Terrain Generation with Midpoint Displacement - <AUTHOR> http://stevelosh.com/blog/2016/02/midpoint-displacement/ <comment><USER2> I remember learning about midpoint displacement as a teen and having its recursive implementation blow my mind. At the time, I don't think I could ever implement it correctly because, like Steve notes here, most explanations really elide about bunch of details around how you do it. In particular, they aren't clear how you do two "stages" of midpoints: corners to sides, then sides to center.

Much later, I got it working, but I was disappointed with the visible seams it tends to lead to. After some trial and error, I came up with an algorithm I liked better for the game I was trying to write at the time.

I thought it was cool enough that I wrote a little tutorial. It's the very first piece of writing I ever put on the web, I think. It's still online (though, alas, I lost my old robot-frog.com domain ages ago):

[http://stuffwithstuff.com/robot- frog/3d/hills/index.html](http://stuffwithstuff.com/robot- frog/3d/hills/index.html)

<comment><USER3> I had a similar experience writing a terrain engine using the quake gl mini- drivers. That was a fun summer! I never managed to make an actual game out of it though...

It seems like these days at least a noise function like perlin or simplex are far better. I doubt I would have understood those at the time though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4>
      (defn safe-average [a b c d]
        (let [total 0 count 0]
          (when a (add! total a) (inc! count))
          (when b (add! total b) (inc! count))
          (when c (add! total c) (inc! count))
          (when d (add! total d) (inc! count))
          (/ total count)))

Doesn't appear so safe against division by zero!

<comment><USER5> The demo and step by step blog is great but there is some really bad code in it... Is it idiomatic Wisp to keep the surface-level syntax of Clojure but none of the important bits like immutability and abstractions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So is this a variant of this

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond- square_algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond-square_algorithm)

Or is this exactly this algorithm?

> The diamond step. For each square in the array, set the midpoint of that > square to be the average of the four corner points plus a random value.

> The square step. For each diamond in the array, set the midpoint of that > diamond to be the average of the four corner points plus a random value.

Seems pretty straightforward. If you couple this with a deterministic random function, you could generate a terrain which always is the same, so that would make multiplayer possible.

That's obviously what you would want in game which is very large, without having a game which is too large to download.

</comment><comment><USER7> Live demos were definitely helpful. Nicely done tutorial!

</comment><comment><USER8>
        $ man triangle
        NAME
         triangle - random mountains using iterative subdivision of triangles.

[…]

        $ /usr/lib/xscreensaver/triangle

</comment><comment><USER9> If this stuff interests you there is a nice book called the fractal geometry of nature that has some interesting techniques.

[http://www.amazon.com/Science-Fractal-Images-Heinz-Otto- Peit...](http://www.amazon.com/Science-Fractal-Images-Heinz-Otto- Peitgen/dp/1461283493)

</comment><comment><USER10> Thanks for sharing, this is very nicely documented.

Funny fact: it can be used as Grass Generator

Exponent: 7 Starting Spread: 35.3 Spread Reduction Constant: 20.5

</comment><comment><USER11> This reminds me, does wisp work on Windows yet?</comment>


Ask HN: Remember a Reverse job site for developers offers - <AUTHOR>

Hi Guys,
Hope your memory is better than mine, a year or so ago I remember visiting a job site where you listed your details and then you received job offers. I think it was targeted to US/London companies only.
Can anyone remember? <comment><USER2> Hired.com?

</comment><comment><USER3> whitetruffle.com?</comment>


Mozilla should move Persona out of the US - workhere-io http://blog.workhere.io/mozilla-needs-to-move-persona-out-of-the-us/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, Persona dev here.

We want to do better: we want to get rid of the Persona servers altogether. As tlocke said, Persona is designed to let you choose who you trust, and anything that requires centralization is considered a bug.

There are 4 points of temporary centralization, each of which can be replaced independently:

1\. The JS polyfill. Until we stabilize the API, we ask that you link directly to login.persona.org/include.js

2\. The persona.org interface. Once browsers have native support for Persona, that will supersede both the polyfill and the persona.org interface. This is all based on what Mike Hanson called Locally Isolated Feature Domains (LIFD): [http://www.open-mike.org/entry/lifding-the-web](http://www.open- mike.org/entry/lifding-the-web)

3\. The Fallback IdP. If your email provider doesn't support Persona, Mozilla will certify your identity after you click a confirmation link sent to your email address. If your email provider _does_ support Persona, it automatically supplants Mozilla's fallback.

4\. The Hosted Verifier. Until we stabilize the data formats, we recommend that sites POST identity assertions to verifier.login.persona.org/verify for verification. The assertions necessarily contain your email address and the site you're logging into. We want this to go away soon, and François Marier has suggested a pretty slick way to get us there. Until then, we've got a strong privacy policy in place and we limit the data we log. I believe Ben Adida is going to comment more on that shortly.

If you're interested in getting involved, drop me a line and I'd be happy to help you get started.

<comment><USER2> > Mozilla will certify your identity after you click a confirmation link sent > to your email address.

Asking email address for sign-up is perhaps important, but I'm wondering why can't it be removed completely from the process? It is a piece of friction, and potentially identifying as OP puts it in his post?

Can't we be just done with the requirement of email address? Let early users, especially those who inspire the rest of the bell curve, remember their persona id with some personal questions that the user may so choose.

Get rid of anything that can be gotten rid of.

<comment> workhere-io Email addresses have certain advantages:

\- Most everyone on the 'Net has one.

\- Most everyone remembers their email address (but they might not remember what usernames they used for which websites).

\- Email addresses are unique, so when a user signs up for Persona, they don't have to go through that time-wasting "this username is taken, try this one instead" process.

\- Email addresses make it easy to recover forgotten passwords.

So - while I see you point - I think that email addresses are the best option.

<comment><USER2> I mostly agree. Now this may be a bit difficult to explain, but all the logic in the points above sort of align towards the intent of achieving mass adoption. But I am afraid that mass adoption is not going to happen just like that. And it is certainly not going to depend on the fact that everyone uses email.

Let's look at an ordinary user first. An ordinary user doesn't half understand the subject of privacy. He/she is rather more interested in sharing his/her best looking picture on Facebook. Or worried about landing a good job with a nice new email with all the strengths. Which is the cool app, what is the next device he can _show off_ etc.

Why would Persona matter to such a user? A type that is majority and we've counted them all in the statement 'everyone on the 'Net has one'. So this is more like opening an end of a small pipe to the atmosphere thinking that all the air will pass through it.

 _\- Most everyone on the 'Net has one._

Yes. But it doesn't provide any motivation for people to go and sign-up for Persona. Hence email registration only adds to friction.

 _\- Most everyone remembers their email address (but they might not remember what usernames they used for which websites)._

This one is real. Since Persona is about, well, persona it is more likely to remain etched in the memory of early adopters (ignore mass adoption for a later stage) provided it is done right, kept right etc. Mozilla is an amazing and capable organization so it should experiment more given that the project itself is an ambitious experiment.

 _\- Email addresses are unique, so when a user signs up for Persona, they don 't have to go through that time-wasting "this username is taken, try this one instead" process._

Dumb users are dumb enough to try signing up with the same email id again. I am not very sure about Persona's positioning w.r.t same person having multiple email ids?

 _\- Email addresses make it easy to recover forgotten passwords._

Agreed. However, Hacker News is a great example of why both email id and password recovery are immaterial for a product to be successful (Kudos PG!). I do agree with the simplicity of recovering forgotten password through email, but this is certainly not a show-stopper at this stage.

<comment> workhere-io I don't think Persona is pitched for the tech-savvy. On the contrary, I think Persona offers a huge advantage for normal users: You can do one-click sign- ups and log-ins for new websites (provided that you've already signed up for Persona and that you've checked the "save my session" button or whatever it's called).

Another advantage is that you don't have to waste time validating your email address when you sign up for a new website. Persona has already validated your email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The fact that Mozilla is a US corporation means that it will still have to give the US government the data it asks for, regardless of where the servers are hosted.

<comment> workhere-io I know. That's why I wrote in the article that they will need to move "both the legal entity behind [Persona] and the servers involved" to another country :)

They don't necessarily need to move the Mozilla organization, but then they'd need to make Persona an organization in itself and move that organization.

<comment><USER4> It's a much safer bet to make it impossible to get the data for the company. It's not like if non-US countries were much better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Mozilla Persona is federated, so the BrowserId service is provided by the email provider. Mozilla provide a fallback service, in case your email provider hasn't set one up. So just pick an email provider in the country of your choice.

There's another misunderstanding in the post:

      > Then NSA would have access to basically 40% of a user's
      > browsing history, including URLs, the email address used,
      > and time of visit.

As I understand it, Persona doesn't 'phone home' each time authentication is required. It's intended that the browser authenticates you from its cache, and only refers back to the Persona server from time to time, and doesn't tell the Persona server anything about the sites you've been visiting etc.

<comment> workhere-io > Mozilla Persona is federated, so the BrowserId service is provided by the > email provider. Mozilla provide a fallback service, in case your email > provider hasn't set one up. So just pick an email provider in the country of > your choice.

The way it currently works is that when you want to log in, a pop-up window from persona.org is opened. This would make Persona able to collect data (which I don't think they're doing, but NSA could force them to).

> As I understand it, Persona doesn't 'phone home' each time authentication is > required

I'm not an expert on the inner workings of Persona, but with the way Persona currently works it actually does fetch JS from the Persona servers on each page load. Try logging in on [http://personaexamples.workhere.io/](http://personaexamples.workhere.io/) and reload the page a couple of times while checking in Firebug / Chrome Developer Tools which JS files are loaded.

