Feynman's proof of the Maxwell equations - <AUTHOR> http://fermatslibrary.com/s/feynmans-proof-of-the-maxwell-equations <comment><USER2> I think this paper has a very misleading title, as the result it presents is not as remarkable as to be actually proof of what is known as Maxwell's equations (they were formulated by Heaviside btw.) Basically what the paper does is that it defines operators for ρ, j, E based on the hindsight knowledge of Maxwell's equations and non-relativistic equation of motion for a particle; then it shows that it is possible to have both sets as Heisenberg equations. That's definitely _not_ something a physicist would call deriving Maxwell's equations. Most of the thing claimed to be derived in the title is actually defined/assumed, the result is merely that the Heisenberg formalism, the commutation relations and non-relativistic equation of motion do not seem incompatible. The speed of light in the result is there purely because Dyson knows the result he needs to get.

<comment><USER3> I disagree. I would call this a proof but not a derivation. In other words, each step follows logically from the previous ones, even if there's no way that you would discover the final equations this way if you didn't already know or guess them.

In general, this is part of what makes reading mathematical papers so difficult; the steps of the proofs are almost never written down in the order they were discovered. All of the false starts and a lot of the intuition is discarded to yield a shorter but sometimes totally mysterious path from the assumptions to the conclusion.

<comment><USER4> The same applies to the more theoretical aspects of programming. (Because Computer Science is a subset of math..)

See [http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/08/you-could-have-invented- monad...](http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/08/you-could-have-invented-monads- and.html) for someone trying to show the way, and not just the result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> See also Feynman's Derivation of the Schrödinger Equation discussed a couple of weeks ago...

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10974803](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10974803)

</comment><comment><USER6> To be honest, the best part isn't the proof, it's the editor's note from Dyson.

<comment><USER7> (Not a physicist) So what's the result of applying Feynman's axioms to the analysis of whatever gedanken experiment that lead Einstein to special relativity? Does it further enlighten whatever paradox existed that required a resolution via special relativity?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was lucky enough of having a good math teacher that understood and taught Lorentz and Einstein equations, he used to say "Once that you get it, you will laugh at them", here I am several years later still waiting for some of those laughs.

<comment><USER9> I think that was the joke.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here is the pdf (downloadable form) of this fascinating paper: [http://signallake.com/innovation/DysonMaxwell041989.pdf](http://signallake.com/innovation/DysonMaxwell041989.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER11> Aside: I'm not signed up for the site (not interested in tying that login to other accounts), but I wanted to comment that luisb's explanation of Eq. (13) seems to miss the point a little. That equation doesn't need to be _derived_ from Eq. (4). Instead, Eq. (13) is just a statement that any antisymmetric 3x3 matrix can always be recharacterized as a (pseudo)vector "times" the totally antisymmetric Levi-Civita symbol epsilon_{ijk}. As the text says, Eq. (13) is the _definition_ of H. Only after we've defined what H is can we then use Eq. (4) to provide a definition of E.

</comment><comment><USER12> It would be nice if somebody could post a recommended bibliography required to understand this proof, assuming graduate level physics background.

Edit: Sorry I meant undergraduate.

<comment><USER13> The proof starts from two sets of equations:

1\. Newton's second law (first year undergraduate)

2\. Commutation relations in QM (2nd or 3rd year undergraduate)

To make the desired connection, one must have seen Maxwell's Equations (which some first year undergraduate physics textbooks include).

There is no need to assume graduate level physics; someone having done a B.Sc. in Physics should know more than enough to follow this derivation.

<comment><USER14> Yeah my Political Science degree is not much help at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There are some interesting comments below the article. The article claims to derive Maxwell equations based on Newtonian mechanics (Galilean transformations), which sounded a little strange. I remember pretty well that one had to consider Lorentz transformations to obtain Maxwell equations. Sure enough, the comments indicate that this is required and the proof does not quite succeed.

</comment><comment><USER2> OK I have a problem with this step: _[x '_1,H_1]+[x'_2,H_2]+[x'_3,H_3] is equivalent to ∂_1H_1 + ∂_2H_2 + ∂_3H_3 = 0._ In the whole paper until the eq. 18 Dyson talks about operators being functions of particle coordinate operators x_k and velocities x'_k. There is no mention of space coordinates. Suddenly he claims that some operator is equivalent to divergence of a field H that was never mentioned before. It is not clear how does he calculate what ∂_1H_1 is. I do not see how this makes any sense.

<comment><USER16> He is not claiming that the commutator is equivalent to the divergence, what he is saying is that [xl',Hl] = 0 is equivalent to div H = 0, which is different. If you click on the annotation on the left you will see that [xl',Hl] = 0 means that Hl is not a function of xl and so ∂_lH_l will be zero and consequently div H = Sum ∂_lH_l is also zero.

<comment><USER2> I know, I forgot to check the formula before clicking the submit button. I meant it as you explain. The problem is that this commutator equation implies nothing about partial derivatives of H with respect to spatial coordinates that EM fields are function of, because Dyson's x_l are not spatial coordinates (which are always real numbers), but they are non-relativistic Heisenberg operators of coordinates of considered particle (infinite matrices).

The difference is as important as the difference between coordinate of a space point and coordinate of a particle at some definite time. This confusion was probably caused by the unfortunate choice of notation, where particle coordinates were denoted as x_l, notation better spent on the general spatial coordinates. If we use, say, r_l to denote Heisenberg operators for the particle coordinates, it is clear that (not being a function of operators r_l) implies nothing about (not being a function of position x_l).

Let me simplify this argument. What Dyson is saying seems no different from saying that if you have a field v_l(x) giving velocity of water at general point x, this field is obviously not a function of coordinates r_l of a test particle and it follows that sum of derivatives ∂_lv_l is zero. Behold, we arrive at the conclusion that the flow must be incompressible, no need to assume anything from experience. All water must be incompressible! The absurdity of this conclusion is pretty obvious, and the reason it was obtained is clear: v_l is independent of r_l, but it depends on x_l, so nothing about partial derivatives ∂/∂x_l can be easily inferred.</comment></comment></comment>


Cleaning algorithm finds 20% of errors in major image recognition datasets - <AUTHOR> https://deepomatic.com/en/how-we-improved-computer-vision-metrics-by-more-than-5-percent-only-by-cleaning-labelling-errors/ <comment><USER2> Why aren't these data sets editable instead of static? Treat them like a collaborative wiki or something (OpenStreetMap being the closest fit) and allow everyone to submit improvements so that all may benefit.

I hope the people in this article had a way to contribute back their improvements, and did so.

<comment><USER3> The datasets serve as benchmarks. You get an idea for a new model that solves a problem current models have. These ideas don't pan out, so you need empirical evidence that it works. To show that your model does better than previous models, you need some task that your model and previous models can share for both training and evaluation. It's more complicated than that, but that's the gist.

It would be so wasteful to have to retrain a dozen models that require a month of GPU time each on to serve as baselines for your new model...

<comment><USER4> That's not wasteful. That's correction.

Is it wasteful to throw away a batch of food when 20% of it has been studied to contain the wrong substance, which ends up causing disease?

Isn't it even more wasteful to continue using unedited and unverified data sets just because all the previous models were trained on it, and thus we can no longer advance the state of the research? It's a case of garbage in garbage out.

<comment><USER3> >By one estimate, the training time for AlphaGo cost $35 million [0]

How about XLNet which cost something like $30k-60k to train [1]? GPT-2 may have been around the same [2] is estimated around the same, while thankfully BERT only costs about $7k[3], unless of course you're going to do any new hyperparameter tuning on their models which you of course will do on your own model. Who cares about apples-to-apples comparisons?

We're not talking about spending an extra couple hours and a little money on updated replication. We're talking about an immediate overhead of tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per new paper.

Tasks are updated over time already to take issues into account, but not continuously as far as I know.

[0] [https://www.wired.com/story/deepminds-losses-future- artifici...](https://www.wired.com/story/deepminds-losses-future-artificial- intelligence/)

[1] [https://twitter.com/jekbradbury/status/1143397614093651969](https://twitter.com/jekbradbury/status/1143397614093651969)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19402666](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19402666)

[3] [https://syncedreview.com/2019/06/27/the-staggering-cost- of-t...](https://syncedreview.com/2019/06/27/the-staggering-cost-of-training- sota-ai-models/)

<comment><USER5> BERT is trained on unsupervised data. It's not the same kind of model the article talks about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nothing is however said about _how_ the errors are detected. Can an ML expert chime in?

<comment> thibaut-duguet I'm a Product Manager at Deepomatic and I have been leading the study in question here. To detect the errors, we trained a model (with a different neural network architecture than the 6 listed in the post), and we then have a matching algorithm that highlights all bounding boxes that were either annotated but not predicted (False Negative), or predicted but not annotated (False Positive). Those potential errors are also sorted based on an error score to get first the most obvious errors. Happy to answer any other question you may have!

<comment><USER7> Curious if you could find errors by comparing the results from the different models. Places where models disagree with each other more often would be areas that I would want to target for error checking.

<comment><USER8> > Places where models disagree with each other more often would be areas that > I would want to target for error checking.

This is a great idea if your goal is to maximize the rate at which things you look at turn out to be errors. (On at least one side.)

But it's guaranteed to miss cases where every model makes the same inexplicable-to-the-human-eye mistake, and those cases would appear to be especially interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 20% annotation error is huge, especially since those datasets (COCO, VOC) are used for basically every benchmark and state of the art research.

<comment><USER10> And people wonder why I am still a bit skeptical of self-driving cars....

