Why didn't the Romans contribute much to mathematics? - <AUTHOR> https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cuu8rc/why_didnt_the_romans_contribute_much_to/ <comment><USER2> Romans aren't the outlier here. Most ancient civilizations had a similar level of accomplishment; a one or two outstanding mathematicians every century, a few practical applications, some new rules of thumb. We did have a dark age, after the Romans after all, which likewise produced little (not none) new math.

The question should rather be, what made the Greeks (and, later, others who adopted their deductive, axiomatic method) so exceptionally productive at mathematics?

Or to paraphrase Wigner, why is Hellenistic mathematics so unreasonably effective?

<comment> crooked-v > We did have a dark age, after the Romans after all, which likewise produced > little (not none) new math.

Use of the term "dark age" is both dramatically inaccurate in many ways [1] and totally elides everything that happened outside of Europe, such as the establishment of algebra as an independent field of mathematical study (AD 800 in Baghdad), the creation of algebraic geometry (AD 1070 in Persia), and the discovery of ways to solve high-order polynomial equations (approximately AD 1200 in India and China).

[1]: [https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/01/medieval-history- wh...](https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/01/medieval-history-why-are-the- middle-ages-often-characterized-as-dark-or-less-civilized.html)

Edit: Fixed a location.

<comment><USER3> Yes but the Dark Age specifically refers to Western Europe, in much the same way the disastrous impact of the Mongol Empire on Islamic scholarship, for example the burning of libraries during or after the Siege of Baghdad, barely touched Western Europe. Chances are the Mongols destroyed some advanced mathematics that took centuries to rediscover.

<comment><USER4> The dark ages simply refers to the loss of texts. There are few surviving texts from that period, so it is "dark". Later the term was re-branded to mean "bad time when no new science was done" but that's a viewpoint that doesn't fit the facts.

Source (a very enjoyable read at that!): [https://going- medieval.com/2017/05/26/theres-no-such-thing-a...](https://going- medieval.com/2017/05/26/theres-no-such-thing-as-the-dark-ages-but-ok/)

<comment><USER5> I mean, there definitely seems to have been a large decline in population, economic output, political cohesion, urbanization, record keeping, trade, etc., in much of the former Roman world following the fifth/sixth century. I suppose it's a value judgement on whether one considers that a "bad time."

<comment><USER6> Curious if you have any sources? I've never seen a data driven case that such a thing as the "dark ages" ever happened.

<comment><USER7> This is an excellent read: [https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there- dark-ages/](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages/)

<comment><USER8> Well, someone has a bone to pick with the early Middle Ages. What an angry rant to prove that the dark ages really existed. He sometimes has a point but in total it really is a non-historian making some weird arguments to prove that 800AD was terrible (look at the difference in these maps! Just completely ignore any cultural and artistic context that matter why they look the way they do!). I'm surprised he didn't compare Greek statues with medieval paintings to prove his point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > "There was once a workman who made a glass cup that was unbreakable. So he > was given an audience of the Emperor with his invention; he made Caesar give > it back to him and then threw it on the floor. Caesar was as frightened as > could be. But the man picked up his cup from the ground: it was dented like > a bronze bowl; then he took a little hammer out of his pocket and made the > cup quite sound again without any trouble. After doing this he thought he > had himself seated on the throne of Jupiter, especially when Caesar said to > him: 'Does anyone else know how to blow glass like this?' Just see what > happened. He said not, and then Caesar had him beheaded. Why? Because if his > invention were generally known we should treat gold like dirt. " (Satyricon > 51)

This apocryphal story on economic incentives vs progressive incentives is as relevant today as it was 2000 years ago.

<comment><USER10> The rise of technology was not so much the birth of new capacities, but the removal of old constraints.

China, despite a much larger and more educated population, did not spark the industrial revolution. Their feedback loops were too stable, their elites too competent.

From the perspective of the old power hierarchy, the industrial revolution was a disaster.

The nobility floated on that great cruel ocean first charted by Malthus, an ocean which began to boil.

<comment><USER11> How much of the Chinese/Japanese vs Western Europe dichotomy in term of technological development do you think is due to geography (Europe has been fractured, politically, for all of history, mostly due to geography, I think, whereas China and Japan have both been comparatively unified and stable for thousands of years). My thinking is that this has a lot to do with how European elites were not able to prevent accumulation of new technology and ideas, whereas Chinese and Japanese elites were (and did).

And then I guess a follow up question would be: do you have an opinion on why the scientific revolution happened in Western Europe and not in the Mediterranean, which is similarly fractured, but also better situated for exchange of technology and ideas (being connected to Asia and Western Europe).

<comment><USER12> The general form of this question, or at least one version of it ("why did the Industrial Revolution occur in England and not in China, which had developed a vastly larger set of technologies far earlier") is known as the _Needham Question_ , after sinologist Joseph Needham, author of _Science and Civilisation in China_ , an epic 30+ volume work covering Chinese invention and technology, begun in 1954 _and still in process_. (Needham himself died in the 1990s.) There's a fascinating Wikipedia article on the topic, and if you can find a copy of the completed volumes (many college/university libraries have it), it's a treat.

The general question of the how, why, and when of the Industrial Revolution has fascinated historians, technologists, and economists for ages. Karl Polanyi's _The Great Transformation_ , Gregory Clark's _A Farewell to Alms_ ,[1] and numerous other works address this.

Geographic determinism has become tremendously unpopular among historians, though elements of it carry weight with me. Of China and Japan vs. Europe and Britain, there are several factors:

\- Political unity vs. disunity, as you note.

\- Crops. Wheat is suitable to individual, independent farming. Rice requires community coordination.

\- Hydrology. The Chinese empire effectively started as a large civil water works management bureaucracy. Outside Egypt and Rome's aqueducts, there was no similarly-scoped coordination in the West.

\- Watersheds. Europe's rivers diverge from the interior, China's flow in parallel to relatively proximate mouths. Political boundaries in Europe have typically conformed reasonably well to watersheds, though allied / opposed alignments have changed with time. Even today, many county-level jurisdictions correspond to local watersheds. And in both China and Europe, virtually all heavy transport until modern times was along rivers or canals, if not sea or lakes.

\- While Britain and Japan are both large islands near continental empires, the geology is utterly different: sedimentary with vast coal deposits, and volcanic with virtually no fossil fuels. While each island was tremendously politically stable, resistant to invasions, England could fuel growth of iron, glass, and steam industries, Japan could not. England was generally relatively wealthy, Japan was one of the poorest countries prior to industrialisation.

\- China has long been politically unified (if subject to occasional invasions), Europe has long been politically fractured. China could shut down innovation and foreign trade. No such global policies were possible in Europe.

Within Europe, the distribution of coal is almost wholly in the north: Wales, England, a tiny patch in northern Spain, some in France, and heavy deposits in Germany and Poland. Southern Germany is very fuel-poor, excepting petroleum (not very handy in pre-industrial times) in Silesia, Romania, and Baku (Russia). Coal fueled metalurgy, glassmaking, and eventually steam power in England.

England's flat terrain and ready access to the sea (no part of Great Britain is more than 60 miles from the coast) made transport of the bulky fuel by ship viable. Overland transport wasn't an option -- firewood fuel locally gathered was far more attractive. A similar situation existed in the US where coal didn't overtake wood as a fuel until the 1880s. Rail transport finally made hauling coal from mountain-based mines in Apallachia possible, but benefited greatly from advances in steelmaking (Bessemer process, 1860s), allowing stronger, less fracture-prone rails, and stronger, more powerful locomotives. Rail is effectively canals-on-land, the first truly viable overland freight tansport mode.

There are many other factors, there's tremendous dispute over all of this, and as I've hinted, there's a large literature. I obviously find the geological argument at least plausible in many regards. Given the lack of testability, final adjudication of the question is unlikely.

________________________________

Notes:

1\. Clark teaches a course at UC Davis on economic history before the Industrial Revolution, which touches somewhat on this (the principle focus is Europe). A corrected playlist for the YouTube lectures, in proper order, is here: [https://pastebin.com/raw/bgKkGyjt](https://pastebin.com/raw/bgKkGyjt)

<comment><USER13> To add to your points on both flat terrain and waterways in England: in fact the current railway that runs a few blocks from my house runs along what used to be a canal dug from the Thames to enable transport. It was one of the last ones to open before the railway took over (and the operator went bankrupt and sold the land to a railway company that drained it and used the conveniently flattened land for more rails)

A local lake used to be an artificial reservoir to keep the canal filled.

The UK is full of canals that were viable to dig because of that flat terrain.

So large parts of England that were not reachable by river are still reachable by canal boat, and even more used to be before many of the canals were filled in or drained when no longer commercially viable for transport.

<comment><USER12> And, researching just now: there are a few canals in Japan, though even a _modern_ listing is short:

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

Among the earliest is the Takase River canal, in Kyoto, 9.7 kilometers, dug in 1611. Most of the remainder date to the 19th or 20th centuries.

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

The Tatsumi Canal was constructed in 1623, 11 km.

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

Contrast the UK:

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

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I suspect the roman numeral system played a bigger role in retarding roman mathematics than the reddit postings suggest.

After all, it's fairly well known that the characteristics of a particular programming language have a strong influence on the way the language is used. (For instance, people don't do OOP or FP using C.)

