the influence of big money in politics and how making it easier to vote would greatly reduce its influence.

And yes, you are in my generation (Y). Please enlighten me in ways big money influences politics that cannot possibly be stopped by the democratic process.

<comment><USER18> I do not understand what is the mechanism that equates "more people voting" with "less money influence". You have done little to explain it, only using an argument from authority ("An important man said it, therefore it's true").

"Big money" isn't directly buying votes. Increasing the number of votes doesn't make an election "more expensive" to buy. If you have only three candidates, to buy out their loyalty you need the same amount of money, regardless if you have one million of people voting for them or ten.

Direct democracy renders the process even worse. People cannot be fully informed about all topics at all times - I hope you realize how uncontroversial this opinion is. So they'll just find the information that is easiest to find and digest and be influenced by it. If you have enough money, you can be the easiest source of information in the topic you care.

<comment><USER17> The idea of liquid democracy is appealing because the issues are all opt-in. If there is a particular topic you feel passionate about, say funding stem- cell research, you can choose to vote on it. That + more votes makes it harder for special interest groups to influence outcomes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Huh. Doesn't the fact that Pirate Party's and Independence Party's results are well within each other's confidence intervals make it a tie?

</comment><comment><USER20> It's a shame the one in Germany blew it because of internal conflict. It would've probably reached 15 percent by now, too.

<comment><USER21> No, the wouldn't. As an ex PP-er (HR), i can say that the major problem in the vast majority of the PPs are that they are literally "too liberal." The differences in how individual members perceive what PP is and should be, are so great that they tear the party apart. From what I've seen (and I've met them), PP-IS is one of the rare which has managed to achieve _enough_ homogeneity of core members which is needed for practical work and progress.

tl;dr: You can't have an organisation where everyone wants to do things differently.

<comment><USER22> I think that diversity wouldn't be the problem, when liquid feedback would work. But communication in the PP is really slow relative to their tech based democratic goals. The process to get a clear statement is too slow.

<comment><USER21> Can there be a clear statement in a group whose members are different enough that it clearly doesn't have a common one?

Electronic democracy solves precisely nothing in practice because democracy is not about technology and mathematics, it's about the people.

What if you have a 50%+1 majority on your vote, and the other 50%-1 of the people are so actively against it and bitter that there is no way they will accept the result of the vote, let even cooperate? And by "50%+1" I don't mean 11 votes vs 10 votes in your library group, I mean like 100,000 votes for one side and 99,999 votes for the other. Can you seriously consider that the first side won the vote? Can you seriously do anything practical with 50%-1 members opposing you?

 _That_ is what was (and I think still is) happening in PP parties.

And on top of that there's all the usual issue of large-ish scale politics, with blocks forming, with small but screamingly loud minorities, etc. etc. which now, because of the digital medium each require attention. Do you wish to participate in a forum where you MUST, by the way of the forum's statutes, listen even to the most vitriolic, uneducated, screaming lunatic trolls, and be expected that you deal with those situations politely with "Thank you for your input. if 50% of the members agree with your idea to make tin-foil-hats mandatory, and declare war on Kazakhstan, we will."? Even if you are, a couple of years of that happening every single day will probably erode that attitude. Hence, no "sane" members, hence no votes.

<comment><USER22> Actually, to get something in german's pirate party program, there must be a 66% majority.

Hm. I never heard of blocks in the pirate party. Luckily, it seems that the core pirates are too liberal for that. Things could go wrong, but then we simply start a new party.

And yes, we must listen to everyone. Whatever troll it might be. You must listen them to tell them otherwise and to learn from them. It might be the only way a democracy can function well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Iceland's Population: 323,002

</comment><comment><USER24> One platform parties are pretty ineffective inside the USA. The only I could think of getting any significant legislation passed are the anti-abortion people. The anti-deficit people and anti-war people have large following, but little traction.

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't have a good knowledge about Iceland situation, but I'm a bit negatively biased against these "protest parties". I'm from Italy and I can see what kind of horrible effect Grillo's party is having on the political thinking of the average Italian. Maybe this is different, but I will need to see results in its fight against the traditional ruling class before changing my mind. In Italy, so far, there aren't.

<comment><USER25> Protest party? Under what definition are you labeling the Pirate Party as such? The core principles of the pirate party is Civil rights, with the implication from living in a information society.

