"You pay to read research you fund. That's ludicrous" - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2016/04/stealing-publicly-funded-research-isnt-stealing/?mbid=social_twitter <comment><USER3> I have to say, I'm a little surprised at how many people in this thread seem to be taking the side of the publishers. If not completely, at least to some extent. I look at this as being pretty cut and dried "if research is paid for by tax dollars, it should be freely available to the public." I don't even see how that's controversial.

That said, I understand the arguments that academics are sort of in a catch-22 situation since funding, tenure, etc. are based on journal publications, impact factor, etc. But I'd like to think that we can all (mostly) agree that the current system _is_ broken, and at least start talking about what it would take to revise it.

At least some progress actually does seem to be happening organically. New open access journals based on the arXiv overlay model are starting to appear, like Discrete Analysis[1]. Hopefully over time this problem may correct itself.

[1]: [http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/articles](http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/articles)

<comment><USER4> To play devil's advocate for a moment, surely there are other things paid for by tax dollars where the benefit is indirect like it is in research?

<comment><USER3> _To play devil 's advocate for a moment, surely there are other things paid for by tax dollars where the benefit is indirect like it is in research?_

No doubt. And there are all sorts of discussions one could get into about what should and shouldn't be publicly funded. As a Libertarian, I'm usually in the minority on those discussions, so let's not even go into that. My take on this is basically "if they're going to take my money and spend it, I at least want the system to be fair" (as I perceive it). And at least in my world-view, I think it's ridiculous to have to pay again just to read the research, especially now that we're in the Internet age where distribution costs are dramatically lower. If I wanted a paper journal mailed to me, sure, I'd be fine paying for that (up to a point). But as cheap as it is to create a PDF and slap it on a website, and then looking at how much journals are charging per article, it just feels like a complete abuse.

<comment><USER4> I suppose the argument that I'd like to investigate is the true purpose of tax dollars, since it's not explicitly clear to me how tax dollars are meant to be used. I think that's a distinct line of reasoning from how research papers should be shared more openly. It sounds like you'd probably agree that the issues are separate, in which case tax dollar allocation may not need to be involved in this conversation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I hate how copyright now lasts indefinitely. There are many papers from the 50's by people who are dead, and these companies are still claiming ownership over them. Copyright should last a relatively short time, and maybe be even shorter if you don't pay a fee to get it extended. Perhaps even a special exemption for scientific research.

If you could read all papers published 10 years ago for free, that would be incredible, even if it still cost $35 to read a new paper.

See the science section here: [https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2016/pre-1976](https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2016/pre-1976)

>1959 was another noteworthy year for science. C. P. Snow presented The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, an influential lecture about the gulf between the sciences and the humanities. The programming language COBOL was developed. Martin Gardner published the Three Prisoners Problem, a probability theory paradox, in his "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American. Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison published Searching for Interstellar Communications, a foundational work for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, in the journal Nature.

>If you follow the link from Nature above (and you do not have a subscription or institutional access), you will see that this 1959 article is behind a paywall. You can purchase it for $32. A distressing number of scientific articles from 1959 require payment or a subscription or account, including those in major journals such as Science and JAMA. And the institutional access that many top scientists enjoy is not guaranteed—even institutions such as Harvard have considered canceling their subscriptions because they could no longer afford the escalating prices of major journal subscriptions.

<comment><USER6> I wish they'd just acknowledge that Disney really, really wants to keep their IP forever, and just make a "Disney Exemption" -> if you're willing to pay all the money you would normally pay lobbyists to lobby to keep copyright perpetual, you get to keep your IP. Otherwise, you only get X number of years, period. That way we can stop artificially extending copyright terms just to make one corporation happy and ruining public domain for everyone else.

I know some people really want to make Disney play by everyone's rules, but they just have too much damn money and influence. At least they do tend to revive their old IP and not just let it sit there to rot indefinitely, like so many other companies.

<comment><USER7> Maybe your pragmatic approach is right but I don't think I could settle for "we'll do this for this company because our politicians are easily bought". The real solution seems to be to get politicians with better ethics or create laws that force them to comply with good morals ... then of course you need a strong judiciary.

<comment><USER6> Ah yes, the "if only we voted in the _right_ politicians". My Dad likes to make this argument till he's blue in the face, and those people never get elected (and it's a different set of people for every individual, I bet you'd disagree with most of his choices).

Of course it would fix things if all the right people got elected. But this is the real world, and that reality almost never, ever happens. It's much easier to get specific protections passed, especially ones that benefit one or more corporations, than it is to make sure "no one gets elected whose vote can be bought and believes in things different from me!"

The main reason I don't hold out much hope for my solution either is because most corporations don't believe they'd have much to gain from limited copyright, focusing too much on what they'd lose, rather than what they'd gain, from being able to use so many newer IP without paying licensing fees.

<comment><USER7> >It's much easier to get specific protections passed, especially ones that benefit one or more corporations, than it is to make sure "no one gets elected whose vote can be bought and believes in things different from me!" //

It's a very good thing when people get elected who have different beliefs to me as I'm not always right.

Also, a politician who sides with me because of a "bribe" is not a good thing IMO; it rather suggests that I'm on the side that can't win through fair play, or indeed that I'm on the side that favours those corrupt enough to pervert democracy in their favour because of their wealth.

I don't think there's any evidence to show that a copyright term less than life will damage artists, nor reduce impetus to create works. Indeed works entering the public domain appear to stimulate creative work.

I don't agree with your "too rich to legislate against the preference of" arguments for Disney. Indeed their wealth suggests strongly that the balance between public protected monopoly and free use of works has been lost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the most important point was brushed over in the article--that journals offer prestige. Scientists are entirely aware of the problems, yet they still volunteer to submit their work to them, because they significantly improve the chances of promotion and tenure. These things are already tremendously competitive, so most would rather not volunteer for a handicap by publishing in other venues.

<comment><USER9> If it's truly misaligned incentives [ie universities are more likely to promote researchers who publish in "top" journals], then it seems like a high- powered university needs to change their criteria for promotion. Instead of requiring publication in top journals for promo, look at other metrics for quality [I imagine this differs some from one field to another].

Imagine if every conference charged speakers for speaking, and in order to get promoted you had to speak at those conferences. It's the same thing. Except most software engineers are happy not paying to speak at conferences because their promo doesn't require it.

<comment><USER10> You get promotions and tenure for doing successful grant work that brings in money to the University. You get the best grants by publishing in Science and Nature. The government (main source of grants) shares the blame here.

<comment><USER11> Grants are not judged by government bureaucrats, but by committees of peer researchers. (At least for NSF grants; not sure about NIH or others).

<comment><USER10> Working under the direction of a grant agency. I know, I worked at two such institutes that managed $10m/yr grant money for planetary and biological science. In this case (NASA) the selection was done based on recommendations from a peer committee, but under directions from civil servants who had the final say, and there was a definite culture of favoritism for the prestigious closed journals. It was good for the institute too -- Science and Nature publications and associated PR raised _our_ image in the eyes of our managers at HQ in Washington.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Article blocked me for using adblock. I don't use adblock. So I don't read wired and I'm confident I'm missing nothing.