<comment><USER5> You can self-host the js files wherever you like. It's not recommended that you do because Persona is still evolving. However the point is that the protocol is completely decentralized.

By the way, as a plug, I've implemented it on my site [http://www.polifesto.com/](http://www.polifesto.com/)

<comment> workhere-io > You can self-host the js files wherever you like

Sure, but those files would still open the persona.org pop-up, AFAIK (until Persona has been implemented directly in the browser). So until then persona.org could theoretically gather data.

<comment><USER6> Any signs of Persona being implemented in the browser?

<comment><AUTHOR> Firefox OS includes pseudo-native implementation, with some work still getting farmed out to persona.org. Ozten and Jedp are working on the beginnings of truly native support in desktop Firefox. We've held off on pushing too far in that direction while we toyed with the API and data formats, but things seem to be shaping up.

<comment><USER7> If you guys get it stabilized and working I wouldn't mind helping get Konq to support it (time permitting, of course).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think that the vast majority of tech companies need to seriously consider relocating outside US jurisdiction, in a similar manner to which they have already off-shored their finances.

<comment><USER9> I wonder if this will lead to tax-heaven countries, the same way we currently have tax-heaven countries or even something which would be equivalent to Switzerland's renown in finance.

<comment><USER8> I perceive that certain countries will become super data havens. Something like Gibson noted in his book Count Zero: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_haven#History_of_the_term](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_haven#History_of_the_term)

The Switzerland of data if you will. You need a durable and sizable connection to the internet, plenty of energy, strong human rights and stable governance. Iceland almost fits the bill, but their governance is not stable enough.

Actually, Switzerland is actually not a bad option. They understand the necessity of privacy and are extremely stable politically. The canton principals are an excellent political stabilizer. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantons_of_Switzerland](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantons_of_Switzerland)

<comment><USER10> The US was already able to force the Swiss banking system open, so I don't see how this would protect anyone's data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That doesn't sound very useful.

Firstly, Persona doesn't have access to any such information. The only interesting information that could be extracted by owning a Persona server is that user X using IP Y wants to connect to some service - but Persona doesn't know which service. So you only get the IP.

Secondly, well, anybody can become a Persona identity provider. Do you want to host one in insert-your-favorite-country here? Well, that's quick and easy.

<comment> workhere-io As stated elsewhere there's a difference between how Persona works now and how it eventually will work. Persona at this stage is stable and works very well, but it does communicate with and send private data to persona.org, which is owned by an American organization (Mozilla).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It seems to me that if the NSA is able to force Mozilla to put in such tracking into Persona (which in its current form, where using the scripts at persona.org is recommended, would be possible—later on, you'd need to modify the source and get people to update to it), _you don 't need to worry about it in the slightest_. You've already got much larger problems: putting tracking into the browser itself would be _much_ more effective.

<comment> workhere-io Sure, but who says every major browser will be controlled by a US legal entity five years from now?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> NSA is good at MITM attacks according to Snowden. Moving outside the USA won't stop them.

Unless it's just for politics, to feel better, then go for it.

<comment> workhere-io > NSA is good at MITM attacks according to Snowden. Moving outside the USA > won't stop them.

If they do MITM attacks, it will probably be on US citizens. Moving Persona out of the US would at least stop the snooping on non-US citizens.

<comment><USER14> That's only if the traffic does not flow through the US which, given the way our current internet infrastructure is setup, is very possible

<comment><USER15> If I have my datacenter in Iceland and you connect from France, I really doubt you'er going waste valuable transcontinental bandwidth with high latency and extra hops by routing through NYC first.

<comment><USER16> If the US decides your France<->Iceland traffic is that valuable, it's a small matter to reach an arrangement with friendly-or-easily-pressured governments, agencies, or companies to have your traffic routed in such a way that the US can see it, whether that's in the US or not, or to just have one of those governments, agencies, or companies to play MITM and pass everything over wholesale.

For that matter, go look up Ivy Bells. Sure, fiber can't be tapped in the same manner, but you can get around that by placing your splice/tap during other outages, especially if you arrange for those too -- "Here's <insert amount> dollars/euros/ducats/doubloons/etc. Drag this across the bottom from point x to point y on your charts on date z, then cut it loose and leave it behind and go on your way."

Now, with a straight face, can you claim that you know, for sure, that your undersea links are pristine and unmolested, either at the end points with the equivalent of the infamous at&t "nsa rooms", or somewhere in the middle? Do you know, for sure, that the people who own the fiber trunks aren't playing ball with the nsa/mi6/dgse/etc?

Unless you own the entire infrastructure, and actively monitor it to be sure of such things, it is best to assume that your communications are vulnerable at some point along the way.

<comment><USER15> > it is best to assume that your communications are vulnerable at some point > along the way.

This claim and the claim of "I'm probably going through the US" are two entirely different claims.

Yes, using encryption helps. Yes, using non-US datacenters help. Security is layers. Its not all hopeless. The US isn't all powerful.

<comment><USER16> If your communications are vulnerable, and your communications are of interest to governments, then there's very little you can do to avoid it being intercepted.

You may, if you trust your hardware, your encryption software, and your key management, be able to keep that intercepted message from being read for some length of time. That is different than actually intercepting the traffic, which is trivial for the organizations we're talking about, and there is very, very little someone can do to avoid the interception.

Believing that being on a different continent makes you safe is deluding yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Unfortunately, you don't need to tap an authentication system to spy which services people are visiting. You can achieve the same for example by ordering a popular jQuery CDN to collect HTTP referrers, IP addresses and browsers fingerprints.

<comment> workhere-io Suppose we found out that the NSA was snooping through the jQuery CDNs. It would only take five minutes for website owners to change their jQuery locations.

It's a different story with Persona. Changing your entire user system isn't done overnight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Your site disables zooming on iOS devices, which makes it inaccessible to some of us. Please don't do that if you want people to read what you wrote.

<comment> workhere-io Sorry about that - I tested it on Android (Galaxy S3), and it worked perfectly. I'll try to test on iOS next time.

<comment><USER19> Just remove maximum-scale=1 from the viewport meta tag. It doesn't allow zooming in Safari, either.

<comment> workhere-io Should be fixed now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> And so it begins. People who care about a strong US tech industry need to oppose government snooping.

<comment><USER21> Opposing a strong US tech industry seems like a better bet for non-americans righ row. If the tech world were distributed across nations in a more balanced way the public would have more leverage today.

<comment><USER20> I disagree. The world needs a 'data safe haven', and it is much better for everyone if that haven is a strong country like the US. Distributed/Piecemeal efforts to maintain data security will be easy to kill.

<comment><USER22> How is the US a 'data safe haven' when the data stored by organisations within it are fair game for the US government without due process?

<comment><USER23> I understood grandparent's post as asking for a country with lot of political power and clout (like US) to be a data safe haven.

Unfortunately I can't think of a single state that has enough power and would want to keep data safe. Russia is basically dependant on US, China is not interested in keeping it safe, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> If you think that the US is the only country with overreaching intelligence bodies then you're deluded.

<comment> workhere-io Thanks for the snarky comment, but the fact that there are countries with overreaching intelligence agencies doesn't mean that every country is like that.

In most countries a warrant will get you access to private data - but what the NSA is doing here goes far beyond that.

<comment><USER25> rasterizer is correct. I think people are misguided in believing that there are viable alternatives. The reason this is such a big deal is that the US (on paper anyway) is built on a tenet of civil liberties which is/was unique.

Obviously, reality is entirely different but my point is that, in other countries/localities, these so-called fundamental freedoms either do not exist or are diminished. In most of the western world, governments have significant leeway into the private lives of their citizens in the areas covered by PRISM.

I think we can be reasonably certain that programs like this already exist, or are identical, in almost any country with the technical capacity to provide similar services to the US.

<comment> workhere-io > The reason this is such a big deal is that the US (on paper anyway) is built > on a tenet of civil liberties which is/was unique.

The US didn't invent most of those liberties. Your assumption that those liberties are not part of the law in other countries is wildly incorrect.

The assumption that most other western countries have as extensive intelligence gathering as the US needs proof. I'm aware that Sweden and the UK are quite big on data gathering, but there are hundreds of other countries in the world.

<comment><USER25> My point is that the number of countries with the capacity/capability to provide the level of service that the US provides is quite small. Of those, I imagine most if not all of them have similar data gathering practices that extends to their own citizenry, so non-citizens are not even an issue.

Let's look at the list of countries (order is random):

1\. EU (probably only France, UK, Germany, possibly the Netherlands) 2\. Israel 3\. Canada, solely by proximity to the US 4\. Japan 5\. China 6\. Brazil 7\. Russia 8\. Australia, that's a big maybe though 9\. India 10\. Iran 11\. South Korea 12\. Singapore 13\. South Africa 14\. Scandinavia (Finland, Denmark, Sweden)

These are the countries that likely have the technological advancement required to even offer cloud-based services of the scale and capability offered by US based organizations.

This is also assuming that significant parts of their overall connectivity does not route through US controlled territories or demarcation (which likely rules out any south-east asian country like South Korea, Singapore, also Canada and Australia).

Of those remaining on the list, very few of them have even have civil liberties legislation codified. A rough guess might be:

1\. EU 2\. Israel 3\. Japan 4\. Brazil 5\. Scandinavia 6\. South Africa?

Israel we could likely rule-out. Not exactly the most trustworthy government, and the close ties with the US likely means that they either participate in or benefit directly from PRISM.

As a collective whole, the scandinavian countries likely could offer the level of cloud-based services provided but not individually.

