Benoit Mandelbrot, RIP - <AUTHOR> http://kottke.org/10/10/benoit-mandelbrot-rip <comment><USER2> Wow, that sucks.

It was fractals that managed to re-ignite my interest in math after having it de-constructed by highschool teachers.

Amazing images embedded in suspiciously simple formulas. Irresistible.

I owe the man a lot, this is really not a good thing to go to sleep with.

<comment><USER3> He died at 85. He had a long full life and accomplished far, far more than you or I ever will, combined, multiplied by 256. (I'd like to think that's an exaggeration; alas.)

I don't get why humans mourn the death of people who die at >80, and especially people who have lead such illustrious, incredible lives. It should be a time for _celebration_ , of the incredible way in which Mandelbrot has contributed to the sum of Humanity's Greatness. We should literally throw a party in His honor.

Humans die around age 80, with a variance of about 55-105. It's just a fact. For all our claims of progress, we are still hopelessly emotional animals who are influenced by whatever-happens-to-influence-us rather than solely by logic and reason.

<comment><USER4> So I'm not sure if I agree with this argument.. And I'm going to link to the ultra-layman's version here: [http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/39/Harry_Potter_and_the_...](http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/39/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality) but why celebrate at someone dying at 85 when we can/should be able to make them live till 170. Or longer.

On a related note -- for anyone who hasn't read "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" -- It's brilliant.

<comment><USER3> Oh, certainly. And people living until 85/100 has become common only recently (relatively speaking).

I'm merely mourning the emotional complex of otherwise-logical humans. I happened to have a frustrating week due to coworkers being unwilling to think about logical benefits of proposed solutions, letting their emotions overwhelm their judgement. " _Schedule feature requests_? Schedules cause pain, anguish, and suffering; also monsters will materialize and devour your soul. _Your whole soul._ Scheduling is out of the question. P.S. I assigned you a bug to get done before tomorrow evening (seriously). Drop your multi-week project and work on that, now. Don't worry, I cleared it with the lead programmer."

So when I read the top comment of the top article on HN, and realized it was negatively charged with emotion, I suppose I got a little cynical. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth ..."

-Benoit Mandelbrot

<comment><USER6> ...and financial returns are not Gaussian

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> He's not dead, he's just transformed into a similar form at a different level of zoom.

<comment><USER3> Random thought: Every human is a fractal, and our age is our level of zoom.

<comment><USER8> That's so interesting. We are definitely self-similar, over and over in the course of our lives. If you could view a person 4-dimensionally (with time as the 4th), then the furthest level of zoom would be the person's entire life, replicating patterns at every instance. Zoom to any shorter time span and you would likely see something different but still similar. Could the narrowest level of zoom be a single thought in a single instance? That it itself probably has fractal-levels of complexity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The NOVA episode on fractals (and Mandelbrot) was one the of best NOVA's that I've watched: <http://video.pbs.org/video/1050932219/>

<comment><USER10> As recommended viewing I'd add Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon's "Fractals: The Colors of Infinity", presented by Arthur C. Clarke.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here's my tribute to Benoit Mandelbrot (text from Wikipedia):

<http://i.imgur.com/RoZ1j.jpg>

Interactive version: <http://www.tagxedo.com/artful/87f79fa9bb6340be>

I was fascinated by fractals when I was very young, and in retrospect, and I owe a lifetime interest in Mathematics and computer science to him.

<comment><USER8> That's awesome. I hope you don't mind that I linked to it.

<comment><USER11> Don't mind at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There are some things that literally change how you perceive the world. Learning about fractal geometry is one of those things.

Farewell, sir!

</comment><comment><USER13> NYT has confirmed it - <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/us/17mandelbrot.html>

One of the first programs I wrote on the IBM PC was a Fractal explorer (on a PS/2 using Turbo Pascal)

</comment><comment><USER14> Can someone explain "A Greek among Romans" from Taleb's homepage?

Benoit Mandelbrot, 1924-2010 A Greek among Romans

<comment><USER15> It seems that Taleb wants to separate Mandelbrot, a sophisticated, educated, refined, and übersmart person, from the rest of the crowd.

* "To Benoit Mandelbrot A Greek among Romans" is the Incipit of The "Black Swan" Taleb's book.

* Taleb calls Mandelbrot the "poet of Randomness" in the chap.16 "Aesthetics of Randomness"

* "Intellectually sophisticated characters were exactly what I looked for in life" (and they are seldom). Taleb p.255 The Black Swan, 2007.

* He could also have said an "Athenian among Boeotian" but Romans are powerful (vs. Boeotians) and Benoit Mandelbrot had to fight the establishment with his visual research. "Pariah amongst French Mathematicians". With his Fractal images, his work was "remarkably easy to understand" for the general public.

* Unlike in Rome, the most popular shows in Athenes were not Circus WWE gladiator fights, it was going to Aeschylus or Sophocles tragedies.

Taleb's homepage <http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/>

<comment><USER16> A few weeks ago I visited the Acropolis in Athens for the first time. To know that, about 25 centuries ago, Euripides and Sophocles presented their premiers in there, at the theater of Dionysos, suddenly gave a pile of rubble an extraordinary sense of purpose and meaning.

I admire the wit of Taleb to call Mandelbrot a Greek--in this modern world of very Roman _panem et circenses_.

<comment><USER17> The Greeks were truly great. Not only did they know that the earth is a sphere, they also calculated what size it was, and considered the possibility that it revolves around its axis and around the sun. They conjectured that matter is made of indivisible atoms. They calculated the value of pi. Unfortunately their discoveries based on logic and observation would later be dictated to be false by the bible (including the value of pi)...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is so odd. I just gave a quick presentation on him yesterday in theology class. The prompt was to "Use you creative genius to show God in a visual manner." I argued that we couldn't describe God in finite terms, so I used fractals because of their infinite detail. Much better response from the class than collages of waterfalls and sunsets. And now that I think about it, fractals came up in my Physics class too. My teacher was describing a talk he gave at Wolfram Research on the subject.

And then Benoit Mandelbrot died yesterday. Very odd coincidence. Rest in peace, Mr. Mandelbrot.

</comment><comment><USER19> The first program written in C that I saw that did anything interesting was a Mandelbrot set generator. It's what hooked me on programming, I think.

</comment><comment><USER20> I owe a lot to him. It was a picture of a Mandelbrot on a computer lab wall that inspired me to pursue programming and computer science in the 90s. It was the combination of math and art that was so beautiful to me.

I programmed my first mandelbrot in basic, then in pascal and C.

Fractint represent! <http://spanky.triumf.ca/www/fractint/fractint.html>

</comment><comment><USER21> Does anyone have pointers/links to application or research of fractals in the recent past ?

Atleast in network traffic analysis, there seemed to be a lot of buzz about "self-similar" nature of TCP/IP,Ethernet, till around 2005-2006- you can see heavily cited papers on Google scholar.

But,of late -atleast in the past three years- you wouldn't find heavily-cited research/publications on fractals in top conferences. ( I may be wrong, I only did a quick look up)

Has the interest in application of fractals fizzled out in the past few years?

</comment><comment><USER22> What profound ideas this man brought to the world. Just finished a project for a guy who mentioned he was deeply inspired by Mandelbrot. With the help of a few friends, he built the world's largest VW bus. Can you spot the hidden Mandelbrot set in this header image? <http://www.walterthebus.org/the- scoop/tribe-walter/>

</comment><comment><USER23> Mandelbrot changed much of my world view and how mathematics relates to it.

I see kids in schools being lauded for correctly identifying triangles, squares and circles and for saying "the moon is a circle". I've wondered whether teachers ever found it strange that true triangles, squares and cubes were hard to find in nature. Wondered whether we're teaching kids to look through the peep hole of classical geometry.

Then I think of Mandelbrot and take comfort in that this man who probably schooled that way too managed to break free, drop the peep hole, and mathematically see what we all see day in and day out, but are blind to. That gives me hope that we as a society are a capable lot.

It also gives me hope that fractals have been around in societies for much longer than we commonly know of .. presented beautifully by Ron Eglash at TED - <http://www.ted.com/talks/ron_eglash_on_african_fractals.html>

</comment><comment><USER24> even in his old age his thinking was still fresh. he had an unusual clarity of thought and was able to convey his theories even to the layman. the man may be dead but his ideas live on.

</comment><comment><USER25> Learning about the fractional dimension of the coast of Britain was one of the most interesting discoveries I've had. :(

<comment><USER26> I never really liked coastlines as an explanation of fractals. Sure, they have some of the same features as you zoom in from the world map level to the callipers-along-the-beach level. But it doesn't keep going forever -- you hit the atomic level where the coastline isn't so much fractal as poorly-defined.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I found some screenshot of a program which can render Mandelbrot fractals extended to the 4th dimension.

If you have Java and a (recent) NVidia or ATI graphic card you can download the software here <http://jogamp.org/jocl/www/> (it is one of the demos). It requires OpenCL.

</comment><comment><USER28> :(

</comment><comment><USER29> I was fascinated by fractals when I was young, I even attended a Mandelbrot conference when I was 14. I could not understand any of the mathematical fundamentals, but there was something intuitively beautiful and irresistible about fractals.

Great man, great contribution to humanity.

</comment><comment><USER30> 1+i minutes of silence for him.

</comment><comment><USER31> In his honor, here is Matlab code to generate a Mandlebrot set (from an old homework assignment):

function inValues= mndl(limits) %no inputs needed, used by the script to zoom in

%amount of detail to calculate; larger number = better resolution, slower calculation stepsR=300; stepsI=300;

%maximum iterations used in calculations maxIter=50;

if exist('limits')~=1; %intial range of real and imaginary numbers to compute lowerR=-2; lowerI=-1.25; higherR=1; higherI=1.25; else numel(limits)==4; %range to compute after zooming in, determined by axis lowerR=limits(1); lowerI=limits(3); higherR=limits(2); higherI=limits(4); end

%Constants: slR=(higherR-lowerR)/(stepsR-1); slI=(higherI-lowerI)/(stepsI-1);

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% % Create the Mandelbrot image.