<comment><USER13> [https://github.com/reek/anti-adblock-killer](https://github.com/reek/anti- adblock-killer)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The counter argument to this is you pay to use national parks even though you already pay for it. A lot of people don't even go to the parks now. Making them free will mean more tax money from people who don't go to them.

How many people read this research? 1% of America? If it is free then tax payers will have to pay more to make sure it is available. 99% percent will pay to provide things they will never read.

To be clear I think it should be free but want to at least provide some counter point (even if it is paper thin...)

<comment><USER15> >How many people read this research? 1% of America?

If anything, it's 1% of the world. The problem is not limited to the US.

And it's a very significant 1% which is one of the biggest - if not literally the biggest - drivers of the world economy.

>The counter argument to this is you pay to use national parks even though you already pay for it.

Parks have huge continuing expenses. They're also owned in trust for the public.

Journal publishing has almost no expenses at all. It's pure privatised oligoply. It provides no useful public or private service of any kind.

There is _nothing_ academic publishers do that couldn't be done better in other ways.

<comment><USER16> >Journal publishing has almost no expenses at all.

If their expenses of 60-80% of revenue is "almost nothing", surely their revenue is also "almost nothing", and therefore we shouldn't care about it.

<comment><USER17> To cite just one example, Elsevier consistently reports over $1b/yr profit on $3b/yr revenue. Not exactly "almost nothing".

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

[https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/mit-open-access/open- acc...](https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/mit-open-access/open-access-at- mit/mit-open-access-policy/publishers-and-the-mit-faculty-open-access- policy/elsevier-fact-sheet/)

<comment><USER16> If $2b of costs is almost no expenses, then surely $1b of profit is as well. You can't have it both ways, downplaying their costs and complaining about their profit.

<comment><USER18> Well, the $2bn of "publishing costs" include paying their CEO tens of millions a year[1], paying million-dollar packages to a number of other managers including Nick Luff and David Palmer, and dropping 1-2 million a year on non- executive board members who don't do anything at all.

Besides, do you really think it takes 28,000 people to publish a single company's journals, given that the selection and review process is all being done for them on a pro-bono basis? There are massive efficiencies there - <USER2> the CEO of a 100-person non-profit couldn't justify a $30 million package, so there is absolutely no incentive for change.

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/people/person.asp?p...](http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/people/person.asp?personId=1244770&privcapId=402524)

<comment><USER16> If you can do it for less, go ahead. The fact that multiple companies all have similar margins, and even open access (besides for the privately funded/subsidized ones) has the same order of magnitude charges makes me think it's unlikely.

<comment><USER17> Actually, chemistry and physics do quite well with nonprofit publishers. Compare the profit margins of for-profit publishers with non-profit ones like the American Chemical Society. In 2015, the ACS made a $10m profit on $500m gross revenue, a much smaller profit margin.

[http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/about/aboutacs/financial.h...](http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/about/aboutacs/financial.html)

The smaller American Physical Society made <$100,000 on $53.5m gross revenue in 2015:

[http://www.aps.org/about/governance/annual- reports/](http://www.aps.org/about/governance/annual-reports/)

So yes, it is possible to have high quality publications produced on much smaller margins. The question is whether it is possible to provide similar services for similar margins in a _for-profit_ context. Given that for-profit companies, by definition, seek to extract the highest possible profits on what they do, one should really question whether it makes any sense for for-profit publishers to have the stranglehold they have on academic intellectual property.

<comment><USER16> Why does the logic of "taxpayer funded research should be free" suddenly change when the publisher is a non profit? If that logic is valid, why is the $500 million fine?

I should probably have said "similar charges" as I said later. Reducing the margins to nothing can at best reduce the cost by 30% or so, which I doubt would satisfy most open access advocates; given that, the real concern has nothing to do with publishers' profit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> ... meanwhile Wired told me "The thing about AdBlock..." and prevent me from reading this "free" article.

Funny thing - I don't even have AdBlock.

<comment> vic-traill I expect there are a number of observable events or non-events that can be used to infer the use of an ad blocker. They don't necessarily work well ...

I've been presented with a "We see you're using an ad blocker ... please turn it off" message (I can't recall where, perhaps Bloomberg or the WSJ?) when I've just had a Hosts file in play.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I agree that publicly funded research should be publicly available, and that for-profit publishers have an entrenched commercial interest that feeds on free access to research.

But it's worth keeping in mind that the value of public funding for research is primarily for the participants, not for the output to the public. Public research funding is an _education_ model that occasionally has the nice byproduct of useful results. I got a Master's degree on public funding, I've published papers in prominent journals in my field, and I'm pretty sure nobody would read my papers if they had them for free. The real value of the public dollars spent on me was my education.

I'm not saying research shouldn't be publicly available. It should. I am saying there are other ways we're getting our money's worth out of research funding.

A print publication with a distribution channel has been historically important. Universities don't want to be in the business of printing & distributing. Many journals also put on conferences. The need for print & distribution is the reason publishers got entrenched, but it's changing as the importance of print declines.

I do wonder if the real crime by publishers isn't locking research away from the public, but charging universities for journals, effectively using public dollars to buy the research that was publicly funded.

* edited. removed points I regret & speculate were being downvoted.

<comment><USER21> It's not about who _would_ read your work, but who _can_. I don't read much the FBI/NSA/rest of government produces but I'm pretty frustrated every time the suggestion of exempting troves of content from the FOIA comes up.

I also know that my access guarantees other researches access to the same content, meaning the research that they do, that may one day benefit me down the road, has had free access to all of the knowledge available to make the best play at their own research.

It's scary to me that scientific knowledge can be locked away. I am the kind of person that believes all pharmaceutical research should be freely published and publicly available as well. Patents provide all the monopoly protections necessary, and sunlight helps disinfect bogus science that sometimes leads to death in the pursuit of profits.

<comment><USER20> I agree with you, and I have the very same concerns, but you're talking about two different kinds of _can_. Government info that is FOIA exempt is not available for purchase.

You _can_ purchase most research, that is a kind of access. And if you're at a university doing research, chances are you already have access without paying personally.

The knowledge we're talking about in this thread isn't being locked away, it's being charged for. I'm with you, and I don't like it, but we can't claim there's no access.

<comment><USER21> That's not access for all. Locking information behind a paywall is limited access no matter how you spin it, whether someone can't afford to access information (individually or at scale) or said access isn't sponsored for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Reputation and Credential-ism, right or wrong are the pillars of Academic Science. Unless we address some of these aspects, it will provide you with copious amounts of "recreational outrage".

</comment><comment><USER23> Can someone get rid of the "?mbid=social_twitter" on this article? it's jumping folks to the middle of the article, quite unnecessarily.

</comment><comment><USER24> Here's the thing with Wired:

[http://i.imgur.com/ONOt88S.png](http://i.imgur.com/ONOt88S.png)

Fight Internet coercion -- boycott Wired. Don't link to their articles, don't visit their site, don't accept their coercive behavior. Ad blocking is not a crime, it's a right.

</comment><comment><USER25> By this notion, I should get free tickets to all college football games. And my driver's license registration should also be free, don't my taxes already go to paying for the DMV? Wait, should anything that is even remotely funded by taxpayer dollars now be free for everyone that pays taxes?