<comment><USER11> In one of his fastai videos Jeremy Howard makes the point that wrong labels can act as regularization and you shouldn't worry too much about them. I'm a bit skeptical as to how far you can push this but you certainly don't need _perfect_ labelling.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is true up to a certain point (for instance, in my experience, having bounding boxes that are not pixel-perfect acts as a regularizer), but there is also a good chance that you are mislabelling edge cases, situations that happen rarely, and that definitely hurts the performance of the neural network to make a correct prediction on these difficult / uncommon scenarios.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Create an account on the Deepomatic platform with the voucher code "SPOT > ERRORS" to visualize the detected errors.

Nice ad.

<comment> thibaut-duguet Our platform is actually designed for enterprise companies, so we don't provide open access unfortunately.

<comment><USER13> I signed up and still couldn't see the errors.

I just see 3 datasets with generic annotations.

<comment> thibaut-duguet The process is actually a bit complicated but let me explain it to you. Once you are on a dataset, click on the label that you want and use the slider at the top right corner of the page to switch modes (we call it smart detection). You should then be able to access three tabs and the errors are listed in the False Positive and False Negative tabs (I've added a screenshot in the blogpost so that you can make sure to be at the right place). Let me know if you have any problem, thanks!

<comment><USER13> Thanks, I can see them now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The title here seems wrong. Suggested change:

"Cleaning algorithm finds 20% of errors in major image recognition datasets" -> "Cleaning algorithm finds errors in 20% of annotations in major image recognitions."

We don't know if the found errors represent 20%, 90% or 2% of the total errors in the dataset.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes agreed with that ! I can't change the title unfortunately

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > We then used the error spotting tool on the Deepomatic platform to detect > errors and to correct them.

I'm wondering if those errors are selected on how much they impact the performance?

Anyway, this is probably a much better way of gaining accuracy on the cheap than launching 100+ models for hyperparameter tuning.

</comment><comment><USER15> Best I can tell, they are using the ML model to detect the errors. Isn't this a bit of an ouroboros? The model will naturally get better, because you are only correcting problems where it was right but the label was wrong.

It's not necessarily a representation of a better model, but just of a better testing set.

<comment><AUTHOR> If I understand correctly they actually did not change the test set.

<comment><USER15> Ah, I guess I missed that

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> These things are why I stopped doing computer vision after my master thesis

</comment><comment><USER17> Weird behaviour on pinch to zoom (macbook). It scrolls instead of zooming and when swiping back nothing happens.

Another example of why you should never mess with the defaults unless strictly necessary.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Using simple techniques, they found out that popular open source datasets like VOC or COCO contain up to 20% annotation errors in. By manually correcting those errors, they got an average error reduction of 5% for state-of-the-art computer vision models.

<comment><USER18> Garbage in garbage out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> An idea on how this could work: repeatedly re-split the dataset (to cover all of it), and re-train a detector on the splits, then at the end of each training cycle surface validation frames with the highest computed loss (or some other metric more directly derived from bounding boxes, such as the number of high confidence "false" positives which could be instances of under- labeling) at the end of training. That's what I do on noisy, non-academic datasets, anyway.</comment>


Marc Andreessen: We'll Invest Up to $100M in One Deal - <AUTHOR> http://www.pehub.com/90246/marc-andreessen-well-invest-up-to-100m-in-one-deal/

<comment><USER2> Woohoo!</comment>


Charging Bull sculptor says New York's Fearless Girl statue violates his rights - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/12/charging-bull-new-york-fearless-girl-statue-copyright-claim <comment><USER2> > accusing New York City of violating his legal rights by allowing the > "Fearless Girl" statue to be installed facing the bronze beast, without his > permission.

> Di Modica called the statue an "advertising trick"

A mite ironic, seeing as "Charging Bull" was initially an advertising trick installed without the city's permission...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charging_Bull#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charging_Bull#History)

That said, I am a tiny bit sympathetic to the Charging Bull artist who had the stated meaning of his art subverted a bit - I get it, you didn't mean it as a "male power!" thing and it sucks to have your work treated that way.

At the same time though, I do feel that this sort of subversion is important artistically, and allowing copyright to stifle it would be unfortunate. Furthermore, I can't help but feel that the idea that you could be able to control the context of an artistic work (not the art itself, but the environment around it) with copyright a little silly, especially for art as public and symbolic as "Charging Bull". All-in-all, an interesting case.

<comment><USER3> I'm not normally one for Schadenfreude, but I sincerely hope he loses this case. It's okay for him to stick his sculpture in the square without a permit, but no one else can, even with a permit? He doesn't own the street, and he needs to learn that firmly and promptly.

<comment><USER4> "firmly and promptly"??

However it goes, I hope it doesn't involve one side or the other saying the other had no business even having their opinion on the matter.

Both artists seem to have had positive intents, yet the two together are incompatible with the first artist's intent. While satire typically allows both works to exist in their original contexts, the Charging Bull becomes a menace here, no longer able to be interpreted as a symbol of economic optimism.

The Fearless Girl has value, too, but it is not without critics either, so there is at least a valid discussion to be had.

<comment><USER3> > _" The Fearless Girl has value, too, but it is not without critics either, > so there is at least a valid discussion to be had."_

I'm all for discussion, but from what little information we have to go on, it appears the bull's sculptor is seeking to stifle discussion and simply have the girl removed despite a valid permit and public interest.

That's what I take issue with; he doesn't get to dictate what is placed on a public street any more than the girl's sculptor does (which she isn't).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a really interesting case, since it seems like it really goes down to artistic integrity. The 'Charging Bull' statue seems to be pro-capitalism - which might not be a popular statement, but seems like a reasonable one to want to make. By adding the 'Fearless Girl' to the mix, it changes the meaning of 'Charging Bull'.

I mean, if someone added a 'Camera' statue to the mix that looked up the girl's skirt, that could be a valid statement about something (objectification of women, for example). But we'd be outraged about the change of the meaning to 'Fearless Girl' \- and so I think it's at least interesting to talk about the change in the meaning of 'Charging Bull'.

<comment><USER6> Yes it does change the meaning of the work. (There's a fine tradition of this in the arts, most famously around the work of Duchamp but less obviously with many others through history.)

Personally I've never liked Charging Bull as an artwork - tis' too propagandistic for my taste, and I think the creator half-assed it by not exploring the equally powerful concept of an angry bear - and then we wonder why people on Wall Street profess surprise and helplessness in times of recession.

I think it's an interesting modification to the work to confront the bull with a human female; not only does it finally balance the work, but by choosing an oppositional figure whose identity is rooted in self-awareness rather than atavistic force, it refutes the abdication of moral agency that underpins the business culture of Wall Street. Assuming it's not destroyed by vandals, the new work has the potential for historical significance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The addition of the girl makes it look like the bull intends to go after her, that's kind of a troubling thought and it does not respect the initial artistic intent of the bull statue.

"financial resilience" becomes "confronting women"? wow.

<comment><USER6> Good. That's what makes Fearless Girl a successful piece of art. You are now thinking about the world slightly differently than you were before you saw it, albeit unwillingly. Whether you like or agree with this novel thesis is beside the point of whether it has caused a shift in your consciousness, which is the aim of art.

<comment><USER7> Sorry for the late reply, the act of living itself makes me see the world slightly differently every day as new events unfurl.

I prefer learning from observations rather than being subjected to ideological propaganda. One respects the sovereignty of my conscience, the other does not.

Art does have a great impact on everyone's conscience, this is what makes it poignant. But there is good art and bad art, and in my book, ideological art is always bad since it veers your mind towards ideologies, towards a self- imprisonment of the mind, towards a false sense of consciousness, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Fearless Girl_ absolutely changes the original intent and meaning of _Charging Bull_. ('A symbol of the "strength and power of the American people".') In a sense, _Fearless Girl_ is a derivative work—using the original art, no less—created without permission of the artist.

It's less about environment and more about the fact that _Fearless Girl_ would not make any sense without _Charging Bull_.

Whether the artist has a right to prevent derivative works, whether this counts, and whether the city was within its rights is what's up for dispute.

</comment><comment><USER9> [http://variety.com/1998/film/news/settlement-reached-in- devi...](http://variety.com/1998/film/news/settlement-reached-in-devil-s- advocate-case-1117467814/)

Reminds me of this case. The movie made a reference to a sculpture, but made it appear demonic instead of the intended angelic effect.

The author of the work sued and won a settlement, having the scene be cut for video sales.

</comment><comment><USER10> The 'little girl statue' is the artistic equivalent of painting a black mustache on the Mona Lisa with a marker. Pure artistic vandalism.

<comment><USER11> I have no idea how you could make that comparison. The original artwork was neither destroyed, changed, or touched in any way. It's not in any way like "painting a black mustache on the Mona Lisa with a marker".

<comment><USER10> Mashups are fine and I support them, fwiw. But putting 'her' in front of the charging bull is a deliberate attempt to change the meaning of his art. It is the attempt of a second rate artist to ride the coat tails of a superior artist. She gets instant notoriety for her work by, not so coincidentally, trashing somebody elses.

<comment><USER6> Changing the meaning of an existing piece of art isn't vandalism, it is pure art. As an artist myself I reject your claim that Di Modica is somehow a 'superior artist' just because he happened to have his work there first. Kristen Visbal came up with something everyone who sees it reacts to without needing an intermediaries to draw attention to or explain the semantics of her artistic statement, which is precisely the goal of art.

<comment><USER12> > Kristen Visbal came up with something everyone who sees it reacts to without > needing an intermediaries to draw attention to or explain the semantics of > her artistic statement, which is precisely the goal of art.

So a swastika on a war memorial is also "art"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Worst case, he can just have his art moved. The other statue is meaningless without his.

I think having the Bull turned 90 or 180 degrees would be hilarious.

