Matrix Calculus - <AUTHOR> http://www.matrixcalculus.org <comment><USER2> For those who might not realize how amazing this is, take a look at how you can do these things manually:

[https://tminka.github.io/papers/matrix/minka- matrix.pdf](https://tminka.github.io/papers/matrix/minka-matrix.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> I never learned matrix calculus so I find this tool helpful for following technical papers that involve some matrix calculus

<comment><USER4> I have done all kinds of work that required some kind of matrix calculus in one form or another. There are of course all kinds of references (sibling links to my favorite), but I have found that more often than not really the best way to get the results you want is just to calculate them yourself. The work involved is usually tedious but trivial. But working through it goes along way to help make some sense of the various identities that come out. In looking at an identity one may see a transpose here, an inner product there, but not be able to assign any importance or distinction to any particular term at first glance. Working through a few calculations help with this.

EDIT: I suppose I should also say that I never "learned" matrix calculus either, in the sense that I internalized the various features unique to matrices under derivatives and integrals. The calculations I refer to above are crude, naive ones in the scalar notation under whatever coordinate system seems appropriate.

<comment><USER5> When I was starting out in machine learning, as a programmer with the most rudimentary calculus background, it was easy to derive algorithms that had terms like "gradient w.r.t X of log(det(inv(λI + A X A')))" which absolutely stumped me when trying to derive the gradient by hand by elementwise partials.

However, thanks to Minka's notes and the Matrix Cookbook, I was able to eventually get a handle on easy techniques for these derivations! It's certainly no substitute for getting a handle on the theory first by studying a textbook, but these pattern-matching shorthands are important practical techniques.

<comment><USER6> How did you start in machine learning. Did you come from a top 10 school?

<comment><USER5> No, I failed out of university and am self-taught. I spent many years deliberately underemployed working on self-study and coding up projects at the limit of my abilities. I had decided to bet on investing in myself instead of just carrying out some boss's wishes, which would be more optimized to benefit the company than my own growth and development.

Here's a great resource if you're starting out today: [http://datasciencemasters.org](http://datasciencemasters.org)

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the link! That's more or less the road I'm starting down right now, albeit with likely a bumpier past (dropped out of HS in addition to college and spent a few years doing almost nothing productive.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can see that x' means $x^T$ (x transposed) but it's not mentioned in the documentation — where does this notation come from?

<comment><USER9> Matlab/octave

<comment><USER10> With caveat that A' is Hermitian transpose (transpose + complex conjugate) when A has complex entities, and you need A.' if you want the real transpose. For matrix A with real coefficients both operations are the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Awesome, pretty handy to have for engineering/scientific computing code. Over time, you do start to build the intuition just like you do for scalar derivative calculations, but it takes time.

</comment><comment><USER12> The example has sine of a vector in it. I haven't had coffee yet today but I've never heard of being able to compute sine of a vector. What does this mean? Defining it by its Taylor series doesn't work like it does for square matrices because vectors can't be multiplied, and if you assume the direct product is what's meant then each term in the Taylor series is a different sized matrix and can't be added. Surely it doesn't mean elementwise sine?

<comment><USER13> It is element-wise sin, which is not entirely correct. You can take the sin of, or any analytic function of a matrix, however you'd have to compute the characteristic polynomial for the matrix and apply the function to that. It is a result of the Cayley-Hamilton Theorem. here is a tutorial: [http://web.mit.edu/2.151/www/Handouts/CayleyHamilton.pdf](http://web.mit.edu/2.151/www/Handouts/CayleyHamilton.pdf)

<comment><USER14> You don't need to know the characteristic polynomial to do it. Just sum as many terms of the power series as you want.

What the characteristic polynomial lets you do is to calculate it faster and more accurately because very large powers can be rewritten in terms of smaller powers that you already computed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is the source code for this available?

</comment><comment><USER16> Along the same lines, does there exist an "algebra checker" that could, say, take in two successive lines of latex, with perhaps a hint of how to get from one to the other, and confirm that there are no algebra errors?

<comment><USER17> Mathematica can probably do that

<comment><USER18> Correct:

        Implies[x^2 + 2 x + 1 == 0, x == -1] // FullSimplify

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I cannot even begin to explain how intensely I've been desiring this.

</comment><comment><USER20> I haven't touched calculus since college and this freaks me out. I don't even know where to begin, all I remember is using mnemonics to recall rules for dx/dy or something. How would someone go about understanding this? ML is super interesting but seems daunting to anything worthwhile without understanding the maths behind it.

</comment><comment><USER21> Some time ago I implemented a library [1] similar to this tool. The tricky part is that derivatives quickly exceed 2 dimensions, e.g. derivative of a vector output w.r.t. input matrix is a 3D tensor (e.g. if `y = f(X)`, you need to find derivative of each `y[i]` w.r.t. each `X[m,n]`), and we don't have a notation for it. Also, often such tensors are very sparse (e.g. for element- wise `log()` derivative is a matrix where only the main diagonal has non-zero values corresponding to derivatives `dy[i]/dx[i]` where `y = log(x)`).

The way I dealt with it is to first translate vectorized expression to so- called Einstein notation [2] - indexed expression with implicit sums over repeated indices. E.g. matrix product `Z = X * Y` may be written in it as:

        Z[i,j] = X[i,k] * Y[k,j]   # implicitly sum over k

It worked pretty well and I was able to get results in Einstein notation for element-wise functions, matrix multiplication and even convolutions.

Unfortunately, the only way to calculate such expressions efficiently is to convert them back to vectorized notation, and it's not always possible (e.g. because of sparse structure) and very error-prone.

The good news is that if the result of the whole expression is a scalar, all the derivatives will have the same number of dimensions as corresponding inputs. E.g. in:

        y = sum(W * X + b)

if `W` is a matrix, then `dy/dW` is also a matrix (without sum it would be a 3D tensor). This is the reason why backpropogation algorithm (and symbolic/automatic differentiation in general) in machine learning works. So finally I ended up with a another library [3], which can only deal with scalar outputs, but is much more stable.

Theoretical description of the method for the first library can be found in [4] (page 1338-1343, caution - 76M) while the set of rule I've derived is in [5].

[1]: [https://github.com/dfdx/XDiff.jl](https://github.com/dfdx/XDiff.jl)

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

[3]: [https://github.com/dfdx/XGrad.jl](https://github.com/dfdx/XGrad.jl)

[4]: [http://docs.mipro- proceedings.com/proceedings/mipro_2017_pro...](http://docs.mipro- proceedings.com/proceedings/mipro_2017_proceedings.pdf)

[5]: [https://github.com/dfdx/XDiff.jl/blob/master/src/trules.jl](https://github.com/dfdx/XDiff.jl/blob/master/src/trules.jl)

</comment><comment><USER22> Would be nice if there was a "symmetric matrix" variable type, so it could simplify Ax + A'x to 2Ax if A is symmetric.

<comment><USER23> I wonder why they don't do it. In the tool I had running, we handled this by removing any transpose of a symmetric matrix (after propagating it before the leaves). Together with the simplification rule x + x -> 2*x for any x, you get the expected result. I could only guess why they didn't include it in the online matrix calculus tool. It was published after I left the group.

<comment><USER24> It is not in the current online tool but we will add it again soon. It is still in there the way you describe it (passing transpose down to the leaves and simplification rules as well). Btw: How are you doing and where have you been? Would be nice to also add a link to you and your current site. GENO is also on its way.

<comment><USER23> I'm good. Looking at things from the data angle now. But unfortunately no public page. You can link to the old one, if you want to. Have you compared against TensorFlow XLA?

<comment><USER24> I did not compare to Tensorflow XLA but I compared it to Tensorflow. Of course, it depends on the problem. For instance, for evaluating the Hessian of x' _A_ x MC is a factor of 100 faster than TF. But MC and TF have different objectives. TF more on scalar valued functions as needed for deep learning, MC for the general case, especially also vector and matrix valued functions as needed for dealing with constraints. But I will give TF XLA a try.

<comment><USER23> I think XLA is trying to reduce the overhead introduced by backprop, meaning when you optimize the computational graph you might end up with an efficient calculation of the gradient (closer to the calculation you get with MC). Regarding non-scalar valued functions: Don't you reduce a constrained problem to a series of unconstrained problems (via a penalty (or even augmented Lagrangian) or barrier method)? Then you only need the gradient of a scalar valued function to solve constrained problems. I imagine you can use the gradients of the constraints for solving the KKT conditions directly but this seems only useful if the system is not too big. But for sure it opens new possibilities.

<comment><USER24> XLA is good for the GPU only. On the CPU MC is about 20-50% faster than TF on scalar valued functions. For the GPU I don't know yet. But it is true that for augmented Lagrangian you only need scalar valued functions. This is really efficient on large-scale problems. But on small-scale problems (up to 5000 variables) you really need interior point methods that solve the KKT conditions directly as you point out. This is sometimes really needed. However, when you look at the algorithms TF and MC do not differ too much. In the end, there is a restricted number of ways of computing derivatives. And basically, most of them are the same (or boil down to two versions). Some of the claims/problems made in the early autodiff literature concerning symbolic diff is just not true. In the end, they are fairly similar. But lets see how XLA performs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is it open source.

