QLB (قلب) - Program in Arabic, display algorithms as calligraphy - <AUTHOR> http://qlblang.org/ <comment><USER2> Neat. I also wrote a bunch of Arabic Lisps, most toys that went nowhere :-)

My biggest obstacle has so far been _language_ itself: I think I'm too much of an Arabic snob to settle for simple, dictionary translation of some technical terms. I also hate transliterating, so I got distracted by months long process of compiling a dictionary.

To give you an example, Qlb replies with "letter is unexpected" when it really means "symbol". حرف vs رمز. A Lisp evaluator operates on expressions, of which symbols are a subset.

Even within technical English, words like letter and character do NOT mean the same thing, though they are similar.

Most of computational concepts one wants to expound either exist or have strong counterparts in the classical Arabic linguistic, rhetoric and logical traditions. Though not a strict requirement, the Arabic PL designer would benefit greatly from familiarity with the Classical, very abstract and deductive, byt often non-secular, works.

One of my favorite games is to read a passage out, say, a type-theoretic paper and try to translate it to Arabic :-)

[Edit:

It _is_ an excellent hack this, but Arabic side of things could use more polishing. قول is not a verb, but قُل is. قول or مقولة means "utterance", not the very "say" as you might intend. لقوله، قم الليل الا قليلا

]

<comment><USER3> I'm reminded of Damian Conway's module to allow people to program in Latin. One Latin expert that he knew had trouble learning because she kept trying to "correct" the grammar. (He'd found a combination of tenses and genders that was never ambiguous - which was a great help to his parser - but was in many cases not what would really be used in Latin.)

<comment><USER2> Except Arabic is a living language and has 300 "expert" speakers :-P

<comment><USER4> Interesting, where do you get that number?

<comment><USER5> Well, maybe he meant that very few people are actually really good at formal arabic? I know I suck at it even though I'm Lebanese and it's supposed to be my mother tongue. Arabic speakers tend to have a colloquial form of Arabic that they speak which is a much simplified version of the formal Arabic language.

I would say the closest analogy is Lebanese is to Arabic what French is to Latin. Clearly derived from it, but very different and much simpler.

300 experts is definitely a very low estimate though. Should definitely be higher.

PS: Hi Ramzi, long time no see :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice.

Everyone knows about algorithm, right?

From Wikipedia:

> The word "Algorithm", or "Algorism" in some other writing versions, comes > from the name al-Khwārizmī, pronounced in classical Arabic as Al-Khwarithmi. > Al-Khwārizmī (Persian: الخوارزمي, c. 780-850) was a Persian mathematician, > astronomer, geographer and a scholar in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, > whose name means "the native of Khwarezm", a city that was part of the > Greater Iran during his era and now is in modern day Uzbekistan. He wrote a > treatise in the Arabic language during the 9th century, which was translated > into Latin in the 12th century under the title Algoritmi de numero Indorum. > This title means "Algoritmi on the numbers of the Indians", where > "Algoritmi" was the translator's Latinization of Al-Khwarizmi's name.

<comment><USER7> And algebra and alchemy (chemistry) and the list goes on.

We have a lot to thank the Arabic world for.

<comment><USER8> And alcohol of course.

<comment><USER9> And for the modern day drug sold at every corner a.k.a. coffee

<comment><USER7> Which contains the _al_ kaloid, caffeine!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great! Next step, programming in the Diwali style of Arabic script[1]. This is one of the amazing forms of Arabic calligraphy that often graces classical Arabic architecture and other works of art. Because really, don't we all want software that looks like this[2]? ;-)

Unfortunately, I understand that Diwali takes sufficient liberties with the forms of written Arabic that it's often very hard to comprehend even for those highly literate in Arabic.

[1] [http://islamic-arts.org/2012/arabic-calligraphy-and-type- des...](http://islamic-arts.org/2012/arabic-calligraphy-and-type-design/) [2] <http://www.typotheque.com/images/articles/thuraya/02.jpg>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For the curious, Qlb means "Heart" in Arabic.

Here's Conway's Game of Life: <http://twitpic.com/bv2cra>

</comment><comment><USER11> This acts simply as a direct translation of what looks like some sort of lisp into Arabic symbols. I once did something similar with #define in C. The calligraphy bit is a side effect of using Arabic letters, which tend to be intrinsically good for calligraphy.

</comment><comment><USER12> So are programs compiled into that rendered tile format? Is this using some existing standard for transcribing algorithms into this calligraphy?

This looks very neat but I'm afraid I don't entirely understand it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just realized the title was misleading so I removed the word "render."

I don't _think_ the calligraphy is rendered automatically at the moment. Looks like the author is doing it manually. I'm guessing automatic rendering is planned, but not sure of that.

<comment><USER12> Hmm, I see. Do you know if the calligraphy itself could be executed/interpreted? The idea of a visual representation of a program being art but also executable appeals to me.

<comment><USER13> Ever heard of Piet?

<http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_%28programming_language%29>

<comment><USER12> Oh man, that is fantastic. Some of those example programs are really reminiscent of Wireworld.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireworld>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Probably about as easy to learn as brainfuck for Western progammers. Interestingly shows the extra hurdle to be overcome for programmers who do not natively use the romanic alphabet, with the more mainstream languages.

<comment><USER15> My native language is Farsi which it's alphabet is very similar to Arabic. First problem is when we work on projects that need to output RTL text. We have to program LTR with RTL string. No editor or IDE can handle it. Specially command line tools. When a string contains both LTR and RTL text then it will be a headache to maintain. You never know where is the ending quotation sign. The other fun fact is, for us non English speakers who started programming from early years of our life, some English words doesn't mean what they actually mean. For example I didn't know what `inheritance` means in real life but I was writing hierarchy in programs for a while!

<comment><USER16> I'm a native English speaker, yet there were several words I knew the computer meaning of before I knew the normal meaning. For example: icon and palette. When people used the word "icon", but didn't mean the thing you click on to start a program, I was confused.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Try this if you're stuck:

(قول "مرحبا يا عالم!")

       قول = say
       مرحبا = hello/welcome
       يا = oh
       عالم = world

<comment><USER18> This displays better:

(قول "مرحبا يا عالم!"))

You need to put a 0x200F (Unicode's right-to-left-mark) both before and after the text, so the neutrally-directed characters ( ) and " will inherit the directionality of the Arabic text, instead of the top-level left-to-right context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you are interested in Arabic programming languages then this will be a treat ;)

Kalimat كلمات –meaning Words translated from Arabic– was designed and built as a programming language that teaches children programming in Arabic as a part of facilitating the process of bringing Computational Thinking to schools in Egypt and allowing children to practice what the've learnt using a powerful programming language.

With children on the mind of the language designer, he made sure that every feature to be added won't add complexity to learning the language but rather empower children to explore more about programming languages.

Kalimat is written in C++ using the QT Framework, and it runs on a virtual machine written by the author of this programming language called SmallVM (proving names can be deceiving :D). Both Kalimat and SmallVM are open source, you can checkout the code repository here: <https://code.google.com/p/kalimat/source/checkout>

Although Kalimat is written for children, that doesn't mean that it is weak or to be considered as a toy language, it's quite the contrary actually. Under this seemingly cuddly language, there's a small beast growing as the author packs the language with features that appear in professional languages.

I am not the author of the language, so I am not familiar with all features of this language, for more details you can:

1\. Checkout the language's website <http://www.kalimat-lang.com>.

2\. Usage guide [http://www.kalimat- lang.com/wiki/%D8%AF%D9%84%D9%8A%D9%84_%D...](http://www.kalimat- lang.com/wiki/%D8%AF%D9%84%D9%8A%D9%84_%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%AA%D8%AE%D8%AF%D8%A7%D9%85_%D9%83%D9%84%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%AA)

3\. The author's blog under label Kalimat <http://iamsamy.blogspot.com/search/label/kalimat>

4\. To begin learning the language, you can check Kalimat By Example tutorial here: [http://www.kalimat- lang.com/wiki/%D9%83%D9%84%D9%85%D8%A7%D8...](http://www.kalimat- lang.com/wiki/%D9%83%D9%84%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%AA_%D8%A8%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A3%D9%85%D8%AB%D9%84%D8%A9)

Side Note: Unfortunately the language website, usage guide and the blog are written in Arabic.

However, these are some of the features I'm aware of:

\- Destructuring

\- Tail Call Elimination

\- Lambda Expression

\- Parallel Procedures

\- Green Threads

\- CSP Channels

\- Callbacks in FFI (similar to Java's JNI, Python's ctypes and C#'s P/Invoke') which enables using external libraries and frameworks like OpenGL <http://iamsamy.blogspot.com/2012/12/opengl-in-kalimat.html>

Along with primitive features like

\- Events

\- Defining classes with fields, Signals and Slots

\- Defining Modules

<comment><USER2> First I hear of this. I know of Arabic Logo and Jeem.

<comment><USER19> It is a sad thing it doesn't get enough publicity despite the effort put to it I guess. As far as I know, it got covered in a few Arabic forums and magazines, but didn't get any global awareness.

I myself learnt about كلمات because the guy behind it was a TA in our university. He's a real inspiration and some of his ideas are really innovational.

Judging by your name, I think you are an Arabic speaker, if so you could check his blog to see for yourself <http://iamsamy.blogspot.com/>.