[x,y]=meshgrid([0:stepsR-1] _slR+lowerR,[0:stepsI-1]_ slI+lowerI); inValues=ones(size(x)); z=zeros(size(x)); c=(x+1i _y);

h_z=1:(stepsR_stepsI); for counter=1:maxIter z(h_z)=z(h_z).^2+c(h_z); h_z= h_z(abs(z(h_z))<2); inValues(h_z)=inValues(h_z)+1; end %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

%format presentation of Mandelbrot image colormap jet; pcolor(x,y,log(double(inValues))); title('Mandelbrot Image: Zoom In and Sharpen for Details'); shading interp; axis off;

zoom %turn on zoom feature initially clear inValues

%Buttons:

%recalculate image to enhance after zooming in (just calls the function %again with new input argument based on current axis) h1= uicontrol('Parent',gcf,'Units','points', ... 'Callback',['mndl(axis);zoom;'], ... 'Position',[105 5 105 20],'Style','pushbutton','String','Sharpen (after zooming in)');

%turn the zoom button on or off h2= uicontrol('Parent',gcf,'Units','points', ... 'Callback',['zoom'], ... 'Position',[215 5 55 20],'Style','pushbutton','String','Zoom On/Off');

%reset the image h3= uicontrol('Parent',gcf,'Units','points', ... 'Callback',['mndl();zoom;'], ... 'Position',[275 5 40 20],'Style','pushbutton','String','Reset');

<comment><USER31> Sorry about the weird formatting, it looks fine when I paste in the comment box. You'll need to add line breaks after the comments to get it working.

<comment><USER32> You might want to put that code in a site such as <http://pastebin.com/> and link to it instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> His 'Fractals and Scaling In Finance' helped me wrap my brain around power laws. Perhaps if certain folks had read it when it was first published (1997), we would have had less financial turmoil these past few years.

</comment><comment><USER33> Goodbye professor. You were, and will remain, one of my greatest inspirations.

</comment><comment><USER34> RIP <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ES-yKOYaXq0>

<comment><USER32> This is the full Mandelbrot Set song by Jonathan Coulton:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOPQ1l4sCjY>

And here's Benoit Mandelbrot's giving a talk at TED:

<http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/909>

<comment><USER35> I guess Coulton's going to have to change the lyrics a little.

<comment><USER36> "Right now he's not alive or teaching math at Yale"?

Not quite as funny, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Source: [http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=12158836789...](http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=121588367899802&id=13012333374)

</comment><comment><USER37> Ahh if only we could discuss things in never ending complexity. Here's to the father of fractals.</comment>


Show HN: MicCheck makes you aware when your microphone is active in background - <AUTHOR> https://gum.co/mic-check <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I am Amardeep, maker of MicCheck.

Why I made it? .. a little story! Due to COVID-19 situation, most of us are working from home - taking classes, attending meetings & webinars on various video conferencing apps.

It just so happened that I was browsing for some important information (no… seriously!) while a conference call was on. The meeting got over and I happily went about working on other things, discussing with my wife who is going to make dinner & who is going to do dishes (I know… right?).

Only an hour later, I realised that I never disconnected the call & my microphone was still listening. That whole day I kept wondering, who all may have heard & what all were the things I may have said (…behind their backs!). Nevertheless, now they all know what I feel about them. I may have lost a few friends (or made a deeper connection … Radical Candor … you see).

Well, this happened thrice in 2 weeks! (Yours is about to happen … just wait!)

So … The weekend came up and my inner geek woke up to solve it. I don't have many more friends to lose after all. Few nights in, and 'Houston, we have a lot of other problems in life but not this one anymore!'

1…2…3 … mic check … MicCheck is in the house!

What does MicCheck do? MicCheck is very high tech! It shows a big beautiful red box (or a small one if you prefer) on top of your screen whenever your microphone is in use; even when the conference call app is lost in one of your 100 browser tabs or buried deep down in your war-room control centre that you have made your desktop to be.

-

Would be happy to hear your thoughts and feedback.

</comment><comment><USER2> Wow! This would come pretty handy. I have had some embarrassments because of my call left connected. This should solve it. I tried to find something similar but couldn't. Thank you, installing right away. Cheers</comment>


Ask HN: Share an idea? - <AUTHOR> If you're like me, you often have a lot of ideas that you don't have the time or resources to execute on.
If so, why not write it down for your fellow hackers' enjoyment?
Topics can be anything: product ideas, service ideas, blog post topics, stand up comedy skits, research initiatives you wish could get funded, etc. <comment><USER2> Pay for full time, beat-walking emergency medical technicians in shitty neighborhoods. This would prevent a lot of unneeded hospital visits and offer basic health services. A lot cheaper than 911 calls. I imagine having people on the ground would prevent a lot of problems.

<comment><USER3> Would this really be cheaper? It's an awful lot of man hours committed to just one area vs. a centralized one that can dedicate the time/effort/resources accordingly based on needs and corresponding urgency.

Also one of the bigger question would still be how would these EMTs have their equipment with them + how would quality of care be ensured?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Problem: Advertising is a big industry. Billions of dollars are spent to bolster brand awareness and drive sales. Increasingly, advertising is digital as consumers spend more time on phones, computers and tablets. Social platforms like Facebook exploit user data for enormous profit, while all the user gets is a "free" product. There is an opportunity for users to reclaim a significant amount of this value, and in doing so realize a greater sense of worth.

Mission: To measure and honor the value of every individual.

Vision: Corporations and Individuals providing value directly for each other.

Product: A URL shortening service for individuals to monetize the content they share. Monetization occurs via an ad featured between the platform sharing the short url (e.g. Facebook) and the site the short url takes the user to (the content being shared).

<comment><USER5> Do you mean like AdFly? - [https://adf.ly/](https://adf.ly/)

<comment><USER4> AdFly is a competitor, but it is oriented toward publishers and advertisers. Everyday people who share content can still use the service, but they will have a difficult time clearing the $5 minimum payout amount.

<comment><USER5> Maybe if you could make it happen automatically, but I don't see regular people using a link shortener often. People sharing links on FB don't want to have an extra step, they just want to share links. You'd also have to look at the metadata stuff, the preview/Open Graph would just show your shortener service and not the actual content which could lead to less clicks.

<comment><USER4> I'm minimizing the complexity of the extra step with a browser extension. When you open the extension, it hits an API with the current URL and gives you the short URL. Ultimately, the goal is to make the service accessible on every site, alongside the Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest buttons common in social widgets.

I'm using tools similar to what social platforms use to aggregate metadata, and embedding this information in the page, specifically for crawlers. Facebook still gets the metadata, except it comes from my service and not the original site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Amazing post-game experience for recreational athletes.

I play soccer recreationally. I've easily played more than 1,000 games and all I have post-game are memories ( which are nice ), but I feel we could do much better.

I have a vague idea for a solution - but it would involve drone-filming all my recreational soccer games, and then have the content edited/produced - so I could see al my plays, everyone else's best plays, and so on and so forth.

It would be really interesting because it would also augment the social in- pitch experience with post-game online socialization.

What do you think?

<comment><USER7> Personally, I think this is a really interesting idea. Sadly, I came across an article which initially focused on stats for recreational athletes and it eventually fizzled out. Can't remember where I read it and not saying that this idea will also fizzle out but it seems hard to get something going for recreational athletes if there's a smaller chance of monetizing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Netflix, but mostly decentralized. End users can be paid to allocate part of their PC's storage toward movies and shows that they stream to their neighbors, taking a lot of the load off the public backbones and central servers.

Of course, these are encrypted and only decrypted (transcrypted?) when they're transferred to someone nearby, intelligently based on `tracepath` or something. My thought (may or may not be feasible) was that the central server only gives you the public key for the data, and then provides the private key and a new public key when the data is transmitted. I'm not sure that's even possible with any level of secrecy, but if so it would remove a _lot_ of redundant traffic and I imagine you could pay people less than you'd save on bandwidth/peering if you could just pay them to P2P content (securely).

Get theaters involved in the initial distribution since they're everywhere and have digital copies (and probably decent pipes).

Basically, my internet got really crappy every day at about 6 PM and I imagined that 90% of my neighbors were streaming the same episodes of Breaking Bad, and it bugged me that it wasn't just sent once and the distributed locally.

<comment><USER9> I am working on a project that let's you stream video / files peer to peer: [https://fuego.link/](https://fuego.link/)

This project is early beta. It's written in Elixir using the Phoenix Framework and uses React for the front-end. The source code is on GitHub: [https://github.com/hayesgm/fuego](https://github.com/hayesgm/fuego)

The end goal is to make file / video sharing in a browser fully peer-to-peer, similar to BitTorrent and cut out the middle-man. The project is open-source to allow anyone to create mirrors for peer discovery.

I'm happy for any feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> 1) An application that connects restaurant chefs and managers to local farmers. Local farmers could upload their goods for the week on a marketplace board, and chefs could find things that they would like to cook with for the week and buy them. Typically chefs meet local purveyors at farmer's markets, but for small enough producers, it would save them time and money to just have their goods bought directly without having to go to a central market and run a stand. Chefs would be able to order local goods similar to the way they order through Sysco or FSA.

2) A dribble-like site for artisans. A site to showcase and upvote artisan work and hopefully drive business to them. Baked goods, building airplanes, cedar strip canoe building, kinetic sculptures, etc.

