SCO Reboots, Lawyers Rejoice - <AUTHOR> http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3728201/SCO+Plans+Rebound+Thanks+to+100M+Lifeline.htm

<comment><USER2> I think there are more then a few lawyers who are groaning at this turn of events. Sometimes market forces don't always do the 'right' thing...

</comment><comment><USER3> Excellent news. Now there is something for Novell to collect on SCO's infringements.</comment>


Connecting an external video card to a notebook - <AUTHOR> http://lab501.net/egpu-connecting-external-video-card-notebook-diy-implementation/all/1/

<comment><USER2> If some manufacturer made a laptop docking station with a full length PCI slot and a fat power supply I'd just throw money at them. It would completely remove my desire to keep building big powerful gaming/development rigs. Laptop CPU:s are already powerful enough for gaming these days, but video cards will stay at several hundred watts.

I'm not exactly sure why thunderbolt has to be involved if it has licensing issues? Couldn't a laptop maker make their own interface for transmitting PCIe to through a docking connector?

EDIT: spelling

<comment><USER3> It's been done. The most high profile one was the 2011 Vaio Z, which came with an external GPU that connected to the laptop over Light Peak but with a non- Thunderbolt connector. They killed the Z series a year later.

The problem with proprietary solutions for this is that you're not getting the efficiency of scale. Vendor-specific solutions are going to be expensive, there will be a lot of uncertainty about whether you'll be able to upgrade to better GPUs later, and if you want to keep the external GPU but upgrade the laptop you're locked to the same vendor. A widely supported standard solution would be vastly preferable.

<comment><USER2> Yes of course, I don't want some proprietary external VGA brick, I want a docking station with a normal full length PCIe slot and enough power to feed it. That is, the fat AMD or Nvidia graphics card I slot into my PCIe docking station should have no idea it's not sitting in a regular desktop.

<comment><USER4> A non-proprietary solution...like Thunderbolt / Thunderbolt II, which has double the bandwidth through channel aggregation, or thunderbolt 3 which doubles what 2 was capable of: [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_%28interface%29#T...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_%28interface%29#Thunderbolt_2)

Really don't know why they don't want to license external enclosures with ~300w power supplies, space for 3x width cards, and 16x PCI-E (physically) slots that would let you run whatever GPUs you want. It definitely seems like all the pieces are there, and if you could add $50 to the cost of a mid-range laptop to add a Thunderbolt port which would let you connect whatever GPU box to it, it seems like Intel would sell more Thunderbolt licenses and chipsets. Consumers would love the choice of upgradable optional notebook graphics, and you wouldn't need to drop an extra $1000 on a laptop with beefy internal GPUs just to play games that a $600 laptop's CPU could easily handle.

I can only assume that they don't do this because it would kill the gaming laptop market and possibly some of the desktop PC market.

<comment><USER2> As long as Thunderbolt is involved there seems there is both the licensing issue _and_ the issue with graphics cards needing Thunderbolt drivers to work in the enclosures. If it was done perfectly, the card would be just like any card in a normal desktop slot, so the normal driver would work. Not sure what would be required for that to work. Also not sure what it would take to just physically run the "on board" PCIe directly to the docking rather than use a cable. It should be much better for latency to just have the card sit in a docking box right under the laptop, within the same distance from the cpu as a normal PCIe card is on a desktop motherboard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been running this kind of setup with a lenovo X220 and a 660 GTX using the cheapo express card adapter from Taiwan. It runs quite well. AMA

<comment><USER6> Can you send a link to that adaptor? Also, did you have to fiddle with the BIOS PCI settings as mentioned in the article? Any idea how this works on Linux?

<comment><USER5> Can I format links nicely here? It's a PE4L by hwtools.net [1]. And no, no BIOS fiddling was neccessary. Actually I just hot-plugged the thing first time, right into a running Windows 7. Windows Update went and downloaded the NVidia driver, required a reboot, an has run mostly flawless since then. I even see the NVidia logo in Lenovo's Energy Manager, suppose it thinks it's on an Optimus setup. Hotplug in rarely works, hot-plug out does work. I get a the usual eject icon in the systray, just the way you'd safe-eject USB devices.

I haven't even tried this in Linux. The EGPU is one reason why I chose to keep Windows native, and Linux in VMware Player, not the other way round. (The other reasons are Steam and some obscure CAD and PCB layout software, so I'm not going to try any time soon.)

[1] [http://www.hwtools.net/Adapter/PE4L%20V2.1.html](http://www.hwtools.net/Adapter/PE4L%20V2.1.html)

<comment><USER7> What thinkpad model do you use? What card? Is there a performance hit because of the ExpressCard limitations?

<comment><USER5> As stated above, X220 + 660GTX.

If I recall correctly, am missing out on about 30% of the 3dmark points I should be getting by combining the GPU with a CPU of that speed level. As far as I know though, It's still faster than any laptop graphics chip available even today.

I sometimes seem to get a minor stutter in games, e.g. I'll lose about a frame or two every couple seconds, which might be due to the low ExpressCard bandwidth. This is game-dependent, and most games run flawlessly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Intel refusal to license thunderbolt external GPU is infuriating, and the sole rationalization I can see is that they are blocking it to protect premium price on their high end integrated GPUs. It really feels like a big let down.

 _(edit: bit- >big)_

<comment><USER9> Apple should grab that opportunity. They probably have enough power to pressurize Intel into allowing this (at least on their computers).

Imagine an apple-manufactured external graphics card that you can carry around and plug into your MacBook Air/Pro.

It could boost sales pretty significantly. I know quite a few people who did not buy a MacBook just because games don't run well enough, and went for another brand that fits their needs in this area (the bigger MacBooks are more expensive, and their advantage to competitors disappears).

<comment><USER4> They could do this, but their market isn't typically gamers (even though plenty of games run well on OSX these days), and it'd probably be a viable alternative to having a Mac Pro _and_ a quad-core rMBP.

So, their reasoning is probably similar to why Intel doesn't do it in the first place: it would eat into the sales of other more niche products. Lame.

<comment><USER10> That said, Apple has demonstrated they're not averse to new product lines eating into other existing ones, as with the iPhone 6 taking some sales away from the iPad family, and in turn, the iPad mini away from the full-size iPads.

I doubt anyone expects them to actually come through with an external GPU option, of course, but it'd certainly be of interest to me, given Second Life's stiff requirements for long draw distances with all the lighting options enabled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Since recently you can also get notebooks that have already built-in support for external GPUs: new Alienware line with "Graphics Amplifier" (Alienware 13, 15, 17) and MSI GS30 Shadow with "GamingDock":

[http://www.alienware.com/landings/laptops.aspx](http://www.alienware.com/landings/laptops.aspx)

[http://www.msi.com/product/nb/GS30-2M-Shadow.html](http://www.msi.com/product/nb/GS30-2M-Shadow.html)

Both use proprietary connectors based on PCI-Express.

<comment><USER7> That "Graphics Amplifier" is a pretty cool idea, I've been looking for something like this. But it uses an proprietary connector which means it can only be used with an Alienware laptop :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> As a large amount of what I do at home is games and Lightroom, what I'd really like (as an incredibly niche product) is a pure terminal laptop that is just a fast wireless screen/keyboard/mouse for the beefy desktop elsewhere in the house.

Today you can kludge it together with a regular laptop and Steam Streaming (latency is impressive, but not perfect), or by using a low-latency/long-range wireless HDMI system like the Nyrius Aries Pro/Paralinx with a lap-sized monitor and wireless keyboard/trackpad.

The second method works (and also works with consoles), but is hampered by the same-room-only short ranges of wireless keyboard/mice, and is a mess of wires and USB batteries.

</comment><comment><USER13> Amazing work. But the fact that it takes _this_ to get something done that should be as easy as connection any other peripheral... it hurts.

