Study: Developing and Testing a Scale to Measure Need for Drama - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886915006327 <comment><USER2> I pictured a man, standing on a physical scale, with an analog arrow indicator swaying back and forth, gradually settling on the bold black words: NO DRAMA

</comment><comment><USER3> Can't read the full article for free, but I expect their measurement techniques are tautological. It's the reification fallacy -- create a measurement, redefine the term as that measurement, then conflate the measurement with the original meaning of the term.

<comment><USER4> To be sure, there are two steps in their process: convince you their assessment is a valid reflection of the construct (term) of interest, and then examine different properties of the assessment (e.g. how reliable are a person's responses to this assessment). The convince you part is why it is not necessarily the reification fallacy.

For example, suppose I create a measure of sadness that is the sole question: are you sad?. Does it seem like a good measure of the term sadness to you? If you think it's a bad measure,then I haven't convinced you, and we need to rethink a more convincing assessment, but it doesn't mean that if I use that question to operationalize (serve as my behavioral definition for) sadness that I committed the reification fallacy. Instead, you've failed to recognize that I'm using an argument of the form, "if you believe this is a good behavioral definition of sadness, then...".

If you could ever see yourself using a statment like "that person is sad", then there are probably observables I could use to do research based on what sadness means to you. That's basically the logic these and many researchers in psychology / neuroscience are taking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ah, this seems very interesting, but I am sadly not sure I would pay $35.95 for access.

<comment><USER6> Full Article: [http://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/01/Fran...](http://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/01/Frankowski-et-al.-2016.pdf)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there an open-source alternative to the AP Stylebook? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Judging by this article

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

it looks like the closest thing to an open, participatory style guide might just be Wikipedia's Manual of Style,

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style</comment>


Disney researchers made an app that turn drawings into 3D characters - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWzurBQ81CM <comment><USER2> This is absolutely mind-blowing! I'm looking forward to reading the paper they published.

<comment><USER3> This may be obvious to some, but the software already knows what's on the colouring book page. It has a predefined model of the character, so it just applies a texture mapping algorithm (with some guessing to colour the back side of the character).

<comment><USER2> I actually just started reading the abstract and let out a deep sigh. It's still impressive but no longer mind-blowing unfortunately.

<comment><USER3> Maybe TEDDY from a few years ago is more like what you're looking for: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=e2H35SlLmUA](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=e2H35SlLmUA)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Local microbiologist weighs in on advice from longtime coronavirus expert - <AUTHOR> https://wlos.com/news/local/local-microbiologist-weighs-in-on-advice-from-longtime-corona-virus-expert <comment><AUTHOR> The microbiologist is James Robb.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Robb_(pathologist)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Robb_\(pathologist\))

Also, Snopes agrees his circulated email is legit:

[https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/zinc-lozenges- coronavirus/](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/zinc-lozenges-coronavirus/)</comment>


The science of Westworld - <AUTHOR> https://blog.plan99.net/the-science-of-westworld-ec624585e47#.th6i2yuzb <comment><USER2> I really enjoyed westworld and found the coverage of ai amazingly not stupid as opposed to most other sci-fi shows.

However the biggest idea in the show was the relationship between god (Anthony Hopkins), self (the robots) and consciousness as an extension of inner conversation.

I had to look up the idea:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_\(psychology\))

<comment><USER3> >coverage of ai amazingly not stupid as opposed to most other sci-fi shows

If they were capable of that level of AI they would have reached exponential growth shortly - to suggest someone would use it to build theme parks is downright retarded.

Like you said - AI is a plot device in that show, just another form of "magic" that lets them ramble on about consciousness while pretending to be sciency.

<comment><USER4> Why would a robot inherently want to make a better robot, or change itself?

<comment><USER5> I love "stupid" questions like this.

We can say that the vast majority of living beings on Earth do not seem to seek any form of radical self improvement beyond ordinary developmental learning and mastery of survival skills. There is no intrinsic reason that there must be an impulse to exceed oneself. Why would AI be different?

<comment><USER6> Why indeed would an AIs motivations even be comprehensible to us.

<comment><USER7> Because an AI would be created by humans, and would therefore be modeled after human intelligence.

An alien AI, on the other hand, would most likely be incomprehensible to us, at least until we understood the aliens that created it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > This sort of "escape hack" isn't possible for human players because you have > to do too many precise actions too quickly, so in the video it's performed > by a separate computer wired up to the gameport.

Well, someone did the credits warp manually, at least: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxFh1CJOrTU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxFh1CJOrTU)

The video in the article shows basically shellcode injection, but that's not timing-sensitive, it'd just take longer for a human. And, as seen above, similar things _are_ possible for humans, if just less convenient to do so.

<comment><USER9> > The video in the article shows basically shellcode injection, but that's not > timing-sensitive, it'd just take longer for a human. And, as seen above, > similar things are possible for humans, if just less convenient to do so.

Wow that just gave me an idea for a story. Humans found out they are mere pawns in a simulated reality, discovered a 'hack' to alter reality, but the 'hack' would take hundreds of years to complete. So generations of humans toiled over at completing the 'hack', passing the baton through each generation.

There could be so many possible storylines from this - corruption/destruction of reality, dictator wanting to change the past, or a cult hell-bent on changing reality, or sorcerers practicing 'magic', or a lone protagonist who's on the verge of completing that hack after hundreds of years, but suffer from ethical conflict and existential crisis.

<comment><USER10> Check out Off to be a Wizard. You will enjoy it.

<comment><USER9> Sweet! Thanks I'll check it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Lily is a swan. Lily is white. Bernhard is green. Greg is a swan." -> "What color is Greg? Answer: white"

At the risk of sounding somewhat stupid, but shouldn't this contain "Swans are white" for it to be a correct answer?

<comment><USER12> If we're limiting ourselves to deductive reasoning, then yes – the facts as stated do not give enough information to deduce that Greg must be white.

If instead we use abductive inference, we might seek the simplest and most likely explanation given our universe of observations. Sherlock Holmes was a big fan of abduction!

Much of real-world reasoning is abductive to a greater or lesser extent. There is a well-known joke about some motley band of engineers, logicians, mathematicians, statisticians, etc etc catching a train through the Highlands. They see a black sheep, the engineer says "look, all sheep in Scotland are black!", the statistician says "no, you can't say that – just that MOST sheep in Scotland are black", another says "no, we can only say that at least ONE sheep is black", another says "no, it's only black on at least one side", then the one you're stuck next to at the party says "you're all wrong, we can only say that at least one sheep in Scotland is black on at least one side at least some of the time". The last statement is fully deductive; the rest of them are abductive, and more-or-less useful.

<comment><USER13> This is why I think the ability to ask good questions is a better indication of understanding and intelligence than the ability to generate answers.

As a gauge for how far we are from AI you can consider what sort of modeling capacity is required until an AI can ask, when presented with such a sequence: "What country is the swan from?" or, even more impressively: "Do you know where this took place and what country the swan's parents were from?" For the first question it would then _abduce_ a color. Same for the second but perhaps it could include probabilities based on estimated number of each color and the genetics of swan color.

This post is a rotation meant to provide a better sense of scale for the problem at hand.

<comment><USER12> > This is why I think the ability to ask good questions is a better indication > of understanding and intelligence than the ability to generate answers.

Certainly! Synthesis rather than reformatting (or, more commonly, regurgitation). Analysis and abduction are more than just "put it in your own words". More useful too.

There is something of a rush on at the moment to generate chat-bots to replace FAQs. Every Slack/Fleep/Blern/Crank channel appears to have five or six memoisation bots. Seems to be largely a solved problem!

When we can start having bots that can be sensibly interrogated for a summary (or even a "hey, you've been away for several hours: here's the key points"), we can finally abandon the chatrooms and let the generative bots flood them with abductive content, and the precis bots can then ping you every couple of weeks when something important comes up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Westworld reminded me a bit of Asimovs stories.

Coupling the whole robotics and AI thing. In Asimovs stories they first built the robots, which get smarter and smarter, but this is not how reality worked. Robots are rather specialized and most AI/automation we have today is about data, which is virtual.

They're all like, lets build a robot, then make it intelligent, but it should also move like a human, oh and why not replace their internals with life-like organs?

It's like they make a run through all science and engineering in about 30 years of development and pretend it's mostly the work of one master mind, which is ridicioulus. The whole "technical" side of Westworld is trash.

It's more a philosophical story than technical or psychological, with a few deus ex machina to get the ball rolling.

<comment><USER15> > Westworld reminded me a bit of Asimovs stories.

I suspect this isn't an accident, given (some of) the same writers/producers are developing the Foundation series for HBO. There are MANY Asimovian themes scattered throughout the series, and even a few things I'm reasonably certain are direct references. (Ex: "Someday".)

> It's more a philosophical story than technical or psychological

And that's why I enjoyed it. My favorite science fiction always fits that description, especially if the big philosophical question comes around for technical reasons. (Such as in "The Cold Equations.") That, and the first season was very much a complete story. They could stop here and I'd be happy with it.

The series had its flaws, but I'm very optimistic if this is the shape of TV scifi to come. Even if it's all adaptations or of a derivative form.

