Told reading tests are a game, boys score higher - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/can-boys-beat-girls-in-reading-1462202491 <comment><USER2> This is completely anecdotal, but when I was back in the Middle East, tests essentially _were_ games/competitions. Everyone knew everyone else's scores and they were often announced out loud as the results are handed back. Students who consistently get high scores are looked up to and respected. Your academic performance contributed significantly to your social standing in the classroom.

Then I came to Canada and this notion was completely absent. It was one of the many culture shocks. Your grades don't seem to matter that much.

The fact that in the media, at least American disney shows, "nerd" is used a pejorative against people who do well academically, was completely puzzling to me (and actually it still is).

<comment><USER3> I was a kid in post-communist Poland in 90s, and the concept of nerd was absent as well. Being good at math etc was not a problem to your social life (in fact it was sth you could brag about, just not too openly because that's uncool too).

Also there was almost no "jocks" (there were some sport competitions but no cheerleaders, and nothing as important culturally as it is in USA, also teams weren't persistent between classes and there were almost none inter-school sport events).

Grades were public as well (or at least - nobody tried to hide them so teachers would just pin a list with results from an exam on the board). Competition was seen as sth natural (at the time unemployment was 20% and kids were told that you have to be good or you will essentially be a hobo).

On the other hand you were supposed to pretend you didn't had to study a lot, because kids that study instead of playing were "kujon"s = boring, lame bookworms. It was cool to be smart without working for it.

Also cheating had no stigma attached, but telling any authority about any misbehaving was the ultimate social suicide. This obviously included telling teachers that other kids were cheating.

This was probably because 50 years of paid spying of citizens on each other by abusive government. Even now whistleblowing in general is hard because of that social stigma.

Nerd and geek concept was introduced later through movies and internet and in mid 00s it was already established, but still not a negative stereotype (but that may be because I changed environment to CS-related in the meantime and ~ everybody was a nerd/geek/whatever).

<comment><USER2> > On the other hand you were supposed to pretend you didn't had to study a > lot, because kids that study instead of playing were "kujon"s = boring, lame > bookworms. It was cool to be smart without working for it.

Yea, where I grew up there was also a term like "bookworm" which was used pejoratively, but it wasn't cause for social rejection, it was merely one of the myriad of ways that kids tease each other. It's not as though the "bookworm" was humiliated or bullied for being so. At least, that's how I remember it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm a man and I really dislike competitive aspects of society. I mean if I'm playing a game and it's for fun, I'm okay with it, as long as everyone play to play, not play to win.

If I'm literally competing to earn a living, or if it ends up in praising winners and blaming losers, it won't be enjoyable, and I'd rather not play at all. Having humility also means that when you win, you also congratulate losers for playing.

I agree that we need to compete on some aspects, like technology, science, construction methods, and business in general. But competing between individuals brings out the worst in people. And that's where exclusion starts: if you keep slapping people's self esteem by telling them that life and society is a game of winners and losers, you'll end up with less and less people ready to take part in it.

Overall, I sense that men avoid competition much more than women do. Or maybe it's the political climate that does. I don't really know.

<comment><USER5> Like or dislike, you would be the first to die in 99% of societies, human or otherwise.

This may get downvoted but don't shoot the messenger. You can't "hate" something that just "is".

<comment><USER4> So does that mean I'm part of the 1%?

Because I'm an unemployed man on welfare.

<comment><USER6> Which is why you dislike competition.

<comment><USER4> But do I dislike competition because of my social status, or is that the other way around? Which caused which? Is that really sufficient to sum up my opinion through my subjective point of view ? Look at the politics of dealing with losers in our society, it's not pretty.

I think that at some point, if there is more competition than cooperation, a lot of people will get alienated, and that won't always be a good thing. I mean trade in general feels more like competition than cooperation.

I agree that competition yields benefits thanks since the economy manages itself, but it also has huge costs. I mean I don't like society for its competition, I like it for its cooperation. If I'd really like competition, I'd live as a hermit. And to be honest, if society become less and less cooperative as a whole, what's the point of it ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Protip: some of us can significantly increase our own throughput if we frame tasks like competitions.

I'll add a warning about not overdoing this, as someone who has previously burned out before I am careful not to trick myself too often.

Edit: at least -> out

<comment><USER8> And some of us do worse! Everybody overlooks the other statistic from this experiment: the girls' scores dropped as much as the boys rose, when playing the 'game'. I'd be more worried about that. Its not about reading, folks.

<comment><USER9> Sounds like a point in favor of going back to gender segegated schools. Let the girls cooperate, and the boys compete, and theoretically everyone will end off better for it.

<comment><USER7> Used to think this was good, but not sure if this is a good thing in the long run:

Sooner or later they need to work together anyway.

I'd rather suggest being honest about the fact that statistically speaking boys and girls are different and both have to respect each other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "The latest study, in France, involved 80 children, 48 boys and 30 girls"

What do i win for spotting errors?

<comment><USER11> Two who declined to reveal their gender? Two intersex children? Hmm, yeah, seems unlikely! Email the editor, or there may be an errata email address.

<comment><USER12> Certainly would be a very odd control group!

Journal article just specifies 80 children, of which 48 were boys, so that would be an arithmetic problem at the WSJ. Lucky they don't deal with numbers on a regular basis :-/ Corrections email address: email@example.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The paper is paywalled so I can only read the abstract, but I am super curious to learn how the researchers were able to confidently determine the male students' rationale. The researchers claim that stereotype threat caused the male students to perform worse on the reading test when the students were not told the test was a game. How did the researchers figure this out without even asking the students?

They are so certain of this conclusion that they put it in the title of the paper. It's amazing how much they could infer from test scores alone. I'm curious to read the paper to determine how they were able to rule out competitiveness, confidence, and every other explanation of the results.

<comment><USER14> Regarding the paywall:

[http://www.sciencedirect.com.sci- hub.cc/science/article/pii/...](http://www.sciencedirect.com.sci- hub.cc/science/article/pii/S0022103116301202)

<comment><USER15> hmmm, so THAT's how it can be used for ! Thank you for the link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow. And after the study they went to the cafeteria and ate food from intentionally smaller plates which tricked their brains into believing they were full -- for about a week.

Psychology is so full of lies. Both the content of the 'studies' and the studies themselves (all testing and no theory). Also the motivations for the studies seem to be quite often political. (Presumably this helps for obtaining public money.)

Here's a little study I propose. Have children, don't send them to school and notice how they learn to read _without_ teaching _or_ testing. And how much better adults report they feel when they aren't trying to do these things to children.

<comment><USER17> Surely you can't mean without teaching. It'd be pretty hard to learn to read without someone teaching you.

Perhaps you mean an experiment where a child is raised by a blind caregiver who never talks about reading. Given full access to children's books and other media but no one to tell them about reading, will they pick it up?

<comment><USER18> In Russian it's much easier. After someone learns the letter shapes, they're able to read anything. The pronunciation is only ambiguous in terms of stress.

<comment><USER19> I used to say this, until I actually tried teaching someone to read in Russian. Then I ran into all sorts of weird cases I had never noticed: "ничего" and similar, various silent letters, etc.

I mean, I agree that it's much simpler than English in terms of going from written letterforms to pronounced word, but there's still a bunch of weirdness floating around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It not only seems that boys do better when told it's a game, girls do worse when told it's a game.

<comment><USER21> I guess it is a bit too simplistic to conclude that the boys prefer competitive environments more than girls?

<comment><USER10> What matters is raising and parent models, not gender.

<comment><USER22> At risk of being patronizing, you're probably being downvoted by parents who figure you don't have kids.

We have spent many years trying to present gender-neutral environments to our children. Yet at age 3 my son completely ignored the giraffe we were trying to point out at the zoo, and would only focus on the irrigation pump. That kind of experience was repeated often with him and my daughters.

One daughter would only build babies out of the meccanno I taught her to use. OK, they were robot babies and that's awesome, but still. This was before school, none of them had daycare, and we never had a TV.

These sorts of stories are repeated ad infinitum among parents, usually in the context of "I can't believe what I used to think..."

<comment><USER23> > We have spent many years trying to present gender-neutral environments to > our children.

[...]

> This was before school

My son's favourite colour before he started daycare was pink. That rapidly got policed out of him by other children and disappointingly by staff in day care.

We persevered - "anyone can like any colour; boys can have pink as their favourite colour, girls can have blue as their favourite colour" and it sort of worked, but he's now in his first year at school and the policing from other children is pretty fierce (although the teachers are much better).

<comment><USER24> Possibly a bit tangential to the discussion, but there's some chance the "pink vs. blue" convention has a biological basis in respect to male/female color vision differences.

For example, red-green color blindness affects about 7% of males, and < 0.5% females. IOW on the whole males are more likely to be able to see and respond to blue than red or pink.

There's also intriguing if incomplete evidence that among humans with normal color vision, females are more likely to have finer color discrimination ability in the yellow-orange-red end of the spectrum compared to their male counterparts.

Of course, there are going to be a few males "outliers" who have superior color discrimination ability, so a boy could very well appreciate pink even if it's not as likely as it would be among girls.

<comment><USER25> >> there's some chance the "pink vs. blue" convention has a biological basis

That makes no sense to me. I'm Greek and in my neck of the woods boys and girls are not expected to wear specific colours, at least not when I was growing up.

If you do a search for Greek traditional dress you'll notice that the colours that dominate are white, black, red and some shade of brown, but they are both pretty much equally distributed between men and women.