If all the major notebook manufacturers could just drop their niche proprietary BS solutions and agree on _something_, maybe, just maybe, we could have some sort of standard for this that actually works (in 3-4years). Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER14> Back when GPU bitcoin mining was still profitable, I really wanted something like this. Unfortunately it does not exist.

If GPU bitcoin mining was profitable for longer, I bet something like this would have been invented.

</comment><comment><USER15> this idea was in my mind two month ago , I really need this for my cuda development.

<comment><USER4> Maybe someone could do a Kickstarter to make an elegant solution to do this with no soldering or PCI-E adapters. The hard part would seem to be getting the Thunderbolt chipset and making the board to allow a 16X card powered by an ATX supply. Seems like a product with BYO ATX PSU + GPU would be pretty popular if it could ship within a year. The decline of ExpressCard is sad, since that seemed to be a better solution than Thunderbolt here.</comment></comment>


Anyone interested in sharing an apt/house in Cambridge this summer to work on startups? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Funny, I thought about posting this same question. I'm looking for an apartment on the Red Line right now. I'm moving there within a couple weeks to start a job with a Boston-based startup. I'm not planning on working out of my apartment, but I'm certainly open to having such a person as a roommate. Shoot me an email. df at my username dot us.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a lease until August 31, but after that, it would be really cool to move into a house with other startup founders.

</comment><comment><USER4> Somewhat unrelated, but I'm looking to share an summer apt in mountain view... If anyone's interested shoot me an email. "first name"@bluwiki.com

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a lease until August 31, but after that, it would be really cool to move into a house with other startup founders.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a lease until August 31, but after that, it would be really cool to move into a house with other startup founders.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a lease until August 31, but after that, it would be really cool to move into a house with other startup founders.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a lease until August 31, but after that, it would be really cool to move into a house with other startup founders.</comment>


Datamappify - A New Take on Decoupling Domain, Form and Persistence in Rails - <AUTHOR> http://fredwu.me/post/54009567748/datamappify-a-new-take-on-decoupling-domain-form-and

<comment><USER2> yes. if give more example, it will good to start.</comment>


Facebook Isn't Just Allowing Lies, It's Prioritizing Them - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/opinion/facebook-political-ads.html <comment><USER2> The NY Times isn't just allowing lies, it's prioritizing them. By allowing a certain law professor to publish opinion pieces that contain hyperbole, innuendo, and other misleading rhetoric, the NY Times is increasing the reach of this law professor. If it had not been for this opinion piece, millions of readers would otherwise have been unaware of this law professor, but are now exposed to his rhetoric thanks to the NY Times.

<comment><USER3> Honest question: can you pay more money to NY Times to get your opinion piece more exposure? Can you target individual readers as an audience based on data NY Times has on them?

<comment><USER4> I mean you can buy ads same as Facebook. It's hard to SEO the NYT but if anyone could pay to get their posts a bigger organic audience on FB nobody would buy ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Man the NYT editors must really hate FB to post an article like this every week. It's not like I _like_ Facebook or anything but this is just exhausting.

They're a forum with user generated content and ads. They're undertaking a huge moderation effort already — trying to have their army of underpaid moderators also police facts is just a problem that can't solved because lies are cheap to spread and expensive to refute.

You could say something snarky like "well FB just shouldn't exist then" which doesn't take into account any replacement someone on HN would approve of would have _worse_ moderation than FB.

The format of massive scale public square social media is the reason this happens. And unless you want to tell the world to get off Twitter and eat their vegetables there's only so much you can do to keep fights from breaking down in a huge public meeting of people who are addicted to arguing and 0 distance away from every conversation.

<comment><USER5> > They're a forum with user generated content and ads. They're undertaking a > huge moderation effort already — trying to have their army of underpaid > moderators also police facts is just a problem that can't solved because > lies are cheap to spread and expensive to refute.

That argument is unconvincing, because Facebook already _does_ fact check ads and disallows ads that lie. Here is their policy [1]:

> Facebook prohibits ads that include claims debunked by third-party fact > checkers or, in certain circumstances, claims debunked by organizations with > particular expertise. Advertisers that repeatedly post information deemed to > be false may have restrictions placed on their ability to advertise on > Facebook. Find out more about Fact Checking on Facebook here.

The controversy is over Facebook's recent decision to exempt political ads from this fact checking.

Political ads are only a small part of Facebook's revenue, so it is very hard to believe that they have the resources to face check all the other ads but not to check the political ads.

[1] [https://www.facebook.com/policies/ads/prohibited_content/mis...](https://www.facebook.com/policies/ads/prohibited_content/misinformation#)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Mass media in general has been profiting off rumors, gossip, and falsehoods for a long time.

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

The difference here is FB is doing it algorithmically on a much larger scale.

</comment><comment><USER7> > By refusing to stay out of politics, the company is building the case for > its own breakup.

Wouldn't this be an unconstitutional basis for breaking up a company?

A popular jab at Zuck/FB is that the First Amendment doesn't apply to private corporations, but only to the government.

Once a government decides that Facebook's maximally permissive view on speech/ads is unacceptable, and goes on to pursue punitive action against it, isn't that within the realm of the sort of government action that the First Amendment prohibits? How is that any different from the government applying punitive action against CNN or the NYTimes for publishing ads it deems dangerous/unacceptable?

<comment><USER8> > Wouldn't this be an unconstitutional basis for breaking up a company?

Smells like to me that everyone knows Zuckerburg knowingly took money to run targeted campaign ads from foreigners. Which is both criminal and pierces the corporate veil. If the next government can prove it in court they can kill Facebook. And the stockholders can claw back all of Zuckerburgs wealth.

<comment><USER7> That wasn't the argument made in this article.

It would be extremely difficult to prove that Zuck _knowingly_ took money to run targeted campaign ads from foreigners, so that's probably not an option.

<comment><USER8> > That wasn't the argument made in this article.

Who cares. Zuckerburg is being told by basically everyone to 'cool it' in all sorts of ways without actually talking about the actual reason. If he keeps doubling down it's going to end badly for him.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, after all mob rule > rule of law, at least nowadays.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> At least the authors of paid ads and their intent can be reasonably sleuthed out by those interested in learning their origin and truthiness. The mass of ad agencies that put their content out through fake accounts with every attempt at hiding their content's true source(s) are more worrisome for me.

Maybe, if Facebook doesn't require an ad's content to be truthful, just placing a disclaimer such as "CONTENT IN THIS AD NOT GUARANTEED TO BE TRUE" will be enough to dissuade its consumers to believe everything they read.

</comment><comment><USER11> This kind of bla bla is getting boring.

> By refusing to stay out of politics, the company is building the case for > its own breakup.

What does NYtimes think will change if FB and instagram separate?

<comment><USER12> This is an op-ed by a law professor at Columbia, not the Times' editorial opinion.

<comment><USER13> Who decides who's allowed to publish op-eds in the Times and what topics those op-eds will be about?

<comment><USER14> Op-Ed authors submit essays, and editors accept or decline. More info here: [https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en- us/articles/115014809107-How-...](https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en- us/articles/115014809107-How-to-submit-an-Op-Ed-essay)

<comment><USER15>
      and editors accept or decline

I think that's the very point @csallen was making.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> All things already mentioned in the comments here aside, it's somewhat personally infuriating to see headlines like this. Facebook recently disabled my account because they can't make sense of who I am (I wrote about it and posted here earlier). I don't know what's going on with their algorithms but they whacked my very legit account while allowing unfiltered political news. Seems the priorities are all out of order.

</comment><comment><USER17> What about traditional media lying all the time? By citing "sources" journalists can say whatever they want without any kind of accountability. This is just old media crying for losing to new media platforms.

<comment><USER18> True. The number of "anonymous sources say..." stories in the New York Times has gotten to the point of absurdity. Might as well be getting the news from 4chan.