<comment><USER14> I don't know... I think it's a nice show and the story telling is really awesome and the philosophical questions and their answers are really interesting.

But the rest feels a bit... meh.

The charaters don't have any depth.

Bernard and Ford had the most, but the rest?

The Maeve story-line was utter crap and the people around it wer basically imbecills, Maeve included.

William had something going on for him and when everything got together I was blown away, but only for a moment because some of the story telling puzzles were solved and not because he is a good character, his development is simply implausible.

Teddy is just... empty?

Dolores was okay, but since the whole story was about her uncovering her past and with it her personality, it took the show till the end of the season till she got some depth.

The scifi aspect is also minimal and basically a huge plothole, it's more fantasy to me.

<comment><USER16> _Spoilers if you haven 't watched._

The tech I can deal with, because they don't even try to explain it, and there was a nice moment where Maeve goes bonkers when confronted by the fact that she doesn't really have free will.

But my biggest gripe was that park security was a joke. It has a kind of Star Wars stupidity - "There's a problem down on the planet that could be hostile? Let's send the captain, first officer and chief medical officer". There's a problem in the park, so they send the head of security alone who conveniently can't get a signal back to base. And then there are the personnel who are wearing armour so ineffectual that they all drop like flies with a single bullet. You'd think that they might design weapons that were biometrically (or at least RFID-tagged to be realistic) linked to real people so they couldn't be stolen.

It seems like the entire park is manned by about 100 people. And until the final twist was revealed, I did wonder how the hell any of the chronology actually made sense - as in the starting town scene was being reset so often that it would be an insane clean-up job every night. Not to mention that there were parallel storylines where characters that had dependent stories seemed to be apart during resets e.g. Dolores and young William, Teddy and old William were being aired at the same time.

<comment><USER16> Ahem, I meant Star Trek...!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > _Here's a harder one that tests basic logical induction: Lily is a swan. > Lily is white. Bernhard is green. Greg is a swan. What color is Greg? > Answer: white_

That's not right is it? At least, not logical induction?

Supposing the second premise were 'Lily is female'; the answer to 'What gender is Greg' should obviously not be 'female'.

<comment><USER18> Well a strict logic question would be "All swans are white. Lily is a swan. What color is Lily?"

But induction is more like learning about the world by observing it, and making probable guesses. So it may be correct for a machine to observe that if one swan is white, the best guess for the color of another swan (in the absence of other info) is white.

<comment><USER17> Thanks, your first sentence is more like what I was expecting before reading the example.

I'm not familiar with that definition of induction, but I haven't studied ML at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If I'm honest with myself I have to admit that a general purpose human level, strong AI would shake my world view significantly.

For that reason, I find it difficult to have a completely unbiased opinion on our current state of progress.

But... while we seem to be making great progress, it seems like we're a long way off understanding how the human mind works.

AlphaGo was an amazing achievement, but I think it's unlikely that the human mind tackles Go in the same way.

It's obviously possible that there are multiple routes to a general human level intelligence. But I think it's still unclear if the way AI is currently being developed is one of them.

<comment><USER20> What I find puzzling is that many people seem to assume that AI can be generated using a specific uniform neurological structure, while the human brain is actually made of many different parts, some older, some newer, some more connected, some more isolated, some inhibiting others, some potentiating others, some mostly signalling with this neurotransmitter, some using that etc.

<comment><USER21> I would assume it might actually be easier to get there with a uniform neurological structure, as you don't have the "legacy" infrastructure left over from millions of years of evolution.

However, I think that the first AI humanity manages to build will be more or less a copy of a human mind and only later will we learn how to construct minds "from scratch". Akin to how a beginning programmer will often scrape together bits from various sources to build his/her first program and only later can make original work.

<comment><USER22> Question is, whether those older parts are best viewed as legacy infrastructure, or as ASICs - parts that are in their local optimization minimas for functions they perform, and better than a uniform architecture?

<comment><USER23> I mean, a lot of the "older" brain is control circuitry that keeps everything running and regulated without our conscious thought. Everything will have that -- at some level. It might just be actual control circuitry and not anything tied to the "brain" (e.g. a PSU in a computer), but the function would need to be performed, and if it's not part of the brain, the feedback we get (e.g. about stress or pleasure) might be lost?

<comment><USER21> I think that a lot is control circuitry, like the bits that regulate digestion or body temperature. I don't see any reason that for a superintelligence these could not be consciously controlled. The main reason we have so many unconscious processes and heuristics in our brains is to limit the total power consumption, as that was super important back in the days when food was scarce. If power consumption becomes less important, you could do more and better thinking.

<comment><USER20> It doesn't require a superintelligence. It's possible to gain a certain amount of control over various unconscious processes by means of mental-training.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think the physiological and the logistical aspect of Westworld is more interesting than the AI

<comment><USER25> Agreed, given the amount of damage the Hosts seem to receive each day it doesn't feel plausible that they could collect them all and do what seems to be a manual operation on each to return them to perfect condition overnight.

<comment><USER26> That's one of the aspects of Westworld that I think you have to just more or less accept and move on. The nightly reset is implausible at all sorts of levels: economically, scale and effort (even to buildings burning down), and just logistically (does the park just shut down for a few hours every night). And we're shown that, as you say, this all seems to be a very manual process for the most part.

Something else you pretty much just have to accept is that through all sorts of mayhem, the humans stay safe (well, until the end at least). There's some rather inconsistent hand waves around guns and bullets but one has to believe there are still ample opportunities for serious injury in some of the scenes we see.

<comment><USER27> > the humans stay safe

[SPOILERS]Dolores kills a human outright by aiming at their head mid-season. Then it isn't mentioned again.[/SPOILERS]

I always assumed something in the suit lining made the guns faux-fire, and the suit responded by exploding a pocket of air or something. But then you can see The Guy In The Black Suit (I've forgotten his name) load his revolver by manually inserting bullets, so I have no idea how that'd work. It's probably one of the only things that bothered me about the series.

<comment><USER28> According to Jonathan Nolan it's the bullets: [https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/article/11-rules-of- wes...](https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/article/11-rules-of-westworld- hbos-killer-robot-theme-park-series/)

<comment><USER26> Which is a reasonable handwave until you start asking about the physical damage that the bullets do to [EDIT] hosts and ignore the mayhem involving explosives, fires, etc.

It doesn't especially bother me though. We know that TV and movies generally have a convention that trauma that would put someone in the ICU in the real world is brushed off as a flesh wound. And I'll accept technobabble about the bullets. I'm also happy to accept that maybe Westworld takes place in a culture where theme park risks on par with base jumping are considered fine and proper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Personally I found the recent season of Humans a lot more interesting than Westworld, which (to my taste) tried too hard to be philosophical, while Humans managed to tell a similar philosophy more subtly without being on-the- nose.

But we're all critics, so YMMV.

<comment><USER30> I tried watching season 1 of Humans but was jaded by first watching Akta Manniskor (Real Humans), the Swedish series it is based upon.

It seems that sometimes a lower production budget yields a better story. Forced to rely instead on the viewer's imagination and subject interest. Especially if it's done with aplomb and intelligence.

I found the dialogue in Humans to be too "explanatory." Haven't seen a full episode of Westworld yet, but imagine the same is true. Big budgets tend to to that.

<comment><USER31> I haven't seen the US Humans but did enjoy the original and found Westworld to be even better in the subtleness category.

It's probably due in part to being an original and even higher production values, so you get actual good writers. Maybe also a higher-brow target audience.

<comment><USER29> Is there a US version of Humans? It's a recent show and on BBC, I wouldn't think a US version existed yet.

<comment><USER31> The series is produced jointly by AMC in the United States, and Channel 4 and Kudos in Britain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I loved westworld. I think it shows imagination and elevates TV. But it starts at a point where the AI is already real. They robots are able to parse reality in all 5 senses in real time and respond. The are physically sophisticated, are supposed to be bio-chemical and match humans in dexterity and motion.

Season 1 focuses on the next step which is consciousness and choice, and the 2 critical theories to explain the emergence of these in the show is bicameralism and memory. It doesn't dwell too much on the how and focuses more on the consequences of it, which is a fascinating journey.

<comment><USER31> They are apparently not having the same kind of inner thoughts that we have and most of what they do is scripted. I couldn't give evidence without some spoilers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> My answers to those example bAbI questions don't match to "correct" answers. I guess I'm not human...

</comment><comment><USER34> Most of the plot of Westworld revolved around the complete absence of any rigorous release strategy - or at least Ford's privilege in thwarting it. That was necessary to expose the development arc of the hosts.

The writers also appear to have used a variation on recursive plot, which is nice to see.

</comment><comment><USER35> >Put another way, there's a risk of AIs learning to achieve their assigned task better by preventing humans from shutting them down.

Thought experiment/short story that goes into this in depth: [https://gist.github.com/deanmarano/142df7a8a824ab05fc777d8e0...](https://gist.github.com/deanmarano/142df7a8a824ab05fc777d8e054ab0f3)

The crux of the story hinges on the magical spontaneous development of general intelligence, so it's pretty unconvincing as a specific plausible scenario IMO. But the general idea, that an AI may take unethical/unprecedented actions to maximize a harmless goal, is a good one.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm a huge westworld fan so I made a fan site: [http://westworld2.com](http://westworld2.com)

</comment><comment><USER37> Lily is a swan. Lily is white. Bernhard is green. Greg is a swan.