<comment><USER15> Roman numerals are profoundly misunderstood by most people today, whose main knowledge about them is that various authority figures use them as an example of an awkward and cumbersome precursor to Hindu–Arabic numerals, backed up by a slight bit of personal experience learning to encode/decode Roman numerals, which is difficult because nobody today has any substantial amount of practice at it.

Roman numerals are a recording tool, not a calculating tool. Romans did calculations using pebbles or other counters on a counting board. Roman numerals are just a way of recording the state of a counting board before/after performing some algorithm. The goal of them is to be as direct and faithful a record of the counting board state as possible.

<comment><USER14> > Romans did calculations using pebbles or other counters on a counting board.

I think you just made my point :-)

Have fun doing long division that way.

<comment><USER15> You can do long division just fine on a counting board, though it is unclear if people had developed something like the modern elementary school division algorithm 2000+ years ago.

We don't really know much about people's calculation algorithms, because they were an oral tradition not written down, and only a very small number of counting boards (e.g. made of marble) survived; others were presumably made of leather, wood, cloth, lines scratched in the dirt, ....

Japanese soroban experts handily beat westerners at doing division, in both speed and accuracy. There is no reason to believe that calculation experts of the ancient world would not have been comparably competent.

<comment><USER14> > You can do long division just fine on a counting board

I searched around a bit, and didn't find much of anything you could do with a counting board beyond division.

<comment><USER16> Counting boards / the abacus are about as good as you get for calculating methods until mechanical calculators and logarithmic slide rules. So it's not really fair to say the Romans had a disadvantage here when no one had anything better. (Granted, the wire abacus was faster than counting boards / jetons).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I was under the impression that the Romans were more applied/practical and less theoretical, but I may be wrong. I got that notion from a professor I had years ago who was fond of saying, "The Romans built roads. The Greeks talked about building roads." Has anyone else ever heard that saying?

<comment><USER18> I've heard "Greeks were mathematicians, Romans were engineers", which conveys the same concept.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> They probably innovated in math, in some form of risk modeling or something, but no single fancy intellectual wrote it all down:

[https://priceonomics.com/how-maritime-insurance-built- ancien...](https://priceonomics.com/how-maritime-insurance-built-ancient- rome/)

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm not an expert here, but wasn't the development of "zero" a rather monumental leap that was required before you could advance past Greek math? The spread into the Islamic world certainly enabled them to finally push past the Greeks.

</comment><comment><USER21> In general the ancient Romans were more interested in mathematical application, instead of abstraction. I think that's true for many other ancient civilizations as well. It's not true that the Romans didn't understand mathematics, they were spectacular engineers. They just focused on something different.

The Romans invented Roman numerals, and it's important to acknowledge that this was a mathematical achievement even though we don't use them as much any more. By putting smaller numbers in front of larger ones, they created a number writing system where you did not have to learn a large number of symbols yet any particular number was short and easy to write. Greek numbers had separate symbols not only for one through nine, but for each of the symbols 10 through 90, which meant you had to learn a lot more symbols for just one through 99.

It's true that doing calculations with Roman numerals is a pain, especially division, but I don't think the Romans thought this was a big deal. Calculations were typically done using an abacus anyway, so you simply needed a simple way to record results.

</comment><comment><USER22> The Arabic countries led by the Muslims were the most advanced scientists/engineers in the world, until they let the religious crazies take over. J [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_science_and_engine...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_science_and_engineering_in_the_Islamic_world)

<comment><USER23> I just have to object.

Early science throughout the world came about because of religion, not despite it. Early Muslim proto scientists like Ibn Sina and Ibn Khaldun explicitly did their science through religion and were heavily involved the religious politics of the day. This was also true also of early scientists in europe like Issac Newton.

Also that statement implicitly kinda carries the idea that europeans took over role of the "advancers of science" due to their tolerance and secularism. That was certainly not the case, european christianity in the 16th and 17th centuries was not in any way tolerant/moderate.

Similarly even if we agree that a decline occurred there are a myriad of other factors that could potentially cause a drop in scientific output such as the various consequences of war, the policies of the Ottoman empire, a lack of the urbanisation that occurred in China and Europe etc.

<comment><USER24> The Pythagoreans were also a religious group, as well as the platonists who followed them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Consider the title of this famous Great work wrote later : "The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing"

It has a graceful theme which is perhaps not accidental for mathematical inspiration. The same symbolic methods, being symbolic could have been painted as "domination and sacrificing" but that might not temper a mindset as mathematically conducive as notions of "completion and balancing".

A cultures achievements in different areas could owe substantially to the spectrum of mindsets which it hosts and celebrates.

<comment><USER26> >but that might not temper a mindset as mathematically conducive as notions of "completion and balancing".

Or maybe what would be considered a mathematically conducive mindset is determined by whose mathematical tradition we are following? Maybe there exists a mathematical mindset out there where "domination and sacrificing" are the requirement for conductivity of ideas?

<comment><USER25> It would seem to be a well kept secret branch if so

<comment><USER26> By out there I don't mean in the physical world, I mean in the world of possibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Paper makes you productive. Romans did not have it.

They had papyrus, parchments and wax tablets, none of them were as convenient or affordable as paper.

The adoption of paper was what really set things in motion in Europe, the Renaissance.

<comment><USER28> Paper - yet another Chinese invention, about 100AD, along with movable type printing, about 1000AD. With gunpowder and compass, two more Chinese inventions, Europeans navigated and conquered the world..

<comment><USER27> And technology and animals from the fertile crescent, efficient crops from the Americas, African slaves and significant military help from local groups.

A lot of merit to share.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Makes you wonder what will be said for our era in 500 years time...

<comment><USER30> Does it? We visited the moon and created the internet in the span of one generation. We are arguably in the most innovative scientific period in our history.

<comment><USER31> Probably the discovery of solid state devices and the invention of the digital computer is more important than the "Internet"

<comment><USER32> We will be remembered for our most important achievement: bringing high speed access to cat pictures to the masses.

<comment><USER33> Nope. Our most important achievement has been to create a system where smart people spend their life trying to get people to click on ads, using morally dubious dark-patterns.

<comment><USER34> If I had to bet, western society will be judged for creating an industrialized world while knowingly ignoring the effect of greenhouse gases.

<comment><USER35> To be fair I think the severity of climate change has only come into mainstream focus in the past 5-10 years. Just as one data point, when I was shopping for a car in 2012, I did not even consider CO2 emissions. Now, climate change is top of mind for me. I now own an electric car, stopped eating beef, mostly eliminated travel, etc... I'm not saying this will make a difference overall, but I imagine others feel similarly, and a lot of young people will hopefully be in a position to work on solving some of these problems.

<comment><USER8> Thanks to fossil fuel companies like Exxon spending billions to confuse the general public, bribe politicians and do everything else needed to spread lies so they could keep their profits up. Exxons own research already confirmed climate change was caused by fossil fuels in the 1970s, yet they sat on it doing nothing.

The Kyoto Protocol was in 1997, but the US didn't ratify it because the API managed to influence US politicians enough to cast doubt on the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> O/T: One real answer, and multiple bot posts, including one about removing another real person's comment. As a person who doesn't read much Reddit, it leaves a really strange impression.

Anyway, the top answer was still a cool read.

<comment><USER37> This is typical of /r/AskHistorians , not Reddit as a whole.

They have an explicit policy of removing any amateurish or unsourced answers, in order to keep quality high.

<comment><USER38> Doesn't that imply that the rest of reddit which is less heavily moderated has more low quality comments?

<comment><USER37> Yes, and IMO it really does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Yeh, what have the Romans ever done for us?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7tvauOJMHo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7tvauOJMHo)

</comment><comment><USER40> I bet it's a bitch to learn addition or multiplication using Roman numerals!

<comment><USER41> You might find this interesting:

[http://www.phy6.org/outreach/edu/roman.htm](http://www.phy6.org/outreach/edu/roman.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> We still use their numbering system today, in prefaces and clocks!

<comment><USER42> And SuperBowls.</comment></comment>


Car Crash Triggers Amazon Power Outage - <AUTHOR> http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/05/13/car-crash-triggers-amazon-power-outage/

<comment><USER2> Sometimes you just can't get a break!</comment>


Is MySpace a Digital Ghetto?  Please Participate in this Sociology Study - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN members,
My name is Nathan and I am working a college sociology project based on the original study behind the recent popular HN thread:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=685231 - MySpace now a "digital ghetto".
The original study attempted to explain the shift from MySpace to Facebook as a form of online social stratification.
My study will attempt to independently analyze and aggregate the opinions of those who use FaceBook and MySpace.  It will attempt to determine why users of social networks prefer their social network over others.
Since I know that there was quite a spirited discussion over this issue in the original HN thread I am confident that this sociological study will also interest you.
If you want to participate then please visit the online survey that I coded and set up for this project:
http://affiliate-script.com/socialNetworkSurvey.php
I thank you in advance for any survey responses that I receive.  Please if you have any thoughts, comments, or advice feel free to comment on this thread.
Thank you,
Nathan <comment><AUTHOR> A live link to the survey:

<http://affiliate-script.com/socialNetworkSurvey.php></comment>


Dev.to post about using Google cloud API to identify cats - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/heroku/how-to-use-computer-vision-to-automatically-filter-images-3g7k <comment><AUTHOR> how far we've come... I remember when programs first started rolling out that could identify a can of Pringles from a glade air freshener spray. good times</comment>


Crash-only Software - <AUTHOR> http://snarkmarket.com/2010/5750

<comment><USER2> When I first wrote programs for a Unix box I would think of the main program as the application. But there would almost always be some sort of shell script to wrap invocation. Sometimes also a cronjob. Maybe a watchdog restart daemon process, etc. Then my understanding expanded to really consider all of this working in concert as the application, even the OS and it's configuration, and any other service dependencies. Whatever had to be a certain way, manually configured or tuned or whatever, to achieve the desired application result.