<comment><USER19> That's not how it works in real media organizations like the NYT. Here's a nice example of how AP explains "anonymous sources" to its journalists and readers. It's harder to trick the New York Times than Jacob Wohl and QAnon believers thought: [https://www.ap.org/about/news-values-and- principles/telling-...](https://www.ap.org/about/news-values-and- principles/telling-the-story/anonymous-sources)

<comment><USER18> Except for those two years worth of anonymous sources say "Mueller is going to take down Trump any day now" stories.

<comment><USER19> Reading comprehension is a prerequisite to good media literacy.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Feynman on explanations - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/99c/transcript_richard_feynman_on_why_questions/#thingrow_t3_99c <comment><USER2> "But it's in 240p! Nobody likes watching 240p videos. So I transcribed it."

I've watched and shared this video several times. The video is just fine in 240p. You miss out on Feynman's delivery and style when it you just read it as text.

I think it's from a BBC documentary; the other parts are on YouTube as well. The discussion about how humans model or understand really big/really small numbers is especially interesting.

<comment><USER3> The resolution complain is particularly strange when you figure that if a transcript is allegedly good enough, then surely you can just listen to the video instead.

<comment><USER4> On YouTube audio quality degrades with resolution. I avoid watching 240p videos whenever I can first and foremost because of their horrible audio.

<comment><USER3> In this case I see absolutely nothing wrong with it. This isn't classical music after all, it's a guy talking.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, AM radio is still used for even the largest talk shows, and it's far from perfect quality (which is why AM is rarely used for music, but it's fine for speech). Likewise landline phones especially long distance calling was never all that great sound quality but it never stopped you from picking up the phone when someone called.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A professor told me once, "Physics is about _what_ happens. If you want to know why, maybe try going to church."

</comment><comment><USER7> If you haven't watched these "Fun to imagine" with Feynman videos from YouTube, I really recommend them. You just can't capture his joy and passion with a transcript.

"Fun to Imagine" playlist: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3pYRn5j7oI&feature=BFa&#...</a>

</comment><comment><USER8> Feynman, I guess because he interacted a lot with laymen (an lay-women) knew that the knowledge frame of the audience is very important. If you think this is obvious, wait till you try to explain internet addresses, cloud storage, etc. to your mom (or grandma), or as in the well-known case (<http://tomayko.com/writings/rest-to-my-wife>) the REST protocol to your wife.

It's _very_ hard to estimate the level of explanation that will actually convey information to the person asking teh question while at the same time keeping them interested.

<comment><USER9> It all gets summed up in the last sentence, which is really a _killer_ :

> But I really can't do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in > terms of something else you're more familiar with, because I don't > understand it in terms of anything else that you're more familiar with

I've never heard that impedance mismatch being told in such clear, humble words. Basically, he's saying "I know things in so much detail that I can't in all honesty imagine wrongful analogies, let alone present them to you".

<comment><USER10> He's not saying that he "knows things in so much detail that he can't imagine wrongful analogies". He's saying that "magnetic force is _different_ from anything you are familiar with", so you have to learn it as something new, not by analogy.

Feynman does (explain a little bit of) Quantum Mechanics by analogy (photons are spinning clocks), but goes on the say you have to learn a truly ne wmodel to understand more deeply.

See also: Dijkstra's "On the cruelty of really teaching computing science: [http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036...](http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036.html)

> It is the most common way of trying to cope with novelty: by means of > metaphors and analogies we try to link the new to the old, the novel to the > familiar. Under sufficiently slow and gradual change, it works reasonably > well; in the case of a sharp discontinuity, however, the method breaks down: > though we may glorify it with the name "common sense", our past experience > is no longer relevant, the analogies become too shallow, and the metaphors > become more misleading than illuminating.

There are lots of gems in that essay, such as this:

> We can view the program as what turns the general-purpose computer into a > special-purpose symbol manipulator, and does so without the need to change a > single wire (This was an enormous improvement over machines with problem- > dependent wiring panels.) I prefer to describe it the other way round: the > program is an abstract symbol manipulator, which can be turned into a > concrete one by supplying a computer to it. After all, it is no longer the > purpose of programs to instruct our machines; these days, it is the purpose > of machines to execute our programs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Excellent. But there is another important situation to deal with, and that is when the interrogator is asking dishonestly, usually to reenforce some prejudice. Personally I have found the best way to deal with such discussions is not to have them, for the simple reason that my contempt for willful ignorance compounded by dishonesty ultimately outweighs my love and joy at explanaition.

Practically speaking, the impact of walking away from such loaded discussions is minimal, because in a healthy society generally these dishonest interrogators' views and opinions simply don't matter (apart from the odd grade-school curriculum debacle). They don't matter for two reasons: first, normally the point of understanding (e.g. evolution, or even magnetism) is not necessary to the persons practical day. Second, a healthy society tends to disregard the views of the dishonest.

This is an argument from practicality. Know when to walk away from some debates.

<comment><USER12> I agree except for the relatively few people who are familiar with this type of discourse. Those that are good at it can destroy the original framing attempt and reframe it for their own purposes. Newt Gingrich is quite good at this.

I simply don't have the verbal chops to compete. Newt studied rhetoric as I recall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Another amazing line: _"So I am not going to be able to give you an answer to why magnets attract each other except to tell you that they do."_

<comment><USER14> I love this about his style. If he couldn't explain something in a manner simple enough for the audience to understand, he didn't explain it at all. There is no simplified yet incorrect version offered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> By far the best video of Feynman is "The Distinction of Past and Future", which is one of his lectures in the cornell messenger series in 1964 (i think).

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Kab9dkDZJY>

</comment><comment><USER16> "Because some things are, and some things are not!" Louis CK does a hilarious job describing how it is digging down the "why" hole: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u2ZsoYWwJA>

<comment><USER17> the whole video is hilarious, but for the hurried amongst us, the 'why hole' bit is around 7:10

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=4u2ZsoYWwJA#t=431s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I love how he covers everything from:

 _"For example, Aunt Minnie is in the hospital. Why? Because she went out, slipped on the ice, and broke her hip."_

to:

 _"You know you can't put your hand through the chair; that's taken for granted."_

What an incredible mind.

<comment><USER18> Watch the rest of the "Fun to Imagine" videos, and you'll hear about why trains don't need differential gears and how the mass of trees comes out of the air instead of the ground.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> While that we are touching on Feynman, I thought this bit was interesting (just 1:26 long)

Richard Feynman on Computer Science - [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL4wg6ZAFIM&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL4wg6ZAFIM&feature=related)

I believe he has a point, I don't know if term Computer Science is the best choice of words.

</comment><comment><USER20> I have an off topic question. I'm not a native English speaker, and I find the way Feynman is pronouncing t, d, k, g, p and b consonants very interesting. He uses hard attacks and hard stops. Does anybody know if there is a name for that ? Maybe a regional thing or just his way to speak ?

<comment><USER21> It's regional. He grew up in Queens, New York City. His dialect is pretty common.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Reading a transcript is just not the same as watching Feynman talk, which is such a delight. 240p or not, I encourage everyone to watch the video.

</comment><comment><USER23> I should refer you to the Feynman Series (from the Segan Series creator) [http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL92F9FC91BBE2210D&...](http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL92F9FC91BBE2210D&feature=plcp)

</comment><comment><USER24> Yay, Feynman!

If this has whet your taste for his wonderful explanations, I highly encourage you to take a look at his lecture series made available by Microsoft Research on Project Tuva[1].

[1]<http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html>

<comment><USER25> Don't bother going to the Microsoft site, where you have to install Silverlight to watch a video, just use Youtube to watch the 7 part series:

[http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+character+of...](http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+character+of+physical+law)

I am actually half-way through watching them and as with all Feynman lectures they are a real joy to watch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think that people's tolerance for simple metaphors is related to their level of curiosity. I'm pretty sure that many people would be satisfied with a "rubber band" explanation even though it doesn't fit. The more curious person though would probably, as Feynman said, want to know why rubber bands behave in the way that they do, and then the metaphor would break down.