</comment><comment><USER26> Bookmarked!</comment>


SF responds to parents in algebra dispute - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-responds-to-parents-in-algebra-10415538.php <comment><USER2> I was ready for Algrebra in 6th grade, but we moved and I had to wait until 8th grade. It was boring repeating arithmetic for 2 additional years.

I'm glad I was able to get it in 8th grade, though, as I was able to get BC Calc in high school. The engineering students in college who first saw calculus in college didn't usually do very well.

In university, I did an informal poll of the foreign students I met over the years I was there. Irrespective of major, they pretty much all said they got to Algebra in 6th grade.

On the other hand, I don't really see the point of forcing everyone to take math as early as possible or as advanced as possible. In our state, nurses need to take and pass college Algebra, which is equivalent to Algebra II, Trig, and some Analytical Geometry and Linear Algebra. This prevents a lot of people from becoming nurses. The argument is that this teaches abstract reasoning skills. Such a waste to prevent people from becoming nurses over a skill they'll never use, and which nothing else they learn needs.

</comment><comment><USER3> _Yet district officials have stood firmly behind a policy that keeps all students together in math through middle school, eliminating the tracking of students into classes based on their level of academic ability, which often separates white, Asian and wealthy students from their low-income, Latino and black peers._

 _To bypass the district's policy, some public school parents have been paying for outside algebra courses to prepare their children to take a placement test that would allow them to enroll in geometry freshman year. But the courses are expensive, and not everyone can afford them._

So, to "fix" a racial issue the district created an economic issue. These people teach children and don't get logical outcomes of their actions.

</comment><comment><USER4> In my school, it was Alegebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, AB Calculus.

The only benefit of Algebra in Middle School was that it set you up for BC Calculus senior year.

<comment><USER5> No Trigonometry?

<comment><USER4> I don't think we had a special class for it.</comment></comment></comment>


MinimaLT: Minimal-latency Networking Through Better Security (2013) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://cr.yp.to/tcpip/minimalt-20131031.pdf

<comment><USER2> Wasn't there research showing that in channels mixed with tcp traffic , high tcp traffic can effectively block MinimaLT traffic, effectively creating DoS?

</comment><comment><USER3> This sounds great. A year later, where's the code?

<comment><USER4> Looks like it will be here: [http://www.ethos-os.org/](http://www.ethos- os.org/)

@JonSolworth ([https://twitter.com/jonsolworth](https://twitter.com/jonsolworth)) occasionally posts progress updates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> >Whether strangers or anonymous users are allowed is left to the underlying system's authorization policy.

While DoS protection is nice, I would hate to encourage networking that forces client authentication. Imagine if Google/Facebook/etc could effectively enforce a real name policy.

<comment><USER6> That doesn't matter. You can generate a new Curve25519 identity key per connection.</comment></comment>


The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps - <AUTHOR> https://www.geekwire.com/2018/new-word-processor-wars-fresh-crop-productivity-apps-trying-reinvent-workday/ <comment><USER2> Just a quibble but I see this a lot - if you're talking about strategy it's "bottom-up", not "bottoms-up".

A bottom-up strategy is something like marketing your tool to users who then bring it into their company for wider adoption.

A bottoms-up strategy is drinking until the problem goes away.

<comment><USER3> I have the same feeling about this, and I've noticed that folks from the UK are more likely to use "bottoms-up" to mean both. I rarely hear it from US- born speakers. Has anyone else noticed this pattern?

<comment><USER4> Not a Brit myself, but I've noticed they tend to put an s on the end of a lot of things. e.g. "maths"

<comment><USER5> "Maths" makes sense though, as short for "mathematics". However, "bottom-up" refers to "from the bottom up", I think, which is singular.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> At this point I look at Word and Excel the same way I look at bash, gcc, grep, sed, awk, et cetera: there is so much iniertia that even when different and arguably better tools come along, it still never truly goes away.

A lot of people still use emacs, vim, BBEdit and so on, but a lot of people also use IntelliJ, VSCode and Atom or whatever is in vogue this year. Vim and emacs will never truly go away no matter how many CPU architectures or operating systems come along this century, and neither will Word. At some point software is just infrastructure. We can build better bridges than we could a century ago, but there isn't an incentive to replace a bridge until it falls down, and it isn't like Word prevented Markdown and TeX and HTML from finding their niches.

<comment><USER7> Word, yes. Word is a turd. Word needs to die.

Excel, however, is magic. Forget the nasty ribbon interface and the horrid MS window chrome, I'm just talking about what happens inside those cells.

Say what you will about Microsoft as a company, about the fact that Excel is possibly over-used and that users should probably get a database. I don't care. Excel, at its core, is a magical product. Nothing else gets close to its functionality/friction curve (assuming you already know how to Excel, that is).

<comment><USER8> Why don't you like Word?

I think it's still going to be the best for a while, if not only because it's _massive._ My CS professor says it's the biggest program ever written.

It can so so much, like check for passive voice and more subtle grammar things.

At the end of the day, the subscription model is off-putting, but "needs to die?" why?

<comment><USER9> > _Why don 't you like Word?_

Here are my main reasons:

\- It does not allow me to make selections where I point my mouse cursor.

\- It breaks between versions of itself and intentionally breaks interoperability with nearly all third party software, especially when tables and formulas are involved.

\- Formula and math editing and typesetting is abysmal.

\- The quality of typesetting is abysmal. I know because I once had to convert an article with formulas written in LaTeX by hand into Word. The editor of the journal was very ashamed of the quality of the result in comparison to the original.

\- Images and other boxes inserted into the text almost never work in the intended way. They slip between pages, get the wrong flow around them, cannot be selected, etc.

\- It is practically impossible to import documents produced in other tools reliably into Word or reliably export Word documents to be processed with other tools (like e.g. LaTeX). Even pandoc cannot compile to Word files that work reliably enough. Some of the errors that occur are nearly unfixable, e.g. bizarre things strange characters in lines that cannot be erased, stretched and distorted characters.

\- Horrible default auto styles.

\- Ribbon interface and other user interface problems that make Word one of the most unintuitive pieces of software on earth (many people just don't realize this, because they have been using it for so long and so often)

\- relatively expensive

<comment><USER10> > Formula and math editing

Word supports LaTeX for formulas now!

That aside, Word's formula editor is really powerful but it does have a learning curve. I'd say that once learned it is rather nice though.

FWIW Unicode Math, Word's format for doing math input, is a published spec.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well... Few time ago I discover my "definitive" productivity app: Emacs. In few months it became the center of my IT life. And I still have to see ANY more effective, simple, flexible, pleasure to use modern application that can only compete with at least some aspects of Emacs.

The problem IMO is that in the glory time of IT software was not a business, was a free thing that came with hw and if it was good and flexible people are more willing to buy your iron. Now (not from now) that software became a product commercial need destroy freedom and evolution creating a modern, colorful, limited and limiting digital middle-age that can barely stand like Babel's tower...

IMO sooner or later tower will collapse and the more we wait the more it will hurt.

More about software: our society mostly live on text: laws are text, newspapers are text, books are mostly text, text is the cheapest and effective means of communication we have so if we really want to being productive we need to have something focused on text. Yes, we have also images, videos, audios, but they are _still_ marginal. We have excellent audiobooks, super- nice videos and diagrams/images that communicate something an order of magnitude better than text but they are still hard to make, hard to design, rare, not really flexible etc. so while we have to work on them hard and constantly to better support/integrate our focus must still be on text. For many years to come.

Try only to do most common task without a keyboard and see how unproductive, limited and hard they are even with the best touch UI we have, with all "AI" support possible.

That's a lesson nearly nobody want to learn but that's also the reality we have to face, willing or not.

</comment><comment><USER12> While I like to see competition, I still think Microsoft has the market for the foreseeable future because you get so much value. My yearly subscription for Office 365 family plan is just renewing and I can;t imagine not paying $99/year for: everyone in the family gets 1 TB of cloud storage, web based apps (which work just fine on Linux), and always up to date versions of the Office apps, if you want those too, and quality mobile apps for access to documents anytime.

I use markdown and Latex to write my books, but I still find a lot of value in Office for occasional uses.

</comment><comment><USER13> One advantage of Microsoft Office is that I can reasonably expect that in 20 years Word will still be around and will be able to read the files I write today. With these apps, I would be surprised if in 5 years I could read the files created with these apps.

<comment><USER14> While we have no plans to go anywhere at Notejoy, we do acknowledge that this fear is very real. So to address it we support full bulk export of all your notes to Google Drive at any point, so you can rest assured that you'll always be able to take them with you.

<comment><USER15> Don't take this the wrong way, but... you've flipped multiple startups. Why would I believe that "you have no plans to go anywhere" this time?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm disappointed to not see our Dropbox Paper in that writeup, although it's a good article! Wish they wouldn't call it "word processor wars" though since that of course misses the point - it has too many associations to the printed page whereas I think everyone incl the author and the people quoted knows it's about a more collaborative content creation experience.

<comment><USER17> Yes. Dropbox Paper is fantastic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Not mentioned in the article but WorkFlowy (YC '10) is still going strong. Minimalist web-based word processor with a flexible outline format. Can hold hundreds of thousands of items, without you getting overwhelmed.

<comment><USER14> The same author actually wrote about WorkFlowy a few months back: [https://www.geekwire.com/2018/workflowly-founder-new-list- up...](https://www.geekwire.com/2018/workflowly-founder-new-list-update- popular-app-keeping-purists-happy/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Good insights on the trends in word processor markets. But, including rich text editors and note-taking apps into the word processor market is bit of an overstretch.