I think that's also where the notion of error handling comes into play because it's obvious at that level that it's not enough to just handle exceptional cases gracefully inside the body of your main program(s), and in fact, you may not want to, you may want to let certain things percolate up and cause the process to exit, if only to achieve a uniformity in how you handle edge cases.

</comment><comment><USER3> _Or imag ine a crash-only busi ness that goes bank rupt every four years as part of its busi ness plan. Every part of the enter prise is designed to scat ter and re-form, so the busi ness can with stand even an exis ten tial cri sis. It's a fero cious com peti tor because it fears nothing._

Is that a startup or a terrorist cell?

In a way, the traditional edit-compile-test-debug cycle is a "deploy-only" development style. The "continuous integration" part of extreme programming is taking that even further.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm having trouble finding a distinction between crash-only software and software with good error handling. If the software (or bank or government or whatever) crashes and then restarts gracefully and automatically, I don't see how it could be said to have crashed.

<comment><USER5> The distinction is simply (but critically!) this: the standard operating procedure (and, in fact, the only available way!) to shut down a piece of crash-only software is to _crash it forcibly_. There is no quit button, no shutdown command, no remote API, there is just kill. Sounds simple enough, but where it really gets interesting is in how this mindset affects your design and implementation decisions.

Imagaine for a moment what it would be like if during every second of work during every day of the week each and every thing you did was accompanied by a corresponding design exercise along the lines of "okay, but what if it crashes right then." Now _that_ would sure produce some "software with good error handling", now wouldn't it. _That_ is crash-only software.

<comment><USER2> Yep, you'd be forced to think more about transactions. What activities needed to be carried out as a transaction, and for what activities it didn't matter. Because at any point the process could exit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm curious to know if anybody here on HN has anything to say about the analogy. How might this extend beyond the domain of programming? Where else could this pattern apply?

E.g. there's a terrific comment over on Snarkmarket that talks about gliders, and how they are, in a sense, always crashing.

<comment><USER7> Could you expand on the gliders? Or give the link to the comment on Snarkmarket?

<comment><USER6> "Powered aircraft pilots practice engine-out scenarios as part of emergency training. A checklist is brought out that usually sets a good glide angle and starts the pilot thinking about a place to land.

However, glider pilots perform that skill every flight. From the moment of release and throughout the flight, they're constantly planning ahead, thinking of where the landing spot will be (and some alternates) and what flight path will get them there."

[http://snarkmarket.com/2010/5750/comment- page-1#comment-1178...](http://snarkmarket.com/2010/5750/comment- page-1#comment-11786)

<comment><USER7> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Isn't this basically a standard principle behind fault tolerant systems design (and languages like Erlang) where you just stuff the system fully of redundancy so you can crash individual parts when they go wrong and recover instantly ?

</comment><comment><USER7> Is this a dupe? I read this before, probably on HN.

Anyway, it deserves to be re-submitted in any case.</comment>


Stream Fusion for Haskell Arrays - <AUTHOR> http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2009/09/07/stream-fusion-for-haskell-arrays/

<comment><USER2> Gosh, Haskell is so _readable!_ Most of those slides have nothing but code on them, yet they read perfectly comprehensibly. I guess it's a testament both to the language, and to the author's skill in expressing concepts clearly in it.

<comment><USER3> If you're not being sarcastic, that's encouraging and makes me want to learn enough Haskell to understand the code.

<comment><USER2> If you go through a bit of learnyouahaskell.com you'll understand the _code_ in those slides quite quickly.

But ... the problem I have with Haskell is that the other people who use it are smarter than me, so while I can parse their code, sometimes their ideas are so abstract/complex that I still don't get it...

<comment><AUTHOR> So you can parse the code in those slides -- despite it being raw high performance-focused code -- but you're having trouble understanding why it is fast?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Critiquing the Doomsday Argument - <AUTHOR> http://hanson.gmu.edu/nodoom.html

<comment><USER2> Cool stuff. I love statistics and probabilities. I don't think "post-human" is going to be a dominant category. It may appear but somehow not sure how stable it would be. I think it would be more a "transition" form, much as archeaopterx was a "transition" between dinosaurs and birds.So, post- singularity one could have "half-man/half-machine" things running about no doubt. But there would be no point keeping DNA-based life around. The meme would have finally beaten the gene. I would say within a 100 or 200 hundred thousand years of the singularity hominids will be extinct, but "life-forms" in the form of replicating worms controlled by "minds" running on millions of machines at once, would be prevalent. These could perhaps survive until the heat death of the cosmos, or close to it, who knows. The key question I am not sure about is how long the "post-human transition form" would last. Maybe 10^4 - 10^6 years or so. Hard to narrow it down further tho.</comment>


The guy who banned Google Glass in U.K. cinemas has not used Glass before - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/30/u-k-cinemas-ban-google-glass-days-after-launch-because-piracy/

<comment><USER2> I think the movie industry is insanely obsessed with the fear of camera copies of movies, no matter what kind of camera it is. I'm amazed they don't make you leave your cell phone at the door.

There are so many movies to watch I can't see why somebody has to watch a pirate copy with bad video and bad sound when you can wait a few weeks and it will be available on Blu Ray and then you can either buy the Blu ray or get a pirate copy somebody ripped off the Blu ray.

<comment><USER3> I would pay extra to go to a cinema which forced people to leave their phones at the door.</comment></comment>


New Intel Speculative Execution Side Channel Vulnerabilities - <AUTHOR> https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/security-center/advisory/intel-sa-00161.html <comment><USER2> == Google Cloud ==

Google Cloud's protections against this new vulnerability: [https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/protecting- agains...](https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/protecting-against-the- new-l1tf-speculative-vulnerabilities)

GCE Related information: [https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/security- bulletins](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/security-bulletins)

GKE Related information: [https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes- engine/docs/security-bul...](https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes- engine/docs/security-bulletins)

== Oracle Cloud ==

[https://blogs.oracle.com/oraclesecurity/intel-l1tf](https://blogs.oracle.com/oraclesecurity/intel-l1tf)

== Azure ==

[https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/virtualization/2018/08/1...](https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/virtualization/2018/08/14/hyper- v-hyperclear/)</comment>


Tutorial on Good Lisp Programming Style - <AUTHOR> http://norvig.com/luv-slides.ps

<comment><USER2> Found a pdf version: [http://www.cs.kent.edu/~arvind/Teaching/Courses/AI/AIinfo/Li...](http://www.cs.kent.edu/~arvind/Teaching/Courses/AI/AIinfo/Lisp/Tutorials/luv- slides.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Who distributes things as .ps files anyway?

Terrorists, that's who.

<comment><USER4> TeX junkies, that's who.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Quite lengthy, but even as a non-Lisper I can see the sense in it. Most of those suggestions apply equally well to other languages.

I code in Ruby these days, and elegant, beautiful code is part and parcel. I can totally identify with:

"Pick out any three lines in my program, and I can tell you where they're from and what they do" David McDonald

(quote from the article)</comment>


RAMCloud Papers - <AUTHOR> https://ramcloud.atlassian.net/wiki/display/RAM/RAMCloud+Papers <comment><USER2> The general gist of RAMCloud makes sense, but the value is hidden by the academic perspective.

The notion of fitting tons of data into memory is happening. As one of the founders of MemSQL, a YC company that ships a distributed in-memory database, it's been my focus the last 5 years.

In addition the growth of IMDBs, Apache Spark is another cue that main-memory processing is the next phase of Big Data.

In-memory processing is enabling the creation of real-time data pipelines next to existing batch systems like Hadoop and other data warehouses, and is critical for real-time recommendations, personalization, and decision-making for businesses.

Call it a side effect of the sharing or 'on-demand' economy, but companies are now moving faster to meet higher expectations from their customers/userbases.

</comment><comment><USER3> SAP HANA is already based in a diskless RAM database only</comment>


Rosenhan experiment (1973) - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_being_sane_in_insane_places

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately, this labeling and clinging onto the early hypothesis happens all too often in daily life. For medical diagnosis, we wish the standards would be higher, but at the very end, there is a human making a judgement.

When analyzing, I often realize that I give more weight to who said something, rather than what was said.

Sad but true?

</comment><comment><USER3> I may have the story wrong, but I believe that a relative--involved in the court system, not medicine--took part in one such experiment, and reported that the patients had no difficulty in distinguishing the pseudo-patients.</comment>


Show HN: Flask Foundation, A Best Practices Template For Your Flask App - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/JackStouffer/Flask-Foundation

<comment><USER2> I, for one, think this is a phenomenal idea. Tip o' the hat to you sir. I'll be digging into it soon.</comment>


Faster AMP on the Origin: AMP and SSR - <AUTHOR> https://blog.amp.dev/2019/08/07/faster-amp-on-the-origin-amp-ssr/ <comment><USER3> So AMP is designed to be so so fast, and yet has such a big JavaScript library attached that we need to process the content twice (once in a server-side render, and then again when the client side JavaScript loads)?