<comment><USER14> That would be great. The fearless girl stared down the bull, and the bull flinched.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Al Jazeera's article is a good second source:

[http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/04/bull-sculptor- fearless...](http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/04/bull-sculptor-fearless- girl-removed-170413044032365.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> Consider it as an internet meme

Copied, modified and spread, until it supercedes the original meme

And then you have the original meme's creator complaining about his meme was stolen

You'd tell him to shut up, its the natural existence of a meme, to be subsumed and regurgitated in new fashion

That's how I see this, anyways. Art should be modifiable in this way; though I don't have an opinion on the ownership of the case, but it seems to me (based on charging bull's wiki) that Modica is overly defensive about his meme in any context (possibly purely for licensing's sake), and fearless girl clearly kills any value Modica has in charging bull

In spirit I think fearless girl is fine; in practice, its pretty messy.

</comment><comment><USER17> I understand why he feels the way he does.

That said, once an artist lets their work go into the public, how that piece is displayed, reflected, or even understood is no longer under their control.

How many authors find their books published, only for the reading public to find an interpretation of their written word different than intended?

When an artist's painting is hung or displayed in a museum, does the artist control the how's and why's of their piece's display? No...

</comment><comment><USER18> Copyright is "the right to copy your work."

Unless I'm missing something here, and the artist can claim copyright to the sidewalk, this is some next level bullshit.

<comment><USER19> Creating a derivative work is a form of copying.

<comment><USER6> This is a transformative work, not a derivative one. Amusingly, the people who most dislike it are bolstering its legal future with their complaints, the most strident of which I anticipate will be cited in legal briefs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Either I'm misunderstanding copyright or he is... what "artistic copyright" applies here?

<comment><USER21> There is a body of quasi-copyright principles that apply to artistic works called 'moral rights.' This framework recognizes a "right of integrity" which prevents unauthorized modifications of the work.

This approach seem pretty strange to those used to the American system of copyright law and U.S. law does not fully recognize them. But, being Italian, this framework is probably informing the artist's views here.

Here is a brief write-up: [https://cyber.harvard.edu/property/library/moralprimer.html](https://cyber.harvard.edu/property/library/moralprimer.html)

<comment><USER22> so basically, he doesn't have a case, thanks for reaffirming my world view.

<comment><USER23> Maybe I'm just really tired, but that article made it seem like he does have a case...

> Authors may seek moral rights protection from state moral rights laws and > art preservation statutes in California and New York, whose provisions > resemble those of VARA.

> VARA grants two rights to authors of visual works: the right of attribution, > and the right of integrity.

<comment><USER22> ah, hm, I was not familiar with that. I skimmed the article but missed that part

I'll keep VARA in mind, looks like he could use both the federal VARA law and the state's

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Good artists copy, great artists steal..

Maybe Di Modica should be more sour that the fallibility of the market, and the cultural realisation of gender bias, has changed the meaning of his work. Or Instagram and the many people polishing it's balls.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm torn, because I absolutely hate the Fearless Girl statue, but at the same time the artist might not have the most right to complain.

A better solution might be to add a third statue changing the meaning of the girl to be negative.

</comment><comment><USER26> The bull artist does seem to be quite immature.

<comment><USER27> "Bull artist" indeed.</comment></comment>


The Emacs Problem  - <AUTHOR> http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/the-emacs-problem <<What would you rather do? Learn 16 different languages and frameworks in order to do "simple" log-file and configuration-file processing? Or just buckle down, learn Lisp, and have all of these problems go away forever?<p>It's a rhetorical question. The answer is patently obvious at this point:   Lisp is evil, and you'd damned well better write all your code in C++ and XML and JavaScript and PL*SQL and CSS and XSLT and regular expressions and all those other God-fearing red-blooded manly patriotic all-American languages from now on. No more of this crazy Lisp talk, ya hear?>> <comment><USER2> Uuugh... XML... how I hate you. Everyone should need to learn Lisp, even if you never ever program it, simply to avoid developing some of these poisonous XML-flavored tools. He mentions Ant specifically. Let me tell you, as an unwilling Microsoft Build expert, XML should be NOWHERE NEAR your build system. He puts down Makefiles, but as someone who wrote a Makefile for the first time after years of Ant and MSBuild, it was like a breath of fresh air. The intentional lack of power is what makes it so great. If anything, Makefiles are too powerful and too close to turing complete.

Here is what a make file should look like:

1) vpath statements for various file extensions

2) Phony targets for logical build units, including "all"

3) Generic rules for mapping _.abc to_.xyz; these rules should have _exactly_ one line of code which executes an external script/tool

4) A list of edges in the dependency graph

5) A few variables as necessary to eliminate redundant edges

If you put any logic in your Makefiles, you are doing it wrong.

If your builds are slow, add empty dummy files for larger culling by timestamps. If timestamps are insufficient, codify early out logic into tools.

Not having logic in my Makefiles enables parallel execution and strong support for incremental builds. If I were to use Lisp as a build system, I'd create a DSL that had these same properties; forbidding arbitrary logic in my dependency graph. It's about finding the right balance to inject expressiveness without losing desirable properties of the DSL. This is why every developer needs to understand more about programming language design. Anytime you create any type of file format, you are doing it. And anytime you are writing any type of file format, you are reverse engineering it. Understanding the intended separation of logic for Makefiles helps me write better Makefiles.

<comment><USER3> > _If anything, Makefiles are too powerful and too close to turing complete._

"Close to"? Not a formal proof of Turing-completeness (and may only work with GNU make, not sure), but...

      [me@host: ~]% cat fibo.mk
      dec = $(patsubst .%,%,$1)

      not = $(if $1,,.)

      lteq = $(if $1,$(if $(findstring $1,$2),.,),.)
      gteq = $(if $2,$(if $(findstring $2,$1),.,),.)
      eq = $(and $(call lteq,$1,$2),$(call gteq,$1,$2))
      lt = $(and $(call lteq,$1,$2),$(call not,$(call gteq,$1,$2)))

      add = $1$2
      sub = $(if $(call not,$2),$1,$(call sub,$(call dec,$1),$(call dec,$2)))

      fibo = $(if $(call lt,$1,..),$1,$(call add,$(call fibo,$(call dec,$1)),$(call fibo,$(call sub,$1,..))))

      numeral = $(words $(subst .,. ,$1))

      go = $(or $(info $(call numeral,$(call fibo,$1))),$(call go,.$1))

      _ := $(call go,)
      [me@host: ~]% make -f fibo.mk
      0
      1
      1
      2
      3
      5
      8
      13
      21
      34
      55
      89
      144
      233
      377
      610
      987
      1597
      ^C

<comment><USER4> "The language of GNU make is indeed functional, complete with combinators (map and filter), applications and anonymous abstractions. GNU make does support lambda-abstractions."

<http://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/#Makefile-functional>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One solution that Steve didn't discuss is JSON. To be fair, JSON wasn't that popular in 2005, but it's still a great solution.

The way it works is that their are no mandatory newline characters in JSON. Whitespace between lexical elements is ignored, and any embedded newlines in strings can be escaped (i.e. as \n). So a log format that a few people are using today is like this:

{'kind': 'foo', 'id': 1, 'msg': 'hi'} {'kind': 'bar', 'id': 2, 'msg': 'there'}

Each log message takes up a single line in the file. You can trivially deserialize any line to a real data structure in your language of choice. You can (mostly) grep the lines, and they're human readable. I do this at work, and frequently have scripts like this:

scribereader foo | grep 'some expression' | python -c 'code here'

In this case we're storing logs in the format described above (a single JSON message per line), and scribereader is something that groks how scribe stores log files and outputs to stdout. The grep expression doesn't _really_ understand JSON, but it catches all of the lines that I actually want to examine, and the false positive rate is very low (<0.1% typically). The final part of the pipe is some more complex python expression that actually introspects the data it's getting to do more filtering. You can of course substitute ruby, perl, etc. in place of the python expression.

I feel like this is a pretty good compromise between greppability, human readability, and the ability to programatically manipulate log data.

<comment><USER6> "XML is better if you have more text and fewer tags. And JSON is better if you have more tags and less text. Argh! I mean, come on, it's that easy. But you know, there's a big debate about it." — Steve Yegge

<http://simonwillison.net/2008/Jun/15/steveys/>

That's the problem with discussing old articles. Information gets updated

<comment><AUTHOR> Not really. The arguments still hold.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _You could even trivially convert it to XML and use XSLT, if you were silly enough. But Lisp is directly executable, so you could simply make the tag names functions that automatically transform themselves. It'd be a lot easier than using XSLT, and less than a tenth the size._

And now anyone who can modify your log can execute arbitrary code in the reader process…

<comment><USER8> People always say that. Fortunately someone figured that out on the order of 34 years ago

[ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security> ]

(for a more recently active discussion, try <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Specific_Language>)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Did anyone else think of CL-PPCRE as they read through the "lisp does not have regular expression support" implications? That was answered by the comparison of elisp to modern Common Lisp, and I wonder if anyone has done any work to make CL-PPCRE work for elisp. In spite of being someone's library, it is much faster than perl's built-in regex support.

There is a point to be made for the idea that you are solving the wrong problem with the log parsing. On the other hand, if you are trying to interface with other developers' popular engines, you may not have a choice.

<comment><USER10> Most of those benchmarks are against Perl 5.8, the version of Perl released in 2002. 5.10 had major regexp engine improvements, and 5.12 had minor improvements. Anything is fast when you compare it to 10 years ago.

<comment><USER11> Furthermore the 5.8 engine is pretty much the 5.6 engine, which was significantly slower than the 5.005 engine. Why the slow-down? Because 5.6 has logic to check when regular expressions are matching slowly, and then to add tracing when it is. This makes many of the exponential slowdowns that _Mastering Regular Expressions_ describes be automatically caught and handled fairly quickly.