Note-making apps are typically for digital screens, with a limited set of tools for document creation.

Word processors cater both for digital screens and print media. They'd have a richer tool-set and are for power document making people.

Interestingly _both_ categories have made lots of improvements recently, when it comes to sharing, reviewing and co-editing.

Take, Zoho Writer ([https://www.zoho.com/writer/](https://www.zoho.com/writer/)) for example. The product beautifully carries the ease-of-use of simpler apps, without compromising on the richer word processor features. This takes the game one- level up. Simple writing apps now have to bring in more document creation features to compete in the market with word processors. Otherwise, they are just their own category with their own market.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm curious what open source options will crop up in this space. So far I haven't seen anything promising that compares to the Notion or the Air Table approach.

</comment><comment><USER21> My problem with these sorts of tools is always the same: I have been spoiled by my emacs keybindings ( evil mode ), the ability to parse structured text, org-mode, and command line tooling.

I do not have to open a web browser and navigate, I just launch my helm- project-search buffer and type `org/work`. I then have a fuzzy search that matches on file name. Toss these files into a dropbox folder, and you are good to go.

None of these applications I have seen support structured text such that I can export / import through Emacs. They cling to your data as tightly as possible and do NOT want to let it go.

I was working as a hobby on an RPG supplement for a popular anime series. I was attracted to notion and coda, but was dismayed to find I did not have a way to turn the data I entered into structured data which I can query to generate an attractive webpage for the game.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'd love to have one notebook-type app that works between all my devices, or some combination that lets me have the same or similar content.

I loved OneNote back in Uni, though I reached a point where I stopped taking notes (through the fault of the powerpoint teaching method, and my own laziness), and OneNote does seem to be a bit bloat-y when it comes to sync.

Stuff like EMACS org-mode (or, preferrably, some kind of Visual Studio Code equivalent) seems enticing, but I'm not sure how I could hook that into my phone in a way that isn't a terminal emulator.

Anyone found anything (app, service, or custom setup) that works for them?

<comment><USER23> I use orgzly to take notes in my phone. It can create and edit org files and sync the files through Dropbox. Then you can edit the files in your computer through a Dropbox sync folder. It's just a nice app for taking notes for me though. I haven't even edited the notes through my computer. Good to know that my notes are backed up without having to use some opaque backup method.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> There was a Firefox thread on here yesterday. Interesting one.

My take was that 10-15 years ago, FF's feature gap was enourmous. Tabs. Extensions like firebug for web development, adblocking for browsing, various "social add-ons" that were innovative and exciting. IE 6 was a dinosaur.

The question for these is.. what more do you/we want from a word processor?

<comment><USER25> Integration with documemt and version control with anything other than sharepoint. Something that is guaranteed to work without application crashes. Configurable Cloud storage/saving. 100% open document formatting to allow for interoperability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I thought Wang made the first word-processors.

</comment><comment><USER27> Notion and Coda are attractive, but I'm wondering if the learning curve is too steep. Not sure if my team would use them without me setting everything up.

<comment><USER28> I use Notion for personal projects and love it. Very easy to learn. I used it to plan and execute my NaNoWriMo challenge last month and really have nothing bad to say about it. Works well on all my devices.

But it's unstructured. I think in a work environment it's most useful as a wiki/project planner/lightweight tracker, but still can't replace the MS/Google office suite, and can't replace Jira/Asana for in depth ticketing.

<comment><USER29> I'd agree: Notion is great for individuals, a household, maybe even a small business? But it'd be a tough ask to scale to 100 people in an engineering org. But who knows, maybe it will find a niche like Basecamp did?

It is a wonderful replacement for Evernote though, and it makes you wonder what Evernote has been doing all these years? The formatting, drag/drop, multiple views on the same docs are _great_.

<comment><USER30> Evernote started the trend but Microsoft destroyed them in the same way they killed Netscape; OneNote is free beer and it's deeply integrated with the Office suite.

I can scan a whiteboard using MS Lens on my phone and it's instantly available on my laptop in OneNote. Oh and I don't have to convince the SOE nazis to allow install.

<comment><USER31> I can do the same thing with Apple Notes. And I don't have to pay Microsoft anything. And it's all available to iWork. Notes even has document scanning.

With Continuity Camera in Mojave, I can take a photo from my iPhone and instantly place it within a Pages document.

For power Excel users, Numbers isn't yet a replacement, but for everything else, the stuff that is built in to MacOS works great and is free while working seamlessly across all Apple devices. I don't work with massive spreadsheets nor use pivot tables so for me, iWork + Notes solves office productivity pretty darned well, plus Keynote puts PowerPoint to shame.

<comment><USER32> > I can do the same thing with Apple Notes. And I don't have to pay Microsoft > anything.

I don't understand what this means. I use OneNote and have never paid Microsoft anything.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Companies behind Top 99 Cryptocurrencies - <AUTHOR> https://craft.co/search?companyList=companies-behind-the-coins <comment><USER2> I'm very looking forward to seeing the crypto-currency bubble burst. I wonder what will be the tipping point.</comment>


The Dead Zone: The Implicit Marginal Tax Rate - <AUTHOR> http://mises.org/daily/3822

<comment><USER2> > "Actually, this being a democracy, there is nobody to blame but the > electorate. Especially the left-liberal do-gooders."

...

<comment><USER3> He's still got a valid point - negative incentives to work are undeniable.

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately, his point would be stronger if he had made it more in terms of a practical problem to be solved, not as an excuse to get in shots against The Evil Other Guys.

Partisan feuding is for people who want political power, not solutions.

<comment><USER3> Or who are simply bitter. But yes, it would be better. The actual income tax is progressive yet it is continuous so you never have to ask your boss to lower you salary by $2 in order to save $20 on taxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> These numbers are really disturbing. I think something like Charles Murray's "The Plan" ( [http://www.amazon.com/Our-Hands-Replace-Welfare- State/dp/084...](http://www.amazon.com/Our-Hands-Replace-Welfare- State/dp/0844742236) ) where each citizen just recieves a $10,000 check every year has a lot of merit. The poor are still helped, but it eliminates the disincentives to do work. Since it's just shuffling dollars, it also minimizes the amount of money lost in the bureaucracy. Another idea is to turn the U.S. government into a joint stock corporation and simply give every citizen dividend paying shares. That way the pie is divided equally, once and for all, and then government can simply concentrate on growing the pie.

</comment><comment><USER5> Economic critics tend to present things as 'Here. This is simple. Policy makers are sooo stupid that they haven't noticed.'

While the current policy may be wrong, this issue exists because the problem is hard. Subsidies & assistance for the poor create perverse incentives. That is true. But they are there for a reason. Most people consider it morally important. We have two things we need to do that conflict with each other.

How do we subsidise to a minimal level without destroying incentive to work? It's not an easy question to answer. Creating an incentive that puts more people in employment but also more people onto the street is not a solution, at least no to the problem as it is implied.

<comment><AUTHOR> _While the current policy may be wrong, this issue exists because the issue is hard._

You make it sound as if the policy makers are talented engineers who made the design decision because it was the best compromise on how to deal with the various trade-offs. That's simply not the case.

In reality, these welfare policies are a result of a chaotic process of various factions battling to get their hands on dollars. This process is not designed, and the welfare law has simply evolved into a giant mess over the course of many decades.

That said, politicians and policymakers are not idiots. They are simply controlled by events larger then themselves. It's the incentives of the political system that are at fault. ( See Government's End by Jonathan Rauch )

 _How do we subsidise to a minimal level without destroying incentive to work? It's not an easy question to answer._

Roll up all the welfare programs into one program - give every American over 21 a check for $10k a year. For people without a job, give a guaranteed government job for $6 an hour. For people who need hands on help, go back to relying on local charities and local government aid. They are closer to the problem and have the right incentives to actually fix things (and empirically, the local welfare systems of the late 1800's worked far, far better than our national system today).

<comment><USER5> You are right. Political systems are not in a good position to design policies in the best possible way. I am completely willing to accept that. But there is some design going on, it is not complete chaos. It's not like neither of these goals has ever had any sort of influence on policy. It isn't as if this is just some big, obvious & uncontroversial policy mistake that everyone would see if they only visit reason.org that politicians have just overlooked.

The system, flawed as it is, is "trying" to solve the problem as I articulated, more or less.

Take your solution as an example. Don't you think these sort of blog posts could easily criticise it's consequences too? First, the same criticism of perverse incentives applies. It takes more compensation to motivate a person take a job if he already has $10k + $6h/hr. Second, you'd have a lot of people in guaranteed 'make work jobs' that are probably more expensive to run then just giving away money.

I'm not yours is a bad idea, but only because the problem is hard. Pretty much every proposed solution is messy & ugly with lots of loose ends & perverse incentives.

The elegant solutions can be found on either extreme of the political spectrum where you don't have to worry about one of the conflicting goals. They are also conveniently excused from reality because neither socialism nor capitalism has ever been _truly_ applied.

