Zuckerberg reflects on 2018 in end of the year post - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/6/posts/10105867879993251/ <comment><AUTHOR> Full text below for those allergic to FB domains.

I feel like he would win more allies by taking a more apologetic or at least humble stance after a brutal year, rather than ending by saying he's "proud of the rest of the progress" made this year. Yes, the challenges faced by Facebook are massive, but if I were in charge over there I'm not sure if I would be feeling pride right now at the way they were handled. Then again, if Zuck had a more humble personality then FB wouldn't be what it is today, for better or worse.

"For 2018, my personal challenge has been to focus on addressing some of the most important issues facing our community -- whether that's preventing election interference, stopping the spread of hate speech and misinformation, making sure people have control of their information, and ensuring our services improve people's well-being. In each of these areas, I'm proud of the progress we've made.

We're a very different company today than we were in 2016, or even a year ago. We've fundamentally altered our DNA to focus more on preventing harm in all our services, and we've systematically shifted a large portion of our company to work on preventing harm. We now have more than 30,000 people working on safety and invest billions of dollars in security yearly.

To be clear, addressing these issues is more than a one-year challenge. But in each of the areas I mentioned, we've now established multi-year plans to overhaul our systems and we're well into executing those roadmaps. In the past we didn't focus as much on these issues as we needed to, but we're now much more proactive.

That doesn't mean we'll catch every bad actor or piece of bad content, or that people won't find more examples of past mistakes before we improved our systems. For some of these issues, like election interference or harmful speech, the problems can never fully be solved. They're challenges against sophisticated adversaries and human nature where we must constantly work to stay ahead. But overall, we've built some of the most advanced systems in the world for identifying and resolving these issues, and we will keep improving over the coming years.

We've made a lot of improvements and changes this year, and here are some of the most important ones:

For preventing election interference, we've improved our systems for identifying the fake accounts and coordinated information campaigns that account for much of the interference -- now removing millions of fake accounts every day. We've partnered with fact-checkers in countries around the world to identify misinformation and reduce its distribution. We've created a new standard for advertising transparency where anyone can now see all the ads an advertiser is running to different audiences. We established an independent election research commission to study threats and our systems to address them. And we've partnered with governments and law enforcement around the world to prepare for elections.

For stopping the spread of harmful content, we've built AI systems to automatically identify and remove content related to terrorism, hate speech, and more before anyone even sees it. These systems take down 99% of the terrorist-related content we remove before anyone even reports it, for example. We've improved News Feed to promote news from trusted sources. We're developing systems to automatically reduce the distribution of borderline content, including sensationalism and misinformation. We've tripled the size of our content review team to handle more complex cases that AI can't judge. We've built an appeals system for when we get decisions wrong. We're working to establish an independent body that people can appeal decisions to and that will help decide our policies. We've begun issuing transparency reports on our effectiveness in removing harmful content. And we've also started working with governments, like in France, to establish effective content regulations for internet platforms.

For making sure people have control of their information, we changed our developer platform to reduce the amount of information apps can access -- following the major changes we already made back in 2014 to dramatically reduce access that would prevent issues like what we saw with Cambridge Analytica from happening today. We rolled out new controls for GDPR around the whole world and asked everyone to check their privacy settings. We reduced some of the third-party information we use in our ads systems. We started building a Clear History tool that will give people more transparency into their browsing history and let people clear it from our systems. And we've continued developing encrypted and ephemeral messaging and sharing services that we believe will be the foundation for how people communicate going forward.

For making sure our services improve people's well-being, we conducted research that found that when people use the internet to interact with others, that's associated with all the positive aspects of well-being you'd expect, including greater happiness, health, feeling more connected, and so on. But when you just use the internet to consume content passively, that's not associated with those same positive effects. Based on this research, we've changed our services to encourage meaningful social interactions rather than passive consumption. One change we made reduced the amount of viral videos people watched by 50 million hours a day. In total, these changes intentionally reduced engagement and revenue in the near term, although we believe they'll help us build a stronger community and business over the long term.

If you're interested in reading more about these changes, I've written extensively about our work on elections here ([https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/preparing- for...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/preparing-for- elections/10156300047606634/)) and content governance and enforcement here ([https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark- zuckerberg/a-blueprint-f...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark- zuckerberg/a-blueprint-for-content-governance-and- enforcement/10156443129621634/)). You can also read about our research on well-being here ([https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/12/hard-questions-is- spend...](https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/12/hard-questions-is-spending- time-on-social-media-bad-for-us/)).

I've learned a lot from focusing on these issues and we still have a lot of work ahead. I'm proud of the progress we've made in 2018 and grateful to everyone who has helped us get here -- the teams inside Facebook, our partners and the independent researchers and everyone who has given us so much feedback. I'm committed to continuing to make progress on these important issues as we enter the new year.

I'm also proud of the rest of the progress we've made this year. More than 2 billion people now use one of our services every single day to stay connected with the people who matter most in their lives. Hundreds of millions of people are part of communities they tell us make up their most important social support. People have come together using these tools to raise more than $1 billion for causes and to find more than 1 million new jobs. More than 90 million small businesses use our tools, and more than half say they've hired more people because of them. Building community and bringing people together leads to a lot of good, and I'm committed to continuing our progress in these areas as well.

Here's to a great new year to come."</comment>


Why anemic domain models aren't so bad (podcast episode) - <AUTHOR> http://coredump.xyz/1 <comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Ask me anything. Feedback also welcome.</comment>


Lego calendar that syncs with Google Calendar - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/design/2013/10/a-brilliant-wall-mounted-lego-planner-that-syncs-with-google-calendar/

<comment><USER2> Yesterday's discussion: [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6475285](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6475285)

Article: [http://www.creativeapplications.net/objects/lego-calendar- by...](http://www.creativeapplications.net/objects/lego-calendar-by-vitamins- design-syncs-with-google-calendar/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Lego standard colors are limited to about 10 different colors. Is that enough?. [http://creative.lego.com/en- us/products/10664.aspx](http://creative.lego.com/en-us/products/10664.aspx)

Non-standard lego colored bricks can be quite rare/pricey.

</comment><comment><USER4> And how does it sync back from Google Calendar to the Lego calendar...?

<comment><USER5> From the video, it looks like the Lego wall board is the master record.</comment></comment>


ProtonMail email loss incident post mortem - <AUTHOR> https://protonmail.ch/blog/missing-emails-restored/

<comment><USER2> How can they recover emails if they were encrypted client-side?

<comment><AUTHOR> "recover" doesn't neccessarily have to mean that they had the mails in plain text</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are your favorite podcasts? - <AUTHOR> I haven't been able to find a good repository for technical podcasts. I currently listen to Javascript Jabber, Tomorrow, and Hardcore History, but I would love to find more, especially good niche podcasts about programming or history/politics. Any suggestions? <comment><USER2> Software Engineering Daily</comment>


Text to comic using GPT-3 - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/nutanc/status/1291768602404589569 <comment><USER2> As much as I enjoy seeing and am really excited by these GPT-3 demos, I wish the authors would open-source their implementations, or at least include a link to a live demo so we can get an idea of how GPT-3 performs beyond carefully curated inputs.</comment>


Ask HN: Twitter archives/dumps? - <AUTHOR>

I've been looking around for a publicly accessible Twitter archive/dump. Anyone know of one? <comment><USER2> I can't find anything complete but you might want to check out this link from the Archive Team:

[http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Twitter](http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Twitter)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is just what I was looking for. Thanks!</comment></comment>


P =? NP Poll (2012) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/papers/poll2012.pdf <comment><USER2> > The number of people who gave an opinion on quantum computing is 16.

> 1 said quantum computing is a hoax.

Wow.</comment>


Procrastination and Perfectionism - <AUTHOR> http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/light/perfectionism.php <comment><USER2> This is me to a tee. And it's terrible. It's such a bad feeling to have so many assignments or projects pile up while you imagine how perfect they could turn out.