So, in no particular order:

1\. France 2\. UK 3\. Germany 4\. Japan 5\. Brazil

<comment><USER26> All the Scandinavian countries you list are actually EU members — a better term for your first group would be Western Europe.

But, really, I'm not sure how much confidence you could have in any of those countries: The UK's GCHQ was very heavily involved in Prism themselves, much to our national shame, for instance.

<comment><USER27> Looks like Sweden has even more intrusive snooping than PRISM, if you can believe that. I'd look toward Iceland, personally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> US based technology companies can no longer be trusted.

</comment><comment><USER29> Why? Nothing about it is remotely centralized and eventually it won't require ANY sort of server-side resources. The entire point is that you trust who you want to be your IdP

edit: never mind, reading the thread it's clear that few here have any idea what Persona is or how it works.

<comment> workhere-io As I've mentioned elsewhere on this page, there's a difference between what Persona is right now and what it will become later.

Right now it _is_ indeed centralized. Check out the integration documentation and you'll see how. [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Mozilla/Persona/Qui...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Mozilla/Persona/Quick_Setup)

<comment><USER29> Nope, that's the Quickstart guide. It's possible to do it without using Mozilla's servers. Someone just a couple weeks ago posted a writeup on how they did it themselves.

<comment> workhere-io I would assume that most website owners will go with the integration method Mozilla currently recommends, and that method is centralized.

For instance, the quickstart guide mentions [https://login.persona.org/include.js](https://login.persona.org/include.js): "You _must_ include this on every page which uses navigator.id functions. Because Persona is still in development, you should not self-host the include.js file."

<comment><USER29> Okay, but for anyone like us, we can self-host and just make sure it stays mirrored and up to date. The only other bit is doing the verification on your own server instead of trusting them. That's as big a deal as anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I don't think you know how to persona...</comment>


Here's Why iCloud Contacts Are Making me Insane - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/04/16/icloud-i-want-to-love-you-but-you-just-keep-screwing-up-our-relationship/ <comment><USER2> Apple are great in many areas and things but absolutely poor in Internet services. They need to seriously overhaul that software department.</comment>


Vox Media is cutting pay and furloughing 9% of employees - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/17/vox-media-furloughs/ <comment><USER2> I don't have any opinions here but for added context and interest, the two unions involved released statements:

NY Mag Union statement on the cuts: [https://twitter.com/NYMagUnion/status/1251218401688772608](https://twitter.com/NYMagUnion/status/1251218401688772608)

Vox media union on the cuts: [https://twitter.com/vox_union/status/1251174537120616454](https://twitter.com/vox_union/status/1251174537120616454)

> While we appreciate Vox Media talking to us in good faith, we don't agree > with the company's decision to furlough employees — especially after > hundreds of us told the company we were willing to take wider pay cuts to > save all jobs.

> We won a guarantee of no layoffs, no additional furloughs, and no additional > pay cuts through July 31, along with enhanced severance for any layoffs that > occur in August-December. The company also agreed to reduce the number of > furloughs.

<comment><USER3> I made this point earlier, but contrast the difference in tone between Vox workers and Amazon workers in what is really a very similar dispute. Cultivating a healthy working relationship with your unions means that when the world blows up, making hard choices doesn't get covered as an existential disaster.

<comment><USER4> Also notice how Vox workers have a union, while Amazon workers don't.

<comment><USER3> Which is sort of the point. Amazon resisted unionization (in the US), almost to a fault. And in the process they ended up offering things like salary and benefits that were quite generous within the relevant industries, precisely to prevent unionization.

And yet it's all blown up. Because while sure: they offer a $15 wage and retraining and all that, what they _don 't_ have is a union organization on the other side of the table who they trust to act in mutual self interest.

So when Vox runs out of money, their unions are willing to accept that and broadly trust the management to do the right thing for everyone, Amazon's workers are faced with trying to Get Theirs before their employer runs out of cash, because they _don 't_ trust Bezos.

And this was all avoidable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this is basically par for the course for media organisations. Let's face it, ad spend is gone and it's not going to be coming back for a while. I suspect we'll be see a lot more of this coming in the near future.

</comment><comment><USER6> The context is interesting:

[https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1248317812260499456](https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1248317812260499456)

[https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1248317824394653697](https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1248317824394653697)

[https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1248317820800086016](https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1248317820800086016)

[https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1248318363538837504](https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1248318363538837504)

The same company that considerably increased the damage the virus did in their country is now in financial difficulty as a result. They mocked people for avoiding handshakes, repeatedly told people that masks were ineffective and dismissed the virus as just a flu.

It's also interesting their political opponents, including the president adopted their original positions a few weeks later.

It's mind-boggling that analysis of the severity of a virus became so highly politicized. I don't think the same could have happened in the US a generation ago.

<comment><USER5> First tweet: Vox saying face masks aren't the best way to avoid Coronavirus. Actually basically the mainstream view in the US at the time, and still arguable. Note how right now the states aren't mandating masks, they're mandating social isolation.

Second tweet: Vox factually reporting the tech industry is eschewing handshakes. Tweet author editorialises that Vox is telling them not to.

Third Tweet: Vox factually reporting that tech companies are providing 9million masks. Factually states that it's not enough to solve the problem. Tweet author contends that's not true - but provides no evidence .

Fourth tweet: Author tries to claim Vox is responsible for Coronavirus.

I find this hilarious, because we all know perfectly well, if that tweeter had found a Vox contributer tweeting that 4th tweet he'd be apoplectic.

I'm sure this tweet thread has nothing to do with Vox's coverage of that tweeter and his previous attacks on the FDA: [https://www.vox.com/2017/1/14/14276530/balaji-srinivasan- tru...](https://www.vox.com/2017/1/14/14276530/balaji-srinivasan-trump-fda- twitter-andreessen-horowitz)

<comment><USER7> Almost makes you wonder if balajis has a personal gripe with vox or recode or Ezra or Kara.

Balaji is a crypto bro and epitome of technocrats who thinks just because they are (rich|famous|networked), they are experts on everything. Fact of the matter is, Balaji doesn't know any more about Covid than what is reported. He's using hindsight bias to claim that media reported was false.

<comment><USER8> Whatever. Thanks to him i knew about Coronavirus and warned everyone back in February.

You re making the exact same remarks that tech hating journos did

If you re claiming the journos knew something he didnt, then it means they criminally misreported it

<comment><USER7> > criminally misreported it

What law dictates that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> didn't Vox got like $200 million from NBCUniversal? why not ask for another round of funding?

<comment><USER10> They did raise $200 million from NBCU in 2015. Now probably wouldn't be a great time to try to raise money given that their revenue streams (ads, events, etc.) are under extreme pressure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> how about Techcrunch, Engadget and Gizmodo owner company? not visiting any of these sites since all of them first redirect you through some advertising tracking domain caught by my ublock, haven't seen any major site doing such shady thing, they would deserve it more

</comment><comment><USER12> I tend to be conservative in my politics, but I hate to see this. If it had to be some liberal publisher, I'd rather that it not be Vox.

Vox seems to me to be about as left-leaning as you can get, but they do it quite fairly. Example: Vox was one of the first left-side publications to run articles about Joe Biden's accuser. A lot of other publications stayed away from this story-- some still are-- but Vox bravely ran it. (From a far-left position, of course. If you go far enough left, you'll end up close to far- right.) They are the real deal, and for that I respect them.

<comment><USER13> Serious question. Are you confounding left-leaning with lack of journalistic integrity, and conservative news outlets as having integrity?

<comment><USER12> No, not at all.

I consider most media sources biased (right or left) and also consider them to have various degrees of integrity.

For integrity, I give Vox good credit for running a story that deserves attention but runs counter to their political leanings.</comment></comment></comment>


Tracing a packet journey using Linux tracepoints, perf and eBPF - <AUTHOR> https://blog.yadutaf.fr/2017/07/28/tracing-a-packet-journey-using-linux-tracepoints-perf-ebpf/ <comment><USER2> This is awesome, and will be awesome potentially for OpenStack clouds where it can get quite messy.

Having said that might need some improvements to also work with OpenVSwitch.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds interesting. How does this hold up against stuff like DC/OS' Virtual-IP black magic routing?</comment>


More than 2800 developers speak out about Java 8 - <AUTHOR> http://typesafe.com/blog/java-8-survey-results <comment><USER2> I primarily use "Java" on Android. I'm very excited to see the language progressing. Recently, I read Gosling gave Oracle a B+ on stewardship of the language:

[http://www.javaworld.com/article/2087444/open-source- tools/j...](http://www.javaworld.com/article/2087444/open-source-tools/james- gosling-grades-oracles-handling-of-suns-technology.html)

However, I'm getting pretty nervous with the lack of conformance Android Java has to the real Java stack. The two are diverging, and I don't see how Google can remedy this.

My guess is that Java 6 & 7 were modest enough that many developers of open source libraries thought it easy to support a profile that worked on Android.

If Java 8 adoption is as brisk as this poll suggests, with all the features many have been waiting for, I'm worried a lot of the libraries I use may become incompatible with Android.

Already, its hit and miss if a open source java library works on android. I just tried lmax disruptor and it didn't work. Things that depend on NIO.2 won't work either.

<comment><USER3> My bet is that sooner or later, Google will drop Java on Android for Node Javascript. It is only a matter of time...

<comment><USER4> yeah whatever, they will never do that.

Did you forget Google created Dart because Javascript is a stupid mess? Google has at least 2 languages (Dart/Go) to try on before they'd even think about that turd that is javascript. And the list goes on GWT .... Google is definetly a Java shop,doing everything not to code in javascript.