<comment><AUTHOR> _It isn't as if this is just some big, obvious & uncontroversial policy mistake that everyone would see if they only visit reason.org that politicians have just overlooked._

Well, all I can say is this. I've spent too much of my time in life studying politics. I've worked in multiple levels of government ( U.S. Congress, city government, state senate), worked in non-profits trying to help the homeless, tutoring inner city kids, etc. I used to browse my college's social library for fun to read journal articles, and on almost every single issue I've read the top books and articles.

My conclusion is that, actually, yes, there is almost always a much, much better, solution, that would make most people much better off, that the political system has simply overlooked.

Note, I do not feel this way about things outside of politics and government. At the company I work at, I think the management generally makes the very reasonable decisions given the trade offs involved. But when I worked in government, I thought the process was insane.

For a few examples:

On the healthcare issue, see my blog post: [http://intellectual- detox.com/2009/09/10/the-perfect-healthc...](http://intellectual- detox.com/2009/09/10/the-perfect-healthcare-plan-and-why-well-never-get-it/)

Or consider Iraq/Afghanistan. If you believe that the U.S. should just get out, then you probably already believe that our current policy is insane. If you believe that the U.S. should stay in and build a workable government/economy, our policy is also insane. For comparison, Britain once ruled Egypt, which at the time had 1/3rd of Iraq's population, with a mere 5,000 soldiers, ruled it so well that Cairo was a notable international destination, and actually turned a profit. The tactics the British used are well documented, and in the end resulted in far, far less bloodshed and collateral damage than our current tactics. Yet we ignore them, and everyone loses. Iraq and Afghanistan remain in chaos and both the Iraqi civilians and the American taxpayer bleed red. Again, insanity.

Or consider education: [http://steve-olson.com/how-the-public-school-system- crushes-...](http://steve-olson.com/how-the-public-school-system-crushes- souls/) and <http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html> Again sheer insanity. And again, if you actually study the history and politics of the educational system, you'll find that the system is not the result of balancing hard tradeoffs. It's the result of an insanely dysfunctional political system.

And don't even get me started on economics and the financial crisis.

Again, I spent a lot of time in the political world and it only slowly grew on me just how insane the system was. I basically went from believing the mainstream academia/NYTimes view ( ie. the American system is flaws, but generally arrives at a workable solution given the constraints) to being legitimately scared at how badly everything is being run.

 _First, the same criticism of perverse incentives applies. It takes more compensation to motivate a person take a job if he already has $10k + $6h/hr._

There is still a bit of a disincentive, but it's much, much, much better than a _110% marginal tax rate_.

 _Second, you'd have a lot of people in guaranteed 'make work jobs' that are probably more expensive to run then just giving away money._

$6 an hour is still a lower wage than ~98% of the jobs out there, so people would still have the incentive to switch to a higher paying, not-make work job.

<comment><USER5> Lets not get too caught up in the specifics of particular policy. I was just trying to point to the fact that there is a genuinely hard problem with inevitably messy solutions. Your solution is also messy. Maybe it is better. but it is not uncontroversially better & it does not give a solution with no perverse incentives.

I also agree that the political system does not produce optimal decisions. I agree with you. But there is a big gap between sub optimal & random.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> mises.org is to Austrian-school libertarians what Redstate is to conservative Republicans. Make your own call about whether we ever want posts from here on Hacker News, or posts that include the words "left-liberal do-gooders". I made my choice, and flagged this.

<comment><USER7> I'd rather choices be made per article, and not avoided because of a domain name.

Likewise with choice of phrasing. I'd be almost happy to block every article that used the words "awesome" or "douchebag" (and variants), but I realize that's an awfully blunt ax to wield.

Is there a term for besmirching an article because of the domain and not the content? I suggest ad domaininem, analogous to ad hominem. (Latin scholars, please correct me here ...)

<comment><USER6> It'd probably be ad principatum.

(-em is the accusative of hominis, the stem of which is "homin").</comment></comment></comment>


Why doesn't the IRS send me a tax bill based on the info they already have? - <AUTHOR> https://politics.stackexchange.com/q/30223 <comment><USER2> The tax preparation companies such as H&R Block and Intuit spend a lot of money lobbying Congress to keep this from happening.

<comment><USER3> This might be true but it's not needed.

I'm looking for the documentary about the US economy and the silent industries that secretly prop it up.

Taxing people is work. To make an industry responsible allows both government to not invest and risk additional losses but allowing people to overpay gives them a surplus while allowing for those that make mistakes that cost the government to recoup in justice fees.

I remember the video having lawyers asked what the most profitable industry in America was, they all claimed the legal system when it was accounting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Things are more complicated than you think.

There are many SSNs in use by multiple people. It's an immigration issue so the IRS turns a blind eye.

Also there's a larger number of cases where the address the IRS has on file is incorrect.

So there's a huge risk of the refund going to the wrong person with pre-filled returns.

<comment><USER5> Yeah PAYE is really really hard and complex. The only countries that do it are Germany and the UK and France (from 2018) and Australia and New Zealand and Ireland and ... etc. etc.

<comment><USER6> Population of: USA: 325 million Germany: 81 million France: 65 million UK: 65 million Australia: 21 million New Zealand: 4.7 million

<comment><USER7> This is a tired trope, because this seems to forget that more people also equals more resources to deal with more people. It's not a substantive argument to just say "well there's more of us so this can never work", which is what I assume you're trying to say here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> California tried this for a trial of their state taxes. Response was overwhelmingly positive. Yet lobbyist for big tax firms fight against it.

<comment><USER9> It still there and very popular, but it is opt-in. However, the majority of people who use it, opt-in.

<comment><USER8> Oh, I didnt realize that still. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "A silent weapon system operates upon data obtained from a docile public by legal (but not always lawful) force. Much information is made available to silent weapon systems programmers through the Internal Revenue Service. (See Studies in the Structure of the American Economy for an I.R.S. source list.)

This information consists of the enforced delivery of well-organized data contained in federal and state tax forms, collected, assembled, and submitted by slave labor provided by taxpayers and employers.

Furthermore, the number of such forms submitted to the I.R.S. is a useful indicator of public consent, an important factor in strategic decision making. Other data sources are given in the Short List of Inputs.

Consent Coefficients - numerical feedback indicating victory status. Psychological basis: When the government is able to collect tax and seize private property without just compensation, it is an indication that the public is ripe for surrender and is consenting to enslavement and legal encroachment. A good and easily quantified indicator of harvest time is the number of public citizens who pay income tax despite an obvious lack of reciprocal or honest service from the government."

</comment><comment><USER6> The IRS doesn't always know everything. For example, they don't know how much medical expenses were incurred in the tax year. If there's a centralized place where all relevant expenses and incomes are logged, then maybe they should do it for everyone. Else, it's going to be a problem going back and forth with IRS over the right amount of taxes to be paid.

<comment><USER11> They don't need to know that, though.

For instance, the irs could send you a statement with everything they know and a total at the bottom.

You can either pay that, or if you think you should pay less, prove it by filling out a bunch of 1040/1099/etc forms with supporting evidence.

Frankly, I'd love it. If it's close enough, I think many people would pay a bit more just to eliminate the hassle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's no reason why they can't. If you're an employee and/or a student then everything you do should be reported to the government, taxes should have automatically been withheld, and the government should be able to figure out everything on their own. They always double-check your calculations anyway.

Only if you're self-employed or have special situations should you need to file anything, and even then, many of these situations can be something where you tick a box or submit a document and then they still do everything automatically.

The situation in the US and Canada is ridiculous.

<comment><USER13> Disagree. For such people the government will generally have everything on the income side. They won't necessarily have everything on the deduction side.

However, even partial data like that would be very useful. The IRS sends you pre-filled forms. You can change anything that's wrong, add anything that's missing. Do your taxes, or just submit the changes and let them deal with the rest of it and send you a bill if need be.

<comment><USER12> If you have things on the deduction side that the government doesn't already know about, you can submit a self-assessment or an amendment. Deductions themselves should be simplified.

You bring deductions up as if it's a problem but many other countries, like the UK, do it this way without problems.

Most people here do not submit tax returns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Article 1, section 2 of the US Constitution prohibits direct taxation. If the IRS sends you a bill, that's becoming a little more 'directy' because they are just assuming that every single head had a W2 with no deductions outside of the narrow info that they know and now you have to proove them wrong. Whereas asking you what you think you should owe and giving you an opportunity to present all facts is more of a levy, and much more just. What this person is asking for on Stackexchange is just pure laziness and super narrow thinking about what activities one could potentially get involved with in one's life. Those who point toward H&R block as being at fault: well yes they would certainly want to maintain a horrible IRS UX, but that is completely separate from how taxes are levyed, which is constitutional. Also I love Sweden but just because Sweden does it does not mean automatically the best solution.

<comment><USER15> Article I Section 2 was amended by Amendment XIV ("The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration."). The original text is legally void.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Grover Norquist.</comment>


Ideas For Startups: Advertising Ideas - <AUTHOR> http://blog.awesomezombie.com/2010/11/ideas-for-startups-advertising-ideas.html

<comment><USER2> Truly awesome ideas; ad feedback is something that makes a lot of sense. Context based ads based on intelligence embedded on ads is also a great idea. This would change advertising from static to a dynamic in nature. Giving advertisers the control is something that would create a lot of value.

</comment><comment><USER3> _A third-party network that sites like these could easily integrate into would mean more money for the sites, more relevant ads for the end users and an alternative to Facebook Ads_

I couldn't agree more. Trafficspaces already provides it. See screenshots - <http://www.trafficspaces.com/tour/>

You can integrate demographic info from your database to show targeted ads just like in Facebook Ads.