<comment><USER11> 1 is not a bad idea. I have an alternative idea where chefs (and anyone else) can post what high quality produce (heritage breeds, etc) they want and how much they will pay for the produce. Farmers could then bid on these requests. This way rather than having to select from what is available, or the farmer having to guess what the market wants, the farmer grows what is wanted by the market and they know how much they will earn. Rather than grow the tasteless varieties that crop and look good, they will grow the varieties that actually taste good.

<comment><USER12> Great idea. A contract growing scheme on a small scale. Community groups (churches, neighbors etc) might even want to get involved. Prepayment for at least some of the growing cost would be nice for the growers (CSA style). I suppose a rating system on growers would be needed also.

<comment><USER11> Yes it could really be expanded outside of the just the restaurant business. Having once had a garden where I grew my own heritage produce I really, really, really miss the quality of those crops - the taste was just fantastic. I now live in an apartment and would pay a significant premium to get someone to supply them to me again.

One final tweak would be to allow people to also select organic growers as well - I personally would not care, but I suspect it would be a big market for this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A product hunt type website but for adding features to current app/websites. User can thumbs up or down a feature request, and can also thumb-up a request with some small money tagged to it. The money collected will go to a non profit.

<comment><USER14> This slightly reminds me of bountry source

[https://www.bountysource.com/](https://www.bountysource.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> \- Startup: create a universal and convenient micropayment system that would allow content creators(writers, comics-artists, video creators) to monetize their content. The problem now is that current systems suck, and each website has it's own, so that it's not convenient for users to pay for content, they have to enter credit card, or go to paypal, etc. There should be a nice embeddable button that allows users to pay for watching a video or reading an article in one click, on any website. Or maybe something even more elegant and convenient.

\- Startup: xprize meets kickstarter. Or a reverse-kickstarter. You create and back the project first, and then anyone can execute it and collect the reward. People come up with projects they want to see happen, submit the idea. Anyone can vote on the idea by sending some money. As a result you have a list of user-created project ideas, ranked by how much money people deposited on them. Anyone who completes a project gets all the money.

\- Project: A convenient website where users can add feature ideas, vote on them, and discuss implementatuon. It would be a convenient way for developers to prioritize which tasks to work on. Probably connected to git. Basically like submitting issues, but it's feature ideas and it's ranked by importance.

\- In-browser markdown editor like on gitbook.com. Please somebody make this. Ideally it would be open source, but I would totally pay for an opportunity to use it on my website.

\- slant.co, but for things other than tech. Movies, books, music, whatever. Or a similar open-source system so that I could spin up my own website with this.

\- Awesome open source chat that I can embed on my website. Like chapp.is or gitter.im

\- ELI5 for computer science and programming. Explain linear regression, ANN, and other complicated concepts in short, simple terms.

-A robot simulator programming game where you control a virtual robot with your code. Targeted to CS and AI students. You could use this game to practice algorithms you are learning. Challenges(levels) are somewhat similar to AIMA exercises, or can be taken from berkeley AI class curriculum. Later you add a "competition" feature, where several teams program their robots to fight each other. Check out Screeps and Starcraft AI Tournament for inspiration. (the whole game is in the browser, robots are controlled with REST API so you could use any language.)

Send me an email to firstname.lastname@example.com if you are interested in working on any of these. I know Django, I can contribute, especially if it's open source.

<comment><USER15> Other stuff:

\- All text editors on android suck. My god they suck so much. Create something like Editorial, and you have my money.

\- Not sure of it exists - betting website. Allow people to deposit money and make small bets. Make it convenient for reddit users, so when 2 people are arguing they could bet on a thing and see what will happen. Or target it to fanfiction readers, to bet on what will happen in the following chapters(would be super useful for /r/HPMOR)

\- Website - a collection of ways to make people's lives weirder. Something like pranks, or ways to mess with people's heads, but harmless, funny, and innocent. Stuff that Harry from HPMOR does.

\- Use ML and CV and image recognition to do something cool with google maps. It's just an interesting idea, use CV to analyze google maps data.

\- Subreddit recommendation engine. Based on your likes and subscriptions. Like on imdb.

\- gitter for subreddits. Connect a subreddit to a chat.

\- HN-lore. There are some links that are submitted to HN regularly, and every 6 months new people discover them. Great stories people here like sharing, articles, books, etc. Create a ranked list of HN folklore and traditions.

\- Automatically compile my HN, reddit, other social media posts into a blog- like post feed.

\- Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding for movies and animation projects. It would be a big kill-Hollywood kind of startup, not sure about how to make this at all, but we should turn movie industry into a github/reddit-like thing. Just a dream I guess.

<comment><USER16> _Use ML and CV and image recognition to do something cool with google maps. It 's just an interesting idea, use CV to analyze google maps data._

As someone working with something vaguely related to this sort of thing. Let me just say, use Open Street Maps. Google mapping data and the licensing thereof is a huge pain and often straight up impossible. Don't lock yourself into developing something for a platform where you will be forbidden from selling or even distributing the fruits of your labor. Plus with OSM you get direct access to the underlying vector data, which in most cases will save you an arduous and error prone processing step

Other than that, the whole field is wide open for all kinds of awesome ideas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Shazam for fonts. Point your phone camera at some text and it tells you the top N fonts it thinks it is with C% confidence.

Niche market for graphic designers.

There's the website What The Font [1], but it's not a super user friendly app like Shazam.

I think the hardest part of this would be the huge amount of time it'd take to get a good dataset and train whatever machine learning model you'd probably wind up using.

[1] [https://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/](https://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/)

<comment><USER11> Nice idea. I think you will find the hardest thing will be that so many typefaces are near clones of each other. It might be easier to just match to the closest open source typeface.

<comment><USER17> Definitely true. That's why you'd have to print out the top N fonts it thinks it's similar to.

Something like

        1. Foo Bar Lite Italic - 99.1%
        2. Foo Bar Italic - 97.2%
        3. Baz Bar Lite Italic - 97.0%
        4. Foo Baz Italic - 95.4%
        ... etc maybe give the top 10 or so ...

Another problem is many logos and whatnot have been hand-tweaked from their original font.

<comment><USER11> Yes it is a hard problem. It might be worth trying on a small scale with a few close typefaces to see how hard it is to separate them and what sort of accuracy could be achieved.

<comment><USER18> Definately not a hard problem. For logos, impossible because of customisation, but for regular text, it's simple. Capture image, make a box around text, warp to flatten, highten contrast, split characters, process characters for features, check against database of known features of fonts. It's similar to a facial recognition algorithm.

Problem is no monetization potential, so it's hobby project level.

<comment><USER11> I think you are under estimating how similar many typefaces are to each other. When even human experts have a hard time determining which typeface is which you know it is a hard problem.

I do agree 100% with you that any such product would be impossible to monetarise. I would certainly like to use it so I hope someone makes it.

<comment><USER18> > When even human experts have a hard time determining which typeface is which > you know it is a hard problem

A font is just a series of images with standardised traits. Computers are great at recognising these traits, and perfect for cross comparing them. It's just pixels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I sometimes even registered the domains, e.g. toothing.org The name offers various cell phone games, even the toothing hoax itself.

The next odd idea requires expert knowledge in Babylonian contracts. Every change of ownership without a contract was theft. Contracts involving people required a cancel clause for each side. And ownership on people without contract was punished by death, as illegal slavery. So most contracts are marriages. The contracts are highly formalized, so one can use them as templates and exchange the names. Print them on a clay tablet, burn them, and send them by mail. I'm sure marriage contracts would sell, especially those with the cancel clause: "and when she says you are no longer my man, he can throw her into the river".

The 3rd and most challenging idea would be a project and freelancer site that does not suck. Where projects, prices and skills do not race to the bottom.

And last _shameless plug about something real_ You can contact me on #o3db @ irc.freenode.net - currently developing a Browser-4GL in Scheme.

</comment><comment><USER20> Here's my pet idea for a hardware product I'd totally use:

A Google Glass like device without most of the functionality (no camera or mics) or processing hardware (doesn't have to run its own OS), except the display (this should cut down costs quite a bit and make it a bit more feasible to manufacturer and purchase than Google Glass itself).

You connect devices to it using Miracast and/or some other wireless display tech and extend/mirror your smartphone/laptop displays.

It can serve as a portable multi-monitor setup for productivity, or a simple portable heads-up display for entertainment (video playback, reading) or utility uses (navigation).

That'd be the MVP anyways. In future revisions you can maybe add things like a mic and/or camera for things like augmented reality and voice control, but figure out how to offload the processing to the master device (laptop/smartphone) rather than dedicating hardware to it on the device itself for affordability and battery life.

</comment><comment><USER21> For the love of God, someone create a World of Warcraft where the quests are educational. Instead of "go kill 8 green dragons" the questiver says "Mata a 8 dragones verdes". The immersion and addiction to progression (i.e. unholy motivation) would have us speaking multiple languages in no time.

Please. I'm begging you to take my money.

</comment><comment><USER22> An Amazon for renting things. All the top Google search results looked antiquated..

edit: my search query was just "rent anything"

<comment><USER23> That sounds like a bad idea from a counter-party risk perspective.

But I suppose so did AirBnB.

<comment><USER11> Everyone says AirBnB was a bad idea, but only the original idea was bad. Once you realise that the business is really about running illegal hotels where the risk is outsourced then it becomes a very good idea.

<comment><USER23> > Once you realise that the business is really about running illegal hotels > where the risk is outsourced then it becomes a very good idea.

No, thats exactly why I'd say it was a bad idea, because who would accept that outsourced risk?!

(It turns out a lot of people did)

<comment><USER11> The original idea was for people to share their home or room to strangers. This was not a good idea, but pivoting into the illegal hotel business where the properties are continually rented was a good idea - at least until there is a major crackdown.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Rooftop solar has really taken off here in Australia, and around 20-25% of houses have a solar inverter. Is it practical to build a cheap rooftop wind- power harvester that plugs into the inverter?