Anyone fancy going through the AMP library and inspecting it for cruft?

<comment><USER4> I mean, there are valid concerns over the ethics or intentions behind AMP, but let's not kid ourselves—it's definitely damn fast to load. Say what you will about the implications or whatever, but they nailed it in a technical performance sense.

<comment><USER5> Strongly disagree. It's way faster than a badly-implemented strawman (which _is_ most media sites, admittedly), but markedly slower than implementing basically the same thing but without AMP.

AMP's main benefit has been making it harder to do expensive things. (Not impossible, by a long shot; merely harder.) And they're deliberately planning to scuttle that benefit by allowing you to run your own scripts (see worker- dom). At that point, I believe that the only benefit of AMP will be how Google search treats it, rather than anything about actual performance.

<comment><USER6> The fact that Google is also moving forward with AMP4Email, which has nothing to do with fast-loading mobile websites, reveals that the true purpose of AMP is simply to create a Google-proprietary replacement for HTML.

<comment><USER7> Another explanation for the name is that it uses a subset of the components of normal AMP, which are all prefixed with "amp-". Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Mail.ru are also moving forward with AMP4Email.

<comment><USER6> As we've discussed previously, the other mail providers are being forced to comply with Google's proprietary format since Google holds a near monopoly on email and they want to remain compatible. It isn't a defense for Google's behavior.

And Google has communicated in multiple other ways that it thinks websites should be developed exclusively in AMP, a replacement of the open standard everyone agreed upon in HTML5.

<comment><USER7> Your conspiracy theory doesn't explain mail.ru.

I'm also curious how you explain link aggregators other than Google using AMP caches.

> And Google has communicated in multiple other ways that it thinks websites > should be developed exclusively in AMP,

It doesn't support everything that full HTML supports, so this statement is obviously false.

> a replacement of the open standard everyone agreed upon in HTML5.

That's like saying RSS is a replacement for XML. It's a replacement for Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles, not for HTML5, which it is built on.

<comment><USER6> You're literally arguing with Google's own statements about AMP now: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXEdcNTs- GE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXEdcNTs-GE) [AMP First: AMP as your main framework (AMP Conf '19)]

"In this special episode of Amplify, discover how to go "AMP First" and use AMP as your main development framework to significantly increase your productivity as developer. You'll also learn why "paired AMP" was never really meant to be an end state for AMP."

<comment><USER7> At the beginning of your video, the presenter says, "It's not a replacement for HTML." This is obvious because HTML5 supports far more than what is exposed in AMP. He later says they want it to be a natural choice for "web development for everything content related." Again, this is not a "replacement for HTML" any more than RSS is a replacement for XML.

I take it you've admitted the rest of your mistakes as you have left them unanswered?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > With this attribute being set, the validator treats SSR'd AMP as valid AMP. > SSR'd AMP optimizations break the rules of the AMP spec, hence making the > document invalid, which is why it's necessary to indicate this case with > this new flag. With the flag and the optimizations both being in place, the > document is considered valid and you're good to go.

Wait, does this mean that websites could serve plain HTML but set this flag and this avoid being penalized by Google? Win!

</comment><comment><USER3> Take a look at Google's AMP script:

[https://www.google.com/xjs/_/js/k=xjs.av.en.1ic8JaUStX4.O/m=...](https://www.google.com/xjs/_/js/k=xjs.av.en.1ic8JaUStX4.O/m=jsa,r,d,hsm,ampsa,amp,tnqaT/am=AACAAORCDwDgqwFWAg/d=1/br=1/rs=ACT90oFDGnudWjXLeDH- NewC5hLtO_NGLw)

Ask yourself... Is that really the minimum amount of script needed to render a basic fast text and images only webpage? Notice the handcoded crypto functions? Notice the copious numbers of debugging functions and log messages and error messages? Notice the large numbers of copyright notices and complete license texts.

This stuff, if Google's dream comes to fruition, will be downloaded billions of times per day. For every byte of cruft in this file, an ethernet cable needs to be installed/upgraded somewhere.

We shouldn't let Google get away with such massive inefficiency in the name of efficiency.

<comment><USER9> I count 185 "try" statements with only 162 "catch".

I don't know much about javascript, but could someone explain what happens with the 20 that don't get caught? Do they bubble up and get caught by another "catch"? Or is this indicative of lots of "holes" in the code path?

<comment><USER10> You can have try/finally without the catch.

<comment><USER9> Ok, fair enough. But then does that lead to a "fatal error" of some sort? I'm curious because I find AMP page quite buggy. ie. not loading at all. Or loading, then reloading a blank page. And thought maybe these were the "dead end" code paths.

<comment><USER11> It's caught by a higher-level catch if there is one.

Try blocks without a catch are a sign of any of these: poor coding, remnants from refactoring, features started and abandoned, possibly result of some build steps combining and optimising code.

<comment><USER12> Try without a catch is fairly common and IMO quite fine when it's not the current method's job to deal with an error but it is its job to clean up state or some resources.

      async showImage() {
        this.showLoadingSpinner = true
        try {
          this.imageData = await fetchImageData()
        } finally {
          this.showLoadingSpinner = false
        }
      }

There might be a parent class/component/whatever that deals with errors and shows them to the user. The image component is responsible for showing the loading spinner and it shouldn't be left spinning if there's an error.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Every developer second put into AMP is a waste of cosmic resources.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't fully understand the implications here, and I know I'm oversimplifying given the SSR half, but I find it amusing that part of this feature is "remove the code we told you to add".

</comment><comment><USER15> > It doesn't make sense to hand-write SSR'd AMP. Instead, use a tool to > automatically transform your AMP files into a SSR'd version, like a compiler > would.

"Compiling HTML" would've been Star Trekian techo-babble a few years ago. And yet, here we are, where a straight-faced Google developer advocate is telling us to do just that. Should we laugh or should we cry?

</comment><comment><USER16> Make your site fast so that Google can avoid the traffic to your fast site.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's just sad that enormous amount of developer resources are being wasted into a tech which should have been used for the standard web instead. It's not just the developer hours put into the AMP project itself. Thanks to all the SEO blogs, every site out there has to wasted resources into an AMP implementation.

The days of maintaining two versions of a website - a "mobile version" (in AMP) and the normal - are back again. Takes me back to the WAP days (not saying it's that bad). Then there are those that are going AMP-only - <USER2> locked into AMP and all the excessive-yet-limited JS baggage (try building a full-fledged site and you will have a lot of AMP JS). JS compilation and execution isn't cheap on phones either. I sure as hell can make faster- rendering sites without that AMP bloat that can compete despite their prefetch.

This proprietary tech isn't helpful and is a massive dev resource sink. And let's not kid ourselves, there were many better ways for Google to prioritize and encourage speedy websites.

<comment><USER18> >And let's not kid ourselves, there were many better ways for Google to prioritize and encourage speedy websites.

That's not the goal, though. Better tracking of your social graph is the goal of AMP. It's like alt.test to see how fast your link propagates, and where it goes. Useful information for influencing you and others.

<comment><USER7> With signed exchanges, they won't have any information about when people share AMP cache links, so that conspiracy theory doesn't work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> No thanks!

Is there a term for creating something with two purposes? Where one seemingly benevolent purpose hides a malevolent one?

<comment><USER20> A Trojan horse?

<comment><USER21> Is it a Trojan Horse when the strategy is so blatantly obviously? Google exists to turn this path:

User -> Internet -> Website

Into

User -> Google -> Internet -> Google -> Website

So that they can sell more ads.

<comment><USER20> Perhaps a poisoned chalice, then?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's called HTML. Google reinvents HTML and calls it an amazing innovation.

</comment><comment><USER22> I look forward to never using this nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER23> Favorite excerpt:

" AMP SSR is for everyone

If you publish AMP pages, you should publish server-side-rendered AMP pages. Similar to minifying your HTML or CSS, running AMP Optimizer or the Go transformers should be a normal part of your build / rendering chain. The improved rendering performance makes a big difference in FCP times, but more importantly, in the user experience.

" Other than being the most heavy handed, imperative/authoritarian style call to arms I've seen, the part of this that really bakes my cake is "makes a big difference... in the user experience." Ya know what makes the experience of visiting my website great for a user? When they actually visit MY website. It's like, the single most fundamental part of a website visiting experience. When their browser and my server host kanoodle around in cyber space together, instead of having some creepy cuckold experience involving Google's server. So I'm thinking that AMP, and all derivative technologies, should really make like 'Google Health' and retire to the trash bin.</comment>


Robotic Formula E support series in 2016 - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/cars/2015/11/robotic-race-car-series-will-support-formula-e-next-year/ <comment><AUTHOR> This article indicates that there will be a "crowd sourced" entry as well. Looking forward to it.

