Exotic four-neutron no-proton particle confirmed - <AUTHOR> http://www.asianscientist.com/2016/01/in-the-lab/tokyo-tetraneutron-proton/ <comment><USER2> I know it's the title of the article, but this is NOT confirmed!

There is a paper about it, and some hints it exists, but it has not risen to the level of accepted particle.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Until they eliminate other possibilities then it is not confirmed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> May be dumb, but first thing that popped into my mind reading the title was "Whoa, element 0 discovered!"

<comment><USER5> voidium

<comment> T-zex Hoarium, to honor null refs! /s

<comment><USER6> He may not play dice, but He does program in ansi C.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They make no mention of how long the tetraneutron might stay around for. Are we looking at whole seconds, or 10^-10 seconds of stability, or what?

<comment><USER8> It's short enough that it doesn't even touch the detector. The evidence is that the energy from the four neutrons all shows up at once, instead of being split among four individual neutrons. [http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/no-protons-needed- pos...](http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/no-protons-needed-possible- discovery-of-a-four-neutron-particle/)

<comment><USER9> So, more like formation flying than some kind of bond?

<comment><USER8> There would be a binding energy just like a normal nucleus. The question here is whether they somehow violate the Pauli exclusion principle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Paywall.

Is this stable for some reasonable length of time, or is it one of those "particles" with a lifetime in nanoseconds?

<comment><USER11> Hello, why writing "particles" with the quotes? Do you consider the reality of a particle to be proportional to its lifetime? By the way, a nanosecond is a very long time when you compare it to the lifetimes of some particles (with no quotes)!

<comment><USER12> Particles are sort of mathematically more poorly defined the shorter their lifetime. But yes, a nanosecond is a long time in this context :)

<comment><USER11> > Particles are sort of mathematically more poorly defined the shorter their > lifetime.

This sentence doesn't make any sense to me. Could you please elaborate?

<comment><USER13> I know nothing about the mathematics. But I think it's fair to say that in general people tend think of particles as being a _stable_ unit of some sort. So the term "particle" becomes less appropriate the less stable something is, and time is often a factor when thinking about stability.

If someone were simply to slam 4 neutrons together, for how long would they need to stay together for this to be deemed a real particle? I think it's for this reason the original commenter quoted the use of the term "particle".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I know this is probably dumb on my part but am I the only one that had "dark matter" pop into my mind?

<comment><USER15> There aren't any known arrangements of neutrons that are stable without protons. Solo neutrons don't exist for longer than 10-20 minutes before decaying into protons and I doubt these tetraneutrons exist for longer than a few seconds unless they're moving at relativistic speeds (and even then, for not much longer). Unless there is something drastically different going on in the interstellar medium, neutrons as dark matter is extremely unlikely.

<comment><USER16> Is there an ELI5 about how a neutron decays into a proton? Aren't they separate particles?

Or maybe an ELI-only-took-undergrad-physics-101? :)

<comment><USER17> > Aren't they separate particles?

They are. Subatomic decay doesn't happen with particles "contained within" other particles; a neutron does not contain a proton but can decay into a proton, electron, and electron antineutrino via the W boson.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Except neutrons are protons bound to electrons, so that's really just 4 of each, so maybe this is just some exotic Beryllium, or a clump of degenerate neutron gas as might escape from a dead-ish star.

<comment><USER2> I can see why you would think that. But neutrons really are distinct particles.

A neutron has 3 quarks in it, not 3 quarks plus an electron.

That down quark that became an up quark: An up quark is not a down quark plus an electron.

<comment><USER19> It gets a bit more complicated than that.

Matt Strassler has a couple relevant articles on his blog site.

The first goes deeper than the 3-quark simplification.

"What's a proton? First and foremost, it's a mess. A total mess"

[http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and- posts/largehadronc...](http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and- posts/largehadroncolliderfaq/whats-a-proton-anyway/)

The second digs into both protons and neutrons

"So there are reasons to go further and describe things as I have elsewhere on this website: a proton is made from three quarks (two up quarks and a down quark), lots of gluons, and lots of quark-antiquark pairs (mostly up quarks and down quarks, but also even a few strange quarks); they are all flying around at very high speed (approaching or at the speed of light); and the whole collection is held together by the strong nuclear force"

[http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle- phy...](http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics- basics/the-structure-of-matter/protons-and-neutrons/)

And the third deals with neutron stability in nuclei, and specifically focuses on the stability of the neutron inside a deuteron.

[http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle- phy...](http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics- basics/mass-energy-matter-etc/the-energy-that-holds-things-together/neutron- stability-in-atomic-nuclei/)

[forgive me for combining a reply to an earlier comment you made on neutron stars]

We don't know the equation of state of a neutron star; most viable models have substantial layering and an impressively busy energy-density flow. Most models predict neutron stars to be very bright in neutrinos, although the brightness is typically greatest at the outer layers rather than from the deeper ones where one would expect a superfluid sea of degenerate neutrons to dominate almost to the exclusion of everything else (e.g. there _may_ be small numbers of superconducting protons floating around in it), and mechanisms which produce the Pauli Exclusion Principle are non-negligible. Possible mechanisms are somewhat constrained. How the density profile goes below the superfluid layer is I think mainly speculation; there are BH-remnant-related reasons to hope for a lattice crystal or some block-like structure of subatomic particles forming an inner core.

JM Lattimer has a recent (2013) paper: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.3510](http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.3510)

<comment><USER20> The Strassler links are VERY good, thank you for posting. I'm especially impressed that he answers comments on the posts in detail, even "stupid" questions.

<comment><USER19> I agree, Matt Strassler is a gifted communicator.

It's a tragedy that he has left full-time theoretical physics for greener pastures as a result of the huge (as in double-digit percentages, and in some cases more than a third) cuts in research budgets in the USA, coupled with his desire to remain working in the States.

Unfortunately there are quite a few good working-scientist bloggers who have been producing much reduced output as a result of lower funding in general. Some have moved out of the USA and continue to blog. Some have had to focus themselves on earning survival income by pushing out many grant proposals in hopes of even partial funding, and simply cannot afford to take the time to explain other scientsists' work to non-scientists. Some have, alas, mostly stopped blogging altogether.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tell HN: The HN submission race made visual - <AUTHOR>

A lot of the people that frequent HN have remarked on the high techcrunch content and other frequently submitted sites.
The reason for this is that there is a relatively small group of people that all 'race' to get articles from these outlets submitted.
The first one to make it is the one that will get points from all the other submitters, mostly because in their haste to be 'first' they forget to check whether the link has already been submitted.
It's the HN equivalent of the /. meme of 'first post', only with a karma boost as an incentive.
This leads to lots of borderline articles getting lots of time on the homepage, which in turn is a small but persistent factor in crowing out the more interesting stuff.
To protect the guilty and the innocent alike I've removed the usernames from the following report, the sort was by number of points per domain per user, so every line reflects a single individual submitting a certain domain.
So, for instance the first individual has submitted 716(!) links from the same domain (and first!). <comment><AUTHOR> I've put the list in a separate comment because the submission box really doesn't like this list for some reason.