The CL-PCRE and Java regular expression engines don't have those somewhat expensive checks, and so are much more likely to encounter catastrophic behavior.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, but who cares about real-world code if you have a neat benchmark page? Most of your "users" will never even get to the point of using your package -- after saying how great it is on Reddit, they'll turn on their porn and forget all about it.

OK, maybe I'm too cynical...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Just to point out LINQ to XML <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/bb387098.aspx>.

It takes a lot of pain out of XML processing. Don't have to remember the specifics of XPath/XQuery but you still have to deal with the pain of multiple namespace resolution inherit in XML.

</comment><comment><USER13> It would be interesting to see an emacs implementation in language better suited for text manipulation like Ruby or Perl.

<comment><USER14> As an emacs newbie with a nagging desire to learn Perl, I would gladly commit to switching to an emacs implementation in Perl.

<comment><USER10> Not that I would use it, but there is Padre:

<http://padre.perlide.org/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> TextMate/Ruby = Emacs/Elisp

<comment><USER8> But Emacs is capable of _intelligently editing_ source code which is not Elisp. As much as I have tried, I cannot say the same of TextMate.

(How hard can it be to select blocks on double-click? Even Terminal.app does it!)</comment></comment>


Android Launcher for geeks - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/shinado/piping <comment><USER2> Nice one, although KISS Launcher is still more usable for me.</comment>


Award winning kids evolution book cannot find an American publisher - <AUTHOR> http://news.discovery.com/human/evolution-book-110916.html#mkcpgn=rssnws1

<comment><USER2> I'm pretty sure you botched the title of your submission. The book failed to find an American publisher and _later_ went on to win the award.</comment>


Ask HN: Google locked me out of my primary gmail account - <AUTHOR> When trying to access gmail form my pc, I got served a brand new product page with a button to sign in, rather than going straight through to inbox.
I hit the button, provided my password. 2fa shows up. It says it sent a code to my mobile phone, but I'm not getting one.
Opted to have a text message sent to my phone number with an auth code. Punch in the auth code. Page shows up 'sorry, something went wrong, please try again'. Tried again, same thing. Tried an alternative recovery method, same thing.
I can still access the account from my phone but the pc seems locked out of it no matter what recovery/access option I choose because they all go to 'sorry, something went wrong'.
Any suggestions how to get a human to help me or figure out what's going wrong with their backend that's causing it to spam 'something went wrong'? This is insane. I'll be migrating everything off gmail after regaining access to the account. <comment><USER2> I'm glad you got this fixed up. It can easily go south from there if you hadn't succeeded early on.

Many years ago an old gmail email address of mine was used in spam messages. Instead of looking and seeing that those emails didn't even originate from my account, my account was locked.

Side effects? My iPad became an expensive bookend because Apple stopped allowing me to update my software as soon as I no longer could authenticate with the registered account. I couldn't even reset it, since that requires said authentication. More than a decade later, and that account remains just as locked as the iPad...

Both companies, imho, handled this in the worst way possible.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Update: 15 minutes later, trying to log in again worked via the default device notification method.

A scary reminder that Google is one backend screwup away form locking you out of your digital life.</comment>


Barcamper exchange program - <AUTHOR> http://www.prateekdayal.net/2009/05/15/barcamper-exchange-program/

<comment><USER2> Perhaps the barcamp ethos is different where you are, but at all the UK ones I've attended, marketing pitches are heavily frowned upon. BarCamp is about sharing knowledge, not pitching to people.

<comment><USER3> The BarCamp Los Angeles mailing list just had a long post-event conversation about talks and scheduling. I believe the consensus was that if disclosed and something that people are truly interested in discussing and listening to, that marketing your own product is not taboo. And that we should feel free to walk out and/or publicly let the presenter know that you believe s/he just crossed the line into too much marketing territory.

Although I really hate product pitches, the last BarCampLA I attended had a pitch/presentation that I thought did a good job keeping it appropriate to BarCamp: one of the awe.sm founders was presenting his service and the audience-driven conversation was a lot more about analytics for short urls and how to deal with issues that may arise from the general idea, rather than about awe.sm itself.

Anyway, back on the actual topic of the link: I hate the idea. Mostly because all the fun in presentations about startups (in my opinion) is about being able to chat with the founder(s) about growing pains and experiences and more that other people merely demoing your product wouldn't be able to discuss. And also in my opinion, it's that extra bit that's way more appropriate to a BarCamp than a demo.

If this person is so interested in doing demos in such a manner, he should just go create DemoCamp Bangalore. Or maybe sponsor the next BarCamp in his area and similar events.

<comment><USER4> > If this person is so interested in doing demos in such a manner, he should > just go create DemoCamp Bangalore. Or maybe sponsor the next BarCamp in his > area and similar events.

As the original blog post says I am a bootstrapper and I think its really hard for bootstrappers to sponsor event.

That said, I do understand/appreciate the other points you mentioned.

<comment><USER2> Putting on a barcamp/democamp is very easy. I put together MobileCampBrighton in a few spare hours and it only cost about £50 of my own money. There's usually some company/coworking space/pub you can use for free.

<comment><USER4> But it still does not solve the problem of not being able to demo in a different city/country.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show/ What do you think of this prototype? (Online Window Shopping) - <AUTHOR> http://www.patriciotarantino.com.ar/ws/

<comment><USER2> Oh wow that is a really cool concept.

My only little concern is that it would work better as an ad network - I think people would rather just look at companies' websites to find the information, than going to your website. That would mean exploring adding this to monetize other peoples' maps.</comment>


Why Mastodon and the fediverse are "doomed to fail" - <AUTHOR> https://write.as/eloquence/why-mastodon-and-the-fediverse-are-doomed-to-fail <comment><USER2> I'm not sure the author of this article lives in the same universe as me:

 _"...A vast number of people find Mastodon, Pleroma, WriteFreely, Pixelfed, and the many other wonderful fediverse tools useful, yet we hear about these platforms almost entirely by word-of-mouth, not from the technology sections of major news sites, or even dedicated tech blogs..."_

Perhaps partially true about the others mentioned but Mastodon and PixelFed in particular seem to have been rarely out of the tech press, for the past year or so. So much so that I have, in the past, asked how come they get so much uncritical press coverage and concluded that they each have very active PR departments.

Funnily enough, I've had a similarly titled draft of an article sitting on my hard drive for months now, but never got around to knocking it into shape. My TLDR; conclusion is that the Fediverse is 'doomed to fail' because it's based on a fallacy of un-censorability and freedom from control by faceless corporations; _" If you don't like the way it's [a fediverse server] run, you can take your data elsewhere"_ being the oft-quoted mantra.

It's a fallacy because you simply can't 'take your data elsewhere'. Exporting your data from Mastodon will export your settings and followers list --the two easiest things to replicate elsewhere. Your actual posts are not able to be exported. So, if you move servers, you essentially lose everything you've invested in Mastodon, just like you would if you moved from Twitter to Mastodon or A.N.Other social network, in the first place.

I'm not sure if a similar situation exists with PixelFed. I never even got so far as trying that one, when I signed up and then found out there was no way to import my existing photos from Instagram. Which raises the other reason why these new kids on the block are doomed to fail: None of them provide a way for you to import your existing data from the 'big boy' social networks they're seeking to replace and hoping people you will switch from.

Here's an issue about this on PixelFed's Github from Jan 2019, which makes this particular point in more detail [0]. as you can see, Pixelfed's response was a vague _" It's on the roadmap"_ and, a year later, to close the issue. As far as I'm aware, there is still no way to import your existing Instagram photos to PixelFed.

The above is also true of Mastodon; no Twitter import there.

In addition to those two glaring problems, the Fediverse is also touted as the answer to corporate censorship and hailed as a defender of free speech. Yet the same freedom loving Fediverse quickly closed ranks in attempt to freeze out Gab.com, when Gab adopted Mastodon; firstly by refusing to list Gab's servers in their Mastodon instance directories --in spite of Gab.com having the largest number of users-- and, secondly, by releasing updates to several Android and iOS Mastodon client apps, so that they would no longer connect to Gab's servers, even if the app user manually entered the server info. So much for 'individual freedom of choice, not dictated by corporations'!

That spat caused Gab to fork Mastodon and create their own version, Gab-Social which, actually seems now to be more advanced and feature rich than the official Mastodon software it split off from. So because of "politics", regular Mastodon users lose out on advances made by Gab's coders and the Fediverse is further diluted by having two different and incompatible versions of their 'Twitter-Killer'. Yay! As if there weren't enough obstacles to mass adoption already, let's add 'fragmentation' into the mix!

'Fediverse Doomed to Failure' is spot on!

[0][https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/issues/765](https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/issues/765)

[1][https://code.gab.com/gab/social/gab- social/](https://code.gab.com/gab/social/gab-social/)</comment>


Gittip: New, Interesting, Important - <AUTHOR> http://justinlilly.com/misc/gittip.html

<comment><USER5> I noticed this a few weeks ago and like the idea. I hope it catches on. I think Gittip could really benefit from Bitcoin integration, since it would lower the cost of micropayments to almost nothing.

EDIT: ANd yes, to be clear, Gittip is not down -- it's hosted by github if I'm not mistaken. The actual address is: <http://www.gittip.com>

<comment><USER6> Bitcoin would also make gittip international. Currently payouts work only in US. This severely limits the possibilities.