<comment><USER26> It's more like a private company has bought the only access road to a public park and is now charging you to get there.

<comment><USER27> > It's more like a private company has _privatized at no expenses_ the only > access road to a public park and is now charging you to get there.

FTFY.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Narrowing it a bit, how about paying to read research I WROTE? I tried to access a paper of mine I didn't have handy and sure enough the fee was $35. Turned to sci-hub, of course. I pirated myself. --Anonymous, just in case

</comment><comment><USER29> I think the article is oversimplifying the issue. This isn't about access, who reads it, or who pays for the research, it's about greed. Plain and simple. Corporations are making money off of the restricting of access to scientific research, and they are fighting to preserve that business model.

<comment><USER16> > oversimplifying the issue

>Plain and simple

Huh?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> But if scientific papers were free, how could nations avoid a free-rider issue regarding other nations?

For instance, a major part of scientific research is done in US, isn't it? Does that mean that the US tax payer should be the major contributor to an hypothetical worldwide scientific activity?

<comment><USER31> _For instance, a major part of scientific research is done in US, isn 't it?_

A good part, roughly on par with Europe, Japan, Russia, and China (number of papers is hardly a measure of scientific production anyway):

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/20k5dk/top...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/20k5dk/top_40_countries_by_the_number_of_scientific)

 _Does that mean that the US tax payer should be the major contributor to an hypothetical worldwide scientific activity?_

All tax payers on this planet (at least those living in a country with sizeable research spending) already contribute to the worldwide scientific knowledge. I believe this is a good thing.

[edit: typo]

<comment><USER30> > All tax payers on this planet (at least those living in a country with > sizeable research spending) already contribute to the worldwide scientific > knowledge. I believe this is a good thing.

Then you still get a free-rider problem, regarding all people that did not pay taxes for this research. You can ignore the issue but tax payers may not.

<comment><USER31> Agreed, but all taxpayers fund only a portion of the worldwide research and benefit from _all_ of it, so the trade-off is still in favor of sharing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> >Publishers acquire this research free of charge

Except of course they don't. They provide publishing services, which cost them between 60-80% of the revenue each paper bring in (based on profit margins between 20-40%). Authors sign over their copyright in exchange for this consideration. (If they didn't get anything, the copyright assignment wouldn't be valid.)

> leading journals have stepped forward to make new findings free to all.

By charging authors upfront.

>Publishers do add value, but that value doesn't justify the cost or the lost opportunities for those who can't (or can't fully) access the research.

This doesn't make sense. "Groceries do add value, but that doesn't justify the cost or lost opportunities for those that can't afford food".

The solution to people not being able to access essentials is not outlawing anyone charging for it. It's subsidizing the cost for everyone to buy it, or making a government-run version that provides it for free. If you want everyone to be able to eat, you give them food stamps (or make sure they have enough money by raising the minimum wage, whatever), don't get upset at companies that provide value but also make a profit. If you can do it for less, go ahead.

<comment><USER27> Have you ever published a paper in an academic venue?

What publishers offered was delivering paper versions of articles to your local research library. Now they only host PDFs online. Apart from that their added-value work is negligible. The biggest improvement I've seen by a publisher of one of my papers was changing "Sec." to "Sect." when I was referencing section, and putting page number in blue rather than black (true story).

Anyway nowadays when a paper is accessible directly from a public repository, it is that version which will be used most often, and it includes literally zero work from the publisher.

All the real work is done by the authors, and by the reviewers, who are other researchers doing their normal job (i.e., they're not paid specifically to review papers, and more importantly not paid by publishers).

The only thing that publishers provide is reputation/prestige, and that's only because of inertia, and it's difficult to change because they own the titles of journals they publish. That's one of the numerous reasons why bibliometrics is an entirely bad idea and is counter-productive for science.

Also, not all open access journal are charging author, that is a lie installed by publishers lobbying (and this is how they actually spend money). You can research "diamond open access" or "overlay journal" for some examples of economical models where journal are high quality, open access and free to submit to.

<comment><USER16> >Also, not all open access journal are charging author, that is a lie installed by publishers lobbying (and this is how they actually spend money). You can research "diamond open access" or "overlay journal" for some examples of economical models where journal are high quality, open access and free to submit to.

Those all seem to be sponsored. That won't scale to every paper unless some large organization funds it. The biggest open access journals all charge.

> it includes literally zero work from the publisher.

As long as their expenses are >60% of revenue, I find this hard to believe. If you think they're wasteful, you can run your own and try to spend less, but denying their costs won't convince me.

>The only thing that publishers provide is reputation/prestige

Like I said, this model doesn't fit with the numbers we have about their margins. I'd at least expect over 50% profit margin if they were merely extracting rent, and probably closer to 90%.

<comment><USER32> Its hard to answer your argument directly because publishers like Elsevier never publish transparent accounting numbers. For all we know, their costs could mostly be "Hollywood Accounting". (not to mention, the profit they do report is already through the roof).

It all does strike me as obviously inefficient though. In my day to day research as a grad student I almost never benefit from work the publishers did. I don't even use them to download my papers because the paywalls are so annoying that I usually go directly to the author's home page (google scholar will even find these for you). Every half-decent CS researcher makes their work available on their personal website, at no cost,

In the end, what I am trying to say is that I don't trust Elsevier's reported expenses and that even if I did I think a huge chunk of them would be something that could be drastically reduced with a bit of technology.

<comment><USER16> >It all does strike obviously inefficient though. In my day to day research I almost never benefit from work the publishers did. I don't even use them to download my papers because the paywalls are so annoying that I usually go directly to the author's home page (google scholar will even find these for you). Every half-decent CS researcher makes their work available on their personal website, at no cost,

Different fields have different needs. You don't need too much trust in CS or math, because you can just evaluate the arguments and proof. But other fields require much more, and you do benefit from the work they did in only showing you certain papers and not others.

<comment><USER32> In all fields, the peer review process is performed by volunteer researches at no cost. The publisher DOES NOT evaluate arguments or ensure that the contents of the paper are correct. The only thing the publisher does is own the name of the prestigious journal.

<comment><USER16> If that's the case, why do people give them prestige and won't give a new startup journal prestige?

Why is it considered hard to get into those journals, when all you need to do is have a correct paper?

<comment><USER32> > Why is it considered hard to get into those journals

Journals only publish so many papers in a given time. Its not just a matter of submitting a good enough paper.

Dunno why this is the case for journals but when it comes to conferences (where lots of CS research is published) there are obvious time limits regarding the number of presentations that can be accepted.

> why do people give them prestige and won't give a new startup journal > prestige?

For historical reasons and perverse incentives, sadly. Young researchers cannot afford to publish on new startup journals because advancing your carrer depends on publishing in prestigeous journals (universities evaluate researchers based on the prestige of where they publish). Meanwhile, tenured professors are under less pressure when it comes to career advancement but they also need to publish on prestigeous journals to secure grant money to fund their labs and to accomodate for their younger co-authors (who are still trying to advance their carrers).

It also doesn't help when the "journal prestige categorization" is defined by the government, as happens in my country[1]. Not only are our journal ratings always outdated (punishing startup journals and conferences) but they also emphasize publishing in journals over publishing in conferences (which is terrible for CS research in particular)

[1] [http://qualis.capes.gov.br/](http://qualis.capes.gov.br/)

<comment><USER16> >Journals only publish so many papers in a given time. Its not just a matter of submitting a good enough paper.