       +</comment><comment>+</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----+</comment><comment></comment><comment>-+</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---+</comment><comment>----+
       | s    | domain                     | submissions | pointspersubmission | redacted |
       +</comment><comment>+</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----+</comment><comment></comment><comment>-+</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---+</comment><comment>----+
       | 6234 | techcrunch.com             |         716 |              8.7067 | redacted |
       | 4453 | nytimes.com                |         628 |              7.0908 | redacted |
       | 3853 | ycombinator.com            |          42 |             91.7381 | redacted |
       | 2519 | paulgraham.com             |          16 |            157.4375 | redacted |
       | 2506 | techcrunch.com             |         206 |             12.1650 | redacted |
       | 1971 | techcrunch.com             |         363 |              5.4298 | redacted |
       | 1888 | thestandard.com            |         446 |              4.2332 | redacted |
       | 1692 | techcrunch.com             |         358 |              4.7263 | redacted |
       | 1471 | technologizer.com          |         543 |              2.7090 | redacted |
       | 1347 | sivers.org                 |          23 |             58.5652 | redacted |
       | 1315 | nytimes.com                |         139 |              9.4604 | redacted |
       | 1308 | techcrunch.com             |         207 |              6.3188 | redacted |
       | 1180 | jgc.org                    |          59 |             20.0000 | redacted |
       | 1178 | techcrunch.com             |         102 |             11.5490 | redacted |
       | 1158 | alleyinsider.com           |         413 |              2.8039 | redacted |
       | 1120 | catonmat.net               |          26 |             43.0769 | redacted |
       | 1090 | techcrunch.com             |         232 |              4.6983 | redacted |
       | 1082 | sfgate.com                 |         386 |              2.8031 | redacted |
       | 1076 | codinghorror.com           |          55 |             19.5636 | redacted |
       | 1036 | techcrunch.com             |         141 |              7.3475 | redacted |
       |  983 | singularityhub.com         |          83 |             11.8434 | redacted |
       |  921 | sethgodin.typepad.com      |          69 |             13.3478 | redacted |
       |  886 | nytimes.com                |          83 |             10.6747 | redacted |
       |  844 | paulbuchheit.blogspot.com  |          19 |             44.4211 | redacted |
       |  822 | gabrielweinberg.com        |          36 |             22.8333 | redacted |
       |  799 | zedshaw.com                |          14 |             57.0714 | redacted |
       |  784 | danieltenner.com           |           8 |             98.0000 | redacted |
       |  775 | centernetworks.com         |         195 |              3.9744 | redacted |
       |  757 | wired.com                  |         123 |              6.1545 | redacted |
       |  722 | antoniocangiano.com        |          95 |              7.6000 | redacted |
       |  718 | daemonology.net            |          22 |             32.6364 | redacted |
       |  708 | treehugger.com             |         280 |              2.5286 | redacted |
       |  699 | itworld.com                |         222 |              3.1486 | redacted |
       |  694 | readwriteweb.com           |         173 |              4.0116 | redacted |
       |  692 | igvita.com                 |          42 |             16.4762 | redacted |
       |  689 | wired.com                  |          45 |             15.3111 | redacted |
       |  685 | googleblog.blogspot.com    |          89 |              7.6966 | redacted |
       |  683 | whattofix.com              |          84 |              8.1310 | redacted |
       |  671 | asserttrue.blogspot.com    |         100 |              6.7100 | redacted |
       |  659 | devcentral.f5.com          |         303 |              2.1749 | redacted |
       |  652 | codinghorror.com           |          21 |             31.0476 | redacted |
       |  650 | 37signals.com              |          48 |             13.5417 | redacted |
       |  646 | david.weebly.com           |          21 |             30.7619 | redacted |
       |  637 | inc.com                    |           5 |            127.4000 | redacted |
       |  637 | joelonsoftware.com         |          13 |             49.0000 | redacted |
       |  632 | centernetworks.com         |         102 |              6.1961 | redacted |
       |  616 | andrewchen.typepad.com     |          46 |             13.3913 | redacted |
       |  615 | techcrunch.com             |          40 |             15.3750 | redacted |
       |  613 | techcrunch.com             |         120 |              5.1083 | redacted |
       |  611 | ajaxian.com                |         199 |              3.0704 | redacted |
       |  610 | steve-yegge.blogspot.com   |           7 |             87.1429 | redacted |
       |  599 | slash7.com                 |           9 |             66.5556 | redacted |
       |  592 | readwriteweb.com           |         157 |              3.7707 | redacted |
       |  587 | tom.preston-werner.com     |           5 |            117.4000 | redacted |
       |  586 | readwriteweb.com           |         107 |              5.4766 | redacted |
       |  553 | readwriteweb.com           |         130 |              4.2538 | redacted |
       |  539 | xconomy.com                |          94 |              5.7340 | redacted |
       |  538 | boston.com                 |          57 |              9.4386 | redacted |
       |  538 | googleblog.blogspot.com    |           8 |             67.2500 | redacted |
       |  526 | blog.asmartbear.com        |           8 |             65.7500 | redacted |
       |  523 | markevanstech.com          |         207 |              2.5266 | redacted |
       |  519 | datacenterknowledge.com    |          91 |              5.7033 | redacted |
       |  515 | economist.com              |          51 |             10.0980 | redacted |
       |  514 | 37signals.com              |          24 |             21.4167 | redacted |
       |  507 | infoworld.com              |         164 |              3.0915 | redacted |
       |  490 | linux-mag.com              |          90 |              5.4444 | redacted |
       |  487 | howtoforge.com             |         228 |              2.1360 | redacted |
       |  486 | esciencenews.com           |         103 |              4.7184 | redacted |
       |  484 | businessinsider.com        |         159 |              3.0440 | redacted |
       |  482 | particletree.com           |          15 |             32.1333 | redacted |
       |  474 | techcrunch.com             |          30 |             15.8000 | redacted |
       |  465 | github.com                 |          17 |             27.3529 | redacted |
       |  463 | paulgraham.com             |           3 |            154.3333 | redacted |
       |  462 | scripting.com              |         118 |              3.9153 | redacted |
       |  461 | mattmaroon.com             |          10 |             46.1000 | redacted |
       |  454 | nytimes.com                |          64 |              7.0938 | redacted |
       |  452 | 37signals.com              |          17 |             26.5882 | redacted |
       |  449 | tipjoys2cents.blogspot.com |          13 |             34.5385 | redacted |
       |  446 | blogs.zdnet.com            |         162 |              2.7531 | redacted |
       |  444 | blog.last.fm               |           2 |            222.0000 | redacted |
       |  440 | nytimes.com                |          37 |             11.8919 | redacted |
       |  435 | mattmazur.com              |          15 |             29.0000 | redacted |
       |  432 | blogs.harvardbusiness.org  |          47 |              9.1915 | redacted |
       |  431 | news.com.com               |         236 |              1.8263 | redacted |
       |  430 | arstechnica.com            |          77 |              5.5844 | redacted |
       |  426 | bits.blogs.nytimes.com     |          72 |              5.9167 | redacted |
       |  422 | redeye.firstround.com      |          41 |             10.2927 | redacted |
       |  422 | paulstamatiou.com          |          25 |             16.8800 | redacted |
       |  421 | 25hoursaday.com            |          48 |              8.7708 | redacted |
       |  420 | venturebeat.com            |         166 |              2.5301 | redacted |
       |  416 | howtosplitanatom.com       |          57 |              7.2982 | redacted |
       |  415 | rondam.blogspot.com        |          17 |             24.4118 | redacted |
       |  415 | foundread.com              |         135 |              3.0741 | redacted |
       |  414 | valleywag.com              |         161 |              2.5714 | redacted |
       |  410 | nytimes.com                |          35 |             11.7143 | redacted |
       |  408 | reynoldsftw.com            |          88 |              4.6364 | redacted |
       |  406 | economist.com              |          92 |              4.4130 | redacted |
       |  404 | nytimes.com                |          91 |              4.4396 | redacted |
       |  397 | nytimes.com                |          37 |             10.7297 | redacted |
       |  396 | adam.blog.heroku.com       |          17 |             23.2941 | redacted |
       +</comment><comment>+</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----+</comment><comment></comment><comment>-+</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---+</comment><comment>----+

<comment><USER16> Can you reveal where I rank of the nytimes rows? I'm looking through face palms hoping I'm not the 628 submissions. But it wouldn't surprise me either...it's my daily morning read for over a decade and I've been coming around here for about three years.

Is that an excuse? :)

In my defense, I can't say I've ever had a "First!" urge. I assume it's just because I'm early to rise and on the East Coast.

<comment><USER17> my first thought was that some of these could well be innocent "click bookmarklet" first thing in the morning.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, the bookmarklet made it very easy to submit with one hand on the mouse and the other on the coffee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It would be a cool feature for HN if pg made it so that the number of times a domain is submitted directly correlates to it's decay rate. Thus, articles from really popular sites would fall off the front page faster, opening up spots for articles from newer (to us) domains.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a really good plan.

It is very tricky to do such things without introducing subtle feedback loops though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> That initial minor boost is enough to throw a submission high up the frontpage - even 2 points, given close enough together in time, can do it.

 _simple solution_ : remove the automatic upvote given when an article is submitted that has already been submitted. If people want to upvote it, it's negligible effort to do so once they get to the story on HN. _bonus_ submitting an article is a quick hack to find it on HN. Often one would also want to upvote the article, but not always e.g. one might be seeking the comments to help evaluate the article. Counting these "submissions" as "upvotes" is inaccurate.

 _summary_ : auto-upvoting of submissions is a needless, inaccurate and distorting convenience.

<comment><USER20> The submitter's vote isn't counted in the algorithm as far as I know. The original algorithm (since chanced) I believe is (p - 1) / (t + 2)^1.5 with p being the number of points. So you can see the initial vote is subtracted.

<comment><AUTHOR> It isn't with the first one, but it is with all subsequent submissions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wrote a scrappy script to process your report and find the "best" domains to consistently get "first post" on by multiplying total submissions by average points received per submission (i.e. total karma benefit). I'll ignore any sites that got fewer than 300 submissions. Result:

      techcrunch.com       - <USER2>
      nytimes.com          - <USER3>
      readwriteweb.com     - <USER4>
      thestandard.com      - <USER5>
      centernetworks.com   - <USER6>
      technologizer.com    - <USER7>
      alleyinsider.com     - <USER8>
      sfgate.com           - <USER9>
      treehugger.com       - <USER10>
      itworld.com          - <USER11>
      devcentral.f5.com    - <USER12>
      markevanstech.com    - <USER13>
      howtoforge.com       - <USER14>
      news.com.com         - <USER15>

TechCrunch is by far in the lead. But why not? They publish good stuff (usually) that HN readers like to vote up. Same for all the others in the list too.

<comment><USER22> _"... TechCrunch is by far in the lead. But why not? They publish good stuff ..."_

Articles from TechCrunch span the topical or breaking news spectrum. On rare occasions, there are posts that really should make the headlines. I'm thinking of some posts Arrington made last year. Often I've tried reading TC articles a month or a week later and there is no substance to them. Marshmallow news. Not my cup of tea.

<comment><USER21> Not your cup of tea and that's cool but.. a lot of people like ephemeral news. TC posts aren't essays that'll make good book material, but in terms of a cutting insight or an exclusive scoop that matters to a lot of people _right now_ , TC is pretty good.

Also, this site is called Hacker _News_ , rather than Hacker Essays or Hacker Articles. While I also _prefer_ the essays, articles, and deep blog posts, I also couldn't say that TC stuff isn't relevant here because it _is_ usually "news."