<comment><AUTHOR> Any plans to offer a service to let people buy ads across sites that run your product ?

(or alternatively an index listing your users so people can go to them directly to buy ads)

I'm doing a targeted demographic buys at the moment and I'm struggling to find places to advertise. Facebook is giving me solid results (good CTR, cheap CPC) but not getting enough volume so I'm looking for other sources. MySpace's demographic targeting is awful, PlentyOfFish has very low CTR, poor targeting and the interface is buggy.

<comment><USER3> We get a lot of enquiries about that so yes, it's definitely going to be available shortly.

We'll probably start off with an index because that's easier to do considering that each social network/dating site/news portal integrates their database in different ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Advertising idea: Can you build a website that aggregates both display and text ads. Basically when searching for X all I would only see ads for X, not content pages.

<comment><USER5> Some day back, I wanted to combine this (searching in ads and define your own selection algorithm) with the "real-time adsense" idea.

Then people could build the ad widgets, themself. Possibly in a plugable way, with a store/subscripton for them.

For example, a youtube ad widget that gets the relevancy from the transcribed text.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually pitched that exact idea at Launch48 earlier this year (and registered the domain adynam.com for it), but ended up building something else instead.

The main problem is getting the initial ad inventory, I thought about using affiliate links to start with, but my back of the napkin calculations showed that they were unlikely to bring in enough money to be competitive.

Although last week someone posted on HN saying that they'd built an adsense competitor using affiliate links and they were getting a decent CPM out of it, so maybe that is a viable route.

<comment><USER5> Yeah affiliate links seemed the right way, but I was also thinking about crawling the ads first, as it looks like some interesting data to have.

Of course money making would be a bit harder, but getting traction would be easier I think.

Actually, it should be validated and that seems to be the hardest point for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A Real Demographics Ad Network

quantcast? And since its inference, not regdata based, we can offer significantly more reach than eg blue kai or excelate

NB: for jackasses -- all opinions are my own. My opinions are not endorsed or authorized by my employers: past, present, or future.

edit: also, small site owners should get themselves into a realtime exchange so their inventory is available for purchase, assuming that nothing else monetizes better

<comment><USER3> I didn't know Quantcast operated an ad network. Interesting. In quantitative terms, how accurate is your inference based data?

On a different note, I have mixed feelings about exchanges cus I feel they overly commoditize inventory. Whilst that may be okay for large sites, it's disastrous for small sites. IMHO, the better strategy is to either join a vertical ad network or sell directly to niche advertisers.

<comment><USER6> Hey DJN (Niyi?) -- if you're reading this, please email me, and consider putting your email in your profile.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you decompress after a bad day? - <AUTHOR> Had a shitty day at work? What are some of the things you do once you get home? <comment><USER2> 1\. Do something constructive:

Clean the dishes, do the laundry, or vacuum.

2\. Do something destructive:

Play a video game, break an egg and cook an omlette.

3\. Do something connective:

Talk to a friend, call a relative, or join a chat room.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I like how you broke this out. Looking back, constructive tasks were things I rarely did on bad days, but the accomplishment really helped.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Music. Mostly heavy metal of various sorts. Everything from 80's glam metal - Motley Crue, Poison, Whitesnake, Ratt, etc. to thrash metal - Testament, Slayer, Exodus, Megadeth, Overkill, etc., to other heavy shit like Fleshgod Apocalypse, Emperor, Dimmu Borgir, Septic Flesh, Iced Earth, Blind Guardian, Sepultura, Stratovarious, Kamelot, etc., etc.

Mix in a little bit of Eminem, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, etc. for a change of pace, and just jam out. That's one of my key strategies.

The other is to draw a hot bath, and just lay in the tub soaking and reading a book for a nice long time.

</comment><comment><USER4> Regardless of how the day went I ask myself what could I have done to make the day better & jot mental notes. Then, I take a hot shower to officially transition into another mode. Compartmentalizing the emotions of the day & transitioning are very important, especially if you have a partner/family/etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> Exercise, and if your into math, work on an interesting math problem!</comment>


How to take your company international - <AUTHOR> http://www.wmediaventures.com/news/how-to-take-your-company-international/

<comment><USER2> This is an interesting business idea for people living outside the USA.

A partnership with already established websites where you use their code base and take care of the translation, marketing and customer relationships in your geographical/cultural region.</comment>


Ask HN: How can I make automated videos from data of real estate I have in Mass? - <AUTHOR> I want to generate a descriptive slide show video (In 4K) ex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZM5jaU7YyE what this guy has done for Watches I want to do real estate properties list I have.
I have property details, photos, some have walkthrough videos too. I want to attach them to make a slideshow kind of video where the text is spoken as good quality voice using may be amazon or google voice API.
What kind of libraries I can use to work this out?
https://rocketium.com/is/quick-and-easy-bulk-video-maker-in-batches/ I saw this but it seems a bit costlier solution for the scale I am looking for.
I have to make more than 1000 videos. So any ready-made cheap solution? Or something where I can hire a dev and get it done? <comment><USER2> Adobe Premiere [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsXMr0Gg0dHrMD_I8KlYmwA/pla...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsXMr0Gg0dHrMD_I8KlYmwA/playlists) I think it's $30/month now with no annual plan.

Generating speech from text can be done with plugins (i think) to premiere or with Adobe Audition but would probably be awful for your use case. It suits the spammy watch shilling video because it's minimally used but you can hire voice over freelancers on upwork/fiverr if your video must talk. In fact you can just hire editors there to do all this for you [https://www.upwork.com/hire/adobe-premiere-pro- freelancers/](https://www.upwork.com/hire/adobe-premiere-pro-freelancers/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I will look over this. Any idea how to render a dynamic template of the same style using the server?

I make one adobe premier video then the data in it are changed and a new video is rendered and that too I want to do server-side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> maybe not suitable for you but I want to share this [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uo5k4_vu5Vk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uo5k4_vu5Vk) he is using after effects and an excel file

<comment><AUTHOR> This solves 70% problem. But there is no way to make Audio out of text using data clay.</comment></comment>


Python for Lisp Programmers - <AUTHOR> http://norvig.com/python-lisp.html <comment><USER2> You may care to read the previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=255774>

Comments there are disabled (as it's so old) so if you have something new to say, this is as good a place as any.

When it was submitted again 4 months ago it got no additional comments: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3331969></comment>


How Old Is The Shepherd? - <AUTHOR> http://robertkaplinsky.com/how-old-is-the-shepherd/ <comment><USER2> I thint there is an unfortunate temptation to look at the students and think "how stupid are they?", but I wonder if the issue is more about familiarity of tasks.

If students are going along solving word problems that always make sense, they have zero practice in identifying which questions are well posed and which aren't. It may not be that they're bad at reasoning through word problems, so much as they aren't used to word problems that make zero sense.

Given that context, it makes partial sense for a child to think "I must be making a mistake--I can't see how this problem works, but it must work somehow, because these problems always do make sense, even if sometimes I get them wrong, because I am not smart enough to understand them."

Is that a good attitude? Heck no. If nothing else, this experiment shows that we need to teach students that math problems aren't always going to be nicely set up so that they make sense. But that's different from thinking kids are dumb for not adapting to an unexpected wrinkle on a test.

An interesting companion experiment would be to prompt the students to explain the problem first, or see whether they could accurately determine which problems made sense and which didn't, when they knew that was what they were doing. My prediction is that the results would not be great, but that they'd be better.

<comment><USER3> I think the last kid was _extremely_ revealing. There are two numbers, and they didn't say "product", "sum", or "difference", so it must be division.

Clearly the problems she gets in school are extremely rote and don't really require reading the problem much. Just look for a keyword or two and you can 'solve' it.

<comment><USER4> I feel bad for this child. Clearly she has gotten through her schooling through sheer brute force without applying very much understanding. She is likely at a grade level where building the basics back up is not possible without 1:1 attention.

<comment><USER5> Welcome to Common Core. Obviously there won't be non-sensical questions on the test, so why bother exposing kids to them in class?

Teachers are being forced, now more than ever, to optimize for test scores, at the expense of real learning.

This isn't a video about stupid kids, it's a video about a stupid education system.

<comment><USER6> Opposition to Common Core? You must be a "white suburban mom"! [1]

[1] [http://reason.com/archives/2013/11/22/no-arne-duncan- white-s...](http://reason.com/archives/2013/11/22/no-arne-duncan-white- suburban-moms-arent)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Especially with younger kids, when they are asked a question by someone with authority, there is a reasonable presumption that it can be answered. I'm all for teaching them to challenge that presumption, but I think you'd get a more fair result if the question was, "Can you figure out the age of the shepherd if you know how many dogs and sheep he has in his flock?"

<comment><USER8> Agreed. I think this is also an issue with the way we teach; we should teach students to have the confidence to deny the solvability or soundness of a problem on their own (rather than forcing irrational thought in order to arrive at a solution).

This is the equivalent of teaching a programmer to "shut up and code", even though they may have objections to the proposed solution.