<comment><USER5> I'm also of the opinion that Google will not replace Java-based Android with nodejs-based Android.

On the other hand, I think it's worth pointing out that a lot of JavaScript development does happen at Google, albeit within the confines of the Closure compiler. Some kind of nodejs project somewhere at Google would not be out of the question. It's a big company. [https://www.npmjs.org/package/closurecompiler](https://www.npmjs.org/package/closurecompiler)

<comment><USER4> my point is given the success of all these javascript only mobile plateforms, it's not going to happen.If one wants to develop js apps,the web is here and free.That's why these weboses make little sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can someone please moderate the title? The actual blog article title is "Java 8 Survey Results". The given HN title of "More than 2800 developers speak out about Java 8" is misleading, if not an outright lie.

<comment><USER7> I'm not a native speaker, but the for me the connotation in the title is that people are negative to Java8. Is that correct?

<comment><USER8> "Speak out" in that context is not universally negative, but it does tend to imply criticism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They say "That being said, the sample, while not scientifically random, is double what's considered statistically relevant for the total population of Java developers worldwide."

Great. So to forecast the next presidential election they're going to poll a million NRA members and celebrate the fact that the sample size is much greater than what's needed.

<comment><USER10> What's 'scientifically' random? Is that like normal random, but with its highfallutin' nose stuck up in the air?

<comment><USER11> When drawing a survey population that you want to use to extend knowledge to the total population you need to sample in a way that doesn't introduce bias. The Simple Random Sampling method is the gold standard here: sample in a way such that each subset of the total population of a given size has equal chance of being selected. This includes, as a special case, that each individual has an equal chance of being selected.

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

More complex sampling methods can be used since SRS is usually intractable (you'd need to put every single person in your superpopulation into a lottery by magic, else you'll bias toward those who like email surveys or actually read their mail). In the event you use one of these you usually need a bias mitigation strategy. For instance, you might just state something like "we assume that receptiveness to email and dislike for Java are correlated". It's then up to the reader to decide whether they trust your assumptions.

You might also do some other support studies which help to measure the size of the bias your non-SRS sampling methodology induces and then correct for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Direct link:

[http://info.typesafe.com/acton/attachment/3608/f-004a/0/-/-/...](http://info.typesafe.com/acton/attachment/3608/f-004a/0/-/-/-/-/file.pdf)

<comment><USER13> You sir are a Gentleman and a Scholar

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is it just me, or does this survey say basically nothing at all? Here's a summary if you don't want to bother reading the PDF (and you probably shouldn't bother):

      - Most use Java7, a few still use Java6
      - Mixed response on when exactly people will upgrade to j8
      - Most exciting feature in j8 is lambdas
      - 98% use Oracle JVM, 20% use dalvik (android)
      - App servers popularity is Tomcat, Jetty, Jboss, others
      - Mixed thoughts on Oracle getting security right

Seriously, what is the point of these questions...? You could get all these answers with a google search.

<comment><USER15> It doesn't say much. This survey will likely be picked up by Java news sources and read by Java devs, since there don't seem to be many surveys geared towards Java devs these days. Maybe some of them will check out Scala.

Why would the company most behind Scala post a very positive survey about Java? One would think that Scala's success probably relies on either replacing or supplementing Java.

The only item that would be rather newsworthy would be the plans to adopt 8, but as you mentioned the survey doesn't provide a clear answer.

My takeaway was that the most interesting new feature for people was lambdas, and Scala already offers lambdas. This could be interpreted as "Survey respondents are most excited about a Java feature that they could already have if they used Scala".

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This reads a bit weirdly to me.

> Immediate Java 8 Migration Plans: 65% of Java developers have plans to > upgrade to Java 8 within the next 24 months.

Er; "within the next 2 years" = "immediate"? That's a long-enough time scale that a lot of the respondents may be thinking "well, all our enterprise stuff is still on version 6, but surely my plans to overhaul everything won't take more than two _years_ , will they?"

Also, 2800 is not actually a very high number, is it? Is that enough to be representative of Java developer intentions, preferences, etc.?

<comment><USER17> 2800 is good number from statistical point of view IMHO. Google: sample size determination.

<comment><USER18> I'm assuming that is a good number for a randomly sampled group. The self selection nature of people that will be taking a typesafe survey gives me doubts about whether it is good here.

<comment><USER19> A larger number wouldn't neutralize the bias either.

<comment><USER18> Agreed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The survey went out to largely a Scala audience (anyone signed up for the Typesafe newsletter). As a developer using mostly Scala with some legacy Java code to maintain I see various benefits to Java 8:

1) More enhancements to the core java libs that are more functional programming friendly for use from Scala.

2) Legacy Java code less painful to maintain.

3) Java programmers suddenly stopped calling $FEATURE evil, since Java now provides $FEATURE too (well for a small subset of Scala features anyway).

</comment><comment><USER21> The new Date & Time API deserves more attention. Working with and persisting dates has always been one of the bigger pain points when working with the JDK. Just last week we encountered some strange bug in Grails where it won't persist null values if using custom UserTypes under certain conditions (which we need to persist Joda date types).

</comment><comment><USER22> I would like to have my hands on the actual data so I can divide results by years of experience etc. This is too generic and doesn't server truly a purpose other than create some hype about Java 8.

Now, what I would LOVE it would be a survey and thorough interview of the public before Java 9 is built instead of after...

</comment><comment><USER23> As long as java doesn't support aliasing (ie: import com.tool.foo.Bar as FooBar) , its gonna be _very_ hard to tackle the extreme verbosity java results in.

<comment><USER24> As a working Java programmer, I wouldn't have said that this was the main source of verbosity in Java. Could you perhaps expand on how this results in verbosity? Perhaps an example of some code in Java as it exists now, and a less verbose version of the code in a hypothetical Java-with-aliasing.

<comment><USER20> I also don't see that as the primary source of verbosity in Java.

In Scala I can do:

import com.foo.bar.{Bar => FooBar}

But that's mostly just useful for dealing with cases where you have to deal with classes with the same name in different packages.

The verbosity in Java comes from a lack of type inference, lack of first-class properties (get/set naming convention doesn't count), and a whole basket of other missing features. Another large contributor to Java verbosity is sadly the the Java culture of over-engineering and resistance to change which has built up over the years (the latter partly in response to the glacial evolution of Java in the last decade).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Java 8 is very interesting to me, and although Lambdas get the most publicity, I feel the concurrency updates and streams are the most important new features.

<comment><USER26> I'm actually the most excited about JodaTime basically being baked into the language. Date and Calendar are so, so bad that it would be hard for Instants to not be an improvement.

<comment><USER27> Why do people keep saying this? It's blatantly wrong, as mentioned multiple times by the JodaTime author itself.

<comment><USER26> Because one of the main authors behind JSR-310 happens to be the JodaTime author and considers it to be inspired by JodaTime, even if it's different to fix some flawed assumptions JodaTime made [1]. And as far as practical use goes, they're very similar, since they draw upon the same concepts. I don't see how it isn't a fair description, especially when you compare to how bad Date/Calendar are right now.

[1] [http://blog.joda.org/2009/11/why-jsr-310-isn-joda- time_4941....](http://blog.joda.org/2009/11/why-jsr-310-isn-joda- time_4941.html)

<comment><USER27> If you read that link, you would realize that the author disagrees with you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> You Know You Can Use Old Motor Oil to Fertilize Your Lawn?</comment>


The Problem with Telling Sick Workers to Stay Home - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/02/coronavirus-could-hit-american-workers-especially-hard/607213/ <comment><USER2> A lot of places, if you take sick time, bereavement, or family leave they will fire you at the next opportunity. If you are a little late or don't dot your I's on a form then you are out of there. It's a sort of a soft retaliation in at-will states.</comment>


Django Generator - <AUTHOR> http://alpha.djangogenerator.com

<comment><USER2> That is really neat! Thanks for building that.</comment>


Fischertechnik 3D printer - <AUTHOR> http://www.fischertechnik.de/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-21/39_read-483/usetemplate-2_column_pano/ <comment><USER2> Nice. I loved Fischertechnik when I was a kid. It almost made me choose a career in "real" engineering. My masterpiece was a gondola system, including two terminal stations. The gondolas would go up and down a "mountain" in the room in my parents' house and turn automatically at the endpoint (with some luck at least...)

<comment><USER3> I also played a lot with Fischertechnik when I was young, it was awesome! I was always dreaming of the robotics sets which you could connect to the PC but back then I could not afford one of those.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm sorry, as cool as this looks, I can't imagine it being as accurate or durable as a reprap build. I really doubt if those plastic lead screws and chains will hold up for hundreds of hours of printing. Also, I'm guessing it won't be competitive on price with the myriad sub-$500 reprap printers. So what's the selling point?

<comment><USER5> It probably won't; I can see a child assembling this more easily than building a reprap though. I think the target audience are children and I see this (as their whole lineup) as an educational product and gateway into engineering.

On the one end we have these fully assembled one-piece 3d printer. On the very other end we have DIY with or without a construction kit 3d printer. None of these are really targeted towards kids; this is, I think is.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> That's Artur Fischer's company, the prolific inventor who recently passed away.</comment>


Mass of the Common Quark Finally Measured - <AUTHOR> http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/04/mass-of-the-common-quark-finally.html

<comment><USER2> "Measured" is a misleading way to rephrase the title. The mass wasn't measured, it was predicted theoretically using computer simulation.</comment>


Zigfrid – A Passive RFID Fuzzer - <AUTHOR> https://z4ziggy.wordpress.com/2017/07/21/zigfrid-a-passive-rfid-fuzzer/ <comment><USER2> Somehow this post skips an explanation of what it actually does. It's a passive RFID tag that sends 40 bits of data (5 bytes). The bits are changed in sequence. More of a brute force attack than a fuzzer.