That's empirical and maybe someone somewhere has a proper data'd study that contradicts me but you really won't find anyone who can point to examples of pink dominating women's traditional dress in Greece.

I believe the same goes for other cultures. Every time I see the traditional ornamentation of people from the Amazon, or sub-Saharan Africa for instance, vivid bright colours seem to dominate for both sexes. If I think of South-East Asian traditional dress, I get an impression of oranges, yellows, and reds for the women (who do tend to wear the most colourful stuff).

And there's nowhere a shade of pink to be found.

So I think this blue vs pink thing is definitely a cultural phenomenon and that it's really just affecting specific parts of the world.

<comment><USER24> > If I think of South-East Asian traditional dress, I get an impression of > oranges, yellows, and reds for the women (who do tend to wear the most > colourful stuff).

Thanks for that info, I wasn't aware of those traditions. Indeed yellow to red is the range of hues that some human females might be able to discriminate better than males. That is, the idea is females see these colors more distinctly or are more visually "sensitive" to these colors.

"Pink" is relevant because it's merely red "diluted" with white, that is, lower saturation of a red hue.

No doubt cultural influences are enormously important re: attributing colors as symbols of gender identity. I was only writing about the _possible_ genetic/biological factors contributing to selecting which colors are assigned to males vs. females, and such factors could certainly be quite secondary.

OTOH the info you contributed is intriguing because it appears to support the hypothesis I was referring to.

<comment><USER25> >> Indeed yellow to red is the range of hues that some human females might be able to discriminate better than males.

That's interesting indeed, because I was wrong about the male/female dichotomy in Indian traditional dress: yellows and reds (and also fuschias, turquoises and so on) are worn equally by males and females. Blues and purples are also very commonly worn by women. The difference is in the patterns and the shape of the dress, but not in the colours. Apologies for that- like I said I'm Greek, not Indian.

Additionally, the other cultures I mention have an equal spread of reds, yellows, and what have you among men and women, so again I don't see how any genetic thing is at play here.

Finally- All this doesn't say anything about why pink is "girly" only in specific parts of the world. If pink in particular was a genetic thing then it would be all over the place, not just in a few countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think that 80 children is too small. The different results could as been biased that there were different classes, so different (possibly) skill levels of the students.

<comment><USER27> What sample size would satisfy you?

<comment><USER28> Replication.

<comment><USER29> How long have you been saving up this one-word response? Because the parent was addressing a complaint about small sample size, and basic reading comprehension would show you that your response was off-topic and did not logically follow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> A single study with n=80, in a social psych journal, with a trendy soundbite conclusion? Of course it's not a false positive! The fact that the authors cite a paper by Jens Foerster is icing on the cake.

<comment><USER31> n=80 is actually not bad, if that's what you're implying. There are a lot of studies that are n=30 since that's the rule of thumb most follow.

<comment><USER32> The n isn't the bad part. I'm skeptical of all psych studies. Readers extrapolate too much from simple, controlled experiments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Here's a link to the paper [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103116...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103116301202)

Decent discussion at reddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/4i75i0/study_shows...](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/4i75i0/study_shows_boys_outscore_girls_on_reading_tests/)

<comment><USER34> The article does a great job of it, too:

"Caveat: The study was relatively small and involved children who were still learning how to read."

Your only take-away isn't supposed to be some editor's choice for the title.

Added after original post:

This is why I don't like the "tl;dr" meme. If people would take more time to absorb the information related to topics we care about, there wouldn't be this desire to have a random person on the net distill that knowledge into something you can consume in 20 seconds or less. It's like getting all of your political opinions from Comedy Central. You're willingly getting your information through yet-another filter, but this filter is presented as unbiased.

Edit: parent comment ninja'd what I was responding to, now this looks super off topic.

<comment><USER33> This discussion is a distracting tangent. Apparently it's now impossible to delete comments after they've been responded to, so the best I could do was edit my comment down.

<comment><USER34> Ah. I see what was going on then. That's bitten me in the past too.

This is a distracting tangent. Just so it's clear, I wasn't responding negatively to you. You didn't invent what I'm railing against and as far as I was concerned you were only the messenger of another community's discussion. I don't think you said anything that needed to be edited down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> No, just no.

This kind of articles makes me cringe. The fact that the journalist is obviously aware of the limited scope in the research by stating the caveats makes it unresponsible publishing.

<comment><USER36> > _The fact that the journalist is obviously aware of the limited scope in the > research by stating the caveats makes it unresponsible publishing._

I haven't read the article, but isn't it the opposite? Isn't it being responsible to state the caveats?

<comment><USER37> This. There are always caveats in an experiment. The fact that they are mentioned in the article is a sign of good reporting by the WSJ.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm not even sure what they tested has anything to do with reading ability. Other than identifying certain kinds of words in a list, it certainly didn't require comprehension or understanding. The task was actually more like a game that involved words than a reading test. So while they may have observed an effect (still a smallish sample) I don't think it says anything meaningful about reading ability.

</comment><comment><USER39> Boys likes games and I believe boys are naturally competitive. Tell any boy something is a game, or a competition, and they will treat it as such. It has nothing to do with race, society, culture, or social upbringing. It's as close to human nature as one can get.

</comment><comment><USER40> Some statistical problems I can see here:

1\. Sample size n=80. You would need a pretty incredible result for a sample size this small to be significant.

2\. All students from the same region of France. Will this result carry over to other countries? Other cultures?

3\. The treatment groups were chosen from pre-existing classes. Classes whose composition may not be random.

It's a cool result, and it should definitely be tried again elsewhere but pop science articles shouldn't be saying this is anything worth talking any yet.

<comment><USER18> 1\. What sample size is necessary for a result of this magnitude to be significant? Because boys did 34% better when it was framed as a game. Did they have to double their scores for it to be significant at this sample size?

<comment><USER40> > boys did 34% better

No, two particular classes of students had their boys do 34%. In reality, the sample size was 4, not 80. They choose 4 classrooms, and saw these results.

If the researchers switched the classroom treatment selections, are you certain we would have seen the same result? Or did we really just find out that boys in those two classrooms happen to be 34% better at reading?

Those classrooms where boys did worse might have done worse for a large number of other reasons: those schools might be on the 'bad' side of town where less affluent students tend to go (happens all the time in small towns); that classroom might have been the one where the school has put all the trouble- maker kids because they know this particular teacher has the ability to teach those kinds of kids (or, conversely, that class might be the one that saw the huge boost when it was a game); the classes who did worse might have had a classmate dying in hospital that week, and the boys just didn't do very well under those conditions.

There are too many other completely reasonable answers that aren't related to the test itself, given the methods used in this study.

How I'd repeat the experiment: pool all the children before randomly selecting them for treatment groups to avoid bias from their origin classroom.

Edit: And to be clear, I'm not saying the results are incorrect. They might be onto something amazing here. They just happen to be bad at statistics. Maybe they should frame it as a game.

<comment><USER18> That's not how you count sample size. If there were four "classes" of one million boys and girls, does it still make the sample size four?

<comment><USER40> I think I'm not stating my point very well. Apologies for that.

The problem with saying that n=80 is that it presumes each 'test' (student evaluated) was chosen for their treatment independently of each other. This is clearly not true, as entire classes were chosen together. So any variable like 'actually this happens to be the gifted class' can throw the whole study up or down because that variable was not independent between the students tested.

For example, let's say we did this same test in America, but two classes happened to be from the wealthiest part of Boston, and two classes were from the poorest part of Detroit. If, as we randomly selected which class was assigned each treatment, we happened to hit the 1 in 4 chance that both wealthy classes were given the 'this is a game' treatment, would we be ready to say 'the game was the cause of the better test results'? I don't believe so.

That is why I find this study flawed, and why I disagree with the idea that n=80. They _may_ be onto something, but they do not have strong statistical evidence supporting their hypothesis.

<comment><USER18> That's not a sample size, that's called bias. The sample size is still 80, but it could be potentially a biased sample.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Gender discussion is too often framed as male vs. female these days. That's come from 30+ years of flawed output from the social science echo chamber and dogmatic denial of human nature. It doesn't matter if boys and girls do better under different conditions, they shouldn't be expected to perform equally in this way. What matters is that we understand those unique conditions and help children thrive whatever their gender. It's great to see research like this, especially when boys across the western world are struggling in academic environments that are perhaps favouring ways of learning more suited to girls.

<comment><USER42> You mean whatever their sex? Gender is such a strange term.

<comment><USER43> Sex is the biology; Gender is the identity. Discrimations are based on gender, not sex. Women are told to wear pink dresses because of how our society see women (female gender), not because they have a vagina (female sex).

<comment><USER44> > Sex is the biology; Gender is the identity

That's only a very recent distinction, and still a contentious one. According to Merriam-Webster ([http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/gender](http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/gender)) and the OED ([http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/english/gend...](http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/english/gender)), it's far from clear.

<comment><USER45> Based on what the dictionary says? The idea that gender and sex mean two different things isn't contentious amongst the people who study the phenomenon academically.

<comment><USER42> Well, gender studies is not very scientific. It is more "theorizing", in the sense of writing obscurantist explanations for everyday phenomenon.