In the end, all of the things I sit on for much too long get done, make other people happy, make the grade, and work, but there's always that lingering thought in the back of my head: I could have done this so much better.

I need to stop doing this...

<comment><USER3> Me too. I think the worst part is when I "sit on [it] for much too long." I always find myself holding onto projects/design papers/documentation because I know (or, actually, _think_ ) that I will be able to fine tune them further and make them "perfect".

Even though I submit great work, I end up getting _less_ work done and as a result, end up looking less competent than some of my peers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been a procrastinator for as long as I can remember. In elementary school I recall being assigned the the task of writing a report on the composer Rossini. I had no interest and I still haven't done it 30+ years later. But for some reason I still think about it. The explanation in this article doesn't hold true for me. When it comes to things that aren't fun or that may be evaluated for quality and I must get them done of face some dire consequence, maybe... I also procrastinate in buying things, mostly as a way of saving money. But I rarely if ever procrastinate in doing things I love doing. I never put off playing a game of chess with my son or going biking or writing or taking on an interesting software project.

<comment><USER5> I don't think Perry was saying that perfectionism is the only explanation for procrastination. I read his essay as a very insightful explanation of his own style of putting things off. Some of us procrastinators may be like him, others may not.

There's also clearly a distinction between avoiding something you have no interest in doing, and avoiding doing something you enjoy. It sounds like you're talking about the former, when Perry was talking about the latter. When he talked about his initial thoughts when accepting the refereeing assignment, he didn't view it as something menial -- rather, it was something he imagined both enjoying and doing well.

Some of us do put off doing things that interest us -- for exactly the reasons Perry describes. Of course YMMV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A joke I read in a David Foster Wallace book went something like ... There was an employee at an ad agency who did good work but took a little too long to complete his assignments. One day the boss comes up to him and asks "Johnson did it ever seem ironic to you that the work paralysis rhymes with perfectionist?".

The employee thinks about it and says "Yea I think I see your point about perfectionist and paralysis being somewhat interrelated like that but there is actually a 't' on the end of the word 'perfectionist'. So even though I think you have a valid point, those two words don't really rhyme like what you're saying".

The boss looks at him for a second and says "Well, close enough".

<comment><USER6> sorry, meant to write "...ironic to you that the _word_ paralysis rhymes with ..."

<comment><USER7> Well, close enough. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There were several good HN conversations on this, back when HN was "young", if anyone cares to look for them. (Unfortunately, I've lost the references I saved.)

(I don't mean to be ironic; I just can't justify the time/effort to dig for them, right now. But I thought they were useful, when I encountered them.)

EDIT:

To clarify, I meant procrastination and "structured procrastination" generally, not just -- but also not excluding -- procrastination and perfectionism.

Also, I'm not comfortable with my vague "go search" suggestion, so here's a least a minimal start:

[https://encrypted.google.com/search?&q=site%3Anews.ycomb...](https://encrypted.google.com/search?&q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+http%3A%2F%2Fwww.structuredprocrastination.com%2F*&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=)

which turns up, for just one quickly identified example,

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=579979>

</comment><comment><USER9> I love the philosopher that wrote this, John Perry. He wrote this other essay called "The Essential Indexical" that is about how we assign reference to the word "I" in different contexts. Read it if you want an example of what Paul Graham refered to in one of his essays, when he says the lesson of philosophy '...is that the concepts we use in everyday life are fuzzy, and break down if pushed too hard." You certainly should read "The Essential Indexical" if you think you understand that when you use the word "I" it unambiguously refers.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the suggestion! What's interesting is that by coming at it from the philosophical and linguistic perspective, he doesn't discuss the psychological limitations of "I" as a concept -- multiple personas and personalities, self- definition via relationships. Or maybe he is discussing them, just using different terms?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a relevant research paper I found interesting: "Several differences exist between healthy perfectionists and the dysfunctional perfectionists..."

[http://www.gifted.uconn.edu/NRCGT/reports/rm99140/rm99140.pd...](http://www.gifted.uconn.edu/NRCGT/reports/rm99140/rm99140.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER12> Here is something I found out worked for me: Say I want to write a blog post, but in order to do it perfectly, I should really have an illustration to go with it. Now, before I start looking into that illustration, I start writing a bit on the blog post. Then I'll work on the illustration. I go back and forth between the tasks until the text itself is finished. Half the time, I end up not needing that illustration, and every time I manage to publish faster.

</comment><comment><USER13> I can't tell if it is on purpose or not, but the way that page renders (in Chrome at least) is perfect for the subject.

</comment><comment><USER14> It very nearly describes how I find myself to function as well. As long as there is theoretical possibility of doing an improved job than I am currently at, if i did something and delivered right now — I will most likely procrastinate into related subjects that indeed could help improve my response to the task at hand.

While at a the start line we have all this potential (we are perfectionist ), we see this perfect solution we will deliver, but deep down we do know that once we actually start — it just does not happen. Its like if we start we know that we will limit our potential because we have to make choices; narrowing down the possible result.

The reason I/we procrastinate is because not doing so means earlier realizing we will not live up to our own high so-believed standards.

To simply tell myself "do the non-perfect thing" might work from time to time, but it doesn't really solve all that much, its just a way to get by.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is me too. I manage to impress other people with what I accomplish, yet feel dissatisfied because my dreams were so much bigger.

I also find it ironic that I own one of Prof Perry's philosophy books (Personal Identity). Bought it 15 years ago, but have yet to get around to reading it!

</comment><comment><USER15> MVP Mantra right there. Don't worry about being perfect just get something out there.

</comment><comment><USER16> I spent a long time imagining posting an astonishingly insightful and erudite comment on this essay, but at the last minute I settled for just posting this.

</comment><comment><USER17> Funny, just three days ago I attended a Master's Thesis info meeting where one of the slides had this exact headline :)

</comment><comment><USER18> Procratinsation is a coping mechanism for perfectionism?

<comment><USER19> I would refer to it as delusional perfectionism. You build up this image of what a great job you are going to do, but well you never end up doing it, until you encounter some outside pressure to just get it done. So that in the end you just get it done and it is most likely no where near perfection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't think this applies for me, even though he says "this is most people". I mean, here's what he's describing:

1\. Recieve task

2\. Create intricate, well-thought-out plan for task

3\. Plan goes awry after banging your head on the wall for 8 hours

4\. Frustration

5\. Time

6\. Do a hackjob near the deadline

Whereas for me, it's

1\. Receive task

2\. I don't want to do this task. Thinking about it scares my brain. It's going to take too long, I'm too stupid, I don't know where to start

3\. HN

Anybody else more on the me side of things?

<comment><USER21> Yes.

I am more of a pragmatist than a perfectionist, so I don't set out to do everything "perfectly" the first time. (Although I suspect the people that know me best would disagree, but regardless, I don't have the thought pattern that this guy is talking about.)

Based on some things I've read recently and observing my own behavior, I've decided that there are two things which will cause me to procrastinate on a task: either the "start cost" is too high, or I don't know how to do it (or how I want to do it).

The first case happens when I know all of how to do a particular thing, but I just don't want to do it. A good recent example of this was spinning up a ground-up web server rebuild and taking notes on the entire thing so that I can automate it later. I know how to do that, I just don't want to. I'd rather go read HN -- or, really, do just about anything else, including the dishes -- so I'll procrastinate indefinitely.

I now keep an eye out for when I start doing this. I have a very simple, small, white lined notepad on my desk, on the very edge of my workspace. If I procrastinate too long, then I start with a clean page on it, and I break my ominous job down into a series of pathetically simple little tasks: "1. Log in to Linode; 2. Order new server; 3. Name new server; 4. Boot new server; ...", and I fill that out while I'm reading something or doing other things. Sometimes I'll take about a day to write something out that way.