What color is Greg? Answer: white

How the hell is that logical? Greg may be white, he may be black or any other color. You could guess Greg is likely white. The correct answer is "can't tell". But I'd expect an intelligent responder to reply with questions and complaints of unanswerablity like I have done here.

<comment><AUTHOR> AI that insists on hard logic even in inappropriate situations is a staple of science fiction, but there's no reason we'd build real machines that way.

The cited example is taken from the bAbI papers, and is a case of inductive reasoning:

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

 _Inductive reasoning (as opposed to deductive reasoning or abductive reasoning) is reasoning in which the premises are viewed as supplying strong evidence for the truth of the conclusion. While the conclusion of a deductive argument is certain, the truth of the conclusion of an inductive argument is probable, based upon the evidence given._

In reality this is often the best you can do, as all you have to work on in the end is the input from your own sensors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Westworld (2016) is an amazing show. In my opinion it is more about how real it feels, than the thematic itself. I'm convinced that same approach would work for other genres, not just sci-fi. It is a kind of hyper-realist cinema, where the plot and acting is so superb that feels credible and breathtaking.

</comment><comment><USER39> As far as I can see, most of the points of this article were brought up in James P. Hogan's 1979 _The Two Faces of Tomorrow_.

</comment><comment><USER40> Meh, I think that human intelligence is vastly overrated. We've been moving the goalposts for centuries to safeguard our place not only at the top of the intellectual food chain, but also to maintain the idea that we are on an altogether different chain.

We've been doing this with regard to various animals since forever. Every time a chimp learns sign language, an elephant cares about its mother, or a dolphin has sex for fun, everyone loses their minds falling all over themselves to "prove" that we are qualitatively different. That there's something else going on with us that is special.

I'm not passing judgment here. I do it too. It's extremely convenient for me to do so. If you start thinking of intelligence as a spectrum with some species closer to one end of it than others, it gets a lot harder to justify most of what we do to animals. And there's a dark place I don't want to go that suggests that some people are far enough down the spectrum that maybe you could justify doing bad things to them.

It get really messy and ugly in both directions when you think about intelligence as a spectrum. At what point should an animal be considered smart enough to merit "human" rights? At what point should a human be considered so dumb that it doesn't?

We, as a society, are not ready to have that conversation. We lack the moral fortitude to do so, which is why I happily participate in this artificial segregation.

But we are going to be forced into dealing with it much sooner than we are ready to. I fully expect that within my lifetime, there will be Bladerunner scenarios with lifelike robots who are practically indistinguishable from actual people.

We live in a bubble here, where all the women are beautiful, all the men are above average, and all the children are FBI agents.

Human memory is far more corrupt and fallacious than we want to think it is. Weird social interactions with slightly (or very) dysfunctional people are far more common than we tend to think they are. Spend a day on the subway in NYC. Spend a day in my hometown in Texas (population: 498).

Many of these people could easily be simulated with a high degree of believability. The real hypocrisy here is that no one wants to believe that you, as an individual, could be simulated with believability. I'll go on the record and say that it would be trivial to simulate me. I'm not that special.

The problem we have with AI tests is that we are testing against the ability for an AI to be anyone. We're checking to see if an AI could be as good at impersonating absolutely anyone as one of the top .00001% of human character actors.

We aren't checking the lower bounds. Because that's extremely uncomfortable for us. We're maintaining goals and standards that are designed to make the tests fail.

Again, we are doing it for good reasons. We haven't yet solved the problem of how to treat each other when we know that we're only dealing with humans. We aren't ready to talk about bringing other entities into our world yet.

Bladerunner was prescient; Westworld is near future. We need to get our shit together because these issues are going to come up far sooner than we expect. And when we're talking about an entity that speaks to us in our own language, with our own idioms, with our own concepts of feelings and emotions--it's going to be a lot harder to maintain the pretense that we are somehow qualitatively different.

On the other hand, this could be really convenient for us. A moment of solidarity, if you will. We could create believable robot characters that we unite against and focus all our hate, violence, racism, and abuse towards. Maybe we all get along better after that.

But what does that say about us? And have we really solved our problems? I think that's the question Westworld is asking, similarly to the question some open world games ask, like EvE Online: in a universe where everything is permissible, who are you?</comment>


Anger mounts after Facebook's 'shadow profiles' leak in bug - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/anger-mounts-after-facebooks-shadow-profiles-leak-in-bug-7000017167/

<comment><USER2> Silly Facebook... what surprises me is that people are shocked. The bug its self is shocking but the fact Facebook is harvesting information... are people really that surprised? I wouldnt be surprised if Facebook knows more about us than our governments (except the american government... I doubt facebook listens to our phone conversations :P) Data is power these days and facebook is just going to keep on harvesting that sweet, sweet personal information.

<comment><USER3> Most people aren't tech, media or social savvy in any meaningful measure. Most people still use their birthdays for passwords, include a phone number in a social website if they keep pestering them for it and disregard the same caution they would show when a stranger shows at their front door on a friendly-looking website.

 _This will not change_

The sooner the tech savvy crowd learns to accept this, the better it is for everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I got a mail from FB with the exact same message saying they had screwd up. The most wtf moment of the email was when they had my contact number listed in the email, I have never uploaded my contact number on my fb profile.

</comment><comment><USER5> So you are friends with a person on Facebook, and this bug allowed them to see your private email address?

I don't see what people are so outraged by. If you're friends with someone on Facebook, why is your email address so private? And what will these Facebook friends DO know that they know your email address?!?

If I was snarky, I would say if you can't share your email address with a friend, choose better friends. But I won't say that. But still. Not worth so much outrage over.

Hey, the government is reading your emails even though they know you're an American just in case there is evidence of some crime in there. Be angry over that.

<comment><USER6> No, this is more like you are friends with your conservative Republican boss on facebook, but you are also a member of an abortion rights activist group.

You've never disclosed that activity to Facebook, but they harvested your data via one of those sleazy commercial personal information brokers and added it to your 'shadow profile' without your knowledge.

Then one day your boss downloads his data using that feature, and he suddenly sees that you are email@example.com and your phone number there.

He then calls you to tell you that not only are you fired, but your wedding to his daughter is canceled.

This is a truly egregious bug (although I think it is probably true that few of the potential 6 million victims have actually had their info leak in this way).

<comment><USER7> Yeah, nice false stereotyping with the contrived conservative smearing.

In reality, we all know that the left are far more intolerant than the majority of conservatives. And they are also the ones who get in your face with vile insults, screams, graffiti, vandalism, and any other behavior that passes when one believes their desired ends justifies their means.

It is far more believable that a leftist would be likely to call for and delight in the firing of someone who holds moral values. Conservatives generally just want to be left alone, and they would not in good conscience vindictively fire someone.

And for ends justifying the means, look no further than apologists for murders by folks like Stalin, Lenin, and Guevara. Some actually do say that was what was needed in order for revolution. Disgusting, but that's what they say.

<comment><USER8> I don't for one moment believe that 90% of Americans have one of two sets of beliefs, is this why this is contrived? This does read like a flame, I assure you it's not, puzzled foreigner.

<comment><USER7> It's contrived because his scenario of a conservative business owner firing a liberal employee is something he made up as an example to fit into his worldview.

In reality, the political witchhunts and thought policing are overwhelmingly leftist behaviors.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


You'll know Apple blew it when it makes a fingerprint dongle - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2017/4/19/15353730/apple-iphone-8-delay-touch-id <comment><USER2> HA! Fighting physics and fundamental limits of engineering don't exactly follow annual release cycles. You can't assemble the world's smartest physicists, pay them the GDP of Greece and demand a "Theory of relativity" every September.

Apple integrating the sensor into the screen should not be a barometer of "innovation".</comment>


Ask HN: Startup School worth it? - <AUTHOR>

For anyone who has been there (or seen videos), how was it? Is it worth a trip? Why or why not?<p>A little bit of background: Startup School is marketed as an event for people who "thought about one day starting a startup" or "afraid of making the final leap". I have previously started two startups, and I am debating if I should make the two-hour trip or not, as I don't seem to be the target audience? Will I still get a lot out of the event? <comment><USER2> I don't know your background, but having watched most years (and attended a few in person), I think one would have to be pretty jaded _not_ to find Startup School to be a fantastic, inspirational day, even if one were already immersed in startup culture. It's certainly worth a two hour trip.

Also, the talks are from speakers at different stages of their careers encompassing multiple facets of the startup ecosystem, so don't worry about being "too advanced" for it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am going for the first time and making a drive up from LA (8~ hours). I think just the chance to be up close and personal with some of the biggest successes of Silicon Valley would be more than worth it. Hearing their stories and talks will be interesting and motivating whatever you are currently doing in your career.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm going and I'm flying half way across the country. You might want to ask questions in this group:

[https://www.facebook.com/groups/705664592796188/](https://www.facebook.com/groups/705664592796188/)

There's around 200 current people going in the group and I know some alum are in the group as well.