<comment><USER11> The killer here is likely to be planning restrictions. The other problem is wind is actually more efficient when centralised. The large turbines that our PM hates so much are much more efficient than small turbines.

<comment><USER24> Agreed on both points.

With planning restrictions, I hope that something small and noise-free could please the nimbyists. Something(s) the size of a Dyson fan on the roof-line would look cool.

With regards efficiency, I think it's not about replacing the large centralised turbines but augmenting the house's existing solar. A typical single solar panel that generates 200w peak makes about 500Wh/day (on sunny days). If (big if) a turbine can generate 20w average over 24 hours, that's 480Wh extra.

But as @desdiv correctly points out - the idea is nothing new. Here's a good looking 20w turbine that I would be happy to have on my roof:

[http://wind-kinetic.com/index.php/other-products/polar-20w-3...](http://wind- kinetic.com/index.php/other-products/polar-20w-3.html)

<comment><USER11> My memory is a bit hazy on this, but I think that turbines place a lot of stress on buildings that they were not designed to handle. Retrofitting the required strength into the building will be expensive given what our tradies charge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> A mobile app platform based on images. Keep a basic JavaScript bookmarklet to decode the images into HTML, so they become browser-based apps. Store everything in the 50MB of cache-manifest. Use the same apps on iOS, Android, etc. Evade parental controls and device restrictions on app stores. Copy app- images directly between phones. I call it "Fondant", meaning "chocolate coated". Because I can have chocolate coated Apple, and chocolate coated Jelly Bean/Lollipop, etc.

</comment><comment><USER26> 1\. deliver organic and healthy food at airports and hotels. When a user checks in for boarding pass, the delivery is ready. One delivery per flight..

2\. building your own store curated from your favorite brands only. Every user gets discount on their fav brand and there is a limit to number of brands

3\. Hire a local "expert" to build your itinerary when you are visiting that local's town/city.

4\. An new email platform built with UI in mind for non-personal emails like newsletters, marketing offers, etc.

happy to work with or share more.

<comment><USER27> Hey. We are building #3. Email me at firstname.lastname@example.com if you want to chat about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Indoor almond farms

I don't mean as a hobby. Industrial scale, genetically modifying the almond trees for better indoor results.

Global demand for almonds will continue to vastly outstrip what California can handle via traditional outdoor growing. That would have likely happened even without the drought. The water requirements will place a cap on the almond industry's growth. The solution is drastically more efficient indoor growing.

<comment><USER11> Wouldn't the simpler solution be just move the Almond industry out of California to somewhere with better water?

<comment><USER12> My understanding is there are only a few areas in the world climate suitable for commercial almond farming. Among them Spain, areas of Australia and California (which produces most of the worlds almonds). Move the Alfalfa first. It uses in sum more California water than almonds and you can grow it in many locations.

Incidentally, the idea of growing almonds indoors is just plain nuts:)

You would have to have a lot of indoor space and the return would likely not even close to cover the cost. Ever. Even if almonds cost 5 times as much. Even if you bred little tiny almond trees (which could probably be done as they have miniature peach trees and vertical espelied peach trees and almonds are essentially a type of peach pit)

<comment><USER11> The areas that are suitable is a function of the price. If the Californian Almond industry runs out of water then other more marginal areas will become viable.

<comment><USER12> They require a certain climate. That's why they aren't already being commercially planted in other places which they would be at current high prices if commercial production in those places were viable.

The media like to beat up on California nuts. But really, the largest and most unnecessary user of California water is Alfalfa. That is the low hanging fruit (no pun intended) in water savings.

<comment><USER11> Growing rice is also insane.

Yes the major problem with water in California is its current ownership and pricing. Almonds should be near the top of the most productive agricultural uses of water. Almonds also look rather nice - certainly much more interesting than alfalfa.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Glasses which become opaque when kissing love making scene pops up in Hunger games sequels, bcos some parents want those scenes to be censored out when they are watching the movie in theater with their young ones.

</comment><comment><USER14> Verlet physics engine that supports

1) collisions

2) contraining particles by the area/volume

3) creating 'areas' that create and destroy particles based off forces effecting it and whether or not the two lines connecting two particles are parallel

</comment><comment><USER30> Decentralized supply-chain system with cryptocurrency escrows, crowdsourced delivery drivers and crowdsourced video verification of delivery verification.

<comment><USER11> I am sure no one would use this to buy and sell illicit substances. Anyone thinking of working on this idea had better be pretty good at not revealing who they are.

<comment><USER30> Whatever, same argument as cash enables crime. Cars enable drive-bys & bank robberies.

I'm thinking of automated industrial supply chains. Robot delivery cars for mass factories, automated checking on deliveries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> 1) A lightweight CRM for friends. I'd love a tool that takes the teachings of someone like Keith Ferrazzi and builds a simple tool around making it much easier for me to be a better networker. Facebook doesn't quite get the use cases right, and neither does linkedin, and other CRMs are too heavy weight to be practical. Maybe with tips on managing my professional networking life in addition to my individual relationships (eg, suggest among my network a group of 4 that would make a good dinner party, and see that I haven't done a dinner party in a while and suggest to send an invite to the group). Or, tell it a handful of aspirational goals (work at Google, start a company, go to YC) and have it suggest a path to get closer to that goal by probing my network, discreetly connect me to others with similar or complimentary goals, suggest when I can help someone that has a goal that's close to my expertise, etc.

2) It would be really cool to get the 'magic' of the command line into the hands of everyday people that don't even know what it is. Magic sort of does with with SMS. I'd love to see an app toy that you totally interact with by emailing it. Then you could email it for all sorts of automated things -- :bcc the app to log data, send it an email for reminders, simple commands could be parsed and understood. It wouldn't have to do a bunch of NLP at first, you could be strict about how the data needs to be formatted for it to work.

3) This one is nebulous, but I think software discovery for the enterprise is really broken right now. There is still WAY too much outbound phone sales and old fashion 'network' selling going on. There should be some place I could go as, say, a sales ops manager to check out the best software eating the uses cases for sales operations (Ambition, BaseCRM, Yesware, etc etc). Maybe it's product hunt style group voting. Maybe it's a curated, impartial look into the 'stacks' of the industry companies that are considered 'best in class'. Maybe it's something looking at Google trend data and finding 'momentum' sort of like Mattermark. Maybe it's a 'pagerank' style connection map by looking at VC investors and the 'client' pages of startups. I dunno the best way to get good information that scales and nimbly identifies new ideas when they emerge, but if you figured out that problem you'd be solving a huge, very real problem and be in the middle of what will be billions of dollars in $ shifting around in the next 10-20 years. Search like Google works when you already know what you want, but it's really hard to distinguish the signal and noise with all the new tech and tools and toys emerging to take over different use cases for large companies. And the people in the large companies that need to know this information often don't have enough time to do the research or even where to begin.

<comment><USER26> +1 for #3. I was working very actively on that problem about a year ago. The issue is to scale such thing with current way. Also typical chicken and egg problem

<comment><USER31> Interesting. What was the project? I'd love to learn more about it. Feel free to email me if you don't want to leave info in comment thread (email is in my profile).

I think the scale issue is a technology problem... it's finding the right algorithm or model that scales itself vs. being human driven. You might be able to do the latter for a while to build the audience, though, and slowly replace it with the former over time (to help with chicken / egg problem).</comment></comment></comment>


Hillary Clinton used a personal email address while Secretary of State - tuna-piano http://www.businessinsider.com/hillary-clinton-didnt-use-a-government-email-while-in-the-obama-administration-2015-3

<comment><AUTHOR> Unreal. The lack of concern of her and her staff to accountability, transparency, and security is telling. Certainly, her use of outside services must have attracted the attention of someone on her team. Did they tell her and get rebuffed? Were they afraid to tell her because of her leadership style? Did they willfully play along with this as part of an intentional plan to thwart transparency? Mrs. Clinton is a likely presidential contender--these are serious questions that need to be asked.</comment>


Hacker News vs TechCrunch (my site is now on the front page of both) - <AUTHOR> https://img.skitch.com/20110726-g8quq1fswme5cs4598ra5mhc45.jpg

<comment><USER2> Tried the site. Made two Pages. Had some interesting things happen. Love it. Would like to shamelessly plug my test - faqme.com/howto

Ideas should be tested in the wild.

</comment><comment><USER3> Its interesting to see the time spent on the site from the two sources compared!

<comment><USER4> Makes sense to me, as I'm always in hurry to get back to the comments on HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> what site is it ?

<comment><AUTHOR> faqme.com</comment></comment>


Better Speaking: Resources for Programmers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.katworksgames.com/2013/07/15/top_speaking_resources/

<comment><USER2> Congrats on the speaking gig.</comment>


Tim Ferriss Major Depression Research - <AUTHOR> https://www.crowdrise.com/timferriss <comment><USER2> I'm very happy to see this. I've seen people with serious depression issues be completely turned around by a single dose of psilocybin. I'm not sure I would have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, but I'm hoping that these studies will become more common and hopefully the efficacy of these treatments will prove out.

</comment><comment><USER3> lmao @ ppl taking this guy seriously

Highlights from his wikipedia page ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Ferriss](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Ferriss)):

> In 2001, Ferriss founded BrainQUICKEN, an online nutritional supplements > company which made a product that was marketed as both BodyQuick and Brain > Quicken.[22] It was claimed that this product would dramatically increase > short term memory and reaction speed, taking effect within 60 minutes, but > these claims made about this combination of ingredients have never been > scientifically validated

> Notable works: The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef

> his campaigns, such as dedicating his birthday to raising funds and heading > LitLiberation to increase literacy worldwide

> The New Yorker Magazine described Ferriss as "this generation's self help > guru"

EDIT: all these downvotes! How doesn't he remind you of this guy?: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg29TuWo0Yo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg29TuWo0Yo)

<comment><USER4> I take him seriously. The slow carb diet from 4 Hour Body has had a huge impact on how I eat. It works and has helped 1000's of people improve their lives.