<comment><USER46> The difference in gender and sex also comes up in biology and neuroscience...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook Beacon settlement - <AUTHOR> http://www.beaconclasssettlement.com/Files/SettlementAgreement.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> E-mail says: This is not a settlement in which class members file claims to receive compensation. Under the proposed settlement, Facebook will terminate the Beacon program. In addition, Facebook will provide $9.5 million to establish an independent non-profit foundation that will identify and fund projects and initiatives that promote the cause of online privacy, safety, and security.</comment>


Ask HN: aufond.me data leak?  - <AUTHOR>

Back when aufond.me launched on HN, I registered an account with aufond@<somedomain>. I just started to receive spam emails on this email address. Is it just a coincidence or did aufond leak user information? <comment><USER2> Leak seems to imply unintentional. A third option is that they could have sold your data. I assume you checked that your email isn't publicly listed anywhere obvious on a profile or anything?</comment>


Symantec confirms theft of Norton Antivirus source code - <AUTHOR> http://securitywatch.pcmag.com/none/292432-report-symantec-confirms-theft-of-norton-antivirus-source-code

<comment><USER2> "Symantec has no reason to believe at this time that the security and functionality of its products, or any customer information, were compromised..."

Yeah, right. Some hackers managed to steal Symantec's source code, but the company says nothing of importance was compromised. If you believe that I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.

[EDIT: corrected poor grammar.]

<comment><USER3> They didn't say "nothing of importance was compromised."

They said that the functionality of their products was not compromised... and if their product is built well enough, this would be a true statement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "So I'm taking it home to my workshop, my dear. I'll fix it up there, then I'll bring it back here."</comment>


What I've been reading #1 - <AUTHOR> https://gerardclos.com/what_i_have_been_reading_1/ <comment><USER2> I like the look of this blog's minimalist design.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Collection of good reads to fill up your Sunday. Essays, fiction and some video content.</comment>


Is AI just search through a powerset of language? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Sort of.

If one defines language as simply a symbol for some thing, than yes, A.I. is reducing the search space. But that's not exactly what happens in the mind. The mind is actually not making the search space smaller, it's remembering how searches are or are not effective. If it needs new knowledge, it remembers it, if it has the wetware to do so.

But here is the thing: when I read Socrates, I can connect with the knowledge that Plato transcribed in a way that is different than what A.I. does because I am human. If an A.I. is to truly be considered to have 'human' intelligence, it must be quasi-human. So I think it's important to discuss A.I. in terms that are closer to something that augments human intelligence rather than something that is independently intelligent. It's a little naive to think of it as a language search, because then you might say that Google's search algorithm is the most intelligent public A.I. agent on Earth. But Watson is way smarter than Google's algorithm, and I'd wager there are even smarter agents at work that we barely understand.

Likewise, language typically describes words that pertain to non science related events such as the President's farewell address. But, even though a linguist could rightly argue that his words are chosen with a certain scientific specificity, the whole of language is scientifically driven in many instances. So good A.I., were it to be as you posit, would reduce say, the amount of molecular activity in a couple of trillion cells to a single act, like walking, for instance, or riding a bike, or dialing a phone, or hammering a nail. All of these things are easily understood by the human mind, but are not so easy for A.I. because of the (importantly) complex activity involved in virtually everything a human does. In fact, I cannot think of anything a human does that isn't extremely complex in terms that would be fully comprehensible by an inorganic agent.

But I think you're fishing a little, and that's cool, because everyone wants to know what A.I. might or might not be, and we all have to learn as we go.

</comment><comment><USER3> From a human perspective, I suppose you could say that. Keep in mind though that that still means an infinite search space given that (human) language is either context-free or context-sensitive and therefore capable of generating an infinite number of valid statements.

If you approach intelligence from a more general not-necessarily-human-like level you'd have to accommodate a much larger set of elements to search through. Think about those recent examples of AI Go players that apparently use approaches in their game tactics which often don't seem to make sense to human players.

AGI thinking might indeed appear very alien to us.</comment>


So Far, It Is The best JavaScript Unix Terminal Emulator I Have Seen  - <AUTHOR> http://cb.vu/

<comment><USER2> Nice, but it's a bit of a stretch to call this a terminal emulator (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_emulator>)

Here's a real terminal emulator (a port of rxvt), implemented in JavaScript: <https://github.com/paddymul/rxvt-js>

</comment><comment><USER3> I love this site. (Note the instruction to try _help_ , if you're completely unsure what to do.)

See also <http://cb.vu/unixtoolbox.xhtml> by the same author for a great overview of Unix/Linux tools.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's broken on a touch screen since it tries to roll its own text input. The virtual keyboard doesn't appear.

 _Always_ use browser provided text input. There are a thousand things that can go wrong if you don't.

</comment><comment><USER5> Backspace button acts as browser back rather than deleting

(Does this work by intercept keystrokes like preezo? Perhaps the Backspace is not correctly intercepted?)

Chrome 8.0.552.215 on Mac os x 10.6

</comment><comment><USER6> Neither backspace nor delete work. Running Chrome on Windows XP.

</comment><comment><USER7> Looks nice but seems pretty limited in functionality. Backspace and tabs don't work in vi, I tried to ssh to my university server but just got a blank screen.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> snake, invaders and even vi!</comment>


Measuring hourly snowfall with a webcam and PHP - <AUTHOR> http://www.boutell.com/boutell/jillsnow/

<comment><AUTHOR> Jill's bucket is in Wilmington, Delaware, USA.</comment>


Carlo Rovelli on the 'greatest remaining mystery': The nature of time - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/a-physicist-explains-the-greatest-remaining-mystery-the-nature-of-time/2018/06/22/ff6f84ae-3840-11e8-9c0a-85d477d9a226_story.html <comment><USER2> Royal Institute presentation that I really enjoyed. Has some visual aspects, but can be mostly listened to while driving:

The Physics and Philosophy of Time - with Carlo Rovelli

> From Boltzmann to quantum theory, from Einstein to loop quantum gravity, our > understanding of time has been undergoing radical transformations. Carlo > Rovelli brings together physics, philosophy and art to unravel the mystery > of time.

[https://youtu.be/-6rWqJhDv7M](https://youtu.be/-6rWqJhDv7M)

Posted 13 June 2018, recorded 30 April 2018.

</comment><comment><USER3> C-SPAN videotaped Covelli speaking about his new book at a bookstore. About an hour long:

[https://www.c-span.org/video/?445419-2/the-order- time](https://www.c-span.org/video/?445419-2/the-order-time)

</comment><comment><USER4> I think I'm a simpleton because I could never imagine time being it's own thing. I see time as simply the amount of change in reality we can perceptually sample. Much like how an object in motion will continue in it's motion until it meets resistance,reality in my opinion is in continuous motion that has yet to meet resistance. Time (imo)is our measure of this change divided by our ability to sample it(where this ability could be second,minute,etc...)

Again,that's my opinion as a layman. I've always wondered why time was the focus, when I at least have been more curious about universal change. Why is everything in motion? and how is everything universally connected to where it changes at the same rate?

Maybe there's already plenty of work on this and I'm being ignorant(apologies if so).

<comment><USER5> Sounds good. Next, please define "change", and explain why or how "change" exists and is detectable by humans.

That's what Rovelli is investigating/theorizing about.

<comment><USER4> Yes but they are investigating our relative perception of the change. It's like studying astronomy without considering the fact that the stars we perceive in the sky is just our perception of how they looked like in the past. We distinguish how things are now from what we can perceive by measuring light and EMR. Why can't we at least consider the possibility that our perception of change might be different from the actual nature and attributes of this change?

<comment><USER6> You don't need to consider that what you see in the sky is "in the past". The light that's reaching us has been travelling at _c_ , the universal speed limit. Since we cannot possibly have known about that information sooner, what we see in the sky is for all intents and purposes, "the present".

Additionally, the _hidden variables_ of the change are exactly what they're talking about when people ask the question "what is time?".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some tangential thoughts: even though I like these popular science (physics, to be precise) books, I have hard times to imagine their writers as a _real scientists_. Tyson, Greene, Carroll, Kaku, Rovelli... So many writers author so many books about these _hey-look!-so-fascinating!_ things. It looks like a bandwagon and more and more scientists (yes, physicists especially) are getting on it - like they don't have any important research to do, like they are so hopeless and desperate about the current state of physics and they stopped caring about it and found a _proxy_ to monetize their knowledge. But hey, that's not a secret anymore - everyone knows about the crisis, from the Queen of England to the hounds of hell. Sabine Hossenfelder is a legend for me. A few years back, when I was taking a Physics101 class, even the lecturer almost begged for help after the last lecture at the end of the semester: "my fellow students, please, please, consider (to continue your career in the field of) physics. Physics is stuck. It needs new ideas, new theories, new minds. Please consider this." I was stunned. That was some real thing. I guess the fast advancement of technology in the late ~100 years made even the most brilliant minds (relatively) lazy. They gradually stopped thinking, beating their brains out year after year and here we are. No serious discovery after the quantum theory. String theory? Yeah, gazillions of dimensions - good luck with that. Higgs boson, Gravitational waves? Come on, nothing revolutionary - we're still waiting for the revolution to emerge from (upgraded!) LHC. For me, they are cleverly and beautifully marketed (minor) findings. (Maybe some of you have heard of, some (if not many) of the top universities have teams working hard doing all the "scientific-marketing" for the Nobel Prize - it's a precious prestige win in this _popular_ world we live in).

Minds get eroded by technology by heavily relying on it. And it's getting worse and worse by the distraction caused by all the digital "life" surrounding us, pulling and tightening its ropes every day. I imagine a true scientist as a monk. S/he doesn't think about writing a pop-sci book, appearing on TV and s/he got a distantiation even for interviews about her/his latest important research/discovery. "Monks" are needed more than ever for science nowadays.