This to me tells me two things about Feynman:

1) He was a man of great integrity

2) He wanted people to be more curious about the world

</comment><comment><USER17> I dig his neverending questionnings and explicitness.

</comment><comment><USER27> Well said, except it is not true about the ice melting under pressure -- a weight of a human is not enough (same holds for skating). The ice is slippery because of its anomalous behavior on the boundary, which is still not fully understood.

<comment><USER28> Yup, but I think in the 80's it was the standard explanation.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/science/21ice.htm>

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is why scientists don't get invited to cocktail parties

</comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone know where I can find the entire talk he gave?

<comment><USER25> The comment on the youtube video links to the entire series on the BBC: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/feynman/>

Not sure if available to watch outside UK but they are the same as on Youtube, just better quality.

<comment><USER15> Not this one, I meant the one from Bell Labs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Can anybody explain me how to make an apple pie from scratch?

<comment><USER31> Well you start with all the matter and energy in the universe compressed to a point...</comment></comment>


Analytics in Bootstrap, Boilerplate etc. Is Google spying while Development - <AUTHOR>

After I set up the 1000th Bootrap or Boilerplate I wondered if the integrated (and active!) Google Analytics snipped would collect and submit data while development progress to Google servers.
That would allow Google to collect information about the quality of development (eg. testing, hours spent, count of developers / testers etc.) month BEFORE the Website launches to public.
Should we all comment out the GA-Snippets while development or is it just OK to leave them active? <comment> chestnut-tree Yes, they most certainly will be collecting tracking data. Do you link to any Google fonts? Or to the JQuery libary they host? Presumably that also sends info to Google.

What info they collect and what they do with that data is not clear. Here's an excerpt from their Google Analytics privacy policy for example

 _" Google Analytics does not report the actual IP address information to Google Analytics customers. Additionally, using a method known as IP masking, website owners that use Google Analytics have the option to tell Google Analytics to only use a portion of the IP address, rather than the entire IP address, for geolocation."_

[http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/analytics/privacyoverview...](http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/analytics/privacyoverview.html)

Notable by omission is what Google do with the anlaytics data themselves, they presumably capture (and save) the full IP address as well as all the tracking data they collect.

I've said this many times before: Google has a rapacious appetite to track and record online behaviour. That doesn't mean they are evil or bad, but it does mean that their policies on tracking, collecting and recording online data should not pass without discussion or scrutiny.

</comment><comment><USER2> If you are running Google's code in your application and you don't even know what it does, you probably want to remove that code from your application. There's a reason that banks don't link in stuff like GA.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting question, as an paranoid, I'd comment out all Google related snippets.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I would not call that paranoid. But I think developers who use software like Twitter's Bootstrap should be aware of feeding information to google while developing (on their test-servers, eg. local, whatever..)

</comment><comment><USER4> Well thought! I'm going to comment them out now!</comment>


Signal Threatens to Leave the US If Earn IT Act Passes - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/signal-earn-it-ransomware-security-news/ <comment><USER2> 1 day ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22825344](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22825344)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I haven't seen that. HN simply moves too fast these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you care about the EARN IT proposed law, and you are a US citizen, then you should be contacting your House and Senate Representatives. Yes, I'm aware that they may ignore your comment. But you should do it anyway.</comment>


Node.js Rap Song: Why the RoR posse should be scurrd - <AUTHOR> http://soundcloud.com/marak/marak-the-node-js-rap

<comment><USER2> lyrics:

          ( javascript mothaafuckkka )
          ( node.js mothhafuckkka )
          ( javascript mothaafuckkka )
          ( dont cry for rails )
          ( nodejitsu motthhafuckkka )

          caus its the java-to-the-script doing this since 96'
          peace to brendan eich for making it exist

          it's an open-source license, of course we be frugal
          peace to Lars Bak for v8 from Google

          big ups to Ry Dahl for keeping it real
          big ups to Joyent for paying all the bills

          big ups to Marak, the new kid on the block
          saying invest in nodejitsu, its a top pick stock!

          ( why? ) node.js allows for real-time sockets
          over http, its socket.io and you cannot stop it!
          Guerimo from learnboost blowing up like a rocket
          just go to the github for the source (if you wanna cop it!)

          need to install packages, use the module system
          it was built by isaacs a man of knowledge and wisdom

          npm install foo, now you rocking
          require foo in any script you be dropping

          ohh so you know a jQuery?
          don't write write node and code
          thats crazier then tim leary
          because thats kinda scary if you don't know flow control
          too many callbacks, its time to slow you roll

          try Step by Tim Caswell
          Chainsaw by Substack, it's just as swell
          make your node code sane and not looking loopy
          Node.js is the best so you better run Ruby.

          (Run Ruby Run Ruby Run)
          (Run Ruby Run Ruby Run)

          so we throw our hands in the air like we don't just care
          we wreck with Connect as our middle-ware
          using the node-inspector to get up in there
          we dance around on Github like Fred Astair, i swear
          the Node wiki page is our second home
          if it's not open-source yo we leave it alone
          Node is the king and he can't be dethroned
          Node is the code that's the hottest tech
          if you don't have Node you better protect your neck

          you see, node blurs the line of the server and client
          battle hardened technologies and a community that is reliant
          10 year javascript veterans that never threw in the towel
          immense skill and experience like my friend paolo

          it's javascript time, we own this shhhh
          have a refreshing taste of caffeinated coffeescript

          drip, drip, drip, thats the sound of OSS
          from document cloud jeremery ashkanes is the best!

          from nyc.js im making it clear yo
          big ups to indexzero computer science hero
          big ups to brian mitchell, and fotoverite
          big ups to tmpvar,  his capacity is very
          intimidating, there is no debating
          if you are a hater, node is what are you should be hating

          ( javascript mothaafuckkka )
          ( node.js mothhafuckkka )
          ( javascript mothaafuckkka )
          ( nodejitsu motthhafuckkka )

          ( PEACE )</comment>


Haxe – target multiple architectures with one toolkit - <AUTHOR> https://haxe.org/ <comment><USER2> Garbage collection is no way to dominate as a modern software development language. Programming with garbage collection is fun, but when you want to squeeze 100% of CPU from application, or reduce memory footprint, the only true option is C/C++ or may be Rust, if you are ready for risk of new language.</comment>


Hacker Pleads Guilty of Stealing $365000 Worth of Bitcoin from Darknet Criminals - <AUTHOR> https://cointelegraph.com/news/hacker-pleads-guilty-of-stealing-365000-worth-of-bitcoin-from-darknet-criminals <comment><USER2> It's really weird to me that the article calls the pishing victims cybercriminals and goes so far as to imply the pisher could be seen as a modern Robin Hood.

The funds weren't stolen from darknet market operators but from users of these marketplaces. The article asserts the pishing victims _could_ utilize the money for illegal activities. It's likely the stolen funds would have been used to purchase drugs which does not make the purchasers cybercriminals.

It seems dangerous to stereotype people only because they use a certain technology (the darknet).</comment>


CSS Styles for cooler looking ascii-art - <AUTHOR> http://briankhuu.com/blog/self/2015/01/14/css-style-for-ascii-art.html

<comment><USER2> I don't have perfect vision, so these sort of glows kick in automatically, especially when I'm tired. I't problematic enough to make me switch to a lower contrast theme when I work at night. It would make sense to apply an effect like that only if it were _increasing_ legibility.

Take a look at this a demo pic: [http://cl.ly/image/1i0x2X3W3G0x](http://cl.ly/image/1i0x2X3W3G0x)

Notice the rare case where the drop-shadow helps increase the contrast between foreground and background. You'll get props for doing that any time you pull it off.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. But I may make the case, that ascii art is more about pictures, and less about text. So the reduced readability of text might not matter as much. I tried shadowless, and its less visually appealing.

                 /\_/\
            ____/ o o \
          /~____  =-= /
         (______)__m_m)

But in the context of ascii-diagrams, then I can see you point of not including stylised drop shadows.