<comment><USER5> It makes me sad to see this comment here. This is precisely how pseudoscience sells and proliferates: subjective attribution of all success to the hyped bunk.

Quirk diets work because adherents accidentally get the calorie balance in the right direction by limiting/changing dietary habits. It's not the quirk, which might maybe contribute a tiny effect if it's not entirely bogus in principle. Yet people hail, "The diet works! The guru was right! All hail the Guru!"

Ask and you'll hear the exact same refrain for homeopathy, acupuncture, rhino horn powder, shark fin soup, albino body parts, ...

<comment><USER3> Yes, and well put too. Evidence seems to suggest that the placebo effect can occur even for those who know they're getting a placebo ([http://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/dec/22/placebo- effec...](http://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/dec/22/placebo-effect- patients-sham-drug\)--) methinks some 'conscious placebo' product could really help people without deluding them...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is cool but I would have liked to see something in the description about why crowdfunding is needed when the fundraising target is pocket change for 1) any of the listed "public supporters", 2) Johns Hopkins. Surely the incentive is there for any of these parties to want to attach their name to such ground breaking research.

If part of the purpose is "show the public that they can contribute to science through crowdfunding", then that is legit and they should make it clear. Or maybe it's too controversial for JHU or NIH to fund, etc.

edit: additionally, a better explanation of what the funds will be used for would set a good precedent.

</comment><comment><USER7>
      This pilot study will enroll up to 6 individuals with
      treatment-resistant depression (at least 2 failed
      attempts at an anti-depressant treatment) who are judged
      by a physician to be appropriate for the study and who
      remain under outpatient supervision for the duration of
      the study.

This requires $80K???

<comment><USER8> Read The Spirit Molecule about the studies done on DMT in New Mexico during the 90s.

It was a nightmare for the lead researcher to get everything done.

80K actually seems like too little to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If only programs like this could be conducted by dispassionate scientists, out of the spotlight, and without the financial angle and the incentive to produce results that investors expect.

When I see a project being promoted by a list of famous, influential investors, instead of the refereed results of extensive and carefully controlled clinical trials, I'm reminded how often this sort of project conceals more than it reveals:

[http://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology- studies-f...](http://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-fail- reproducibility-test-1.18248)

Let's all remember that, in science, evidence trumps eminence -- or it should.

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately, there are certain area of science where there are unexamined biases. Stray too close to there, and they are automatically dismissed as crackpot.

In science, evidence trumps eminence, unless it is something like cold fusion.

If we can measure this "crackpot bias", I am not sure psychedelic research would have as high of a bias as cold fusion, but it might have been closer say, ten or twenty years ago. No one wanted to touch that stuff or could get grants to do such research.

<comment><USER9> > If we can measure this "crackpot bias", I am not sure psychedelic research > would have as high of a bias as cold fusion ...

Yep. For things like cold fusion, wishful thinking reigns, but for anything health-related, desperation reigns. Neither produces any kind of desirable science, the kind that's curious without being passionate for a particular outcome.

<comment><USER10> I brought up cold fusion as a great example. There are some very interesting research out there that are fighting against this very bias you are demonstrating right now. Is there wishful thinking? Sure, but perhaps not among some of the serious efforts going on.

"for anything health-related, desperation reigns" <\-- That sounds like a clever, truthful statement, but it's nothing more than a blanket statement that also demonstrates this bias I spoke of. Are there desperate people? Yes, quite a number of them. Is what Tim Ferris doing a result from desperation? I doubt it. Are there people who will unthinkingly fund this because of Tim Ferris's fame? Sure. Are there people who are open-minded though skeptical and curious about what Tim Ferris is doing? Sure. So what's the problem here?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Also see today's discovery a new kind of anti-depressant.

[http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/new_type_...](http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/new_type_of_antidepressant_found_to_act_quickly_in_mice)

"The compound CGP3466B, already proven nontoxic for people, may effectively and rapidly treat depression, according to results of a study in mice.... it may work in patients who are unresponsive to other types of drugs and it lays the foundation for the development of a new class of fast-acting antidepressants that target the same network."

</comment><comment><USER12> "Here take this, it may be a placebo, so you may or may not get extremely high"... I can't imagine what that would be like..

<comment><USER13> Probably disappointing if you get the placebo. On a more serious point if they use a sugar pill as a placebo it's going to make it pretty obvious to the subjects who got the real stuff and who didn't thus rendering the results iffy. Maybe they should use something like Citalopram as the placebo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't think using a placebo is sufficient in a study like this.

I'd like to see another psychedelic used as a control, not just a placebo. Subjects are going to "know" when they've received psilocybin and then they're going to be likely to "perform" better when evaluated for depression.

At least that would be my hypothesis.

</comment><comment><USER15> You can grow that funny helping fungi yourself. And in Sweden for example they just grow in the forest, although tropical varieties are much more potent.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder why they chose 'people with depression AND cancer' demographic.

<comment><USER17> It'll be due to the social stigma will experimenting with psychedelics. It's more permissible to try 'last chance' therapies with people who are dying from cancer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Through observation and personal experience, I've come to the conclusion that the majority of depression has its basis in physical conditions -- the state of (the rest of) one's body, and/or of one's environment. And really, environmental causes become intractable when they produce corresponding physical changes in the subject. (Including, but not only, the brain.)

So, until physical health and environment become center stage, "the problem" of depression will continue, with at best various palliative treatments -- too often touted as "the cure" \-- slapped on to ameliorate, or bury, some measure of the symptoms including "depression".

I'm not saying this is 100% the case. But I've seen too much of the extreme opposite end, where diagnosis and treatment are rather divorced from the physical circumstances.

Even these days, the "industry" seems to be heavily populated with... [oh, redacted, I guess].

P.S. Regarding psilocybin, which the OP endeavor is apparently focusing on, perhaps again my experience is an anomaly, but many of my drug-taking friends from my younger years seem to have ended up happier and more "successful", in a personal sense, in life.

Having been more than sufficiently scared/indoctrinated in my early years, I avoided drugs. Looking around me, I now more than occasionally regret that. Maybe a little self-medication and experimentation would have led to some different choices at critical junctures that I now see, in retrospect.

Granted, drugs do destroy some people. And, given current circumstances, societies. I don't mean to make light of that.

But the often hypocritical, "just say no" fear-based inter-generational culture that has predominated in my part of the world, with respect to this topic? Not productive.

Hell, aside from the personal side, we've lost -- delayed for decades -- research into psilocybin and marijuana, that earlier showed signs of promise and now are proving to be quick fruitful areas of pharmacological development.

P.P.S. Maybe this is the wrong message to share. And even with my current wondering, I have -- retrospectively, I guess -- no desire to become, or have become, a habitual user.

My primary point, I guess, must return to the personal and the anecdotal. I've had my ups and downs, but I always used to bounce back -- until some physical injuries led to chronic discomfort and limitations on my activities. That marked the start of extended dark times, and a gradual but relentless downward spiral including further, reinforcing physical health developments.

Guard your health! Your first and best line of defense -- or offense, to put it perhaps in a less fearful term.

That includes guarding it by using it for positive experiences. They tend to be self-reinforcing -- just as the negative are, in the opposite direction.</comment>


Write an Excellent Programming Blog - <AUTHOR> http://emptysqua.re/blog/write-an-excellent-programming-blog/

<comment><USER2> Great post and read, thanks for sharing this. As someone who just started my own blog[1] it is quite timely.

I especially liked the run-down of the different types of posts. Most of mine fall into the how-to or how things work categories but I would like to share more stories and opinions.

[1] [http://anonfunction.com](http://anonfunction.com)</comment>


Ask HN: What kind of text analysis/processing system do you need? - <AUTHOR>

Or may be you know an unsolved problem, which requires some textminig? <comment><USER2> a reuters-like named entity extraction tool that lets me define my own entity definitions to be extracted from the content i supply</comment>


People Cheat More If the Benefits Are Shared - <AUTHOR> http://web.hbr.org/email/archive/dailystat.php?date=070711

<comment><USER2> > The experiments, in which hundreds of people participated in word games and > other activities online, suggest that splitting the benefits makes cheating > seem less unethical, Wiltermuth says.

Eek. I don't think we can _necessarily_ conclude that or anything like that. The ethical-ness (or not) doesn't even have to enter people's minds for these numbers to happen.

Other possibilities:

What if perhaps people just like helping people in a stackoverflow-esque way? Maybe someone won't cheat if its just them, but if they can make someone else happier/feel better, then they will?

What if they enjoy the sense of camaraderie? Working together while cheating at some game is still working together.

They don't have to be thinking about ethics _in the least_ when choosing to cheat more (or less). People simply like helping, interacting, and working with other people, pretty much regardless of context. I doubt cheating more at a word game when another person is involved is anything more than this.

<comment><USER3> The decision to cheat always comes with an ethical dilemma for any non- sociopath.

How much they value that ethical choice depends on a lot of factors, though, and this study would seem to show that the benefits outweigh the ethical concerns more often when the cheater isn't the only person benefiting.

And I have to agree. I've been in plenty of situations where I would not have gone against my ethics for just myself, but when someone else was involved, especially if they're counting on me, then I go ahead and do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here is the actual paper: [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749597810...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749597810000841)

<comment><USER5> I dont have $40 spare. I'd love to read it, but apparently there's no colleges even in my state which have SciDirect access.

Wait, isn't science about everyone knowing?