And how does that happen without any staff evaluating papers, as you claimed above?

<comment><USER27> Could you stop faking to be an idiot, please? We already responded to that question and you know it.

<comment><USER16> ufo claimed above that "The only thing the publisher does is own the name of the prestigious journal."

This is false. Why is calling them on it now "faking to be an idiot"?

I pointed out that there's curation, and that imposes costs. Denying that it exists doesn't help.

<comment><USER27> Pfffffff.

Once again: the curation is not performed by the publisher, but by the editorial board and the reviewers, who are researchers, and are not paid by the publishers for this work.

<comment><USER16> A cursory google search turns up plenty of counterexamples.

See [http://blog.journals.cambridge.org/2012/06/14/recruiting- a-j...](http://blog.journals.cambridge.org/2012/06/14/recruiting-a-journal- editor-an-hss-challenge/) and [http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2002/02/editorial- boards-s...](http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2002/02/editorial-boards-step- academic-career-ladder)

I'll note that even PLOS medicine wasn't able to get editors for free, as an open access journal [http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/s/competing- interests-...](http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/s/competing-interests-of- the-plos-medicine-editors)

<comment><USER27> Paid academic journal editors are rare exceptions.

From one of your own links:

        Carol Barnes, professor of psychology and neurology at the
        University of Arizona in Tucson, is a reviewing editor at
        the Journal of Neuroscience, a 3-year appointment for which
        *she receives no compensation*.
        (…)
        Barnes has received funding from the university to hire an
        assistant to provide clerical support to assist her with
        the manuscript review process. She considers herself
        fortunate, because "without this help, I would have had to
        decline this position."

Not only she was still paid by the university for whats seems to be a full time job during 3 years according to the article, but in addition to that the university, not the publisher, paid for an assistant to this job!

<comment><USER16> That journal appears to be owned by a non profit.

<comment><USER27> And I can assure you that the situation is similar with journals owned by Wiley, Springer, and Elsevier, for examples.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Worst Oil in the World: Crude That's Tarring the Climate - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-worst-oil-in-the-world-the-crude-thats-tarring-the-climate

<comment><USER2> It's all well and good to say that we should use less oil. The trick is to make the alternatives _cheaper_. That's what a lot of people don't understand. A middle class Californian can afford to spend a little extra to be "green". The majority of the developing world, and even a significant portion of people in the most developed parts of the world, cannot.

All that being said, this index leaves out several vital pieces of information. First, which way are these sources are trending? Alberta's oil sands have come a long way and are driving research in carbon capture. California Midway Sunset, on the other hand, is likely just as dirty now as it was decades ago. Nigeria Obagi may have lower carbon emissions than some on this list, but it is by far the dirtiest in terms of toxic chemical pollution, and is major contributing factor to why life expectancy is so low in Nigeria. There are social costs as well because many sources of oil prop up less than democratically elected leaders.

One cannot measure the impact of oil producers using carbon production alone!

<comment><USER3> > It's all well and good to say that we should use less oil. The trick is to > make the alternatives cheaper. That's what a lot of people don't understand. > A middle class Californian can afford to spend a little extra to be "green". > The majority of the developing world, and even a significant portion of > people in the most developed parts of the world, cannot.

Yes, but the average middle class Californian uses a lot more energy that an average person in the developing world. If an average Californian can cut their energy use and green house gas output by 20%, that has a lot more environmental impact than say 75% cut of the average person in the third world. The people who have to get their environmental impact down the most are people in the 1st world.

<comment><USER4> Making people feel bad about the environment has a very small effect, and only a privileged minority that can afford to care will change their habits.

If you instead make the environmentally better choices cheaper, _everyone_ will change their habits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "By now, everyone knows that oil is a leading driver of global climate change."

Knows? I thought it was coal.

[http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/coal-not-oil- sa...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/coal-not-oil-sands-the- true-climate-change-bad-guy-analysis-shows/article547607/)

[http://www.wired.com/2008/12/oil-not-the- cli/](http://www.wired.com/2008/12/oil-not-the-cli/)

What's it going to be next week?

</comment><comment><USER6> Vice is doing some great comprehensive reporting on climate change. Their recent episode on HBO about the Arctic ice melting was fascinating.

-[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_h92Ath_2XA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_h92Ath_2XA)

<comment><USER7> I couldn't watch past the first ten minutes. The absurdity of the reporting was too much.

Climate change is real, if you're skeptical, you're a denier and you must be funded by big oil. Seems like all this guy has to offer is scenes of summer ice melt and ad-hominem attacks.

If their science was right, that Greenland is 60yrs ahead of ice melt predictions, then where is the sea level rise that was predicted?

<comment><USER8> The basics are very basic physics that have been known for a long time, so we know what green-house gases do with a planet. Where it gets harder are the details - climate is complex and we find new influences every day.

Here is another carbon sink, oh, and here is a source, and apparently heating this spot in the stratosphere causes a change in circulation which influences the biosphere, and there is a volcanic eruption shielding some solar input, oh, and looks like it is also destroying ozone, oh, and that albedo change there has a slightly bigger influence than thought, and can I get more computing power for better grid resolution?

So, details are hard. What do we _know_?

\- We do measure an increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases.

\- These gases are absorbing light of long thermal wavelength, and are clear to short solar wavelengths --> thus a first order feedback would a higher ground temperature.

\- And yes, the amount is big enough to make a difference.

What do we have to find out is how all the higher order feedback mechanisms work, such as atmospheric water content, circulation, uptake in sinks and emission from sources, albedo, .... but you can be sure there will be change since the system is not in a stable position. How that change will look like is hard to say, but we're working on it. Don't be too harsh, it's a hard problem.

<comment><USER7> >Don't be too harsh, it's a hard problem.

That's my point. It's a hard problem. Hard problems don't get solved by pretending we know the solution.

<comment><USER8> Well, we know part of the truth. We have to work on the details, but are hopefully getting gradually more correct. At the same time, if the predictions are right, acting is good. If the predictions are not right, acting is at least not bad, and many of the proposed ideas are still good. If you're sceptical, bring your arguments and help us refine our knowledge. (Google first, most points have been adressed extensively by many people.)

(e.g. 'Don't burn oil but save it for better uses' is good in a world with finite oil reserves. 'Don't treat the land badly and keep forests' is good for water management and erosion.)

There is a more fitting blog post, but I cannot find it right now. This also works: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/gq/the_proper_use_of_humility/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/gq/the_proper_use_of_humility/)

Seriously, if we for some reason find there is no cause to worry there will be a huge party!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Am I crazy, or has there been an abundance of vice links appearing on HN recently? Any particular reason?

<comment><AUTHOR> They've been writing an awful lot of decent content. That'll end eventually, though.</comment></comment>


A Basic HN Client in React - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/armujahid/hnreact/ <comment><AUTHOR> I developed it last year in few hours and it's currently hosted at [https://hn.armujahid.me/](https://hn.armujahid.me/)

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com](https://news.ycombinator.com): 7 requests 61.86 KB / 20.48 KB transferred Finish: 845 ms DOMContentLoaded: 483 ms load: 823 ms

[https://hn.armujahid.me/](https://hn.armujahid.me/): 18 requests 374.67 KB / 104.76 KB transferred Finish: 1.47 s DOMContentLoaded: 179 ms load: 539 ms

Is there any other point to take note of?