About a year ago he started another blog titled Computational Thinking in Egypt if you're interested: <http://ctegypt.blogspot.com/>.

<comment><USER2> صراحة اخبار مفرحة.بتابع مدونة اﻻستاذ سامي من اﻵن، واشكرك على تعريفي به وعمله.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Cool project,

one nit in the description: "The name قلب is pronounced 'alb "

in standard arabic, it is actually "qalb", some dialects happen to drop the q sound

<comment><USER4> Spoiler Alert: I'm Lebanese ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This makes me really appreciate non-english speaking programmers. They not only have to learn all the logic and syntax I do, they had to learn the symbols and what they meant and the english words.

</comment><comment><USER22> this is amazing, I created a similar hack for the "deseret" language. There is a running repl at <http://deseretpl.org>

It has multiple levels of authentication - highest is:

user: elohim pass: melk

It is essentially a port of a toy lisp (soy) I wrote a while back so deseret keys map straight to their ascii equivalent (as that is what deseret itself really did).

QLB is much cooler in that it seems to be make semantic sense.

</comment><comment><USER23> I was a little confused by the link; the main image is a screenshot of what looks like a fairly ordinary Arabic text editor. I think the calligraphy referenced here is the tile mosaic in the photograph. There's more photos of geometric / artistic typesetting of QLB code in Nasser's tweets and blog. Is this Kufic-like calligraphy being autogenerated from the source code? Or is it laid out by hand?

</comment><comment><USER24> Some years ago I asked: what would "programming" look like if it was not "invented"/"dominated" by the western culture? It's not only about the symbols ... how about f.e. a more holistic approach to problem solving instead the dominating "commanding" approach used to "control" a machine ...

</comment><comment><USER25> Why its not right to left and aligned to left ?

[https://github.com/nasser/---/blob/master/public/lib/amthila...](https://github.com/nasser/---/blob/master/public/lib/amthila/konway.qlb)

<comment><USER26> This is because github does not _yet_ support right-to-left (RTL) programming languages ;-) To display the text RTL, you need to specify the direction attribute ("dir") in HTML.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. Although @jorendorff on GitHub turned me on to a great Unicode feature that might help: <https://github.com/nasser/---/pull/4>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Thats artistic.. how did you overcome RTL support ?

<comment><USER4> Glad you like it! RTL was overcome by using the latest CodeMirror and this <https://github.com/marijnh/CodeMirror/pull/1103>

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> interesting experiment! but I think we should benefit from other cultures experiments also; I mean, is there any similar (Chinese,Japanese, ...etc) programming language? and what are the benefits or experience they got from these languages?</comment>


How to Talk to Your Parents About Encryption - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-to-talk-to-your-parents-about-encryption/ <comment><USER2> Here's another helpful story based explanation of encryption.

Comment on the above article by Richard Tucker - [http://debaffle.net/tech- primer-online-services-and-encrypti...](http://debaffle.net/tech-primer- online-services-and-encryption-part-1/)</comment>


Simple ATM cards being declined - <AUTHOR> http://status.simple.com/ <comment><USER2> I don't have anything to do with 'simple' but I'm working with a group of people on another system somewhere in the payment chain. In banking failure is not an option, a little detail that I keep having to drill into my collegues, some of who would rather have an MVP with the occasional bit of downtime than something a lot more solid. So for now we're stuck in the 'hurd' loop.

Within any start-up there are always differing opinions on the level of reliability required. My first real job in IT was with the Dutch division of the Chase Mannhattan bank, they made it pretty clear upon hiring me that they did not mind hiring me into a responsible position as young as I was but that my first fuck-up would also be my last. I'm not sure if they would actually follow through on that promise but it certainly made me a bit more wary and more responsible. The fact that I ended up leaving of my own accord means that their threat probably had its intended effect.

When you're in the payment chain, whether as an IPSP, a bank or something else that directly affects peoples income and ability to function in society you have no excuse other than 'meteor fragments took out all three of our datacenters'.

Stuff is up, check-totals are at '0', transactions are never lost. 24 hours, 365 (of 366) days per year.

If you can't do that don't bother playing.

The bank I'm with (Rabobank in nl) lost a lot of respect from me (after building that up for 2 decades) when they blamed a bunch of down time on 'hackers'. What bugged me even more than the fact that they were down was the fact that they wanted to blame another party for being down.

The one thing I'll leave a little bit of room for is capacity issues during the holiday shopping spree, but even that is pretty bad form and indicative of very bad planning.

Judging by the post the error lies with Simple's partner, unfortunately for Simple customers will likely not care about that at all. To them their simple card doesn't work when they expect it to work.

I hope for simple they'll be able to fix this very quickly.

<comment><USER3> Just to contrast this a little, what you paint here is a panacea, while the reality is that even just this year 10 million accounts in the UK were out of order for a period of months due to a reliability problem: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jun/25/how- natwest...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jun/25/how-natwest-it- meltdown)

<comment><USER2> That looks like their settlement batches were no longer accepted. They deserve to lose their customers / go bust over that. Natwest will survive because not all their customers care about such stuff to the same extent, some may not even find out. Others are bound by their mortgages to have checking accounts with Natwest.

I didn't say that those things don't happen. I said that they are not acceptable. The fact that others fuck up does not give you an excuse to fuck up.

These are exactly the kind of discussions that I was hinting at above.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Simple has earned such goodwill with me for their amazing customer service, zero fees (even for overdrafts), and overall customer experience that I'm happy to give them a pass on this.

The fact that they're being proactive about their status updates, and transparently honest, helps a lot, too.

A relationship with a bank is a lot like a relationship with a doctor: bedside manner is sometimes the most important element to patient (customer) satisfaction - sometimes even surpassing outcomes, as long as it's not too serious.

</comment><comment><USER5> Sibling threads touting banks as paragons of reliability, with any momentary loss-of-access-to-funds as unforgivable, must have been dealing with a different banking system than me.

With major banks like BofA, Citibank, and others, I've had…

• credit cards often disabled for fraud-alert false alarms

• check deposits sometimes subject to mysterious fund-availability delays

• individual ATM clusters or whole ATM networks down for short periods

• account information and ATM withdrawals sometimes unavailable during 'system maintenance' hours (often early Sunday AM)

• a check erroneously bounced by a major bank (BofA) when _both_ available-by- rule funds and enrolled 'overdraft protection' would have each been individually able to cover the check amount

• my ATM card unusable while traveling to the exotic third-world locale of Ottawa, Canada due to some sort of more-than-one-day network security issue

Stuff happens, to banks also. Cut Simple some slack.

<comment><USER2> Errors on individual transactions and reporting being unavailable is not the same as transactions simply not happening at all.

Stuff happens to banks and then people switch to other banks, especially when you're a new player.

If my bank did this to me I'd be gone instantly, I almost did just over their inability to keep telebanking working through a denial of service attack, and then blaming it on the hackers. All my cards (credit, debit across several companies and private accounts) link back to the same bank. If that bank does not do its job I can't do mine.

ATM and pos worked fine during that period, if it had not I'd be gone for sure.

<comment><USER6> >If that bank does not do its job I can't do mine.

If banking is that important to you, then perhaps you ought to consider redundant providers? I mean, that's what you do with connectivity. you don't rely on one provider with a good sla; no, you get two providers.

<comment><USER2> There are quite a few problems that come with setting up double accounts for every company that I'm involved with. You'd have to spread the funds around in such a way that you could cover any contingency from any account, which in effect would mean that you's need twice the money. It also means a lot more work for the bookkeeper, two two factor auth tokens to keep on me, two account managers to manage, double the contracts and so on.

They deal I have with my bank is simple: they do their work, they get to keep transaction fees, screw me on the interbank interest rates and delay foreign transactions just long enough that they can go play with my cash. In return I expect them to deliver one thing: utter reliability.

If it gets to the point that there is no single bank that gives me the feeling that they can do just that I will indeed have to split assets across several banks. (there are other good reasons to do that, such as the maximum insured balance per account holder).

But the costs of doing so are what is holding me from that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It looks like this started around Jan 1 00:00:00 UTC 2013.

I wonder if it's related to the leap second bug discovered in July. Apparently, a some popular NTP servers incorrectly sent out leap seconds at midnight. Even if it's not that specific issue, I bet the root cause is a time-keeping bug.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ordinarily I might consider this worth a loss in reputation, but given the uniquely one-sided battle that is trying to cause any disruption in the banking industry, I'd be willing to cut these guys some slack. In this area the enemy has big guns

<comment><USER8> I wouldn't cut them any slack. I can't say my bank cards have ever gone down. Totally losing access to your customer's money doesn't help your reputation at all, "disruptor" or not.

EDIT: "The Bancorp Bank", the bank Simple farms out the actual banking to, has been around since 2000[0]. Simple _might_ have an excuse for screwing up like this if this was all their own system, but an established bank doesn't.

[0] <http://www.thebancorp.com/about/>

<comment><USER3> The inverse of this is exactly why I'd cut them slack: there's no way for them to do business without partnering with the competition, in this case being solely dependent on them.

Edit: it's exactly like trying to reinvent Twitter by consuming their APIs, and we've all seen how that goes

<comment><USER8> The Twitter comparison doesn't work here; Bancorp is explicitly a middleman. As long as Bancorp is getting paid, it's in their best interest (excuse the pun) for Simple to stay afloat.