\---

Btw, no shadow example is added now.

<comment><USER2> I suppose what you like about the effect most, is that it fills the gaps that are intrinsic to ASCII art. But our brains are already wired to do that: [http://bit.ly/1xeEci5](http://bit.ly/1xeEci5). The shadow blur eats away at the details that are in fact a quality of ASCII art (like which characters were chosen to emulate a shape). The demonstrated CSS drop-shadow effect is really easily toggled by squinting your eyes instead: [http://bit.ly/1DNrkXK](http://bit.ly/1DNrkXK).

Guess you're right in stating that it looks "cooler" though. Try making the shadows dark grey instead of black: [http://cl.ly/image/073a412z0f34](http://cl.ly/image/073a412z0f34).

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. Lighter black seems to do the trick. Page corrected.

text-shadow: 0 0 5px rgba(100,100,100,0.5);

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice! The banner generator uses figlet fonts and there is a javascript parser out there, check out [http://github.com/scottgonzalez/figlet- js](http://github.com/scottgonzalez/figlet-js)

Also speaking of which I created a canvas breakout game that uses a modified version of that lib a month ago - [https://github.com/jarv/ascii- breakout](https://github.com/jarv/ascii-breakout) ([http://ascii- breakout.com](http://ascii-breakout.com) if you want to see it in action)

<comment><AUTHOR> very cool! Impressed that you could get that working like that. Quite fun too.

On a side note. I wonder if you would like to somehow port [http://ditaa.sourceforge.net/](http://ditaa.sourceforge.net/) to javascript.

Since many technical diagrams are done in ascii. It might actually be handy to auto convert to a Canvas image.

Not sure how one would deal with ascii-art to canvas however. But technical drawings is important.

<comment><USER3> It would be relatively simple to do, I'm surprised that [http://asciiflow.com/](http://asciiflow.com/) doesn't have an option for it, but now that I think about it a little more I think most people create these ascii diagrams because they just want ascii for embedding in a text doc and probably? don't need to convert them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd prefer plain style without shadows.

<comment><AUTHOR> That should work with just a removal of the "text-shadow" line.

        /*
        Diagram and ASCII ART styling for Jekyll
        (and other markdown parser that appends a .language- prefix)
        */
        .language-ascii-art {
         display: inline-block;
         font-family: "Lucida Console", Monaco, monospace;
         letter-spacing: -0.2em;
         line-height: 0.8em;
        }

<comment><USER5> Wouldn't it also work by just not having CSS on it at all? Except for maybe the font.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well the point of this, is to ensure that stuff like dashed lines, appears as a solid line. So in the context of ascii-art, this reduces the screen door effect (At the cost of visibility of alphanumeric texts).

If you look at the style, it's essentially just moving text characters closer to each other.

\---

Btw, no shadow example is added now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Although, I like the Mona Lisa example, I have to think that the point of ASCII art is to look like ASCII art because if it doesn't, then it's just a shitty picture. Cool POC tho.</comment>


Trap Street - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street <comment><USER2> See also "Canary Traps"

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

Apparently this is common practice in the movie industry - cast members are given slightly different versions of the script so that any leaks can be traced back to a unique individual.

<comment><USER3> If you think that one through it seems like doing this for a movie would be a logistical nightmare. Most actors are pretty good about learning their lines, which means you'd couldn't just put random changes in because otherwise their time would be wasted. I'm guessing that it's only used for pivotal plot changes like the Roddenberry incident describe on Wikipedia. Seems like the path used these days is extreme lawsuit threats built into their contract, something you'll see just about every Marvel star joke about during interviews.

<comment><USER4> There is more in a script then just this actors lines. You could slightly change Lines of other characters in the scenes or you could change the descriptions of the scenes in slight ways. You would still give the correct lines to each actor and make it obvious who shared their script.

<comment><USER3> … Which I hope was trying, apparently without success, to get across. It just seems like a ton of work and maintenance.

<comment><USER5> I wonder if it is automated with a thesaurus or some NLP

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Previously discussed at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4992748](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4992748) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10418586](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10418586).

</comment><comment><USER7> See also "Paper Towns"

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

<comment><USER8> I particularly like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agloe,_New_York](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agloe,_New_York) since it turned into a real town behind the authors' backs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Back in the 90s one of these really screwed me up when I was trying to find my way to a new and super out-of-the-way neighborhood using my trusty Thomas Guide, which at the time was the gold standard for maps in Southern California. I'd got lost and was scrutinizing the map street by street to find my way again. The moment I realized I'd "passed" the trap street I went back to make sure I didn't get lost again. Did this three times before I decided it was a bug on the map, not knowing about trap streets at the time. I still get stressed thinking about that trip.

<comment><USER9> I was considering commenting about the possibility of this happening, but thought maybe they'd just do it on streets nobody would want to go through. Thanks for the story!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have noticed apparent typos on memorable page numbers in fiction and non- fiction books (ie. 13, 69, 100, 123, 222, etc.) that must be intentionally edited in for this purpose, but I have not kept a list.

I went looking online and apparently this is semi-notorious in reference material (calling the trap a "mountweazle," [1], [2]) but (in a brief search session) I could not find mentions for ordinary books.

Edit: This quickly led to another (limited) set of examples on Wikipedia [3] and then on to the fiction of Jorge Borges [4] where I think I'll spend the rest of my Sunday.

[1] [http://wmcz.com/legal-ideas/using-traps-to-snare- copyright-i...](http://wmcz.com/legal-ideas/using-traps-to-snare-copyright- infringement/)

[2] [http://www.youblawg.com/ip-technology/5-copyright-traps- you-...](http://www.youblawg.com/ip-technology/5-copyright-traps-you-never- knew-about)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry#In_fiction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry#In_fiction)

[4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertiu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertius)

</comment><comment><USER11> This kind of thing goes back to '91 at least with Feist v. Rural when Feist copied telephone entries from Rural's directory which included some fakes. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co).

<comment><USER3> This turned out to be one of the more interesting IP decisions IMHO. The Supremes decided that a list cannot be copyrighted if it's organized in a simple and obvious way, like a phone book.

Which means that if you went to a bunch of trouble to license a ton of local phone directories, as you'd have to do back then, in order to create a national listing, your achievement would be worth exactly nothing. While I'm grateful to the Supremes for the decision as a dev, I can certainly empathize with Rural (the losers) as a businessperson.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm pretty sure this little accident happened as a result of a trap street near where I used to live:

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england- wiltshire-22158829](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-22158829)

The 'trap' was that on google maps it was made to look like a regular street when it clearly wasn't.

<comment> another-cuppa I've found many errors in Google maps over the years. I'm not convinced any of them are traps, they are just the result of not actually surveying the areas they claim to map.

<comment><USER13> Digital cartography is hard. Even without various intentional errors and distortions (many maps contain intentional dimensional non-linearities for "strategic reasons", ie. so that they cannot be directly used for directing artilery fire) the input data is full of various unintentional noise and non- sense because of the processes that were used in acquiring and digitizing that data in the first place. Processes ranging from digitizing paper maps of generally unknown accuracy with digitizer to just guessing positions of things from sharpie marks on hand-drawn map created by who knows who in the field. Trying to make some sense of such data was my first real IT job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Something similar: vendors of stock price data are said to add extra ticks in order to catch people who are illegally reselling it.

</comment><comment><USER15> Meet me in the trap, it's goin' down.</comment>


Show HN: Bail – get out of your commitments without the guilt - <AUTHOR> https://www.bail-app.pw/#/?v=1 <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all,

A few months ago, I posted about my startup idea, Bail: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22250962](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22250962)

I've now finished building the application, as an integration with Google Calendars, and its just passed the Google oAuth verification process.

My original post got a lot of attention, both positive and negative. I'm interested to see how the conversation goes this time, now the actual app exists.