Those were my humble 2 cents.

<comment><USER8> "I have hard times to imagine their writers as a real scientists. Tyson, Greene, Carroll, Kaku, Rovelli..."

If you mean by "real scientist" that they are doing real work that advances the field, some of them are and, yes, some of them aren't. I don't mean that as a criticism, because there is real value in being a PR person for science. (Some danger if they do it poorly, but a lot of value, too.) Hawking, for instance, was certainly a real scientist by any measure, right up until his unfortunate passing, but also did good PR and wrote some very popular books. And not to pick on him, but according to his CV [1], Neil deGrasse Tyson hasn't published a paper in a decade, and if you skip three related papers in 2007-2008, hadn't published prior to that since 1998. Doesn't mean he's not doing useful stuff, or that he wasn't at least a scientist in the past, but he's certainly not on the same sort of track as Hawking was.

<comment><USER9> I think that science is grossly lacking in good spokespeople who are respected in the field, and it should be rewarded _more_ within the academy, not less.

When a large fraction of the population has frankly anti-scientific beliefs and when funding for continued scientific endeavor depends on votes, science _needs_ to continually justify and promote itself in the public eye.

Are there dangers to that? Yes. But it's worse than holing up in the ivory tower to only quietly do research.

<comment><USER10> I agree, but it's unlikely that they will get respect and reward within the academy. They are just as susceptible to feelings of envy as people outside the academy. You can see this manifest itself in the academy's treatment of Carl Sagan, and in the many ramblings of Murray Gell-Mann about Richard Feynman. Sure, their expositions of the science may not have been rigorous and they weren't perfect human beings, but maybe that's what it takes to popularize science and draw people in. I often see the role of science popularization as that of turned the science illiterate to literate, not the uneducated to the educated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Time could be composed of tiny frames(quanta) of time. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronon) [https://archive.org/details/arxiv-hep- th0106273](https://archive.org/details/arxiv-hep-th0106273)

<comment><USER12> And what do those "time quanta" represent? "Time of light traversing the radius of an electron", really? Isn't that just another measurement device based on light quanta and distance?

<comment><USER13> No. That "time quanta" represents the smallest value Δ such that it doesn't make sense to take about events which happened between t and t+Δ. Δ may not be a constant though like Planck's constant.

<comment><USER12> The shortest distance between two events in space and time, when there are time quanta, then there must be space quanta as well.

<comment><USER13> What do you mean? We do already have space quanta: Planck Length.

<comment><USER12> Ah, well, I heard Planck _Time_ also already exists. What's the point then re- inventing time quanta when they already are defined?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Time does not exist. It is an abstraction based on the movement of matter. We use time to compare the relative motions of things.

Every instrument we use to "measure" time involves movement: pendulum, sandglass, rotation of Earth, translation of Earth around the Sun, vibration of atoms, etc.

<comment><USER15> Don't you need time to even define movement? Movement is a change of the position with respect to time. So without time you can't have movement. But obviously you are right that the two concepts are strictly related, that doesn't mean time doesn't "exist" (however you define "exist").

<comment><USER16> Forgive me for sounding rhetorical in this question, but I'm genuinely wondering.. Isn't saying "time doesn't exist" akin to saying "human thoughts don't exist"?

<comment><USER17> Paradoxically, thought (human or not) is the only thing we might be certain exists.

[https://www.the-philosophy.com/solipsism-definition](https://www.the- philosophy.com/solipsism-definition)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Not to nitpick, but I'm not sure the nature of time is so indisputably the greatest remaining mystery.

The nature of consciousness, life, and death can all certainly give it a run for its money.

Incidentally, would anyone happen to have a direct link to a version of this article that could be read without enabling javascript?

<comment><USER19> Yes. For me the greatest remaining mysteries are more in this order.

1\. Nature of Life (we are still nowhere near understanding how it arose or how living organisms work in all their intricate detail).

2\. Nature of Consciousness - what is consciousness, how can living matter instantiate it, how can we quantify it, etc?

3\. Origin of the Universe

4\. Why do we seem so alone in the Universe?

5\. Resolving Quantum Mechanics / Gravity

6\. Understanding Time

<comment><USER20> I would bump the origin of the universe to the top, because no matter what universe-generating physics you come up with I can always ask, "but what set things up to work that way?" I'd also put consciousness up there, because it's fundamentally distinct from measurable things. Consciousness and the origin of the universe get place 0, and the others all get place 1 because they're solvable but we don't know in which order.

<comment><USER21> > I'd also put consciousness up there, because it's fundamentally distinct > from measurable things.

No one knows that it is not measurable. Is love measurable? is hunger? happiness? they seem to be as measurable as consciousness, that is to say we can at least measure them in binary as either present or not.

<comment><USER22> How do you know everyone else is not a "p-zombie", indistinguishable in any external way from a human such as yourself, but devoid of internal "consciousness"/"subjective experience". Even the mere logical possibility of p-zombies indicates that consciousness is unmeasurable.

<comment><USER21> Solipsism is basically the only defense against the conclusions from the evidence of the "real" world. But if you argue for solipsism then I say you have much bigger problems than consciousness because you basically rejected everything that has ever been "known" or experienced. If you reject our "shared reality" then anything is possible, including paradoxically, the "shared reality".

If you accept the shared reality on the other hand, consciousness is measurable to some degree. So the real question is do you or do you not accept we share experiences?

As an addendum, if it is all up to me as you suggested, I just made consciousness measurable so there is no need to keep arguing about it.

<comment><USER18> _" Solipsism is basically the only defense against the conclusions from the evidence of the "real" world."_

Far from it. There could very well be an external world, and one populated by plenty of other and fully real human beings even, but your own personal view or understanding of it could be distorted or false.

This could be simply because you're hallucinating, or insane, or your brain could be injured, or could be living in a virtual reality (which itself exists in some other "real" reality), or you could be the proverbial brain in a vat, or aliens (or god or a demon/devil) could be deceiving you, etc.

<comment><USER21> All those options are the same: they are either part of a shared experience or they are not. Nothing is preventing a demon from deceiving me right now, in fact one can come anytime I'd love to meet him, preferably her.

<comment><USER18> If experiencing something that's not shared is the only qualification for solipsism, then we're all solipsists, as (arguably barring the possibility of telepathy) our experiences are all private.

But that's not what solipsism typically means. Solipsism usually refers to the position that only you (or perhaps only your own mind) exist. By that commonly accepted definition, one could be mistaken or deceived in any of the ways I laid out earlier without them entailing solipsism.

<comment><USER21> I meant to say shared context. Everything you said is part of a shared context or not, those are the only two options.

<comment><USER18> Even if there is some sort of "shared context" (more commonly known as "objective reality") your view or understanding of it could still be deceived, hallucinating, simply mistaken, insane, etc. These are not solipsism. What they are are possible obstacles to your connection to any shared context or objective reality.

<comment><USER21> Sure, but they don't change the fact those are the only 2 options.

And in the "shared reality" option, consciousness is somewhat measurable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Disclaimer: I'm a physicist who didn't finish the Phd and went to work in the tech field instead.

I wish physicists would stop writing these bullshitty popular science books. A lot of the books are popularizing unverified / unverifiable things like String Theory or Multiverse or Arrow of Time. And when they're talking about more plain things like Special Relativity, then I still cringe, because it's not something that's worth explaining to lay people: there is no situation in which some high-level bullshitty understanding of GR or SR or QM will be helpful or relevant in life, at best it will confuse you.

It is a good and necessary thing to tell students about this, so some of them become physicists, but you don't need popular science books for that, it should happen in schools, for free.

If you're going to speak about Physics to lay people, at least do it it in a way that's relevant to them, eg. look at how Feynman taught Physics. Explain how a boomerang works, or how thermodynamics relates to photosynthesis.

<comment><USER24> I Feynman is the right approach to teaching physics to the lay person...which book is the place to start?

<comment><USER23> Surely you're joking: not a physics book, it's about Feynman's life, it's a way to get you inspired and into the mindset.

Feynman Lectures on Physics: freshman level course that Feynman taught at MIT. Lots of material, will last you year(s).

Six easy pieces: 6 easy lectures from Feynman.

Six not so easy pieces: 6 not-so-easy lectures from Feynman.

Feynman lectures on computation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Planck's constant, speed of light travel when you chain across space which Planck himself should have understood if he thought about transmissions of information in series. Curves when gravity pushes/pulls light from straight paths. What questions are there?

<comment><USER22> Your comment is gibberish (I've read it 3 times and can't make head nor tails, but maybe I'm missing something).</comment></comment>


Tumor Biology retracting 107 papers after authors faked peer review process - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/107-cancer-papers-retracted-due-to-peer-review-fraud/ <comment><USER2> > "When a lot of the fake peer reviews first came up, one of the reasons the > editors spotted them was that the reviewers responded on time," Wager told > Ars. Reviewers almost always have to be chased, so "this was the red flag. > And in a few cases, both the reviews would pop up within a few minutes of > each other."

I have submitted late peer reviews before and felt really guilty about it. But with this new information I should be _proud_ about my late reviews -- it helped make the fake reviews stand out!

</comment><comment><USER3> Now it is interesting to see which paper were fraudulent. Sponsored by industry or not? Specific authors, for specific institutions? Particular kinds of research?