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow. I didn't even notice that. I am using github pages with cloudflare cdn that may be one of the reason of its fast load time

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Pretty cool to see how you did this since there's so much different ways to build a react project. :) Curious to see the same being done with hooks and useEffect

<comment><AUTHOR> Hooks version is now live :)

<comment><USER3> That's awesome! :D</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook deceived users about the way it used phone numbers, FTC to allege - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/23/facebook-deceived-users-about-way-it-used-phone-numbers-facial-recognition-ftc-allege-complaint/ <comment><USER2> Facebook started sending me newsfeed notifications to the number I'd registered for 2FA, around a year after I'd done so, without any opt-in on my part.

After the first few, I passive-aggressively texted "go away" back to the robot buzzing my phone. Within the hour, I started receiving concerned messages from friends asking whether I was alright... Turns out Facebook posts anything you text it straight to your profile, and the out-of-context "go away" read like cry for help.

<comment><USER3> So you're telling me for the low low cost of porting someone's 2FA cell phone, I could use it to post to their page and they wouldn't know about it? No need to reset password, just use the phone number straight to account.

<comment><USER4> SMS source addresses are spoofable, so you probably don't even need to do that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> To put this in plain English, could we say Facebook asked for phone numbers in the name of "security" but there was no restriction on how Facebook could use those phone numbers. Usage was not restricted to the purpose for which Facebook collected the numbers. Facebook could use them for reasons other than "security".

<comment><USER6> I remember Facebook asking for my mobile number for 2FA purposes, with an explicit note that would be the only purpose.

I didn't trust them then; so didn't hand it over; but is this where they then re-used the mobile number anyway?

<comment><USER7> Seems so: "the FTC will allege Facebook misled users about its handling of their phone numbers and its use of two-factor authentication"

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-ftc/facebook- to-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-ftc/facebook-to-settle- ftc-privacy-allegations-adopt-new-policies-sources-idUSKCN1UI2GC)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Linkedin (Microsoft by ownership now) should be ready to pay out their own massive fine, if we're going after dark and deceiving patterns.

<comment><USER9> I created an Outlook email address a month ago and Microsoft blocked it until I entered my mobile number. Sneaky bastards.

<comment><USER10> Google does the same, you need to provide mobile to signup, at-least in India. It is difficult to get a truly private email account.

<comment><USER9> With Microsoft I was able to use my email for 2 weeks before they blocked it, they don't require the mobile number on sign up. It was a legitimate email, not spamming etc. so it was pretty bad of them.

LinkedIn is even worse, every week they ask me to add a profile photo even after I decline, and I pay for LinkedIn premium. Really scummy tactics.

<comment><USER11> I tried to create a hotmail account a couple of days ago; while they don't require the mobile number on signup, they do require it before you're allowed to send any email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Facebook showed me my own mobile phone number prefilled into a textfield when logging into their mobile website and asked if they should add it to my account.

I never gave it to them and never ever had installed any of their apps. I can only suspect that they got it by farming my friends contact lists on their phones.

</comment><comment><USER13> I had never activated 2FA on Facebook for exactly that reason. And later I had removed my Facebook account - that was 7 years ago.

Why would anyone had any relation to Facebook - them being such an unethical company?

<comment><USER14> I did give it to them specifically for 2FA, and that's the reason I'm kinda pissed. It's still weird for me sometimes. I feel like logging in with my phone number didn't work for a long time. Mostly because I feel I'm not 100% sure it works right now.

Anyways, that came with the promise they would only use it for 2FA. What happens when they see it in contact lists then? I'm 100% sure they hoover up the goodies. Ask forgiveness not permission?

I signed up for FB 14 years ago last Sunday. Putting the dorm building and room number where I lived was a _requirement_ of the signup process. I openly lived my dorm life on this site. The feds were not on it. Cops? I don't think so. My mother was _never_ supposed to show up for the party.

On the other hand, seeing Grandma there was dope.

Mark Effing Zuckerburg xD, and he _still runs the place!_

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> >The misuse of the phone numbers was first identified in media reports and by academics this year.

Wasn't it in 2018?

[https://gizmodo.com/facebook-is-giving-advertisers-access- to...](https://gizmodo.com/facebook-is-giving-advertisers-access-to-your- shadow-co-1828476051)

</comment><comment><USER16> It's ironic that Americans are trying hard to bring down Facebook while flocking to services like TikTok and games released by Tencent, who use your data in numerous evil ways and are not planning to tell you any of that.

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure what data TikTok has exactly. What else beyond an email address, a username, and a user-supplied password?

<comment><USER18> Faces... Videos of all kinds of people and places.. Friend networks (via who you follow).. What videos you like showing what you think.. They have a lot of data

</comment></comment></comment><comment> lota-putty Giving up your personal "mobile" phone number to online services which feed on your brain-chemicals to make profit is like agreeing to place one foot in the bear-trap.

People's behaviour as a collective is business, a predictability leading to profit.

For instance, a friend of mine help develop an app which track each product- placing in super-markets, Store-Planning for profit.

Same reason, most super-malls don't let customers have a time-sense inside the mall.

</comment><comment><USER19> Reminds me of the time Facebook reactivated my account and posted on my behalf when I replied, "No" to their SMS asking me to come back.

Ahh yes, here it was: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16244522](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16244522)

<comment><USER20> Reminds me of the time my aunt got an SMS saying reply 1 to post happy birthday to my dad's wall, she replied 1 and it posted 1 to his wall.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/facebook/comments/2qbg9j/reply_1_to...](https://www.reddit.com/r/facebook/comments/2qbg9j/reply_1_to_post_happy_birthday_text_doesnt_work/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It would be hilarious if the settlement forced facebook to spin whatsapp out. 19bil for nothing</comment>


Predicting the next Mac desktops - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/2012/06/22/predicting-mac-desktops <comment><USER2> FWIW, Marco said on Twitter he already received credible-sounding emails claiming that both predictions are wrong: <http://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/216244550207942656>

EDIT: He clarified further saying no retina iMacs and Ivy Bridge instead of Haswell Xeons: <http://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/216249589949399041>

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't see Retina as priority for the desktop line at the moment. Sales of standalone iMacs and Thunderbolt Displays are a rounding error on their income streams and ordering 27" panels would soak up a lot of HiDPI panel output that would be much more valuable in portables.

The yield rates on giant panels right now would probably be atrocious, driving up costs. And Apple clearly doesn't need Professional Imprimatur to make money anymore.

But in a year or two, 200DPI will be table stakes for anything with a display.

<comment><USER4> One reason for creating retina 27" displays would be for content generation. Developing and designing applications and other digital content for retina iPads and new retina MacBooks means that the designers need even more real estate.

<comment><USER3> No don't get me wrong, I would strangle for 200+ DPI across 27". And it does seem inevitable. I thin it's just asking too much of the supply right now, especially when there's an entire MacBook and MacBook Pro line to update, not forgetting the legacy Windows market too.