<comment><USER7> For reference, here's the Bitcoin ticket:

<https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/14>

And here's the non-US payouts ticket:

<https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/126>

<comment><USER7> (P.S. It's hosted on Heroku.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The problem with gittip is the size of tips developers are collecting. Most developers have high-end salaries, IMO. The top people on gittip are collecting around $150/week. For these people that's probably converts to an hour or two a week of paid equivalent work. Great, so these developers can handle a couple of merge requests a week, but it doesn't actually enable them to work on something. Gittip also lacks focus, it doesn't commit a developer to work on something, it's merely a thank you, a donation. Donation-ware conversions are super low, you can't expect it to supplement anything.

I think gittip is a neat idea, but I strongly feel that it is a doomed project unless something changes radically.

<comment><USER9> The article talks about the focus issue as well, with the "What do they want from me?" question. I think that's partly missing the point of Gittip, as is your first point. All of these people have been contributing to open source long before Gittip came along, and would continue contributing even without it. Now they potentially get something a little extra for that, no obligations, no nothing. As I perceive it, it's not outright meant to be a platform that makes you quit your job and go open source full time (though Chad's goal is exactly that). It's just showing open source contributors that their work is noticed and appreciated. Full time salaries might happen for a certain percentage if/when the service grows, but I don't see that being a necessary element of the service.

I see other issues with it, but they're all part of a new developing platform. Biggest one is the payments/receiving payments issue for anyone outside of the US, but I think Chad is aware of this as much as anyone.

Another one is psychology of the thing. Seems like a lot of people receiving money from it experience this awkward response, as if it's somehow wrong to get money for their open source contributions. I don't know if they undervalue their work so much, but I hope they realise these rewards are to be proud of, and that they in no way signify any obligations, but just appreciation of their work.

Last, an issue that's becoming more evident as the service grows, is a need for a more structured list of people on the platform and their received donations. I'd love if there was a possibility of browsing through a subset of developers, for example Ruby or Android developers, maybe by letting users fill out an additional field in the sign-up process. The effect of this could be positive from multiple perspectives. The person donating can focus on donating in the field they're interested in, and as a bonus, it would be a great discovery platform for open source projects inside that specific field. As far as people have commented, it's mostly the Python community now, but maybe grouping specific communities would also have the effect of it being more interesting to other communities aside from Python (edited from Django), and some people would just visit gittip.com/Ruby every day.

In general, I love the idea and I hope it continues to grow. Good luck Chad!

<comment><USER7> Okay, your second-to-last paragraph sent me down a rabbit hole, from which I've emerged with this:

[https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/27#issuecom...](https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/27#issuecomment-8792611)

The idea of associating individuals with groups (aka communities, projects, etc.) is one of the trickiest aspects of Gittip. I feel one step closer to finding a solution that handles the complexity appropriately. Thank you! :^)

(A side note: the givers leaderboard is basically ad real estate available to companies. We've already got one company, workforpie, using the global givers leaderboard as such. IMO this is totally within the spirit of Gittip because their gifts still have no strings attached and are anonymous to the individuals receiving them. Having different giving leaderboards for separate communities would create more and better-targeted ad space for companies, increasing cash into the system.)

<comment><USER9> Just my two cents here, maybe it's worth thinking of offering a more loose relation to specific fields for gittip users instead of projects/corporations, which isn't related to being compensated for being in that field. Something like the tag system on Stack Overflow, for example. Considering the broad scope you mention the platform could have in the future, it could look like this: upon sign-up, a musician adds tags to his profile, #music and #acoustic, a programmer adds #programming, #python and #opensource. That way you let your users build your categories, and your users get a nice filter for their interests, and as you mention in the side note, companies can get ad space by donating in the fields they care about.

(I decided to give feedback here, since the issue is more about projects than communities, and I don't want to mess up the issue content.)

Edit: I forgot to address the issue of people tagging themselves with a specific project. Maybe it's me, but gittip seems to be oriented around people, which is why I find the projects aspect confusing. I think a much simpler solution is currently in place (and maybe should be encouraged for this case in the future), where companies/teams/projects can sign up with a single account, and people can decide to donate to that account, and the companies/teams/projects solve the money split internally. I know you've done a lot of thinking on the projects aspect, and there's been a lively debate on the issue, but personally, it seems as it adds a lot of complexity to the system, with relatively little benefit.

<comment><USER7> Great thinking.

Let's use the following ticket for tags / communities:

[https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/94#issuecom...](https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/94#issuecomment-8794419)

I posted your edit to the projects / corporations ticket:

[https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/27#issuecom...](https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/27#issuecomment-8794461)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's a pretty safe bet that the money is related to django as the last time i looked nearly all of the activity on gittip was django related.

And if you're going to define "open company" I think I'd shoot a little higher than open source project + authorized_keys

<comment><USER7> > [T]he last time i looked nearly all of the activity on gittip was django > related.

Quick rundown of the top ten, username - known for:

whit537 - <USER2>

davisagli - plone (python)

readthedocs - readthedocs (python-centric)

jnoller - psf (python)

alex - pypy (python)

mitsuhiko - flask, etc. (python)

zzzeek - sqlalchemy (python)

steveklabnik - <USER3>

kennethreitz - requests, etc. (python)

antirez - <USER4>

You could argue it's python-heavy, but not django-heavy. And besides, who cares? You gotta start somewhere. If you're plugged into different communities, then go spread the word.

> And if you're going to define "open company" I think I'd shoot a little > higher than open source project + authorized_keys

Please do. :^)

<comment><USER11> FWIW I also do work on Django :)

<comment><USER7> Oops. Too late to edit. :^)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Gittip is one of the most interesting charity concepts I've seen these past few weeks.

</comment><comment><USER13> LOL... Gittip.org is down, the URL you have in your post should be "gittip.com".

<comment><USER7> I scrambled and wired up DNS for gittip.org, but not soon enough apparently, sorry. :^/

Oh well, ready for next time. :^)</comment></comment>


Share your experience with selling to stock photo sites. - <AUTHOR>

In the spirit of looking for assets I already have to monetize, I have been thinking about iStockPhoto as a possible way to add a few bucks of monthly income.
I have thousands and thousands of hi-res RAW images that just sit on my HD, mostly because I'm unsatisfied with 99% of them (what photographer isn't?).
After reading "Developer income report #6", I was struck by the fact that his non-negligible income from iStockPhoto is over a smallish portfolio of a bunch of cat5 and a decently framed picture of a plane being loaded.
Please tell HN about your experience of selling stock photography to iStockPhoto:
What's the relationship like? Does anyone have problems? How much money do you make (ballpark) on what size portfolio? Are they photos that you are tremendously proud of or just whatever seems like it might sell? Are there certain personal rules or guidelines that you keep to when deciding what to submit? How much post-proc will you do with a photo before submitting it? What else do you have to say about selling stock photography in general and wherever? <comment><AUTHOR> I hope that's not insensitive to kreci!

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2095979></comment>


Stagefright Exploit Is Now Available for Testing Purposes - <AUTHOR> https://blog.zimperium.com/the-latest-on-stagefright-cve-2015-1538-exploit-is-now-available-for-testing-purposes/ <comment><USER2> What python module provides mp4?</comment>


Hard Drive Archaeology - <AUTHOR> https://blog.archive.org/2011/09/03/hard-drive-archaeology-and-hackerspaces/

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought of this because of a post about recovering data from optical media snapped in half:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9317861](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9317861)</comment>


$110,000 USD stolen from Bitcoin web wallet users, TOR exit MiTM suspected - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2njz9j/blockchaininfo_wallet_robbed/cmeakot

<comment><USER2> This contains no definite info. The victim/user doesn't even know if he accessed the SSL version of the Blockchain site.

Blaming it on Tor is presumptuous. It could just as easily have been a local exploit (keylogger/malware), not accessing the SSL site, an exploit of the Blockchain site itself, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> this is why I'm not using tor anymore.</comment>


Only 9.6% of YC News Readers Use IE - <AUTHOR> http://selfdebugging.com/2007/10/01/only-96-of-yc-news-readers-use-ie/

<comment><USER2> I think Windows could be over-represented in that data because people might visit from work, where they're forced to use Windows.

<comment><USER3> agreed

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Accounting for the 9.6%:

1\. 3.0% - IE at day job

2\. 3.0% - Modified User Agent string

3\. 3.0% - IE Tab in FF

4\. 0.6% - Just for the irony of it

<comment><AUTHOR> Or, Microsoft employees hitting "Refresh" all day.

With apologies to my MS friends :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know I accidentally loaded YC News with IETab a couple times (have it installed in Firefox for browser testing). So those stats are definitely inflated... _chuckles_

<comment><USER6> I was about to post the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for the stats! Very interesting indeed. Most people here are technology trend-setters and are influencers. Usually, you can forecast what people will use in the next few years by looking at what "alpha geeks" use today (Tim O'Reilly's term).

<http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail716.html>

<comment><USER8> I am not so sure. I still think in 5 years time Windows will be the dominant desktop/client platform (yet the "alpha geeks" generally avoid it).

I hope that isn't the case, but I know that it is just hope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've got ff 75% vs ie 13% vs safari 7%, my app isn't specifically directed at hackers.

<http://www.marioromero.org/browserstats.png>

site(app) <http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2354684299>

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. Although, I would guess that among Google Reader users, a very high percentage are tech oriented people.

<comment><USER9> indeed, I'm not sure and I don't remember the exact number but I think that in that leaked? google reader video, the browser stats for their users were mentioned and ff was at the top.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd be interested to know what percentage are using IE 7 vs. IE 6.

<comment><AUTHOR> It was 52.8% for IE7 and 46.6% for IE6. And there was one single user still using IE 4.01 !!!

<comment><USER11> That's probably from a cell phone...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Guilty as charged. I was a Vista early adopter (need it for dogfooding at work), and back when Firefox was doggedly slow in Vista, I went with IE and never switched back. IE7 isn't too bad.