<comment><USER6> Just get 39 other people to pitch in $1, then violate the terms of the sale and share your purchase with the other 39. Sure, its cheating, but if done as a group, you'll feel ok about it ;).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So they're trying to equate communism with cheating?</comment>


Andrew Ng on Life, Creativity, and Failure - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2015/05/13/andrew-ng_n_7267682.html <comment><USER2> > People that count on willpower to do these things, it almost never works > because willpower peters out. Instead I think people that are into creating > habits -- you know, studying every week, working hard every week -- those > are the most important. Those are the people most likely to succeed.

That is the one insight that I wished I truly understand years ago. After figured out that intelligence barely means anything, I thought that willpower would be the most important characteristics (because of endurance, perseverance yada yada you know).

Turned out that just like physical muscle, mental muscle get exhausted and you can run out of them. You really can't exert your willpower all the time, and have to preserve them for the really tough time. As human tends to do, we reverse to our habits for the majority of our lives. Well, I hope it's not a lesson learned too late.

That said, training for habits is damn hard.

<comment><USER3> If you want to try out a new technique to train for habits, check out this site by BJ Fogg @ Stanford University:

[http://tinyhabits.com/](http://tinyhabits.com/)

The method trains you to add a new habit to your life by doing a tiny habit every day, anchored to an already existing habit. For example, "Before I visit Hacker News, I will drop down and do TWO pushups." Eventually, you can grow your new habit to make it a bigger part of your life.

<comment><USER4> There is a lot of focus in the literature right now on developing habits. What I'm interested in is the deeper motivations that drive a person to select their habits in the first place. Why does Andrew read research papers and books all day on a Saturday? Why did you decided to add two pushups to your daily routine? I think that without understanding these deeper motivations, we are left with habits that do not have enough fuel to drive them, leaving us to resort to the habits with the least resistance (i.e. lazy habits).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >(On Tuesday, Baidu announced it had achieved the world's best results on a key artificial intelligence benchmark related to image identification, besting Google and Microsoft.)

And a week later was found to have cheated in said test, apologized, and withdrew its results[0].

[0] [http://www.technologyreview.com/view/538111/why-and-how- baid...](http://www.technologyreview.com/view/538111/why-and-how-baidu- cheated-an-artificial-intelligence-test)

<comment><USER6> I have no affiliation with Baidu but I'd like to defend them on this point a bit because it seems to me that they are getting quite a lot more hate than they deserve. Baidu had a without-a-doubt strong and at the very least a very near state of the art visual recognition system. Then a group of people within the company tried to squeeze out all the last few 0.01% they could with questionable means. When people erase all context and say Baidu cheated, it sounds as if there was a wide, organized top-down effort within Baidu to make their bad system look good with blatant cheating. None of which, in my mind, was the case. A slap on the wrist is more appropriate than burning at stake. </endrant>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I loved his critique of the recent hyperventilation about AI taking over the world--

"I don't work on preventing AI from turning evil for the same reason that I don't work on combating overpopulation on the planet Mars."

As he points out later in the interview, much of the recent gains have been due to a great increase in data and computational power. The history of AI is replete with incredibly overoptimistic predictions of achieving Strong AI. Andrew's focus on the current, important problems of the field bodes well for the future of Baidu's AI work.

<comment><USER8> Chomsky has been saying this for a long time. He equates our current language tech with stone age tools. Long way to go...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > As Ng explained, "The remarkable thing was that [the system] had discovered > the concept of a cat itself. No one had ever told it what a cat is. That was > a milestone in machine learning." If you dont mind, let me call this > bullshit out. No one in machine / deep learning thinks that this was > anything more than PR fluff combined with a very very weak paper that people > had to approximately cheat to find the actual cats. (You had to initialize > your random vector very close to an actual cat image, and do gradient > descent, before it "figured out" for itself about a cat).

<comment><USER10> I am not sure why you're saying they cheated. I am a layman, but my understanding of that quote is that he refers to a rather large deep neural network, which was trained unsupervised to encode general images (not just cats), had a neuron representing the concept of "cat". You can run the network in generative mode to see how the general concept of cat would look like.

So I am puzzled by your comment - you seem to be talking about supervised learning, but I think the network was trained unsupervised.

<comment><USER11> > You had to initialize your random vector very close to an actual cat image, > and do gradient descent, before it "figured out" for itself about a cat

and

> a rather large deep neural network, which was trained unsupervised to encode > general images (not just cats)

seem to be in contradiction, afaict, or was general vector initialized rather close _general images_?

<comment><USER12> The initial value of the vector determines what it will encode/converge to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm taking his machine learning course [1] and it's absolutely fantastic. It's one of the mondern wonders of the internet that you can have such a tutor for free. Plus it's fascinating to see what people go on to do after the course [2].

[1]: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine- learning/](https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning/)

[2]: [https://syrah.co/joshdickson40/5604e5e10fc1786b0152a51a](https://syrah.co/joshdickson40/5604e5e10fc1786b0152a51a)

<comment><USER14> I've heard that the course is diluted compared to the brick-and-mortar school one, is this true?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> At first sight I thought that the microphone was an spermatozoon mad with joy stirred up by Plutarch's quotation. Unfortunately that was only an illusion and life is not such exciting today.

To force to your mind to work creatively you must feed your mind with lots of examples and experiences. And the suggested way to accelerate the learning process is via showing off corner cases.

Innovation places us in a field in which the corner cases are unknown unknowns, his workshop is about an strategy to detect and anticipate corner cases in uncharted territories. That amounts to finding the fount of creativity, and that is not an easy feat.

Edited n+1 times for learning English.

</comment><comment><USER16> > After figured out that intelligence barely means anything

I think that's probably an exaggeration. A better way to say it might be: intelligence only takes you so far, and true achievement requires something more.

</comment><comment><USER17> Before you buy into the negativity of some comments on this thread, take a moment to pause. Andrew has achieved some truly remarkable feats. Why not accept what he has achieved is many standard deviations away from the average, and try and learn from what he thinks was useful?

To me, that the top comment right now is about how Baidu "cheated" on an AI benchmark says both that no one can have perfect oversight, but also that no matter your other achievements, someone will always point out a shortcoming.

</comment><comment><USER18> I am learning the course of Machine Learning [1] at Coursera. I didn't know he co-founded Coursera. Can't believe this awesome course is free. Andrew Ng is really a good teacher. Thank you Andrew Ng and Coursera.

[1] [https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine- learning/](https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning/)

</comment><comment><USER19> > But often, you first become good at something, and then you become > passionate about it. And I think most people can become good at almost > anything.

So many people don't get this. When parents send you to learn a profession, don't say "I'll do what I want". You can always do it later.

Instead, go get a proper, extensive education in anything - it will help you immensely, and you might find that you love doing what you learned.

Otherwise, you may waste years being stuck in a loop of finding yourself and your purpose, which sometimes really sucks...

<comment><USER20> I first heard the notion from someone here on HN: instead of doing what you love, love what you do!</comment></comment>


8 Stunning Italian Coastal Towns One Must See in a Lifetime - <AUTHOR> Do check this out:-<p>https://www.theblueberrytrails.com/index.php/blog/entry/48/8-stunning-italian-coastal-towns-you-have-to-see-once-in-a-lifetime <comment><AUTHOR> We are The Blueberry Trails ([https://www.theblueberrytrails.com/](https://www.theblueberrytrails.com/))

We will even personalize a tour to wherever you wanna go and make sure you have offbeat experiences and unique moments to remember for lifetime.</comment>


The future of car ownership that no one is talking about - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/13/the-future-of-car-ownership-that-no-one-is-talking-about/ <comment><AUTHOR> Not a great article, but still a topic worthy of discussion. I do assume that starting in a few years that the average number of cars per household will begin to drop towards zero. Clearly this has huge implications for the economy since the automotive sector, including, financing, insurance, aftermarket parts, maintenance, etc. is amongst the largest sectors of the US economy.

I still think that it will be a net positive, as people will spend less wasted time in traffic (since they're not driving, the time can be used), and the number of accidents will drop considerably. But still, we're in for some painful adjustments.</comment>


Two billion-transistor beasts: POWER7 and Niagara 3 - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/02/two-billion-transistor-beasts-power7-and-niagara-3.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

<comment><USER2> I've been an application developer for AIX and Power7 for almost 2 years, and I'd say the grind rate is pretty impressive. Developing for power is a bit of a bitch, and the hardware is expensive but it is certainly an impressive slice of engineering.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm curious if anyone knows why chips like these are being used today.

If you already have software that parallelizes to 16 cores, why not just use a few more x86 cores and save a lot of money?

<comment><USER4> Part of it is software licensing that charges per-socket or per-core. For Sun they do have certain applications in mind that are very parallel, such as web serving and message routing, where memory latency can serve to slow things down; the idea of hardware threads is to keep the CPU busy in spite of waiting for a fetch from main RAM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, 16 cores on one die. 128 threads. I can't wait until this makes it into consumer-level hardware. (I'm not sure what I'll do with it, but "build it and they will come".)

<comment><USER6> No need to wait -- you can already buy a GPU with that kind of specs, and program it with CUDA or OpenCL.</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Links in submission text? - <AUTHOR>

What do you guys think about having linkable text when folks ask questions?
When people ask about their start-up, we are stuck with doing a copy-and-paste to view the site.
I don't see a downside to this, if the submission is spam, it won't rank high for long.
http://www.make-me-linkable.com/ <comment><USER2> Why not just make the link rel="nofollow" until it reaches a certain threshold of points and or comments?

<comment><USER3> I really like this idea for links in general.

My only hesitation is that someone might see it as a reason to create false accounts to game upvoting. Maybe a certain threshold of upvotes by users with high karma is what it takes to remove nofollow from an auto-link?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the idea is to discourage using self-posts to preface links with your own commentary rather than just posting a direct link.