<comment><USER9> Agreed - it would be interesting to run the numbers with "questions may not have an answer" as a qualifier. If I try to put myself back in my young student mindset, I would only expect to be correct with a non-answer response for a specific kind of test, or with a certain type of teacher that asked non- structured problems. If given this problem in a structured environment such as a standardized test I would likely look for a possible answer, realize none was possible, write a number as a guess with some notes about the median age of shepherds, and then be extremely frustrated at the test designer haha.

I get that this is supposed to outline the differences between structured / unstructured learning, thinking, and classroom conditioning, but it's not quite fair to draw a conclusion that doesn't take that conditioning into account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The problem is teachers! One of my relatives is taking Community College level math right now. I was helping her with some homework, which was multiple choice. The problem was simple, find an area of a triangle. We did the problem, and the answer was not among one of the possible solutions. I quickly double checked my work, making sure I was right, and we decided to mark none on the problem sheet and give the right answer + show work. The teacher said that in this case you should always guess what the closest right answer is, and just mark that. WTF. The actual answer was roughly 65, the closest number to that on the answer sheet was 73.

Math in USA is taught like religion, you have to believe what you are told, and god save you if you ask for proof. I remember in School we were reviewing Pythagoras Theorem. I asked the teacher to explain why it worked. She proceeded to draw on paper a triangle with sides of 3 and 4 inches, and then measured the long side, and said 'see,' with a very proud tone in her voice. When I asked if there is any more definitive proof, she replied that "it's a theorem, there is no proof, that's just the way it is."

I spent the first 6 grades of my education in Ukraine, admittedly in the communist equivalent of prep schools. There we were given math problems, and we were expected to solve them OR prove that they were unsolvable. At least one problem on every test was unsolvable, and they actually expected you to provide proof. My experience with college level math on US was the same, the teachers were smart and taught well. But Middle School and High School level math in USA is pathetic, in my experience.

<comment><USER11> It sounds like you just had a bad math teacher. The Pythagorean Theorem has quite a few proofs, a number of which are understandable to students with only basic geometry knowledge. I'm almost certain I had to prove it in my math class at the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is totally unsurprising. Most word problems in textbooks are poorly written and have little to no basis in reality. My experience as a grade school student is that most teachers get annoyed when you question the logic of the questions being asked. Critical thinking is not rewarded in those situations.

So that given, which student is going to stick their neck out in that situation? It's better to risk a wrong answer than to risk annoying the teacher. The students may not think in those terms. They just know they need to provide the correct answer in the correct format. Understanding why is not important or rewarded. Only the result matters.

<comment><USER13> "If two sides of a triangular garden are 3 and 4 feet respectively, find the length of the third side."

Okay, hand me a tape measure.

In a middle school algebra class we had a word problem on a test that had us divide by the number of cards in a deck of cards. I didn't think this was a fair question, because it assumed that everyone knew how many cards were in a deck of cards. I went to the teacher's desk and whispered this concern to her and she said "Come on, even my 5 year old knows how many cards are in a deck of cards."

Not 10 minutes later, another student raised his hand and asked how many cards were in a deck of cards.

<comment><USER14> > In a middle school algebra class we had a word problem on a test that had us > divide by the number of cards in a deck of cards. I didn't think this was a > fair question, because it assumed that everyone knew how many cards were in > a deck of cards. I went to the teacher's desk and whispered this concern to > her and she said "Come on, even my 5 year old knows how many cards are in a > deck of cards."

Just for reasonably-common playing card decks, I can think of at least three possibilities -- 48 (standard pinochle deck), 52 (poker deck w/o jokers), and 54 (poker deck w/jokers). And in middle school -- since there was a lot of card playing in my house -- I probably would have been aware of all three.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is incredibly interesting to me, and points to a problem in our schools.

We traditionally teach children to solve problems that have solutions. In particular, eighth grade teaches pre-algebra and algebra, so the way students approach problems is directly connected to how the student decodes the language of a "word problem".

We need to change our conceptual understanding of what learning actually requires, and give students a situation in which they must write the problem themselves. Instead of "decoding" a predefined word problem, the student then must explore the situation and interpret the available information.

A good way to handle this problem is to allow students to write word problems for other students based on a set of data, and subsequently create the "answer key" that includes the mathematical proofs. Proofs should be taught from a much earlier age.

</comment><comment><USER15> I just asked my 2 yr old this same question. He just responded with "yellow!" /facepalm

<comment><USER16> That answer isn't really any more wrong than "His age is 25 sheep per dog".

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This would never happen if there was a laptop in every classroom. (EDIT: Sarcasm alert -- see my response below before you downvote me)

EDIT: Just watched the video. Scary.

<comment><USER18> Wait, how would having a laptop in the classroom prevent this situation?

<comment><USER17> That was sarcasm. My point was that if this level of critical thinking deficiency is really present, then there is something seriously wrong with the way kids are being taught, and calls that you hear for extra funding to pay for things like laptops in the classroom are really a giant waste of money until we fix whatever that is.

<comment><USER19> That's a good example of Poe's law. I decided to reply with (hopefully more apparent) sarcasm, because if it wasn't sarcasm, I didn't want to let it go, and if it was, I didn't want to be an ass, and I assumed you could take it as me going with the joke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have an idea for whenever I'll have my own kids. I'll buy them as toys as many measurement devices as I possibly can. This will show them, I hope, that numbers are not an abstract thing. They are everywhere. Not visible at first glance but with proper device you can see them.

I think the fact that my grandfather (electrician by trade and self-taught carpenter, shoemaker and general DIY guy) owned and used vernier scale, micrometer, folding rule, voltmeters and ammeters contributed to my ability at mathematics, physics, chemistry, computer science and being a reasonable person.

Surely I used a vernier scale as a makeshift futuristic gun, micrometer to squish my fingers, folding rule as kind of pretend switchblade but later also for seeing numbers in the world.

</comment><comment><USER21> When I tutored sixth grade math, it was not uncommon to see kids who guessed that 7 + 3 was 9. When you are that far behind in math, your only possible approach to the subject can be weird heuristics that make no sense.

</comment><comment><USER22> I don't honestly think that the students are "dumb", I think they tried to work out the answer so they wouldn't fail the test with out trying. That's usually my method, if I don't know how to work out the answer I'll guess or try a logical method so that I might have a chance.

I also think that because they don't expect a teacher to lie they tell themselves there has to be a answer.

</comment><comment><USER23> These kids were in something of a no win situation. I'm imagining a different class where 75% of the students said that there wasn't enough information to complete the problem:

\---

Our younger generation is doomed because they clearly don't understand math. After all, this is a fairly basic Fermi problem. The shepard probably started his own flock at around 18 and with two sheep. A sheep is a large mammal, so I'll assume that it has a gestation period around 9 months. We'll also guess that a sheep reaches sexual maturity after 3 years, or four gestation periods. If we assume that all adult female sheep are kept gravid and that genders are divided evenly, we know that the number of female sheep after n gestation periods is

a(n) = a(n-1)+a(n-5)*0.5

Solving the recurrence relation and assuming that both sheep are adults when we start, there will be 60 female sheep, or 120 sheep in total, after 19 gestation periods. Thus the shepherd is around 33.

Of course, I've made several assumptions in my solution and I wouldn't expect eighth graders to come back with the same answer. However, the fact that they just threw up their hands and declared that the problem is insolvable shows that our school system is failing the next generation of entrepreneurs. We don't need people who give up and declare that nothing can be done - we need people who make guesses and take risks. Yes, expecting an eighth grader to solve a recurrence relation is beyond their ability, but they could make simpler approximations. Heck, they could have just divided the number of sheep by two and been right to within an order of magnitude. It works as a model - say a sheep is born every six month and be done with it. It may not be the best model, but the perfect is the enemy of the good. Instead, we've taught our student to be dependent on our teachers to provide them with all the information and not make any guesses on their own.

\--

Obviously, the above is exaggerated, but the point remains that any answer or non-answer by the students can be interpreted as a lack of math skills and evidence of poor critical thinking.

I'm not going to deny for a moment that our schools do a horrific job of teaching unit analysis - I've taught intro to physics and know how little our high school graduates know. Still, students are caught between two masters. When lacking information, students who guess are punished for lack of critical thinking and those who don't guess are punished for lack of effort and creativity. The blog post obviously indicates that the pendulum is currently swinging toward rewarding creativity over critical thinking. However, the pendulum will swing back and, in twenty years, we'll be complaining about how are students aren't doing nearly as well as the brilliant, creative children this blogger visited.

<comment><USER22> Is this honestly a joke. How on earth could you expect a student to come up with an answer to a question with no information even slightly relevant to the answer; that is not a basis to judge math skills.

Also your above calculation is no better than the ones the grade eights had made. If you had any knowledge of farms you would know that the Shepard probably bought a lot of sheep too and maybe some of them belonged to his father. How can you assume that he started at 18. In Arabia some kids become Shepards at the age of 13.

Your example was just plain stupid and so is your assumption that they have bad math skills.

<comment><USER24> His assumptions may be faulty but that isn't the point, he constructed at least a somewhat reasonable model and extrapolated some number crunching.

The OP link claims a few students tried (for no reason) to divide 125 by 5 and failed to do even that. There is no right answer obviously, it is how you play and tinker with it - the more mathematical tools you have in your toolbox the more you could improvise, see also Credit Default Swaps.