<comment><USER4> The point of peer review isn't primarily about finding fraud, which is rare, but about finding errors in reasoning by the authors, lack of needed experimental controls, faulty statistical analysis and so on. The retracted papers aren't necessarily fraudulent in a malicious way, but by circumventing the peer review process as the authors did, it is hard to judge the merits of the papers -- they might be great papers or they might be crap.

<comment><USER5> >The point of peer review isn't primarily about finding fraud, which is rare.

Rare? Scientific misconduct is rampant. It seems like theres a new professor every day being caught out on retraction watch.

<comment><USER4> That's like thinking crime is rampant given that every time you look at a tabloid newspaper there's a story about some robbery or murder. You have to do the math and realize that even if every story is true they still are very rare occurrences given the number of people in the community (physical or scientific)

<comment><USER6> Good point, but scientific papers can have larger ramifications in social policy,funding allocation(billions of tax dollars), even daily public life (food guidelines).

It's also far more important for science to keep its hands clean because fair or not its public relations is important. In our high technological society, we cannot allow people to lose faith in the scientific process, It would be a global disaster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Journals are already under fire for privatizing publicly-funded research. They justify their existence by claiming to hold the research they publish to the highest standard, primarily through the peer-review process.

That this journal has now repeatedly failed in the most basic standard of quality control leaves it with zero credibility, and it therefore should immediately be shut down.

<comment><USER8> > That this journal has now repeatedly failed in the most basic standard of > quality control leaves it with zero credibility, and it therefore should > immediately be shut down.

Whatever your thoughts on journals, I don't think that follows logically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> From time to time a quick visit to retractionwatch.com is a good way to understand how often Research papers have issues, from very minor ones up to something so big that it seems impossible that the article managed to be published at all.

It is really sad how diffused are let's say less-than-fully-ethical practices among scientists (even if of course the cheaters are a minority).

</comment><comment><USER10> Shouldn't at least the authors and the sponsors be named? Have their names and info posted online? A blacklist of shady researchers and their associates would perhaps deter some of the fraud.</comment>


Have you ever got lost in HackerNews? - <AUTHOR>

Problem 1: For the last two days, i've been spending most of my time going through all HN stories, reading the links and going through all the comments to make sure i'm not missing out any information. I always want to learn something new and there's tonnes of new stuff in HN. Now, I'm completely addicted to HN. Sometimes all of a sudden i'll stop doing my work and jump into HN to check through the new stories and articles. That's the level of addiction!
I would like to know
- How much time you spend on HackerNews on daily basis?
- Do you spend time going through the comments thread? How much? As the comments count keeps on changing, more people jumping into dicussions, do you go through them again and again to see the new comments?
Problem 2: There are lot of new things like people talking about some reverse engineering, startups, open source, physics, future, programming.. etc. It's too difficult to list out all the categories and the list can go on so long. I'll just stumble upon some article which explains about some hardware stuff, which i'm not really good at. I want to understand the depth of the article but i couldn't, so i'll save the article to come back in future time hoping someday i'll be able to understand the breadth & depth of the article. The more the time i spend on HN, the more the topics,subjects i would like to be good at.
- Is it really a good idea to try to understand all the articles and participate in discussions?
- How do you digest all the new information? Do you make notes, saving articles? Will you ever go through the articles or notes? <comment><USER2> A hint: upvoting a story creates an entry in the "saved stories" link that is part of your profile.

In general I digest a lot of information partially and much of it slowly. It's addictive, and for a while I used "noprocrast" but that was a long time ago.

Anyway, I read what I read and don't bother worrying that I missed something. The first order value of HN is breadth, and less than everything still broadens my knowledge and understanding. Nobody can read all the good things, never mind read everything.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> maintaning any kind of notes.? or just upvoting and going through them whenever needed?

<comment><USER2> I don't take or maintain notes based on what comes across HN. I suppose that little bits might occasionally leak into my journal from time to time but not deliberately nor often.

Usually, I use search to find past HN threads. I occasionally book mark a link. Usually I come back and read it within a couple of days or a week. Then I'll delete the link. There's just too much.</comment></comment></comment>


Water-Powered Spaceship Could Make Spaceflight Cheaper - <AUTHOR> http://www.space.com/11230-water-powered-spaceship-mars-solar-system.html <comment><USER2> Steam-propelled spacecraft. I fully approve.

However, this would likely not be especially cost-effective if we have to pull all the water into orbit from earth; while the article mentions mining water from asteroids or moons, it puts that in a hypothetical future, even more so than using water as reaction mass, with refueling in low-Earth orbit proposed.

</comment><comment><USER3> How does this compare in terms of thrust to, say, an ion engine?

<comment><USER4> It all depends on how much they're able to heat up the water with their solar panels, which is to say "who knows?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > "Water would be a big part of the space coach's body, too, according to the > study. Packed along the habitat modules, it would provide good radiation > shielding."

erm… doesn't that mean that once you use the fuel (water), your radiation shielding is gone?

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a minor and nitpicky point, but that's not what Phobos looks like. It's oblong because its tidally locked, and it's long axis faces Mars, not the direction of its orbit.

Also, that's a wee bit close. I demand accuracy in my sci fi watercolours.

</comment><comment><USER7> As soon as the next world war breaks out over water, I'm sure petroleum will once more be the cheaper alternative :)

That, and no one will approve of shipping water (our _only_ renewable resource FFS!!!) to outer space.</comment>


Everybody Be Cool, This Is a Robbery - <AUTHOR> https://www.blackhat.com/us-19/briefings/schedule/?hootPostID=db681a52c6a321681e1f9281b5124457#everybody-be-cool-this-is-a-robbery-16233 <comment><USER2> If you speak French, the authors already gave the presentation at SSTIC 2019.

Their material is online.

Paper: [https://www.sstic.org/media/SSTIC2019/SSTIC- actes/hsm/SSTIC2...](https://www.sstic.org/media/SSTIC2019/SSTIC- actes/hsm/SSTIC2019-Article-hsm-campana_bedrune_neNSDyL.pdf)

Video: [https://static.sstic.org/videos2019/1080p/SSTIC_2019-06-05_P...](https://static.sstic.org/videos2019/1080p/SSTIC_2019-06-05_P07.mp4)

<comment><USER3> For those that don't speak French is there a translation or a good summary?

<comment><USER4> [https://cryptosense.com/blog/how-ledger-hacked-an- hsm/](https://cryptosense.com/blog/how-ledger-hacked-an-hsm/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While somewhat interesting, I'm not sure there's much to discuss unless the presentation or details are already available.

Interestingly, this reminds me of two Defcon talks I watched in the last day or two, which also cover vulnerability through additional processors onboard.[1][2]

1: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmTwlEh8L7g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmTwlEh8L7g)

2: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH0F9r0siTI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH0F9r0siTI)

</comment><comment><USER6> Is this just a link to talk description for a talk that hasn't happened yet?

I'm curious how this got so high on HN with so little actual content.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've always been skeptical about HSMs. They're treated as some sort of magic bullet to solve the problem of storing private keys and the like, but they run software written by humans just like anything else and are still subject to bugs that create vulnerabilities.

EDIT: grammar

<comment><USER8> It depends on the HSM. In principle they can use specialized ICs that prevent direct access to the secret. This is how many so-called "secure elements" work --the hardware provides specialized operations, for both symmetric and asymmetric keys, like "generate", "sign", or "encrypt" that access the secret key. Software, on- or off-chip, simply can't read the key. See, e.g., [https://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/en/ATsha204a](https://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/en/ATsha204a)

Further up the stack, ARM and some other embedded chips commonly have dedicated AES instructions that operate on a 128-bit or 256-bit non-volatile register that cannot be directly read. They include a generate instruction that sets a write-once register[1] to a random value--hopefully using a hardware RNG. This effectively creates a unique key that cannot be cloned but can be used by software to be build more complex primitives (hardware attestation, exporting secret keys off the device, etc). See, e.g. [https://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/sw_manuals/xili...](https://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/sw_manuals/xilinx11/pim_c_introduction_efuse.htm)

"Web scale" HSMs don't usually implement the strongest method discussed above. You need to be able to export ("wrap") and load ("unwrap") an arbitrary number of keys, perform a high rate of operations, and handle significant throughput. They may use something like the non-cloneable AES key for wrapping and unwrapping, but for whatever reason (hardware cost, development time, laziness, ineptitude, lack of demand) everything else is usually controlled by software, with the unwrapped secret keys visible to the software. Sometimes this software runs on a separate chip or within a different privilege domain (e.g. TrustZone); sometimes not, as I presume is the case with the hacked Gemalto HSM device. But in any event it's a distinction without a difference-- it's a pile of buggy software when not even a single line of potentially buggy software should be able to read the keys. In principle they could use formal verification techniques, but apparently not many do. They don't even seem to make use of projects like seL4, which would get them 80% of the way there.[2]

Anyhow, it _can_ be done properly. And some HSMs may do it properly. It's hard to tell because the industry is so opaque. You're right to be skeptical, just don't assume nobody is doing it properly, though it's probably true very few are.