Then, I'll be staring at the notepad, I'll see the first line, and I'll think ... huh, that's not so bad. I could do that. I should do that. I think I'll do that. ...OK, that was easy. I guess I should do the next thing too. Before I know it, I've immersed myself in the task and I won't come back up for air again until it's done.

In the other case, where I don't know how to do a particular thing, I've just come to terms with that and I structure my workflow around it. I try not to commit to projects that are too large, or with too many question-marks, or with too tight of a schedule. I'm confident that eventually I'll figure out whatever puzzle it is that I'm stuck on, I just have to give it time, and stressing out and trying to force myself through it won't help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Observations on procrastination:

I only do things like cleaning up around the house, vacuuming, etc. when there is something less pleasant that I'm required to get done. Need to call the insurance agent to work out a billing issue? Suddenly this carpet looks positively filthy.

I'm easily bored and addicted to certain brain chemicals. In interpersonal interaction, I generally lose interest quickly unless it's witty banter. Reddit is obviously a dangerous inhibitor of any productivity for me, then.

Since I'm easily bored, procrastination provides a handy way to create an interesting, high-pressure situation. I can't count the number of times I pulled all-nighters for the most inane school assignments. Usually, I thought I did terribly, yet yielded an acceptable or high score. This payoff feeds back into the excitement for next time.

Disappointment is painful. Truly putting one's best into something -- which turns out to require many times the amount of effort that you imagined -- only to find flaw in it (QA, or teacher grading) leaves one feeling devastated. It's much better to have my hand forced by 'external' factors (time restraint) so that I have an excuse for imperfect results.

<comment><USER23> I was once sitting at a table in a restaurant, eating lunch by myself, when I overheard at a nearby table: "... it's my `N - 1' theory of work: you always work on the second most important thing." It was so true, I burst out laughing.</comment></comment>


Should I give my lawyers equity? - <AUTHOR> http://www.venturehacks.com/articles/lawyer-equity <comment><USER2> The analysis here seems pretty shallow. As in every other deal, one needs to consider what they're offering, and your own position.

In our case, we are equity rich and cash poor. We don't care nearly so much about our share, so long as a great product gets off the ground. We also don't particularly think it's a wise course of action to bargain with a law firm. Especially when one has better things to do.

We're talking about 1% here. Shouldn't you be spending time worrying about your product? Or more cynically, getting a better VC deal?

Lastly, there's the equity equation. If these particular lawyers would improve your prospects for 1.01% over the alternative (other lawyers, or more specifically, over the bargaining process for other lawyers when you should probably just be coding), it should be worth it: more if you're risk averse.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the comment Dani.

When it comes to applying the equity equation, consider the opportunity cost:

<http://venturehacks.com/articles/equity-equation#opportunity>

For example, 1% spent on lawyers is 1% you can't spend on developers.

<comment><USER2> True, but another consideration is that sometimes those optimal deals take long enough to make, they should be factored into said opportunity cost.

Whatever time you're spending hunting and bargaining with lawyers could be, alternately, spent hunting for developers, or hunting for users, or one of any other things. Indeed, the value of the better firms may be far more than worth any 1% investment.

Perhaps a better idiom is that the lawyers are investing in the _company_. They're large enough to qualify for riskier investments open only to institutional investors, so they miss much higher levels of interest than the public. This means that a deferred payment is a significant hit to their bottom line, and should be counter balanced.

Additionally, certain law firms waive their fees unless an initial financing to completes. These firms, in addition to helping you out legally, also can help appreciably in raising the next round, and getting the best deal (for themselves _and_ the founders).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A venture lawyer we know usually puts a warrant on for his firm (DLA Piper), which allows them to invest at the round valuation for up to .1 to 1% of the company.

I generally think that law firms nowadays are really not taking as much a hit by deferring fees, especially the ones in silicon valley who are competing for your business.

<comment><USER3> I wonder what the warrants are priced at? If they're priced low, it is like giving them free equity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Give them bones--they especially like to crush bones to get at the tasty marrow inside.

Oh wait, that's hyenas.

How much value do the lawyers bring to your business, and are the services they're offering specialized, or of the commoditized, cookie-cutter, boilerplate variety?

<comment><USER6> It's a lot like a protection racket. You need lawyers to help protect you from the laws others lawyers have made. You need lawyers to protect you from your competitors' lawyers. You also need lawyers to protect you from random people who know how to take advantage of the litigation system setup by the same lawyers who made the legal system to create more work for lawyers.</comment></comment>


Top Mistakes in Behavior Change - <AUTHOR> http://moonbase.rydia.net/mental/blog/personal-development/top-10-mistakes-in-behavior-change.html

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion on HN concerning the same slides (minus the guys comments): <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2106553>

tldr: start small, don't set bullshit goals, it acually is hard. much harder than you think

<comment><USER3> _"it acually is hard. much harder than you think"_

Actually "assuming that behavior change is difficult" is listed as the tenth mistake.

<comment><USER4> Ah, "It's hard but it can't be difficult"...

Paradoxes like this always frustrated me so I worked-out a more concrete model for these change systems:

You've got "area of behavior" which you've got good conscious control over and where you can plan and work hard. You've got another "another area of behavior" where you don't have much conscious control and you tend to screw-up in.

You want to work hard _within the area you do control_ to create a framework where things are _relatively easy_ for you in the area you _don't control_.

You don't want to just throw a lot of effort at the area you don't control, you don't want to discourage yourself concerning the area you don't control. You want to have clearly understandable goals in the area you don't control.

And so you want the "heavy lifting" to be within the area you do control.

Now, "hard" is for the work in creating your framework. "not difficult" is for the experience you have within the framework.

Make sense?

<comment><USER3> Definitely. I think that it applies to their method too - setting up the triggers and making the behaviour easier is the "hard" part within your control.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The best part is the link to captology at the end. I especially like this video. (I replace "simple" with "easy", because I think it's a better description of what he's talking about.)

<http://vimeo.com/2094487>

The difficulty/easiness of an action has six components: time, money, physical effort, brain cycles, social deviance, and non-routine.

Thus, the overall difficulty/easiness of an action depends on the resource profile of the person performing that action. That profile varies wildly from person to person, as well as according to context. Awareness of your own resource profile is important for self-control, and awareness of other people's resource profiles is important for persuasion.

The captology site also discusses using triggers to tilt the odds in your favor. The most effective variety of trigger depends on both difficulty and motivation level.

<http://captology.stanford.edu/projects/behaviordesign.html>

</comment><comment><USER6> A related BJ Fogg post from 2004 that would be useful for startups, "Ten Ways Computers Manipulate People." The only place I could find it was at archive.org:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20041204095306/http://captology.s...](http://web.archive.org/web/20041204095306/http://captology.stanford.edu/notebook/archives/000078.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> I was hoping this was going to be about UI behavior change.

</comment><comment><USER8> If anyone wants to read a book on behavioral change, try "Switch" by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. It's _sooooo goooood_.

<comment><USER9> Indeed. For me, one of the key takeaways was that to successfully implement lasting change, you must appeal to emotion. Logic is not enough.</comment></comment>


The perils of a table-based layout (open in IE for the full effect) - <AUTHOR> http://www.lowellsun.com/

<comment><USER2> This could just as easily be titled, "The perils of a terrible web developer"

Tools/languages/frameworks don't kill web sites, people do.

<comment><AUTHOR> It took more than one pair of hands to create that. First there was the CMS, with a layout engine written in tables in 2003. Then there were all the developers in between who never did anything about it, because it more or less worked -- and if you look at all the other sites using that CMS ( [http://www.denverpost.com/portlet/layout/html/sitemap/mng_si...](http://www.denverpost.com/portlet/layout/html/sitemap/mng_sitemap.jsp) ) you'll see most of them don't have the same horrific time to render problem. Then there were the users of that CMS, who also use tables to lay out the pages. I think the list goes on.</comment></comment>


500 Startups Is Taking Applications For The First Time by Leveraging AngelList  - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/13/500-startups-angellist/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is really a nice move. Obviously it's intent is to help 500 startup and ensure Dave doesn't miss any nice deals. However, it's a great help for entrepreneurs and founders.