I won't try to sway your opinion either way. I personally have found networking with the people going worth it already by itself.

</comment><comment><USER5> I flew from Australia in 2011 for it and have no regrets. At the time though I was very new to the startup scene.

Like any conference most of the value is derived from the networking rather than the speakers/presentations. Keeping in mind the target market, expect to see a lot of undergrads and startup newbies.

That being said the talks are still amazing and there are some more senior guys that go.

</comment><comment> rush-tea How do I get tickets? It seems it's already sold out? When is the earliest to apply for it?

Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER6> hesitant about 2 hours??? i'm coming from Israel!</comment>


How to get your startup covered by TNW and VentureBeat - <AUTHOR> http://blog.trak.io/this-is-how-we-got-coverage-from-the-next-web-venture-beat/

<comment><AUTHOR> Updated the post to include input from Mike Butcher after he checked out the first draft. He offered his advice on what to do if you want to get covered by TechCrunch's writers</comment>


Generic programming to fight the rigidity in the C++ projects - <AUTHOR> http://www.codergears.com/Blog/?p=945 <comment><USER2> I find the whole focus on abstraction as a solution to flexibility very troublesome. Taking the declaration for a C++ function and whacking an abstract interface only goes a small way to making the system more flexible. All your interacting components still depend intimately on each other's _behavior_. The behavior is not fully captured by the interface - if it was, it wouldn't be an interface, it would be an implementation. So abstractions leak by their very nature, and the success of our attempt to enable flexibility through those interfaces depends completely on how well we choose what the interfaces are and how much of the behavior specification we decide should live in the interface definition vs the implementation. That subtlety of the design process is completely lost by this love of abstraction where it is assumed that anything with an abstract interface is completely flexible whereas anything without one is not.

<comment><USER3> > The behavior is not fully captured by the interface - if it was, it wouldn't > be an interface, it would be an implementation.

I think your argument is weakened by the reality that even "behaviour" has plenty of abstraction in it... particularly if you are using a compiler. You've got the compiler, library linkages (and to different libraries), the OS's abstraction, and of course these days there's usually a hypervisor in there. Then there's the abstractions in the hardware... You just can't get away from it.

Good interfaces allow encapsulation, which tends to be very helpful, although there is a point where it does more harm than good.

> That subtlety of the design process is completely lost by this love of > abstraction where it is assumed that anything with an abstract interface is > completely flexible whereas anything without one is not.

It's all abstract. Design is concerned about the _right_ abstraction. The wrong abstraction gives you no flexibility, or no flexibility where you need it, or just a ton of unneeded complexity. Abstraction for abstraction's sake suggests a _lack_ of design.

<comment><USER4> > Abstraction for abstraction's sake suggests a _lack_ of design.

And yet a surprisingly large number of people think "good" design is entirely about adding abstractions until no more can be added. The classic example of this is enterprise Java, where designs are almost always overly abstract and flexible, but only in these narrow directions that were thought to be where _extreme_ flexibility will be required in the future; and inevitably, the flexibility that's eventually needed turns out to be in a completely different direction.

<comment><USER5> In their defense mathematicians have gained huge advances in algebra (and other areas) precisely by abstracting away all unnecessary parts (most notably by Emmy Noether).

Of course working out which parts are necessary and which aren't is a very subtle process, and one of the areas of programming where a mathematical background can be a huge advantage.

<comment><USER3> You nailed it. Getting the _right_ abstraction is very hard. One does one's best, and generally fails miserably.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is an interesting write-up, but it leaves out some specifics in designing C++. A few are:

1\. Concurrency

In garbage collected languages, the runtime can generally add objects to a free list and clean up memory when it's more-or-less convenient. Since C++ uses deterministic destruction and freeing, there has to be clear responsibilities defined. In particular, it has to be clear which thread is ultimately responsible for running the destructor. Point being, writing code that would otherwise be "abstract" in Java-land implies (but rarely explicitly defines!) some rigidity in design with respect to how long objects need to be around for different threads to use them.

Maybe that's too abstract. Here's some code to illustrate:

        class IHandler {
        public:
            virtual Status handleAsync(const Msg & msg) = 0
        };

        class CopyingHandler : public IHandler {
        private:
            WorkerThread m_worker;

        public:
            Status handleAsync(const Msg & msg) override {
                // capture the msg by value, taking a copy
                return m_worker.push_back([=msg](){
                    handle(msg);
                });
            }
        };

        class RefHandler : public IHandler {
        private:
            WorkerThread m_worker;

        public:
            Status handleAsync(const Msg & msg) override {
                // Capture the msg by reference. Assumes
                // sticks around at least as long as the
                // background thread does.
                return m_worker.push_back([&msg](){
                    handle(msg);
                });
            }
        };

Anyway, I left some details out, but you can see that both implementations adhere to the interface provided by IHandler, but each makes drastically different assumptions about what's OK. In some cases, problem domains, copying the message might create a performance bug. In most programs, you could easily (likely) have undefined behavior by capturing the message by reference, letting the message be destroyed, and then trying to use the message afterwards.

Point being, rigidity in C++ designs is easy to create subtly and accidentally, and even generic programming won't necessarily help you here.

2\. Polymorphism

C++ actually allows for quite a range of polymorphic behaviors. You can't really rank them from highest rigidity to the least, since there are pros and cons to each approach, but generally inheritance is more rigid than the other approaches. In contrast, you can also have:

2a. Opaque Pointers

Not necessarily very type safe, but if you need to wrap something up in a black box, pass it around, then unwrap it and use it later (maybe in a message queue, a mailbox, a private implementation, or in certain kinds of IOC patterns), you can completely lose your type and recover it later. Typically there is a small performance hit as you use RTTI ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run- time_type_information](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run- time_type_information)) or a discriminator (an enum maybe) to decide how to recover your type when you're ready for it. See <experimental/any> ([http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/experimental/any](http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/experimental/any)) for an example of this.

2b. Type Erasure

This one is more involved but clever use of generic programming lets us automatically provide the adaptor boilerplate to get types to play nice with other code. Sean Parent does an excellent walkthrough of this technique in his GoingNative talk in 2013 ([https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/2013/Inheritanc...](https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/2013/Inheritance- Is-The-Base-Class-of-Evil)). Point being that type erasure lets you have a different flavor of flexibility in a way not seen in Java-land.

2c. Unions

This is harder to do properly in practice, as evidenced by the difficulty in standardizing something like boost::variant, but from time to time it might be worth playing around with various types of unions. They're a bit awkward, but you might try boost::variant if you like the tradeoffs it provides.

3\. Value Semantics

Since objects are values in C++, you need to know the size of things much more often. This causes dependencies you might not think about in other languages, depending on how their standard libraries are designed.

<comment><USER7> > Since C++ uses deterministic destruction and freeing, there has to be clear > responsibilities defined. In particular, it has to be clear which thread is > ultimately responsible for running the destructor.

Ownership itself is an abstraction that is very useful for manipulating ephemeral resources, and which is very difficult to express in languages where garbage collection is the mandated universal solution for resource reclamation.

> Point being, writing code that would otherwise be "abstract" in Java-land > implies (but rarely explicitly defines!) some rigidity in design with > respect to how long objects need to be around for different threads to use > them.

When you care about ownership, "who frees this object" isn't an implementation detail or an abstraction leak. It's a part of the interface.

> Since objects are values in C++, you need to know the size of things much > more often.

Pretty sure everything is a value in ML and Haskell, and I don't recall every having to worry about the size of anything when using those languages. C++ programmers tend to wrongly conflate "value" with "a physical copy of the value". It's better than what you get in Java (no user-defined values at all!), but it still leaves a lot to be desired.

<comment><USER6> > Pretty sure everything is a value in ML and Haskell,

That's a good point. I guess it's the combination of value semantics and manual memory management. I'll try to keep that in mind in the future.

> When you care about ownership, "who frees this object" isn't an > implementation detail or an abstraction leak. It's a part of the interface.

Exactly. But even more than that, references that don't extend the lifetimes of objects (like native pointers and references) are simple to create and are in many ways the default type of reference in C++.

At any rate, 'this message queue _only_ works with types that are easy to copy' is not generally a prominent part of the documentation in C++, if it's present at all.

<comment><USER3> > But even more than that, references that don't extend the lifetimes of > objects (like native pointers and references) are simple to create and are > in many ways the default type of reference in C++.

C++ has a lot of cases of defaults that one tends not to use all that much (because it tends to default to maximal efficiency). Raw pointers would be a good example. Those are generally frowned upon.

On the other hand, references are encouraged and have pretty clear semantics around ownership.

> At any rate, 'this message queue only works with types that are easy to > copy' is not generally a prominent part of the documentation in C++, if it's > present at all.

Really? That's a very prominent part of say... the STL's documentation.

<comment><USER6> Even the documentation of vector describes what it does and few implications. It doesn't warn you that vectors of raw pointers are bad parameter types, for example. It does talk about iterator invalidation, but it doesn't really educate us about how that affects our designs.

That's not to criticize vector, but to point out that C++ had especially nuanced implications if loosely coupled design is a concern.