Bancorp is a closer analog to EC2; they let Simple get off the ground quickly without having to build and harden their own banking systems and transaction networks. Also like EC2, Simple gets to take the heat equally if Bancorp screws up.

That said, this is pretty bad, but if Simple had built their own network and left a glaring security hole open, they'd be utter toast.

<comment><USER3> In the context of Wikileaks, Visa and Amazon were explicitly middlemen. As long as Visa and Amazon were paid, it was in their best interest <snip>

No doubt you already see where I'm going with this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Uhh. This is quite catastrophic actually. Not being able to access your funds at all really blows.

<comment><USER10> Running a bank is like being a cop, the stakes are high for fucking up.

<comment><USER11> The difference being that banks are (relatively) open to free market forces, while the police is not.

<comment><USER10> Unless you're an exceptionally large bank :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was hit with this, but like I'd imagine every other simple user just pulled out a credit card. I figured it was some issue with Subway's card reader on University, guess it wasn't.

</comment><comment><USER13> All news is good news? I had never heard of Simple before this and am now semi-interested in getting a card..

<comment><USER14> What do they do? What benefits they offer over traditional banks or credit cards?

<comment><USER13> They provide a much better UX for debit cards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It looks like they are trying to do good, however Banking is not like Google or Amazon cloud. Whilst the odd downtime happens with these technology companies, people forgive and move on, but banking really is different.

If my bank went down losing access to my money, I would be naked, I don't always have cash and money is our oxygen is this society, a absolute essential. Hopefully the downtime for Simple will be short, but if they had 100 million people using them as their main bank and this happened, you could expect mass exodus the next day.

The only time I have lost access to my money was a few years ago when VISA or MASTERCARD went down (or both), with them you don't have a choice and everyone lost access to their money, but if ever just one bank went down it wouldn't turn out good at all.

</comment><comment><USER16> I have six invites for any adventurous HNers interested in living life on the edge.

<comment><USER17> Would love one. email@example.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm just curious: who is their transaction partner?

<comment><USER19> <http://www.thebancorp.com/about/> is their partner bank so I'm guessing the issue is there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This actually bit me last night. It was a little bit embarrassing, but it all worked out in the end.

</comment><comment><USER2> They're back up.</comment>


Every Man a Derrida: A nation on the verge of self-deconstructing - <AUTHOR> http://reason.com/news/show/129283.html <comment><USER2> _Every Man a Derrida_

And we thought the recent headlines about an impending depression were alarming.

<comment><USER3> Derrida came to Stanford when I was there. His talk was at the largest hall on campus, and when I got there it was so packed you couldn't even get a spot on the floor (the aisles and every spare corner were covered with people). He was so important they couldn't just introduce him: they had to introduce someone to introduce him (that was Rorty, who himself talked for quite some time and said Derrida was the most important thinker since Wittgenstein). The moment he started talking, I saw dozens of earnest students writing notes so quickly that they must have been trying to capture every word.

After a few minutes, the first person got up and left. Then another, then another. After 15 minutes, you could get a spot on the floor because people had moved into vacated seats. After 30 minutes, there were empty seats and after 40 minutes there were a lot of empty seats. It was a steady drain of people. The note-takers were still furiously at it, though.

After an hour or so I left. I memorized a bunch of the best (i.e. worst and most convoluted) things Derrida said and for a few years I would pull them out to make people laugh, but they're long forgotten now. Anyway, I had a fun idea. I stood outside the exit and asked people as they came out: "Excuse me. Did you understand a single thing he said?" Most people laughed and said no. A handful looked suspicious and said yes defensively. I wanted to follow up with "Oh yeah? What?" but that would have been mean.</comment></comment>


The Problem with Taking a Digital Detox - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@lukethomas14/the-problem-with-taking-a-digital-detox-f44b665b4339

<comment><USER2> Cool to see your journey during this project.</comment>


Don't build a roadmap for a SaaS product, build a valuemap instead - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/payhawk/dont-build-a-roadmap-for-a-saas-product-build-a-valuemap-instead-5cb24b4dd58c <comment> boyko-karadzhov Great insights!

</comment><comment><USER2> Well done!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Let me know if you a valuemap works for your product too.</comment></comment>


Algorithms Every Data Scientist Should Know: Reservoir Sampling   - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cloudera.com/blog/2013/04/hadoop-stratified-randosampling-algorithm/ <comment><USER3> The core problem with Reservoir sampling is the huge number of calls to the random number generator. That quickly drains the entropy from PRNGs.

Also, for some sampling applications, the calls to the PRNG are the slowest part of the algorithm. So, you should prefer an algorithm that makes the fewest possible number of calls.

Lastly, you should take care in how the algorithm is implemented. For example, if the PRNG yields consecutive 32-bit values, computing randbits modulo n leads to small selection biases whenever n doesn't evenly divide 2^32. There are a lot of ways around this problem, but naive implementations won't give equi-distributed results.

For the most part, you should choose some other sampling algorithm unless you have exotic needs: not knowing the population size until you loop over it, AND not caring about the huge number of calls to the PRNG, AND having a limitless supply of entropy for your PRNG, AND having an easy means of getting equidistributed values in range of 0 to n-1, OR the quality of your results isn't important.

<comment><USER4> Another thing about the algorithm and article is, this is _supposed to be_ a "real world problem" that the interviewer asks because they're struggling with it themselves. But what would a single randomly chosen item from a huge set _mean_ to "real world" operations? That you would very occasionally get a very usual value? - You'd have to run the scan many times for that and whatever other thing you were thinking of.

Basically, the algorithm is "cool exercise in probability" that any deeper look will discover has just about zero use or practicality in the actual "real world". Which kind of throws into the zone of obnoxious interview brain teasers despite claims to the contrary.

<comment><USER5> The problem was supposed to be based off of a real world problem. Almost always, when you simplify a problem you have to its core, you end up with a very simple question that appears to have no practical applications.

Normally, this simple question is also easy, in which case simplifing it is the only skill you need. In other cases this question is hard, in which case you need to be able to solve it. Both of these skills are valuable, but should not be tested in the same question.

Also, if you are trying to pick a candidate's brains, their is no reason to make them redo your work of simplification, when you are stuck on the actual problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love reservoir sampling. When I first heard about the algorithm I had been preparing a lab session for a course I was a TA on. (I had a lot of freedom to create labs in this course -- a good and bad thing!) I made dinner in a bit of a daze while I proved in my head that reservoir sampling worked. It's a simple inductive proof, which is a good thing because if it was more complicated I might not have been able to do it without paper, and I might not have eaten that night.

I've since learned there are many other interesting sampling algorithms that apply in a streaming setting. A few are give here: [http://people.cs.umass.edu/~mcgregor/slides/10-jhu1.pdf](http://people.cs.umass.edu/~mcgregor/slides/10-jhu1.pdf)

<comment><USER7> Good link, thanks. Here's a couple people doing basic algo research

[http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arora/publist.html](http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arora/publist.html)

[http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~muthu/streams.html](http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~muthu/streams.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've always loved the one-liner of this in Perl: [http://learn.perl.org/faq/perlfaq5.html#How-do-I-select-a- ra...](http://learn.perl.org/faq/perlfaq5.html#How-do-I-select-a-random-line- from-a-file-)

<comment><USER9> Let's unpack that,

        rand($.) < 1 && ($line = $_) while <>;

We all know _rand_ and _while_ , but if you don't know perl the rest is hard.

<> is a common way to read stdin, and the value is assigned to the $_ special variable.

The one I didn't know was $., the current input line number. In other words, its your loop index that automatically increments.

[http://www.kichwa.com/quik_ref/spec_variables.html](http://www.kichwa.com/quik_ref/spec_variables.html)

<comment><USER10> That's good until your input stream exceeds 32768 lines [1]. There are better generators available from CPAN, like Math::TrulyRandom.

[1] - [http://www.perl.com/doc/FMTEYEWTK/random](http://www.perl.com/doc/FMTEYEWTK/random)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hmm,

Given the article's windup, I'd be a bit skeptical of the naive solution - <USER2> input n, with probability 1 /n replace the current choice_.

Once you've reached input number 10^8 or whatever, you've got all sorts of chances to have arithmetic overflow and/or the weirdness of that many pseudo- random operations screw you.

I'd rather keep a list of x's; let x1 be randomly chosen from the last 10, x2 randomly chosen from the last 100, x3 random chosen from the last 1000, etc and when termination time come do a little fixup. That'd take O(log(n)) memory instead of O(1) but if this matters, shouldn't you want some sample of what's happening?

<comment><USER11> _Once you 've reached input number 10^8 or whatever, you've got all sorts of chances to have arithmetic overflow and/or the weirdness of that many pseudo- random operations screw you._

Why? Double floats don't overflow until 10^-300 or so, and RNG's give uniform numbers from 0 to 1 just fine...

<comment><USER12> Most RNGs that generate numbers from 0 to 1 actually just generate a random 64-bit value, and divide by 2^64; which means that they do underflow relatively easily. (This is relatively easily to overcome using a better (& more expensive) random bits -> double algorithm.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I first saw that sampling technique in The Practice of Programming by Kernighan and Pike. It's used in their Markov Chain example.