Since AngelList is an agnostic platform, the amount of time an energy you spent on one application can help you with other investment opportunity.

I learnt this the hard way. We recently applied to AngelPad. I really like their small size and watching Scoble's interview with Thomas made me think it was the outfit I wanted to be involved with. That devotion got stronger after talking to AngelPad graduates.

That said, AngelPad promised a 10-day turnaround. Nicely, they soon emailed everyone and explained due to the volume it may take them a bit longer but either way (in or out) they contact you-that was a nice gesture! Now you like them even more. So I spent a lot of my referral capital and time to enhance our chance of getting in. So far we are approaching the two months mark and I have not heard back at all. I do understand they are busy and I'm thinking they are being very diligent and I've emailing them every couple of weeks.

But now seeing what 500 startup has done, I wish everyone would use the same standard. This way, I spent all my energy in building my referrals in one place and I can apply to multiple program. These accelerators/incubators are designed to help founders, so why not use a process like angellist for future application and let founder spent their time an energy once and focus on building product, traction and a business.</comment>


Compile Vim with Python & Ruby support on OSX with Homebrew - <AUTHOR> http://mikegrouchy.com/blog/compile-vim-with-python-on-osx-with-homebrew.html

<comment><USER2> There is a terminal version of Vim inside of MacVim.app at Contents/MacOS/Vim.

<comment><USER3> I like to symlink to MacVim like so: /usr/local/bin/vim -> /usr/local/bin/mvim /usr/local/bin/vimdiff -> /usr/local/bin/mvim

Then put /usr/local/bin higher up in my $PATH. Works like a charm.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is a pain of compiling vim yourself; definitely makes it easier.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm curious. Why do you install Mercurial without Homebrew?

<comment><USER5> Why would you install Mercurial with Homebrew, it is a python package. As a rule, I generally install all python packages with pip.</comment></comment>


Theranos is offering investors Elizabeth Holmes' shares - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/23/theranos-is-offering-investors-elizabeth-holmes-shares-if-they-promise-not-to-sue/ <comment><USER2> So they are basically paying people, in potentially worthless shares, in order to stop being sued. I guess that makes sense because if they are sued then the shares will definitely become worthless. This is a cunning move but I would never accept it as an investor. Why accumulate even more shares in a dodgy company when suing might actually result in real cash you can actually spend.

<comment><USER3> No investor in their right mind will accept this deal. It's a foregone conclusion that Theranos is going under at some stage soon.

As you said, the shares are worth jack shit.

<comment><USER4> Ruport Murdoch just sold $125 million in Theranos shares back to the company for a $1

[http://www.businessinsider.com/rupert-murdoch-sells- theranos...](http://www.businessinsider.com/rupert-murdoch-sells-theranos- stake-2017-3)

<comment><USER2> Strange deal, I would have held out for at least $100. That would at least have paid for a pizza night at home.

<comment><USER4> Tax shelter. Can take it as a loss now against other income.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If the technology doesn't work aren't the shares worth little or nothing? Why bet on the future of the company if there's a cash settlement still possible?

<comment><USER6> Maybe there's a chance the IP is worth something.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. They patented all their 'ideas'. If they could not get them to work with todays tech does not mean that they cannot work in the future. The patents still hold...</comment></comment></comment>


Hacker News Story Pickup Ratio - <AUTHOR> https://hnpickup.appspot.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I know this is a duplicate, but I'm posting it anyway because I recently saw a couple 'AskHN' posts regarding when it's a good time to post. I just figure this is a nice reminder about a great website.</comment>


GradientFlow: Training ImageNet in 1.5 Minutes on 512 GPUs - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.06855 <comment><USER2> The authors trained ResNet-50 in 7.3 minutes at 75.3% accuracy.

As a comparison, a Google TPUv3 pod with 1024 chips got to 75.2% accuracy with ResNet-50 in 1.8 minutes, and 76.2% accuracy in 2.2 minutes with an optimizer change and distributed batch normalization [1].

[1]: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.06992](https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.06992)

<comment><USER3> A TPUv3 pod is ~107 petaflops (Googles number from your paper). 512 Volta GPUs is ~64 petaflops (Nvidias number from [1]).

v3 pods don't seem to be publicly available. A 256 chip 11.5 petaflop v2 pod is $384 per hour, $3.366 million per year. [2]

Meanwhile Google Cloud Volta GPU prices (which are probably inflated over building your own cluster, but are hopefully close enough to a reasonable ballpark) are $1.736 per hour, would be $7.791 million per year for 512.

Unless Google GPU prices are really inflated, clusters are legitimately substantially cheaper than cloud GPUs, or these researchers did a poor job, it seems like this is a good advertisement for TPUs.

[1] [https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/volta-gpu- architect...](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/volta-gpu- architecture/)

[2] Pod availability / performance / pricing information here: [https://cloud.google.com/tpu/](https://cloud.google.com/tpu/)

[3] GPU pricing info: [https://cloud.google.com/gpu/](https://cloud.google.com/gpu/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 512 GPUs on 56 Gbps network? I'd rather see researchers exploring potentially more efficient alternatives to traditional neural nets, like XOR Nets, or different architectures like ngForests or probabilistic and logistic circuits, or maybe listen to Vapnik and invest into general statistical learning efficiency.

<comment><USER5> I have realised that the age of a AI is just a movement of big corporations towards a profitable monopoly.

They are teaching us how to solve problems with hardware instead with algorithms, and we, as individuals, will never have access to their computing power.

<comment><USER6> This is completely wrong.

I work in the field, and the way it works is like this, in this order:

1) Someone works out how to do something

2) Someone works out how to improve the accuracy

3) The accuracy maxes out

4) People improve training efficiency.

We see this over and over again. Take a look at the FastAI results on ImageNet training speed for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For all those complaining about the cost:

FastAI trained RestNet-50 to 93% accuracy in 18 minutes for $48[1] using the same code which can be run on your own GPU machine.

If you want to do it cheaper and faster, you can do the same for in 9 minutes for $12 on Googles (publicaly available) TPUv2s.

This isn't a monopolization of AI, it is the opposite.

[1] [https://dawn.cs.stanford.edu/benchmark/](https://dawn.cs.stanford.edu/benchmark/)

<comment><USER7> Do you have a link to their code?

<comment><USER6> Click the "source" link on the page to go directly to the tagged Git code that got that performance.

<comment><USER7> Thanks. Blew right past the source link first time through before your comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Oh well, this is the death of democratic AI and an end of independent researchers :-( There goes any hope of a single Titan RTX producing meaningful commercial models.

<comment><USER9> Sorry but even tho the big companies produce a lot of interesting research, I challenge you to not find any interesting model trained on a single GPU from recent publications (the majority coming from academia). Actually it's very rare to find a paper where largely distributed training is necessary (i.e: the training would fail or would be unreasonably too long). Yes having more money help you to scale your experiments, it's nothing new and it's not something specific to AI.

<comment><USER8> A trivial example is BERT_large; won't fit into 12/16GB and takes ~year to train from the scratch on a single 15TFlops machine. It's now a base model for transfer learning for NLP.

<comment><USER9> I'm not saying that there's no very big model, just saying that it's a minority of publications, for any trivia example of big model I can show you 10x trivia examples of relevant non-big models.

Also you are talking about a model which is specifically designed for TPU (the dimensionality of the networks is especially fine-tuned).

And even tho, BERT_large still fit in the memory of a single GPU (for very small batch), there is an implementation on Pytorch. I don't understand, are people complaining that Deep Learning is actually (reasonably) scaling ? Isn't it a good news ?