<comment><USER22> _"... a lot of people like ephemeral news. TC posts aren't essays that'll make good book material, but in terms of a cutting insight or an exclusive scoop that matters to a lot of people right now, TC is pretty good. ..."_

I'm not really disagreeing but I'm wary of posts from TC & a few others because the posts tend towards sensation, scoops and controversy before fact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Very interesting, is it possible to check quickly if the points follow Benford's law? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benfords_law> as a first approximation to see if people are gaming HN?

<comment><AUTHOR> Is that how it Benfords law works ?

I thought that Benfords law would allow you to distinguish between a set of points that is made up and a real one, not between a real set made by real users and one by real users + users gaming the system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I bet I'm somewhere high for Techcrunch(possibly #1...although 716 seems high), I used to submit a ton of their stuff. Don't do that as often, since I'm busy with my own site now.

edit: apparently it's not me, since searchyc only shows 91 submissions...and a few of them are "Ask HN" types

edit #2: apparently it IS me, and searchyc just doesn't work that well. (thanks for the email Jacques). I'm actually surprised that only accounted for 6K votes, I figured it'd be closer to 15K

<comment><AUTHOR> So much for the accuracy of searchyc then.

<comment><USER24> maybe I did something wrong

what I did was search for vaksel as a user, and then hit within results and entered techcrunch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> You know, after reading this, it would be interesting to compile a list of the top averaging websites as sorted by points on HN. That would be a neat way to find new sites that we collectively find interesting.

<comment><USER26> You mean, like this?: <http://top.searchyc.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've briefly considered writing a bot to just submit everything from reddit to HN.

And then I realized that would make y'all cry.</comment>


Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Laboratory - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_U-238_Atomic_Energy_Laboratory#Description <comment><USER2> If you think the link is cool, and you wish you had even one piece of it, you can build your own cloud chamber at home:

[http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/january-2015/how- to-...](http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/january-2015/how-to-build- your-own-particle-detector)

</comment><comment><USER3> The relevant clip from the last episode of QI.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipFIxrsYSxs#t=3m40s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipFIxrsYSxs#t=3m40s)</comment>


Thanks for the offer, but... - <AUTHOR> http://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2011/10/thanks-for-the-offer-but.html <comment><USER2> Four years ago, I got annoyed with repeated emails from Google recruiters and asked them to place "DO NOT CONTACT" on my file. This worked for a few months; then I started being contacted again by recruiters who "just wanted to check in case [I] had changed [my] mind".

Asking for this to be changed to "DO NOT CONTACT ON PAIN OF DEATH" seems to have worked, though.

<comment><USER3> I replied to one saying "Thank you for your continued interest, but I am no longer interested in having an employer." Maybe not those exact words, but close, and that short. Haven't heard from them in nearly two years, when it used to be every 6-12 months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > And that's where things fall down. If someone currently has a job, then > emailing them out of the blue to ask if they want to come and interview for > something vague is hoping that they're either looking, and just haven't come > to you yet,

Agree with this point, but

> or not looking but unhappy enough with their current role that all they > needed to start was an email asking them to submit a recent CV.

this is also valid, but not addressed in OP. Consider an employee who is working at a large corporation or consulting firm, who is talented but not particularly attached to his/her employer. There are many of these people. This email out of the blue from Google (or whoever) is pretty nice, and really could be the impetus to make a career move.

</comment><comment><USER5> If in-house recruiters are bad, what about headhunters?

I've received emails from a headhunter 3 times within a month asking me to apply for the same position. After the second time, I notified them that I was perfectly happy with my current position, and was not interested (noting that I had already respectfully declined the week before).

They didn't respond.

A week later I receive the same exact email.

Of course none of this trumps a friend of mine who was asked if he was interested in a "fantastic opportunity" at the company he currently worked for. After asking if he would get a referral bonus for recruiting himself for a job he already had, the recruiter hung up.</comment>


You are Probably Mis-Diagnosing People as Stupid - <AUTHOR> http://jasoncrawford.org/2010/04/how-to-work-with-stupid-people/

<comment><USER3> I had a one hour disagreement with someone at my college who was a creationist. Not only did he believe the world was only a few thousand years old, but he also believed that at some point there were floating layers of ice in orbit around the earth.

I completely disagreed with him on all fronts. However, I'm not sure that he was stupid. The impression I got was that he was working with a completely different set of axioms than I was.

At some level, you can't ask why any more. There has to be some sort of core base to your beliefs. My core belief is in things like science and math. His core belief was in the concrete word for word truth in the bible. Intelligence didn't really play into it.

When you think something is stupid, a lot of times it has to be with the core assumptions that underly their beliefs. Unearthing and understanding these beliefs and agreeing to disagree is very important.

<comment><USER4> One of my best friends in grad school was a creationist. We discussed the subject exactly once. He realized that I knew rather more about the debate than he did, I knew there was no percentage in pushing it, and we both knew that neither person was going to change their opinions soon. So we found other things to talk about.

I got him through his topology qual so he could get a masters. (He went on to get a PhD in math.) He introduced me to Linux. On the whole I think I got the better long-term bargain.

<comment><USER5> Seems reasonable.

One interesting question you can ask each other is "What would it take to change your mind?". In a certain sense--which may remind you of Karl Popper, the weaker the conditions you can offer on which you'd change your mind, the stronger your standpoint is.

Of course asking this question can be quite uncomfortable for yourself. For example, I like to think of atheism as the reasonable person's natural point of view. But I could not offer good conditions that would make me change my mind. Because I suspect I'd rather doubt my sanity than accept sensations that would be incompatible with no-gods.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Remember when that article about Facebook had 100 comments along the lines of "what have you done with the old Facebook login page? I hate this one!"?

We are probably not misdiagnosing them as stupid.

<comment><USER7> They are computer illiterate (or internet illiterate to be more precise), but not stupid.

<comment><USER6> Or just plain illiterate.

<comment><USER7> How did you come to that conclusion?

There are a lot of things I don't know and some things I am very new to. If I were to sit down with Brian cox and argue about the nuances of quantum physics I will come off as someone who is Quantum Physics illiterate, not stupid.

To some people the internet is new, mysterious and complicated like quantum physics, simply because they are not very familiar with it or interested in the technical aspects of the internet doesn't make them stupid.

<comment><USER6> How can you confuse a newspaper article with a login form if you have any ability to read and understand what you read? Yeah, the word facebook is used, and the facebook logo is on the page. But if you RTFA...

Anyway, acting stupid is as bad as being stupid. Worse, even.

<comment><USER8> I don't understand this. Why is it so hard to give someone the benefit of the doubt?

The whole piece boils down to that. And it's very useful advice for arrogant computer dweebs. You can't just write people off like that successfully.

And you certainly can't do it because 100 out of N misdirected users of one of the most _popular sites on the internet_ don't have the correct mental model for what's going on or complete confidence in that model.

<comment><USER9> "100 out of N misdirected users" Good point....I agree with the idea that whoever got confused by that article is stupid (I mean, if you can't figure out you are reading an article, then is the state of stupid even possible), but it was a fairly small sample of people, considering how many people log in to facebook per minute.

But then, I guess we're back to the question of why they navigate to facebook via google....sigh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> All of these points assume that someone who is "stupid" is someone who disagrees with your point of view. I find that is very rarely an issue in my day to day job. The real question I'd like to know the answer to is how do you deal with people who require more help and guidance than others? How do you help others to think for themselves and come up with great solutions to problems by themselves?

<comment><USER11> Great question, and something I'm still learning. I touched on some points I know in the article. E.g., if you have data or lessons-learned that they don't, share that information.

Probably a whole separate post in helping others see your point of view via questions rather than statements, so they learn your method and not just your conclusions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Easy rule-of-thumb: if you think somebody is stupid, ask "Help me to understand"

I've found that once you understand, very, very rarely do you think they are stupid any more.

<comment><USER13> I couldn't agree with you more.

On a personal note, I must admit that the level of arrogance seen in IT is sometimes quite overwhelming. Just because someone can use a computer does not automatically make them smart; _other_ people have _other_ skills, amazing! ;)

<comment><USER14> "She's not troubled, she's a dancer" \- Sir. Ken Robinson on a child whose parents feared she might be learning-disabled, thus demonstrating that different types of intelligence exist. Look up the speech on TED Talks; it is incredible.

<comment><USER15> I know the video you're referring to. It is really cool, and opens up the idea that intellectual intelligence is only 1 type of intelligence.

From my personal life, my wife couldn't care less about computers and probably would never watch a TED video, but her "people intelligence" is very high -- she can relate to many different kinds of people and wherever she goes she makes good friends and people around her hold her in high esteem.

Her dad is something of a bookworm who knows a little bit about everything and quite a bit about a couple of things. If he were younger (he's in his 70's) he'd probably get his news from HN. I've often wondered if his "intellectual intelligence" was transferred to her but in a different form... like she used it in a different way, in interacting with and reading people, instead of books.

<comment><USER16> I suspect at the biological level there are vary few differences in "types of intelligence" but people can get vary good at solving the types of problems they have already solved. I think the real trick is not to measure people based on what you are good at but what they are good at.

Coders can often walk though large logic problems instantly, but IMO that's the same basic thing as an artist knowing which 12 lines capture the basic idea of a picture. Think of it like the brain missing the correct API's, you can fake it but it's slow and buggy. But, if you start to spend 10,000+ hours solving the same types of problems and you are going to create that foundation.