<comment><USER3> From the comments in the source, the code needs 20 clock cycles to send a new tag, it's running at 125kHz and each tag is 40 bits long. How can this device bruteforce the tag at this rate? Won't it be extremely slow compared to the number of possible tags?

<comment><USER4> Well let's do the math

125 kHz _2 bits /cycle = 250 bits /sec

A 2^40 bit string has 1099511627776 combinations, and would require 1099511627776 _40 = 43980465111040 bits to besent to try all of them. That would take 43980465111040/250 seconds or about 5575 years

And that's under ideal "spherical object in a vacuum" conditions.

So yeah your right, unless they get lucky.

<comment><USER5> I believe your math is off by a factor of 1000.

125kHz = 125,000 cycles/sec * 2 bits/cycle = 250,000 bits/sec

250,000 bits/sec / 40 bits/code = 6250 codes/sec

2^40 = 1,099,511,627,776 possible codes / 6250 codes/sec ~= 175,921,860 sec ~= 5.578 years

While this is still an extremely long time for the worst case, by the looks of other comments, as well as the author's video, it appears extremely doubtful that most RFID readers have anywhere near 40 bits of security - and it takes about 10 seconds (65536/6250) for the fuzzer to brute force all codes 16 bits or less.

<comment><USER4> Shoot you're right, it's kHz not Hz haha I'll update my comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I found the following interesting.

 _Using a curtain capacitors combo might initiate a DoS attack on the reader which will prevent legitimate tags from being read correctly after placing it against a reader only once. A hard reset to the reader will be required to resume work. Just FYI._

Seems like a cute way to create a diversionary scene or frustrate physical security personnel in physical pen testing.

</comment><comment><USER7> Why bruteforce when you can just passively listen for a working code (once someone else uses their card)?

40 bits of bruteforce at 125khz, with every code being 40 bits long, results in 3125 codes/sec at best, thus it will take roughly 11 years.

<comment><USER8> They include a video of a parking garage being opened after just a few iterations. The code used in commercial applications could often be lower bits given criminal prosecution is a larger deterrent than code security. Although, OP may have set a specific range for that demo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wonder if there's some sort of low-power hardware-easy problem you could use to reduce the request rate for individuals, instead of just shutting the device down when it detects a brute-force attempt. Seems to me that having hardware that breaks inconspicuously means you can't leave it as unmanned as you'd want to.

<comment><USER10> With these kind of systems (like a parking meter) you could add a 2-3 second delay between each attempt. Most people wouldn't notice the slowdown, but it would make brute forcing so slow that it would be useless in the field. This also works for things like logins on websites where the time taken to authenticate can be a second or two without annoying the user (vs loading a page which should be instant).

There is absolutely no reason why anything RFID controlled, like a door mechanism, should allow key entries at full speed (3k keys/sec someone posted).

<comment><USER11> It's usually easier and faster to get the sniff of the communication between MCU and the reader(UART,I2C,SPI,USB) in some cases you've to dump MCU's flash or EEPROM to get an idea about the keying scheme used in particular product range.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This made me wonder if iOS 11's CoreNFC API can be used in similar ways. It would be cool to consolidate my tags (building and office) if they speak NFC.

<comment><USER11> You can do this with some cards/tags with rooted Android phone(some tweaks are needed in the NFC subsystem) with certain NFC chipsets. It needs to be card with broken crypto (Mifare) so you can obtain the password and then copy complete card's content. The door reader shouldn't rely on the card's UID (unique serial number) as this can't be spoofed, the chipsets doesn't allow this.

I don't waste time with closed systems, so I can't comment directly on iOS capabilities, but I would guess, that it's going to be almost impossible to make it working in such locked down iOS world.

<comment><USER12> What Android versions/handsets/tweaks/etc do you recommend for NFC work?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does anyone here generate their own electricity? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Not personally, but my solar panels do.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's nice ! . was it a diy installation at your home ? I am actually struggling to find some real life stories of people who have actually been successful enough at generating electricity by themselves for domestic purposes

<comment><USER2> No, I paid for them to be installed. 3kW system and it will halve my power bill for eternity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interested to find out the same. I recently got thermal solar panels for heating and they're working great but coming into summer, I'm wondering if there's a way to convert the captured energy into electricity.

They generate 130C+ on clear days, which in my mind could be used to generate some sort of steam powered generator.

Has anyone ever done similar?

</comment><comment><USER4> _My own_ electricity? You mean, like, in my body? Probably, I guess. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerve)

<comment><AUTHOR> No.. Not your body. Like electricity for domestic purposes .

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yes, but not solely depending on it at this time.</comment>


Humanities Paradox - <AUTHOR> https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/09/01/analysis-considers-contradictions-high-school-and-college-students-interest <comment><USER2> I went to University in Australia initially planning to study Biology. I took an introductory Philosophy course and I was hooked. I ended up completing my Bachelors and doing some postgrad work. I committed all the way - I had no other major or minor.

In my experience, that introductory course was key in convincing me to follow that path.

Now I work in IT ;)

<comment><USER3> I've heard this story more than once, but I'm curious is this is really all that common. You obviously break the "humanities=future burger-flipper" stereotype.

<comment><USER2> I had a think about the people from Philosophy I kept track of and I can honestly say they are now predominantly upper-middle, unless they stuck to academia, which about 30% or so did, and obviously, are poor (as far as I know), and somewhere on the road to a PhD.

There's a schism in philosophy between analytic - the more "logical" side, with rigorous proofs and arguments - and continental - the more "what is art/ethics/love" side. I was firmly interested in the continental side. Of those that left philosophy, I found that continental people would often end up in some kind of community-oriented area, like education or sociology or social work or the like, whereas on the analytic side, people tended to end up doing physics/maths/comp sci type stuff.

Obviously that's not a rule. When I left university, I worked in an industrial site, and a magazine, and at a Salesforce implementation company, and then at the industrial site again, teaching myself more and more programming at each. I got promoted to the IT department of the industrial site, and continued to learn, and then got a job doing ETL/Database/Automation stuff at a big telecom in the marketing department. I've been lucky, and I've known the right people, but I honestly would still be happy if I was working at that industrial site. There was a Theology graduate who also worked there, driving a forklift.

If people ask me, do I recommend getting a philosophy degree, I say I don't. That's like asking if I'd recommend that people get a tattoo. I'm very happy with mine, but its a decision that needs to be made by an individual. Like a tattoo, it reduces your job prospects, and there are no take-backsies.

Now comes my smug paragraph. Everyone in philosophy, and who even starts philosophy, hears the same jokes. Pretty much nobody is saying its a good idea to do a philosophy degree. To do philosophy, people have to overcome the societal expectation that they will die in a ditch, poor and unable to do anything "useful". To do philosophy, you really need to love that shit. I've honestly never heard someone speak with regret about completing a philosophy degree, whereas of the biologists, engineers and economists I know, some wish they'd done something different. If you read philosophy, and you love it, do what you love. Don't do something just because you think it'll make your life safer.

I'd rather live a happy "burger flipper" than discover I don't love what I do in 20 years.

<comment><USER4> >There's a schism in philosophy between analytic - the more "logical" side, with rigorous proofs and arguments - and continental - the more "what is art/ethics/love" side. I was firmly interested in the continental side. Of those that left philosophy, I found that continental people would often end up in some kind of community-oriented area, like education or sociology or social work or the like, whereas on the analytic side, people tended to end up doing physics/maths/comp sci type stuff.

Ironically, I'm a comp-sci/math type person, and I regard continental philosophy a bunch better than analytic. Continental philosophy usually considers matters inside their social and historical context, so at least sometimes, when they can be bothered to refer to the real world, they're referring to it with a solid context.

Whereas analytic philosophy often seems to me to suffer from math-envy, and to formalize too early and too often. The result is that analytic philosophers spend a lot of time debating over _what they think_ are rigorous, scientifically-grounded concepts _when in fact_ our best science says that things just don't work that way or the theories aren't "done cooking".

(I'm thinking of a Stanford Philosophy Encyclopedia page someone directed me to last night on "reductionism", which was given three definitions, _none_ of which matched what a working scientist would usually call reductionism. Or of the very concept of supervenience, which needs less metaphysics and more information theory. Or of the perennial debates over the "Hard Problem" of consciousness.)

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I feel like I'm totally on the same page as you. Analytic philosophy always seemed like a bit of fun to me, but seemed to boil down to logic games that have as much application to the real world (as a simulation and explanation of it) as boolean, programmed representations of it do. Which is to say, some.

That doesn't mean I don't have immense respect for analytic philosophers, but I have the type of respect for them that I also have for fiction writers that create immensely consistent and engaging fantasy worlds. Zing!

Continental seemed to me to more generally have the view that all debates and philosophies were necessarily making ontological and epistemological claims. That immensely appeals to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Alternative explanation for the spike in freshmen interest: the engineering/cs classes are 95% men where I am. Liberal arts has more even mix.

Not only is stem widely considered harder and requires crazier time commitments, it also exacts a toll on your sex life. These are young people at the peak of their productive cycles and this is a very large consideration.

<comment><USER6> This idea can be extended beyond simple sexual desire: engineering as it is taught in prestigious universities is an enormous time commitment which dominates your entire life for the prime 19-23 4 years that maybe you should be spending learning about the world and interacting with people. People see this and reject it; they'd prefer to make friends and have fun than disappear into a black hole for 4 years only to emerge as a creature which they suspect will be allowed by the capitalist system to make money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I went to a college of liberal arts and sciences. There was a big load of required humanities courses, but the college had a relatively good physics department and a terrific math department. And math and physics were my interests: So, I majored in math and had nearly a major in physics.