<comment><USER3> > It doesn't warn you that vectors of raw pointers are bad parameter types, > for example.

Vectors of raw pointers function very effectively, they just have all the problems intrinsic with the use of raw pointers. I'm not sure I'd blame the vector documentation for that...

> It does talk about iterator invalidation, but it doesn't really educate us > about how that affects our designs.

Design implications are a subtle thing that you can write entire books about. I think failing to fully capture those implications in the API documentation is more than understandable and far from unusual. For example, Java's containers have similar issues with iterator invalidation, and similarly don't have documentation on all the design implications.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Beer prices could go up under FDA rule that angers farmers, brewers - <AUTHOR> http://www.oregonlive.com/health/index.ssf/2014/04/fda_rule_would_increase_cost_o.html#incart_river

<comment><USER2> The FDA must be drunk on it's own stale ale. This nonsense is what happens once you flush common sense & democracy down the toilet.</comment>


Meeting Snowden in Princeton - <AUTHOR> https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2015/05/02/meeting-snowden-in-princeton/ <comment><USER3> A couple of things that bugged me from this writeup (these may be attributable to Anderson instead of Snowden):

1:

 _Homegrown crypto is routinely problematic, but properly implemented crypto keeps the agency out; gpg ciphertexts with RSA 1024 were returned as fails._ is later followed by _The NSA is even more cautious than the FBI, and won't use top exploits against clueful targets unless it really matters. Intelligence services are at least aware of the risk of losing a capability, unlike vanilla law enforcement_.

Reconciling these statements is disquieting. _Snowden_ has never seen a successful decrypted RSA-1024 intercept. But he also believes that the good stuff is kept under wraps, which is what everyone else who understands SIGINT thinks as well.

2:

 _We can push back a bit by blocking papers from conferences or otherwise denying academic credit where researchers prefer cash or patriotism to responsible disclosure, but that only goes so far._

Well, that, and the whole thing about how publishing papers isn't merely an exercise in making the authors feel better, but also how science works.

3:

 _People who can pay for a new kitchen with their first exploit sale can get very patriotic; NSA contractors have a higher standard of living than academics._

I have a problem with casual innuendo about how vulnerabilities are expensive because exploiters pay so much for them. In fact, ever-increasing dollar amounts for serious vulnerabilities is what you want to see: if there's a liquid market for vulnerabilities, the last thing you want is for serious ones to be cheap. This is highly specialized engineering work; whether Ron Paul likes it or not, it commands a high rate.

A simpler response: lots of people have made enough off vuln sales to replace kitchens without ever selling them to anyone who would exploit them.

I do have a moral problem with people who sell vulnerabilities to (a) the USG or (b) people who exploit them. I do not love the emergence of vuln markets. But I am not willing to tar everyone who earns a living doing this work as an NSA shill.

Moreover: all reverence for Snowden stipulated and set aside: nobody has ever made a claim for his expertise in vulnerability research or sales. Can we be clearer about why we're meant to carefully consider his take on it?

•:

Generally, this reads a lot like STRATFOR to me. It starts out with facts and stuff that appears verifiable/falsifiable, but it trends into a sort of geopolitical/legal LARPing exercise.

<comment><USER4> Regarding your first point, there's some confusion between active exploits (i.e. botnet infections, etc) and passive intercepts. They are indeed cautious about using exploits and botnet platforms (I don't think that makes any of it _right_ ).

Absolutely NSA & GCHQ should be able to crack RSA-1024: it is not magical, and it is _definitely_ well within their budget, but it still isn't particularly _cheap_ timewise, so unless something is really _super_ important, it's not going to join the crypt attack queue for supercomputing resources, and they would not be waving it around too widely.

By comparison, we know RC4 is _toast_. We have a rough sketch of the attack (though please correct me if any of this is wrong): passive; returns plaintext from ciphertext, with either no or a few bytes of known plaintext header at most; runs in software on blades and other places at mass-intercept scale in _real-time_ , so we have an upper bound on its complexity (and it's very low compared to RSA-1024).

We don't know many technical details about the attack yet. RC4 is a peculiar beast, quite unlike semi-modern or modern ciphers like AES or Salsa20/ChaCha20: huge state; crappy diffusion; several known weaknesses, but no public break yet. I can't wait to find out more: this is one of the few areas NSA actually are ahead, as the public sphere definitely know RC4 is too wobbly to use, but still quite some way off decrypts of it. Whatever technique is used may well not be applicable to ciphers of a more modern design (but what about Spritz?).

If you've been using RC4, ever, this should give you pause. Think about what's ever gone out using it. Think about what someone could have recorded - <USER2> _did_ record. Do you need to be changing any passwords?

If you're _still_ using or accepting RC4 anywhere for any reason (ahem, Mozilla, Google, Microsoft?), for heaven's sake, get your arses in gear. You're not beating the attackers, you're now only limiting the damage. Given the RFC and everything, and the internal discussions you've been having, I personally would be loathe to consider any further delay ethical before action. Please do remember Holmes' Law of Reverse-Engineering: what one can invent, another can discover.

<comment><USER5> > If you're still using or accepting RC4 anywhere for any reason (ahem, > Mozilla, Google, Microsoft?), for heaven's sake, get your arses in gear.

Amazon AWS signup, as of last night? [http://i.imgur.com/Wq0lnnR.png](http://i.imgur.com/Wq0lnnR.png)

<comment><USER6> [https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=portal.aws.am...](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=portal.aws.amazon.com)

If your TLS client tried stronger cipher suites before weaker ones (which only MSIE does, and it considers only RC4 weak), you can get TLS 1.0 with RSA key exchange, AES-256-CBC encryption, HMAC-SHA1 authentication with that server. That's not secure (only TLS 1.2 with PFS and AEAD is secure).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > _Secret laws are pure poison; government lawyers claim authority and act on > it, and we don't know about it._

"Secret laws" are not laws. It is the equivalent of "because I said so", and that is simply a fascist edict.

@CombiHack points out:

> _If "ignorance of the law is no excuse", then the law MUST be publicly > available. [..] Alternatively (less preferable): If "secret laws are laws", > then ignorance of the law MUST be a complete defense. End of story._

</comment><comment><USER8> I have immense respect for the author, and I know these are just notes, but the tone of technologists who talk about Snowden is very annoying.

We know certain technologies like Tor and OTR are safe because of the weight of scientific research that support them, and the immense effort of the developers. Not because someone said so at an event. Statements like "gpg ciphertexts with RSA 1024 were returned as fails" are totally meaningless.

I wish people had more confidence in good old science (like Anderson's works) than glamorous events like this. You should all check out _Security Engineering_ by the same author, it's free! www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html

<comment><USER9> I mean, that scientific research includes a bunch of timing attacks which shows that if someone can manipulate both the entry and exit points (like the NSA can), they can deanonymize TOR users. The TOR team specifically state that a "global" adversary (like the NSA) is beyond the scope of threats they are trying to protect against.

There is no theoretical guarantee that the NSA cannot break TOR, the question is whether they have actually got the engineering in place to do so. And the Snowden leaks showed they didn't, at least not in 2013, although they were working on it.</comment></comment>


Observations from a real-world Clojure project - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/ffcd4bc722852b4?hl=en <comment><USER2> "Everything* just worked. We took a snapshot at 1.1.0, and we didn't update it. [* The JVM does SEGV on us occasionally. Internal error, which we have not diagnosed.]"

How are memory protection errors just a footnote?

<comment><USER3> You shouldn't be able to SEGV a JVM no matter what bytecode you feed it (exempting JNI). So it is a JVM bug.

<comment><USER4> OTOH it doesn't really matter whose "fault" it is; if using Clojure causes SEGVs but some other Lisp doesn't cause SEGVs, that's a problem.

<comment><USER5> That depends if you're using it primarily because it is a lisp or primarily because of its Java interop / the fact it runs on the JVM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd like to reiterate the lack of good debuggers for not just Clojure, but also free CL implementations. I haven't branched out much recently, but is sbcl/SLIME still state-of-the-art for lisp debugging in the open source world?

<comment><USER7> I personally use SBCL, but I've heard a lot of people use Clozure Common Lisp (<http://www.clozure.com/clozurecl.html>) because it has better Slime integration (better stack frame inspector, etc).

The very best tools are probably Allegro CL (w/ its non-emacs IDE) and Lisp Works (and its own IDE too). I've heard nothing but good things about both (and have used Allegro CL enough to know it - and its associated libraries - are very impressive).

As far as I can gather no one really uses them since they are just too expensive though. They must be making money somewhere, I just don't know where ...

<comment><USER8> _I've heard a lot of people use Clozure Common Lisp (<http://www.clozure.com/clozurecl.html>) because it has better Slime integration (better stack frame inspector, etc)._

Really? I would have said CCL has worse Slime integration in general (Slime being an epiphenomenon of the SBCL-on-Linux world) and far worse when it comes to debugging. Am I missing something?

We're using CCL with Slime on OS X. The Clozure people are working on a new IDE, but I don't know how good its debugging facilities are yet. It would take a lot to get me off Emacs, but slick debugging might do it.

Alternatively, I often think that maybe we should just take the time to make sldb do what we want. But it's hard to take precious resources away from one's main project.