<comment><USER8> You need to study state-of-art a bit more. BERT_large can't reproduce results its authors achieved with TPUs on a Titan V/Tesla P100 as for getting there you need to use substantially larger batch sizes that won't fit into 12/16GB. If you get a V100/Titan RTX, it would fit, but you'd wait ~1 year for a single training session (40 epochs) to finish.

MS already published another model based on BERT that is even better. It's unlikely memory x #GPUs would go down in foreseeable future; it's more like that everybody will start as large models as their infrastructure allows if they find something that improves target metrics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I thought we were optimising for cost now?

</comment><comment><USER11> Why? What deep problems have been solved? How will this make our children better?

</comment><comment><USER12> Silicon is inferior to chemical energy. Human is upwards of thousands of orders of magnitude more efficient than today's best GPU's. However, speed != efficiency. Classifying imageNet with a human would take 1000 hours.

<comment><USER13> On the other hand GPUs are made for computing and will crunch those numbers for you until they die. If you want a human to classify things you have to consider the lifetime cost of making said human and keeping it entertained.

They also need idle periods every day, during which they don't even shut down!

You can't power them with PV cells either, instead they rely on carbohydrates produced via a horribly inefficient chemical photosynthesis process.

And if you intend to let your human classifier run for 8 hours a day you better buy at least three of those for error correction.

And I must say this comparison is still quite lenient towards the humans since we're not even comparing them to purpose made silicon entities but generalists.

<comment><USER14> Matrix begs to difer.</comment></comment></comment>


Vmtouch – Portable file system cache diagnostics and control - old-gregg https://github.com/hoytech/vmtouch <comment><AUTHOR> I think linking to the homepage would've been better. It includes a "What is it good for?" section, as well as examples.

The articles on the vmprobe[1] homepage are also very well written. They present a simple scenario, and talk through it without lots of buzzwords. A bit sad that there's no macOS support.

I just tried using vmtouch on the root of a web project with lots of dependencies. I tried evicting and touching a few times, and it seems to consistently take ~1 second off its startup time. Unfortunately, touching seems to take ~3 seconds.

Does anyone regularly use this in their daily workflow?

[0] [https://hoytech.com/vmtouch/](https://hoytech.com/vmtouch/)

[1] [https://vmprobe.com/](https://vmprobe.com/)

<comment><USER2> Thanks! Ya I'd like to add macOS support at some point to vmprobe, but I'm using a bunch of linux-specific stuff at the moment: mostly pagemap/kpageflags, although also some mmap/madvise flags that are linux extensions. Still, the basic use cases don't need this.

Regarding your web-app, it's possible that you are touching a bunch of files that you don't need to. Rarely-accessed static files, the .git directory, and so on. vmprobe snapshots might help here, or you could figure out which files are used for start-up and just touch those. There's also the -I switch. You might try something like:

      vmtouch -t -I '*.html' -I '*.js' -I '*.css' /var/htdocs/

Also, sometimes it is possible to page in the necessary files before your web- app is started, or concurrently while it's starting (maybe at boot-time, container start, etc). Also, sometimes assets are paged in before the first request is received.

I know of quite a few people and companies that use vmtouch in their daily workflows. vmprobe is still largely experimental at this point though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> vmtouch and vmprobe are both pretty cool utilities. There's an interesting presentation where you can see how it's used: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoBIr9sFCS8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoBIr9sFCS8)

</comment><comment><USER4> Where can I read more about Linux internals? Any good resource with design decisions and algorithms?

<comment><USER2> In terms of virtual memory, there's a somewhat dated book that explains the linux implementation:

[https://www.kernel.org/doc/gorman/pdf/understand.pdf](https://www.kernel.org/doc/gorman/pdf/understand.pdf)

And there are some maintained text files in the kernel source tree itself:

[https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/vm/](https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/vm/)

Of particular interest is the pagemap.txt file.

There's also a really neat utility in the kernel source called page-types and you can learn a lot by compiling it and playing around, and of course reading the source (there are lots of tricks in there):

[http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/tools/vm/page-types.c](http://lxr.free- electrons.com/source/tools/vm/page-types.c)

Finally, you could also read the source to vmtouch or my vmprobe utilities, or ask questions in the vmtouch github repo -- we can probably point you in the right direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Now _this_ is how you write a readme. The first sentence has a clear, concise explanation of what the code is for and why you might care, without a garble of acronyms and abbreviations.

</comment><comment><USER6> Great tools that are very useful for my purpose, installing it now and Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm so happy to have come across this. Had no idea it existed.

</comment><comment><USER2> Hi! I've also been working on another program called vmprobe which does some neat things vmtouch doesn't:

[https://vmprobe.com/](https://vmprobe.com/)</comment>


Web 2.0 is more about toys than anything - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Actually, Facebook generates a great deal of revenue via advertising. That said, I will concede that the ad based Web 2.0 business model has yet to be tested in an economic downturn. This is something that could leave a Web 2.0 company at the whim of unscrupulous hedge fund managers in the public markets. If their revenue proves to be susceptible to downturns, it will be a less than happy time for Bay area employees. Still, perhaps these companies will be able to come up with a new revenue generating product line. I know that most Web 2.0 entrepreneurs can trot out a list of other "business models" a mile long. However, the issue with them is that they generate revenue in the millions in 'best case' scenarios. What the markets would be looking for is revenue in the hundreds of millions, or billions. At a MINIMUM tens of millions in the 'worst case' scenarios.

I think that Facebook has the best chance of ALL of the Web 2.0 sites to make a run at the public markets. Maybe they can charge the users for access later. Or perhaps they can charge all of the developers for access to the platform API. Maybe they will make contracts with advertisers that span YEARS while the internet ad boom is hot. That way they will still have money to get them through to the next ad boom. There are a lot of things they could do.

<comment><USER2> OK . . . I got one.

Maybe Facebook is even more clever than I gave them credit for. What if they use the platform to stage different features, all implemented by different companies, and some of these companies are WILDLY successful in charging a price for their product. Facebook could buy these companies or replicate the services and boom, they have another revenue line.

Shady, but it works.

<comment><USER3> Most Facebook users are students, so how can you expect them to shell out cash for products or services?

If Facebook ads don't result in more sales, advertisers will give up on Facebook eventually.

<comment><USER4> Well, students are a great market for the credit card industry, so they must be spending that money SOMEWHERE.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Facebook will go the route of myspace will go the route of friendster will go the route of Yahoo! Geocities. That's the problem. Throw them away, and a million clones will fight for their place. Meanwhile, Proctor and Gamble still sells rendered hogfat for billions a year.

</comment><comment><USER6> Counterpoint: 37Signals (and their products)

<comment><AUTHOR> this is an effing retarded counterpoint. Boy are their biz model scalable to hundreds of millions.

<comment><USER6> You asked for a scalable business model, they have one. They're profitable and they are more than likely breaking a million or two in earnings already.

If you aren't interested in an intelligent conversation, go read digg.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Blogga, PLEASE. You know that's not true.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I have yet to see any true ipo-able web business to appear so far. When i mean truly ipo-able, i mean it has a REAL business model and one that can scale to billions. Something like Paypal or Ebay. Let's face it, Youtube, Facebook are all toys. They have eyeballs but no scalable business model. The best hope i've seen so far is Prosper.com. It doesn't have the massive eyeballs yet but hey, at least their biz model is scalable.

Does this mean that all the good billion-dollar ipo-able web ideas have been taken up? Is this it?

<comment><USER8> You're worrying too much about respect a company gets. It's not about that.

If a company makes a billion dollars selling retarded pink web2.0 bunnies while you built high power laser communication systems and made one tenth that -- as a company, they have won.

<comment><AUTHOR> Who is talking about respect here? I'm talking about biz models!

Most web 2.0 co. are based on advertising revenue.

<comment><USER8> There are ad based companies that make far more income than non-ad based.