For the humanities, they claimed to teach about people, but at the time I couldn't see that they were doing at all well at that, and later I concluded that actually the humanities are not at all good about teaching about people, e.g., get as much that is wrong as right and, really, darned little good insight, but that parts of clinical psychology could teach some important and reasonably credible lessons about people.

I really liked music, and the record collection in the library was terrific, but I never took a course in music -- later started violin and made some okay progress eventually.

But for the humanities courses I took, i.e., was _force fed_ , I came to hate as nonsense, misleading about people, and otherwise a waste of time.

E.g., history: I wanted to learn some about history, but the history course was absurd, from some pompous, pretentious text with no overview and otherwise nearly impenetrable. And the darned course took so much time before year 1 that it never got to the 20th or even the 19th centuries. Bummer. Finally I learned some about history from some books and some relatively serious TV documentaries, e.g., _Victory at Sea,_ _The Battle of Britain_. The courses? Bummers.

In the history courses, I wanted to learn _why_ , that is, the causes or at least the candidate causes -- metals, domesticated animals, open ocean sailing, relatively productive crops, etc., but the courses essentially ignored all concepts of causes. Bummer.

Overall, IMHO, the humanities are suffering from lack of good methodology. In particular, their _results_ are open to a lot of individual _interpretation_ and definite _maybes_ , and it's tough to have the work be _cumulative_ in any very useful sense.

</comment><comment><USER8> I feel like my undergrad in Economics was the perfect middle ground between humanities and STEM. Also helps to do it at an engineering school with engineering/math as the core curriculum.

</comment><comment><USER9> I still regret not double majoring in one of the humanities when I was in college. There's lots of technical / science people on HN. Does anyone feel the same way?

<comment><USER10> See the "humanities is easy" comment below. Too many STEM-Lords in HN a lot of the time sadly. It's a very immature view but a sadly common one in much of tech.

<comment><USER11> The humanities ARE easy.

This is why it is common for someone to give up on Computer Science / Math / Physics / Chemistry / Engineering, but go on to graduate in History or English or Journalism.

Does anyone know a single person who tried and tried, but just couldn't manage a History degree, so they had to take the easy route and ended up majoring in Physics???? HA!

<comment><USER2> Interesting assumption, but it could be that the humanities are more engaging than STEM fields, so people are likely to convert to them, but not go the other way. Maybe people are more likely to be unwillingly driven in STEM, but more likely to actively choose the humanities. All those silly assumptions explain the same behaviors. I'm sure that the situation is more complex than that.

<comment><USER12> I'd like to clear up at least one place where you and justin_vanw are talking past each other:

At many engineering schools, the humanities _are_ a joke.

They are often filled with engineering dropouts and students who couldn't get accepted into a more prestigious liberal-arts school.

Mix in the fact that the engineering schools often have a "wash out" course at the 100 level, while the liberal arts fields tend to not have this, and what you get is STEM students who take a few 100 level humanities classes, see nothing as rigorous as their 100 level engineering classes, and you get this perception.

I also can't stress enough that the rigor of any department is directly related to the quality of students the department attracts. No college will allow a department to fail 90% of the students (impacted course tracks notwitstanding) so poor students leads to low standards.

I went to Purdue, but have observed similar trends at other large engineering schools. I minored in philosophy, and anyone who tool philosophy at a liberal- arts school would likely not believe how low the standard for a B in the classes there was.

Even comparing stories with Indiana University students, (also a state school, in the same state, but not an engineering school) the classes were a joke.

<comment><USER2> This makes a heap of sense! I think though that we are on the same page with this, that there are a bunch of complexities that it is very tempting to simplify away in explanations of the differences between the fields.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Humanities: where you don't realize you need to tell us what the y axis of the graph is to make your point, and then wonder why people aren't lining up to not learn anything.

Then blame common core, because... too many tests?

And the sad, sad conclusion: Of course the answer is for professors to insist that their institution force more students to take more humanities classes.

Because it would be a tragedy if you didn't make a future chemist sit through a semester of Introduction to Shakespeare and force them to write 3 essays that will be vaguely skimmed and returned. If they didn't have to do that, well, I think we all know you can't be a well rounded person without having to listen to a class discussion between a dozen borderline illiterate communication / journalism / criminology majors, and taking notes as they try to make a coherent point about Henry III.

<comment><USER2> >>Humanities: where you don't realize you need to tell us what the y axis of the graph is to make your point, and then wonder why people aren't lining up to not learn anything.

The y-axis was explained in the text! Did you just give us all the perfect opportunity to draw some snarky conclusions about the difference between STEM and humanities students? :D

<comment><USER11> Actually it's not really explained.

The second graph is especially weird, since it says 'number of college students is going up' but the graph goes from 0 to 0.18. I assumed it meant 'percent of college students who expressed an interest'?

<comment><USER2> I somehow comprehended it on the first go.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


IBM Compose deployments have been down for 8 hours - <AUTHOR> https://status.compose.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> We are using IBM Compose database as a service offering for our production PostgreSQL and Redis hosting. This morning around 6 am (EST) we started getting alerts of failed connection to PSQL. The outage, for production application has been ongoing for more than 8 hours at this point and all our company services are down as a consequence. What should we have done to prepare? What would you recommend doing now, with no the resolution in sight?

<comment><USER2> The answer is obvious: you should have migrated off IBM Cloud a while ago. Your business isn't the target market for IBM.

<comment><AUTHOR> I completely agree with that, we migrated out our analytics database but didn't go through the effort of migrating the production one's. Such a long downtime just seems outrageous none the less...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> We have been suffering as well.And it sucks as there is no support response, just a status page. Clearly, they do not value smaller tech businesses. We definitely will be looking to migrate to compass, that was long time due.</comment>


Show HN: Curated Podcast Snippets - <AUTHOR> I curate ~10 minute snippets from the best tech podcasts of the week into a single episode for my friends to listen to.
Here's an example -  https://soundcloud.com/user-857781619/podcastcurated-scarcity-consumer-social-investment-thesis-39/s-ep1sI
I love podcasts and take a lot of notes on them, but my friends/family just want the most interesting snippets of them because (1) they don't have the time to listen to all and (2) there are TOO many podcast episodes. It's fun for me to pick interesting sections and create a "compiled" episode, and so wanted to share with HN too. In the example above, it's my favorite snippets from recent episodes of three podcasts (Starting Greatness, Invest like the Best, and Venture Stories). Now you can sample these three episodes, learn something new, and if you like a specific one, go and listen to the whole episode!
Would love to share with y'all too! Feel free to fill this Google Form with topics you're interested in and I'll do my best!
https://forms.gle/8gUEgTugUt4Gfw6L9 <comment><USER2> I like this a lot. I often find myself too "behind" on the podcasts that I like to listen to and often don't have the time to sit through and listen to all of them.

I'm down to try it out. Maybe you and I like similar things

</comment><comment><USER3> I love the idea but how do you navigate copyrights on these podcasts? Do you get permission to use their clips?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now no, it's just a small group of friends (and hopefully future HN users like you :)).

I'm assuming since all podcasts are public and free it would be okay (i.e. I'm getting it from ListenNotes). It's a good point that I should include links to the podcasts in the description so people can go directly.

What do you think I could include in the audio to help with giving credits to the podcast authors?

<comment><USER3> Links in the description might be sufficient. If you want to put it in audio, I'd recommend something at the begging like "Todays snippets are courtesy of podcast X, Y and Z."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great idea! Could you add timestamps in your show notes for folks who want to skip to a specific section?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes will do!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is pretty cool, just signed up.

Does this take a lot of time? Or do you have a specific note taking process for podcasts?

<comment><AUTHOR> The end goal is to automate it, but right now doing a hand curation process. Doesn't take too much time and my friends get value out of it anyways. We also then discuss it among ourselves and I like the seeding of discussion.

I take a LOT of podcast notes, it's just how I go about learning things. Just on apple notes I jot down what is interesting during a podcast. It's helpful to sometimes to go back and review / remember the podcasts that are good enough to re-listen too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Efficient documentation is a crucial habit. Do you want to be bad at it or good at it? Definitely great at it yes? Learn online now with Project Documentation. For more, visit, [https://www.theccm.co.uk/courses- page/project-documentation/](https://www.theccm.co.uk/courses-page/project- documentation/)</comment>


Macaw: a powerful and easy-to-use vector graphics Swift library with SVG support - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/exyte/macaw <comment><USER2> Looks pretty neat! Any plans for a specialized charts lib built on top of it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly! Right now we are working on a couple of libraries that are using macaw. And one of them is charts!</comment></comment>


What I Learned from the Worst Novelist in the English Language - <AUTHOR> https://newrepublic.com/article/158761/learned-worst-novelist-english-language <comment><USER2> Really enjoyed this piece. Quite poignant and has enough self reflection to conventuals the writers experience without being self indulgent.

<comment><USER2> *contextualize

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Anyone that creates and that cares how their work will be received by others should volunteer as judges in competitions until they realize fully how subjective and biased the judging committees are.

Since Burrows already had some experience running against the establishment (his university administration) I expect that he was not particularly fazed by the negative review.

<comment><USER4> If you can't do, judge.

I suspect some of these people are bad faith in their criticisms simply because they're bitter their own work didn't take off.