</comment><comment><USER14> Just yesterday this blog post was on r-bloggers that shows how to use it with R: [http://things-about-r.tumblr.com/post/53690776834/time-is- on...](http://things-about-r.tumblr.com/post/53690776834/time-is-on-my-side-a- small-example-for-text-analytics)

</comment><comment><USER15> This is a great algorithm, entertaining to read about. I can say pretty safely that I wouldn't have come up with it on the spot.

Maybe that's why I'm not so enthusiastic about it as an interview question? ;)

More seriously - I do think that questions with specific optimal answers (or at least known answers that are considerably better than simple greedy solutions) _can_ be good interview questions, as long as they contain a big middle, with plenty of opportunity to think about the problem and show some good problem solving skills.

Questions where you know the answer or don't are probably the worst. Questions where you get the right answer or you get nowhere aren't great either. Questions where you can get a good answer by thinking about it, even if you don't get the most optimal answer, are probably best.

Another good way to approach this would be this: how much would an interviewee/candidate's performance change if he or she were allowed to type "how to randomly sample from a list of unknown length" into google. If that would make a huge difference, then it probably isn't a great question unless you're really testing to see if someone is already aware of an algorithm.

</comment><comment><USER16> I deduced this myself when I wrote an AI for Ludo, so that it chooses one of the possible moves - equally likely - as the moves are getting generated :)

Some other similar logic - Selecting n distinct items out of N, all C(N,n) selections being equally likely, passing through the data only once :)

And the next step - if the data can be accessed randomly, the above can be done in O(n) time instead of O(N) through a modification of the algo, still giving a statistically equivalent sampling scheme.

</comment><comment><USER17> Any data scientists on HN? I just ask because I wonder if it would be a good career move for me. Spent 10 years as a programmer and systems analyst. Got real tired of that.

<comment><USER6> "Data scientist" is a really vague term. It's really a matter of looking at your current skill set and interests, and seeing where they fit.

For example, many CS grads don't have strong stats/maths backgrounds. However there are still many "data science" jobs open to them. For example, you can work on the tooling that goes into storing and processing data (e.g. Hadoop), or you can build visualisations. If you want to work on, say, data analysis you need to have a stronger background in stats.

<comment> UK-AL Since machine learning and A.I is pretty much applied stats, there has got to be quite a lot of cs grads with good stats skills.

<comment><USER6> Some CS departments require undergrads to do the typical engineering maths sequence (Calculus, Linear Algebra, etc.) but many don't. Lots of PhD students in machine learning have undergrad degrees in physics, maths, or engineering.

Where I did my PhD (the top ranked CS department in the UK by a recent survey) the undergrad students did one maths courses in their entire degree, with most of it being discrete maths (IIRC). This really limited the ability of students to undertake research in machine learning or theoretical CS.

<comment> UK-AL Since your based in Birmingham I can take a good guess at where that is, because I studied there and live in birmingham. And I agree, but the machine learning/A.I modules themselves had to have maths placed within them.

Nice to see brummies on hacker news. Since your start up guy, I guess you hang around faraday wharf?

<comment><USER6> I was at Faraday Wharf a few months ago, but I mostly work from home now. Drop me an email (address is in my profile) if you want to chat more.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: How do you perform website A/B Testing? - <AUTHOR> Ask YC: How do you perform website A/B Testing? <comment><USER2> In the olden days, A/B testing of newspaper adverts took advantage of a printing system in which two otherwise identical copies of a newspaper was printed on wide rolls of paper. This fixed the testing ratio at 1:1. For new website features, this doesn't have to be the case.

Pick a small sample of random users, perhaps where account creation time modulo 1000 equals 120. Make new code paths available to these users only. Measure load. Get feedback. Then repeat where the userbase is larger. Repeat until the feature is available to everyone.</comment>


Creating Org mode sparse trees in Emacs and organice - <AUTHOR> https://200ok.ch/posts/2020-02-09_creating_org_mode_sparse_trees_in_emacs_and_organice.html <comment><USER2> I just started using organice a few days ago. I was very impressed. I am hoping it can replace Joplin as my mobile note taking app. Only thing it really lacks is text level search.

<comment><USER3> Why did you decide to replace Joplin?

<comment><USER2> Because I use emacs on the desktop. But I was never able to find a good org solution on mobile and Joplin was just about everything I was looking for.

<comment><USER4> Have you looked at Orgzly, and if so why didn't you go for it? I'm asking because I'm considering switching to Org mode for notes and looking for a good android client.

[http://www.orgzly.com/](http://www.orgzly.com/)

<comment><USER5> I use Orgzly and find it quite nice.

The main difference seems to be that Orgzly is a native Android app, while Organice is a (self-hosted) web service that happens to render nicely in a mobile browser.

I didn't to run a a whole separate server just so I could edit my org-mode files from a phone, so I like Orgzly better. But YMMV.

Lately I am trying to migrate to just running the native emacs on my phone with Termux :>

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right that Orgzly is a native app, but you're spot on in that organice just happens to render nicely in a mobile browser. You also don't have to run a 'whole separate server' to use it.

organice is a progressive web app and specifically built for that purpose. More on this in the docs: [https://organice.200ok.ch/documentation.html#orgcc693e5](https://organice.200ok.ch/documentation.html#orgcc693e5)

As for the installation of it, there's no server required. More on this in the docs: [https://organice.200ok.ch/documentation.html#orgfa38071](https://organice.200ok.ch/documentation.html#orgfa38071)

Having said that, please continue to use whatever works best for you^^ I just wanted to clarify these points.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a side note the company is rather interesting, it's basically like an Incorporated team.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for checking out 200ok^^

<comment><USER6> I like the idea, I'm wondering how it came to be? And whether it can be replicated.</comment></comment></comment>


6 years in, why are Bing's results still wrong? - <AUTHOR> http://volb.space/2016/05/04/6-years-in-why-are-bing-s-results-still-wrong.html <comment><USER2> I am not sure if these are "wrong", they are just not reflective of what matters to you. Somebody else might have another opinions.</comment>


Ask HN: Where to go to find out who's who in Austin Startups? - wh-uws

I'm about a month away from graduating from college and I've got some good ways to find out about Bay Area and NYC Startups: HN, Startup Foundry, ( though controversial and gossipy they may be) Techcrunch
But I hear Austin, TX has a pretty good scene as well and I want to talk to and find out more about companies there as well.
Any Thoughts? <comment><AUTHOR> Talk to the guys at Conjunctured coworking (<http://http://conjunctured.com/>). They're well connected with the Austin startup scene.

In particular, Cesar Torres (@cesart on Twitter) is a great guy to talk to.

</comment><comment><USER2> Look up @edash on Twitter. Dude is connected to Austin startups.

Also...AppSumo/Noah Kagan is looking for a sales guy/gal in ATX.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are a ton of startup events in Austin. Hit me up when you want to come down.</comment>


Persistent XSS in Rocket.Chat username - sicher- https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/pull/10793 <comment><AUTHOR> A PR is already being merged to fix this right away. Thanks for the concerns.</comment>


Taming the Wild Tuna - Why farmed fish are taking over dinner plates - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/articles/why-farmed-fish-are-taking-over-our-dinner-plates-1415984616

<comment><USER2> >It was more than that. The moment the researchers grabbed a few juvenile fish out of a net, the skin started to disintegrate, killing them. It took four years just to perfect delicate fast-releasing hooks for capturing juveniles and moving them into pens.

Can anyone explain why this is? Seems odd that a wild animal's skin would be so easily ruptured when it has to survive the rigors of the ocean.

<comment><USER3> I don't know for sure, but I had a few guesses.

1\. Juvenile, so immature? Softer/more vulnerable scales?

2\. The scales may be optimized for speeding along quickly through water and the net basically tore the scales apart?

3\. The scales may not be durable since the tuna's primary mode of defense is probably speeding away.

4\. The end of the article does say that "only one in tens of millions becomes an adult," so it could just be a weakness that was never changed in the course of evolution because it's not detrimental or common enough to force selection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a great article and I feel like the headline doesn't even do it justice. I'd love to read something more in-depth (a book, even) on the trial- and-error approach the researchers went through to find everything affecting the tuna in captivity. I was amazed that this species is even alive, especially with this quote: "in the wild, only one in tens of millions becomes an adult."

One thing that did bother me, though, was the WSJ's presentation of the pictures -- I had huge white gaps between all of the pictures and kept wondering if I was missing content.

</comment><comment><USER4> thank god. industrialized hunting at a global scale is probably the least sustainable activity we are doing.

</comment><comment><USER5> The one in 30 million statistic is crazy to me! That means that the surviving fish need to average 30 million children in their lifetime to sustain the current population - if they stay adults for 2 years, that's 41,000 children per day! Can someone shed light on how that's possible?

Note also that it's 1 in 30 million babies that actually hatch that survive, not just 1 in 30 million eggs.

<comment><USER6> Wikipedia looks like it makes sense:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_bluefin_tuna#Life_histo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_bluefin_tuna#Life_history)

They are reproductive for more than 2 years and lay millions of eggs in each breeding season.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is an immense step from salmon fishing, where the animals are under 20lbs.