I realize making Firefox slow on Vista was probably not a deliberate marketing decision by Microsoft, but it certainly worked on me.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm currently using a laptop with Windows XP, because it isn't mine - if it were, it would have some Linux distro. But I do run a virtual machine with Ubuntu installed. Do I count as Linux or Windows?

</comment><comment><USER14> I use IE... once a week to submit my time to a lame corporate outsourced timesheet.

</comment><comment><USER15> Most of the clients claiming to be IE were probably email address harvesting spiders.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm one of the 9.6%... On the iPhone now though

</comment><comment><USER17> ...at work?

<comment><USER3> that's my deal

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I use IE, not really sure what the 'hateration' is for since firefox is constantly freezing.

<comment><USER13> Maybe you like being spied on, but most people don't.</comment></comment>


The rich are having more children -- an important change in demography - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14164483

<comment><USER2> Rich _countries_ are having more children. The evidence doesn't say whether rich people in rich countries are having more children, or poor people in rich countries, or whether it's all sections of society in rich countries.

(I interpreted the title initially to mean that rich _people_ were having more children.)

</comment><comment><USER3> "No doubt all these social explanations are true as far as they go, but they do not address the deeper question of why people's psychology should have evolved in a way that makes them want fewer children when they can afford more."

I've always explained this as so (I have no evidence for any of this): 1\. People in different social classes have different inherent desires in life. Some people simply want a family and have no other ambitions. 2\. Lower class people (or people that have more children on average) have a harder time delaying gratification on average. Delaying gratification is a skill very beneficial when attempting to be successful and is related to the ability to think ahead and visualize the future. Having this ability instills different desires in a person and may detract a person away from parenthood due to truly understanding how much of a commitment children actually are (20+ years of your life, hours a day). Having this ability also helps one realize the difficulty in caring for many children.

<comment><USER4> My wife works in development. Her theory is insightful and simple: she says mortality from disease (even until age 20) is _VERY_ high for poor people (I know of a poor 10-yr old who died of rabies in India, which is _extremely_ uncommon among the middle-class of India). So they're being rational by having more kids.

Which is why development reduces fertility; people have higher confidence that their brood will survive into adulthood even if it's smaller.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> In Australia you get $4000 for having a child. No questions asked : produce baby, get cash. This has done wonders for the birth rate. It's actually a response to the problem of the baby boomers : they know they need more workers to pay taxes to look after them, and encouraging babies now will pay off in 20 years time when baby boomers are retiring in record numbers.</comment>


The 39th Root of 92 - bit-player http://bit-player.org/2016/the-39th-root-of-92 <comment><AUTHOR> I continue to be baffled by the arcane units in the US.

This uses a measure on the completely wrong abstraction level.

An accidental production process now defines a wire unit instead the end result the consumer/engineer/technician wants to know (mm^2 or inch^2 oh no no it's pica^2 ?).

There must be some sociological phenomenon going on that keeps the US from adopting modern units. Maybe can't admit a shortcoming and fix it?

<comment><USER2> If you have never wired a house for electrical, then sure, the units seem arbitrary. But if you do, then the units seem very comfortable. 12ga for most typical 20a circuits, 14ga for light, 10ga or thicker for some heavy-duty circuits.

Hey boss, we seem to be all out of 3.31mm^2 romex, all I got left is 2.08mm^2. And why did you mention cross-sectional area? Why not radius? or diameter? Or better yet, circumference? I'll take awg12 and awg14 please.

<comment><USER3> That's the trick. In a sense, the units follow the application, and hence English units always feel a bit natural. They have a tendency to have integer multiples and simple fractions.

And when I say natural, I _don 't_ mean elegant. They often tend to be thoroughly arbitrary. But they match the needs, which is usually reasonably pragmatic. For example, 360 degrees is ideal for simple in-head directional geometry, but radians are by far simpler in algebra or very precise measurements (because Pi can often be neatly factored out).

Once you start using enough decimal points, all units are lousy. I remember using angstroms in astronomy because it fit better into the optics theory and the distances are already absurd it didn't matter. So you may as well use the units that are convenient, and just get good swapping.

(PS: glass sheets are sold by the square foot, but in thicknesses measured in millimeters. Turns out to be pretty convenient that way.)

<comment><USER4> The Sumerians divided the circle into 360 degrees because the Sun's annual path took 360 days to come around a full circle. It's no wonder that 360 degrees feel natural for directions.

Another thing I've encountered: in South India, there is a measure of distance & time called a "nazhika". It is 24 minutes. 2 1/2 nazhika is one hour, 60 nazhikas make a day. A nazhika is also roughly the time taken for a normal person to walk 1 mile. Hence a nazhika is also used as approximately one mile. Seems a bit weird until you remember that light-years involve the same identification of time and distance.

Non-metric units like these and others ("foot") have probably very good reasons behind them, and they could be used by people in their day-to-day activities while not carrying measuring instruments with them. Metric System is more systematic, but people "lose touch" with intuitions of quantity.

<comment><USER5> I assume that the Sumerians were observant enough to realize that there were still a few days missing, and that 360 was better because it was a more divisible number actually.

The Sumerians did, in fact, periodically insert intercalary months in order to offset the difference, which suggests that this is in part close approximation and on the other part nice for application.

<comment><USER3> I feel like unit debates often result from a misunderstanding between sides of "is perfect the enemy of good?" I thought it suspicious that they would have miscounted the days, but you're right: it's so dang useful that it's worth a little error (with occasional corrections) for such convenience.

Of course, at some point it becomes a huge pain and you buckle down and choose something just as arbitrary but easier to handle. And that's why we don't count angles in the milliseconds since 1970. Or days in a year; though we do sometimes measure 3D angles in solid minutes, which seems like a metaphor taken too far :)

<comment><USER5> How many kiloseconds will you spend working next week?

Even in metric-using countries, nobody uses it for time.

For actual applications of spherical trig though degree, minute, second makes a lot of sense, primarily because the earth rotates about one arc second every 4 minutes, and if you know this then you can do manual navigation via the stars and many other things.

However for many things I _do_ use metric time, just not for the human aspect of it. For example, for one customer (admittedly in the sciences), we had to help them estimate how much hardware they needed for additional load. So you do the work in seconds because at that point the math is easiest, and convert to ratios following.

<comment><USER6> I for one would love to have metric time. Just today I had to add some durations together to get total duration, which would have been simple thing to do with metric time.

Of course for practical use using SI second wouldn't be very good solution. Traditionally second is derived from the length of day, and I think that would make sense for metric time too. 1 milliday would be somewhat close to 1 minute and 50 millidays (or maybe half deciday) would be close to one hour. Of course the name probably should be something else than "day" to reduce confusion.

So I could be working something like 16 decidays next week.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > It's worth noting that instruments were being tuned to this scale well > before the invention of logarithms. I assume it was done by ear or perhaps > by geometry, not by algebra.

Well temperament wasn't known before 1681, there were predecessors that came close but none used the the twelfth root of two. Logarithms were introduced by John Napier in 1614 [1], the twelfth root of two was first calculated by Marin Mersenne in 1636 [2], well temperament was introduced by Werckmeister 1681 [3].

> Around 1600 Simon Stevin did attempt to calculate numerical values for the > pitch intervals by decomposing 12th roots into combinations of square and > cube roots; his results were not flawless.

He had the right idea but not the right math.

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

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

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

<comment> bit-player (I'm the OP here.)

My source for the statement that "instruments were being tuned to this scale well before the invention of logarithms" is an article by Edward Dunne and Mark McConnell, "Pianos and Continued Fractions," Mathematics Magazine, Vol. 72, No. 2 (Apr., 1999), pp. 104-115. They write: "Guitars in Spain were evenly tempered at least as early as the fiftheenth century, two hundred years before Bach. And Hermanus Contractus, born 18 July 1013, invented a system of intervalic notation that anticipated equal temperatment."

My source on Simon Stevin's work is a Rudolf Rasch, "Tuning and Temperament," published as Chapter 7 in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory." Rasch gives an interesting account of the state of root extraction before the advent of logarithms. He attributes the errors to "Stevin's sometimes rather reckless rounding of digits after the decimal period, which are often truncated rather than rounded."

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to "How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?" is "Go fuck yourself," because you can't directly relate any of those quantities."

\- Wild Thing, Josh Bazell

</comment><comment><USER9> Hugged to death.

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://bit- player.org/2016/the-39th-root-of-92)

</comment><comment><USER10> As a guitar player I'm glad the article also mentioned equal temperament tuning. The frets of a guitar for example are spaced using the 12th root of 2. Musical theory is a tangled rat's nest, but at least that part is easy to understand.</comment>


Google Fiber is now in 3,000 apartment complexes - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2017/09/28/google-fiber-is-now-in-3000-apartment-complexes/ <comment><USER2> Where? The only places that have been "wired" near me are brand new condo or apartment complexes. Wired meaning they are setup but I haven't heard of anyone getting actual service yet.

Anyone in Atlanta actually have Google Fiber yet in or outside midtown?</comment>


Thanks Nelson Bolyard for fighting with the server vendors during secure renego - <AUTHOR> http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/tls/current/msg05066.html

<comment><AUTHOR> It helped us to prepare for finally disable SSLv3 fallback years later.</comment>


Setting Up Local HTTPS During Development with Docker - <AUTHOR> https://spin.atomicobject.com/2017/10/28/local-https-docker/#.WfTpuLQtkn8.hackernews <comment><USER2> I ended up using mitmproxy as TLS reverse termination proxy with CA cert installed on local machine/phone for local development. It handles TLS connection and forward unecrypted request to your application server. I'm running it in docker container. IMO it's more convenient to not be dependent on external CA like letsencrypt which certificates are only valid for 3 months. The main use case is developing PWA with features that require https like navigator.getUserMedia()...</comment>


Hack: Site steals your browsing history based on URL link color - <AUTHOR> http://caughtyouwatching.com/catch.php <comment><USER2> This is really old news. Here's an HN link discussing someone's batshit crazy startup idea based on it:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=404564>

<comment><USER3> It's definitely a useful trick for only showing certain content to certain users. For example, I wrote a script so you only show Digg buttons to visitors that have been to digg.com: <http://int2e.com/blog/improved-digg-integration- script/>

<comment><USER4> You don't even need Javascript.