<comment><USER5> "But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so." \--Anton Ego, _Ratatouille_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Off topic: This is how this website looks when I open it:

[https://i.imgur.com/M1m5LJX.png](https://i.imgur.com/M1m5LJX.png)

yikes

<comment><USER7> On my phone in landscape orientation, the blue popup in front of the other two popups that cover half of the screen each is so big that the closing-button is unreachable. Quite unusable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I really enjoyed the writing even though it took me some time to correctly understand some passages (I am not a native speaker). I feel sorry for Burrows's case, he seems to be a great militant against oligarchy and oppression as well as a tempted writer who was not fairly reviewed by his peers.

</comment><comment><USER9> I would argue that the worst English language novelist, among those of reasonable renown, was Anthony Trollope (but this kind of statement is fraught with issues, due to inclusion criteria - I'm not counting people that write for, say, Castalia House - and inherent subjectivity).

<comment><USER10> I'd nominate Hugo award winning author Liu Cixin.

<comment><USER11> That's just ridiculous. His trilogy is good, in the vein of Asimov. It's riddled with issues, yes - such as poor characters, unbelievable human behavior, etc. But the big ideas (which is what a lot of the people reading science fiction are after) are very cool and fairly novel. Come to think of it a lot of this could be said about Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke. Their characters sucked too, yet their books are classics.

You know, Cixin won the Hugo award? This fact alone should tell you that he cannot be the worst, not even close. A lot of people enjoyed his novels. You could argue that he's over rated and that's about that.

<comment><USER9> It must be said that he won his Hugo in part due to the consequences of a openly hostile voting campaign for the nominations organized by people who did, in fact, write for Castalia House.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Robert Burrows wasn't the worst novelist in the English language. The article makes that clear.

The article includes Gene Weingarten's demeaning characterisation to get clicks. That wouldn't be necessary if Barrett Swanson had listened to his better instincts, and built on his portrait of Robert Burrows as an earnest man of letters. Instead, he had a bet each way, perpetuating Gene Weingarten's cruel ruse as a straw man, and negating it.

<comment><USER13> Robert Burrows is not newsworthy without Gene Weingarten. The article would leave a massive unanswered question at its center.

<comment><USER12> > Robert Burrows is not newsworthy without Gene Weingarten.

Are you saying that in your way of thinking, newsworthiness only arises from a false, disparaging accusation?

<comment><USER14> It's easy to answer that question by just, you know, reading what they're actually saying, instead of making insinuations based on the dumbest possible thought someone could have about the article.

<comment><USER12> I read the article, andrewfinr.

It seems like a serious attempt to inform us about the humanity and abilities of Robert Burrows. The reason it tends more towards clickbait than necessary is obvious from the headline:

What I Learned From the Worst Novelist in the English Language

If the article was more of an attempt to rehabilitate Robert Burrows, who the author visited on his death bed to get the story, the headline might more candidly have been written as:

What I Learned From the "Worst Novelist in the English Language"

Swanson does encapsulate the insult in inverted commas, but not until para 19, when he writes:

There was something regal, something monumental, in his bearing, and though I knew otherwise, I found myself thinking, "There he is. The worst novelist in the English language."

Was it really necessary, or beneficial to share that thought, if the point of the article is to debunk the insult?

<comment><USER14> Those are reasonable points that are entirely irrelevant to mine, which was about how you misrepresented ponker's position through your asinine, insulting "in your way of thinking" question.

You didn't even have to stretch for a charitable interpretation: the surface reading was perfectly decent. Instead you either thought they were making some ludicrous generalization about newsworthiness for all time, or found it rhetorically useful to seem to think that. In either case your comment provided negative value.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook to Exempt Opinion and Satire from Fact-Checking - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-to-create-fact-checking-exemptions-for-opinion-and-satire-11569875314?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> It would be difficult for me to trust fact-checking by a profit driven company where the facts may be biased to fit their business model. On top of that, you have the political and religious biases of people directly involved in establishing these "facts". I think people would be foolish to blindly accept this without verifying for themselves, from multiple sources, what is being conveyed.

</comment><comment><USER3> The best way to know about how good Facebook fact checking is will be to see what terrible facts about Facebook they are willing to admit are actually true. Since I doubt Facebook has the stomach to be honest, judging from their congressional hearings, we can treat their official fact checking as officially worthless.</comment>


UNSW researchers make quantum computing breakthrough - <AUTHOR> http://m.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/unsw-researchers-make-another-quantum-computing-breakthrough-20151116-gkzv4b.html <comment><USER2> > Quantum entanglement is an awfully complicated form of computer code whereby > two or more particles cease to exist except in relation to each other, so > bear with me.

That's terribly wrong. Quantum entanglement is not "computer code", but a situation where quantum state of two separate systems that cannot be factorized, which means it is not equivalent to any tensor product of separate quantum states for the two parts. Also, it does not mean the particles "cease to exist except in relation to each other". Entanglement changes nothing for existence of particles, it only changes the calculated probabilities of results of measurements. I wonder why researchers allow their work to be misrepresented so much. Is it just for publicity and funding reasons?</comment>


The Most Dangerous Gamer (Jonathan Blow) - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2012/05/the-most-dangerous-gamer/8928/3/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> I quite Like Jon Blow's creative activity, but my god the author of that article must never play any game that costs less than €50.

Blockbuster games have as much intellectual requirement as blockbuster films. The films advertised on billboards aren't typically the ones that advance the medium creatively. Games are no different.

The problem with Braid is that it wasn't that innovative. Nice art style, sure. But is a 2d-platformer so revolutionary? Time-based play elements weren't new either.

So it was a well-built, good looking game, based on established mechanics, with a great story. Not a revolution in gaming though.

There are far more progressive games out there, which are far further removed from the world of the Blockbusters. On that basis I'd say that Blow is nice to have around, but he's no messiah, and not as essential to the medium as is suggested. I'd go so far as to say his attitude actually propogates the stereotype of the surly, antisocial gamer.

Some examples:

Amnesia - pure distilled terror in a way no other medium can achieve, a proof of the unique value of games

Minecraft - a game with no purpose, pure zen, which stuck two fingers up to fancy graphics (and it's sales proved the market for such games)

Child of Eden - an absolutely beautiful game which connects the player with music

Anyone want to add some of their favourite progressive games?

</comment><comment><USER3> The latest game describe sounds a lot like the Myst series <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst_(series)>

<comment><USER2> Aye, he's a lot more deriviative than he lets on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you haven't played Braid and don't want to spoil the ending, skip the 4 paragraphs starting with "After traversing Braid's five main realms,"

</comment><comment><USER5> the part where is describes having millions in the bank as 'absurd' might suggest he has his head up his arse

<comment><USER2> It might. It might also suggest that he hasn't developed any embarassment about thinking out loud and openly contemplating various aspects of our lives. That's not a bad thing if you're in the storytelling business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Dup: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3838757></comment>


Stockfish Wins Chess.com Computer Championship - <AUTHOR> https://www.chess.com/news/view/stockfish-wins-chess-com-computer-championship <comment><USER2> Unfortunately, Stockfish is not doing too well in the more recognized TCEC unofficial world computer chess championship at [http://tcec.chessdom.com/live.php](http://tcec.chessdom.com/live.php), due to lackluster performance against the weaker engines. With just over 3 rounds to go, it looks like it's out of the final:

      N Engine           Rtng  Pts  Gm     SB Ho   Ko   St   Fi   Ch   Gi   Bo   An

     1 Houdini 6.02     3184 17.0  25 187.25 ···· =01  ===  ==1= 111= 1=1= 1=1  =1==
     2 Komodo 1959.00   3232 17.0  25 183.25 =10  ···· ==0  ==1= =1=1 11=  =1=1 1=11
     3 Stockfish 051117 3228 15.0  24 173.25 ===  ==1  ···· =1=  ==== =11= =1=  1===
     4 Fire 6.2         3112 13.5  25 152.25 ==0= ==0= =0=  ···· ==1  ===1 =1=  1==1
     5 Chiron 251017    3013  9.5  25 114.00 000= =0=0 ==== ==0  ···· ===  ==== ===
     6 Ginkgo 2.01      3052  9.5  25 110.00 0=0= 00=  =00= ===0 ===  ···· ==== 1==
     7 Booot 6.2        3091  9.0  24 104.75 0=0  =0=0 =0=  =0=  ==== ==== ···· ===
     8 Andscacs 0.921   3100  8.5  25 107.25 =0== 0=00 0=== 0==0 ===  0==  ===  ····

It had better win its current game against Booot to keep some very slim chances. Which it now seems to be doing...

<comment><USER3> Worth noting that Stockfish is actually the only engine that hasn't lost a game. The lackluster performance is it just not beating the weaker engines, something that Komodo and Houdini have done (but they have also lost against stronger engines).

<comment><USER4> So can we conclude that Stockfish just plays more "drawishly" than the other top-tier engines? Or is this effect just random chance so far?

<comment><USER5> This is true, Stockfish expects its opponent to play as well as itself (outside of the 'contempt' setting, not sure if that was used or tuned per game). So it won't play edgy lines that invite blunders if they are even a centipawn worse than what it thinks is the 'correct' line.

Funnily enough, I feel there's a lesson for startup people in this. I have seen many people (myself included) talk themselves out of big, bold bets just because they are very good at thinking up reasons something should never work.

<comment><USER6> Oh man Now I have to add a "contempt" parameter to everything I make!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Congratulations to Stockfish! The community is amazing, and the patches keep on flowing. The sheer number of ideas is pretty incredible. If you are interested in contributing, head over to [http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests](http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests). You can submit a test, and it will be run by the virtual cluster of user donated machines.