Nerds like to conflate basic competence at technical skills with intelligence. :)

However, while being able to muck about like this doesn't necessarily prove one is smart it at least demonstrates some capacity for _learning_ and exploration. I think that is the gist of the lament - that schools don't play with math, they drill - and agree with its spirit.

<comment><USER25> His solution isn't much different from solutions most of the kids were giving. That is when faced with problem you don't understand -throw away the problem -solve something you are comfortable with -try to convince others it is the solution of the original problem

We don't need people who fabricate data and make unfounded guesses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> We can learn from Descartes, Aristotle, and others to develop a curriculum teaching children how to think and process. The idiots that run this country do not want that. It's about the curriculum. We can develop the world we want by teaching the next generation.

<comment><USER27> I don't really understand this kind of categorical bashing of public education. Descartes, Aristotle, and most "others" you're thinking of lived in societies where the majority _couldn 't even read_, and they didn't consider that a problem. Reading without moving your lips was considered an exceptional skill during the middle ages (or so I've heard).

Are you sure they really knew much more about a practical system of education than we do now?

<comment><USER28> > Reading without moving your lips was considered an exceptional skill during > the middle ages (or so I've heard).

You are refering to what contemporaries wrote about Thomas Aquinas, a well- renowned theologist in medieval era. I believe he was considered a _genius_ because he could read without moving your lips.

While it is a good food for thought for intellectual capabilities, one should also take note that in his time books were not what books as we know. No typography existed and whitespacing blocks between words were non-existent. Truly, they were mostly transcribed words with sometimes bad spelling and without a paragraph break. To read without reading out aloud meant that the reader had a mental capability to quickly parse out words, form a sentence, understand what the author meant out of context.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I remember back in my first year engineering physics midterm, it was 13 multiple choice questions and each question had a "there is not enough information given" option. I guess that's why everyone at my school calls it the rite of passage to university.

</comment><comment><USER30> Google Cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://robertkaplinsky.com/how- old-is-the-shepherd/)

</comment><comment><USER31> Let's assume the shepherd graduated high school at 18 then bought 2 lambs and a farm. He was nice to his sheep so didn't breed them until 2 years and not after 7. The average litter size is 2 and the average age is 11. Let's assume an even number of male and female sheep. At year 2 he'll have 4 sheep (2 original and 2 new lambs). 2 more at year 3 and then 4 at year 3 (the first litter can now breed). At year 7 the original sheep stop breeding.

The shepherd is about 30 years old after he has passed the 125 mark. The dogs didn't matter. (Some story problems throw you a red herring.)

<comment><USER32> Or, conversely, the shepherd is 16 and they are the father's sheep. Nobody said they were his sheep.

<comment><USER31> You're right, nobody did say that. The point I was trying to make is that with the absence of data, you have to make assumptions and they should be clearly defined. My assumptions defined his starting age and how he obtained the first 2 sheep and the fact they were his.

I guess I would want my kids too look at any math problem with the following things in mind: * identify units of measurement * identify useful data * identify non-useful data * identify assumptions needed to complete answer

There are more or different assumptions I could make, such as cooperative breeding amoungst other breeders or a larger flock to start with, or a completely different model of breeding sheep. I could have described a scenario where he started with 2 sheep and went through several trading and auction rounds until he had 125 with some bonus dogs like the guy that got a house from a paper clip.

We don't have a time measurement in years, so we need some type of sheep per time or time per sheep unit. I choose an assumption of breeding and came up with about 1 sheep per year per sheep.

The original question is very close to a nonsense question, which requires so many assumptions that probably most answers can be well defended with the right set of assumptions. But at the very least you would hope a student could identify an answer in years could not be obtained with the given data of # of sheep and # of dogs.

(And, no, I don't think the units method is beyond an eight grader, even if the educational system thinks it is. The fermi problem may be.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> the 12th fibonacci number is 144.

Assume some of the sheep didn't make it through a winter or that one of the dogs attacked some of them and had to be put down. So, 125 sheep left from a potential of 144 after 12 years of shepherding seems possible.

Assuming the shepherd lives in a country that still has shepherding as a profession, we'll assume s/he started at 15.

The shepherd is 27 years old

Q.E.F.

<comment><USER34> What's scarier than the kids in that video are the number of people on HN who don't seem to have grasped the concept of where "lamb" and "mutton" come from. :-)

EDIT: Too harsh! Tone down!

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I wonder if I do an abstract version of this in code sometimes when I'm being lazy...

</comment><comment><USER36> I think many eighth graders would be sophisticated enough for some dimensional analysis if it were presented in the right way. It's hard to imagine students who had been taught that, making these sorts of mistakes.

<comment><USER16> But dimensional analysis is just another mathematical process turned into a rote method which does not require deeper understanding. The problem is not the pile of rote techniques is too small, but that students aren't learning how to actually think mathematically.

<comment><USER36> I find this "think mathematically" concept you invoke to be a bit fuzzy. Even geniuses (not me, but I've met some) can be caught out by novel constructions if they haven't had time to consider them carefully. Much mathematical sophistication consists of adding to "the pile of techniques". If a student has too shallow a pile, the goal of educators should be to pile on more. If we suspect the research under discussion represents something real and not simply a series of methodology blunders, then it points to an improvement that educators could make. It's likely that basic dimensional analysis is not a complete answer, but I suspect that an admonition to "think mathematically" is not even wrong.

<comment><USER16> > I suspect that an admonition to "think mathematically" is not even wrong.

I am not suggesting that we _admonish_ students to think mathematically. I'm suggesting that we _teach_ them to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is fascinating. I would be intrigued to see the results of asking the same question to students undergoing self-directed learning, either in a home schooling setting or in more progressive schools.

</comment><comment><USER38> Link appears to be down :(

</comment><comment><USER39> I weep for humanity.

</comment><comment><USER40> Well, looks like the kid on 2:22 is on to something.

</comment><comment><USER41> I would really, really like to see more HN readers asking their young children, and posting the results.

<comment><USER5> Your first data point:

My daughter smiled and tried to hand me her juice. Granted, she's 15 months old...</comment></comment>


Simulation of what a massive black hole would look like - <AUTHOR> https://www.theweathernetwork.com/ca/news/article/nasa-black-hole-simulation-seems-to-def-reality <comment><USER2> Back in 1979, Jean-Pierre Luminet created the first "image" calculated the using the IBM 7040 mainframe but drawn by hand plotting points on paper with black India ink.

The pic is cool.

[https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/19/black-hole-image-jean- pi...](https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/19/black-hole-image-jean-pierre- luminet/)

<comment><USER3> Off topic, but that link doesn't work because it redirects through guce.advertising.com and I use a pi hole. I wonder if it was a deliberate decision to redirect traffic away from the site to an ad server to have it redirect back after trackers are set. Maybe they don't care that they lost the adblock users. Still, it seems like there's a better way than to redirect all traffic away. That makes no sense to me.

<comment><USER4> It is intentional.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The astronomical news community would do the public a very big favor if they started stating clearly which pictures are taken by telescopes and which are cgi.

<comment><USER6> That and including a standard scale for apparent width.

I always thought that photos of other galaxies resolved into specks the size of stars in the night sky. This composite of Andromeda and the moon blew my mind: [https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap061228.html](https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap061228.html)

<comment><USER7> But that isnt what you would see by eye or even a normal telescope. That is a long-exposure image. By eye you can only see the brighter/smaller core. Get a more sensitive camera, something able to see the diffuse gas and dimmer stars, and andromeda would be twice even that size.

<comment><USER8> I don't think anyone is under the impression that image can be seen with the naked eye.

<comment><USER6> You're right! But I tried tonight just to see if it was possible to see anything at all. My eyes are kind of shitty but we live out in the boonies with no light pollution. There's a little 'yellow brick road' of stars that lead you to it and if i looked slightly aside i could juuuuuuuuust make out the slightest smudge where it is supposed to be. It was right on the edge of my ability to perceive it, need to try again after spending an hour in the dark.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's a clearer explanation of why the disk looks that way and how the gravitational warp makes those light paths [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo)

</comment><comment><USER10> Awesome, but also oddly familiar. Does this new simulation add anything to Kip Thorne's black hole simulation[0] as soon in Christopher Nolan's movie _Interstellar_?

[0] [https://www.wired.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/10/ut_interste...](https://www.wired.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/10/ut_interstellarOpener_f.png)

<comment><USER11> Not really, they are both the same sort of pop-cultural prop. I think one does include a bit of the blue shifting effects of the disk, a prominent effect they left out of interstellar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There were 2 major events when this became to regular people who were interested in black holes. First was the Interstellar movie, and the second was the black hole picture by the Event Horizon telescope team. This independent simulation also comes to the same conclusion. In summary, the light from the side of the black hole facing away from us, is also curved back and thrown towards us, when looking at the black hole from the side.

<comment><USER13> _the light from the side of the black hole facing away from us, is also curved back and thrown towards us, when looking at the black hole from the side_

What does it mean to look at a black hole "from the side"?

<comment><USER14> Perpendicular to its spin axis (black holes have angular momentum, which is a vector).

<comment><USER15> Does the 'equator' of a spinning black hole have any relationship or influence on the accretion disc? Or vice versa?

Is the direction of spin of a black hole even knowable?