        ...digg button code...

Now you can use CSS to hide visited links.

        a.digg:visited { display: none; }

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is so old it's even mentioned in the spec as something a browser can choose to avoid:

<http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/selector.html#link-pseudo-classes>

 _Note. It is possible for style sheet authors to abuse the :link and :visited pseudo-classes to determine which sites a user has visited without the user's consent.

UAs may therefore treat all links as unvisited links, or implement other measures to preserve the user's privacy while rendering visited and unvisited links differently. See [P3P] for more information about handling privacy. _

</comment><comment><USER6> This is all very cute, but the real exploit isn't embarrassing your friends and co-workers by revealing their kinks. Imagine a phishing site which could sniff your browser history to see which bank you use, and then provide a customized login form masquerading as that same site.

Exposing browsing history via CSS color information in the DOM is a serious security hope that should be closed by browser vendors.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is the best use of it: <http://startpanic.com/>

Demonstrates how powerful the technique is.

<comment><USER8> It also crashed my browser...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> [http://code.google.com/p/aza/source/browse/trunk/SocialHisto...](http://code.google.com/p/aza/source/browse/trunk/SocialHistory/SocialHistory.js)

It's one of those things which has questionable ethics…but honestly? A little awesome...

</comment><comment><USER10> Some time ago I wrote this:

<http://antirez.com/page/cachetest.html>

AFAIK the bug I shown is not currently fixed. The idea is to perform a request for an image in the target site (usually the logo), meter how many milliseconds it takes, if it takes very little (near to zero) you already visited the site. If the latency is instead in the normal range you didn't. See the article for more info.

</comment><comment><USER11> Here something similar based on social sites: <http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/socialhistoryjs/>

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't know if I've seen any privacy exploit that (1) compromises this much personal data, and (2) is as easy to execute. Can anyone think of one?

</comment><comment><USER13> Yet another reason to use NoScript.

... why would I be down-voted for mentioning a solution which prevents 100% of JavaScript history attacks???

<comment><USER14> It's not really relevant to anything. I could say it's another reason to go back to using BBS's instead of the WWW, but that's not really a useful observation is it.

<comment><USER15> But that's not what noscript does; it allows you to whitelist known-good scripts, and only run those. So when you go goodsite.com, you can see the cool javascript animations, but when you browse to steals-your-history.com, your history won't be stolen.

Sure, goodsite.com can choose to spy on you... but that is less likely than some other random site being the bad one.

<comment><USER16> "... but when you browse to steals-your-history.com, your history won't be stolen."

Ah, but you won't know if your history's being stolen, right? The exploit can be hidden from the user's eyes, hidden in an ad, for example, that the site you trust shows you without realizing that ad is hacking your history. Phishing sites, too, of course.

A big problem caused by this elegant hack is that it uses services web users can't easily do without, services that most browser users don't know about (and, ideally, shouldn't need to understand). I guess you're suggesting that a user must be more wary of websites, avoiding unknown ones. Is that what you're suggesting?

It'll be interesting to see what can be tried to remedy the privacy issues caused by this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Scary stuff, good thing i always clear my history...</comment>


Gaming Startup makes their own reality TV on buiding their flagship title - Kaos War - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Agames.net+creating+Kaos&btnG=Google+Search

<comment><AUTHOR> I started watching episode 1 and got hooked. By the way, the company is Shattered Reality Interactive and they're one of the TC50 presenters.

Lots of startup drama as the series continues.</comment>


A new Google Maps app for smartphones and tablets  - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.in/2013/07/a-new-google-maps-app-for-smartphones.html

<comment><AUTHOR> "The offline maps feature for Android is also no longer available. Instead we've created a new way for you to access maps offline by simply entering "OK Maps" into the search box when viewing the area you want for later."

In what way does Google think this is an advance? It's hardly an intuitive user experience. Not sure quite what they're thinking.

<comment><USER2> It feels like they've buried it rather than disabling it. In a year's time they can point to really low usage figures of that feature and...?

(I'm not part of the Reader/Wave/Notepad hate machine and I'm generally a fan of Google - I just can't think of any other reason for this manifestly weird change.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "My Maps functionality is not supported in this release but will return to future versions of the app"

-> Deliberately regressing, so sorry, we'll add it back later.

Um what?

</comment><comment><USER4> gee, we've removed your favorite features- latitude, off-line searches... hurry up and download us fast!

Anyone know of a good alternative to google stalker? I really like having fast always on map location sharing with my wife.

I don't understand why google(+) is pushing for the real names integration so hard, they have the data already on the back end. I am unwilling to give up my public anonymity. This is just pushing me out of their ecosystem faster.

<comment><USER5> Google is doing what corporations do; they're re-thinking products, whether they need it or not. They're integrating products, to make it better for them. This is why overlooking companies doing questionable stuff is bad. "Oh, its Google; we love them." Ten years later, they've integrated everything into one massive system, you're required to use your real name, real phone number, and have location on all the time. ("Oh, no, you don't need that turned on, but most featured won't work without it.") And because they under-price everyone else, or use their market position to run them off, there is a desert of alternatives.

P. S. I'm not picking on merely Google; this is reality of Corporate America.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I know Maps is a core Google function and excellent app, but doesn't this seem pretty competitive with Waze?

<comment><USER7> Google recently bought Waze:

[http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/11/its-official-google-buys- wa...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/11/its-official-google-buys-waze-giving- a-social-data-boost-to-its-location-and-mapping-business/)</comment></comment>


Summers Vindicated (again) - <AUTHOR> http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/07/summers-vindica.html

<comment><USER2> I guess the "politically correct < correct" debacle is the one thing nowadays future generations will look back on our time and say, "These people were vehemently retarded about some things. [1]" This is the current case of "emperor's new clothes". I for one prefer to have intellectual self-respect and avert my gaze, _even though I'm Hispanic._ My IQ, as given by race, should be around 93, and I still can't put up with this nonsense. I'd benefit if every brain was suddenly standardized to match that of Anglo-Saxons, but that doesn't mean I'm going to lie to myself. If I have to lie to myself, I'm going to do it about bullshit that isn't quite so pungent.

The evidence in favor of cognitive differences across race and gender is enormous; in fact, it couldn't reasonably expected to be any greater. Hundreds of millions of standardized tests, tens of thousands of autopsies, brain scans, hormonal testing, etc. They all align. Not only that, but it's plain even to small children that not all humans were created equal. We're past the point of an emperor's new clothes dilemma; at this point, the emperor is butt- ass naked, trudging through snow, losing toes to frostbite, with big billboards of closeups of his genitals all over the place. I don't publicly call out the nakedness, but I'll at least avert my gaze.

[1] They'll say retarded because it will be the most appropriate term for something that is slow and stupid, and because they won't be chastised for saying it.

<comment><USER3> "The evidence in favor of cognitive differences across race and gender is enormous".

That differences in realized cognitive ability exist is without dispute. Evidence for a genetic basis for these differences is pretty much nonexistent. The Flynn effect basically shreds the credibility of any argument from so- called "g". Disadvantaged groups invariably score 10-20 points lower than the dominant groups within societies, and when members of both emigrate to other countries, the gap vanishes.

Frankly, I'm pretty sure that my barbaric, 7th-century European ancestors would have tested very poorly on any IQ test.

<comment><USER2> The genetic basis is there. First, I suspect the Flynn effect is simply natural selection in modern society; after all, if environment changes in the Galapagos can change the shape of birds beaks in a few generations, industrialization should make people better at desk jobs. And according to Gregory Clark, this has happened to Anglo-Saxons between the 1300s and the 1800s. [1] The same appears to have happened to Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians.[2] Keep in mind they, too, were once very disadvantaged in American society, but there's no keeping them down; both groups are richer than whites now, and had to contend with heavy discrimination on their way to riches. In fact, because of the belief all races should be equally represented, Asian students are heavily penalized in college admissions to make room for African Americans and Hispanics. [3] Finally, I wouldn't go so far as saying emigration eliminates gaps; emigrants aren't necessarily representative of a group, as they're the ones who are ambitious or desperate enough to want to leave. Mexican immigrants in the United States do not form an accurate cross- section of Mexican culture. Nigerian immigrants in United States have the highest rate of PhDs and Master degrees per capita [4], but that has a lot to do with immigration policies. It's a lot easier to get into the States with a Masters or a PhD, so there's selection at hand.

[1][http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/clark_evol...](http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/clark_evolution.pdf) [2]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_intelligence> [3][http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=h...](http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fopr.princeton.edu%2Ffaculty%2FTje%2FEspenshadeSSQPtII.pdf&ei=uziPSLHMJZSUeur3gKwH&usg=AFQjCNFM9ICtMOYFosbcEEFCncLmIX26UA&sig2=kHO7HZtc2qijBQqh6LaYlw) [4][http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/05/nigerians-are-most- educat...](http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/05/nigerians-are-most-educated- nationality.html)

<comment><USER3> Why do you assume that the changes in the Galapagos occurred over "a few generations"? My understanding was that the separation occurred thousands of years ago.