EX: Cab drivers develop much better spatial reasoning skills over time. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/677048.stm>

<comment><USER17> @Coders can often walk through large logic problems instantly: I work in an IT shop where we write in house systems to support the business processes of nontechnical people. When we try to hammer out business requirements for systems we'll often have discussions with customer where we carefully question "OK, so it is ALWAYS the case that P and Q implies R", and "It's NEVER the case that P or R implies S" and so forth. The customer will say yes, yes, yes, throughout this, then she'll mention some other case can happen that logically invalidates the rest of everything she said. Only, she doesn't realize this because she doesn't have a coder's hard-edged sense of logic. But when this happens I, my boss, and my boss's boss (the CIO) will all three exchange a quick incredulous look with each other at the same time because we all ran through the logic and found the contradiction nearly instantly. Or, that is to say, as she was talking we were all three building up the same structure in our minds, and the last thing she says brings it crashing down in all three of our heads at the same time.

Trying to explain that to a non-coder is not easy to do without appearing arrogant, and I think that is why people in IT can appear rude. How do you politely say, "Your mental representations are so messy and imprecise I'm having trouble categorizing what you need?"

<comment><USER18> _How do you politely say, "Your mental representations are so messy and imprecise I'm having trouble categorizing what you need?"_

You say: "OK, now that we've covered the standard flow, let's talk about the strange cases. What are the weird situations that come up once in a while?"

For many users, "ALWAYS" translates to "always, except for the oddball case", and "NEVER" translates to "not usually, but you never know."

That's why Requirements Analysis is as much about psychology and anthropology as it is about logic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Thanks for sharing: this is a pretty succinct summary of a much better way of approaching the world than the "everybody sucks, only I see the light." It's almost NEVER true, and the people who I know that are right often enough to say that, never would.

"To know that you do not know is the beginning of wisdom."

</comment><comment><USER20> I've often found that people who "don't have the patience for stupid people" are really masking a deep seated insecurity. They figure out the one or two areas they regard as their strengths and arbitrarily define that as "intelligence" (and, sometimes, they really aren't even great at those cf: Dunning-Kreuger: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dun...>). That way, they can look at the world and see that the majority of people are "stupider" than them.

In reality, we all have areas of strengths and areas of weakness. Some people are great conceptual thinkers, some are great communicators, some are brilliant at being detail oriented etc. When I meet somebody for the first time, I really try and find where they are strong & I am weak so that I can learn something from them. Over so many dimensions of human endeavor, there's usually at least one or two major areas in which I feel like I gained something from that encounter.

Once in a while, you genuinely will meet someone who has nothing to teach you and nothing you want to associate with them. In those cases, I just put up a wall, be pleasant and engineer to be away from that person as soon as possible.

But I pretty much approach everybody with an open mind and a humble heart and it's worked wonders for me.

</comment><comment><USER21> The interesting thing about this article is that it's assumed that the problem is on the other end.

        Are they afraid of the conclusion?
        Are environmental stresses degrading their judgment?
        Are they intimidated by you?
        consider these potential cognitive and psychological problems
        They may have good judgment but poor communication skills.
        They may have raw intelligence, but poor thinking habits—patterns of absorbing, processing, and filing information.
        They may have general insecurities that make them afraid of looking stupid or give them a psychological need to win arguments.
        They may have a problem with you personally.

What if it's not them, but you, with the problem? What if (gasp) you're wrong?

This article isn't about how to work with "stupid" people, it's about how to pander like an asshole.

<comment><USER22> Trying to overcome communication barriers and understand where other people are coming from is not "[pandering] like an asshole."

<comment><USER9> Yes, but what if they are __actually __wrong, then what?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Part of the problem, particularly with Western culture, is the desire to assign _everything_ a rank, without much clue as to whether or not the metric used is credible at all. Your GPA, SAT/ACT/GRE scores, IQ, credit rating, college major, average income and choice of university all form an impression on people who want a nice box to put you in, whether you like it or not. Sure, some intelligence is probably required to achieve high rankings in some of those areas, but it isn't indicative by itself of who you are or what you're capable of. To the perceptive crowd on Hacker News, this probably seems obvious, but to most of society, these facts and figures define who you are and what you should do with your life.

The best hope for humanity, in this regard, is to judge people on what they contribute or accomplish. This will probably never become a viable paradigm for most people, because it isn't inherently concrete; it's much harder to look at someone's entire life and judge their merit relative to someone else, rather than noting that a 3.5 GPA is higher than a 3.2 GPA. In fact, once you look at the big picture, it starts to become rather noticeable that judging people at all is, most of the time, a fruitless task.

<comment><USER24> People like linear status orderings. They exist in every culture and get reinvented when there's no culture present at all.

That's why we're prepared to believe things about IQ that we'd never believe about processor or compiler benchmarks.

<comment><USER25> Could you elaborate on the IQ remark? I'm just curious as to what your thoughts are (I have no particular opinion on the matter)

<comment><USER22> Try reading this, by Cosma Shalizi: <http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html>

<comment><USER26> I would suggest submitting that to HN as its own thing. It's quite a nice read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Good article. I wish more of those smug arrogant idiots who think everyone else is an idiot would read this :P

</comment><comment><USER28> We all have vastly inflated images of ourselves. Every single person.

<comment><USER29> That is massively, dangerously wrong. Dunning, Kruger and an array of later researchers have shown that while the inept do strongly overestimate their own abilities, the highly able strongly underestimate them. The very able assume that if a task was easy for them it must be easy for everyone, while the completely inept assume that a task seems difficult because it is objectively difficult, and that they must be very able to have made the progress that they did. The lower you estimate your own ability to be, the more likely it is that you are in fact highly able. CF Downing demonstrated that people with high intelligence tend to overestimate the intelligence of people who are similarly intelligent to themselves and underestimate their own. If you think that the people around you are more intelligent than you, you're statistically likely to be the most intelligent person you know.

Personally, I think this is a highly pertinent cognitive bias, so pervasive as to affect nearly every aspect of modern life. I think that our most able thinkers keep quiet for fear of being wrong, whilst the stupidest and least informed in our society shout from the rooftops in blissful ignorance. I think that between the natural effect of "the more you know, the more you realise you don't know" and the pervasive anti-intellectualism in our society, we are becoming dominated by the loud and inept.

In my work as a gambler, I rejoice in this bias, as it is what pays my bills - bad gamblers can't even conceive the idea that there might be skill involved. Unfortunately, I think it is fucking up society - while professional scientists are careful to speak precisely, avoid hyperbole and only make statements that are backed by strong evidence, their opponents feel free to rant and rave, to extrapolate one anecdote into compelling evidence, even to deny the possibility of objectivity.

<comment><USER30> _the highly able strongly underestimate them._

I think that's a lot less generalizable than you suppose. For details, see

[http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238...](http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300123852)

Both behavioral economics and cognitive psychology show that most people overestimate their abilities most of the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This seems to be sort of a primer on rhetoric - how to effectively address an argument instead of dismissing it as merely stupid. He touches on a number of rhetorical techniques somewhat informally and I like his treatment of the subject. If you found this interesting, I'm in the middle of a book on the subject of argument and rhetoric that is actually quite engaging, called Thank You For Arguing by Jay Heinrichs.

</comment><comment><USER32> I think it's partially the environment. When I'm in an environment with people who are interested in the things that I am, I am constantly amazed at how bright people can be.

E.g. at university programming classes, some of the students are... crazy smart...

However, when I'm around people who don't share my interests, it can get tedious trying to explain things.

</comment><comment><USER33> Obvious as all this seems, I've found in managing people that it's generally something they have to learn for themselves from scratch. And it was something I had to learn for myself. It's so much easier to wrap yourself in the comfortable delusion that you're right and everyone else is a moron - <USER2> idiots in Department X have no idea how anything works and have no sense of the strategy etc etc. Engaging with the full complexity of a situation and still finding a path forward is something that comes with maturity.

</comment><comment><USER34> "stupid refers to lack of ability while ignorant refers to lack of knowledge" -- Therasus

You can educate ignorance, you can't rewire stupidity.

</comment><comment><USER35> Isn't there a saying that all people are logical and rational, but everybody just starts from unique assumptions.

</comment><comment><USER36> stupidity isn't very common... but laziness and indifference are a different story.

<comment><USER37> I don't know why you wouldn't assume that stupidity is roughly as common as intelligence. By definition, 50% of the population is below the median.

<comment><USER5> That says nothing about the distribution, or the absolute levels.

Most people are pretty competent in breathing, they don't suffocate. Still half of them are below median in their breathing abilities.</comment></comment></comment>


Imagining features for an ObjC 3.0 - <AUTHOR> https://swiftopinions.wordpress.com/2014/10/13/objc-3-0-beyond-a-new-syntax/

<comment><USER2> Exactly this. I'm holding off on Swift for as long as possible for many of the reasons that others have said better than I can (in a nutshell, it's got all of the bad parts of C++, with few of the good parts of ObjC).

The approach this article suggests would have been ideal; fix some of the warts of Objective C, but stay firmly rooted in its spirit. As things stand now, I'll be learning Swift out of necessity, not desire. And I'll be putting it off as long as possible in the somewhat selfish hope that it's a flop.

<comment><AUTHOR> Personally I went all-in on Swift. Unfortunately I found that the sceptics were largely right about Swift:

The safety features did not make the code more safe, but caused new classes of bugs. Runtime performance fairly random. Generics caused ten times as many problems as they solved. Optionals simply added runtime crashes, no additional safety.