If anyone feels the same way and is interested in hacking on this, email me - maybe we can work something out.

<comment><USER7> IIRC, ITA Software (one of the biggest Lisp houses in the world ...) uses SBCL for their main QPX project. A few years ago when they were starting the new Polaris project, they decided to go with CCL instead of continuing with SBCL.

My understanding is that the two major motivating factors for this decision were that CCL compiles faster and has better debugging support.

This is all based on my memory of conversations that took place about a year ago, so it's entirely possible I'm mis-remembering or what used to be true no longer holds. I have no first hand experience with CCL so if you do, I'll take your word for it ...

<comment><USER9> I currently work on QPX, the air travel search engine. We continue to use SBCL, primarily because it produces faster code for our workload. We and our customers are very sensitive to the performance of the application.

Dan Weinreb, another ITA developer, did a talk at Google a few months ago on ITA's new reservation system (the Polaris project you mention). They do use CCL, but the code also compiles and runs with SBCL. The primary reason he cites in that talk for preferring CCL over SBCL (about 22 minutes in) is that CCL compiles code more quickly than SBCL.

I haven't used CCL much, but I understand SBCL and CCL have different debugging strengths. An SBCL developer tells me that a significant chunk of the compilation time for our application is in constraint propagation for types. That's part of the "generates more efficient code", but it also means that it's smart about telling you when you're doing something that's not going to work. For whatever reason, type propagation or otherwise, CCL won't do as much to help you at compile time. I am told that CCL gives better stack traces, so SLIME can help you more.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, that vibes with I've seen in SBCL (and been told about CCL). Thanks for the inside scoop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _5\. The functionality of the docs hasn't kept up with Clojure.

6\. Debugging facilities also have not kept up with the state of Clojure._

These two are the first thing I check before trying to use any programming language.

<comment><USER11> That is true only if you use bleeding edge clojure (EG. 1.1.0), clojure 1.0 docs are very mature. And since 1.1.0 is a developper version at the moment, it appears quite illogical IMO to complain about the state of documentation.

<comment><USER12> They're mature, but they are also not very good. I still spend ages digging around trying to figure out what should be relatively simple stuff. The documentation around ns in particular is difficult to navigate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Example: ~10M records are processed and transformed, various computations > occur, and ~100K records are spit out. Lots of statistics. One type of run > takes 12 hours on an 8GB, 4-core Linux box

That seems insanely slow, unless they are doing something insanely complex. In other words, this doesn't tell us very much.

<comment><USER14> My "slow sense" is tingling too. I'm deadly curious to know how fast I could make that "12-hour" job using Scala or Java.

I've done extensive work with Scala, Java, and bytecodes; writing performant Scala code requires some knowledge of the JVM and how Scala is compiled, and requires sacrificing some of its power; but because the static typing and method dispatching is so similar to Java's, you can get there. From everything I've read about Clojure, it sounds a whole level less efficient.

Not trying to knock Clojure, but 12 hours just sounds way way too long without more explanation.

<comment><USER15> How can anyone even approach this with a straight face? You don't even know what they are computing!

If you want to question clojure's performance for technical reasons, do that. But let's not use feelings, and instincts in discussions about concrete scientific topics. There have certainly been several interesting articles on clojure performance, and work done to improve performance for native data structures (transients). I, and no doubt many others, would be genuinely interested in performance studies on more complex concurrency problems I've seen so far.

<comment><USER16> Then this discussion between Cliff Click and Rich Hickey may be of interest: [http://blogs.azulsystems.com/cliff/2008/05/clojure-stms- vs.h...](http://blogs.azulsystems.com/cliff/2008/05/clojure-stms-vs.html)

Its a bit dated ('08), but sounds like the jury is still out on STMs.

<comment><USER17> That's a great read, thanks very much. It might be worth submitting the link itself to get a wider audience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Bah. I still can't forgive Google for wrapping everything sent though Gmail or Groups to 80 characters.</comment>


List of software and things that use or support WireGuard - <AUTHOR> https://ianix.com/wireguard/wireguard-deployment.html <comment><USER2> > OPNsense 19.7 supports WireGuard

yep, can confirm :)

currently running on this passively-cooled thing:

[https://www.amazon.com/Firewall-Micro-Appliance-Gigabit- AES-...](https://www.amazon.com/Firewall-Micro-Appliance-Gigabit-AES- NI/dp/B0742Q3NT6)

<comment><USER3> That's pretty expensive for what is essentially a rebranded Qotom. On the other hand, if you are in the USA, it's probably a good choice.

OPNSense 20+ also support WireGuard just in case someone gets confused about that specific version reference.

<comment><USER4> The ProtectLi boxes might cost a little bit more, but they seem to be really well made and of good quality. I moved from a PCEngines APU to a ProtectLi because I needed faster packet forwarding performance when I upgraded my home internet connection to 1 Gbps.

<comment><USER5> I run an apu2c4 at home, with 1 Gbps internet connectivity. It's a two legged setup, one leg to the ONT, and one leg to the switch carrying dot1q tagged VLAN traffic. It never fails to saturate that internal interface and does that with ~20-30% cpu idle time. I also run few small processes like DNS, NTP, syslog receiver in their own containers, serving the home. The only time this machine struggles is when my wife is out in a library, coffee shop with good connectivity and her VPN traffic (wireguard) to home is above 200 Mbps and at the same time I'm downloading from somewhere that can feed me at least 800Mbps. In this case it cannot saturate the gigabit interface because CPU is too busy.

Linux 4.19 kernel. IPtables for packet filtering and IPv4 NAT. ~30% of my traffic is v6 without NAT overhead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe a little OT but any word of a FIPS 140 implementation of this protocol? Would make the adoption of this in an enterprise environment possible.

<comment><USER7> a very good questions indeed, but that means you need certify lots of kernel crypto modules for whatever wireguard depends on, redhat has fips-140 kernel so I assume it will do something similar to wireguard, as redhat will want to sell this to governments etc

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is there a way to suggest additions to the page? Wireshark supports WireGuard dissection and decryption[1], and the pcapng[2] file format has a block type defined for WireGuard secrets.

[1][https://wiki.wireshark.org/WireGuard](https://wiki.wireshark.org/WireGuard)

[2][https://github.com/pcapng/pcapng](https://github.com/pcapng/pcapng)

</comment><comment><USER9> > "wireguard-vanity-address[0] — generate Wireguard keypairs with a given > prefix string"

generating 4-5 character-prefixed keys seems to up the chances of collision by many orders of magnitude, right? but even so, is that enough of a concern to not use such a tool?

[0] [https://github.com/warner/wireguard-vanity- address](https://github.com/warner/wireguard-vanity-address)

<comment><USER10> It's just a brute force so I think it should not matter. Once you find a public key that match what you are looking for you have the same amount of work to do to find the private key.

It would be different if it was to generate a private key that matches the prefix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://github.com/trailofbits/algo](https://github.com/trailofbits/algo) Also supports it.

Have been using it for personal VPN deployments, very easy to use and each time I notice they have made moves to be more secure.

</comment><comment><USER12> TunSafe also works on iOS, Android, Linux and Windows. Not just on macOS!

</comment><comment><USER13> managed wieguard: [https://tailscale.com/](https://tailscale.com/)

<comment><USER14> I'd like to try it but why force users to login with either gmail or Microsoft? What's wrong with a plain old username/any other email provider and password?

<comment><USER15> They addressed this in another post on HN.

Basically they don't want to manage U/P. They are looking at other services as well (such as github).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> You can add Firefox VPN to the list too.

</comment><comment><USER17> > It is recommended to use official WireGuard software whenever possible.

I don't agree with his sentiment _at all_. With OpenVPN Viscosity is by far the best OpenVPN client and both the 'official' client (OpenVPN) and the open source alternative (Tunnelblick) are buggy and have crappy UI. I'm hoping Sparklabs either repurpose Viscosity to include WireGuard as well, or write a new client specifically for WireGuard (which I'd happily buy).

Edit: wow, what the hell. I guess HN hates improved clients with a violent passion.

<comment><USER18> What does OpenVPN having a shitty official client have to do with wireguard?

<comment><USER17> Both the iOS and macOS Wireguard client are functional but they aren't shining examples of great UI, UX or feature richness. Often 3rd party clients (as happened with OpenVPN) will fill that gap.

<comment><USER18> Hmm, I can't say I've noticed much UI/UX issue with the MacOS wireguard client; it seems very straight forward to me. As for feature richness, wireguard not having a bunch of knobs and buttons to tweak is one of its nicer features I think.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Geoff Hinton's Dark Knowledge - <AUTHOR> http://fastml.com/geoff-hintons-dark-knowledge/

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea of model compression is quite exciting to me. It could bring difficult classification tasks such as scene analysis and large scale classification of visual or auditory concepts to devices with limited computation and memory resources. Think smart phones, but robots as well.</comment>


Why are (some) physicists so bad at philosophy? (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/02/why-are-some-physicists-so-bad-at.html <comment><USER2> I think one reason (some) physicists are so bad at philosophy is that philosophy concerns matters that are of interest to everyone, but that the human mind is not well designed to deal with. In fact, the fact that we can do it at all seems to be an accidental side-effect of mental and linguistic abilities that were produced by evolution to solve very different sorts of problems. That is why, of the thousands of cultures that have existed, only one happened to develop what Feser is refering to as philosophy.