[1] These registers are often implemented as so-called eFuses--[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_eFUSE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_eFUSE)

[2] Hardware can have bugs, too. The best way to approach the problem is probably to find the right mix of hardware and software that permits you to formally verify most if not all the critical components and semantics. Again, seL4 is an obvious choice here as a core architectural component; it's outright negligent seL4 or something with similar guarantees isn't more commonly used.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is a way to translate the paper: [https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=auto&tl=en&u=h...](https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sstic.org%2Fmedia%2FSSTIC2019%2FSSTIC- actes%2Fhsm%2FSSTIC2019-Article-hsm-campana_bedrune_neNSDyL.pdf&sandbox=1)

</comment><comment><USER9> related anecdata: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12069784](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12069784)

 _with undocumented commands, export the key from the device in an unencrypted format and loaded it into the other model_

</comment><comment><USER10> Leave it to Blackhat to implement a site which won't let you go back a page.

<comment><USER11> Or read it with executing an arbitrary program.</comment></comment>


What worries me about AI - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/what-worries-me-about-ai-ed9df072b704 <comment><USER2> The article's conclusion:

 _Not only does social media know enough about us to build powerful psychological models of both individuals and groups, it is also increasingly in control of our information diet. It has access to a set of extremely effective psychological exploits to manipulate what we believe, how we feel, and what we do._

 _A sufficiently advanced AI algorithm with access to both perception of our mental state, and action over our mental state, in a continuous loop, can be used to effectively hijack our beliefs and behavior._

 _Using AI as our interface to information isn't the problem per se. Such AI interfaces, if well-designed, have the potential to be tremendously beneficial and empowering for all of us. The key factor: the user should stay fully in control of the algorithm's objectives, using it as a tool to pursue their own goals (in the same way that you would use a search engine)._

 _As technologists, we have a responsibility to push back against products that take away control, and dedicate our efforts to building information interfaces that place the user in charge. Don't use AI as a tool to manipulate your users; instead, give AI to your users as a tool to gain greater agency over their circumstances._

</comment><comment><USER3> That'd be interesting if I could tell Facebook (or whatever social media) I want to be closer to my family (so it surfaces family posts) or local community (so it surfaces geographically close posts) or that I want to lose weight (so it surfaces motivational/dieting posts) or I am training for a marathon (so it surfaces running/training posts) or I went through a bad breakup recently (so it surfaces pictures of puppies and my single friends living fun bachelor lifestyles), or that I want to learn programming (so it surfaces programming things). Or like a button for "Only show me positive, happy stuff".

I mean, I guess you can achieve all of that with a carefully curated Newsfeed / friends list, but it's different than having the dials for what you want to feel/accomplish (how you want to be psychologically manipulated) and the AI could periodically check in ("Am I making you happier?" or "Do you feel inspired to run more often?") and adjust how the content is being surfaced.

<comment><USER4> I think most people would enjoy that. The problem to solve first though: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem)

<comment><USER5> Isn't he proposing cutting out some of the agent's curating and priorities and substituting his own, actual interests? Sounds like a start.

<comment><USER4> That's the thing though, right? How do you optimize for two contradictory objectives? The "simple" answer is that you align incentives and avoid the problem by redefining it.

<comment><USER5> You mean distinct objectives, and the answer is with weights (sliders, usually on the UI.) Align what with what? And how is taking these choices out of the hands of the principle and handing it to the agent avoiding principle-agent?!? But in any case how does this relate to your previous comment?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This blog post appears to be the followup to a very good tweetstorm: [https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/976563870322999296](https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/976563870322999296)

</comment><comment><USER7> Honestly, I'm not afraid of AI.

Instead, I'm terrified of that step before - which does not yet have a name - in which sophisticated bots generate a news bubble (whether real or fake may not even matter that much) that leads us to destroy ourselves.

Think about it - the riots shortly after the election, the cries of fake news (on both sides of he political spectrum), the growing gap between the left and right, etc.

That's enough to get us off the rails in the US. Now imagine what that would do in a country with a much more fragile democracy, or a split religious population.

Truly, that is more frightening. If you've ever seen what one person can do to another under strained circumstances, you know what I mean.

</comment><comment><USER8> Medium's "Pardon the interruption" pop up is starting to pissing me off. This is the last article I will read on Medium until I've heard they removed it.

<comment><USER9> They've removed it.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for letting me know !

<comment><USER8> Actually they did not. They must have a timer in a cookie.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Anatomy of a Machine Learning Algorithm - <AUTHOR> https://www.dropbox.com/s/xpd5x6p6jte3th5/Chapter4.pdf?dl=0 <comment><AUTHOR> The link to the book [http://themlbook.com](http://themlbook.com)</comment>


Ask HN: Monitoring best practices - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for reading/resources/advice on best practices for monitoring our SaaS offerings. We run on AWS, but general reading is helpful too.<p>What tools, articles, and books have you found helpful in building monitoring infrastructure for your products? <comment><USER2> You may want to read Google's recently released SRE book, watch the many conferences(monitorama, @scale, and many more) videos on YouTube and/or hunt down slides, check various engineering blogs (e.g Twitter posts about observability, Uber posts about their Atlas outliers detection system etc) and talk to people who are already dealing with those kind of problems.

That said, I think what's more important is to log everything ( use Kafka ), even if you don't know in advance how to make use of them. You may need them later. And you need to break this down into 3 different problems. Data exploration, data visualization, and alerts. And you probably shouldn't or won't be able to find one product that will help you address all those needs - or maybe will be too expensive. You should instead use multiple and all should consume from your events feed/stream. If you want to do it yourself, and you don't have the hardware resources to handle lots of data points, then use two differ sets of services. One that will retain say upto 24 hours worth of data so that you will get predictable, consistently fast query, processing and visualization time and another that may hold data for a longer period. Chances are you will want to understand issues and that happened recently so optimize for that. Good luck :)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the recommendations. Went ahead and bookmarked the links. If anyone is interested:

[https://landing.google.com/sre/book.html](https://landing.google.com/sre/book.html)

[https://vimeo.com/monitorama](https://vimeo.com/monitorama)

[https://atscaleconference.com/videos- articles/](https://atscaleconference.com/videos-articles/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hi,

We are currently building a product to do that ! We have a prototype and we'll be happy if you'd want to be a pilot/beta customer. Shoot me an email: firstname.lastname@example.com</comment>


Google+ Pages don't make any sense - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/u/0/115937550430731208132/posts/NcC5kDY4Xjr <comment><USER2> Why does everyone expect Google+ to be as fully developed as Facebook, a product that was launched 6 years ago.

I don't like Google+, but of the complaining about its lack of features is getting annoying. It's very apparent the Google+ team is working as fast as they can to implement their product plan.

<comment><USER3> My complaint isn't so much that Google+ isn't developed as what they _are_ developing and releasing has been very underwhelming and lacks any cohesive path to increasing engagement.

Almost all successful social networks that succeed have relatively high engagement from the get go. Notice, I said engagement and not user-base(that usually takes time to grow and understandably so). Google+'s engagement sucks. And their user-base numbers are bloated: google can stick a call-to-action to any service on their homepage and claim millions of signups overnight. It speaks more about Google the search engine and almost nothing about Google+'s success.

<comment><USER4> We get it, you don't like Google+. That doesn't mean you have to take every thread tangentially related to the product and make a point to criticize them for not releasing engagement metrics barely two months after launch.

If you have any facts or statistics to back up any of your claims I'd love to continue the discussion. Wild speculation and opinions stated as facts? Not so much.

<comment><USER3> It is a fact that at 10M users, facebook was reporting engagement, notably that over 50% of the users log in every single day. (1)

It is a fact that google+ has 40+M users.(2)

It is also a fact that Google's exec refused to release any info. about engagement despite repeated attempts by journos. (3)

Given these facts, I think it is logical to conclude that google+'s engagement is poor.

1\. [http://techcrunch.com/2005/09/07/85-of-college-students- use-...](http://techcrunch.com/2005/09/07/85-of-college-students-use- facebook/)

2\. [http://allthingsd.com/20111013/four-month-old-google- has-40m...](http://allthingsd.com/20111013/four-month-old-google- has-40m-users/)

3\. [http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_plus_engagement....](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_plus_engagement.php)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yeah, like most everything about Google+, it's pretty ill-thought out, but a patch for these obvious oversights has been "promised" in the near future. I'm sure that Google will add multiple admins to +pages, but this is another large complaint in a long list of errors that Google has made with this product. Sadly, Google+ is here to stay, and users of other Google products (gmail, youtube, everything...) can expect G+ to be shoved further and further down their throats.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm honestly surprised by the defenses of Google in the context of G+ pages. Yes, G+ is a new product, but releasing G+ Pages for business without multiple account support is _not_ anything like a minimally viable product. It's just not. It's actually worse than useless, it actively frustrates and confuses any organization larger than a few people unless you're willing to break the Google rules and used a shared account.

The fact that multiple admins are coming means they should have waited until they were here. Releasing before then is kind of a trick to make companies not dismiss G+ as worthless.

</comment><comment><USER7> They already said multiple admins for +Pages will come...

<comment><USER8> here's the announcement for that:

[https://plus.google.com/101560853443212199687/posts/BbbJc6tB...](https://plus.google.com/101560853443212199687/posts/BbbJc6tBo81)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is an odd rant. First, it's coming from a Yahoo employee. Next, it's about a service that is only a couple months old and a feature that is just a couple weeks old. Next, it's the type of feature that is easy to see not making the first release but would come at some point in the probably near future. Finally, the post doesn't support the headline at all.

<comment><USER10> Hi. That was me. What's odd about a Yahoo! employee using Google+?