I've come to the conclusion that advertisers and many websites can get far more money out of people than either can individually. I don't like it either, but that's how it seems to be working.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. It would be nice to see some actual numbers.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


They Write the Right Stuff - <AUTHOR> http://m.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

<comment><AUTHOR> While I am happy that bot every program needs 40 000 pages og written docs to be signed off there is sone very interesting observations here.</comment>


App loyalty needs to stop so we get better apps - <AUTHOR> http://youscare.me/post/93343088034/app-loyalty-needs-to-stop-so-we-get-better-apps

<comment><USER2> Very few apps post an entirely new application entry when they update to a new major version. When you go to Twitter's developer page, you see "Twitter", not "Twitter 1.0, Twitter 2.0..."

I'm really not sure what this is asking us to do, if an app isn't getting additional financial support when it updates to a new major version, then I'm not sure what pressure there is if people start moving away. Is it (to borrow from my earlier example) "stop using Twitter entirely" or "use a different Twitter app?"

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm actually more than happy to pay for a new version (e.g. TweetBot 2), but I'm more referring to big company apps where there are funds and not indie devs.

<comment><USER2> I am too, but the opportunity to do so is rather rare. I can't think of any instances I've personally encountered.</comment></comment></comment>


Do grad school students remember everything they were taught in college? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Learning/Do-grad-school-students-remember-everything-they-were-taught-in-college-all-the-time

<comment><USER2> I studied at a university and not at a college, but I don't remember half of it.

But I think the core of this education is to get shit done without help. When I started I felt lost, because everyone was like "yeah... if you want to come to lecture do it, and if not don't, I don't care"

So I started and failed horribly.

The first year was a PITA, but eventually some students get it figured out and do their thing.</comment>


The amazing & powerful things I learned from The Personal MBA (notes) - <AUTHOR> http://www.zacharyburt.com/2011/01/the-amazing-and-powerful-things-i-learned-from-josh-kaufmans-book-the-personal-mba-notes/ <comment><USER2> Instead of reading the notes I would scroll to the bottom of the page and click the "AwesomenessReminders" ad (Zack's idea that has been discussed on HN before) and let that idea kick you in the butt. When crazy ideas like that work, that is what I call learning something powerful.

<comment><USER3> being paid $45 per month per customer would certainly tell me I'm awesome just by itself! :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm the author. Glad you found the book useful, Zachary!

</comment><comment><USER5> So this is a meta meta source. A summary about a book about a 2 year degree.

Still worth a quick read.</comment>


Flutter – My Thoughts and Impressions – PART III – FlutterPub – Medium - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/flutterpub/flutter-my-thoughts-and-impressions-part-iii-4e3c9584156a <comment><USER2> I like these articles where iOS devs try out Flutter, because given its origins, the framework almost feels like it'd be Android-first. React Native has a reputation for being better with iOS, for whatever reason, and it'd be good if any new cross-platform solutions avoids having a bias for either.</comment>


Can I procedurally change my website style without affecting PageRank? - <AUTHOR>

Hey folks,<p>I have an ugly, but old personal web page. I'm thinking  of writing some code that would procedurally create snazzy styles, perhaps even changing the style every day. Do you have any idea whether this would decrease my Google PageRank? <comment><USER2> PageRank is more about content than style.

Additionally, PR doesn't really have any value by itself, it's only marginally interesting if you're trying to pass links/SEO credit on to another site.

What's most important is where you rank for given terms you want to be found when searched on. I've seen many cases where a page with a rank of 2 outranks a page with a rank of 6 for the same term because the PR2 site is deemed to have better content for that given term.

So, as long as the content stays relatively the same from a bot perspective, your fancy styles will be happily ignored.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you're changing the style by CSS (as you should be) then really the content shouldn't be affected, unless you're changing the actual structure.

I've never really seen the point in PR tbh, as far as I know it isn't much representation of how many hits you'll get from Google (and that's dependant on keywords anyway).</comment>


Homeconf: replicating the conference experience at home - <AUTHOR> http://markos.gaivo.net/articles/homeconf.html <comment><USER2> The idea of blocking out a full day [or two?] to watch conference videos is interesting. It's something I would struggle to give myself permission to do.</comment>


Microsoft ups revenue share for developers in the online Store to 95% - <AUTHOR> https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-ups-revenue-share-for-developers-in-the-online-store-to-95 <comment><USER2> To be clear (the headline isn't), a maximum of 95%. If you find an app in the Microsoft Store you're getting 85%. But for developers pushing people to install right from their own website, it's 95%.

So Microsoft gets a larger cut if they helped your app get discovered, which makes sense, and Microsoft always gets a small cut in general, which makes sense to cover distribution costs.

Given that neither Apple nor Google have really budged on the "we'll take one third" approach of app markets, this is kinda a big deal, though of course, since each one markets to it's own platform, this isn't really "price competition" in the strictest sense.

I saw a Reddit post asking if anyone had actually made any money on UWP yesterday, so, you know, this should help.

<comment><USER3> Honestly do not see it changing anything. It will continue to be all about the Apple and Google app stores. Too late.

<comment><USER2> As noted: They aren't really competing since the Microsoft Store runs of Windows devices and the Play Store runs on Android devices and the like. But whereas Google is fleecing you for a third of your income, Microsoft is being far more generous. Take that for what you will.

Obviously Microsoft won't see a huge surge of activity in their store as long as Windows 7 is still supported (which means developers are writing legacy apps).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Too late. That should have been done with Windows Phone Store launch. And also no killing this OS where it sold (Europe) would have been nice to keep a reason for using it in the first place.

<comment><USER5> Actually not having windows phone makes things easier. Developers only need to care about desktop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this is great news and something I've been pushing for for a long time. Sure adoption of Windows Store apps are pretty low now and it's incredibly hard to earn any money on them, but at least it's not impossible now like it was before with MS taking such a big cut.

Maybe this is enough that some hobbyist start putting some more effort into developing for the platform, which actually is quite nice.

</comment><comment><USER7> How much is 85% of nothing?</comment>


Y Combinator: Winter 2014 Funding - <AUTHOR> http://ycombinator.com/apply.html? <comment><USER2> I read this excellent answer on Quora by Harjeet Tagar on whether or not YC would fund a startup that competes with one of its portfolio companies: [https://www.quora.com/Y-Combinator/Is-it-worth-applying- to-Y...](https://www.quora.com/Y-Combinator/Is-it-worth-applying-to-YC-if-YC- has-already-funded-a-startup-that-has-a-similar-vision-i-e-a-competitor)

Curious if people here would still apply if they knew a competitor was accepted in a previous batch.

</comment><comment><USER3> When and why did the funding of companies decreased significantly? Last year it was sill 80k. I assume this $10k is enough to survive for 3 months and after that if the outcome is positive, a next serious round will be introduced.

[http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/08/y-combinator-opens-new- clas...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/08/y-combinator-opens-new-class-as- average-funding-amount-raised-grows-to-3-18m-around-1-5b-total/)

<comment><USER4> That was between S12 and W13:

[http://ycombinator.com/w13smaller.html](http://ycombinator.com/w13smaller.html)

I can't find the source for the cut in extra VC funding but it was around the same time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What was the age of oldest person you accepted as founder? What is the preferred age group?

Do you accept husband-wife as founding team? Have you accepted any such teams in the past?

What if the founders don't need money? They only want to be part of the program for experience, expertise, and networking?

<comment><USER6> There were at least three husband-wife teams in our W13 batch, including ours (Lollipuff). There are also at least three couples (pre-marriage during YC, one just recently married). Multiple groups with families (spouses / children) too.</comment></comment>


Strike for physics funding - <AUTHOR>

So many good software engineers I know are way more interested and talented in physics than they are in software.  Yet, the money is here in software.   But software seems so obvious, it's always just the next single thing, to create a new login script that's five chars less than the previous.  And so un-inventive in a way.  Physics however is its own completely undiscovered realm, with potential beyond our imagination.  Is there a way to "strike" to pursue our dreams, without having to live on the streets to do so? <comment> T-A This strikes me as rather uninformed. Physics is far from a completely undiscovered realm. The standard model of particle physics (completed by the mid-70s) + general relativity (ca 1915) fits every experiment ever performed. Unexplained astronomical observations can be accommodated by additions which, while phenomenologically important, add nothing conceptually new. The remaining Holy Grail, quantum gravity, suffers no lack of proposed solutions; what it really does suffer from is a lack of ways to test any of them.