As a result of this mismatch between aspirations and mental abilities, even brilliant philosophers such as Plato have made many mistakes that took centuries to straighten out. This means if you are going to do philosophy well you have to spend years studying it, including learning about all the common mistakes and how to avoid them. The physicists in question, unfortunately, seem to have not done this.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is quite confusing then. My knowledge in philosophy came from a single semester of philosophy in college, so I am no expert, but from what I remember, one of the things philosophy addresses is proper definition of terms under discussion.

What is "nothing" that he refers to? The "something" that the physicists are taking about is essentially mass and space, which you can't really argue are not things. The "universe" is spacetime and its mass. I think that is as far of physicists go when they claim whether anything came from nothing.

This[0] seems like a good source, although it'd be nice if philosophers can vouch for it.

[0][http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nothingness/#WhyTheSomRatT...](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nothingness/#WhyTheSomRatThaNot)

<comment><USER4> In my experience, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy can generally be considered reliable.

The proper definition of terms - same goes for the guidelines of discussion, even though those aren't as relevant to define in this instance - is indeed both an issue philosophy concerns itself with deeply as it is problematic in itself. Especially in the field of Ontology, 'to be' can and will have so many wildly varying definitions that discussion becomes tedious and at times impossible without learning the specific vocabulary of whatever subset of Ontology one is debating in or against.

Something and something and nothing and nothing are hardly the same ad hoc.

I'm by no means an expert in astronomy and astrophysics, as I only follow it with an amateur's interest. That said, as far as I'm aware, the quantum fluctuations that are presumed to have caused the big bang are fluctuations within a field of potential. While we may be inclined to call it 'nothing', as there was no matter yet, nothing tangible at any rate, the existence of said field and potential does not make it the absolute nothing philosophers would normally consider when they ask whether the universe came from something or nothing.

Gorgias of Leontinoi, contemporary of Socrates and eponym for the platonic dialogue Gorgias, argued that 'nothing', the absence of everything, allows this void to be filled with just about anything one pleases to fill it with. I can't recall the exact argument, but despite Gorgias being a troll of sorts - he famously perverted Parmenides' thesis on being - it was a rather sound foundation for his rhetorical efforts. Not much of his work on nothing remains, so it's hard to say for sure, but I'd argue that Gorgias is also talking about the nothing that still allows for potential. As silence, the absence of sounds and words, potentially allows for someone or something to make a sound. Take away anything that can make a sound, everything that could potentially ever make a sound, and everything that could potentially lead to something making a sound and we're getting closer to the silence that rivals the absolute nothing around which we cannot wrap our minds.

Absolute nothing would be the absence of anything, without any potential for something to ever come from it or exist in it, but that's not necessarily the same nothing people mean when they speak about nothing.

<comment><USER3> Before posting my comment, I edited out a sentence, "how can 'nothing' by the author's definition exist? Wouldn't that be a contradiction?" If nothing existed but potential to exist did, I think the author would retort the potential is something, which leads us down the ad nauseum rabbit hole.

As a physicist, the concept of the vacuum in physics is somewhat defined, but the vacuum and the laws that govern it are not the same thing. As far as we know, the laws that govern the vacuum are what we observe from nature, and that's it. Physics can't go deeper than that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a disputable issue</comment>


Show HN: InStock – like Waze, but for grocery availability - <AUTHOR> https://whatsinstock.app/ <comment><USER3> Of course it requires a critical mass of people reporting before it becomes widely useful, and thinking cynically, I could see people "InStock-bombing" their local store - saying it's out of everything - in hopes of driving people away and keeping it for themselves.

But if you've solved both of those problems and/or found them not to be problems, I think this could be really helpful

Edit: Also, I just tried to search for it on the App Store by "InStock" (what it's called on the website), and it didn't come up. Then I searched for "whats in stock" and I _think_ the one that came up (named "WhatsInStock") is this one, based on the screenshots. I think greater consistency would probably result in greater discoverability and trust.

Edit 2: I just opened it up and the nearby stores it found didn't include HEB, which is the most common grocer in my region (Texas), nor Whole Foods nor H-Mart. And while there isn't one close by, if it doesn't have HEB it probably doesn't have Central Market either. Just fyi.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hear you on the cynacism. We'll just have to see what happens.

Regarding the app store name, thanks for that feedback. We couldn't use InStock unfortunately since it was already taken, but we'll definitely think about this.

Regarding the store search results, we are using an api for this and this is quickly floating to the top of our backlog as something to work on for the next release. Thanks for the feedback on this as well, as it helps us prioritize the things that really matter to people. :)

<comment><USER3> > We couldn't use InStock unfortunately since it was already taken

Understandable; one solution would be to adopt the App Store name as the new "real name" and put it on your website, etc.

> Thanks for the feedback on this as well, as it helps us prioritize the > things that really matter to people. :)

Sure thing! Best of luck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is kind of similar to Milo.com which was acquired by eBay in 2010. It was a real-time inventory monitoring/tracking service for local shopping - <USER2> had to install a plugin for their QuickBooks application, which would automatically update store inventory to Milo. It had a search engine front end which allowed users to find items nearby -- [https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/02/confirmed-ebay-acquires- mi...](https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/02/confirmed-ebay-acquires-milo- for-75-million-investors-make-a-killing/) and [https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/15/milo-fetch-allows-local- re...](https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/15/milo-fetch-allows-local-retailers-to- upload-their-inventory-to-ebay/)

OP should def contact the founder of Milo (whose now a VC) for ideas on scaling, monetization, features etc

</comment><comment><USER5> Would you be able to offer a web version? There are a lot of us who don't have iphones, and that might provide a simpler cross-platform alternative.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback!

I hear you on this. I actually am an Android guy myself. Android is on it's way, and we've talked about adding a web version too. it's a bit tricky since we have some feature ideas we have could be tough to implement via a web app.

<comment><USER5> Great, I appreciate the response and am glad to know that. I'm curious, what's the long-term plan for monetization?

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't really have one. We may never have one. We just knew there was a real problem here.

If the app merely helps people get what they need and get home sooner (away from the virus) and doesn't cost us a fortune to maintain, then that's ok with us. If there's a business to build around the app, that'd be great too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This needs crowdsourced data with _extremely_ short shelf life (if you pardon the pun).

I don't understand how this will ever work unless you find a more automatic way to get the data. Some ideas:

\- Cooperate with the grocery store, and integrate with their existing inventory systems.

\- Build the app around a smart shopping list. Automatically suggest the nearest store that is most likely to have everything on my list in stock. For any items I've added but didn't check off after I left the store, report it automatically as not available, to build up the database.

\- Something something AR?

<comment><USER7> 2 and 3 are unlikely, most in store inventory and ordering systems are quite antiquated, not easily integrating with modern web technology, they also do not monitor things like shrink and shelf misplacement. Working with a large grocer, the best method for in stock is sales analysis.

<comment><USER8> I've done multiple POS data integration products with retail sales and inventory data and have thought about the backend of this sort of app before. #2 is doable, the main problem is that every retailer has different systems. But it can be done with enough capital.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How the heck are you able to get this data? I called the local store (Fred Myer) and they say they don't know they wait until the truck arrives and then they see what they get.

<comment><USER10> Crowd sourced reporting

<comment><USER11> What will motivate reports?

<comment><USER12> Probably nothing really. It will work a while for frequently out of stock items when the app has a small number of users. This replaces text messaging to let others know what's in stock.

But with many users, notifying other people will just make the store run out of stock sooner. So people will revert to texting their friends to let them know when something's in stock.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Awesome. About 8 years ago I was on vacation in Concan, Tx on the Frio river. There are maybe 3 stores in the area and then 3 roads out of town that each have a couple stores 10-15 miles away. I needed diapers. I didnt care what brand, I just needed some diapers. I imagined a similar idea wherein a person could search for "diapers" "beer" "charcoal" or whatever and find the closest item.

Glad to see it has come to exist.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! We think it's a neat idea too. My partner and I both had similar stories. In fact, when he started to describe his story, I knew how it ended and I just said, "I'm in. Let's build it."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A better method would be to have reservation only items, or even just a sign up sheet and distribution. As the concept of people following hot tips and traveling to en mass to various locations around the city will almost certainly exacerbate the spread. If the majority of people are good enough to use the system for it's intended purpose, then they can maybe also just not hoard items others may need.

</comment><comment><USER14> Awesome intentions behind the idea, but I've got to be realistic: how on earth are you going to motivate enough people to report on availability?

I'm a huge fan of crowdsourcing, but I'm having a hard time seeing how the math works out even remotely here. It's very, very different from Waze in this aspect.

<comment><USER15> Devil advocate: why do people report things on Waze? What motivates someone to report road conditions when it doesn't really benefit them?

<comment><USER16> The math works out very, very differently for traffic conditions than it does for store availability. With traffic conditions, with a full road of traffic, if even only a couple percent of people have Waze, and then even only a couple percent of _those_ report an accident, for example, you can still be fairly confident the accident occurred.