<comment><USER6> It's kind of a step backwards, one of the considerations for farming animals is how efficiently they convert feed into protein ( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio) ), and salmon are probably more efficient at this than tuna.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's kind of funny to me that it's easier to conquer nature, than it is to change human behavior.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'd love to know why, but the article doesn't load with NoScript.

<comment><USER10> because it's 2014, and lobotomizing your browser may have harmful effects.

<comment><USER11> Would you install and run random applications that you have no idea what they are doing from random sites? No? Interesting.

If in 2014 you need to run code in my PC to display some fucking text or to let me scroll, then we're pretty much doomed.</comment></comment></comment>


Amazon EC2 Elastic GPUs for Windows - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-ec2-elastic-gpus-for-windows/ <comment><USER2> Is this going to enable me to build my own little remote gaming server with steam? I remember seeing someone attempt to do this with Linux GPUs a while back with EC2. I get the feeling things might be easier with on a Windows EC2 instance.

<comment><USER3> The Linux attempt was pretty successful. [https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised- and-much-faster-run-your-ow...](https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much- faster-run-your-own-highend-cloud-gaming-service-on-ec2.html)

<comment><USER4> Confused, isn't this example using Windows?

<comment><USER3> You're right. I'm a moran.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> DirectX, Cuda and OpenCL are not supported. Only OpenGL 3.3 supported. Makes this very limited for now.

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder what the balance of local work in the ICD is to RPC. I wouldn't have thought to proxy OpenGL to an IP network for anything interactive, but their example given is KSP.

</comment><comment><USER7> Wait so data I push to my GraphicsBuffer/GPUMemory...

I get charged for that right? As network data?

<comment><USER8> Probably not. Intra-AZ traffic in AWS has always been free and intra-region has always been pretty cheap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can someone confirm support for OpenGL 4.0 on these?</comment>


Pixlserv v0.3 (Go server for on-the-fly processing and serving of images) - <AUTHOR> http://reshnesh.github.io/pixlserv

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I've just released a new version of pixlserv ([http://reshnesh.github.io/pixlserv](http://reshnesh.github.io/pixlserv)) which I am making as my final year university project.

I would be very grateful if you could have a brief look at the project and fill in a quick survey: [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1BnkzF- KtW505FLjdVgfJ_ohAe8q...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1BnkzF- KtW505FLjdVgfJ_ohAe8qxXWDPkmZ7_m3158I/viewform)

Many thanks</comment>


Bitcoin Can Drop 50% and China Miners Will Still Make Money - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-10/bitcoin-can-drop-50-and-china-s-miners-will-still-make-money <comment><USER2> Actually Bitcoin needs to drop 94% for mining to be unprofitable. The break even is 1 BTC = $922. Yes, mining is insanely profitable right now. Miners are swimming in cash.

This is assuming $0.05 per kWh (which is a rate available to many miners outside of China, eg. Gigawatt Mining in Washington State pays $0.028 per kWh,) and a miner efficiency of 0.1 joule per gigahash (such as the popular Bitmain Antminer S9). The break even point is calculated with:

j_over_gh × cost_per_kwh / 3.6e6 (joules per kWh) / reward × (2^32 × diff) / 1e9

The parameter are: j_over_gh = 0.1, cost_per_kwh = 0.05, reward = 12.5 BTC per block, diff = 1931136454487.72. (This ignores transaction fees which have pushed the average block reward from 12.5 to around 17 BTC over the last few weeks, so the true break even point is even lower, around 1 BTC = $680).

I am occasionally interviewed by journalists who write about Bitcoin mining and they often get many details wrong. This one is no exception—Dan Murtaugh should have contacted me :)

<comment><USER3> How many machines would you need to be sure that you actually mine a block in a given year? AFAIK its a stochastic process right? I think I calculated once that , given the current hash power, you'd need about 20 miners in order to have P(you mine a block within a year) close to 1. Can you confirm/discard my conclusion?

I'd post my calculations but I don't have it here at work!

<comment><USER2> That's right, at current diff (1931e9) you need about 19 S9s (14 TH/s each) to mine a block in a year:

19 × 14e12 × 3600 × 24 × 365 / (2^32 × 1931e9) = 1.01

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Miners break even at $6,925 at China's top power price." It is my understanding that they don't pay top power price but rather they locate in areas where local electricity is abundant and cheap.

<comment><USER5> Do they go and cash out their coins immediately? If Bitcoin ever drops, they may lose everything.

<comment><USER6> If I recall correctly, bitcoins from a coinbase (mining reward) transaction can only be transferred after 100 blocks confirmation (ie about 16.5 hours). I'd assume that they might keep a bit of a speculative long position, but otherwise liquidate - they have bills to pay.

<comment><USER7> As far as I know only 6 confirmations are required for a transaction to be considered practically irreversible. Is it different for coinbase (reward) transactions?

<comment><USER8> Yeah, it's different for coinbase transactions because those transactions and the reward from them vanishes if that block is ever reorganized out of the main chain, whereas ordinary transactions will generally be included in the new chain too. It's as much a protection against technical issues as it is malicious attacks. I think there have been a small handful of reorganisations that are larger than 6 blocks in practice, and this has generally held up well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So China is basically exporting energy for a hefty amount of foreign currency.

<comment><USER10> Mining is the best way to export cheap energy without building high-power lines. I am surprised Germany doesn't have more dominance in the field, considering the headlines of their wind energy farms going into negative at certain hours of the day.

<comment><USER11> I really don't understand this statement, the energy isn't being transferred between power grids or otherwise exchanged as energy. The energy consumed during mining no longer exists as grid-based energy, it is waste heat. You don't get it back at the other end of another transaction. From the point of view of energy transfer for use in a power grid, mining has a 100% loss rate.

<comment><USER10> > You don't get it back at the other end of another transaction.

Neither does the energy exporter. They get money.

<comment><USER11> Do you really not see the difference between money changing hands for a comodity that has a physical basis, and the nominal creation of value through a process where the computation involved results in waste heat?

<comment><USER10> One of them requires a smaller investment upfront and produces dividends quicker.

<comment><USER11> This sort of thinking represents all of the things wrong with the current hype-cycle of cryptocurrencies, damaging both their long-term credibility and short-term stability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What a huge waste of resources, just to create competition.

<comment><USER13> Competition for the cheapest energy in the world.

This will spurt R&D efforts in renewable energy once there is parity with mining chips.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I thought the number of miners is supposed to be equal to the expected value of the coin. If there's profit to be made, more miners would open up shop to capture the marginal benefit.

So I guess China thinks that bitcoin will ultimately be worth half what it is now.

<comment><USER15> >> If there's profit to be made, more miners would open up shop to capture the marginal benefit.

>> So I guess China thinks that bitcoin will ultimately be worth half what it is now.

The best BTC ASIC miners on the open market are all sold out and backordered for months, and better ones keep being developed every six months. This means that, no, literally it's not possible to bring more miners online at a faster rate since they aren't openly available for purchase, and miners are still running older hardware since those miners are not yet -$EV(power) but they don't yet have enough money to purchase the new miners (which aren't readily available anyway).

It's not a perfectly competitive market. It's supply constrained.

<comment><USER16> Imagine that bitcoin is a bubble, and then I don't think humanity would have had ever spent such a huge amount of energy and resources for such a « useless » purpose.

<comment><USER17> Nuclear weapons? Their existence is a blight on humanity. MAD hasn't prevented wars, only caused them to be outsourced to countries no one cared about like Vietnam and Afghanistan. It is only through dumb luck that a superpower has not destroyed the world by _accident_

The military-industrial complex:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

<comment><USER18> >> MAD hasn't prevented wars,

If North Korea didn't have nukes, you bet we would have invaded them by now.

<comment><USER19> Between the close of the Korean war in 1953 (though no peace treaty was ever signed) and 2006, when North Korea's first tested an atomic bomb, the US did not invade North Korea for the same reason it has not invaded today, which is not due to DPRK's nuclear capability.

Seoul, the capital of South Korea, is a _scant_ 35 miles from the North Korean border, and North Korea has an unknown amount of _conventional_ artillery pointed at South Korea, enough to kill millions of South Koreans.

If the US were to invade North Korea, Seoul, and the surrounding areas would be obliterated.

That North Korea now has nuclear weapons changes things a bit, but the nukes weren't previously the thing holding the US back from invading North Korea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is just basic math, and nearly axiomatic: All else being equal, _any_ mining setup that was was profitable when Bitcoin was at half its current price will still be profitable with a 50% drop.

Because the price spike is so recent, the headline is true for nearly any mining setup that existed even shortly prior to the spike.

<comment><USER20> That's not true. Network hash rate has increased dramatically too.

<comment><USER11> "All else being equal".

Besides, it increases equally for all miners, so a rig that existed on Nov 1st and was profitable would still be profitable now at Nov 1st exchange rate and today's difficulty. Only the rate of profit/day would change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Difficulty when bitcoin was last 7k: 1.3T Current difficulty: 1.9T

<comment><USER22> Yeah, profitability is declining [https://fork.lol/reward/dari/btc](https://fork.lol/reward/dari/btc) but it could still be quite high. When no miners shut down around the last halving it was a sign that mining was nowhere near equilibrium.

This makes no sense economically, but it seems like the difficulty is controlled by how much equipment Bitmain decides to manufacture and the profitability is controlled by how much Bitmain decides to charge.