[http://blackflag.jalopnik.com/its-here-formula-e- announces-i...](http://blackflag.jalopnik.com/its-here-formula-e-announces- intention-to-field-a-driv-1744956097)</comment>


Netflix deals at Sundance don't make economic sense, they don't have to - <AUTHOR> https://pando.com/2016/02/01/netflix-and-amazons-deals-sundance-dont-make-economic-sense-because-they-dont-have/7786b67b6819c04e01d83dbf55499944396d3c87/ <comment><USER2> I enjoy watching established players in industries that have exhibited decades of abusive behavior toward independent artists and consumers get stomped on by the new Internet economy. It's not that I necessarily think that in the end Amazon and Netflix will treat creators or consumers any better than Hollywood, though they might, it's hard to know yet. But, I think seeing the movie industry and the music industry (in particular, the music industry) kicked in the damned teeth until they cry for mercy is downright hilarious.

Hollywood thinks they have money and power...until an Apple, or Google, or Amazon comes along and shows them what real economic clout looks like. Again, it may not end up better for creative folks or consumers, but it sure is funny while it's shaking out.

<comment><USER3> > Hollywood thinks they have money and power...until an Apple, or Google, or > Amazon comes along and shows them what real economic clout looks like.

Something I read once stuck with me. I don't remember the exact wording, but basically the movie industry's entire market, soup to nuts, is an order of magnitude less than just one of Disney's physical goods departments.

An entire industry's _market_ doesn't even hold a candle to one company's _department_. Hollywood is stranger than you could ever know. It makes a pitiful amount of money in relation to global capitalism, always has, always will. But it wields outsized influence on American policymaking regardless.

Another quote comes to mind. When Apple released the Watch, someone asked one of the top watch companies if they were worried about Apple butting into their market. He just smiled and said something to the effect of, "Call me when they can figure out how to get men to wear diamonds on anything other than a watch."

Established industries have spent long, long periods of time getting to know their customer. More often than not, they can take any upstart's best efforts and treat it as outsourced R&D. Netflix and Apple can succeed to their hearts content and still not have a prayer of unseating Hollywood.

<comment><USER4> On watches, I'd say when you have low cost smartwatches (like what happened with phones), then things might change. Watches might become relegated to being statements for the fashion conscious.

<comment><USER3> > Watches might become relegated to being statements for the fashion > conscious.

When have they ever not been? The watch, even back in it's heyday as something you carried around in your pocket, has always been a status-first, function- second fashion accessory. It has always been much, much cheaper to use the established methods of telling time, most villages first infrastructure investment was a town clock, once those became cost-effective to build.

It has only been very recently where it became fashionable for everyone to wear one, and that's only because of cheap electronic watches. Cheap electronic watches had the inevitable effect of whetting appetite for luxury options. Casio was the best thing that ever happened to luxury watch makers.

<comment><USER4> Right. And the choice could now be upgrading to a smartwatch from Casio as opposed to a higher end Swatch. Check out Swatch's share price since 2013.

No clue why Europe is the only relevant market you're referencing here. Either way no clue what the market size for town clocks was.

<comment><USER3> People upgrading from Casio to Apple are of no concern to higher-end makers like Patek Philippe. Swatch is not a premium watch maker. What Patek and the like might be worried about is people moving from Patek to Apple.

But when you start to think more carefully about that scenario, it's rather ridiculous. People into watches don't just buy one. You don't "switch" brands, you just select a different one for your next purchase. It could be another Patek, perhaps an Audemars Piguet, or even an Apple Watch.

The idea that someone buying these watches would sell them all and buy an Apple Watch, never to own another high-end watch again, is simply absurd.

<comment><USER2> _" People into watches don't just buy one. You don't "switch" brands, you just select a different one for your next purchase. It could be another Patek, perhaps an Audemars Piguet, or even an Apple Watch."_

You're talking about collectors. They already do not represent a significant portion of the current market for high end watches. Sure, wealthy people who like watches probably have one or two "nice" watches. But, people who collect things will never be the majority of a mass market consumer good. There are car collectors with classic cars, that won't save internal combustion engines. There are people who collect old computers, too, but no one is seriously suggesting the Commodore 64 will ever be a mass market product again. People collect dolls, but Barbie doesn't make their millions from sales to collectors; they make their millions from the mass market.

So, you're arguing there will always be classic watch collectors. No problem. I'm sure there will be. Hell, there are still people that knit their own sweaters. Watch collectors will not be common, and they will not represent a multi-billion dollar market.

<comment><USER3> > You're talking about collectors.

No, I'm not. I'm talking about people that buy high-end watches. They're like ties, it doesn't really make sense to own just one. You need one for every occasion, to match all the types of outfits you wear.

It makes sense for you to own just one high-end watch. But the kind of person that can pay $30K for a watch is not you. They are the people that keep Patek Phillipe in business. They made €765.6 million in 2013. The Swiss watch industry as a whole is around $10 billion.

<comment><USER4> $800MM is a small business and $10BN is a small industry fyi.

<comment><USER3> I never said it wasn't. The theme is small, entrenched industries that seem way bigger than they are. Hollywood seems so much bigger than it is because geopolitically, US culture exports are a big contributor to global goodwill.

The watch industry is sheltered by old, old money, patronized by the kind of people who could comfortably buy up the entire industry if they saw the need.

Market logic is a useful thing to grasp, but there are bigger things in the world than markets, and it's really useful to be able to understand how they work. What looks small often isn't. Bigger, better, faster, stronger are not the only rules the world lives by. There exist points at which normal logic upends and irrationality rules.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Netflix and Amazon are doing what Murdoch did in the 90's when he massively outbid CBS (by over $100 million/year) to get the NFL on FOX: he wasn't just buying football games, he was buying a ticket to the big time network business and simultaneously shutting doors for other fledgling channels from Warners and Paramount that were following FOX's path.

<comment><USER6> Overpaying for the NFL was also a message to the affiliates, that we have deep pockets and are in this for real.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Commoditize complements until you run out of complements (for which one shouldn't hold one's breath).</comment>


Repeating Radio Signals Coming from Distant Galaxy Detected - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/frb-fast-radio-bursts-deep-space-breakthrough-listen-657144 <comment><USER2> This is the really interesting bit IMO

 _In addition, their observations revealed that the brightest of these 15 emissions occurred at around 7 GHz. This was higher than any repeating FRBs seen to date, which indicated for the first time that they can occur at frequencies higher than previously thought. Last, but not least, the high- resolution data the Listen team collected is expected to yield valuable insights into FRBs for years to come.

This was made possible thanks to the Digital Backend instrument on the GBRT, which is able to record several GHz of bandwidth simultaneously and split the information into billions of individuals channels. This enables scientists to study the proprieties and the frequency spectrum of FRBs with greater precision, and should lead to new theories about the causes of these radio emissions.

So even if these particular signals should prove to not be extra-terrestrial in origin, Listen is still pushing the boundaries of what is possible with radio astronomy. And given that Breakthrough Listen is less than two years into its proposed ten-year survey, we can expect many more sources to be observed and studied in the coming years. If there's evidence of ETI to be found, we're sure to find out about it sooner or later!_

<comment><USER3> Cant we see a way to backhaul radio telescope data from very remote locations, in the same way that Cloudflare is using asymmetric website traffic patterns? Is there any potential for collecting radio data inexpensively, I mean can we substitute network scale and geography to such a extent that commodity radio observatory is possible, in the 20 years to my retirement, or in my life, or beyond?

I hear you loud and clear about the potential, but I am desperate to get a clue about how much the ramp will become steep and quick?

Funny thing, if it weren't for the cheap and distributed way of inexpensive intelligence that had bombarded my senses with new information, I should be very possibly unaware of the potential for this immense explosion of discovery!

<comment><USER4> Do you mean like the square kilometer array? [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Kilometre_Array](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Kilometre_Array)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Strangely, or perhaps not, the most interesting part of this article to me was this:

"Using the Digital Backend instrument on the GBRT, Dr. Gajjar and the Listen team observed FRB 121102 for five hours. From this, they accumulating 400 terabytes of data"

That has to be one hell of an all flash array to take in that much data at a steady state of 22.75 GiB/s

<comment><USER6> Fun fact: the Square Kilometre Array (SKA telescope) will gather roughly 3 TB/s when it's up an running.

<comment><USER7> Would it be a reverse DoS attack when the North Koreans try to steal the data and 3 TB/s crashes their Pentium II "mainframe"?

<comment><USER8> "There is no greater danger than underestimating your opponent." ― Lao Tzu

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article keeps mentioning "intelligent alien life" over and over, then closes with

| Despite widespread speculation, the possibility of the signals coming from an advanced alien civilization has been largely ruled out.

Way to be a buzz kill.

<comment><USER10> The scale of the universe is depressing.

Edit: because I feel that were stuck here for now. If Voyager took 40 years to exit our solar system. And solar system in galaxies and galaxies in the universe...

It's a good thing I'm too busy being poor to be concerned about interstellar travel.

It is mind blowing though... Way to quote pale blue dot... Everything we have ever known...

<comment><USER11> At least you're not a paramecium, or an ant, or a dog, or a mollusk, or an electron. You have self-awareness which is something many things on many scales do not have.

Not to mention, you can speak English (world's most used langauge), and have an internet connection. Hopefully, you make end's meet, and aren't starving in the street. Even on the scale of other sentient beings, things are all relative.

<comment><USER10> Hahaha hey man it's my right to complain. I just went to whole foods, live in a first world country. I do wonder is it better not to know. Yeah I could be a paramecium under a slide in some high school biology class.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> New analysis of a known FRB source. They find new signals.