<comment><USER2> I don't think the Airs will get retina for a while – until a case redesign or the retina display gets thinner. Take a look at this shot from the Ars review of the 15": [http://cdn.arstechnica.net//wp- content/uploads/2012/06/rMBP_...](http://cdn.arstechnica.net//wp- content/uploads/2012/06/rMBP_thick_v_Air.jpg)

The thickness of the two notebooks are the same, but the MBP has a much thicker display and thinner body. That's fine for the "spine" of the notebook, but I don't think the Air's thin end can get any thinner.

I think next in line for a retina display is the 13" Pro and that Apple might keep a non-retina vs retina distinction between the Airs and the Pro for a little while.

<comment><USER3> Good eye! I think you're totally right. This might force a new Air body which makes it more of a project than it would otherwise be.

If the Air wasn't selling it might be a priority, but these things appear to be blowing off the shelf.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's an interesting theory, but technically the thunderbolt port carries the display signal separately from the data signal (which speed he quotes).

Display Port 1.2 Spec allows 17.28 Gbit/s of bandwidth and 1.0-1.1 allowed 8.64 Gbit/s. It looks like the current thunderbolt is based on 1.1.

</comment><comment><USER6> I still don't see what's preventing them from shipping Core i7 Ivy Bridge Mac Pros now.

I wonder if the near future of the Mac Pro might be headless, providing storage, CPU and maybe GPU horsepower and advanced legacy I/O for an iOS device, which serves as the principal UI.

<comment><USER7> Mac Pros use Xeons, not i7s. But yeah, the big question is why they aren't using the Xeon E5 that's available now.

<comment><USER6> I'd probably take an i7 Ivy Bridge over the Xeon Sandy Bridge, especially if it meant a lower price point. I don't really make good use of all those cores in any case, though the L3 cache penalty would probably be felt.

<comment><USER7> Now you're into the xMac discussion. Everybody says they want an xMac, but Apple doesn't want to sell one.

<comment><USER6> Hmm, maybe you're right. The xMac is traditionally assumed to be a gaming device, with prosumer CPU and beefy GPU. This is likely a battle Apple can't win, as I can build a nice gaming rig for a relatively low price, and I'm going to want to run Windows on there in any case.

Maybe what I really want from Apple is an iServer, which is a Mac Mini with lots of HD bays and legacy I/O. Or maybe I'm in too small of a market, and I should just consider a Mac Mini and a Thunderbolt breakout expansion box.

It seems to me like using iOS apps to access your iServer's resources is the direction we're headed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would have been really entertained if this link returned a 404.

</comment><comment><USER9> Maybe Apple is designing a new chip for the Mac desktops? A6?

<comment><USER7> That's not feasible. Even so, if the A6 is not ready yet, why not release an E5 stopgap? Supposedly Apple has a "plan B" for every situation, so they should have _something_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> In addition to the good points you make, I've heard that top people within Apple are increasingly assigned to the iPhone and iPad, and there just aren't enough (human) resources left over to design new desktops (to Apple's high standards).

<comment> excuse-me Not bashing Apple but how much revolutionary design goes into a Mac desktop?

The CPU, chipset and graphics card are all off-the-shelf. The motherboard is Apple but isn't anything special. The cases are nicely built but so are high end HP workstation (since they are actually designed by BMW consulting)

It wouldn't tie up 1000s of Jonathon Ive's little helpers to stick a new Xeon and more memory slots in the existing models (and throw in Thunderbolt and USB3)

<comment><USER11> Agreed.

In fact, one of Apple's Chinese suppliers could probably do most of the design work involved in providing a product to customers who (e.g., because the customer is a large organization that cannot afford the cost and the publicity of losing a software-infringement lawsuit) cannot use Hackintoshes, but want to run OS X on hardware vaguely competitive with current beefy Windows and Linux tower computers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> May help: <http://mactracker.ca/></comment>


Gathering honey from a weed (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://the-life-i-read.blogspot.com/2013/10/gathering-honey-from-weed.html <comment><USER2> Widikedpa references: 1894 The Mummy: A Handbook of Egyptian Funerary Archaeology. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Which predates the listed references and the excavation of king tuts tomb.

There are also other discovery's. "The _honey stains_ found in the ceramic vessels, found 170 kilometers west of Tbilisi, are believed to be made by bees that buzzed around in Georgia 5,500 years ago" [http://www.eurasianet.org/node/65204](http://www.eurasianet.org/node/65204)

Honey stains are not honey, but the residue might be edible.

PS: Less reputable reference: Traveller 10:35AM on 03/04/11

 _When I was in my previous profession (archaeology), I had the opportunity to have roughly 3000 year old honey. It 's the one food that never goes off really. You just have to heat it and mix it to be able to eat it again. Actually, it was delicious! Just like honey that I have in my cupboards right now! Just a little grainy...but that might be because we were impatient about getting to try it! ;)_

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> RE: [http://xkcd.com/1717/](http://xkcd.com/1717/)

<comment><USER3> In case anyone needs extra incitement to click: "pyramid honey truther"

<comment><USER4> Is there an easy way to read the mouseover text on mobile? Firefox truncates after a few words if I press and hold over the image.

<comment><USER5> Not a general solution, but m.xkcd.com has an alternative presentation of the mouseover.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oriental Institute has lecture about ancient beekeeping on youtube with photograph of 2500 years old honey. It is recognizable but far from eatable.</comment>


Show HN: ClickLock – Lock your screen with one click on the menubar - <AUTHOR> https://clicklock.xyz/ <comment><USER2> Do you know that Hot Corners allow you to do the same thing, easier (no aim or app needed) right? [https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/mac- help/mchlp3000/mac](https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/mac- help/mchlp3000/mac)</comment>


Ask PG: What Changed? - <AUTHOR> Two years ago, you referred to the question, "Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage" as "one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications."[1]
But, as recently as a few months ago you said, "How you hacked some real-world system to your advantage is not a super important question. Probably not even in the top 10."[2]
So, why is the question not as evocative as you once thought?
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693870 <comment><USER2> There are 35 questions on the application. A question can be one we consistently pay attention to without being in the top 10.

Also, we added at least 2 new questions we care about more since we added that one. (The field names of one or both of those may be those of previously existing questions, but we changed the question itself in a way that made the answer more important.)

<comment><USER3> > A question can be one we consistently pay attention to without being in the > top 10.

Sure, but the query was about "pay _most_ attention to".

I wonder if hacking the YC app process via PR stunt became too obvious an answer to the question over time.

<comment><USER4> > Sure, but the query was about "pay most attention to".

If you interpret that as "pay most attention to (when questions are ranked by the amount of attention we've paid them over all rounds)", nobody gets killed and we can all go home.

<comment><USER3> Right, right. Or! We could stop redefining common words and agree that 'pay' is a verb in the present tense.

(Please don't kill me.)

<comment><USER4> I have suggested no redefinition. Technical accuracy is one of the aspects of my communication I pay most attention to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Stop turning over PG's every word like some soon-to-be unemployed English major. It is pathetic. You need experience with the real world through use, and not by the cool reflected glow of the Internet on your monitor.

<comment><USER6> 1) The hit against English majors was entirely unnecessary.