The fight against the Bourgeoisie, while relevant for some, is not the focus of this party.

<comment><USER18> I got the idea from the top comment [1] (in a hindsight, I should actually have replied to it instead of starting the new comment thread).

Particularly this part:

> This backlash agains the 'old block' and what is called 'traditional > politics' started when comedians, artists and musicians (among others) > started the 'Besti flokkurinn' (Best Party) and won the elections for city > council in Reykjavík ?five? years ago.

I am aware of the origin of the label at the international level, but it looked to me that in this particular case the origin dynamics were closer to Grillo's.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9231591](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9231591)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What I like about the PP is p2p power not vertical power structures. No more falsely heroic leaders acting as a CEO of the country or party whips to enforce the leader's decisions by threatening to backbench party dissenters and throwing away the entire idea of representative democracy by replacing it with a command structure.

</comment><comment><USER27> Where can their political programme be found? (in English)

<comment><USER28> On the party's website seems like a good bet: [http://www.piratar.is/?lang=en](http://www.piratar.is/?lang=en)

<comment><USER29> By the way - here are links to programs/statutes/manifests of many other Pirate Parties: [http://wiki.pirateint.org/wiki/Pirate_Party_Statutes_and_Pol...](http://wiki.pirateint.org/wiki/Pirate_Party_Statutes_and_Policies)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> well, this is great news, im not sure weve had a real government since jfk tho. i dont think afghans were insurgants anymore, i think we were killing residents, and im really sad.</comment>


Ze Frank's Star.me Is Like Being In Kindergarten All Over Again - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/04/star-me/ <comment><USER2> I hate to be so negative about something so positive, but the only word that comes to mind is ghastly. I was actually thrown off a bit by the dissonance between the positive tone of the article and the product being described.

>themed Stars with messages like "UR CRAZY,""UR CUTE," "BFF,""Frenemy""Bromance," and (!) "Mom Jeans."

I don't think you're going to find too many adults who are really all that interested in embracing their inner 12-year-old girl.

>Both the actions of giving and receiving Stars cause new and more diverse stars to be unlocked

The reason games like WoW work, IMO, is because there's enough shininess to distract you from the TINO (time in, numbers out) nature of the game. If you distill that down to its core I don't know if people will like what they see. Kind of like how I'll enjoy broccoli smothered in butter or mixed into a cheese dip, because it doesn't really taste like broccoli, but eaten plain it's a chore.

Hey, I'd love to be wrong. I generally want people to succeed, and I'm sure everyone involved here is a nice person...but I'm not sold.

<comment><USER3> > I don't think you're going to find too many adults who are really all that > interested in embracing their inner 12-year-old girl

If you look at Ze Frank's many past efforts you will see that is exactly what he's adept at finding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Remember, people - just because it doesn't appeal to the typical reader of Hacker News, it's not doomed to failure.

There are many, many people out there with preferences different from your own. I suspect several of my family members would love this.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is the product from someone with a doctorate in neuroscience? So much for moving the human collective forward. Now I don't feel so bad about the kids coming out with undergraduate CS degrees feeling like they don't know how to program.

I don't use Facebook but I do use Twitter. I do love games. What is it in regards to social networks, games and the idea of positive reinforcement am I missing with this project?

<comment><AUTHOR> _What.... am I missing with this project?_

Umm, the fact that you haven't seen it yet?

<comment><USER5> Is star.me not accessible/visible to you?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is, but I don't have an account yet. Do you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> hooray! i'm glad to see this finally launch. (i'm an investor)

<comment><AUTHOR> Why did you invest?

<comment><USER6> I thought it would be fun to join Ze for the ride.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Did any of the haters on this thread watch his TED talks? There's the one linked to in the article (from 2004), and another one Ze gave last year (<http://www.zefrank.com/ted/2010.html>).

Having watched "the show" back in the olden days before youtube, i'm convinced ze is a genius. He's incomprehensible to HN because he really doesn't care _how_ it works, he only cares about how it's being applied.

It's all about the application of technology to make a human connection for him. His _only_ metric is the quality of that human connection -- which is weird to people who care about clean design, or scalability, or neat javascript "fade" effects.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wish people on Hacker News would be (much) nicer about peoples startups.