> _The source known as FRB 121101 was discovered back on November 2nd, 2012, > by astronomers using the Arecibo radio telescope. At the time, it was the > first FRB to be discovered; and by 2015, it became the first FRB to be seen > repeating. This effectively ruled out the possibility that repeating FRBs > were caused by catastrophic events, which had previously been theorized.

And in 2016, FRB 121102 was the first FRB to have its location pinpointed to such a degree that its host galaxy could be identified. ... And in the early hours of Saturday, August 26th ... What they found was evidence of 15 new pulses coming from FRB 121102, which confirmed that it was in a newly active state._

</comment><comment><USER13> The article has a completely unrelated image, captioned _A colorful deep space image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, as seen in a NASA handout from June 3, 2014._

There is no claim that the RFBs came from that area of space.

That "colorful" image is a Hubble image that is incredible in its own right. It is the Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2014. [http://hubblesite.org/image/3380/news/91-astronomical](http://hubblesite.org/image/3380/news/91-astronomical) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra- Deep_Field](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field)

 _The HUDF shows a small section of space in the southern-hemisphere constellation Fornax. Now, using ultraviolet light, astronomers have combined the full range of colors available to Hubble, stretching all the way from ultraviolet to near-infrared light. The resulting image – made from 841 orbits of telescope viewing time – contains approximately 10,000 galaxies, extending back in time to within a few hundred million years of the big bang._

</comment><comment><USER14> Cue the 'aliens' click bait stories in about 24 hours.

Less sarcastically...has anyone created some sort of internet archaeology tools that allows quick traceback of information linked from page to page to show how science becomes news then bad news then click bait?

<comment><USER15> Actually the Ancient Babylonians had clay tablets that could trace the origin of information linked from tablet to tablet far more accurately than modern computing devices can.

<comment><USER16> > far more accurately than modern computing devices can

I feel like have no idea how complex computers actually are...

<comment><USER17> I think you missed the Trig Tablets article earlier this month..

<comment><USER16> I really hope you're being sarcastic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Despite widespread speculation, the possibility of the signals coming from > an advanced alien civilization has been largely ruled out.

Anyone know how?

<comment><USER19> Why would an alien civilization do this?

And I don't just mean, come up with something that maybe some really powerful but really _stupid_ alien civilization might conceivably do in a silly science fiction book. Explain how this is the best use of their still-limited power.

Even the old standby "well maybe they're just incomprehensible and we can't understand them" doesn't really work here because when we're talking about "incomprehensible" aliens we don't usually mean that they're incomprehensible on account of being cosmically stupid and wasteful.

(I am speaking about what we actually have evidence for. If there's multiple exabytes of incredible data packed into this signal somehow we have no evidence for it. I like to distinguish very clearly between "things based on the evidence that we have" and "airy flights of fancy based on what might be hiding in the gaps", on the grounds that the latter is unbounded, so while they are fun in stories, in a way the very unlimited nature of the possible sets of speculations makes them uninteresting as an analysis of the real universe, all equally lost in the noise of all the other fantastic possibilities.)

<comment><USER20> > Explain how this is the best use of their still-limited power

Weapon. I suppose you could ask the same question looking at our nuclear tests - why someone would waste so much energy in a single event? Maybe it's just remnants from their firing range?

<comment><USER21> Or an actual use of weapons.

<comment><USER22> Perhaps they're celebrating the failed attempt by anarchist revolutionaries to cause the emperors home star to go nova.

<comment><USER23> And that's probably genocide on a multi star system level. Good cause to celebrate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> But is the frequency of the signals prime numbers?

<comment><USER25> I always thought an interesting experiment would be to fire off a handful of nuclear bombs in space. (Rather deep space, like well out of where they could do any harm to Earth.)

 _Then pace the time between detonations to different prime numbers..._

<comment><USER26> > Then pace the time between detonations to different prime numbers...

There is a problem though. Whose time ? Your time, observers time ? Are the bombs moving with the same velocity ?

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

<comment><USER27> > Are the bombs moving with the same velocity?

Relative to the speed of light, where these effects actually become appreciable?

Yes. Hell yes. Basically identical velocities. Signal to noise ratio issues will do in this idea long before relativity has any sort of impact; it's not even close.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Does anyone have a copy of the signal, be interesting to play with and how many bits of information were there etc.

<comment><USER29> They have some data here and a nice plot :)

[http://www.astronomerstelegram.org/?read=10675%20and%20will%...](http://www.astronomerstelegram.org/?read=10675%20and%20will%20be%20described%20in%20further%20detail%20in%20an%20upcoming%20scientific%20journal%20article).

<comment><USER28> Interesting, looks like the plot of part of an orbit :-/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I guess this is cool, but not really that novel a result (and yeah, it's an ATel, not a paper yet, although that's just a matter of time). We've seen similar burst storms from this FRB source before, which is what allowed us to localize it in the first place. And I'm disappointed that they used the Hubble Deep Field - we have very nice deep images [1] of this field already.

But yes, the Breakthrough digital hardware is really pretty neat!

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/04/science/fast-radio- burst-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/04/science/fast-radio-burst- galaxy.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> In the video, she says "even if 0.1% of habitable planets have life, you would expect over a million planets with some form of life."

Where do we get this 0.1%? why it is not 10^-20% and probability of life in the galaxy is impossibly small?

<comment><USER32> Carl Sagan talks about this point in Cosmos. Life arose here on Earth pretty quickly after it cooled. So the thought is that it's not difficult for life to appear on favorable, habitable planets. A probability of 0.1% may be far too low.

Remember too, an earth-like planet can have lots of organic chemicals floating around, and you only have to hit the right combination once over millions of years to end up with life.

<comment><USER31> Even the most basic life seems super complicated to me, I am not sure the first spark of life has that high probability of happening even under right conditions. But maybe I am over estimating its complexity.

<comment> le-mark People have studied this, and basic building blocks (amino acids) arise spontaneously when electric current is applied to chemical soups for example. Also when we look around today, we see the end prodcut of billions of years of evolution, we don't know what truly primitive life may have looked like in the first few millions years, life forms even more primitive than viruses, say.

<comment><USER33> Still, a few amino acids are far far away from proteins, let alone all proteins that work together and makes a simple living cell. Or mechanisms like: [https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/mitochondria-14053...](https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/mitochondria-14053590)

it might still be possible "given enough time".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I don't know why this is getting a press release (beyond presumably the Milner support). FRBs are mysterious and cool, but this one was already localized and was already known to repeat. The higher-frequency detection is not too exciting. This isn't even a paper, just an "ATel"\--roughly the scientific equivalent of a blog post.

</comment><comment><USER35> Just curious: If you wanted to plant a fake signal that looked like it were coming from a distant galaxy (say 3 billion ly), how far away from Earth would you have to place your transmitter?

<comment><USER36> You can be on Earth and just sabotage the deep space network antennas or radio telescopes or whatever they use to receive the signals to directly inject the signal in the processing pipeline.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> > Despite widespread speculation, the possibility of the signals coming from > an advanced alien civilization has been largely ruled out.

In other words, none of the scientists want to sound like quacks. How could this possibly be "ruled out"? Oh right you put "largely" in front of it.

<comment><USER38> How much effort did you put into answering "How could this possibly be "ruled out"?" before you assumed it was just a weaselly political decision?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> One of my favorite Stanislaw Lem novels is "His Master's Voice", about a message from space (only accidentally discovered because it was recorded on mag tape that was recycled as a one-time random pad, which turned out to inexplicably repeat itself), which had multiple ambiguous conflicting interpretations.

It's actually scathing social commentary and philosophical satire about how fucked up government and military sponsored science can be, and the divide between the social scientists (elves) and physical sciences (dwarves).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_\(novel\))

Throughout the book Hogarth—or rather, Lem himself—exposes the reader to many debates merging cosmology and philosophy: from discussions of epistemology, systems theory, information theory and probability, through the idea of evolutionary biology and the possible form and motives of extraterrestrial intelligence, with digressions about ethics in military-sponsored research, to the limitations of human science constrained by the human nature subconsciously projecting itself into the analysis of any unknown subject. At some point one of the involved scientists (Rappaport), desperate for new ideas, even begins to read and discuss popular science-fiction stories, and Lem uses this opportunity to criticize the science fiction genre, as Rappaport soon becomes bored and disillusioned by monotonous plots and the unimaginative stories of pulp magazines.

[https://scifistandpoint.wordpress.com/2008/12/13/the- voice-o...](https://scifistandpoint.wordpress.com/2008/12/13/the-voice-of- that-sf-master-stanislaw-lem/)

The hypotheses popular before the existence of the Project seemed to me incredibly shallow; they ricocheted back and forth between the pole of pessimism, which called the silentium universi a natural state, and the pole of mindless optimism that expected announcements clearly and slowly spelled out, as if civilizations scattered among the stars would communicate with one another like children in kindergarten. Yet another myth has bitten the dust, I thought, and yet another truth has ascended overhead — and, as is usually the case with truths, it is too much for us.