And this was surprising, given that I regularly program Java with its optionals, use finals everywhere, clearly annotate nullables and of course I use its generics. (Given how poor the generics is in Java, anything would be an improvement, right? Or so I thought)

Programming in Swift isn't _anything_ like programming in Java/C++. It adopts a much stricter typing model - then leaves you hanging without the tools to overcome the consequences of it. Same with generics, stricter constructor rules etc.</comment></comment>


Can you figure out who wrote the chapters of this machine learning book? - <AUTHOR> http://www.aicbt.com/authorship-attribution/

<comment><USER2> Wow, even as I did not really understand all of the code, as it is quite clearly above my comfort-level, I really loved this post, as it showed me a lot of what is possible.

Having studied literature and developed a liking for a quite formalistic school of analysis I should have read more on this/got these ideas some years earlier.

I believe, that there really lies an interesting possible topic of research for students of literature, following the school of structuralism/formalism analyzing intertextuality.

Looking at a big corpus of texts from different authors/epochs (and so on) and looking at topics, references, analog "links" between the texts, quotes, et al, would maybe yield quite a "Library of Babel"[1]

[1]: [http://amzn.to/1dPUUg7](http://amzn.to/1dPUUg7)</comment>


Researchers Develop Neural Prosthesis That Improves Memory in Rats - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2011/06/22/researchers-develop-neural-prosthesis-that-improves-memory-in-rats/ <comment><USER2> Fascinating. We've been trying to read from brains, and lo, we might figure out how to make them writable.</comment>


Internetopia - the supersized Internet drawing - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/67633562/internetopia-the-supersized-internet-drawing

<comment><USER2> It's a smaller, cheaper, offline version of the milliondollarhomepage[1]

[1] [http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/](http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/)

<comment><USER3> The main difference being that the Homepage scaled much better, made it's creator a million dollars and had no physical counterpart product that had to be manufactured from a handcrafted original.

But otherwise, it's really "smaller" and "cheaper", I guess.</comment></comment>


Computational Complexity: David Johnson (1945-2016) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2016/03/david-johnson-1945-2016.html?m=1 <comment><AUTHOR> Again, the passing of one of CS heroes. /Computers and Intractability/ was one of the first CS books I bought. The anecdote they open with, about coming to your boss claiming "I can't find an efficient algorithm, I guess I'm just too dumb" (as opposed to proving that the problem is NP-complete: "i can't find an efficient algorithm, but neither can all these famous people") is still one of my favorite teaching stories.</comment>


This is the best drone according to Amazon? – The HS100 - <AUTHOR> https://dronedj.com/2018/10/30/amazon-reviews-hs100/ <comment><USER2> Just use [https://reviewmeta.com/](https://reviewmeta.com/) to validate Amazon scores of products. When you do it on HS100 it immediately gives you a warning: "Unnatural reviews possible" . Fakespot shows a Fakespot Grade F and a corrected rating of 1.3: [https://www.fakespot.com/product/holy-stone- hs100g-drone-wit...](https://www.fakespot.com/product/holy-stone-hs100g-drone- with-1080p-fhd-camera-5g-fpv-live-video-and-gps-return-home-function-rc- quadcopter-for-beginners-kids-adults-with-follow-me-altitude-hold-intelligent- battery) It seems to me that Reviewmeta and FakeSpot do work. It is just Amazon that is too lazy to do anything against fake reviews.

<comment><USER3> Fakespot and reviewmeta seem to have a bunch of false positives. I recently looked up a hair brush on fakespot and it had an F because the reviews were too similar. Turns out there isn't too much variety in how you can describe a hair brush. The reviewers I looked at had bought a variety of items and gave varying scores, so I doubt they're fake. It's more accurate to read the reviews and see if they sound genuine. A numerical score for something qualitative isn't very useful anyways.

<comment><USER4> The real problem is that the review aggregator sites don't have all the data that could possibly be available to them. For example, I wrote a 2 star review of an LED light bulb I bought on Amazon. Claimed to be 90+ CRI, was actually a garish green color with a little bit of red and blue thrown in. I measured it with a spectrophotometer and included the spectrum chart in my review. The review was not posted for "violating their guidelines" or something. So any review aggregator is missing that genuine review, as is anyone browsing Amazon.com. For this reason, I don't trust _any_ reviews anymore. Amazon filters out the negative ones!

<comment><USER5> > _" violating their guidelines" _

Any guesses as to what guidelines were violated?

<comment><USER4> My guess is that the spectrum chart triggered some spam protection, honestly. I would call customer service but Amazon's customer service can't do anything other than send you another copy of the item you're complaining about.

(That's my other Amazon story. One time, I bought some bicycle tires on Amazon. They sent me the wrong model, mountain bike size instead of road bike size. I wrote them a detailed email describing what they sent me and what they should have sent. "We're so sorry!". The next day, two identically wrong tires arrived. I complained and they refunded my money. I now had to find a way to use four mountain bike tires, and I still had no road bike tires. 2 riding days lost. An hour writing emails lost. And I still had no bike tires. I bet 99% of people would call that "great customer service". I think it's terrible. (Amazon did eventually remove the listing in question, so that's nice.))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ok so erm... we all know what to expect when an amazon article hits HN.

 _Amazon has devolved. Counterfeits. Fake reviews. Crap quality...._

IDK if this is true. That is, IDK if amazon's meaningfully worse than traditional big department stores or the brick-and-mortar sector generally.

But, say it's true. Amazon has jumped the shark. This is HN. This isn't the place for customer complaints. It's the place to hatch plans to kill amazon.

What's the bridgehead (à la pg) to a full-scale invasion of amazon territory? Reviews? Some product subset? Discovery? How would _you_ build the company that replaces amazon?

<comment><USER7> Can you beat Amazon at this point? If Amazon sees a threat, they can easily use their pricing power to force it out of business. They don't mind losing money as a means to pressure competition.

I think you'd need to play a different game altogether if you wanted to carve a new niche. What that looks like, I'm not sure. Maybe a shopping site that builds carts across various retailers and orders from the least expensive?

<comment><USER8> Everything can be beaten. Wal-Mart is now offering free 2-day shipping (min purchase, but no membership fee), and I wouldn't be surprised to see stiff competition as drone regulation loosens.

As Amazon gets into more sectors, competition will increase. I don't think that will kill Amazon, but a big breach or other bad press could be enough to get people to move to alternatives, especially if those alternatives have become more competitive.

I don't think startups can compete until larger businesses threaten Amazon (Costco, Wal-Mart, CVS, Target, etc).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Instead, they contract low-cost Chinese manufacturers to provide a custom > logo on a drone that already exists. Then Holy Stone puts the drone up on > Amazon at a significant markup.

Seems like Amazon is filled with "fake" brands like these. Is just so that if some brand messes up, they can just put out the same product under a new brand?

<comment><USER10> A lot of electronics are just rebranded Chinese goods. I remember some years back a DLink, Netgear, Netcomm etc. modem routers all came from the same supplier in a different case. I used to work for one of them and we'd purchase competitors product, open it up and it's look the same inside. We could even install our firmware onto their box.

<comment><USER11> A lot of items _period_ are like this. I've seen my same fridge with an LG, Electrolux, and Whirlpool logo on it. My grandpa worked at a factory (here in the US) that made chocolate-covered cherries and mid-shift every day they'd have a switch-over on the boxes to switch which brand they were producing. The boxes were the _only_ thing they changed, the chocolate and the cherries were still the same. Even car companies do that, the Chevrolet Aveo was made by Daewoo and branded as a Chevrolet, Daewoo, Holden, Pontiac, Ravon, and Suzuki.

<comment><USER12> That's interesting with the cars. I drive a used Camry and my cousin drives a brand new Yaris, and while I've had precisely 0 problems with the Camry she has constant problems with the "budget" Toyota model.

Googling it, it looks like Mazda makes at least some of the Yaris line, which used to be the Scion brand before that.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2018/04/09/2018-t...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2018/04/09/2018-toyota- yaris-se-its-surprisingly-ok/)

<comment><USER13> Yaris and Scion are different badgings that coexisted at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Shameless plug: as an advisor for DronesBench [http://www.dronesbench.it/en](http://www.dronesbench.it/en), which tests the electro-mechanical compliance of consumer drones, I suggested them to work on test drives of these cheap, dangerous drones to make the general public aware of the low quality level in the market. Their answer was that the general public does not care anyway, it is a war you cannot win because low prices trump all.

<comment><USER15> Since a drone can potentially violate restricted airspace, I could see some regulatory body eventually requiring approval/certification before a drone aircraft can be sold. I can imagine private pilots aren't too keen on running into some out of control flying piece of garbage at a few thousand feet.

<comment><USER16> > requiring approval/certification before a drone aircraft can be sold

Drones are like computers, you can buy all the individual parts and build it yourself. They only have a few parts: flight controller, PDB, ESCs, motors, propellers, radio receiver, camera, video transmitter, and a frame to hold everything together.

These vendors of cheap drones are just putting them together themselves and add a fancy canopy on top.

<comment><USER14> That's it. That's also why DronesBench comes with a novel, single efficiency benchmark for the electro-mechanical compliance of the drone as a system [http://www.dronesbench.it/en/fomdrone/](http://www.dronesbench.it/en/fomdrone/) . Just measure it at factory and write it on the plate or stick it somewhere on the frame, then measure again periodically during its operational life: significant decreases express hidden defects, thus becoming a preventive tool for flight safety.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A lot of comments about existing tools to spot fake reviews, and wondering why Amazon doesn't use them because the fake reviews that are dominating Amazon are clearly hurting consumers.