I'm aware that this is a terrible time to launch, given most people will have cancelled most of their plans due to COVID-19 anyway, but interested to hear feedback regardless

Thanks for looking, Chris</comment>


Goals and Anti-Goals - <AUTHOR> https://riskfirst.org/post/news/2020/01/17/Anti-Goals <comment><USER2> Maybe this is just an unassailable difficulty and not an anti-goal as described here, but getting your SaaS idea past 'the algorithm' and noticed by an unforgiving world seems to me the biggest problem everyone faces.

I guess we live in a world of too much choice, but it feels like there's so much good stuff out there, and so many good bits of software that the world simply doesn't have time To appreciate them all.

The winner-take-all nature of software these days is a big anti goal in my view.

Vvvvvv was lucky but a lot of people are just sucked into learning the world of growth-hacking. It might be just a sad downside of the Metcalfe effect but surely there are thousands of other games that deserved some attention too?</comment>


Markov Chain Monte Carlo for Bayesian Inference – The Metropolis Algorithm - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantstart.com/articles/Markov-Chain-Monte-Carlo-for-Bayesian-Inference-The-Metropolis-Algorithm <comment><USER2> I'm sad that every explanation of MCMC uses complicated symbolic explanations. I was trying to explain it once and came up with a fairly intuitive way to visualize it. Probably that is the way it was first discovered, though who knows.

In words, you can visualize it as doing a random walk around the area of a probability graph. Then it just turns into an explanation of why random walks accurately sample from an area, and the various tricks used in MCMC methods to make random walks more efficient.

Relatedly, bayes theorem makes much more sense when you visualize it, e.g. this post: [https://oscarbonilla.com/2009/05/visualizing-bayes- theorem/](https://oscarbonilla.com/2009/05/visualizing-bayes-theorem/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Not to hijack this post, but I'm saddened every time I see anything monte carlo related referred to as the metropolis algorithm. When you're the boss, what you say goes.

[http://andrewgelman.com/2014/06/30/invented-metropolis- algor...](http://andrewgelman.com/2014/06/30/invented-metropolis-algorithm/)

<comment><AUTHOR> There is also a bit of historical discussion on Wikipedia about this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis%E2%80%93Hastings_al...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis%E2%80%93Hastings_algorithm#History)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is so incredibly far over my head.

<comment><USER5> Yup, going to have to save this for later... I vaguely remember a Metropolis Light Transport from my college graphics course, which I assume uses similar sampling methodology

<comment><USER6> I came here to .. too late.</comment></comment></comment>


Dalio warns Fed of 1937-style rate risk - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/7a535d24-ccb7-11e4-b5a5-00144feab7de.html

<comment><USER2> Stock market !== economy. The stock market can rise without lifting employment meaningfully (as we've seen ample evidence of since 2008) and fall without meaningfully hurting employment. Meanwhile, low interest rates mean little incentive to save (for emergencies or retirement) when you have no hope of keeping up with inflation.</comment>


Hotelling's Game, or Why Gas Stations Have Competitors Nearby (2008) - <AUTHOR> https://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2008/03/25/game-theory-tuesdays-hotelling%e2%80%99s-game-or-why-gas-stations-have-competitors-nearby/ <comment><USER2> The model seems incorrect:

1) It misses pricing. If I am next to another gas station or hot dog stand, I have competitive pressure; my best strategy is to price just below the competitor. If I am isolated, I can jack up prices by however much people are willing to spend to not go further.

2) It also assumes just two players on a beach. With more players and a longer beach, you end up with everyone spread out. With three players, the two outer players will continue to move in towards the center player. If the center player ever has less than 1/4 of the beach, they'll want to move to just outside one of the other two players, who will then want to move to the center.

<comment><USER3> This is actually a common misunderstanding. The example of ice-cream vendors on a beach or, in this case, gas stations, are toy examples.

The model is not really about location. It is about product differentiation in SOME dimension. By extension, it is also about the number of market participants with differentiated products. Distance or location stands for this differentiation of products.

This is typical of econ models. They are not trying to be realistic, but show a certain mechanism.

By the way, the model can be extended with different pricing mechanisms and many actors (for example on a circle, not a line, to show that generally too many firms enter a market than can be supported).

As for your points:

1) Pricing depends on demand and maket configuration. Usually, one would work with what is called the "inverse demand", where the company has basically solved price as a function of the the amount of goods it WANTS to sell, given other market participants. Note how pricing is implicit in this. While these functions are of course usually assumed to be well behaved, you could do what you want here. So it doesn't miss pricing, it just abstracts from it

In particular, that you can jack up prices depending on location is _explicitly_ in this model.

2) Note how the locations depend on the distribution of demand along the "line". Your intuition depends on this as well. If demand is concentrated somewhere in the middle, you will get a different result...

<comment><USER3> By the way, think about what would happen if you could differentiate in two dimensions? You'd be on a plane or a circle on which a demand distribution exists... etc.

That's the idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What I'd also like to know is why a cluster of gas stations ends up with different prices. If you have a competitor next door advertising gas at, say, $3.95 per gallon, why would you put up a giant sign saying yours cost $4.05?

Even more baffling, as a customer, why would you go to the more expensive pumps? Sure, loyalty discounts might account for a certain number of decisions, but that can't be the only answer. I've often wanted to go up to someone pumping gas at a higher price when there's a cheaper station right next door, and just ask them how they decided to pay more.

<comment><USER5> I never look at the price before I go to the pump. If there are multiple stations available then I probably made the choice based on which was easier to get to (side of the street / which direction I'm going) or which looked like it will have cleaner restrooms if I need to pee. I'm not super wealthy or anything, but none of the vehicles I drive take a ton of gas so a difference of 10¢ per gallon just isn't really worth thinking about.

<comment><USER6> I've seen differences up to $0.30. Pay me $4 to make a left turn? Sign me up.

<comment><USER7> Driving in Florida, I'll gladly pay $4 to _skip_ a left turn... :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's very interesting seeing an article on HN about this. Before my current job, I worked as a data scientist at one of the largest travel centers in the U.S., and we analyzed this problem almost nonstop with regard to both gas and diesel prices. A good pricing strategy is quite complex, and you'd be surprised at the number of factors that goes into it.

<comment><USER9> Can you talk more about a good pricing strategy for gas and diesel prices, some factors involved, or things you learned?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This makes sense, but it's very unfortunate. In Utah there are quite a few small communities that have no services at all so you have to drive maybe 20 to 30 minutes for the closest anything. Needless to say this sucks. In the rare event that a small town has only _one_ station it is virtually guaranteed to have extremely high prices (with one exception that I know of). It's one of the reasons why even tho I prefer a more rural place to live, I opt to live closer to the big city instead. We are getting to a point where the opportunities and conveniences of the big city are making small town life much more difficult (in contrast) and expensive. You have to forgo many conveniences. Perhaps things will change in the future, but that is definitely not the current trend.

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't drive a car nor buy hot-dogs but what struck me as a convincing and important example is how all news-stations play the same news. And not only that but they also much broadcast at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER12> The Gas Station's game doesn't seem to correlate well with the game suggested with the Hot Dog stand analogy. Setting up gas stations is expensive and requires a lot of infrastructure setup and time, once set up people just can't move it around in a city. Now if I were setting a new gas station I would place it in a location where I win greater market share and is disadvantaged to the competitor. Due to the resource constraints, the competitor has to just stay where they were. Gas station locations don't lie in efficient markets where the equilibrium is achieved by being close to each other.

</comment><comment><USER13> Another way of thinking about it; when you've been on the highway and see gas, and pull off the highway, and there's a sign "1 gas station left" and "3 gas stations right", you almost always go right. You probably try to go to the first station, but if you pass it, you go to the second station. Each one tries to be the "first" station there, but only one can be first, and the real estate costs for gas-stationed zoned properties probably go up for the closest one.

</comment><comment><USER14> A discussion from 2011: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2814864](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2814864).