2) I don't see how experiencing the real world would have gotten him any closer to the answer. HN seems to be a perfectly reasonable forum to ask. There might have been something interesting there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's not a terrible question, but it's really not that different from more common corporate-speak interview questions like, "We like 'out of the box' thinkers here. Does that describe you, and if so, how?"

If anything, it's an easier version of that question, since it primes the applicant with the hint of considering responses outside the standard domain. It makes sense to me that pg doesn't consider this a top ten question.

</comment><comment><USER8> Nothing changed, it was never a good question. There are many ways to be productive, entrepreneurial, and creative while working "within the system", so the question was intrinsically discriminatory to those who did so.

<comment><USER9> It's generally not possible to do anything "revolutionary" without encountering some very severe obstacles. The status-quo guards itself.

<comment><USER10> If someone loses 30 pounds of body fat and you ask them how they did it, would it be considered hacking the system if they told you that they worked out and ate healthy meals while restricting their caloric intake? To me, that's the expected normal way to go about losing weight and for the majority of people is guaranteed to work.

So it is possible to get extraordinary results through the application of discipline to boring, traditional approaches.

<comment><USER11> I lost 40 pounds of body fat in 3 months by not eating carbohydrates, and eating an over 2000 calorie high fat diet. I think that losing 30 lbs of body fat the normal way isn't that extraordinary. I think what I did by hacking the system was more so extraordinary.

<comment><USER12> did the same thing, this works. I've learned to enjoy avoiding bread. <http://reddit.com/r/keto>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It must be weird having everything you say picked apart -- it's like being the Pope or Alan Greenspan.

Interesting with Greenspan we ended up with sort of a reaction to the previous tea-leaves reading by Bernanke -- he's vastly more transparent and communicates really boring things.

<comment><USER14> Being famous, successful and surrounded by padawans does that to you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd guess it's the same reason no one asks "what's your greatest weakness" to job applicants any more. Everyone's been trained to come up with an answer like "oh, I guess it's that I just work so damned hard all the time!"

<comment><USER16> This reminds me of the way people answer how you know people need what you're making. Everyone says they've validated the idea with users or talked to users. When you start getting deeper in the conversation you can tell they've only scratched the surface level. They don't know users all that much. I guess people are starting to be trained how to answer the question. The only person they're fooling is themselves though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think one issue might be that everyone knows about this question and primed by the earlier comments on the importance might end up over optimising this. There might end up being lots of really impressive answers to this question that didn't correlate well with results.

In earlier rounds when less people that were applying knew the question it might have been a better indicator.

</comment><comment><USER18> How about the possibility that every batch of new admissions is a learning experience. No one has all the answers to what makes a great startup. You live and learn every day.</comment>


Neural Networks Are Impressively Good at Compression - <AUTHOR> https://probablydance.com/2016/04/30/neural-networks-are-impressively-good-at-compression/ <comment><USER2> People are knocking this guy for not being an expert and maybe getting some details wrong. Maybe it's a little bit like watching a non-programmer stumble their way through a blog post about learning to program- experienced programmers may cringe a bit.

But I really appreciate these kinds of write-ups: he declares his non- expertise up-front, and then proceeds to document his understanding as he goes along. There's something useful about this kind of blog post for non-experts.

I'm working my way through Karpathy's writeup on RNNs ([http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn- effectiveness](http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness)). I've mechanically translated his Python to Go, and even managed to make it work. But I _still_ don't entirely understand the math behind it. Now obviously Karpathy IS an expert, but despite his extremely well-written blog post, a lot of it is still somewhat impenetrable to me ("gradient descent"? I took Linear Algebra oh, about 25 years ago). So sometimes it's nice to see other people who are a bit bewildered by things like tanh(), yet still press on and try to understand the overall process.

And FWIW I had the same reaction as the author when I started toying around with neural nets- it's shocking how small the hidden layer can be and still do useful stuff. It seems like magic, and sometimes you have to run through it step-by-step to understand it.

<comment><USER3> Sorry about that! There's a lot to cover for one blog post to do satisfyingly. I encourage you to check CS231n for a more thorough treatment where we also discuss, for example, the tradeoffs of different activation functions like tanh(), have a more gentle introduction on gradient descent, I devote a whole lecture to char rnn, assignment #1 (they are available) would demystify the backward pass, etc.

Also definitely +1 for not putting down people who write similar posts. I encourage everyone who is trying to learn to do it through blog posts because it lets you explain/organize thoughts. I also enjoy reading them quite a bit because it illustrates the kinds of conceptual problems beginners face (which is not at all obvious once you've been in the area for a few years). And it's also interesting to see many different interpretations of the same concepts, as everyone has different background and the way they reason through things is usually quite unique. Granted, this one could have been named something more appropriate!

<comment><USER2> No need to apologize- I learned SO much from your blog, thank you. I didn't realize the course was online ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfnWJUyUJYU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfnWJUyUJYU)). Also, looks like there's a subreddit for it as well: [https://www.reddit.com/r/cs231n](https://www.reddit.com/r/cs231n)

It's really wonderful that all of this is freely available, thank you.

<comment><USER4> The lecture that covers gradient descent in the Youtube list you linked there is the first time gradient descent actually clicked for me, and I made it through the entire Andrew Ng Coursera ML course. Highly highly recommend it.

<comment><USER5> the video became private, anyone know the title of the video or is there another copy of it somewhere else?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I thought this would be about something like giving the Hutter Prize [1] a go using character RNNs [2]. Instead, it's a somewhat confused "gentle introduction" to neural nets (which there are plenty of already, of higher quality) and compression is sort of handwavely discussed, not properly with bits and entropy like us information theorists would have it :)

[1] [http://prize.hutter1.net](http://prize.hutter1.net) [2] [https://github.com/karpathy/char-rnn](https://github.com/karpathy/char-rnn)

<comment><USER7> It's an interesting idea though, as sophomore as the attempt was. I'd be curious to see images lossy compressed via a neural net. Do you know of any better attempts than this?

<comment><USER8> Not excatly what you've asked, but even more interesting:There's a startup that uses deep learning to take a compressed video and knows how add details and improve the quality, just by understanding what we are expecting.

Can't find the startup's name though.

<comment><USER9> [http://www.piedpiper.com/](http://www.piedpiper.com/)

<comment><USER10> The middle out Compression company

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's good to see people write up their experiments, it's useful for the rest of us to test how we understand neural nets.

I think there are a few mistake in your maths though. You can learn a 1-1 discrete mapping through a single node where you are using a one-hot vector. You just assign a weight to each of the input nodes, and then use a delta function on the other side. If I understood correctly, this is what you are doing.

Also, if you use a tanh in your input layer, but keep a linear output layer (as you start off with), you are still doing a linear approximation because you have a rank H (where H is the hidden layer) matrix that is trying to linearly approximate your input data. This is done optimally using PCA.

I'd second the advice to look into the coursera courses, or the nando de freitas oxford course on youtube (that actually has a really nice derivation of backprop).