The long play for Amazon might just be that consumers gravitate towards the products that are actually sold by Amazon, because they can be sure that it should at least work. Eventually Amazon doesn't just control the marketplace, but is the only major vendor as well, and actually controls everything from the factory to the consumer.

<comment><USER18> It's also that fake reviewers probably don't try to game 3rd party sites rating systems. It seems plausible that if you implemented the same algo that some spotting-fake-reviews site uses on Amazon, sellers would quickly find a way around it.

<comment><USER17> Yea that's a really good point. The best way for Amazon to deal with the problem is to curate the reviewers, not the reviews, in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Anyone old enough to recall Walmart's rise to power will find amazon's trend towards cheap crap familiar. Walmart sold dirt cheap Chinese stuff of dubious quality but customer service would replace it at the drop of a hat (similar to how these companies keep bad reviews down). As shown by Walmart's success most people don't care they just want cheap crap.

It took a while for Target to rebrand itself as the less crappy source of overpriced but better quality cheap crap store for the middle and upper-middle class. Perhaps someone will come along and do this to Amazon online. Whereas Amazon clearly doesn't care that it's selling cheap crap, someone could come along and apply a little more curation to the offering.

</comment><comment><USER20> To give Holy Stone credit, they have good customer service. I bought one of their crappier models when I was first exploring the quadcopter marketplace a few years ago. They did the usual thing of proactively emailing and asking for a review after a few days, but then actually replied to my email rant about quality control with suggestions to debug the issue. Finally, once I'd crashed it one too many times and destroyed it, they sent me a new drone free of charge. I suspect they're probably doing similar to anybody who leaves a bad rating in order to groom their listings.

(Don't get me wrong - their customer service doesn't make up for their poor products. Never buy a drone with injection molded frames, since they're not serviceable. Carbon fiber with replaceable frame parts all the way.)

<comment><USER21> I've had something similar happen (with another product). I think it's the flip side of fake reviews that people don't consider: you might be able to fake your way to five stars with a new product, but keeping it actually requires a decent product and being responsible to unsatisfied customers (usually with one of those "contact us directly if you have any concerns" cards in the box)

<comment><USER22> Their reviews inevitably tank, so they start selling the same product under a new brand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is this a new thing, "Review engine 'optimization?'"

So what's the real fix here?

If I report the company then it'll shut down and reopen under a different name.

If I leave a review it'll drown it out with fake reviews.

If I shame the company - no one will see it. mom trusts ama son because ten years ago I told her to look at the reviews there.

<comment><USER24> The real fix is for Amazon to have a department of curation. Beyond a certain scale, you can't only be a passive intermediary. There are all sorts of negative actors. Just like HN has some curation (great work, Dang) Amazon needs some too, but obviously on a completely different scale.

<comment><USER25> Why should Bezos care? He's worth $160 Billion so something must be working for him. Why would he feel the need to change? Amazon is making money, he's happy, investors are happy, so ... who cares about a few unhappy customers?

<comment><USER26> Bezos cares because he's customer obsessed.

<comment><USER27> meh. just look at "Amazon dark patterns" : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17651488](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17651488)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> There's one upside to the Amazon shopping experience devolving into a primordial sludge of counterfeits and random whitelabel garbage. These vendors have no discoverability beyond Amazon reviews, so their desperation to prevent your 1-star review is drastic. If you leave a 1-star review, they'll often get in touch with you and offer you another item for free, as often as it takes, however long it takes.

The products are garbage, but most of the prices are already pretty good. When you realize the prices are for two at the cost of a review, they're even better.

I still get emails trying to give me free stuff to change a one-star review I left a year ago for a one-ear bluetooth earbud.

On the other hand, I don't see how you can buy quality on Amazon anymore. I've started shopping on niche sites for things that I want to work, and I'd never buy expensive electronics. The risk of a counterfeit is just too high.

<comment><USER16> > If you leave a 1-star review, they'll often get in touch with you and offer > you another item for free

But is it at the price of removing your 1-star review? They are buying your honesty?

<comment><USER29> Sounds like the ultimate 1-star review for these types of situations should note that they will give you a free one if you 1 star the product. People will start doing that just for free ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Man, when I read the headline I seriously thought this was going to be a report on drones that Amazon had been evaluating for commercial delivery purposes, not just an aggregate customer review article... sometimes this habit of referring to Amazon users as "Amazon" or reddit users as "reddit" has problems.

</comment><comment><USER31> It would be really nice to have a browser extension that shows the amount of other reviews every reviewer has in the last n months. Someone with 20+ review can not really be trusted and can be filtered out.

Or even better: If Amazon would spend some of their AI departments time and delete those fake reviews on a daily basis. So tired of them.

<comment><USER32> The article actually mentions Fakespot [1] which has a chrome extension as well as ReviewMeta [2] which as far as I can tell doesn't. Neither do exactly what you're asking but they seem quite useful from a quick investigation and highlight some of the issues highlighted in the article when you look at the linked product.

[1] [https://www.fakespot.com/](https://www.fakespot.com/)

[2] [https://reviewmeta.com/](https://reviewmeta.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The tiny Holy Stone drones come with one tiny 6 min battery.

A package insert offers three more batteries free, and by the way, don't forget you can give happy reviews.

The implications probably play out well for them.

// The HS170G for $30 is a hoot to zip around indoors to practice your "Mode 2" controller chops, certainly worth 5 stars for entertainment per dollar:

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0762GZR25/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0762GZR25/)

</comment><comment><USER34> Just a consideration: Isn't it at least somewhat plausible that some products attract people who are satisfied more easily and thus write good reviews? In this scenario, lots of these reviews might be honest, but nevertheless not helpful to you, since the good review only implies that you will be satisfied if you are of a similar demographic.

</comment><comment><USER35> This reminds me why I use [https://www.fakespot.com/](https://www.fakespot.com/) analysis of Amazon reviews for products that I'm unfamiliar with. I see they mentioned fakespot in the article, which is nice.

</comment><comment><USER36> From the article:

"I also think Holy Stone must be doing something to appease unhappy customers in exchange for not providing a negative review. It's just too good to be true. Just 6% of reviews of the HS100 have 1, 2, or 3-star rating."

So there are nefarious ways to achieve this. But you do not need to do sneaky things to get excellent reviews from pissed off customers. It is easy to assume that the more underhand ways have gotten the good reviews and I am sure you can go to a fake reviews bot to prove the thesis. But it is actually easier and more cost efficient to get those excellent reviews for an average product from pissed off customers by good old customer service.

Most companies have their customer service team at the bottom of the food chain, outsourced and on the minimum wage. From my experience of Google products I suspect that this goes on in a lot of companies that genuinely make wonder products. We all know the story, you struggle to find out how to complain, you struggle filling in an online form and, if you are lucky, you get an automated response. They then make resolution of your complaint as hard as possible, divorce proceedings could be easier.

Most companies don't go the 'full Google' on lousy customer service, however it still takes a while. You get there in the end. They actually have a good product so the complaints are a relatively rare thing for them. Consequently they don't have to major on customer service, the customer service guys are one or two grunts in the company and the whole thing is seen as a cost rather than a revenue centre.

If a company does have a real problem with the product and there are a lot of warranty claims then they have to shape up and get good at customer service. Otherwise they are doomed to go out of business. So they throw people at the problem and more people and are still not winning. The next step is to automate the hell out of it. So you have extremely polite letters sent to customers to get the information needed to process a warranty claim. Customers receive these and the process rolls real quick. They provide required information and the highly automated customer service process just requires some human operator to approve the claim. The warehouse (FBA) then sends the customer out replacement product on the same day. Again, sensible communication goes out and the customer again thinks that for once in their freaking life they have been listened to. Maybe, up until then they have had 'Google grade' customer service and felt left out in the cold. At this point they don't really care so much about the product - most products are commodities anyhow - they just get wowed by the instant response.

There is social engineering in this, the customer can also be led to believe that they are the first person to notice that the 'plastic could be moulded better' and they think that their feedback will be passed along to the 'design team' to help make a better product. They feel involved.

Next the follow up email goes out, asking the customer if their experience with customer service was good enough. By now they have 'bonded' with 'Debbie' or whomever they thought those nice emails were from. They don't realise that 'Debbie' can't spell to save her life and cares more about watching Netflix than their problems with the product. 'Debbie' just clicked a button with automated systems and email templates doing the rest. But because they think they know 'Debbie' they obligingly write a really nice thank you and give five stars. A review is a review, on the site - Amazon or other - there are no silos for reviews breaking them down into 'customer service' and 'product', it all goes into the same pot.

'Debbie' might reject some warranty claims but for these people 'Debbie' can click a different tick box that sends out a discount code for the customer to buy a replacement. So whatever happens, thanks to automation put in place due to the lousy nature of the product, the customer always gets something far beyond what the 'good' companies would do.

These reviews all look formulaic praise for the company because there is a high likelihood that people will write the same stuff, e.g. 'fab, utterly delighted, will buy again'. What else are they going to write?

Then some fake review spotting bot comes along and goes 'ahem... these reviews are all the same!' which implies something dastardly. Nothing dastardly has gone on at all, this is assigning conspiracy when a more plausible explanation is possible. No customers have been bribed, no begging for reviews has gone on, the hustle is far more sophisticated than that.