<comment><USER5> Yes. This used to be a big problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Linkification for Firefox works wonders. Get the 1.3.4 Beta at the bottom of the page for FF3:

<http://yellow5.us/firefox/linkification>

<comment><USER7> I'd rather not have to install a plugin to compensate for the lack of a feature in a website.

<comment><USER6> Why should Firefox support plug-ins at all, if not to compensate for a lack of features? Why should Emacs support scripting, if not to compensate for a lack of features?

The point is that we enjoy FF plug-ins and Emacs scripts because they allow us to customize these "featureless" products to our individual needs. Similarly, I welcome plug-ins like Linkification and Scriptmonkey because they allow me to customize websites to my individual needs.

I would be surprised if this were the only website that you would find the Linkification plug-in useful for!

<comment><USER7> FF plugins are great. So are websites with basic features built into them, such as the "hyperlink."

I don't know if there is anything more fundamental to making the internet a "net" than the links connecting all the pages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think it is a good idea. I am always having to copy-paste and presumable the code is done since comment links are clickable. <http://i-am-clickable.com/>

</comment><comment><USER9> If you're a Safari user, select the text of the link and Ctrl+Click to select "Go To Address".

<comment><USER10> Wow, that's amazing; never knew of that feature before. Thanks.

Nice to know someone was thinking about this problem at WebKit. Does Firefox do anything similar?

<comment><USER11> Wow, control click on something in firefox and it seems to highlight the containing box (div perhaps).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> No way, try rocking a plugin like "text/link" to open these.

</comment><comment><USER13> Just pretend you're in emacs-- C-c C-t C-v enter.</comment>


Ask HN: Why fossil fuel untouchable in Washington, but tech is the whipping boy? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Look at the lobbying totals by sector: [https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=i](https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=i)

"Tech" you're thinking about about is tiny subset of the "Electronics Mfg & Equipment" sector. While it spends more than "Oil & Gas", I'd say that Oil & Gas is much more focused on certain issues (e.g. no or limited carbon regs), while the EME category has a much wider and more fragmented set of concerns and lobbying. If you click into the number of clients, this is reflected in 242 for EME vs 178 Oil and Gas. Also, notice Koch industries is #1 in that Oil category, and they have an incredibly famous, well established, and effective network for both political lobbying, judicial packing, academic think tanks, as well as organizations for manufacturing of consent. The spending for which is likely vastly larger than what is required to report as lobbying.</comment>


What's the Difference Between Icenium and PhoneGap Build? - <AUTHOR> http://www.icenium.com/community/blog/icenium-team-blog/2013/05/01/whats-the-difference-between-icenium-and-phonegap-build-

<comment><USER2> Since being acquired by Adobe, PhoneGap Build has consistently failed to build any of my projects. Attempts to contact the team, even by way of friends at Adobe, have failed. In short, the team is checked out.

Glad to see someone else moving into the space.

</comment><comment><USER3> Icenium now has integration with Sitefinity 6.0 (Telerik's cms)

You can now edit and manage your app through a cms.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice, Icenium looks like a good option</comment>


The Probability and Statistics Cookbook - <AUTHOR> http://matthias.vallentin.net/probability-and-statistics-cookbook/ <comment><USER2> This covers a lot of ground, and is quite accurate and balanced. Very nice work. Kudos to the author.

I noticed a couple of things.

The graph of the F distribution on page 8 is mislabeled as chi-square.

The sets Ai must be disjoint in the law of total prob. and Bayes rule on page 6.

In section 5 on page 7, "variance of sum equals sum of variances" certainly does not imply ("iff") independence. I'm not positive it implies uncorrelated, although it certainly might. The safe thing is "variance of sum equals sum of variances" if uncorrelated. Uncorrelated is usually abbreviated with an inverted T (reminiscent of "orthogonal", although that abbreviation is not introduced in these notes). The inverted capital Pi used here means independence.

A small typo: the Strong Law of Large Numbers is mis-abbreviated, it is the SLLN (sec. 10.1).

And, neither the WLLN nor the SLLN requires Var(X1) < Infinity. They just need finite first moment ("E[X1] exists finite.") This is not an error in the notes, it's just that the result holds in more generality than is stated there, and the lack of need for a second moment shows the strength of the result (i.e., if the mean exists, you always get convergence to it, end of story). (This is in Billingsley's book, or Durrett's book, or also in <http://www.math.ust.hk/~makchen/Math541/Chap1Sec7.pdf> as Thm 1.7.)

Also, one omission: Brownian motion in Stochastic Processes (sec. 20). Since Poisson processes and Markov processes are there, it would make sense to have one continuous process. ("random walk" gets a couple of bullet points in sec. 21, but it's not the right place nor the right position.) All you need to define B.M., or a gaussian random process for that matter, is that B.M. is the continuous process with independent increments characterized by:

      X_0 = 0
      X_t - X_s ~ N(0, t-s) for t > s

Sec. 20.0 might also be a good place to introduce Kolmogorov's extension theorem (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_extension_theorem>), since it is such a powerful result, is easy to state, and explains the centrality of finite-dimensional distributions.

<comment><USER3> Variance of sum equals sum of variances is not sufficient for pairwise uncorrelated for more than 2 random variables. Simplest counterargument is any Cov(A,B)=-Cov(B,C)!=0 for three variables.

Closest results I can think of to the "iff" they're getting at:

If sum var=var sum for all linear transformations of the individual variables (i.e. X_i -> a_i*X_i), that's sufficient for pairwise uncorrelated;

If sum var=var sum for all transformations of the variables for which variances exist (i.e. X_i -> f_i(X_i)), that should be sufficient for independence (but I don't think that's an easy proof and maybe I'm missing technical conditions).

<comment><USER2> You're right, there's no way that could work for >2 variables.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If anyone is reading this and wants to know what it means, this is the best resource I have found for people with some math knowledge who want to develop a practical knowledge of statistics. <http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/>

<comment><USER5> Also, if you are interested in learning R while you build your knowledge of probability and statistics this is pretty good: <http://ipsur.org/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This really is a fairly thorough overview of an undergraduate statistics degree. It reminds me a lot the summaries I would write before exams. The first few sections covering probability are especially good. Though some of the later sections do simplify whole subjects a bit much. For example, an introduction to stochastic process ([http://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/gordanz/notes/introduction_to...](http://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/gordanz/notes/introduction_to_stochastic_processes.pdf)) will cover more about state classification and absorption.

</comment><comment><USER6> Holy crap, I have a statistics exam on Wednesday and I was looking for something like this...Talk about lucky, thanks!

</comment><comment><USER7> The pages of the pdf are too wide to fit comfortably on my screen. Any way I could fix it (like modify the LaTeX) besides buying a bigger monitor?

<comment><USER8> Probably a command called \landscape in the header. Look for that, then remove. LaTeX's default is A4 portrait, if I recall correctly. The source is on Github the website said.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wouldn't call it a cookbook.

It is an (unusually large) cheatsheet.

<comment><USER10> John D Cook's blog post actually inspired me to rename this work from cheatsheet to cookbook, as it outgrew the form factor of a classical printable cheatsheet.

[http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/10/04/probability-and- sta...](http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/10/04/probability-and-statistics- cheat-sheet/)

<comment><USER9> A cookbook has recipes. If this is a cookbook, where are the recipes? :-)

Such a concept might make sense in this context. e.g. Recipe to calculate p-values. How to fit various distributions. A recipe to calculate posterior probabilities, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for posting this. It's most helpful!

</comment><comment><USER11> many thanks! this looks great and useful.</comment>


Follow up on 'Consultants vs. Employees' - <AUTHOR> http://www.backforty.io/blog/2014/1/employees-vs-consultants-followup

<comment><USER2> 2) Skin-in-the-game

This is much different than money. My first thought would be lifetime support costs and future autonomy.

My other experiences with consulting is that while consultants "just want to code", for their bill-ables and deliverables are much more important than well-written code.

In particular, this is expressed with agencies / consultancies scaling. In order to continue profit margins, agencies must hirer lesser experienced and cheaper consultants as the number of projects grow. Without billing for training, this results in a very disparate deliverable.

A final emphasis is that consulting often doesn't result in tested code (healthcare.gov) because the client isn't often isn't willing to spend the extra money on a product that should be deliverable (and huge assumption, but bug free)

</comment><comment><USER2> 1) Charging for Bathroom Breaks

Whether you charge a higher rate so that you don't have to work the time, or a lower number and count the time in the bathroom it should all be equal. If it's not, well, I don't really want to be related to the business of whether a person will be penalized for a required natural bodily function.</comment>


Show HN: An Android app to slow your test device down – comes with an API - <AUTHOR> http://www.recursiverobot.com/post/68170841323/an-android-app-to-slow-your-test-device-down

<comment><USER2> Nice app! How long did this take you to build?

<comment><AUTHOR> Total real time was under a week, since I did it on the side. I didn't keep track of the number of hours.</comment></comment>


How Google Looks for the Colorblind - <AUTHOR> http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-07-25-n47.html <comment><USER2> I like the idea of them running the colorblind web logo.

Google has (perhaps unintentionally) done a lot for making the web accessible to the blind, too -- sites designed for their crawlers are going to be vastly more accessible to the blind as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm intrigued that everyone testing websites for colorblind accessibility is using the colorblind page filter. It's very awkward when you have more than just websites to test (think everything from applications to documentation), and when you want to do it on your own without submitting anything to another site.