<comment><USER9> I would send you a UR NICE star for this comment but since HN doesn't have that you'll have to settle for an upvote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> And so we continue to amuse ourselves to death.</comment>


Reddit takes down its /Jailbait section - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/JrieW.png

<comment><USER2> Largely because of this: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnJZXFEy6Cg> and [http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/l6neu/dozens_of_reddit_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/l6neu/dozens_of_reddit_posters_hound_the_op_for_nude/)</comment>


Ecomom mourns the passing of Jody Sherman - <AUTHOR> http://www.ecomom.com/blog/ecomom-mourns-the-passing-of-chairman-and-ceo-jody-m-sherman

<comment><AUTHOR> "While we grieve, our focus is on the business and continuing to move forward with Jody's vision of providing exceptional customer service and safe, easy choices for moms"

That sounds ice-cold to me. But maybe that's just how business works?</comment>


New bcachefs release - <AUTHOR> https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/3/15/813 <comment><AUTHOR> Happy to answer any questions about bcachefs :)</comment>


James Dyson's 'Wrong Garden' Fountain Inspired By MC Escher - <AUTHOR> http://www.ohgizmo.com/2009/08/22/james-dysons-wrong-garden-fountain-inspired-by-escher/

<comment><USER2> You wouldn't know it from the shoddy copy-pasting, but this garden was actually displayed at the 2003 Chelsea Flower Show [1,2], thus stretching the definition of the phrase "this year" to include six years ago.

[1] [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/3311041/The-Wrong- Garde...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/3311041/The-Wrong-Garden.html)

[2] <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3046791.stm>

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, that is so cool. Anyone have a video of it in action? That's gotta be pretty trippy.

<comment><USER4> The best I could find is <http://www.chelsea.dyson.co.uk/>

Click on "Water Fountain"

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Original link: [http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/08/james_dysons_uphill...](http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/08/james_dysons_uphill_water_flow_illu.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890)</comment>


Knowledge from small number of debates outperforms wisdom of large crowds (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.00045## <comment><USER2> I would say that this has been known for quite some time in philosophy, but I guess it's good to have some real-life verification for it. This article on Belief Merging and Judgement Aggregation[0] is a good entry point for the field, for anybody that is interested.

[0]: [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/belief- merging/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/belief-merging/)

<comment><USER3> Off-topic, but I love the logo at the upper-left corner of the plato.stanford.edu web pages.

Stanford has an amazing collection of sculptures by Auguste Rodin, including his iconic "The Thinker". If you have business or just visiting the Silicon Valley area, it's worth exploring the Stanford campus and its Rodin museum.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Rodin](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Rodin)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Am I correct that they asked the same people the same questions 3 times?

It's no surprise that the 3rd time the answers were the best. I'd expect this to happen even if there was no debate (if not to the same degree).

> Each participant was provided with pen and an answer sheet linked to their > seat number. The event's speaker (author M.S.) conducted the crowd from the > stage (Fig. 1A). In the first stage of the experiment, the speaker asked > eight questions (Supplementary Table 1) and gave participants 20 seconds to > respond to each of them (stage i1, left panel in Fig. 1A). Then, > participants were instructed to organize in to groups of five based on a > numerical code in their answer sheet (see Methods). The speaker repeated > four of the eight questions and gave each group one minute to reach a > consensus (stage c, middle panel in Fig. 1A ). Finally, the eight questions > were presented again from stage and participants had 20 seconds to write > down their individual estimate, which gave them a chance to revise their > opinions and change their minds (stage i2, right panel in Fig. 1A). > Participants also reported their confidence in their individual responses in > a scale from 0 to 10.

<comment><USER5> I can't follow your reasoning. How does asking you the exact same question twice improve your accuracy? If you don't know how high the Eiffel Tower is, why would you know it the second time? Conversely, you likely created a mental anchor when giving an estimate the first time and would be hard pressed to provide an answer contradicting your first estimate - even if it might be more accurate.

There were no answers provided between asking the questions as far as I understand this excerpt.

In the group only 4/8 questions were asked and here a difference in accuracy can be made. Maybe you're mixed with travelers who recently visited Paris, historians or people who due to other circumstances or pure luck provide more accurate estimates, effectively influencing the anchor of your first estimate.