<comment><USER14> The spinning black hole drags space around it, which certainly distorts the accretion disc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Well, I guess Nolan got it right. I seem to remember that being how the black hole was depicted in Interstellar

<comment><USER17> If I remember correctly Nolan consulted with some actual astrophysicists to get it right. Furthermore, they managed to make use of the Hollywood-funded super computer time to get some actual science out of the deal. Here's a random article I googled discussing the topic: [https://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar- blac...](https://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar-black-hole/)

<comment><USER18> Not just any astrophysicist. It was Kip Thorne, who was already an authority in general relativity even before he received the Nobel prize in 2017 for his work on gravitational waves. His works on the movie led to the publication of a scientific paper: [https://aapt.scitation.org/doi/10.1119/1.4916949](https://aapt.scitation.org/doi/10.1119/1.4916949)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There are some nice somewhat interactive black hole renderings on shadertoy...

[https://www.shadertoy.com/results?query=black+hole](https://www.shadertoy.com/results?query=black+hole) [https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XdjXDy](https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XdjXDy)

</comment><comment><USER20> The simulation is pretty amazing, but the wording and headline of the article point to what I feel like in science, not just physics, ecology's pretty bad for it too, but the impression I always get from models and simulations is that when they don't match up with reality, somehow reality's wrong and not the model or simulation.

<comment><USER21> "Mind-bending black hole simulation appears to defy reality"

"Appears to". Doesn't say it does. Doesn't suggest it does. I think you're being unfair.

> when they don't match up with reality, somehow reality's wrong and not the > model or simulation.

Can you point to some examples? This is not something I've noticed myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Lovely. Interestingly, this feature of black holes that they allow you to see what is on the "far side" of the black hole as a result of gravitational lensing was one of the heuristics used by Leonard Susskind to propose the holographic principle in his famous paper, "The World As A Hologram" [https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9409089](https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9409089)

Note especially Figure 2, Figure 3, Figure 4, used to justify that a two dimensional screen is enough to capture all the information.

Obviously there is a lot more going on -- especially the black hole entropy formula which says that entropy growths with surface area not volume -- to motivate this idea, but I always thought those figures were particularly educational.

</comment><comment><USER23> Click-bait title, ugh. "The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you." - Neil DeGrasse-Tyson

</comment><comment><USER24> Veritasium made an excellent youtube video explaining how this effect works (before the image was released!) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo)

</comment><comment><USER25> Also interesting in this image is that the left side of the disk around the black hole appears brighter than the right side, because the matter in the disk is spinning so fast that you get Doppler beaming near to the speed of light.

</comment><comment><USER26> Here's a real time raytracer I wrote with first person movement to move around the black hole: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDqnRs_xTWQ&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDqnRs_xTWQ&feature=youtu.be) [https://github.com/fernand/schwarzschild_raytracer](https://github.com/fernand/schwarzschild_raytracer)

</comment><comment><USER27> There was a cooler ESA simulation a few months back. I've struggled to try and find the video

<comment><USER11> Maybe you think of this _magnetohydrodynamic simulation_ : [https://www.eso.org/public/videos/eso1907o/](https://www.eso.org/public/videos/eso1907o/)

The NASA video is a visualisation that "simulates" the optical distortion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The picture is beautiful but I feel that it doesn't convey the right mental model of the black hole.

It would be a great picture to illustrate gravitational lensing, but it's a not so great one for conveying what a black hole is.

From the picture it seems that particles are swirling around in multiple directions, whereas the mental picture you should get is : there is a standard accretion ring but with gravitational lensing visual filter turned on.

A black Saturn with a Snapchat filter

<comment><USER10> A black Saturn wouldn't do it justice. Saturn doesn't bend space as extremely as a block hole does, and it's that extreme bending of space that's the hard part to visualise about a black hole. It's trivial to imagine a black ball with a ring around it, but it's the bending of space and the subsequent bending of light that's the hard part.

<comment><USER28> Yep bending of light and warping is hard to visualize. Thankfully we can play with our own black hole at home. I took my crystal ball cut some cardboard into a ring.

If you look, you can see both side of the ring behind the black hole :

[https://gistnoesis.github.io/blackhole.jpg](https://gistnoesis.github.io/blackhole.jpg)

You just need to imagine a little stronger warping.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Interesting. I'm amazed how the shape was declared by the notion you would never lose "sight" of the black hole no matter the direction you looked at it from. I just realized that was how the shape came to be.

<comment><USER30> > you would never lose "sight" of the black hole

You would never lose sight of the _accretion disk_. And you can see both sides simultaneously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Would it be possible that a habitable planet be close enough to one to see this with ordinary telescopes?

<comment><USER11> Might be, black holes come in a very large range of sizes so a configuration where you have a habitable planet very close to a large enough black hole isn't impossible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> isn't the gravity bending effect used by astronomers to compute stuff hidden by planets too ?

<comment><USER33> Yes! E.g. you can use the sun as a lens during a solar eclipse. It was actually the experiment that proved Einstein's general relativity to be more than a theory, because during a solar eclipse we can see stars at the edge of the eclipse that are actually _behind_ the sun.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_May_29,_1919](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_May_29,_1919)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> That's beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER35> This reminds me of the black hole shown in Interstellar (movie). It's fantastic even though being in a shelf is kind of unbelievable ;-)</comment>


Cargo cult - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult

<comment><USER2> See also: Most sysctl.conf settings on the internet.</comment>


Linux on Laptops: Asus Zephyrus G14 with Ryzen 9 4900HS - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/linux-on-laptops-asus-zephyrus-g14-with-ryzen-9-4900hs/ <comment><USER2> I Just made the jump from a macbook to a dual GPU nvidia Razer Blade 15 running pop!_os. Everything more or less works out of box except for thermal CPU boosting ( which works with some minor tweaks). With the hybrid power mode you still need to manually decide which apps to run on the dedicated GPU, but it mostly powers down when not in use.

Still, all the issues running linux on heterogeneous desktop hardware leads me to think that we need a better business model for linux on the laptop.

<comment><USER3> _> better business model for linux on the laptop_

I wonder what the numbers are for linux on laptops.

I suspect that the number of people who buy new laptops dedicated to linux are low

I think it's much more common to replace a laptop and put linux on the old one.

And there could also be a middle ground where folks dual-book linux and their favorite OS.

Given that, it's no wonder Microsoft is heading off dedicated linux laptops by running linux in a container under windows.

<comment><USER2> Excluding chromebooks the market share is ~1-2% of all machines. However when you look at the developer crowd, the situation changes with ~25% of devs using Linux as their primary OS.

Considering that developers often prefer premium and powerful laptops it seems like there could be a market if the experience was polished.

Edit: Source: [https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#development-e...](https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#development- environments-and-tools)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> >, I downloaded a free-to-play game instead. First, I installed Steam, then DOTA2. Full confession: I don't know the first thing about DOTA2. However, I don't think two frames per second is normal on the menu, before even launching a match.

This seems odd to me. I've got a 5-6 year old pretty mid-range laptop with a terrible graphics card yet I'm able to run DOTA2 just fine without any framerate issues on linux.

<comment><USER5> Yeah the key here is you have a graphics card, even an old low-end one. With these "dual-GPU" laptops, the default is whatever integrated nonsense is, and you have to specifically activate the fancy NVidia card for specific programs (the Windows drivers do this automatically).

I can't easily figure out from the ASUS page what the other card is. If it's the APU it _might_ theoretically be able to do OK on DOTA2, with the right drivers, but without setup I'd give decent odds the author is running the fallback VESA driver, meaning it's basically doing the whole thing in software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ha, exactly what I've wanted to know since I first saw this laptop. It's sadly kinda normal that laptops are broken on Day 1 with Linux. The WiFi card in my XPS-13 (a laptop that, in certain cases, even comes with Ubuntu preinstalled) was broken for the first month or so before kernel support was added. Shame, since everything else about it was basically perfect right out of the box.

<comment><USER7> Not to be a Linux apologist, but you have to do the same with Windows anyways, no? (Keep in mind it's been almost a decade since Windows was my daily driver)

For example video drivers you always have to install separately, and I remember having to copy drivers for Ethernet cards after formatting.

Due to the popular opinion of Pop!_OS on here, I gave it a try, and it's performed wonderfully on my XPS 13 7390. Everything working out of the box

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm so disappointed. When I initially saw the headline I thought this was going to be a decent AMD Linux laptop. I've been keeping my eye out for something to replace my old Lenovo with, and I really don't want to go NVidia because of the proprietary drivers, but for some reason only the lowest-end laptops are AMD at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER8> I just got the G15 after six years on a MBP and am thinking about to returning it. The video card fan is so loud when it kicks on that it's probably louder than the speakers. My wife started complaining about it across the living room. Tried to install Elementary OS and after three hours gave up.

</comment><comment><USER9> lol guess who?!?! NVIDIA!!!

always proprietary. always closed. always custom. never interoperable. this laptop embodies the nvidia legacy.

</comment><comment><USER10> Article is from early April 2020

</comment><comment><USER11> I have the same machine I've resorted to VM or WSL

<comment><USER12> I'd love to get one but it's out of stock everywhere :(</comment></comment>


Is Burning Man on the cusp of becoming a permanent Utopian community? - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/08/will-burning-man-become-a-permanent-community.html

<comment><USER2> tldr: No. "..would require a lot of money".

Anyone who's been to bm can see in an instant how utterly unsustainable the lifestyle is with today's tech.</comment>