<comment><USER20> If anything the parent comment means that it's more profitable now. And that's without the crazy transaction fees these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Didn't the WSJ just have an article today about China shutting down bitcoin mining? Seems like there is a bit of disconnect in the reporting...

Source: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-quietly-orders-closing- of...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-quietly-orders-closing-of-bitcoin- mining-operations-1515594021)

</comment><comment><USER24> Wow not even mentioning difficulty. What a terribly researched article.

<comment><USER25> It's a Bloomberg article, I think they wanted to keep it simple on the tech side and focus on the money. Besides, electrical costs are essentially a predictor of difficulty. The higher the electrical costs the fewer miners there will be. Smaller operations and household miners might have to close up shop if high electrical costs and low Bitcoin price don't make mining feasible. Miners dropping off the network means the difficulty will drop too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The ASIC developer (mainly Bitmain) is in a huge position of power here.

Bitmain seems to be the only serious game in town, and spooling up a chip run isn't quick, even for someone like Intel, AMD, or the dozens of other chip makers (TI, microchip, etc). This gives them something of a headstart.

I wonder how long they can stay ahead of the other chip makers.

<comment><USER27> There is also Baikal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This kind of has to remain true for Bitcoin to remain secure. If the price were to drop enough that a large fraction of the mining fleet were unprofitable to operate honestly, it could be bought up on the cheap to launch 51% attacks.

</comment><comment><USER29> From the video on the page:

"You have hundreds, sometimes thousands of servers out there. All trying to get to the Algo!"

Nicely tried, my friend. Nicely tried.

<comment><USER30> Is that quote a reference to something?

<comment><USER29> It's a quote from the main Bloomberg video on the page linked above. The presenter seems to have gotten the meanings to a few of his buzzwords mixed up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm going to go out on a limb and emote regarding the article (especially the headline), rather than be terribly contributory to the conversation or add to knowledge of trivia. I believe this is more in spirit of the BTC speculative bubble we find ourselves in.

\---

Yeah.... but I won't!

Please everyone, keep logjamming the transaction/second throughput to drive up the relative scarcity!

Ah, whatever, it's more or less monopoly money anyway.

</comment><comment><USER32> And it's NOT a waste of resource. Miners mostly use seasonal renewable energy that otherwise would not be converted to electricity in the first place.

To maximize profit, they utilize hydroelectric power plants built on Yangtze river. Not the ones like Three Gorges Dam, but those small/micro plants (<10MW installed capacity). Most of those plants are owned by local governments or private companies. Usually, State Grid -- which is obviously owned by the state -- would purchase their power output but during rainy seasons, there is just too much electricity that State Grid wouldn't buy it all.

That's when miners came and built datacenters close to the power plants, made deals with the power plant owners to buy the power that State Grid didn't want. It's a win-win for everyone: power plants get extra cash, miners get cheap electricity.

And when it comes to dry season (starting October), miners ship their mining rig to Xinjiang or Gansu, where wind turbines are having a similar situation.

<comment><USER33> One season perfectly coinciding with another with a giant consistent pile of surplus electricity? And all of these miners transport whole data centers worth of miners a couple of times a year?

I want to believe it but this sounds too convenient to be true. It sounds more like propaganda invented to cover up the massive waste of energy. Do you have any sources to back it up?

Also, most dams don't produce more electricity during high level seasons. They generally produce a fixed amount with a constant flow to the generators and then the only thing that changes is the spillways being used during the wet season.

<comment><USER32> Well definitely not perfectly coincided. In fact in dry seasons some went to Inner Mongolia where coal is cheap and coal power stations' output is much stabler... That part indeed is a waste :\

Some sources:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in- chinas-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-chinas- tibetan-highlands-the-bizarre-world-of-bitcoin-mining-finds-a-new- home/2016/09/12/7729cbea-657e-11e6-b4d8-33e931b5a26d_story.html?utm_term=.92f61d71a226)

His latest mine is still under construction, between a hydroelectric power plant and the concrete shell of a disused power transmission station, between Kongyu and the city of Kangding.

As China's economy boomed, private companies set up hydroelectric plants in western Sichuan; then, as the economy slowed, they found themselves unable to sell to the national grid, elbowed out of the market by more politically powerful state-owned firms.

"It took a lot of money to build the plants, but it doesn't cost that much to maintain them," said HaoBTC's Mu. "So it makes sense for them to sell the power to anyone willing to buy, even at a low rate."

Also:

[https://news.bitcoin.com/brief-glimpse-lives-chinese- bitcoin...](https://news.bitcoin.com/brief-glimpse-lives-chinese-bitcoin- miners/)

[http://en.people.cn/n3/2017/0223/c90000-9181806.html](http://en.people.cn/n3/2017/0223/c90000-9181806.html)</comment></comment></comment>


Apple's Official iPhone 3G Unlock - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/external/gigaom/2009/08/20/20gigaom-apples-official-iphone-3g-unlock-99791.html <comment><USER2> Here's the article at theappleblog.com, which I believe is where it was originally posted:

[http://theappleblog.com/2009/08/20/apples-official- iphone-3g...](http://theappleblog.com/2009/08/20/apples-official- iphone-3g-unlock/)

<comment><USER3> It also shows the picture which is mentioned in the NY Times article, but the NYT failed to include it.

<comment><USER4> NYT's syndication of gigaom has always been a little wonky

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How is this noteworthy?

If he paid off the remainder of the contract, he paid the full price of the phone. Every carrier lets you unlock your phone at that point, AFAIK.

I bought my iPhone 3G in Italy (where I live) last year in october already unlocked (legally) and bundled with a rechargeable Vodafone sim card.

Edit: Furthermore, since the 3gs came out, you can also buy them at the Apple Stores.

2nd edit: here in Italy, subsidized phones are locked for the duration of the contract (usually two years). Once the contract is over you can unlock the phone. Or you can buy any phone unlocked for the full price.

This also apply to the iPhone.

Usually the difference in price of a contract with a subsidized phone and the same contract without any phone is almost exactly the difference between the full price of the phone and the subsidized price (split in the 24 months of the contract).

Isn't the same as in the US?

<comment><USER6> Perhaps it's different in the US. The terms in their mobile phone contracts do seem to be from another world (pay for reciving SMSs and calls? How is that even legal?).

<comment><USER7> I think all the carriers charge for incoming data in the US (voice, SMS or otherwise)

<comment><USER8> Why do American consumers put up with that? (It's not like that anywhere else in the world, AFAIK.)

If you have a landline phone and it rings, you don't expect to be paying the bill... How did it happen that mobile phones got treated differently and nobody raised a stink about this rip-off?

<comment><USER9> You're absolutely correct. I used to work in the Mobile industry in the U.S. FWIW, here's the sordid history behind the craziness - it wasn't merely to rip the consumer off initially. It might help to imagine that all of this is taking place about 15 years ago:

Traditionally, toll charges (a surcharge) can be assessed to the calling party in the U.S. based mostly on area code (a.k.a. the NPA, the first three digits of the phone number), which designates a geographic region of the country. Thus, the caller knows how much toll he/she will be charged based on the phone number. I live in Maine, which is in the northeastern part of the U.S., with a 207 area code. If I call a number with a 310 area code (mobile, landline, it doesn't matter), I know that's in Los Angeles, and I can expect to be assessed toll charges based on the fact that it is so far away.

Let's say I'm a mobile subscriber living in Maine, thus my mobile number will start with Maine's area code (207). Let's say my mom, who also lives in Maine, gives me a call. I happen to be roaming in Los Angeles.

When mom calls my mobile number, that call is routed to my home switch (a.k.a. the HLR). which then forwards the call using a technique called "call delivery," to a temporary number (called a TLDN) that was assigned to me by the visiting switch (the VLR), when I arrived in L.A. My home switch knows my temporary number because it was transmitted to it when I arrived in L.A., so it's no biggie for it to just forward the call.

Now - who should pay the toll on the "leg" of the call between Maine and L.A.? My mom didn't know I was in California, so is it fair to hit her with toll charges because she had no idea she was calling all the way across the country. Naturally, it makes more sense to hit the receiving end with the toll charges.

In addition to toll, we used to have a myriad of mobile network providers in the U.S., and they had varying roaming agreements which charged the home carrier different airtime rates based on the nature of the agreement between the carriers. Again, when I was in L.A., it probably cost my home carrier in Maine a lot more because the L.A. carrier would charge the Maine carrier an arm and a leg to host my call. Who is responsible for this increase in charges? There was no technical mechanism to pass it on to my mom, and it probably wouldn't be fair to sock her with it anyway, so it was charged to me, the recipient.

Now, with the advent of national plans with thousands of minutes, and with carriers consolidated down to a few national networks, and very low network costs, a lot of this doesn't make sense anymore. And some carriers (I saw that someone mentioned U.S. Cellular) are coming to their wits and abandoning this tradition. But getting huge, stodgy networks to change their ways and drop a cash cow for the hell of it when they have a virtual monopoly won't happen overnight.

TL;DR - it's a holdover from the early days when roaming cost more, and it wasn't fair to hit the calling party with surprise charges. It probably shouldn't be that way any more.

<comment><USER10> It still doesn't make sense. They should have charged your Mom for the local call and charged you for the leg between Maine and LA.