<comment><USER4> Given more time I can remember something, or I can notice that the last question gives some hints or even unrelated associations that help to answer the first question.

I don't think "if you don't know the answer in 20 seconds you won't ever know it" is true.

<comment><USER5> As far as I understand it, these were not simple right/ wrong questions, but questions about estimating a continuous measure (height, age, percentages). I have no reason to believe that questions were related or would give hints. Such a correlation would destroy the power of the experiment.

As far as I understand it, this paper is not about "Do you know what is true or false in 20 seconds" but "what is a value you confidently estimate within 20 seconds". This is a field much studied in psychology and when you look into Kahnemann and associated research I would be surprised to find any scientific evidence that time improves your estimate. I'm not saying it's impossible, I am confident that - on average - it simply does not happen.

Kahnemann showed we're full of biases and this research shows that calibrating ourselves with others is a much higher predictor of improving accuracy of estimations than time.

<comment><USER6> Wow, that's a terrible way of conducting an experiment. Having more than 20 seconds to reason through an estimation will produce a much better result if you are any kind of systematic thinker.

In 20 seconds for the Eiffel Tower I'll just pull a number out of my ass. In 5 minutes I will think through the comparison charts it shows up next to on other high rises. I'll remember the half scale one in Las Vegas and its relative height to the Bellagio across the strip (about the same) and that the Bellagio was about 40 stories. Given 40 stories at 13 feet per floor, you get 520 ft * 2 = 1040 ft for the Eiffel Tower.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Perhaps we can save democracy by replacing the voting mechanism by placing people in groups of 10, and letting them reach consensus before making a vote.

<comment><USER8> That was how the US Senate originally operated. You would elect your state legislature (where your vote is _much_ less diluted than at the federal level) and they would elect your Senator.

Early 20th century populism took that away. It also meant that the states now have no representation in the federal legislature, which led to an almost immediate federal takeover of basically everything.

<comment><USER9> That amendment really screwed democracy in the US. Not only does it remove room for debate, but it has IMHO been a major factoring in lessoning voter interest in the state legislature. This has far reaching consequences, such as making it harder to make new amendments and checks against gerrymandering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've only read the summary but Philip Tetlock comes to this conclusion based on his work with "The Good Judgment Project" (described in his book "Superforecasting").

The GJP is a kind of experiment he's been running for a few years in an attempt to learn how to improve predictions.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Judgment_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Judgment_Project)

From what I remember: overall, teams did better than individuals and wisdom of the crowds because they were able to feed off and combine each other's points of view and separate knowledge.

However! It's important for teams to not let groupthink dominate—individuals within teams needed to challenge each other.

</comment><comment><USER11> Deliberative democracy is great. Put people in enriched decisionmaking environments for better outcomes, _and then_ get greater democratic legitimacy from doing so than even some representatives? Win win.

This is the opposite of populism too: when we voted Brexit in the UK, it was an uncontrolled, information-scarce (and falsehood-rich) environment. A room where people were organised and where they asked for their own experts and talked to one another would never have delivered that result.

<comment><USER12> People in the uk voted brexit, because it was just after the uk us and france were dropping bombs in lybia and syria, arab spring they called it, the destruction of infrastructure created millions of refugees, the bbc amplyied the importance and strength of isis, and flashed images of thousands of the refugees in calais tripping over each other trying to illegally cross the channel into the uk. The good souls of england thought they were under attack, bless em.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> You can make a case that democracy is a grand application of "wisdom of large crowd". But if that can easily and consistently outperformed then do we have better political system than democracy? What are the consequences of this?

<comment><USER14> That would be _direct democracy_. No "democracy" on Earth is actually a direct democracy, but a representative democracy, which seems more in line to what this study proposes, no? A small group of elected officials to "debate" issues.

<comment><USER15> Switzerland is close to a direct democracy with a model based on: representative democracy by default but direct as soon and anytime the people feels the subject should be handled so. That system has proven very stable.

<comment><USER2> > That system has proven very stable.

Caveat: with a small, well-educated population. Try and apply the same system elsewhere and your mileage may vary.

<comment><USER16> Then the obvious solution is to divide nation states down to small, well- educated populations no?

<comment><USER17> Say about 6 million people? On average?