</comment><comment><USER12> I think some of his statements are a little off-base, for instance, regarding the choice of tanh() for the activation function he says: "But mostly it's 'because it works like this and it doesn't work when we change it.'" People have spent a fair amount of time investigating the properties of different activation functions, and my understanding is that tanh() is generally not in favor, and ReLU (rectified linear) is probably a better choice for many applications, for reasons that are well understood. Maybe the author isn't all that familiar with the field?

<comment><USER13> It depends on who you read. LeCun certainly advocated tanh for a long time. ReLU seems to be currently favored, especially for deep nets but I'm not sure it's being used universally. In my own experiments I am seeing it train faster than logistic, but not necessarily give better results (maybe because you don't want the net to train too fast to reach the best optimum).

His overall point that the field is largely empirical with little solid theory to guide one's choices is, in my opinion, not wrong. It may be that a general theory doesn't exist and different network architectures and hyperparameters are needed for different types and sizes of problems.

<comment><USER14> It doesn't depend on who you read. ReLUs (and their variants) are virtually universal now. LeCun advocated tanh but that was years and years ago before ReLUs came out (they came out in 2011) and he advocated ReLUs as early as three years ago ([http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~yann/talks/lecun-ranzato- icml2013.pdf](http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~yann/talks/lecun-ranzato-icml2013.pdf)). Empirically they give better results and are faster.

(I say "almost" because while I haven't seen a single state of the art result without ReLUs, I'm sure there is probably a random paper out there)

<comment><USER13> As far as I can tell LSTM's are still using a combination of logistic and tanh transfer functions, at least through 2014 and some of the most impressive deep learning results have been obtained with these.

For example: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.0850](http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.0850)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Lossy compression. Reminds me of this hilarious bit: [http://web.archive.org/web/20050402231231/http://lzip.source...](http://web.archive.org/web/20050402231231/http://lzip.sourceforge.net:80/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> Neural networks are used for over a decade in Context Mixing compressors like paq [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAQ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAQ)

</comment><comment><USER17> I was expecting to read about some experiments with autoencoders here, not this tutorial. I'm not sure how the author is learning about neural nets or where they are now, but anyone at this level of knowledge who wants to know more would be well served by going through Geoff Hinton's class on Coursera.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is not compression. The author focuses on the small number of nodes and calls it compression but it's the edges that encode the information and there are a lot of them.

<comment><USER19> >If you count the number of connections on that last picture you will notice that there are fewer than there were in the first network. There were 5 _5=25 at first, now there are 5_ 2*2=20. That reduction would be larger if I had more input and output nodes. For 10 nodes that reduction would be from 100 connections down to 40 when inserting two nodes in the middle. That's where the compression in the title of this blog post comes from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> How can the author draw conclusions without citing any code or experiments. For example, if we try to use the features DeepDream leaned we can see that our image will have terrible compression artifacts (faces of cats). DNNs do dimensional reduction, it is not clear if this correctly preserves image features.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is really cool. Totally can see a way where the algo would adapt based on object getting compressed

</comment><comment><USER22> ZPAQ and pngwolf have very nice approaches to learning algorithms for compression. Especially ZPAQ.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm sure with perturbation analysis you could also remove even more edges from the ANN.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is both a fascinating read of an obviously bright and clever fellow and also a TERRIBLE way to approach building intuition around the emergent behaviors of neural networks. If you want to learn about them without repeating the terrible mistakes this guy is about to make if he continues down this path, pick up a book.

<comment><USER25> What sort of terrible mistakes are you referring to?

<comment><USER24> A fundamental misunderstanding of the space, focusing on the wrong things, thinking he can visualize (or should visualize) the mechanics, hyperfocus on topologies, misunderstanding of key distance functions, sigmoids, training/overtraining, add buzzword here.

Right now he's a chef who obsessively spent six months thinking about knives. But it's about the meat and the heat, not the chef knife.

Just pick a problem and start playing with it! If you lean to this sort of pedantic "I MUST UNDERSTAND ALL FUNDAMENTALS" (I do!) I still recommend Matlab (available for $49-$99 in student editions) because the tools are so good and the docs are so damn readable. This post is basically a matlab doc page minus the links to the stuff that actually works.

<comment><USER26> >Just pick a problem and start playing with it! If you lean to this sort of pedantic "I MUST UNDERSTAND ALL FUNDAMENTALS" (I do!) I still recommend Matlab (available for $49-$99 in student editions) because the tools are so good and the docs are so damn readable.

 _Don 't pay to torture yourself!_ Use Python instead! Numpy and scipy are the standard libraries for most scientific code nowadays, and you'll be able to use Theano, Caffe, TensorFlow, PyMC, scikit-learn, pybrain, and loads of other machine-learning and statistics libraries with Python interfaces!

<comment><USER24> +1 for python however good luck building fundamentals given the sea of chaotic products. The whole point of the Matlab recommendation is that, like Amazon S3, they haven't really touched the damn NN toolkit in a decade. While y'all were tinkering with MVC apps in 2007 some of us were researching and publishing and laying the foundation for the nine different open source learning libraries that can't agree on terminology or workflow patterns or which cloud provider they are clandestinely pushing you toward.

That said, I deploy using Python and several of these libraries (and more interesting unmentioned ones). But often, Matlab for exploratory dev! I re- recommend it for getting started.

<comment><USER27> >more interesting unmentioned ones

care to share more info?

<comment><USER24> NN is flavor of the month at HN but these core toolkits don't really do much. They're all running the same Fortran code and MIT FFT libraries Matlab's been using for 20+ years. It's the base that the cool experiments happen on top of.

Once you dig in and try to actually do something, you stumble on the cool stuff. It's often Python throwaway or Matlab spaghetti code in a .edu directory that starts with a tilde. And it disappears when you need it most.

(If it's Python, it's guaranteed to be something wonky that uses 2.7 if you're on 3.x or vice versa, or requires three additional packages that throw obscure build errors on your distro. And if it's Matlab, it inevitably requires you to shell out another $299 for some stupid toolbox just to generate white noise...)

Good times. I won't kill your fun by being overly specific. Dig in!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I suppose that one episode of POI (the chain of laptops on ice with Pink Floyd) could have implied a neural network of sorts, manifesting at the hardware level. If you remember the episode, they had to compress the AI to fit in a briefcase.

</comment><comment><USER29> Ok so 3 layers increases the complexity but simplifies the connections. The human cortex has 6 layers.

Now create 6 layers, classify different sets of inputs as 'different' to represent different neurochemicals (you need several excitatory and several inhibitory and then a couple of very small master neurochemicals that have major excitatory and inhibitory responses to represent the dopamine network and a whole system for the amygdala), cluster different groups to either respond to inputs or create outputs, and set it loose on an environment. How close would we come to something that behaves as if conscious?

<comment><USER30> > How close would we come to something that behaves as if conscious?

The human brain is recursive in nature - the neurons and synapses form a cyclic graph. You can't do that with a simple perceptron.

<comment><USER31> If the human brain is recursive... whats stopping it from going in infinite circles ... Chemistry? If you inhibit that reaction..do you crash? can you canbecome a master of a field by having the specialized neurons keep there cycle support ed?

<comment><USER32> Cyclic graph with distributed/parallel execution means infinite loops don't halt the entire system. Some specialized neurons being tightly recursive don't generate new information, thus wouldn't build expertise, but obsession can be fruitful</comment></comment></comment></comment>


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