If industrialization has been driving human evolution, it has probably not been in a positive direction. Fertility and IQ are negatively correlated in contemporary industrialized societies, so if anything, this would propel the opposite of the Flynn effect. The dark comedy Idiocracy is essentially about this.

<comment><USER2> The separation indeed occurred long ago, and the most dramatic evolutionary changes happened then. But the populations on the Galapagos continue to make observable evolutionary changes because of weather conditions.

[http://www.nwf.org/nationalwildlife/article.cfm?issueID=115&...](http://www.nwf.org/nationalwildlife/article.cfm?issueID=115&articleID=1472):

"Recently, the Grants witnessed another form of natural selection acting on the medium ground finch: competition from bigger, stronger cousins. In 1982, a third finch, the large ground finch, came to live on Daphne Major. The stout bills of these birds resemble the business end of a crescent wrench. Their arrival was the first such colonization recorded on the Galápagos in nearly a century of scientific observation. 'We realized,' Peter Grant says, 'we had a very unusual and potentially important event to follow.' For 20 years, the large ground finch coexisted with the medium ground finch, which shared the supply of large seeds with its bigger-billed relative. Then, in 2002 and 2003, another drought struck. None of the birds nested that year, and many died out. Medium ground finches with large bills, crowded out of feeding areas by the more powerful large ground finches, were hit particularly hard.

When wetter weather returned in 2004, and the finches nested again, the new generation of the medium ground finch was dominated by smaller birds with smaller bills, able to survive on smaller seeds. This situation, says Peter Grant, marked the first time that biologists have been able to follow the complete process of an evolutionary change due to competition between species and the strongest response to natural selection that he had seen in 33 years of tracking Galápagos finches."

I'm also aware of the negative correlation between IQ and Fertility; however, this is not without explanation. IQ correlates with k-strategy (bigger investments in fewer children that are slow to develop), and k-strategy correlates with having few children. [1] R-strategists have lower IQs and higher fertility rates. In the society outlined by Gregory Clark in his paper, wealth correlated with reproductive success. Right now, we live in an anomalous situation where food is not a limiting factor. But this is coming to an end; food prices have increased dramatically in recent years, with no sign of falling any time soon. This phenomenon is not new, and illustrates the possible advantages of r-selection.

From Clark's article: "The strength of the selection process through survival of the richest also seems to have varied depending on the circumstances of settled agrarian societies. Thus in the frontier conditions of New France (Quebec) in the seventeenth century where land was abundant, population densities low, and wages extremely high the group that reproduced most successfully was the poorest and the most illiterate."

[http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Capitalism...](http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Capitalism%20Genes.pdf)

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-selection>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Men fall to the extremes of every pursuit. Even dressmaking, cooking, and interior design. Both testosterone and a greater likelihood of psychosis would account for this.

</comment><comment><USER5> The article mentions 'Note that we are assuming that mathematical ability is normally distributed - we know the data fit this distribution around the mean but we don't know much about what happens at the very top.'

Which is precisely the thing being talked about. Why is this being voted up? The post isn't a relevant part of the discussion, and has little to no bearing on the articles it links to...

</comment><comment><USER6> Generations from now our scholars will be lumped in the same category as alchemists and geocentrists---much to their discredit.

<comment><USER7> Don't you mean "our media"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Larry Summers was effectively forced to step down by a large body of highly educated academics at Harvard that reacted emotionally to statistically accurate statements. The media didn't help though.

<comment><USER8> That is nonsense. Summers was forced to step down because he picked fights (on hiring/firing/promotions, spending priorities, the balance of power between different parts of the university, etc.) with the majority of the faculty, and forced out some wonderful and very popular members of the community. He tried to run the university like a CEO would run a corporation, and learned that a faculty made up of many of the the top scholars in every field isn't easily pushed around. The public gaffes were just the icing on the cake.

Also, in being "forced to step down", he was given a University Professorship: not the roughest of deals, to be sure.

<comment><USER9> Are you referring to Cornell West? My impression was that Cornell West was not bothering to show up for class and grade papers, and that Summers asked him to do the job he'd been hired to do. I guess that could make someone unpopular.

<comment><USER8> No, I'm not. However, "not bothering to show up for class and grade papers" is grossly inaccurate. Here's a link to West's radio interview with Tavis Smiley at the time: [http://www.npr.org/programs/tavis/features/2002/jan/020107.w...](http://www.npr.org/programs/tavis/features/2002/jan/020107.west.html)

<comment><USER9> "In 2000 economist and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers became president of Harvard. In a private meeting with West, Summers allegedly rebuked West for neglecting his scholarship, and spending too much time on his economically profitable projects.[5] Summers allegedly suggested that West produce an academic book befitting his professorial position. West had written several books, some of them widely cited, but his recent output consisted primarily of co-written and edited volumes. According to some reports, Summers also objected to West's production of a CD, the critically panned Sketches of My Culture, and to his political campaigning."

And

"In October, he had the temerity to meet with Cornel West and suggest that he turn his hand to some serious scholarship-West's most recent production was a rap CD called Sketches of My Culture-and lead the way in fighting the scandal of grade inflation at Harvard, where one of every two grades is an A or A-. What an outrage! West went to sulk in his tent, announcing on the way that he was applying for another year's leave of absence (he had just returned from one) and letting it be known that he might just up and leave Harvard."

To whom were you referring?

 _Edit: I accidentally misspelled the professor's name in my previous comment. He is, of course, Cornel and not Cornell._

<comment><USER8> First: whoops, I edited my comment while you were replying. Second: Summers was clearly in the wrong at the beginning of his spat with West, who was at the time a University Professor (an extreme honor, which places a professor outside any department, and accords him the ability to teach whatever he likes); West's outrage at Summers' disrespect was predictable and easily avoidable.

There were several resignations of much-loved deans, &c. in the last couple of years of Summers' presidency. Go read through the Crimson's coverage of Summers' departure if you want a reasonable semi-outsider's (students aren't party to internal faculty disputes) look.

Edit: that National Review article you quote is garbage: _"The unpalatable truth is that Afro-American Studies is a pseudo-discipline—an academic ghetto constructed to accommodate the beneficiaries of 'affirmative action'—and that the celebrated occupants of Harvard's department are second-class scholars with first-class salaries and perquisites."_

<comment><USER9> What was summer wrong about? West was an embarrassment -- too busy writing a bad rap album to publish any actual work? It's not like they have accounting professors who are busy playing country music or death metal.

I hadn't heard about the other deans. I can understand Harvard professors being huffy when someone tries to make them behave differently, but that doesn't tell me it's wrong to ask -- it could be, but perhaps those professors were too egotistical or cozy. Very hard to say.

Is the _National Review_ article factually incorrect? What parts of my life have been improved by the diligent and industrious researchers of the world's Afro-American Studies departments?

<comment><USER8> I don't think we'll get anywhere with this discussion—you have an existing prejudice about those involved which causes you to toss around trivializing sarcastic insults of Professor West (have you read any of his "actual" work?) and Harvard professors in general ("huffy", "egotistical", "cozy"? "behave differently?").

And no, it's not "factually incorrect": it's an opinion piece. It is, however, garbage.

<comment><USER9> It's more of a post-judice. I notice that in disputes with Larry Summers, Summers offers lots of data and the other side offers lots of emotion. I mean, the Big Stink over Summers was when he mentioned a fact about the standard deviations of test scores, and a professor in the audience swooned ("I would've either blacked out or thrown up.")

So yes, I think referring to the emotional aspect is important, here. People nail Summers for mentioning data they don't like -- which is probably why he gave up on academia and government and moved closer to finance.

I would like to know what about the article is garbage. My request for ways in which the legitimate field of Afro-American studies has improved my life still stands. If you can't discern a single logical or factual error in the entire _National Review_ article, but you persist in, er, trashing it, shouldn't I just accept that you're reenacting the typical disagree-with-Larry pattern?

<comment><USER8> No, Summers was not canned because of his comments about women in science (at least that was not the primary reason; it certainly didn't help him out). That was the whole point of this sub-thread. "People" didn't nail Summers for mentioning data: that is a straw-man mischaracterization of any serious part of the dispute with Summers, even of the dispute about women in science. Summers did not give up on academia: he holds a University Professorship and teaches courses.

But more to the point, you are conflating three separate disputes, and trying to change the subject as a way to dodge my questions. But again, this discussion is going nowhere, and is therefore pointless.

As for the National Review article, it adds no substance, and makes no attempt to engage with any of the discussion it supposedly disagrees with, and instead makes a classic troll argument of empty epithets. It has no factual inaccuracies, because it not arguing facts. (Note: it does not take factual inaccuracies to make a stupid argument.) It is garbage, because the only possible reactions to reading it are "Yeah, they're right. Those liberals _are_ just useless elitist leeches on society," or else "No, they're wrong. Studying how society works is important," neither of which is a worthwhile reaction (e.g., "Hey! That article taught me something I didn't already know," or "Wow! That article really clarified that concept I was having trouble understanding.").

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The issue is one of variance, not mean. When social intelligence is included, I think the average woman is probably smarter than the average man, but men have more variance and are thus more prominent at the extremes.

I doubt that there is a strong genetic basis for this. It is probably due, in large part, to the ways boys and girls are raised. Speaking very broadly, and acknowledging the existence of counterexamples; boys are raised to be smart, while girls are raised to be social and cooperative. This means that gifted male children can more easily zip ahead in school, but that the stragglers fall further behind in academic and social skills... and are more likely to end up becoming criminals. A lot of girls feel guilty and insecure about being "too smart" compared to their peers, which holds them back.</comment>


Startups in 137 chars - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/paulg/status/22316438109 <comment><AUTHOR> I know at some point links to twitter updates were killed right away on hackernews.

Posted this one to see what'll happen when it's a tweet from the bigwigs :)</comment>