[I'm a Scot - though that's not where I got the number from]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> We intuitively do know this and mankind has used different variations of this concept throughout human civilization. Sortition has been used for more than 2000 years to come up with fair representation of the population in governance [0]. A more contemporary example would be the jury system in the US. But, nice to have experimental results on this concept.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition)

</comment><comment><USER19> There's a big unanswered question about whether "debate" is quite so useful at improving accuracy of answers when it consists of an audience with strong priors listening to motivated reasoning rather than people deferring to the people who are most confident they have a decent grasp of the subject of a neutral trivia question. I think it's conceivable the opposite effect might occur if the experiment were be to repeated using polarising political issues, even if the questions themselves were fact-based (economic growth rates, crime rates, immigration figures, global temperature changes etc).

<comment><USER20> In the same experiment (but still unpublished) they actually find evidence that a similar CONSENSUS effect is observed in polarized issues with no clear "best" choice.

[https://www.ted.com/talks/mariano_sigman_and_dan_ariely_how_...](https://www.ted.com/talks/mariano_sigman_and_dan_ariely_how_can_groups_make_good_decisions/transcript?language=en)

The most interesting bit to me is the fact that a rare middle position stakeholder, a "high confident gray", allows groups to reach consensus more often. This potentially has huge applications in system design of the processes of democracy imho

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It reminds me of that assertion that the IQ of a crowd is the lowest IQ divided by the number of people in the crowd. Seems the study validate this with that smaller groups performs better

<comment><USER22> Except that the previous study refuted that idea: the average answer was better than individual answers, which is definitely not IQ_crowd = IQ_min / n.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This TED video tuned me into this research earlier in 2018, and while not rigorously tested, there are some even more interesting hypotheses that are being sussed out of the experiment:

[https://www.ted.com/talks/mariano_sigman_and_dan_ariely_how_...](https://www.ted.com/talks/mariano_sigman_and_dan_ariely_how_can_groups_make_good_decisions/transcript?language=en)

</comment><comment><USER23> The line to know: "Remarkably, combining as few as four consensus choices outperformed the wisdom of thousands of individuals." Confer away!

</comment><comment><USER24> The aggregation of many independent estimates can outperform the most accurate individual judgment. This centenarian finding, popularly known as the wisdom of crowds, has been applied to problems ranging from the diagnosis of cancer to financial forecasting. It is widely believed that social influence undermines collective wisdom by reducing the diversity of opinions within the crowd. Here, we show that if a large crowd is structured in small independent groups, deliberation and social influence within groups improve the crowd's collective accuracy. We asked a live crowd (N=5180) to respond to general- knowledge questions (e.g., what is the height of the Eiffel Tower?). Participants first answered individually, then deliberated and made consensus decisions in groups of five, and finally provided revised individual estimates. We found that averaging consensus decisions was substantially more accurate than aggregating the initial independent opinions. Remarkably, combining as few as four consensus choices outperformed the wisdom of thousands of individuals.

<comment><USER24> wonder how that would compare to people providing a confidence to their guess and using a weighted average.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wonder how much statistical independence has to play in this. e.g. the large crowd can be biased when they influence each other in a way that the small debates cannot. What happens when you have small independent debates versus large independent crowds?

</comment><comment><USER26> We had poker planning introduced to my team and within two months or so we got to the point where most of the time we all get the same number or get something like 8-13-21.

</comment><comment><USER27> I think attributing the accuracy to debates is a rather hasty conclusion. I would love to see an experiment where the individual participants rated their confidence from 1 to 10, and only the highest confidence answer in each group was taken. My hunch is this would perform just as well (if not better) than post-discussion.

</comment><comment><USER28> Whenever I come across such ideas it makes me want to more deeply investigate the Communicative Rationality [1] of Jurgen Habermas. Despite modern trends towards a conservative stoicism (e.g. Jordan Peterson) I actually think Social Critical Theory feels to be moving in the more-correct direction. However, the current negative association with moral-relativism and postmodernism is a new McCarthyism. The bridge should be pragmatism but even that is too closely associated with socialism.