In India, in earlier days, each cellphone number will have a 'home area' generally conformed to the state you live in. If you are in the state where you bought the phone, you don't pay any incoming charges (voice/sms). Anyone else calling you will pay charges to connect to your number. If you are going out of your home state, you have to 'activate' roaming (it could be automatic if you wish to) and now you pay the 'roaming' charges from your home state to the current place where you are roaming.

Above is how it used to work when cell phones had just arrived. These days you pay a flat fee if you are calling another mobile from your mobile. Incoming call is free for the other party. Things do change if you call a landline phone from mobile (you pay higher rate because landline is mostly government owned in India).

<comment><USER11> _They should have charged your Mom for the local call and charged you for the leg between Maine and LA._

That _is_ how it works. In the US local calls are free, and his mom pays all $0 of it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Finding Ideas For Your Next Project - <AUTHOR> http://nathanbarry.com/finding-ideas-project/

<comment><USER2> I think a better approach is to solve your own problems. This way you don't have to waste time cold calling people and hoping they are sincere with you with their feedback. You are the user and the creator... It's a very powerful position to be in.

I would recommend reading Paul Graham excellent post on "startup ideas" (which could easily translate to "project ideas"):

"The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself." <http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html>

<comment><USER3> Solving your problem is a good way to find ideas. You know the problem well and the context the problem is in. However, if your work life, social life or life in general is not too varied, finding a problem to solve can be a problem in itself. Not being respectful and some people live quite contented lives like these, but living a simple, straight forward, suburban life style can be hard to find pain problems.

So to increase the ways of gaining problem to solve, getting out there to experience different aspects of life and talking to other folks are two sure way of find problems to solve. The side effect is that you will be a more rounded character and will, most probably, enjoy life much more.

Basically, this is what Nathan is saying.

<comment><USER2> The problem is that people could be insincere, non-rational or ignorant. I doubt they will know what their problems are, what they are willing to pay or what the solution could be. There's a great quote by Henry Ford: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

For Nathan his pain point could be something related to writing and publishing books. I think this would be a much better problem domain since he is a user and I am sure he has some problems regarding this process that could be improved.

<comment><USER3> Great quote! It stresses the point that a great solution to a problem could comes from a different domain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "I'm doing some research into software used by ________. Just curious, is there any software you've been looking for?..."

I think you would be surprised at how many people get confused by "software." I've received answers like "Safari" to this same exact question.

Just a thought, but instead of focusing on providing another piece of software (and phrasing it that way), look to provide business value. I know that's your end result, but I would present it that way from the first interaction.

Also, when you've picked the market/client base you want, I highly recommend seeing if you can visit the business for a day or two (if you can find time.) There's nothing better than immersing yourself...it will lead to better insight.

<comment><USER5> Reading through, Nathan wasn't expecting any realistic answers to this question. It was just an ice breaker to establish contact for the follow up call.

As to your last paragraph; this is solid advice. I've picked up a few software ideas by viewing businesses "in action" and observing the pain points.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I stole Drew Houston's idea for ideas by carrying a little notebook around to write down things that annoy me; has lead to the beginning of several little projects.

<comment> alok-g How do you handle cases when annoyed by lousy implementations of features of existing products? In other words, if the idea resulting from the frustration looks like "feature, not a product". Doing it right now involves not just doing that particular aspect right but also the remaining 95% of the product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd say asking them as well, "What do you think you'd pay for it?" could be useful to establish if it's genuinely worth going after it, but it's a really awkward question to fit in and it's a _really_ awkward question to answer as well.

<comment><USER8> I like to judge the awkwardness of their response. It helps you learn how serious they are. If they really struggle to find a price they probably don't think their problem is that painful.

You can also focus on how much a problem costs them in wasted time or lost revenue.

<comment><USER7> That's a pretty awesome kicker to the question, I'd never thought of it in quite those terms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Another option: do what someone else is already doing. For instance, bug tracking and project management apps have proven demand. Sometimes you can steal enough market share by doing things better or by making subtle variations.

</comment><comment><USER10> There is more than one way to skin a cat. Customer development based approaches like this are effective at birthing certain types of products. But lets not fall into the trap that there is a one-size-fits-all approach to innovation. Necessity is always the mother of invention, but often people can't conceive of what their life is missing or what parts of life could be more enjoyable or less painful.

</comment><comment><USER11> HN traffic took it down? all I get is "Error establishing a database connection"

<comment><USER8> Sorry, should be back now.

<comment><USER12> It seems like it went down again. I'm getting the DB error as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ideas, execution, problems, audience....

They are all part of the same thing.

You can choose to be the gold digger or the merchant. It doesn't matter. One is filled with risk but great fortune. The other is more secure but the prospects of making it big are much less.

<comment> bjelkeman-again Yeah. I always think it is funny when people are talking about ideas as if they are really worth much. I have new business ideas regularly. Ideas are cheap. Execution and access to markets, is where the idea hits the road.

And the likelihood that the idea and execution will make you insanely rich is so small that I have removed it from my equations these days. Just keep executing though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I dig this overall process (and transparency), but I'm bummed that ultimately it came down to "I have an idea." It's an idea that has some customer validation, but the value of this series of blog posts for folks was to prove a process for creating a web application that didn't start with "an idea."

<comment><USER8> I didn't start with the idea. It came out of a conversation with a friend last week.

My goal for the post series is to create a web app and be transparent about the process. So finding an idea and validating it matches that goal perfectly.

<comment><USER15> true, but the idea coming out of the idea finding process that you describe in your post would have been slightly more awesome.

...but only slightly, and i'm still eager to read follow-ups on this experiment!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There are a couple of sites that help for finding or at least verifying viable markets:

1) U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (www.bls.gov) 2) and FreeLunch.com - <http://www.economy.com/freelunch/default.asp>

</comment><comment><USER17> I really like articles like this (on how to "find" ideas) and have seen a few on HN. Does anyone have more articles like this book marked? I've seen PG's essay.

<comment><USER18> Here are a few: \- <http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html> \- <http://cdixon.org/2010/03/14/developing-new-startup-ideas/> \- <http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/08/st_qareis/>

These are tangentially related: \- [http://blog.eladgil.com/2012/02/entrepreneurial- turbulence.h...](http://blog.eladgil.com/2012/02/entrepreneurial- turbulence.html) \- <http://500hats.com/niche-to-win>

I have more general "starting a startup" links here: <http://bitly.com/bundles/o_7ki5mkvgf8/1></comment></comment>


The Moby Dick theory of big companies (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part5.html <comment><USER2> Great article. For anyone who wants a book-length drama revolving around the same pitfalls, read Jerry Kaplan's great account of GO Computing, published in the mid 90s. Time is on their side, and so is the Koolaid.

[https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Silicon-Adventure-Jerry- Kapla...](https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Silicon-Adventure-Jerry- Kaplan/dp/0140257314)

<comment><USER3> Awesome book!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Fourth, beware bad deals.

> I am thinking of one high-profile Internet startup in San Francisco right > now

which specific startup is being referred to in this section of the article?

<comment><AUTHOR> This was from @pmarca's old blog, so I am not sure the date on the post is correct.

No idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just shut down a company because we fell into some of these pitfalls. Such a great article to remember next time.

</comment><comment><USER6> The advice is sound but the analogy is ridiculous.

<comment><USER7> The analogy strains at times, but I don't find it completely ridiculous. In the world of sales and BD, "whale" is a common name for a very big account or target. Oftentimes this means a big company.

<comment><USER8> I think what the parent meant was that "Moby Dick" as a metaphor for "something alien and unknowable whose behavior you can't predict or understand" is not how it's usually used, which can be confusing. Usually when Moby Dick is used allegorically, it means "something very rare", or it's a metaphor about being consumed by the pointless desire for vengeance. Neither of those are the way the author used it here.

(More abstractly, if X is usually used in literature as a metaphor for Y, but you use it as a metaphor for Z, and Z and Y are unrelated, readers will sometimes find it hard to follow.)

A closer metaphor might've been Solaris, or some kind of Lovecraftian monster, but that reference may have eluded readers. Oh well.

<comment><USER7> Gotcha.

I've usually heard Moby Dick referenced to mean something elusive or borderline impossible to catch -- which is not necessarily the same thing as rarity, but has a similar outcome I suppose.

Of course, as you point out, the ultimate point of most Moby Dick metaphors is caution: chasing the white whale leads to your doom.

That latter point, even though it isn't the thrust of Andreesen's metaphor, nevertheless comes through in the article. So the whole "Moby Dick = unpredictable" thing doesn't quite hit its mark, but "Chasing Moby Dick = fruitless and possibly self-destructive" still does.

I'd love to see someone reference Solaris in a post like this, but yeah, it's just too obscure for most audiences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is all excellent advice! The one about the startup that struck a deal early and then was hamstrung in pursuing its business is, sadly, a classic.

</comment><comment><USER10> Nice reading.</comment>


Yahoo Maps, or not - <AUTHOR> https://maps.yahoo.com

<comment><USER2> I believe they announced it. Yahoo Maps are to be discontinued.