With stores that have thousands of products, and the app is only useful based on it's accuracy for each individual product, you need many, many more people reporting because their reports are spread over so many products.

TBH, I don't think this idea is workable, mainly because for the most in- demand items where you want a service like this, the inventory changes by the minute. I mean, whole aisles of toilet paper can easily be cleared out in 10 minutes even when purchases are limited to one package per customer. It takes me 10 mins to drive to the nearest grocery store.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Or they could just do online ordering and curbside pickup. Then availability is online and updated by the in store system. And social distance is ensured

<comment><USER18> My local grocery stores have pretty much killed that. You might be able to get a pickup window some time 8-10 days from now, but they will straight up cancel all of the high demand items like toilet paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Would be great if you could lease out this platform for other in demand assets or services that need crowd sourcing info.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting idea! Do you have any specific examples in mind?

<comment><USER20> We had a similar idea, but didn't follow through. Here are some non-obvious use cases that you may find interesting

\- Price comparison for the same item at different local stores \- Localized demand estimation for brands \- Referrals for items not available in the traditional distribution model (eg. Organic/Handmade goods)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> One thing that would be helpful to me is to get a list of the re-stocking times for my local stores. I know that my local City Target gets restocked at 11am every day. And that a Walgreens down the street gets restocked on Tue and Fri nights so Wed/Sat mornings are when to get in line early to get some of the tough-to-find goods. This could be crowd-sourced like the rest of the app or an appointed business owner could be verified or introduce a superuser/moderator role for people to get karma based off of verified submissions.

</comment><comment><USER22> It would be amazing to be able to see what Grocery delivery service has the earliest delivery times open in your area, if it is even possible

</comment><comment><USER23> I tried it briefly. Please tune the location algorithm to let me pick a nearby store. I live in the city and it detected a bunch of one-off corner stores but did not search broadly enough to find any actual grocery stores even major ones just a few miles away.

<comment><AUTHOR> We've updated the app so that it searches more broadly (10 store instead of 5), let me know if that helps! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> My local news has done something similar with storm pins. Storm pins is an app people used to post pictures and videos of interesting weather events, and, gas and water during a hurricane.

They've enabled things like toilet paper and sanitizer in the app. It's been pretty good.

</comment><comment><USER25> Interesting how this kind of app will be most useful if everyone uses the same app. In which case there is perfect market transparency (well, regarding availability only in this case) and perfect centralization. Of course, this is still individuals contributing, and so it's not exactly central planning, but it does go to show that centralized organization of available goods is quite helpful in a crisis situation, simply because it is more efficient. Especially in this crisis, where inefficiency (wandering around town trying to find stuff) is in direct conflict with the best remedy (social distancing).

</comment><comment><USER15> Someone should make a website that does this. No reason for this to be a native app.

<comment><AUTHOR> Turns out this exists: [https://www.instok.org/](https://www.instok.org/)

And we're happy that it exists. :) Hopefully, more people working on this will mean people spent less time exposed at grocery stores.

FWIW, we may pursue a web version of the app, but we do have some feature ideas that could be difficult to implement as a web app, so we'll have to see. :)

<comment><USER15> I love shipping things that people think are difficult to implement as a web app. Get at me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> shameless plug...we made something very similar... covidneeds.com ... just a bunch of volunteers ..we've put this up over a weekend trying to help... very basic.. sorry, if I shouldn't be posting about it here...

<comment><USER27> Maybe it could also let you specify "old person hours" at your nearby stores? And does it let you specify a thing you're looking for? (like 151 proof alcohol)

I think the best way to get this off the ground is to pick 1 community and really push it there, to try out how useful it can be. Then use that one as an example.

<comment><USER26> cool..yep... thats what we're trying to do... hence you see a lot of updates from NY / NJ area where its most needed; and where we're based of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Nice additional feature could be to display times, when there's probability to meet least number of shoppers.

<comment><USER29> Google has estimates of this which you can see in Google Maps.

<comment><USER27> This busy-ness info doesn't show up when I use google maps on my phone, though. Even when it is in desktop display.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> How are you getting your data? Are you scraping grocery websites or relying on users to report it?

<comment><USER9> You missed the answer to my question -crowd sourced reporting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Maybe you should look into reaching out to grocery store people and adding it. Plus in the app there's no way to report duplicates or add stores (Costco for example doesn't show up).

<comment><AUTHOR> These are great suggestions.

You're right that the functionality is limited right now. Allowing people to see more stores is one of the first things we want to work on next. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Next; let users request updates about particular stores. Hire task rabbits or provide your users with some gameified reason to go check the store.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback!

Requesting updates about particular stores is my favorite idea here. We had a similar one: requesting updates about a particular item. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Are you an Orlandoan, by chance? I'm seeing some familiar addresses in the features screenshots. Need any help?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am in Orlando! I appreciate the offer to help. I'll definitely keep that in mind. Can you send me an email (email on my hn user is good)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> it would have been somewhat would be useful if you could tie into inventory systems like brickseek, or directly from online grocers/amazon- wholefoods/instacart.

but... during this time, even those systems are unreliable so i cant imagine this being of much use as of now.

<comment><AUTHOR> good point. we agree that this would be useful, even if the information isn't perfect.

you're exactly right to point out that the information isn't perfect, by the way. I was just at a store earlier doing some personal shopping and I noticed they had employees counting the items because their inventory system wasn't reliable.

<comment><USER31> If this were to take off and maintain popularity past the COVID crisis, you could start showing trends to identify when stores receive shipments, restock their shelves, etc.

During the crisis, I don't see many people clicking "I Can Help", but it would be interesting if you could find a way to solve that. Gamification as others have said, might help, but not sure.

It would be interesting InstaCart shoppers, etc, could adopt this as a way to drive more business for themselves. If they're already out shopping and can identify high-demand items are in stock, a would-be buyer could procure it pretty quickly by starting an order with that Insta-shopper. I haven't thought through that, but it's an idea.

I could also see uploading, emailing InstaCart receipts. You could grep in- stock/out-ouf-stock information from those and timestamp it based on when the shopping was done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> just downloaded and unfortunately there's a bug that list the same 10 stores like 10 times. so i was scrolling forever just to get to the bottom where it told me "Unfortunately, no one knows what's in stock there."

I love the concept though.

</comment><comment><USER34> Can't find it on the Canadian app store :(

</comment><comment><USER35> It looks like a glide app , is that correct ?

</comment><comment><USER36> there's another app of the same name on the google play store that is wack as frell might want to look into that

</comment><comment><USER37> Thanks but no thanks.

[https://whatsinstock.app/privacy](https://whatsinstock.app/privacy)

</comment><comment><USER38> I recognize an app is more convenient but I do find that sometimes people forget that they can _call_ the store to check if they really need something.

<comment><USER39> did you read the site?</comment></comment>


Football penalty shoot-outs are unfair (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://www.lse.ac.uk/website-archive/newsAndMedia/newsArchives/2010/12/Penalties.aspx <comment><USER2> They're not primarily designed to be fair. They're designed to get a necessary result with a little more player input than a coin toss.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's a shame they didn't take their solution all the way and recommended the Thue-Morse sequence.[1]

[1]:[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thue%E2%80%93Morse_sequence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thue%E2%80%93Morse_sequence)

</comment><comment><USER4> The article makes a good point, but I can't even get to thinking it matters when the metagame of players diving vs refs/VAR decides far more matches.

This seems like a perfect application of ML. Upgrade the VAR to decide all potential fouls without real-time human intervention. Humans can only take part in offline training supervision. We'll just have to deal with the fallout of machines being able to accurately assess humans trying to lie to them.

</comment><comment><USER5> American football has a similar problem. If the score is tied in regulation, then there is a coin toss. If the team that gets the ball first scores a touchdown, then game over immediately. The other team doesn't even get to try to score.

Don't like that? Well, then play better in regulation.

<comment><USER6> The rules in the NFL were changed a while back to prevent winning during the first overtime possession by a field goal, in the name of "fairness".

That goal always struck me as self-contradictory. The fact that you've gotten to overtime, and that you have overtime, inherently means the teams are nearly equal, but we don't want a tie. The whole point of overtime is to prevent an equal score, so inherently it requires amplifying tiny differences and getting an arbitrary result. Trying to give the teams each an equal chance just demonstrates that people don't know what they want.

It appears that in 2017, overtime periods were shortened from 15 minutes to 10 minutes, out of concern for the fatigue of extra playing time. If I was in charge, I'd just say no overtime in the regular season and go back to having ties like in the old days. That seems "fair" to me.

<comment><USER7> Like you said — it should be about amplifying the skill difference (e.g. Tennis is phenomenally good at this.) rather than arbitrarily giving one ransom team a bigger chance at winning.

<comment><USER6> Amplifying anything amplifies the noise, and being tied at the end of regulation is prima facie evidence that the difference is just noise. Even after the fact you can argue about whether one team was better, or just lucky, and people do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> With 60-40 advantage, the article says "The coin gives a 20 per cent advantage to the team that shoots first"

Not particularly strong on statistics, but is this not a 50% advantage?</comment>