<comment><USER39> Good sci-fi is good philosophy. A good companion to sci-fi is history. When people nay-say because we have no proof and 'given what we know today' I am reminded that most people didn't have electricity 150 years ago. The combustion engine is being superseded only 100 years after it became commonplace. Hell, 50-80 years ago half of England didn't have an indoors toilet and plumbing. What was the population of the US's tech-central, California, in 1850? The region was hardly populated. The last 500 years, and especially in the 20th century we have moved at an astounding rate, both technologically and socially. I have sci-fi books on my shelf from 40 years ago in which the population of Earth reaches 'critical' proportions at 5 billion. Nay-sayers at the time would never have accepted that we would reach over 7bn in 2016. Some HNers in the comments here clearly don't realize that a great many sci-fi writers have been scientists and cosmologists, professional and amateur, but dedicated to the science of the genre, and from there they take their starting point.

<comment><USER15> Lem didn't have a very positive opinion about most sci-fi writers, except for one in particular:

Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans

[http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm](http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm)

But that one particular sci-fi writer had some harsh things to say about Lem to the FBI, and Lem's criticism got him kicked out of SFWA:

[http://english.lem.pl/faq#P.K.Dick](http://english.lem.pl/faq#P.K.Dick)

"[...] What is involved here is not that these persons are Marxists per se or even that Fitting, Rottensteiner and Suvin are foreign-based but that all of them without exception represent dedicated outlets in a chain of command from Stanislaw Lem in Krakow, Poland, himself a total Party functionary (I know this from his published writing and personal letters to me and to other people). For an Iron Curtain Party group - Lem is probably a composite committee rather than an individual, since he writes in several styles and sometimes reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not - to gain monopoly positions of power from which they can control opinion through criticism and pedagogic essays is a threat to our whole field of science fiction and its free exchange of views and ideas. Peter Fitting has in addition begun to review books for the magazines Locus and Galaxy. The Party operates (a U..S.] publishing house which does a great deal of Party- controlled science fiction. And in earlier material which I sent to you I indicated their evident penetration of the crucial publications of our professional organization SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA. [...]" -PKD to FBI

Why was Stanislaw Lem expelled from the SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) in 1976?

The following quote from J. Madison Davis' book on Stanislaw Lem gives an answer to your question:

Lem has always been critical of most science fiction, which he considers ill thought out, poorly written, and interested more in adventure that ideas or new literary forms. (...) Those opinions provoked an unpleasant debate in the SFWA [the "Lem affair"]. Philip José Farmer and others were incensed by Lem's comments (...) and eventually brought about the removal of the honorary membership(...). Other members, such as Ursula K. Le Guin, then protested the removal (...) and the SFWA then offered Lem a regular membership, which he, of course, refused in 1976. Asked later about the "affair," he remarked, that his opinions of the state of science fiction were already known when he was offered an honorary membership (...). He also added he harboured no ill feelings towards the SFWA or U.S. writers in particular, "...but it would be a lie to say the whole incident has enlarged my respect for SF writers".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> A long time ago, in a ......

</comment><comment><USER41> E.T. phone home?

</comment><comment><USER42> If there were aliens, we would have known with clear proof. If they are there, they are light years ahead and behind in technology and no need for crappy radio signal.

<comment><USER43> _no need for crappy radio signal_

radio travels at the speed of light.... if the speed of light is a hard limit, that may be the best we will ever do

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> The correct title here should be "Repeating radio noises coming from distant galaxy detected". The elephant in the room that SETI fans don't really want to admit is what if intelligence is actually not that smart, but is actually a viral form of stupidity that leads to self limiting catastrophe?

<comment><USER45> Don't want to admit? Self-destruction is a pretty common posited solution to the Fermi paradox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Are other astronomers confirming the origin of these FRBs? There's this example, where an unexplained signal turned out to be caused by a microwave oven: [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/05/microwave- ov...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/05/microwave-oven-caused- mystery-signal-plaguing-radio-telescope-for-17-years)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton_(astronomy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton_\(astronomy\))

<comment><USER47> With our luck it will turn out to just be an alien microwave.

<comment><USER48> How about signal from a terrestrial microwave oven being looped back through a wormhole.

(Probably ruled out easily by parallax.)</comment></comment></comment>


For the first time, most new working-age hires in the U.S. are people of color - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/for-the-first-time-ever-most-new-working-age-hires-in-the-us-are-people-of-color/2019/09/09/8edc48a2-bd10-11e9-b873-63ace636af08_story.html <comment><USER2> This article seems to exclude South Asians and Asians as people of color (focusing only on Blacks and Hispanics). That angers me, we do have colored skin. I don't know why we got less fucked in today's society, but arbitrarily shifting the definition of colored to exclude people who are literally colored is frustrating.

<comment><USER3> It's because the report it's based on [1] was split into only 4 categories: white, black, hispanic, and 'other'. Why they took such a coarse approach, I don't know.

I guess the article _could_ have interviewed some Asians, but chose not to (I assume - I skimmed/skipped the interviews). Ignoring Asians when talking about people of color is the usual media M.O.

[1] [https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds- notes/rece...](https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/recent- trends-in-wealth-holding-by-race-and-ethnicity-evidence-from-the-survey-of- consumer-finances-20170927.htm)</comment></comment>


Trading Deals, A Lost Art? - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/12/trading-deals-a-lost-art.html <comment><USER2> As Fred says, there are both good and bad reasons why trading deals has gone downhill.

I think what matters is that the VC is always transparent to the entrepreneur about it. They can recommend their partner by saying "I think they'll be good for you because X, Y and Z, but I also owe them a favor because they let me invest in Foo.com."</comment>


Ask HN: Which model is more effective? - <AUTHOR>

Hello there,
I was wondering, which model is more effective to attract users?
-A Freemium and Premium approach, in other words a premium Saas application
-Or, a completely free application using advertising as monetization.
What are your recommendations?
If you have any past experiences, please share.
Thanks everyone, <comment><USER2> Depends on your product and customers.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1907332>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=335514>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1787533>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=302202>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=375417>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your reply. I've read all of your submissions, very helpful. Leaning more towards a completely free application.

Take for example a blogging platform such as Posterous or Tumblr. Any suggestions as to how I would monetize my application other then direct banner advertising?

Past experiences?

Thank you for your help,

<comment><USER3> Premium themes work for Tumblr.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What Did Steve Ballmer and Donald Sterling Meant by $2B in Cash - <AUTHOR> From the article https://www.latimes.com/sports/soccer/story/2019-08-10/us-womens-soccer-nwsl-investment
Quote from article: "At one point, Donald tells Steve Ballmer, 'I'm curious about one thing,' " Samini recalls. "Ballmer said, 'Of course, what's the question?' Donald looks at him and says, 'You really have $2 billion?' We all started cracking up, and Ballmer said, 'Yes.' Donald said, 'You have $2 billion in cash?' And Ballmer said, 'Don't worry, I have the money. I can call the bankers and they can verify the funds.' Sterling starts laughing and he looks at him and goes, 'That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life.' Ballmer looks at him and says, 'What do you mean?' and Sterling says, 'Why would anyone have $2 billion in cash? You should invest the money or pay off your debt. You'd be stupid to have that kind of cash.' "
Edit: Clarification, I'm sure they didn't mean $2 Billion in actual cold hard cash in a vault somewhere. But Sterling made it sound it's like that. <comment><USER2> What Ballmer means is that he has immediate access to $2B. This does not mean that he has that amount in the bank account.

When Ballmer calls a bank and asks them to verify that he can get $2B, he means that bankers arrange that kind of credit for him so fast that it's like cash. He has line of credit he can get without negotiating with his bank.</comment>


Eric Schmidt Says Talking to Glass Can Be Weird, Inappropriate - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/04/26/schmidt-glass <comment><USER2> In my opinion, articles like this represent the most interesting part of technology. Google Glass itself is awe inspiring - when I was 6, I dreamed of having something like Google Glass (and using it to accomplish my dreams of becoming a Jedi). However, the most fascinating part will be watching society and its norms catch up to the technology.

/waxing-philosophical</comment>


The Excel Depression - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/opinion/krugman-the-excel-depression.html?smid=tw-NytimesKrugman&seid=auto&_r=0 <comment><USER2> "So the Reinhart-Rogoff fiasco needs to be seen in the broader context of austerity mania: the obviously intense desire of policy makers, politicians and pundits across the Western world to turn their backs on the unemployed and instead use the economic crisis as an excuse to slash social programs."

Amen. After reading any piece of news, you'd think that the only utility economists have is to (rather poorly) justify decisions that are actually fully ideological in nature, using numbers whose origin is uncertain.

<comment><USER3> I think Krugman himself has noted that economists are referenced most on things they disagree on (such as the relation between deficits and growth), and referenced least on things they agree on (such as the effects of rent control).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Please, bear in mind that Krugman has a very opinionated view against austerity (he seems to be going the Keynes way these days) and this article is not about Excel. He just wants to show how right he is and how sloppy the austerity guys are.

The way to compete against Excel is actually learning to love the tool (it took me 2 years, but I almost can say I love it... sometimes).

EDIT Since I am on HN, I always try to have a serious discussion about Excel and business software. That's why I always try to tie this kind of topic to my general idea: that we need to understand very well the type of work people do in Excel before proposing any solution.

But... if we want to talk about austerity, let's talk.