</comment><comment><USER15> This article is writing as if this is a growth business, we are a century in and it is more a game of musical chairs, so it is a question of where the survivors are located, not where new entrants start.

There used to be petrol stations everywhere, it was the hot new product to sell once upon a time and every garage would want to have a forecourt. The infrastructure needed then wasn't that much more sophisticated than that needed for a lemonade stand. You could just put the sign up and profit from the passing trade very much on a know-the-customer-personally basis. No upsells were needed, it was an easy way to print money.

Then the market got saturated. Much like mobile phone shops, suddenly small towns had half a dozen of them.

Then this business got picked off by the supermarkets in European markets. They sold own brand petrol at first at a better price than the established brands. The brand did not matter as it is a commodity product. They did not have to make money off it as they were luring customers in for their big shop.

After this round of musical chairs only supermarkets, convenience stores and motorway service stations survived.

I think it has been a cruel business and it is quite sad that something so valuable has no return in it for the end retailer.

<comment><USER16> "every garage would want to have a forecourt"

In American this would be every... mechanic? would want... a gas pump out front?

<comment><USER17> As an American, "garage" is still perfectly valid nomenclature

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is a powerful example but for some reason it never dives into what happens when the 3rd stand appears :D

</comment><comment><USER19> Explains why political primaries tend to skew so far left or right, and yet when the final election comes, the candidates race towards the middle while framing their opponents as extremists.

<comment><USER20> [https://geopoliticalfutures.com/in-defense-of-party- bosses/](https://geopoliticalfutures.com/in-defense-of-party-bosses/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Another factor: commercial use and potential hazard zoning. Cities may disallow gas stations in large areas.

<comment> nathan-io Indeed, I'd say in the case of gas stations in particular, zoning could be the primary cause of such clustering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Zoning is a giant factor in clustering of gas stations in populated areas, link below an example.

[https://www.apnews.com/7bf2dceaacfc48178535dfc56d5cdbf3](https://www.apnews.com/7bf2dceaacfc48178535dfc56d5cdbf3)

</comment><comment><USER23> In economics, this is called clustering. Malls and shopping streets are a good example, but also the NYC Diamond District, Las Vegas, and Silicon Valley.

</comment><comment><USER24> What happens in the repeated game? Seems more applicable to the current problem.

<comment><USER25> How often do gas stations move locations?

<comment><USER24> How often do gas stations franchise and expand locations within a similar region?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> the-dude Reminds me of my own observation in the US ( 2001 ) : car dealers concentrate.

<comment><USER26> Anyone going to dealerships in 2019 is already losing. I made that mistake recently with my wife's car. We went into dealer and I talked to manager. We knew exact model and color we wanted and told him we were there to see it in person and then would get quotes from area dealers... Because he was nice I told him to just give me his absolute best price then and we'd consider it... it was few grand more than I knew I could get so I went the email/quote route. 2 weeks later he won the pricing quote and was 6 grand lower than what he said was his lowest in the showroom. Only shop via email. Ever.

<comment><USER27> Reminds me when I bought my second car. I wanted to test drive 2 different cars at a couple dealerships. I called ahead to the first one and asked if the model I wanted was available. They said yes, and asked what I wanted to pay for it. I totally low-balled them because I didn't care at this point. When I got there they gave me the price I offered. Never test drove the second car...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > If voters pick the candidate closer to their views, and voters are spread > out across the spectrum, then both candidates would converge to the middle. > It's no surprise that politicians seek the "average vote." It also suggests > why it's so hard to tell the difference between candidates during the > campaign trail.

Needs a (2008)...

<comment><USER6> It's incredible how the political landscape has forever changed in the last years.

<comment><USER29> Fewer people having more voting power via their states having disproportionate voting power changes the game.</comment></comment></comment>


New Relic Inc CEO Sells $1,106,820 in Stock - <AUTHOR> http://www.financial-market-news.com/new-relic-inc-newr-ceo-sells-1106820-00-in-stock/796184/ <comment><AUTHOR> New Relic shuts down Seattle office, moves employees to Portland: [http://www.geekwire.com/2016/new-relic-shuts-seattle- office-...](http://www.geekwire.com/2016/new-relic-shuts-seattle-office-moves- employees-portland/)

New Relic Stock is 22.23% down: [http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=NEWR+Interactive#{"range"...](http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=NEWR+Interactive#{"range":"max","allowChartStacking":true})

<comment><USER2> Sold 39,000 shares, leaving him with 376.

Earnings were reported yesterday (Thursday) but were better than estimates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Maybe he needs to cover his short positions, maybe he wants to buy a house. This represents 0.1% of the company. Although an insider sale is never a bullish signal, there can be lots of good reasons why someone might sell, including a greater need for diversification.

</comment><comment><USER4> New Relic got stuck trying to provide mainstream analytics in a world where analytics solutions must be highly tailored to the applications they are responsible for providing insights into.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think it could be that he is able to see what is about to happen to the tech market (well, is starting to happen already).

</comment><comment><USER6> Sell whatever you own if any. Advice from someone thats been around.</comment>


What Can Bonobos Teach Us About the Nature of Language? - <AUTHOR> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/bonobos-teach-humans-about-nature-language-180975191/ <comment> tuna-piano For a brief period in 2013 the facility was looking for money and allowed public visitation. I visited during that time, and I loved the experience of seeing these animals face to face (through glass) in person. Sue was not there (supposedly sick... but perhaps looking back this was just an excuse). It was a little weird how the staff interacting with the Bonobos were (I believe) all related to Sue.

Few photos of my visit (felt a little like Jurassic Park while entering).

[https://imgur.com/a/RhbqWLy](https://imgur.com/a/RhbqWLy)

Another long article about Kanzi and another famous ape, Koko: [https://slate.com/technology/2014/08/koko-kanzi-and-ape- lang...](https://slate.com/technology/2014/08/koko-kanzi-and-ape-language- research-criticism-of-working-conditions-and-animal-care.html)

Disclaimer: Like many things I've done in my life (visiting zoos and aquariums, eating meat, etc) I'm not sure whether I made the right ethical choice to visit. Certainly was a selfish decision, not sure I caused any harm or if that harm was worth my enjoyment.

</comment><comment><USER2> I think the article misrepresents Chomsky's views on language to some extent. It makes it sound as if Language is claimed to simply be some special organ in the human brain and that's why bonobos can't have language, by decree.

In fact, no such claim is made. Chomsky's point is that, given how fast human beings acquire language, we must have some special structure in the brain that gives us this capacity, that we are born with. That doesn't exclude the possibility that other animals also possess some form of this capacity, it just excludes the possibility that Skinner's behaviorist model was right - that a being without such an 'organ' could learn language, or at least that it could do it with the speed with which humans do it.

However, Chomsky is rightly skeptical of animal language claims. One of his main discoveries from studying Universal Grammar is that (human) language is mostly a mechanism for thought, not communication. This is mostly argued from the way many concepts are encoded into language in a way that is very efficient to the one doing the encoding, but very inefficient for decoding by someone who lacks the proper context - better suited to the thinking process of the person who produced the phrase, less suited to communicating the concept to someone else.

Because of the above, vocabulary is hardly worth studying as part of language, especially when discussing concrete terms. If you truly want to claim an animal possesses something similar to human language, you need to study the way it creates phrases, and the way it can compose simple phrases into complex phrases - that is where the key power of human language lies. An animal that can recognize a million words and even basic syntax ("do A then B" != "do B then A", which is already more than most animals have been successfully taught) but that can't form novel phrases from simple phrases should not be labeled to possess the same kind of capacity that humans do.

Note that none of this is to say that possessing the capacity for language should be required to consider someone conscious or worth protecting! I absolutely believe that apes and a vast swathe of mammals (and even animals in general) posses enough consciousness that we should feel morally obligated to not torture them (I do not believe that humanely sacrificing an animal and consuming it's flesh is torture; raising a chicken in a coop where it can't move more than a few cm for its entire life is, though;;; drug testing on rats is a much more difficult moral matter).