The point of my "rant" was specifically that it doesn't make any sense to launch a feature like Google+ Pages -- a feature targeted at organizations and groups -- without the ability for those pages to be owned and administrated by more than one user. This ability is fundamental to the usefulness of the feature (and even to the way Google has chosen to market the feature), so the fact that it launched without it is puzzling and frustrating.

<comment><USER9> It's odd on a number of levels. First, does Yahoo have anything similar? If yes, use it. If not, why not? Yahoo doesn't even have a blogging or publishing service? Second, unfortunately, Yahoo criticism of Google doesn't resonate well in 2011. The whole thing just comes off as further evidence of some weird problems over in Sunnyvale.

<comment><USER10> No, Yahoo! does not have anything similar to Google+. Even if Yahoo! did have a similar product, it would be silly for me to restrict my community outreach efforts to that product, ignoring YUI users on Twitter, Google+, and elsewhere.

Please go back and look at my Google+ post one more time. Look closely. The name next to it is "Ryan Grove", not "Yahoo!". The profile photo is a sketch of my face, not a Yahoo! logo. The word "Yahoo!" isn't even used in the post.

This is not "Yahoo criticism of Google". This is me, Ryan Grove, person, criticizing Google+ Pages. And to be even more clear, I'm criticizing out of frustration because, on the whole, I like Google+ a lot. I wanted to like Google+ Pages as well, but it has fundamental flaws. I'm criticizing it not because I want to hurt it, but because I want it to get better.

This is not "evidence of some weird problems over in Sunnyvale". This is my personal opinion, expressed on my personal account, and has nothing to do with any views held by my employer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Bradley Horowitz "kind of" explains why pages look like user profiles: [https://plus.google.com/113116318008017777871/posts/QBPAvCBa...](https://plus.google.com/113116318008017777871/posts/QBPAvCBaDes)

</comment><comment><USER12> Release Early, Release Often.

The day they released pages they mentioned multiple admins was planned. By releasing earlier they can also get some more user feedback as-they-go, I would imagine.

</comment><comment><USER13> what exactly are the benefits of creating a G+ page for YUI?

<comment><USER10> We currently use Google+ Hangouts (via our personal profiles) for team meetings, since several members of the team (including me) are remote. It works great (much better than iChat or Skype, which we've previously used).

It'd be super awesome if we could use a Google+ Page for YUI (instead of a personal account) as a community hub, which would allow us to more easily host Hangouts that are open to the community, share YUI news and videos, and just generally interact more closely with our community on Google+.

In theory, this is exactly the sort of thing that Google+ Pages are for. In practice, there's no point to us creating a Google+ Page for YUI, since it currently has no actual benefits over just using a personal profile (and would actually be more work).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> You see, G+ is doing exactly what Facebook does. The brands are basically duplicating their efforts for social interaction. I don't see any difference between how FB treats page creation versus Google Plus.

<comment><USER15> Difference is, Google will be integrating the Google+ pages and profiles into the Google search results, something Facebook only has a slight chance to do with BING.

<comment><USER16> Google: facebook pepsi

Not sure how more integrated into google search results facebook could get.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: bloom, a wool blanket inspired by origami - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/78643492/bloom-blanket

<comment><USER2> Wasn't there a blanket like this in the (in-)famous bedroom scene of A Clockwork Orange?

edit:

[http://www.pixelarq.com/cwo/cwo-night.jpg](http://www.pixelarq.com/cwo/cwo- night.jpg)

Sorta like it, at least.

<comment><USER3> Speaking of which, anyone know where you can get those two Ludwig V. B. posters in that image?

<comment><AUTHOR> All I could find was a disappointing mosaic version: [http://www.ebay.com/itm/BEETHOVEN-MOSAIC-35-X25-INCH-B-W- WAL...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/BEETHOVEN-MOSAIC-35-X25-INCH-B-W-WALL-POSTER- CLOCKWORK-ORANGE-LUDWIG-VAN-/221247783479)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's the advantage? I only see that it might "break" earlier because of many additional stitches, right?

<comment><USER5> Looks beautiful. Extra loft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is it just me, or is $250 pretty expensive for a blanket?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the Italian cashmere wool is quite expensive, as well as the shipping and customs fees out of Spain. I wish that I could sell it for cheaper!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Neat product!</comment>


Free online masterclasses in Erlang programming - <AUTHOR> http://www.kent.ac.uk/news/kentlife/6083/launch-of-free-online-masterclasses-in-programming <comment><USER2> These are very good. Highly recommended:

Here are some direct links to playlists:

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLR812eVbehlwEArT3Bv3U...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLR812eVbehlwEArT3Bv3UfcM9wR3AEZb5)

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLR812eVbehlwq4qbqswOW...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLR812eVbehlwq4qbqswOWH7NLKjodnTIn)

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLR812eVbehlx6vgWGf2FL...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLR812eVbehlx6vgWGf2FLHjkksAEDmFjc)

</comment><comment><USER3> Kent and all involved should be proud of this. These videos serve as an excellent, approachable introduction to Erlang.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've been seeing a lot of articles about Erlang recently any reason?

<comment><USER5> Elixir (which leverages the Erlang VM) has been gaining some momentum, so it could be related to that. Alternatively, distributed systems are more abundant than they've ever been, and many of the problems they present have been solved in Erlang.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Erlang isn't a terribly complex language, rather I believe OTP is the barrier to entry for me. Anyone know good docs for OTP? I've read LYSE a while ago, but is there something specifically for OTP?

<comment><USER3> Did you maybe stop before, or skip the parts, about OTP in LYSE? It's got solid, comprehensive coverage in my opinion.

<comment><USER6> I think I maybe just went too fast through that section. If that's the best place to learn it with an understanding of the language primitives, I'll just reread it.</comment></comment></comment>


Online Retailers Are Desperate to Stem a Surging Tide of Returns - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-03/online-retailers-are-desperate-to-stem-a-surging-tide-of-returns <comment><USER2> I don't know if I'm wired weirdly, but I vert rately return things. I really don't like dealing with customer service, and I kind of live by a "buyer beware" motto. One time amazon shipped me a broken AmazonBasics mouse. For $6.88 I said screw it, literally not worth my time, and just stopped doing business with Amazon.

On larger problems, I would issue a chargeback with my credit card company. I have won 4 of those for between $25 and $1500!!!

I used to have an Amazon seller account where I would ship video games and books. People who tried to return items and complain to Amazon were literally the death of my business. One chargeback wiped out the profits from 100 successful sales.

So like I said, I'm not sure if I'm wired differently, but I don't like this phenomenon and avoid it 99.99999% of the time.

<comment><USER3> > _I really don 't like dealing with customer service_

Most online retailers (including Amazon) require zero interaction with customer service to return something. Some clothing stores actually send retail labels in the package itself.

> _On larger problems, I would issue a chargeback_

> _One chargeback wiped out the profits from 100 successful sales_

It's really wrong to issue a chargeback when the seller is willing to work something out, and it seems like you were bitten by the same type of behavior.

<comment><USER2> Amazon requires zero interaction? I didn't know, it's been a few years since I have interacted with them, and I always remember my friends and family having to call Amazon to fix some issue, which, good on Amazon for handling that process efficiently.

Any seller who is willing to automate returns and eat costs is good in my book. Sadly, as a small shop, I couldn't automate that process and couldn't eat many costs whether I was in the right or in the wrong. So it was a big problem when Amazon would just automatically side with the customer, no matter how hard I tried to work with them and prove my credibility.

Like I said, I try to avoid issuing chargebacks wherever I can, 99.9999% of my purchases are just fine. But I've charged back 2 plane tickets and 2 parking tickets, believe it or not, and my credit card company was just absolutely stellar in handling the situation for me, since the companies involved were totally corrupt and non responsive.

So the net net of all of this is, unless you have deep pockets to fund your customer service ops (an increasingly large cost center), you will probably get burned on chargebacks and returns.

This will only increase the centralization around Amazon and Walmart, which I would define as "not always a good thing".</comment></comment></comment>


What is a good site for tech job search - <AUTHOR> Hi, I joined a job straight out of school about 11 years ago. Back then, I remember using Dice (as well as career pages of companies I was interested in). I am now back to job search. What is the best site to search for jobs?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> [http://remoteok.io](http://remoteok.io)</comment>


Ask HN: Where Should I Look For A Programmer To Partner With For My Start Up? - <AUTHOR>

I am looking to find a programmer/designer or two to partner with in order to continue building my start up company's website.
I can only offer part ownership of the company in the form of stock issued to them. It is a legal S-Corp.  How much stock depends on the amount of work and input offered. I do not have capital at this point.
I originally launched my site in 2005.  It is a Social Magazine about all forms of art and the business of being an artist.
Its content is by and large about and by the community.  The goal for every piece of content is to inspire and educate people.
33% of the profits once monetized will be donated to charity every quarter.
Every piece of content is linked together using a system like facebook's pages. We released that feature in 2005. This is one example of how I know my concepts and ideas of how they should be executed are still ahead of the curve.
In 2006 everything came to a halt because I became very ill and almost died. I was out of commission for years and my entire personality was altered for this time due to a tumor.
While dealing with that my original team had to take on new jobs and what capital I had raised was used up.
I am not looking to find a programmer to take advantage of and not compensate them what they deserve. The plan is again, to offer part ownership of this company and split income accordingly once the site is monetized.
I have a very extensive plan for how this entire project will scale.
I just don't know where to look for a potential partner to build it out with me.
I am based in Los Angeles but I am willing to travel between San Diego and San Francisco if there are good meet ups going on where programmers look for start ups to join.
If there are good places to meet programmers online please inform me of those sites.
Please advise me on where to seek a new partner or two. Thank you.
Sincerely, Gary Livingston <comment><USER2> You might find some useful into here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2320545>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2309722>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2293542>

[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:news.ycombinat...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:news.ycombinator.com+find+developers&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=)

[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:news.ycombinat...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:news.ycombinator.com+find+hackers&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=)

[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:news.ycombinat...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:news.ycombinator.com+find+cofounder&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Lots of fun stuff to look through!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Gary, I am not sure if developers would be interested to partner/share the stock of non-profitable company. Usually good developers get at least one inquiry as such a week. Therefore, they got to be very careful. Besides, nowadays it is extremely hard to get a startup developed by an individual, you need to find a team. I would strongly suggest to hire a team. And make sure you hire the best of the best, not the cheapest of the cheapest. Of course, it costs money... but... in software development you always get what you pay for or less. I would suggest joining a solid software development team as a marketing or sales pro and get hours-for-hours deal from them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sidenote: I would hire and pay a very high rate if I was able to. Unfortunately, that illness had me out of work for years and I am just now getting back to the job market. My savings are shot from what my medical insurance didn't cover of my half a million in bills.