It's been over four years since I put fishtest up, and in that time, there have been over 20,000 tests submitted. The really cool thing is that this distributed testing framework is only possible with an open source engine. So instead of being a disadvantage (everyone can read your ideas), it turns into an advantage!

<comment><USER8> This is super cool! Are there any posts about how the fishtests work? I love reading about how people solve interesting testing problems.

<comment><USER7> There are a ton scattered around :).

Here is the announcement of fishtest on the talkchess forum: [http://talkchess.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=47885&highlight=s...](http://talkchess.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=47885&highlight=sprt)

Initial discussion of the introduction of SPRT into fishtest, which led to a dramatic increase in our ability to measure improvements in self-play, in a statistically sound manner: [https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!searchin/fishc...](https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!searchin/fishcooking/sprt|sort:date/fishcooking/cgMSMBUC7JQ/fkdjLTiDuwMJ)

SPRT background here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequential_probability_ratio_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequential_probability_ratio_test)

Basically, we use a two-phase test to maximize testing resources. First a short time control test (15s/game), using more lenient SPRT termination criteria, then, a long time control (60s/game) test using more stringent criteria. That combined with setting the SPRT bounds to allow us to measure 2-3 ELO improvements has allowed the progress of Stockfish to be almost only improvements. Previously when developing an engine, you'd make 10 changes, and if you were lucky, 2 or 3 would be good enough to make up for the other bad or neutral ones.

If you look at the graphs on [http://www.sp-cc.de/](http://www.sp-cc.de/), you can see that it just keeps getting better, one small improvement at a time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Incredible that now the best engine (Stockfish) is open source engine and the best server / app (Lichess) is also open source. Well done chess community!

<comment><USER10> Why is Lichess better than chess.com? I've used both and can't really say one is the "best".

<comment><USER11> I really wish I could customize Lichess to have an aesthetic similar to Chess.com chessboard/pieces. I prefer Lichess, but what I have found with Chess.com's aesthetic it sounds and looks similar to an old classic board but not in a super cheesy way whereas the iconography used on Lichess feel very stockish.

<comment><USER5> The Lichess mobile app, at least, has themes that can make it as ugly as Chess.com, if that's what you're after. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _"One major facet of the tournament format was that there were no opening books"_

Code and data are equivalent (for example, instead of an opening book that says "if you play white, open with pawn E4" one could have an evaluation function that says "after the first move of white, having a pawn on E4 is worth a million points"), so how did they enforce that rule?

<comment><USER13> Hardcoding an opening would be considered playing with an opening book.

Regarding the enforcement of this rule: As all chess engines that competed are pretty well known (and sometimes even open source), I'm pretty sure that they (rightfully) trust the programmers not to do anything against the rules.

<comment><USER14> I wonder if someone were to come up with an neural network based, AlphaGo- style engine that was competitive with these other top engines, how they'd deal with these sort of rules. An "opening book" of sorts would likely be baked into the neural nets, unable to be turned on or off.

AlphaGo, for example, has definitely played well-known human openings (and innovated on them) despite having no opening book.

<comment><USER15> All these top chess engines definitely play well-known human openings and innovate on them, they just happen to be the best sequences of moves in certain situations (as far as we know)

The rule is against "explicit" hardcoded opening books, to force the engines to calculate the best move each time, to encourage variation and (I think) to allow the developers to focus on building stronger engines instead of managing huge opening books.

The encourage variation part didn't really succeed in this format, as they all tend to converge to the same openings

<comment><USER5> It's sort of funny to consider that our opening books are the product of several hundred years of incredibly slow, inefficient Monte Carlo tree search done by humans playing over wooden boards. Seems odd to deny that to engines that can knock it all out in a weekend anyway.

<comment><USER16> This isn't true, though. There are a lot of openings where the humans turn out to be right anyway, even though the computer thinks it's found a marginally better move. Humans have a better intuitive understanding of how certain openings create endgame possibilities, and if I remember correctly the combination of a Super GM and an engine is still markedly stronger than an engine alone.

Engines have contributed substantially to modern opening books but they haven't supplanted the existing knowledge. Humans turned out to be wrong about many sharp lines (which were refuted by computer) and the computer can find really interesting ideas in many positions (which would be nearly impossible for a human to find) but the old human-approved Best Openings are still standing tall after the engine revolution.

<comment><USER14> > I remember correctly the combination of a Super GM and an engine is still > markedly stronger than an engine alone.

This may have been true when engines were still only marginally stronger than humans, but I haven't seen any evidence that is currently true. A few years ago Nakamura + Rybka (previous best program) lost to Stockfish.

<comment><USER15> At the time Rybka was not one of the strongest engines anymore, and "correspondence chess" (human + computers) is still played.

The strongest players are not GMs, as far as I know, and a very important part of those games is trying to force positions where the opponent's engine might make a slight mistake

Here is an interview with the world champion [https://en.chessbase.com/post/better-than-an-engine- leonardo...](https://en.chessbase.com/post/better-than-an-engine-leonardo- ljubicic-1-2)

<comment><USER5> Do you know of any evidence that these players+engines can beat engines alone, instead of each other?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Keep in mind, this was a "Rapid" event with quicker than normal time controls. It was meant to be an exciting event for fans and to test the engines at quicker speeds that humans can both follow and enjoy. It certainly produced exciting games (in my opinion)!

</comment><comment><USER18> Without wishing to denigrate the achievements of all the people involved in this tournament, nor the entertainment aspect I'd like to ask:

What is the statistical power of a 90-game round robin? Would this be a publishable result with p < 0.05 (or the new 0.005) against the null hypothesis that Stockfish and Houdini (2nd place) were of equal skill?

<comment><USER19> I don't know if you can really put a p-value on this result without a more specific null hypothesis, but anyway it looks like this tournament result provides extremely weak evidence that Stockfish is better than Houdini. In the round robin component, Stockfish and Houdini played two games against each other, each winning one and losing one. In the "superfinal", they had 15 draws, Stockfish won 3 games, and Houdini won 2 games.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > That said, there was some serious computer science behind the event, as each > engine played from a powerful Amazon Web Services computer.

Love the subtle product placement :D

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder how a machine learning approach like AlphaGo zero would do.

<comment><USER22> We actually had an engine which was based on neural networks, called Giraffe. It used an alpha-beta search with a neural network evaluation. The Computer Chess Rating List put it at 2500 Elo, which is a strong human level. It was very slow, searching thousands of positions per second compared to the millions that even weak programs can do, but it's widely agreed that the NNs were worth about 300-400 elo - if Giraffe could search at Stockfish speeds, and given the rule of thumb that a doubling of speed is worth 70 elo, that's 2500 + 70 * log2(3000000/3000) = 3270 elo. That puts it in the top 20.

Sadly the developer was pinched by Google to work in DeepMind. We suspect this was to help work on AlphaGo.

<comment><USER23> Just curious, who's "we"?

<comment><USER22> I was referring to the computer chess community as "we". My apologies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> If you're into chess, I'd encourage you to check out the last of three annotated games in that article (Stockfish v Houdini). Stockfish mates on move 174. Game would have been declared a draw by human players by move 40.

<comment><USER25> When I read your comment, I thought the reason Stockfish won was because the computer found an innovative tactic that a human would not see.

Watching the game, it looks like if there was a human player instead of the Houdini computer, the human would be easily able to force the game into a draw instead of a loss.

Nonetheless, as an intermediate chess player, the games were fun to watch because of how different the play style computers can sometimes have versus humans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> According to the commentators Houdini had more impressive wins and the game that decided the tournament (the third game shown in this article) was supposed to be a draw but somehow got blundered away due to the contempt rule.

Basically it was very close and Houdini may actually be slightly better, especially at the abstract heuristic stuff. Although Houdini creates good positions for itself, Stockfish excels at brute force and somehow always manages to turn things around as it transitions into the endgame.

</comment><comment><USER27> Is it only this code and nothing else?

[https://github.com/mcostalba/Stockfish/tree/ONE_PLY/src](https://github.com/mcostalba/Stockfish/tree/ONE_PLY/src)

Is there no DB or machine learning inside?

<comment><USER22> It's actually [https://github.com/official- stockfish/Stockfish/tree/master](https://github.com/official- stockfish/Stockfish/tree/master)

No, SF doesn't use machine learning, it's entirely heuristic.

<comment><USER27> Doesn't it use a database? From README:

> If the engine is searching a position that is not in the tablebases (e.g. a > position with 7 pieces)

and it speaks a lot about tablebases. What is it?

<comment><USER22> Okay, I'll concede that one, my apologies. A tablebase is essentially a precomputed endgame solution for all positions with that many pieces. Likewise, it has an opening book, which is a database that contains moves for the first few turns of the game.

It's still a heuristic searcher when it's not using those though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Where did the good old Fritz go ?

<comment><USER29> Fritz the engine hasn't been very strong for a few years, Fritz the UI (which also allows you to use other engines) is still the best thing out there for learning/play.

They seem to have focussed more on making the Fritz engine a good tool for human analysis rather than the strongest possible engine.

Not sure what the new stuff is like the last one I bought was Fritz 12 some time ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Houdini is still my favorite engine though. It plays much more interesting than Stockfish, which plays like a, well, a stockfish.

</comment><comment><USER31> $1000 prize money? Can't they crowd source something more than that?

<comment><USER32> These people are all skilled programmers doing high speed analytics. They aren't doing it for the money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Good to know I've been using the best to destroy my opponents on chess.com

<comment><USER34> Isn't that cheating?

<comment><USER16> Yes, and I've already reported him to chess.com. :)</comment></comment></comment>