<comment><USER3> > we must have some special structure in the brain that gives us this > capacity, that we are born with

We have special faculties for things like recognizing faces. Correspondingly there are people that have some damage/abnormality with this mechanism but they are otherwise fully functional human beings. There doesn't seem to be an equivalent phenomena with language. I mean, you have things like dyslexia.. but that's something that only applies to the writing word (which is kinda bizarre if you think about it b/c writing is relatively new, evolutionary speaking). As far as I know, people that can't process language at all are deeply mentally retarded. If it was some complex hard-wired mechanism in the brain then you'd expect to see functionally intelligent people that can't process language at all - but as far as I know that doesn't happen. Or does it?

<comment><USER2> That could add to the idea that language is primarily the tool we use for thought. If you can't have abstract thought without language (in humans), as Chomsky claims, then that would fit perfectly with an observation that people who are incapable of language are also incapable of 'higher' thought.

I'm not personally sure whether this observation is accurate or not.

<comment><USER4> I'm not generally persuaded that we think linguistically, my experience on reflection seems to be that forming ideas linguistically is 'post processing'. On the other hand the rigor of trying to express a thought or idea linguistically can greatly aid the thinking process. If they are 'technically' separate faculties, I suspect that in humans the specifics of the implementations are extremely highly coupled and interdependent.

<comment><USER2> To me at least, anything longer than 1 'idea' must be put together in language. For example, I couldn't think of a mulți-step algorithm or a plan or even a recipe without putting it in language.

Still, I think Chomsky's idea, as far as I understand it, is that there is a level of language that is not immediately accessible to us, where basically your mind constructs a concept tree that can be 1:1 mapped with the syntax tree of the phrase that it could be used to represent. The strucutre itself is the same, but the thought process works with internal concepts, while the expression in external language works with English or Japanese words. The brain would work with this tree internally, applying well-defined transformations to it, merging it with other similar trees, embedding it etc. ; this would happen both consciously, semi-consciously and unconsciously to different degrees. In the end, when a plan is formulated, it can be acted upon directly, or it can be communicated to others, by encoding it in English or Japanese or Sign Language etc.

Note that I am not claiming to have studied this seriously, so this is at best a layman's understanding from watching a few lectures. Chomsky also is careful to mention that his idea of language as the mechanism primarily for thought is a fringe view in linguistics, though he strongly believes some version of it will come to be accepted as correct in the future, as the field matures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This idea that only we as humans can think and feel in particular ways is slowly being eroded and I think that scares us both intellectually and morally.

</comment><comment><USER6> Disappointing to see this talking about Sue rather than anything of actual substance or new research.

Based on personal knowledge, I can say the apes are much better off without her. She should be shunned from the scientific community for her practices instead of any sort of praise that this article gives.

<comment><USER7> With due respect, that doesn't mean anything--as far as we know, it's just the unfounded opinion of a person who may or not be qualified to have an opinion. What's your connection here, and what's your personal knowledge?

The article wasn't entirely positive on her, either, not that anyone seems to feel they need to read the articles they're opining on on HN.

<comment><USER6> It wasn't entirely positive, but it shouldn't have been positive at all.

Does putting a diaper on a bonobo and taking it to a restaurant sound like scientific research?

Sue hasn't been connected with the initiative for many years and for years after her leaving harassed the workers and organization such as by constantly calling the police and reporting false animal abuse. It took the author until nearly the end to begin mentioning similar items. The article in general is a rehashing of previous articles on Sue and the bonobos. There is nothing new or significant in the article worth mentioning. No new research.

You can take these as anecdotes. My opinion doesn't matter in the grand scheme and take everything with a grain of salt, but the scientific community should have higher standards.

<comment><USER7> > Does putting a diaper on a bonobo and taking it to a restaurant sound like > scientific research?

Science isn't an aesthetic choice, so whether or not something "sounds like" science, is completely irrelevant.

Science is asking questions, and trying to gather observations which answer the question.

If your critique is that what she's doing doesn't _sound like_ science, that just sounds like you don't know what science is. I'd have to know what question was being asked to know whether bringing a bonobo in a diaper to a restaurant is really a good way to gather observations on that question.

> Sue hasn't been connected with the initiative for many years and for years > after her leaving harassed the workers and organization such as by > constantly calling the police and reporting false animal abuse. It took the > author until nearly the end to begin mentioning similar items. There is > nothing new or significant in the article worth mentioning. No new research.

Just because it's not new, doesn't mean it's not significant.

So far, your "personal knowledge" just sounds like a grudge which you would benefit from working through. I'm not saying you have to like her or pretend that everything she did was right and good, but you also don't have to go on the internet and try to tear down the good parts of her legacy.

You don't need to persuade me she was a destructive and slightly crazy person --that's in the article--and its clear that her presence had become harmful to progress. But her earlier research does look pretty interesting, and it would be a shame to not look at her earlier research because she became hostile later. Sometimes assholes discover interesting things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The best paragraph

> In an email to me, Frans de Waal, the primatologist, described the case as > emblematic of a deeper conundrum in the study of animal minds: "Work with > Kanzi has always lived somewhere between rigorous science and social > closeness and family life," he wrote. "Some scientists would like us to test > animals as if they are little machines of which we only need to probe the > responses, whereas others argue that apes reveal their full mental > capacities only in the sort of environment that we also provide for our > children, with intellectual encouragement among loving adults. There is some > real tension between these two views, because loving adults customarily > overestimate what their charges are capable of and throw in their own > interpretations, which is why children need to be tested by neutral > psychologists and not the parents. For Kanzi, too, we need this middle > ground between him feeling at ease with those around him and being tested in > the most objective way. The conflict around Kanzi's custody is a fight > between both sides in this debate."

What Sue is doing is quack science or engineering in the short term, but if replicated in parallel, could be excellent science in the long term.

</comment><comment><USER9> From one of the image captions:

> Kanzi blowing soap bubbles, demonstrating voluntary breath control, which > apes were long said to lack.

Aside from the quality narrative surrounding captive bonobo research, this demonstration of breath control alone made the long read worthwhile. Completely unexpected.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think it's amazing that dogs can even "speak".

It's very limited, but still very funny and amazing:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCi- FwKsBDg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCi-FwKsBDg)

</comment><comment><USER11> Is it just me? I don't want to have to skip over the irrelevant nonsense about a yellow school bus and cottonwood trees to read an article about a scientist when the headline it about the bonobos themselves.

I might well be interested in an article about Savage-Rumbough or her travails. That's an interesting topic in itself. But this is like an article in a business magazine e.

Is this what Smithsonian readers want? To feel like they read about science but not actually have done so?

Plus I'm still curious about what we've actually learned from this about the nature of language.

<comment><USER7> It's not just you, there's an entire community of people who have decided that four sentences of introduction is too much--Twitter.

Writing that not only is aesthetic but informative, is exactly what I want here.

> Is this what Smithsonian readers want? To feel like they read about science > but not actually have done so?

That's simply not true, this article is definitely about science.

> Plus I'm still curious about what we've actually learned from this about the > nature of language.

Then you'd have to read more than four sentences of the article.

"To some scientists, Kanzi's intellectual feats demonstrated clearly that language was not unique to human beings."

"The controversy masked an uncomfortable truth: No one agreed on what the difference between language and communication actually was."

The article then goes on to describe a wide variety of events which explain what happened with the Bonobos, highlighting events which might be indicators of discoveries and difficulties with collecting scientific observations about Bonobos and language/communication.

<comment><USER11> There's a tremendous amount of such work not just in various primates but non- primates such as birds, prarie dogs etc (not to mention a spectrum way down to more autonomic systems such as eusocial insects and biofilms). I didn't see much science discussion at all in proportion to the filler.

(As a side point: though I disagree with you it seems unfair that you are being downvoted (your post is greyed to me). I gave it an upvote — hth)</comment></comment></comment>