I swear I am not someone that looks to take advantage of others or unfairly compensate myself at the expense of another. I believe in the same notion you have about paying for the best of the best and paying what they deserve.

I just simply can not do that at this time so I can only offer what I have and fair ownership of what they put into this.

I hate when people try to take advantage of me as a photographer. Part of why I started this project is to undo that mentality of taking advantage of others and using this project to establish higher rates for all creative people.

Just, one step at a time.

<comment><USER3> Sorry to hear about health problems you've gone through. Wish you the best luck and, yeah, as a web developer/designer, I know it is really hard for people in creative services nowadays.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You're in LA - look up coloft - they are in santa monica and have a website of the same name. They have a lot of events for startups and the owners are fantastic people.

You have all kinds of hacker groups in la too. go to meetup.com and see what you can drum up.

My observation is that LA startup scene is really heating up and I wish you the best.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for leads to both. Coloft sounds great! I think my friend has gone to a few of their events. So, I'll be sure to drag him with me.

I'll see what meetup.com has to offer too. Thank you again!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You could post on the monthly "Who's hiring" thread on HN. Lots of programmers look at it for interesting gigs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Will do! I'll be sure to look through others first. Thank you for the suggestion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> IRC

<comment><USER7> Care to elaborate? (Assuming it's not sarcasm.)

<comment><USER6> Sure. Freenode and EFNet tend to have significant concentrations of talented developers and developer/managers.

I think many people would be surprised at the caliber of people who idle( usually as ops )on the various programming-related IRC channels. Of course, these channels also attract droves of newbies looking for help, often with elementary homework projects. But if you use a decent vetting process, sorting signal from noise can be fairly trivial.</comment></comment></comment>


Communist China warns U.S. about diplomacy with the Republic of China (Taiwan) - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/china-warns-us-about-taiwan-diplomacy <comment><USER2> The President should pack his bags, and say, "If you give us counter-tariffs, I shall visit Taiwan. I'm all ready."</comment>


Sites begin self-censoring? Using Game Theory to Break The SOPA Code - <AUTHOR> http://danielmillsap.com/blog/technology-news/using-game-theory-to-break-the-sopa-code/

<comment><USER2> The legal term for this is "chilling effect": from Wikipedia, this is 'used to describe the inhibition or discouragement of the legitimate exercise of a constitutional right by the threat of legal sanction.'

This is well studied in law, but mostly in the context of freedom of speech. It is clearly applicable in this case as well, and I wish the author had looked this up instead of coming up with an independent parallel analysis of the same idea.

</comment><comment><USER3> The next step is Stockholm syndrome.

Where self censoring sites begin to believe they deserved to be censored.

Look out for it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Moderately interesting article, but what evidence is there that sites have begun self-censoring? There's no reference to the title in the article.

<comment><USER5> it's hidden subtly. I think the point of the article is that the goal of SOPA was not to give the government the ability to censor sites, but to compel sites to censor themselves due to the threat of having their lives made difficult. And the title implies that this can be shown through an application of game theory.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for articulating this.</comment></comment></comment>


Love for Makers - <AUTHOR> http://pavelgraham.com/

<comment><USER2> Got confused for a second, but then I noticed the url. Note to anyone else: it's on pavelgraham.com, not paulgraham.com

</comment><comment><USER3> Websense is telling me not to go there.. Bad stuff on that site. hmmm

</comment><comment><USER4> One of the best pieces I have read in a really long time.</comment>


You Can Now Pre-Order the Pyra Linux Handheld PC - <AUTHOR> http://pandoralive.info/?p=5305 <comment><USER2> So this is picking u the pieces from Open Pandora. While I like the idea of open source hardware in general I am somewhat skeptical on why it might work this time. Nevertheless I hope they are successful.

</comment><comment><USER3> Neat, it looks like the spiritual successor to the Atari Portfolio.</comment>


Ask HN: What Windows 8 Metro apps are you working on? - <AUTHOR>

I'm working on a HN viewer right now, using Javascript. I would love to know what apps are others working on. <comment><USER2> I've thought about making desktop apps with web-technologies, but then I stop and think, "Why?"

Why not just make it available to everyone via the web, instead of making an OS-specific version for a subset of your biggest possible audience?

<comment><USER3> Look at Facebook, they took the same route with their apps. The reviews on the app store were horrible, and it now appears they will be making a native version of the app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm working on a Reddit app in Xaml.</comment>


Chalkdust – A magazine for the mathematically curious - <AUTHOR> http://chalkdustmagazine.com/ <comment><USER2> Love Chalkdusk! My 3 favorite math, physics and cs websites that I discovered this year are:

\- [https://www.quantamagazine.org](https://www.quantamagazine.org)

\- [http://chalkdustmagazine.com](http://chalkdustmagazine.com)

\- [https://fermatslibrary.com](https://fermatslibrary.com)

These 3 provide a stream of amazing, very well curated content, with no nonsense or spam. Have learned a ton from these this year.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there a mailing list? It's not often that I want to receive emails from websites, or even news outlets that I read, but I would love to see this in my inbox

<comment><AUTHOR> There is an RSS feed:

[http://chalkdustmagazine.com/feed/](http://chalkdustmagazine.com/feed/)

Pretty sure there's a mailing list - certainly I get email from them.

Here are their contact details:

[http://chalkdustmagazine.com/contact/](http://chalkdustmagazine.com/contact/)

<comment><USER4> That's great thanks, added to Feedly!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very cool!</comment>


Ask HN: How well tested should an MVP be? - <AUTHOR>

A Minimum Viable Product is used to validate whether your idea has legs. It should be released early enough that you should be embarrassed about it. So how well tested should it be? And by this I mean unit/integration tests, not a manual click through test.
A safe estimate for including tests is to double your development time. Theoretically, you could pump out two untested MVPs versus one fully tested MVP. However, if your MVP has legs, you have an untested product which slows you down in the long run.
Three scenarios off the top of my head (not exhaustive): 1. Untested. If it works out, add tests after. You can pump out MVPs quickly, but will be slow afterwards. 2. Fully tested. If it works out, you can move quickly afterwards, but will take longer to reach validation. 3. Half-tested. Best of both worlds? However, modifying existing tests feel just as hard (or harder) than starting from scratch. Could be worst of both worlds?
Should you go for speed or robustness? What has worked for you? <comment><USER2> I think the answer somewhat depends on what purpose the app fulfills for the user.

Are you launching hot-or-not_2.0? Well, there's not a lot than can go really wrong if it totally burns.

Are you launching mint-for-the-enterprise? Well, you might not get a 2nd chance if you accidentally transfer all of a users funds to Nigeria as part of your automated email handling code.

</comment><comment><USER3> It definitely depends on what your product is. Some customers will not be very forgiving while others will be relentless champions for you.

Our approach has been somewhat unique. Our MVP is mostly a throw-away version we got out into the world as fast as possible to test the idea. As such, we didn't do much testing. We excluded most of the back-end stuff we'd like to have but was not absolutely essential for basic operations (mainly automation of some tasks). This worked because we can do most of the required tasks for a small number of customers by hand in the mean time. This has been very successful and has been helpful on a number of levels -- we know our core customers quite well, they get personalized service and seem to be very loyal, and we were able to launch much earlier. The idea was to avoid spending a lot of time in development/testing in case things didn't go well.

Now that we know there is a place in the world for our product we can build a 2.0 version with everything we want/need in it. Plus, given our experience in the field and with the customers, we have a much better idea of what exactly our software will need to handle. Rather than mod our product to fit the requirements, we'll just build a new one and migrate the existing data. In the mean time we have some grass roots growth and customers who give us constant feedback.

I would note that if you are seriously looking at the possibility of growing very quickly then you probably don't want to use a throw-away MVP. If we got hit hard right now we would be in a tough spot for a few weeks (maybe more). Since our niche is rather small we felt a bit more comfortable taking on this risk.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think it depends on what you're trying to learn from your MVP. If you can get the data and feedback you need without building tests then I don't see anything terribly wrong with that.

</comment><comment><USER5> As little as possible while still being able to live with the risk and consequences of the thing blowing up.

</comment><comment><USER6> having a regression test of some kind is always good. You don't have to test everything, but at least have something you can run each time you change it to make sure the basics work.</comment>