Too many isms but the ones that are scaring me most now are authoritarianism, fascism and totalitarianism. Ideas like communicative rationality feel to me like the most reasonable solutions.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicative_rationality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicative_rationality) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory)</comment>


Leading with commas – ugly or efficient? An investigation over 320GB of SQL - <AUTHOR> https://towardsdatascience.com/winning-arguments-with-data-leading-with-commas-in-sql-672b3b81eac9 <comment><USER2> That this has three lines could not be easier to see:

      [  la la la la la la la la la la la
      ,  la la la la la la la la la la la
         la la la la la
      ,  la la la la la la la la la la la
         la la la la la la la la la la la ]

Seeing that in this requires a little more work:

      [  la la la la la la la la la la la,
         la la la la la la la la la la la
         la la la la la,
         la la la la la la la la la la la
         la la la la la la la la la la la ]

In real-world code, the lists might be of expressions that can themselves contain commas, and the lines can be longer and more heterogeneous. All of those factors make the leading comma idiom even more readable relative to the trailing one.

</comment><comment><USER3> It is easier for normal humans to read trailing commas, but difficult to change during development. If you are actively developing a query, perhaps you could just add a dummy column:

SELECT a, B, c, 0 ...

</comment><comment><USER4> I like Go's solution: mandatory trailing commas. Doesn't work for set-in-stone sql, sadly.

<comment><USER5> Java, in a few places, has optional trailing commas. That is, if your last item also has a trailing comma, that is okay.

To put this into SQL notation:

SELECT col1, col2, col3, FROM Table

Now the columns were on separate lines, it is easy to comment/uncomment, or copy/paste columns around. just write every column with a comma at the end. But not in SQL -- just in various places in Java code. But I wish that were in SQL.

In Java enums are the first that immediately comes to mind. Every item can have a trailing comma. After the final item (and its optional comma) use a semicolon to begin class level declarations for the enum (if any) such as a custom constructor.

In Java, another example is array initializers:

int[] values = { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, };

If those initializer items were on separate lines, it is easy to comment/remove/interchange rows because they ALL have a comma.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Do the results stay the same if you exclude files longer than say 1000 lines?

I think a lot of big .sql files in repos might be autogenerated by tools, and being long would be a good way to remove some of them.

</comment><comment><USER7> I prefer leading with commas, and one column per line.

</comment><comment><USER8> Another argument for designing languages and formats so that there is no need for the comma.</comment>


Medium's big mistake... - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/human-communication/how-medium-is-stifling-creativitiy-894bb8f8db07

<comment><USER2> Somebody can't tell "average story" and "average reach or story" apart. I'm not sure medium.com assigned weights to the stories based on their reach.</comment>


Counting ants - <AUTHOR> http://grahamshawcross.com/2014/07/26/counting-ants/

<comment><USER2> I find this research a bit suspicious:

1\. The authors do not provide a single complete video of the experiment, only very short 5-15 seconds fragments.

2\. The papers lack detailed experimental procedures and protocol description (compared to a typical paper from Nature on the same subject).

3\. The papers are published in seemingly unrelated journals, which may not have the adequate know-how to do peer review of such experiments: Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter, etc. If the behavior described is real, it is highly notable, I would expect at least one paper published in Nature by the authors.

4\. The only videos available are short fragments, where 1 ant is seen crossing a single (1) left/right branch. Why not film an entire ant path, which according to paper should last about 100-200 seconds?

[https://www.youtube.com/user/reznikovazhanna/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/reznikovazhanna/videos)

I also checked both author's pages: [http://boris.ryabko.net/papers.html](http://boris.ryabko.net/papers.html) [http://reznikova.net/Publications.html](http://reznikova.net/Publications.html)

Is this specific counting and communication capability independently confirmed by other research groups?

</comment><comment><USER3> > This is not about how to count ants but how ants count.

I was disappointed to read this, I tried to figure out in my head how they count ants in the world, and now I'm left with that void...

Edit: After having read the article, I'm not disappointed anymore, this was really interesting!

<comment><USER4> How to count an ant population:

1\. Collect 25 ants

2\. Paint a dot on their abdomens

3\. Release them

4\. Wait

5\. Collect 25 ants again

6\. Count how many are marked with dots

7\. Divide 25² by this number

The result is a pretty good approximation of the size of the total ant population. To increase precision and accuracy, replace all the "25"s above with a larger number.

<comment><USER5> What's this method called?

<comment><USER6> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_and_recapture](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_and_recapture)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> nitpick: the article uses the male pronouns for the worker ants. All ants and bees except for short-lived breeders are female.</comment>