The sad reality of "fundamental" physics is, and has been for decades, that there is really very little that is both doable and worth doing. If somebody were to dump a Genius grant on me today, with the only condition being "work on whatever you want in physics for the next 5 years"... I would feel compelled to give it back. Because I really don't see anything sufficiently promising or interesting in physics that I would be willing to dedicate the next 5 years to it. (All those people you see screaming for more physics funding? What they are really screaming for is their "right" to keep comfortable upper middle class lifestyles, funded by the tax payers, in exchange for nothing of any value.)

Now compare that to what is going on in software. If "new login scripts" is the most interesting thing you can think of, you really need to broaden your horizons. Just look at the last few years of very rapid progress in deep learning. There is nothing comparable going on in physics. Things like thought vectors are giving me vertigo - my old skepticism about the feasibility of general AI has been seriously dented lately. Problems which once looked completely intractable suddenly look easy, and you start wondering how many more surprises are just around the corner, and how many - or rather few - years it might really take to get there.

And the potential? Suppose you managed to write down the ultimate, complete, fully quantized, elegantly unified, simple, concise, true Theory of Everything. There it is, an exquisite formula on a sheet of paper. It summarizes everything we know about physics. Everything around us follows from it. Wonderful. But... what do you do with it? Sure, stare at it, marvel at its ingenuity and the centuries of concerted effort needed to get there... but then what? How long can you stare at a sheet of paper and marvel at the history and elegance of an equation before it gets a little... old?

Now compare what AI, even just the narrow kinds emerging right now, can do, and the potential of true general AI. Now that would - will - obviously change the world.

<comment><USER3> And you think deep learning isn't physics? How much RG did you study in grad school?

More importantly, many "fundamental" questions about mathematical physics will soon get to be resolved through tabletop type experiments. AdS/CFT type methods led to the first analytical proof of Bethe ansatz results I've ever seen that made me sit up and take notice of that field (BA, not AdS/CFT).

It disappoints me that on pressing issues of our time like climate change, APS can't seem to get its shit together and take a stand. This may be a symptom of what you are saying, the best and the brightest are going to the fields you describe and taking the power and the klieg lights with them.

PS: And where the dickens do you think belief propagation came from - <USER2> certainly first heard about it from statistical physicists. To treat deep learning in a divorced manner as you are is like saying oh, I'm too lazy to learn how the foundations of my house are mortared, I just want to rearrange the furniture in the solarium.

<comment> T-A To establish in a semi-rigorous way the (btw obvious) relationship between coarsening in physics and in stacked neural networks, as was done long after the latter became a thing [1][2], is at the same level as observing the analogy between Black-Scholes and diffusion. It's cute, but it does not turn the subject into physics.

It should go without saying that you can not, by definition, resolve fundamental questions about _mathematical_ physics by experiment.

The APS took a stand on climate change years ago [3]. It was clear enough to make Harold Lewis [4] and Ivar Glaever [5] resign in protest.

P.S. Belief propagation was first proposed by Judea Pearl in 1982 [6]. The closest connection to physics one could realistically claim is that Pearl got a M.Sc. in physics before turning (back) to electrical engineering and then AI.

[1] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.3124](http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.3124)

[2] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.3831](http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.3831)

[3] [http://www.aps.org/policy/statements/climate/](http://www.aps.org/policy/statements/climate/)

[4] [http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/15/a-physicists- cl...](http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/15/a-physicists-climate- complaints/?_r=0)

[5] [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/climatecha...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/climatechange/8786565/War- of-words-over-global-warming-as-Nobel-laureate-resigns-in-protest.html)

[6] [https://www.aaai.org/Papers/AAAI/1982/AAAI82-032.pdf](https://www.aaai.org/Papers/AAAI/1982/AAAI82-032.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Some good points, but you refused to address my Bethe Ansatz comment (cf. [http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.5055](http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.5055), [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-theory_(physics)#Reconciling...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-theory_\(physics\)#Reconciling_twisted_K- theory_and_S-duality))

and in any case, I recall Schwinger resigning from the APS over cold fusion. Doesn't make cold fusion right.

Also I didn't realize the ground state of the Hubbard model wasn't mathematical physics? Spin liquids aren't mathematical physics? This is the same old story where people like des Cloizeaux and Pearson discovered bosonization and helped establish the long tradition of condensed matter people studying the Heisenberg model and making useful contributions to "high energy" physics and basically get ignored

In the end my point is that you loved the idea of changing the world more than you loved physics. There's nothing wrong with that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Physics major here building login validation as you do. I have to say I miss Phys but there is no way for me to going back. Once your living standard is high. You can't afford to lose it for a phD student allowance. My dream now is just to make a lot of money in this tech bubble and educate my kids to be incredible scientists without worrying about money. As for me, I will just try to forget about it.

Don't say there is nothing to be discovered in physics, please you are just making yourself less academic intelligent as you might have sound.</comment>


Building a web scale semantic image search. Anyone wants to hack with me? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@deepmike/hacking-on-semantic-image-search-f8e4ca55278b <comment><USER2> Why did you take the link down?</comment>


Wrote a small web app, would love feedback - <AUTHOR> http://ridity.com/

<comment><USER2> I would love to see a "How it works" section on the landing page. I know there's a "Sample" section, but that just lists an entry after it was created. I'd like to see how the entry was created using the app.

Also, have you looked at this app: <http://www.everytrail.com/iphone.php>

</comment><comment><USER3> The site design is nice, although the use of hash-urls for things like the login URL is mildly irritating... especially if it doesn't work with Chrome autofill.

Showing the workflow is key. I'm a RunKeeper user; do I use this on my phone like RK, or need to enter routes? Can I choose common routes that other users have put in?

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not a rider, but I like the elevation map in the example. Nice feature.</comment>


Apple dropping Intel as radio chip supplier, killing off the product – report - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2018/07/05/apple-radio-chips-intel/ <comment><USER2> Apple really used Intel well. They used them to squeeze a better deal from QC then pitted them against each other if frivolous lawsuits to get even better terms and then dumped Intel after using and abusing it. The only thing left for Intel is to the walk of shame.

</comment><comment><USER3> The writing is on the wall. Apple will use an in-house developed solution to cut out and integrate another chip into their A-series processors. Just like they did with their GPU from imagination technology last year...

</comment><comment><USER4> Well, this sucks for Germany. Intel's GSM radio division is formerly Infineon, AFAIK still located in Germany. There wasn't much state of the art microelectronics left in Germany anyway (correct me?).

<comment><USER5> Depends on what you call "State of the art"? Cutting edge logic processes are a domain of Intel, TSMC, Samsung, GF and the incumbents in China.

But for everything else, like IoT, Sensors, Power, you can find plenty of companies and subsidiaries in Germany: Infineon, Bosch, GlobalFoundries, NXP, Dialog, Elmos, Melexis, Xfab, AMS, IDT (ZMDi), TI, Intel, TDK (Micronas) and many smaller ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Assuming the design of next gen modem from Intel are done on 10nm, which is highly likely so, it shouldnt be surprise Intel will fail to deliver it on time.

Given Intel had precisely one customer to serve and failed to meet their demand, I highly doubt Intel will win back whatever they loss.

I also doubt Apple "used" Intel, more like given an opportunity to Intel. Which they really need to get into the 4G/5G value chain. I hope Apple has back ported their latest 4G design to 14nm+++.

Things are looking very ugly.