There's a few apps I do recommend in lieu of the website: Color Oracle (<http://colororacle.cartography.ch/>) for all platforms

Sim Daltonism (<http://michelf.com/projects/sim-daltonism/>) for OS X

General color accessibility tool: [http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/contrast- analyser.htm...](http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/contrast- analyser.html)

A whole slew of other tools: [http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200709/10_colour_contr...](http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200709/10_colour_contrast_checking_tools_to_improve_the_accessibility_of_your_design/)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is strange. I am one of them red/green colorblind (basically, some shades of green look brown to me, that's the best I can describe it), but the "how it looks to the colorblind" image looks different than how it looks to the non- colorblind. Who knows, maybe my eyes are over correcting the colorblind version of the image.</comment>


Emberjs vs Knockoutjs - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bootstraptoday.com/2012/01/23/emberjs-vs-knockoutjs/

<comment><USER2> Also something to keep in mind that KnockoutJS has a few plugins which aren't as well publicized.

<https://github.com/SteveSanderson/knockout/wiki/plugins>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Yes we have looked into it and have used some of them in our new design.</comment></comment>


The Big Read: Crossing the Antarctic by Degrees - <AUTHOR> http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11552416 <comment><AUTHOR> Here is a link to Henry Worsley's website of the expedition - [http://shackletonsolo.org](http://shackletonsolo.org).</comment>


Wikipedia pageviews this year for each line of 'We Didn't Start the Fire' - <AUTHOR> https://www.tomlum.com/remember-the-fire <comment><USER2> I feel so surprised, didn't realize this song had such lyrics. Makes me really want to come up with a modern set of lyrics and go to a karaoke. Something like this:

<comment>

Mitch McConnel, AOC, trade war, Cardi B,

fake news, ICO, arnold schwarzenegger,

wiki leaks, bitcoin, hacker news, facebook,

North Korea, South Sudan, annexing Crimea,

Game of Thrones, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Key and Peel,

Buttigieg, Snoop Dog, can you "feel the Bern"?

We didn't start the fire, sha-lalA-la-lAla

(and so on... please someone finish the rest)

<comment><USER3> [https://twitter.com/we_didnt_start](https://twitter.com/we_didnt_start) was a pretty hard-working bot for this sort of thing.

<comment><USER4> I'm bummed it didn't match the rhythms, which isn't impossible for a bot, see [https://twitter.com/wiki_tmnt/status/1142070265150464000?s=2...](https://twitter.com/wiki_tmnt/status/1142070265150464000?s=20) . Maybe I should make a follow up bot.

<comment><USER5> you _should_ make one!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> On a related topic, apparently the lyrics for "We didn't start the fire" and "It's the end of the world as we know it" by R.E.M work quite well when played together, despite being thematically contradictory: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEYc8ar2Bpw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEYc8ar2Bpw)

<comment><USER7> This is remarkably good.

<comment><USER6> My favourite mashup of his is Village People's Y.M.C.A with Hans Zimmer's Inception soundtrack. It really puts the lyrics in the spotlight

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DsoCe7C4Kmk](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DsoCe7C4Kmk)

<comment><USER8> Not as good as Smack my Bitch up the Orinoco Flow! I'll admit, the lyrics don't _quite_ work together in that one.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dLScpNjQbak](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dLScpNjQbak)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We're Gonna Build a Framework: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm2h0cbvsw8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm2h0cbvsw8)

<comment><USER10> Gave me PTSD from when I had to make a choice on a backend framework.

Thank you

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "England's got a new Queen" seems to have 1.5m views - how is that a more popular search term than "richard nixon" or "marilyn monroe"?

I can only assume it's some kind of google suggested term after people type england, and then they click on it thinking it's breaking news ...

But it seems a weird outlier

<comment><USER12> If you click on a term, you'll see the page it leads to. I'm assuming they manually assigned a page per line and then counted pageviews for each page.

<comment><USER11> oh i thought it was actual search term

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Woah, I had never heard of the Syringe Tide ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syringe_tide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syringe_tide))... which was caused by the Fresh Kills landfill??? You can't make this stuff up.

<comment><USER14> > The landfill was opened in 1948 as a temporary landfill but by 1955 it > became the largest landfill in the world

Indeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ha! I did the same in 2014, interesting to see how it has changed in that time [http://interconnected.org/home/2014/12/12/billy_joel](http://interconnected.org/home/2014/12/12/billy_joel)

</comment><comment><USER16> Genius link here, in case anyone needs it: [https://genius.com/1136925](https://genius.com/1136925)

<comment><USER17> Wikipedia's own article on the song has a brief summary of each event, too: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Didn%27t_Start_the_Fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Didn%27t_Start_the_Fire)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can't scroll down the page without hearing the song in my head.

</comment><comment><USER19> "Here Comes Another Bubble" uses the same tune:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I)

This song came out in 2007.

</comment><comment><USER20> I just went through and clicked on the dozen or so I didn't recognize, and I'm much better off for doing it. This is a fun and great site.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think log scale or some different minimum/increment (start from the min instead of zero) would make the chart more informative.

'England's got a new Queen' really skews the precieved scale as most everything else is sub 500k, with it pulling ~1500k

</comment><comment><USER5> somewhat related (sorry for going off on a tangent) ....

the lyrics from the Datarock's song "True Stories" are entirely made up of Talking Heads song names.

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

Also the lyrics of the song _" Seed (2.0)"_ from The Roots have hidden meaning[1] that kind of blew my mind (huge Roots fan here):

"I interpret the song to mean that they are attempting to unite the rock and roll and hip hop genres. In this case, they are trying to plant the seed of hip hop within the womb of rock and roll. He's having to do "fertilize another against my lover's will" because hip hop is resistant to integrating other musical styles. This interpretation is supported by the lines in the first verse that go:

"She don't want no rock-n-roll She want platinum or ice or gold She want a whole lotta somethin' to fold"

The lines are describing the hip hop culture obsession with money and "bling." Whereas, "I lick the opposition because she don't take no birth control" signifies that rock and roll is open and willing to integrate influences from other genres.

If you're still doubtful, just listen to the beats underlying the song. You have the heavy beats that are commonplace in hip hop and then the distinct guitar riff."

[https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/3530822107858522508/](https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/3530822107858522508/)

The crazy thing is that Mos Def (now Yasiin Bey) takes that idea one step further within his own lyrics by fusing every (hip-hop) song of his album "The New Danger" with a different genre showing that Hip Hop does lend itself for fusion. E.g. his song "The Rape Over" actually sounds like a song from "The Doors". The whole "The New Danger" album is full of examples like this.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srx- Wf5KrzQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srx-Wf5KrzQ)

</comment><comment><USER22> A simple yet brilliant song

<comment><USER23> For being based on a gimmick, I agree. The thing is you can only have one of these. Anything even vaguely similar will just a a knockoff. For a less memorable gimmick song, anyone remember Cotton Eye Joe by Rednex?

What impresses me is Billy Joel's range as a musician and song writer. Piano Man, Movin' Out, We Didn't Start the Fire, and Longest Time are all popular, but so different.

<comment><USER23> I ran across another gimmick song this year: Netflix Trip by AJR. The narrator basically relives his childhood over a Netflix binge of The Office.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Fascinating. Although the tiny numbers for 'vaccine' and 'birth control' make me query what's going on here

<comment><USER25> Those seem to be pretty specific pages on wikipedia, likely to refer specifically to what the song was.

Vaccine links to the polio vaccine and birth control to the (nearly empty) wikipedia page for 'oral contraceptive pill'

<comment><USER26> The pill link is just a portal to other links. When I used DDG to search for "the pill" it took me to one of the child links first, which has rich details on one form of the pill.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_oral_contraceptive_pi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_oral_contraceptive_pill)</comment></comment></comment>


Apple releases iPhone Lightning Dock for $39 - <AUTHOR> http://store.apple.com/us/product/MGRM2AM/A/iphone-lightning-dock

<comment> trimble-alum Looks like the Apple dock again suffers from the same, historical rough edges.

A likely better alternative: Elevation mentions they will have a redesigned Lightning dock available in a couple weeks: [http://www.elevationlab.com/products/elevationdock-for- iphon...](http://www.elevationlab.com/products/elevationdock-for-iphone5)

(24 previous elevation dock 2's currently on eBay [http://m.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=elevation+dock+2](http://m.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=elevation+dock+2) )

<comment><USER2> What historical rough edges? Genuinely curious.

Looks like the dock you link costs more, and doesn't have the audio out / remote control port that Apple's dock has.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Groundbreaking technology. I'm overwhelmed by Apple's consistent brilliance and their fresh take on accessories.

<comment><USER4> HN "rules" say I shouldn't upvote snark, so I didn't, but I think you're right on. I like my iPhone and my Mac but jeez, sometimes the drama over the simplest things is over the top...especially when the "innovation" isn't much, if anything.

<comment><USER5> What drama are you talking about? I see no drama at all. There's a bit of marketing copy for a product description, but it's hardly calling it innovative or life changing - it just explains what it can be used for. And if you're referring to the fact that a dock was submitted to HN at all, it's somewhat interesting because Apple hasn't produced docks for a while, and people on HN might be interested.

This isn't showing off Apple's engineering or innovative genius or whatever, it's just a courtesy to the Apple customers of HN: here's a new product, you might want it.

<comment><USER4> Sorry; I didn't mean drama on HN specifically but rather that Apple's pedestrian development is typically received with the same over-the-top accolades that their cool technical development receive (which frankly serves to devalue the technical advancement IMHO). And really, it's hard to find something more pedestrian than a dock, yet there have been about a dozen articles in my RSS feeds.

Admittedly they do quite a bit of advanced stuff that's over most of the press's heads (look at the security architecture that protects your fingerprints, or the implementations of their recent CPUs) so I shouldn't complain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And it accepts power from.....a lightning connector. Seems like an expensive way to stand your phone up.</comment>


When can median income consumers afford the very best? - <AUTHOR> http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/01/when-can-median-income-consumers-afford-the-best.html <comment><USER2> The very best? Never.</comment>