What is the real problem with anti-austerity measures today? We could accept a GDP/Debt ratio of 200, 300, 1000, infinity, and let people live their lives, right? Well, hell no. For 1 simple reason: interests. And I am not talking about the obvious problem with interests (that you have to pay them), but the bit that everybody forgets: they are a bet against the future that growth will be high enough to pay them. And that's the problem. We have a low growth rate expectancy (we western countries). And that's why serious economists (meaning: not Krugman) are telling us that increasing our debt exposure is the path to future ruin.

Now, you will say, but anti-austerity financed with higher taxes will bring growth! If that were true, we would have had serious growth the last 50 years (a period within which tax ratio on GDP increased pretty much everywere). The truth is that historically public spending has brought much less growth (if any) than private spending. Meaning: for each $ that we take away from privates to the public we are deliberately reducing present and future growth. And why public spending brings less (if any) growth? Well, simply because the market is so complex that we need multiple agents. Giving too many resources to 1 agent (the State) is like betting most of our money on 1 black jack game, does it make sense? No. You need to spread risk and resources, you need to let people make decisions and you need to let people keep most of what they produce.

<comment><USER5> He does have a very polemical writing style but of the New Keynesian vs Chicago school (or saltvater vs freshwater) camps his side does come out of the post-2008 crisis looking better, if you look at the predictions.

Pro-austerity camp have been on pretty weak ice recently, with the IMF admitting the big multiplier and European states (eg. Britain) doing so poorly with austerity. And now this.

And yeah, he's not really blaming Excel, just ridiculing the programming error lightly. Hw could be saying Word if it turned out some key wording had been autocorrected to an unintended meaning.

Edit: your amended discussion about austerity goes ad-hominem against Krugman ("not serious"?, he's got a Nobel, and is one of the most respected & prolific guys in the field) and is based on counterfactual claims (absence of "serious growth in last 50 years", see eg. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_%28...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_%28PPP%29#World_1.E2.80.932003_.28Maddison.29))

<comment><USER6> Exactly what kind of "austerity" do you think is happening in Britain? Government spending has gone up. Saying something doesn't make it true.

<comment><USER5> There are lots of references here. Everyone in the UK seems to agree they have a austerity program.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_government_auste...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_government_austerity_programme)

If the spending isn't going down that just means it's not working very well even for its stated purpouse, nevermind its damaging effects to the economy. More people will be falling on the social safety net programs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> GDP is in $/yr, while debt is in $. Thus, debt/GDP has units of time. 90% really means 10.8 months.

One of the reasons the idea was sticky is that 90% seemed like a significant number, almost all the way to 100%. Where there's nothing so obviously magical about 10 or 12 months.

<comment><USER8> For an analogy, look at individual households. Many of them have over a year of debt, aka over 100%. Getting a mortgage of 3 or 4 times one's yearly income isn't that hard.

Now, people will argue that, for many, the value of their house will be higher. That is true, but the same applies to governments. Infrastructure such as roads has value.

Traditionally, in many countries, the state also owned airports, water pipes, and electrical wiring that brought in money. That, I think, is where the real problem lies for some countries: they have sold the stuff that brings in money without bringing down their debt.

<comment><USER6> GDP isn't your income, tax receipts are. Tax receipts as a percentage of GDP are about ~25%, so 100% debt/GDP is 4 years worth of debt, not 1.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Question: has Paul Krugman made a practice of releasing his raw data? Can anyone point me to the database of tab-delimited text files behind the econometric papers he's written, or to any systematic attempts to replicate them? If not, should be fun to try to get a dataset out of him. Most published macroeconomics research won't stand up to attempts to replicate it (whether "pro" or "anti" austerity), if the great replication experiment in psychology is any guide:

<http://psychfiledrawer.org>

Basic kinds of corrections like weighting nations by population will often invalidate macroeconomic correlations.

<comment><USER10> Couldn't you answer this question yourself by using the Internet? A combination of Google and other, more academic services might give you a list of papers, and by reading them, you might find datasets that are mentioned, but do not seem to be public. Then you could return to HN to ask a more specific question, or email Krugman yourself for the answers you seek. That should be fun, too.

<comment><USER11> Fair enough, but that's way less effective as rhetoric. How do we know Krugman _didn't_ falsify his results and murder people?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The excel error: _Coding Error. As Herndon-Ash-Pollin puts it: "A coding error in the RR working spreadsheet entirely excludes five countries, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, and Denmark, from the analysis. [Reinhart-Rogoff] averaged cells in lines 30 to 44 instead of lines 30 to 49._

[http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/researchers-finally- rep...](http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/researchers-finally-replicated- reinhart-rogoff-and-there-are-serious-problems)

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a bit misleading since the Excel error in question merely overstated the magnitude of the impact of high debt, not the direction.

<comment><USER14> Yes, the direction was created by ignoring swathes of contrary data and arbitrarily weighting the data that was included. The paper was unworthy of publication in a credible journal. Just correcting the latter eliminates their result, while the former would probably suggest the reverse effect.

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure where you're getting this, but that's absolutely untrue.

As luck would have it, their coding errors mostly cancelled each other out; fixing them changed their conclusion from growth of -0.1% in high-debt countries to 0.2%; an insignificant change.

As for the weighting chosen, Reinhart and Rogoff chose a fairly standard weighting which - as it turns out - has some flaws. In particular it makes their conclusion highly sensitive to the experience of NZ (which had _terrible_ growth during the brief period it had high debt), which is - admittedly - problematic. But their chief critic suggests an unusual weighting which is subject to the _precise same flaws_ except in reverse. By weighting each year equally, Herndon's conclusions are dominated by the results of Greece (which ran debts for year after year will little result). Than sensitivity is _also_ problematic, and the inherent correlation of debt loads in sequential years raises questions about the meaningfulness of their results.

Professional economists are now debating the question of the best weighting, but if anything Reinhart and Rogoff seem to have the better argument so far.

In short: Their errors did _not_ eliminate their result. Even changing weighting did not eliminate the result (much less _reverse_ it - that would mean more debt leads to higher growth; a simply absurd result!). And in any case, the method they chose has strong arguments in its favour.

Or for real TL;DR: Everything you said was wrong.

<comment><USER14> Negative growth to positive is a change in direction, no?

How is treating nineteen years of British data as having the same weight as one year of NZ data a "fairly standard weighting"? Britain is far larger in population on top of everything else.

"So what do Herndon-Ash-Pollin conclude? They find "the average real GDP growth rate for countries carrying a public debt-to-GDP ratio of over 90 percent is actually 2.2 percent, not -0.1 percent as [Reinhart-Rogoff claim]." [UPDATE: To clarify, they find 2.2 percent if they include all the years, weigh by number of years, and avoid the Excel error.] Going further into the data, they are unable to find a breakpoint where growth falls quickly and significantly."

2.2 vs -0.1 — you're only out by an order of magnitude.

As you say, weighting by number of years is also a problem. If you weighted the values by population or size of economy ("fairly standard weighting") I suspect the results would shift again but be biased in favor of more recent figures (economies and populations are bigger over time).

[http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/researchers-finally- rep...](http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/researchers-finally-replicated- reinhart-rogoff-and-there-are-serious-problems)

TL;DR -- none. Read the evidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I thought it was kind of well known: don't use Excel for floating point math, statistical analysis, anything moderately involved that would have to be reproducible and auditable

<http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~bdm25/excel2007.pdf>

<http://support.microsoft.com/kb/78113>

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeric_precision_in_Microsoft_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeric_precision_in_Microsoft_Excel)

<comment><USER14> The errors in question has nothing to do with inherent flaws in Excel (beyond, perhaps, the difficulty of reviewing Excel code). The problems were in decisions made to exclude data, arbitrary "analysis" with no basis in statistics or common sense (19 - IIRC - years of data from England were given the same weight as one year of data from New Zealand), and an egregious formula error that simply ignored several rows of data.

<comment><USER17> _beyond, perhaps, the difficulty of reviewing Excel code_

This has always been one of my concerns when Excel is used much beyond 'electronic squared paper'. The interwoven data and code nature of the tool makes testing and verification more difficult - certainly not impossible but going against the grain of the tool. Excel is used by a diverse range of people, many of whom have limited software skills and could do with a tool that enforced the right behaviour.

Also I think this shows the need for openness when people make such important claims based on data. Particularly in this case where all the data and calculations could easily be zipped up and put on a website.

<comment><USER18> Agree-the fundamental problem is that formulae are copied from cell to cell.

It is so easy to make a mistake on a big spreadsheet.

A much better approach would be to write user defined functions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't really understand how this paper could be claimed to have 'destroyed the economies of the world' when it's in the aftermath of the GFC. 'Not made it better', sure, but bad fiscal practices causing deep financial problems were there before 2010.

<comment><USER20> That argument would be based on the policies that the paper served to justify.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nice headline, but I can't see what this has to do with Excel.

<comment><USER22> among the issues in the original analysis there appear to be a messed up excel formula (they excluded some rows from the calculation)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why not the 'Arithmetic Error Depression' in place of 'Excel'?

To accurate/concise for Krugman? Must be half a dozen articles about this I've seen now and all have titles suggesting Excel made the error.

<comment><USER14> Again, it's not arithmetic that's the cause.</comment></comment>


Groupon's Controversial Tibet Super Bowl Ad - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/06/groupon-tibet-super-bowl_n_819353.html?ir=World

<comment><USER2> Since they were straddling the controversial line, they should have at least made it funny. That was a pretty weak attempt - I was expecting something that'd at least make me smile.</comment>