</comment><comment><USER7> This seems to explain the rumors of Apple supposedly moving Macs away from Intel better than that rumor, which doesn't really make sense, certainly not on the timescale of 2020. If supply chain orders to Intel declined, it makes much more sense if it was for radio chip orders than CPUs.

</comment><comment><USER8> When the Intel based modems first launched a couple years ago there were tons of reports of worse performance. Unfortunately, I ended up getting one of those phones -- pretty confident it was worse than the qualcomm based versions. So, it does worry me that Apple will in the process of developing their own solution repeat some of the same mistakes Intel and Qualcomm (probably years ago) made and we will have a couple of years of slightly worse modems in our phones.. so not looking forward to that..

</comment><comment><USER9> They never had a competitive product. Look at any of the head to head reviews of the QC vs intel radios.

Anecdotally, my intel modem equipped iphone has worse signal performance than any phone i've owned in the past 10 years, pretty much.

</comment><comment><USER10> So what are the other brands using? It also sounds kind of unlikely Apple would go all-in on their own design without a backup plan.

</comment><comment><USER11> Any guesses on if this was the proposed "real reason" behind the CEO's recent departure?

<comment><USER12> This is a fairly small failure by Intel's standards. The 10 nm fiasco is far larger.

<comment><USER13> Been wondering if this is on purpose. Internally they know 10nm is gonna be the last process step and they need to milk each generation as long as possible/stall until new wondertech.

<comment><USER12> Intel isn't even following their own roadmaps (even the watered-down PAO). If it was planned, they'd at least make it look less embarrassing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Intel has gone to shit. I'd be happy to see laptop mfgs stop using their awful wifi radios as well.

</comment><comment><USER15> The decline has begun. It will soon be time for Intel to shut shop.

<comment><USER16> I mean, they missed a few trends and are having some scaling issues on their next generation of transistors but they made like $60 billion in revenue last year and the company is worth ~$240 billion. I _think_ they're going to be around for a few more years.

<comment><USER17> The taller they stand, the harder they fall.

<comment><USER18> No, actually. In tech, the typical path of a failed giant is slow decline for a while, a few wild gyrations, and finally patent trolling and brand necrophilia.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Server Security - <AUTHOR> https://keybase.io/docs/server_security <comment><AUTHOR> Hey mods editing this post — this isn't a general article about server security, this is a _specific_ article about "Keybase.io's Server Security", which was the original, more appropriate, more useful, title. Why fix what ain't broke?

<comment><USER2> Based on the lack of human sensibilities, it could be a robot implemented by someone who believed the heuristic was acceptable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> So here's how I would make a Keybase.io that is resistant to server compromise.

1\. don't store private keys (of users). 2. distribute the organization around the globe; different datacenters, different states/countries, different peers/service providers. 3. use different infrastructure, hardware/software, hardened, with tripwires. 4. make your clients auth all the sources, with a minimum of N/3 valid, identical responses from distinct parts of the network. 5. implement the rest of the service's functionality as described in the post.

As long as you have a shit-ton of distributed locations you can survive internet outages, state actor intervention, service provider compromise and server compromise. It would all have to be highly available mesh network, of course, but it's feasible and should be pretty low on resource use as it's just public keys you're copying around.

<comment><USER4> Yes, you can architect a system that's more difficult to compromise or knock offline, but a better solution would be to remove the need to trust the server or to have it constantly online. To their credit, the Keybase guys have done this - their client fetches information about a user from the Keybase server, but performs the verifications itself and deposits the public key into your PGP keyring if successful. Once that's done, you don't need Kebase at all in order to communicate with that person securely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wouldn't a server compromise allow someone to "lie" to the web client only, while continuing to give correct answers to the standalone client? Seems like that would be very difficult to catch.

(or, just hack the web client so it lies, independent of what it actually sees from the server)

Server compromise wouldn't even need to take place on the server itself.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm really enthusiastic about Keybase and am hopeful that it will succeed where others have failed to push mainstream adoption of PGP.

I've been trying to think of innovative applications of the Keybase API [1], which exposes much (most?) of the functionality available via the command line client.

I've got a few vague projects in mind but would love to hear more ideas. I've got a few Keybase invites left and will give them while they last to anyone who proposes an interesting use of the API, as long as Keybase doesn't object to this type of "contest" [2].

1\. [https://keybase.io/docs/api/1.0](https://keybase.io/docs/api/1.0)

2\. maxtaco and malgorithms, please let me know if that's an inappropriate use of the invites and I'll rescind the offer.

<comment><USER7> Totally appropriate. I should say that we don't really want to be in the business of building general crypto apps ourselves, but Keybase identity proofs can make a bunch of things possible. Anything from financial transactions (send a BTC to twitter user X and know it's going to an address they control) to data access (let Keybase/github/twitter user Y access this server/file/whatever). The idea here is that any app can (1) ask Keybase for a user's key and identity proofs, and then (2) verify it all.

The API is not done, btw. If another call is needed, and you're really serious about building it, we will expand the API.

<comment><USER6> >send a BTC to twitter user X

Exactly. I've had my eye on Keybase issue #218 [1], and I'm hoping that you all will provide a way for users to provide a confirmed Bitcoin payment address.

You could just generate a unique message for the user to sign with the address using their Bitcoin client. Most bitcoin-qt and most other GUIs even have a menu option now for signing, so it should be easy for users to do.

To preserve privacy, a user could even post a stealth address, to the extent that stealth addresses are supported in the user's client software. Most clients aren't there yet, but I think more will start supporting stealth addresses this year.

1\. [https://github.com/keybase/keybase- issues/issues/218](https://github.com/keybase/keybase-issues/issues/218)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love Keybase and the possibilities are endless with it. I've already started working on an end-to-end, encrypted filesharing app utilising the keybase API and I've got 2-3 ideas for other apps already. It's amazing what having easy access to PGP can do.

I think the biggest nut to crack is going to be making the onboarding process as simple as signing up for an email account. I dream of a day where the majority of people have PGP keys and while I think keybase's signup flow was straightforward, I can see how it would be very confusing for an average computer user.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why not use Oauth to verify someone on Twitter instead of having someone post a tweet?

How many people are automatically logged in?

The only thing is that you would see the keybase message that you didn't send but it is Twitter and most people don't look back on their recent tweets.

<comment><USER10> Tweets can be seen publicly, unlike OAuth connections. This is true for the other Keybase proofs too.

<comment><USER7> yes, the premise here is that the Keybase server can be caught lying. If you want twitter user X's public key, Keybase can tell you the key and which tweet to look at to verify it. Then you can check it yourself. OAuth doesn't allow this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> did anyone think there ought to be a similar way to hash-chain all the /etc files on a server - a 'tripwire' approach (hmmm, I seem to remember tripwire doing hashes but not as a chain)

</comment><comment><USER12> For the untrained eye, this looks like a partial implementation of a Bitcoin blockchain, just without the proof-of-work. Or like a git repository without forking.

Am I right or did I pick up something wrong?

<comment><USER13> It's more like Git where the latest action is linked to all previous action + data is organized in a tree so any piece can be efficiently demonstrated as a part of the trusted whole (via a merkle branch).

<comment><USER7> Yes; here's a tl;dr: for a given user, all of their signatures form a chain of signed statements, where each one points at the previous statement. They don't have to be the same kind of statement: your identity proofs, your tracker statements, etc.

And then each user's chain is itself pointed at in a leaf node of the signed merkle tree. (The tree is signed by Keybase).

So you as a client can verify any individual's personal signature chain, and you can verify Keybase's merkle tree. Finally, and this is the more subtle connection, each user's signature chain has statements about the merkle tree itself, so you can verify all these users are seeing the same Keybase-signed merkle tree.</comment></comment></comment>


Introducing Deploy Previews in Netlify - <AUTHOR> https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/07/20/introducing-deploy-previews <comment><USER2> being able to see pull requests deployed live without compromising production changed drastically the way we work as a team and we build our front-end applications. I can't wait to get other people's feedback.</comment>