Obviously there is a lot of product that has to be sent out for warranty claims however, in this customer service model there is no huge team of people weighed down with a massive queue of complaints and not knowing what to do, only to ever let people down. Every complaint is dealt with in real time and there is no backlog.

So then think anti-pattern here. If you can convert 99% of complaints into raving reviews then you kind of need more complaints as that is the best way to get awesome reviews. Happy normal customers don't usually care to write a review, they have better things to do. Pissed off customers that get delightful, not seen before, utterly speedy customer service will go that extra mile and forgive human and product failings to write reviews. These reviews provide the social proof other people need to buy the product. Clearly the product is not better and can't be for this gaming of the system to work.

I am not saying this has gone on in this instance with this product - I don't work for this drone company and have no idea how they work behind the scenes. However I do know that the above technique works and that nobody is going to scan the page to notice 'all these reviews are as a result of customer service'. Even the Google bot won't notice.

Most proper companies don't put the grunts of customer service high up in the food chain, some companies selling so-so commodity items have to. So off-brand products can win reviews remarkably easily with nothing being faked in the underhand ways people with no skin in the game can imagine. I have to say American consumers are the easiest 'marks' for this type of shenanigans, YMMV in Europe.

<comment><USER37> Every time I've bought something with rave reviews only to find out it's garbage, I've left a bad review and then been emailed offering my money back if I deleted it because bad reviews hurt their business (I could of course keep the product). I've never retracted a review, and have always reported the behaviour to Amazon, but it's extremely common.

<comment><USER38> I know it's not very nice but would taking the money and not taking down the review dissuade businesses from doing this?

Or, if that is illegal (which I can imagine), just putting up a new bad review.

<comment><USER15> Ideally I'd like to see people start screenshotting the emailed "offer" and adding it to their existing negative review.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This year, media was focusing on taking down Facebook, i'm forecasting 2019 will be the year media will focus on Amazon. Let's see

</comment><comment><USER40> some iPhones have bigger margins than these drones.</comment>


Please, Learn All the Things - <AUTHOR>

"Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can - there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did." - Sarah Caldwell
I am a specialist (programmer), and a jack of all trades. In the last two month my garbage disposal broke, my mailbox was ran over by a car, and my lawn welcomed its new dandelion overlords. I have managed to replace my garbage disposal without being a plumber, replace my mailbox without reading the manual, and overthrow those fascist dandelions without being a professional landscaper.
I remember once received about 25 'broken' monitors from a hospital. I was able to fix everyone (with the exception of the broken screens) by simply knowing how to identify and replace broken capacitors, something I was taught a while back with every intention of becoming the best electrical engineer I could be.
Programming is my primary passion and profession. My secondary profession is cooking Thai food. My secondary passion, learning.
I am a professional programmer, who just recently turned 21, with no degree. I can say I am no professional landscaper, no plumber, and definitely no electrical engineer. I can say though, that at each opportunity I was given to learn something about plumbing, programming, or electrical engineering, I have taken and benefited.
To the argument that is currently going on on whether or not everyone should learn to program, I say that neither side is right, and even the argument itself is wrong.
Strive to be the best programmer/electrical engineer/cook/plumber/landscaper/you name it you can be, and you will benefit... always.
So to anyone anywhere, I say learn everything everywhere. Not just programming or plumbing, but everything at every opportunity. <comment><USER2> There's a difference though between taking opportunities to learn and going out of your way to learn something.

You don't mention anything about learning to speak Polish, though you certainly could learn if you wanted to.

I agree that you shouldn't pass up opportunities for learning, but you also can't learn everything. And there's opportunity cost involved in anything you decide to do with your time. For example, time spent dealing with dandelions could have been spent learning Polish if you had paid someone to take care of the dandelion problem.

I think almost anyone (myself most definitely included) can benefit from a renewed emphasis on learning, but you can't forget that while you can learn anything, you can't learn everything.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is true, there always is an opportunity cost. But people have a lot more time in their day than they believe, and there definitely is time to go out of your way to learn something new.

I may not be trying to learn polish right now, but I am attempting to learn Italian. (Due to the fact that learning a language is no small undertaking, I'm attempting to learn using the "pimsleur approach")</comment></comment>


So I baked a Sony Vaio today... - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/yhtnd/so_i_baked_a_sony_vaio_today/

<comment><USER2> LOL. I misread and thought he put the whole laptop in and the tinfoil was what was left of the casing.</comment>


A nice service for a website to make screenshots - <AUTHOR>

Anyone remember this nice website, which allowed a user to push a button on the website to make a screenshot of the view he's currently seeing and then automatically send it to the customer support?
I know i saw this url on HN some time ago, but cannot remember now what it was...
Thank you. <comment><USER2> Do you mean take a view of the website, like <http://www.websnapr.com/> does, or do you mean a view of the whole screen?

I'm sure I've seen the whole screen version but can't find it. There are several screencast creation programs - this <http://alicious.com/2010/online- screencast-tools/> gives a roundup of a few.

Also aviary and pixlr have plugins for FF that allow you to take screenshots; as mentioned in that link.

<comment><AUTHOR> I mean just from website, something similar you mentioned, but with higher resolution. It also offered a layer where user can enter some details for the screenshot and then press "send" button to send this screenshot with his/her comments to the help desk. Thank you for your suggestions.</comment></comment>


AT&T Will Now Filter Robocall Spam, If You Pay Them Extra - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190711/07183542565/att-will-now-filter-robocall-spam-if-you-pay-them-extra.shtml <comment><USER2> So if I pay more for this service and still get robocalls, do I get double my money back, only what I paid back, an apology, or pointed to a section in the terms and services that paying extra guarantees me nothing?

</comment><comment><USER3> Private entities that knowingly transmit robocalls, spam, and financial scams should be prosecuted for harassment and accessory to fraud. As they've long argued, they're not a common carrier with a responsibility for neutral content transmission.

</comment><comment><USER4> This may be a dumb question, but when I first moved to the US I was stunned to find that I was paying to receive calls and text messages. Is that still a thing? If so, would knowingly forwarding spam and fraud, and charging you to receive said call be itself fraudulent?

</comment><comment><USER5> I just had a thought, and it might be a very bad one: why can't robocallers be de-platformed in the same way Facebook and Twitter de-platforms accounts they consider to be harmful on their platforms?

<comment><USER6> There's no moral reason for any of these actions. AT&T makes money from spammers, so do the other networks, and it's hard to switch phone providers, so they won't stop them.

Unless they are forced to either block the calls or forced to forward the origination information so users can block whatever callers they want using a ublock/adblock style subscription list, this won't stop.

<comment><USER7> > There's no moral reason

Of course there is a moral reason. There are moral reasons we can come up with for every possible human action, because morals are subjective. Thus, the statement "There's no moral reason" is always false. The opposite is meaningless (in the same way that saying "water is wet" would be meaningless).

<comment><USER6> This is nothing but pedantry. All I'm saying is that AT&T isn't going to come up with a good solution to spammers out of the kindness of their hearts.

<comment><USER7> In the same way that what I said is pedantic, claiming a moral reason is obvious or self-evident is self-righteous. You are implying that to you there is an obvious moral reason and it should be obvious to the reader what that moral reason is. What I was trying to tell you is that it is not obvious to me.

Even now that you've explained the effect of your moral reasoning, I don't understand what makes this moral (or even a reason). Is it a moral reason when they continue to exploit the situation as it is even though it is unfriendly to their customers and stimulates abuse of the system?

<comment><USER6> We seem to be in agreement that AT&T is exploiting a bad situation. The top poster asked why they don't come up with a more effective solution to eliminate spam calls for good. All I'm saying is that it's naive to assume any phone company will implement such a solution unless forced to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> NomoRobo has been doing this for ages. Lots of companies do this already.

</comment><comment><USER9> First one to do it for free wins the mobile market.</comment>


itiswhatitis.fm - <AUTHOR> https://xn--mp8hai.fm <comment><USER2> More context here: [https://constine.substack.com/p/what-does-mean- well](https://constine.substack.com/p/what-does-mean-well)

We should know more tonight by 7 pm.

</comment><comment><USER3> What character is the url supposed to be?

<comment><USER4> It's supposed to be:

Woops, HN filters the emojis. The eyes and mouth on the page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice to see emoji domains in the news...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> it is what it is</comment>


Ask HN: What is the oldest code in production that you still use? - <AUTHOR> I defined "oldest" as code which hasn't been updated/maintained since. <comment><USER2> I started work in 1998, first thing I worked on was part of the Bank of England regulatory reporting software used by 100s of banks. I'm pretty sure some of that will still be in use.

The next thing I worked on was for British Gas for one of their core processes. I changed at least 100 screens and rewrote their daily batch process. I just heard that's still going and unlikely to have changed.

Both systems originated from early 1990s

<comment><USER3> Hi I like what you have to say thorin. If possible could you email me @ firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Our company has COBOL that's from the 80's. There's some Java batch stuff and Oracle SPs that I worked on 7-8 years ago that are still in use.</comment>


WD Announces PiDrive for Pi Day - <AUTHOR> http://www.wdc.com/en/company/pressroom/releases/?release=22d07183-95f4-44de-a170-5c79659e9ddb <comment><USER2> OK, this is just silly. They clearly had to throw away some of the capacity to get that number. Or am I am being duped?

<comment><USER3> I think you're right.