[http://news.softpedia.com/news/Yahoo-Shutting-down- Several-S...](http://news.softpedia.com/news/Yahoo-Shutting-down-Several- Services-Maps-and-Pipes-Are-the-Main-Casualties-483423.shtml)</comment>


Cisco's warning: Critical flaw in iOS routers allows complete system compromise - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/ciscos-warning-critical-flaw-in-ios-routers-allows-complete-system-compromise/ <comment><USER2> um _ouch_

> "A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary commands > in the context of the Linux shell of VDS with the privileges of the root > user,"

but only for "a vulnerable release of Cisco IOS Software" on "Cisco 809 and 829 Industrial ISRs" and "CGR1000"

[https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurit...](https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco- sa-ios-iot-udp-vds-inj-f2D5Jzrt)

</comment><comment><USER3> Headline: IOS, not iOS

<comment><USER4> Yeah, this is the switch/router operating system that runs most/all Cisco networking devices, not the mobile operating system which runs on iPhones.</comment></comment>


We need to talk about CSS - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/seandurham/we-need-to-talk-about-css As developers, we put a lot of effort into keeping our code clean, clear, and flexible. So why do we let our CSS become such a mess? It's time to grow up as web developers and take responsibility for writing high-quality CSS and keeping it that way. Here's how I did it on a recent project. <comment><USER2> If this is your problem, you need to bite the bullet and learn to use preprocessing.

Furthermore, I strongly recommend you start taking steps towards becoming a web _developer_ , rather than an html skinner. Otherwise, you'll risk being left behind.</comment>


Newly Declassified Documents Show How the Surveillance State was Born - <AUTHOR> http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114795/declassified-legal-opinions-show-how-surveillance-state-was-born

<comment><AUTHOR> This article is about a collection of previously classified documents spanning most of the twentieth century about advice to various United States presidents on secret surveillance programs in the interest of national security. The article was a more interesting read than I expected when I first saw it on my Google News page. President Franklin Roosevelt was advised to violate a specific Supreme Court holding about intercepting telegraph communications with persons outside the United States.[1] The history, across multiple administrations, has often been a history of security concerns trumping individual liberty concerns.

But on the whole the history is also hopeful. A key idea from the article that really connects to me is "just as the book shows how that apparatus has been built up, it also tells a second story: of how public outrage, loud and sustained, can tear it back down." Countries have been in danger from external enemies before, and countries have been in danger from their own leaders and complacent citizens before. When the people mobilize, they can still rein in the government.

[1] From the article: "In his opinion, Assistant Solicitor General Charles Fahy had little hesitation about validating the president's authority to intercept electronic communications to parties abroad. There was just one problem: The Supreme Court had explicitly held that the Communications Act barred such a move."

<comment><USER2> On the mobilization front, this rally is aiming to be a large display of support for reforming the surveillance apparatus: [http://rally.stopwatching.us](http://rally.stopwatching.us)

<comment><USER3> Any idea why the SSL certificate for that site would be invalid? I'd rather not connect to a site, given the nature of the content, if I can't know who maintains the site and where a valid SSL certificate is a good first step in due diligence.

<comment><USER4> Why would you care about an invalid cert if you aren't handing over any credentials?

<comment><USER5> An invalid cert could indicate a MITM attack. Even if you're not sending anything down, who knows what they're sending back?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _When President Obama changed course and decided not to press forward > unilaterally on planned strikes against Bashar Al Assad's regime, he was > effectively heeding that constitutional catechism. Congress and the public > had signaled their opposition to military action, and Obama responded by > acknowledging the need for congressional support. After decades of > presidents ordering foreign interventions without consulting the House and > Senate, his move represented a dramatic and welcome reversal_

It is disingenuous to claim that Obama is "bold" for not proceeding with a ridiculously ineffective plan opposed by the overwhelming majority of all Americans, up to and including his own wife, especially after Obama persisted in pushing it despite all that opposition. Further, is the author forgetting Libya? Obama didn't wait for congressional support then. Claiming Obama is heeding or has heeded a "constitutional catechism" is absurd.

<comment><USER7> To me, the situation appears to have been carefully constructed to have avoided any realistic probability of warfare against Syria.

<comment><USER8> In retrospect it appears almost _orchestrated_ \-- from Obama's push for strikes, to Kerry's press conference 'fumble' [1] -- given how clearly and cleanly it allowed Russia/Syria to concede to world demands without losing face. (Indeed by appearing to be the bigger/better/more sane people.)

[1] Wherein Kerry facetiously offered the supposedly-unacceptable path to avoiding conflict, allowing Putin to 'call' that bluff by actually agreeing to it.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. Let's not forget the "oops, sooo the British actually aren't with us on this one" part either. But everyone sacrifices a little bit to gain something much more important.

\- Obama took one on the chin and temporarily looked inept, but in the long run, no one will remember the war he didn't start, and both parties get to forget about that awkward time they were forced to advocate for positions opposite of traditional party lines.

\- Russia lost a the ability to prevent any action against its increasingly isolated stoolpidgeon, but got some much needed diplomacy cred, and a distraction from its very public human rights issues.

\- Assad doesn't risk provoking a multilateral military action against his government, but also gains a pretext to prevent proliferation of weapons that have become a huge liability, and some much needed legitimacy as the "grownup" in Syria.

I'm not a new world order guy, but I do absolutely think that there are times when unfriendly nations work through the backchannels to prevent things that are just awful for everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> >When President Obama changed course and decided not to press forward unilaterally on planned strikes against Bashar Al Assad's regime, he was effectively heeding that constitutional catechism. Congress and the public had signaled their opposition to military action, and Obama responded by acknowledging the need for congressional support. After decades of presidents ordering foreign interventions without consulting the House and Senate, his move represented a dramatic and welcome reversal

This wasn't about the constitution it was about making sure the blame was well spread around for any actions taken.

When you are entering a war that will last past the end of your term it is good for you and the party. People don't like change during war so unless you really screw up you and your party are safe for that election. If you start a war that is unpopular and you can't extend it past the end of your term then you and your party won't win the next round.

I'm pretty party agnostic, and there are things I both like about Obama and things I very much dislike. But he is a good at playing crowds and making decisions based on polling. That's what was done here.

</comment><comment><USER10> Racist fuck.

Oh I can't make baseless claims on the internet? What's your excuse?

Look I don't really like how Obama has handles anything but laying the blame on him is pretty fucking retarded when these programs have been in the works for decades.

<comment><USER11> So I've got to ask... What part of the article did you feel was racist?

<comment><USER10> None of it... I think you missed the part about baseless claims I was getting at.

<comment><USER12> Looks like it backfired.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tyler Cowen: We should focus on economic growth and stability of civilization - <AUTHOR> https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tyler-cowen-stubborn-attachments/ <comment><USER2> If we are approaching an era of resource constraint, then those are opposing concerns.</comment>


Fields medalist: Continually aim just beyond your current range - <AUTHOR> http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/continually-aim-just-beyond-your-current-range/

<comment><USER2> I was really pleased when Terry started blogging

...rarely does reading a blog push me past my current range. _smile_

There's a promising trend of putting, on blogs or wikis (Terry has done an incredible job on the dispersive wiki, and Scott Aaronson built the complexity zoo), thoughts not quite ready for 'primetime' (nor any specific journal). It's quite an exciting development. It certainly changes the social dynamic: I can imagine that in the near future, the most important research institutions will not be individual research departments but online communities crystallizing around prominent scientists who happen to be terrific bloggers.

</comment><comment><USER3> For many years, weight lifters thought that by increasing the number of repetitions, they could increase their strength. Eventually, they found out this wasn't true. What's needed is a very few reps and a great amount of weight. The same is likely true with intellectual pursuits. Better to struggle with Bach's inventions 30 minutes a day than to play "Smoke on the water" for 10 years.

<comment><USER4> The original author is actually wrong..especially using his chess analogy. Incremental improvements will get you nowhere. The best way to raise your chess game is to play against people who are faaar better than you. Do this for one week, and you will find yourself crushing your [former] peers.

Using the same analogy, Mark Zuckerberg should have beeen aiming to build facebook into a 10 million dollar company (or something)

<comment><USER5> The original author is arguably the world's best mathematician. He certainly hasn't gone nowhere. It may be worth considering that he knows what he's talking about.

<comment><USER4> It may be worth considering that I am talking about chess.

<comment><USER5> You made an analogy to Facebook, so you weren't just talking about chess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the way to translate this principle for hackers is: "Continually aim to be the stupidest person in the room".

If you want to improve quickly you must work on projects with people who have a lot more skill and experience than you do.

<comment><USER7> As long as you have sufficient ego to not take the experience of being repeatedly outperformed to mean that you suck.

<comment><USER6> Most programmers are not nearly as good as they think they are. Learning how much you suck at programming is the very first step to getting any good at it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Oh, please, can anybody correct the title? It's "Fields medalist", not "Field's medalist".</comment>


Parse Server – 100 days later - <AUTHOR> https://swifting.io/blog/2016/05/30/16-parse-server-100-days-later/?utm_campaign=iOS%2BDev%2BWeekly&utm_medium=email&utm_source=iOS_Dev_Weekly_Issue_253 <comment><USER2> NodeChef is probably the most advanced offering right now for fully managed Parse Server, just like the popular Parse.com. You may want to include it in your article.

[https://nodechef.com/parse-server](https://nodechef.com/parse-server)</comment>