But I also think it has a USB3 adapter on the drive itself (straight connection to the Pi USB) and an altered form factor to fit the Pi. The latter is hard to tell from the description/photos, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I just noticed the USB connector, so thats another couple of bucks you don't have to shell out for if you were just fitting a standard HDD, that could be $5-10 depending on what you got.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sadly, the 320GB WD Blue 2.5 drive is $22 on Amazon, so its not even really a good deal. When you consider the volume of the market its pretty gimmicky. However, if this drive is actually lower power usage, it could be worthwhile for certain types of embedded applications.

<comment><USER4> Do you happen to have a link for that?

I've found a WD Blue 3.5" 320 GB for $22 [1], but am not seeing any 2.5" for less than $37. Those are SATA, so you'd need a USB to SATA adaptor. The PiDrive is USB already.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Caviar-Drive- WD3200AAJ...](http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Caviar-Drive- WD3200AAJS/dp/B000Q85WOK/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Purchase page:

[http://wdlabs.wd.com/products/wd- pidrive-314gb/](http://wdlabs.wd.com/products/wd-pidrive-314gb/)</comment>


Trickle-down Workaholism in Startups - <AUTHOR> https://signalvnoise.com/trickle-down-workaholism-in-startups-a90ceac76426 <comment><USER2> [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PcuiIW...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PcuiIWsmSSYJ:https://m.signalvnoise.com/trickle- down-workaholism-in-startups-a90ceac76426+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca)

</comment><comment><USER3> Link is down.

<comment><AUTHOR> Grargh. Fixed link is [https://m.signalvnoise.com/trickle-down-workaholism-in- start...](https://m.signalvnoise.com/trickle-down-workaholism-in- startups-a90ceac76426) (with an m). Could a kind mod fix that up?

<comment><AUTHOR> And under _that_ URL, a much more complete discussion is at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14444467](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14444467)</comment></comment></comment>


The Evolution of an Elevator Pitch - <AUTHOR> http://www.emergentone.com/blog/the-evolution-of-an-elevator-pitch/

<comment><USER2> Inspiring read. I especially like the anticipated 'how' question at the end. This encourages me to trial and error my own elevator pitch.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting to see how the pitch improved when the explicit problem statement and value proposition were dropped. Those are instead implied in the single- sentence pitch, which I guess partly is what prompts the "How?" question.

</comment><comment><USER4> I initially read the domain as "emergent tone"...I thought it was a single- serving site about this topic!</comment>


Easy-Python: Libraries and Resources - <AUTHOR> http://easy-python.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

<comment><USER2> This is a nice list. There's also [https://github.com/vinta/awesome- python](https://github.com/vinta/awesome-python), which is a bit more comprehensive.

<comment><USER3> Came here to post the same link. This includes a lot of packages that I use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why not add these to the Python Guide [1]? When I'm learning/reading about something, I like big, comprehensive resources, especially if they cover the same topic, instead of hunting for small websites like this...

[1]: [http://docs.python-guide.org](http://docs.python-guide.org)

</comment><comment><USER5> It almost collects all the packages I've ever used. Nice list!

</comment><comment><USER6> Web2py?????</comment>


Highway to the Danger Zone: Meet Kenny Dialoggins - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/coroutine/kenny_dialoggins Hi, there. I'm Kenny Dialoggins. If you're a Rails developer who wants to use scriptaculous dialogs but doesn't want to mess with JavaScript, you might want to prep your best friend for some bad news. We're going to be spending a lot of time together. <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, there. I'm Kenny Dialoggins. If you're a Rails developer who wants to use scriptaculous dialogs but doesn't want to mess around with JavaScript, maybe we should hang out.</comment>


Show HN: Fido U2F on Android - <AUTHOR> https://hwsecurity.dev/fido/ <comment><AUTHOR> We developed a vendor-independent FIDO U2F implementation for Android that works with Security Keys over NFC and USB.

It's dual licensed under GPLv3 so you can inspect the source code or use it in your open source Android app: [https://github.com/cotechde/hwsecurity](https://github.com/cotechde/hwsecurity)</comment>


Pediatricians walk back school-reopening stance as WHO gives dire warning - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/07/pediatricians-walk-back-school-reopening-stance-as-who-gives-dire-warning/ <comment><USER2> The administration is clearly following the currently available science and what the global community is doing. On the other hand the teachers Union in LA wants to use this opportunity to increase federal funding and get a moratorium on charter schools. If that isn't political I don't know what is. I heard them say they didn't have time for preparations? What have they been doing for almost 5 month?

Both, NY and LA, the big school districts that won't open this fall, are in deep blue states and not swing States. They hope to signal a strategy to the rest of the country. We will see how that's gonna work out.</comment>


CrossCat: a domain-general, Bayesian method for analyzing high-dimensional data - <AUTHOR> http://probcomp.csail.mit.edu/crosscat/ <comment><USER2> Paper describing the software, including some example figures: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.01272](http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.01272)

</comment><comment><USER3> There are not so many nonparametric Bayesian alternatives yet for multiview clustering. So, this software is a really nice contribution!

Alternatives:

* The group of Ghahramani [1] use a stick-breaking representation instead of the authors of CrossCat, plus a variational method rather than sampling.

* It's even possible to reuse features across categories by stacking an Indian Buffet Process and a Chinese Restaurant Process [2].

The difficulty for the person who has to cluster the data is that the inference method has to be obtained from scratch. Each time that something small changes, not only the model has to be altered, but also a new inference process has to be implemented.

So, suppose we have dependencies between the categories, they might be spatial, they might be temporal, this leads again to more complex processes.

I think it's important for CrossCat to describe what kind of structure it can discover. To be future-proof it's also important to describe what the roadmap will be.

[1] [http://www.ece.neu.edu/fac-ece/jdy/papers/nonparametric- mult...](http://www.ece.neu.edu/fac-ece/jdy/papers/nonparametric-multiclust- kdd10.pdf)

[2] [http://machinelearning.wustl.edu/mlpapers/paper_files/AISTAT...](http://machinelearning.wustl.edu/mlpapers/paper_files/AISTATS2012_NiuDG12.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks like a good lib, but only Python2 with lots of C++ hooks =/

It would probably be fairly time consuming to port this to Python3.

However, shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.

</comment><comment><USER5> Sounds interesting! Are there any examples of the output/analysis somewhere?</comment>


Show HN: Our first infographic: The evolution of Nexus devices - <AUTHOR> http://blog.getinch.com/evolution-nexus-devices-infographic/ We just finished our first ever infographic and looking for feedback. Every comment is welcome; what do you think? <comment><USER2> a little insider info: it was created using Sketch.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you use AWS autoscaling with fully baked AMIs? - <AUTHOR>

Is anyone using autoscaling on AWS with fully baked AMIs and blue/green deployments (as opposed to base images that get the latest app code from git or S3 at boot time, then get explicitly deployed to for updates) ? This is what this blog post describes as « phoenix » rather than « snowflake » servers : http://blog.woorank.com/2013/10/phoenix-servers-packerio/
I'm using Packer and Ansible to build a ready-to-go AMI in a few minutes from a base OS image.
But then, what tools do you use to automate the process of getting this AMI live ? Which entails : creating a new Launch Configuration with the AMI, pointing a standby autoscaling group to the new Launch config, ramping up the number of instances in it, start routing live traffic to it (likely by updating a Route53 alias entry to point to the right ELB), and finally scaling down the previously live group. Rinse and repeat.
I'm about to roll my own boto-based script to do that, but I'm sure this has to be a common pattern : anything out there already ? <comment><USER2> We use Cloudformation to define everything in our stack. The AutoScalingGroup resource has an attribute called UpdatePolicy that describes how instances with the new AMI are deployed into the existing autoscaling group.

As long as there is enough difference between the current number of instances in service and the maximum size of the ASG, existing instances won't be terminated until the new instances are passing healthchecks and the load balancer is sending them traffic. If the maximum has been reached, enough existing instances will be killed to provide room for the next batch of new instances.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've built just this for a client recently. There's one Ansible playbook that can be used to build a template for baking the AMI, and that same playbook can also be used to update a running instances on the fly, so you can update code without having to replace instances (which I strongly believe is better, and it's certainly faster than doing the instance cycling dance).

Then there's a second playbook to bake the template into an AMI, update the launch configs and tell the autoscaling groups to use the new launch configs. For the latter two I had to write Ansible plugins (which the client might let me open source, once documented).

</comment><comment><USER4> The BBC use the pre-baked AMIs exclusively for our deployments, we have a concept of a "bakery" which creates a full formed AMI which we then use in our launch config.

The idea being that when you do a deploy, the launch config is updated to use the new AMI ID. The old instances are terminated and the new ones popup in its place. You can play with the scaling options to set an update pause time. We can get a 0 sec downtime with this.

</comment><comment><USER5> I bake ami using both packer and ansible and then do blue/green deployments using asgard from netflix. Asgard streamlines the whole process of creating a new autoscaling group, ramp up new instances and then cut of live traffic to the older instances. They also expose a simple http api to fully automate deploys.

I have been doing continuous deployments baking ami's with asgard for a couple of years now and have had great results.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you're comfortable with Chef, OpsWorks makes this pretty easy. There are several lifecycle stages, including one for deploying your latest app code. OpsWorks also lets you autoscale based on load or time of day. There is a Capistrano plugin to launch new deployments if that's what you're used to. It's all not as well documented as a lot of AWS, but it's a great tool.</comment>