Ask HN: Resources to learn Discrete Mathematics? - <AUTHOR> I am an undergradute student of Applied Mathematics in Brazil. This semester, I will do the Discrete Math course and I am keen on learning this subject!
I really like HackerNews. This is a great community with awesome people and marvelous content going on. It would be nice to receive some advice from you guys.
The professor has two books on the syllabus: Concrete Math (Knuth) and Discrete Mathematics (Rosen). I am looking forward to supplementary material that will help me absorb this books.
1 - Is there a YouTube content particularly good for this topic?
2 - Is there some specific good strategy to study this topic?
I really like to study doing exercises and, then, checking the answer. Not just the final answer but the whole answer. This is not always available. Slader is a great website for that. Maybe there is an even a better resource than Slader that I do not know.
Thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> I think this was the book I used at uni and it was the reason why the class was one of the highest marks i ever got at uni [https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.042/spring17/mcs.pdf](https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.042/spring17/mcs.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> Discrete mathematics is basically a grab bag of topics selected from naive set theory, combinatorics, calculus, graph theory, linear algebra and probability theory. It also includes asymptotic algorithm analysis. You can look for resources that cover these topics in particular or resources that cover them together. Relative to what you're already going to be reading, I'll make a few recommendations based on 1) equally comprehensive, but more more compact material, 2) more computational, practice-oriented material for engineers, and 3) more theoretical, proof-based material for computer scientists and mathematicians.

If time is of the essence, the first ~100 pages of the first volume in Knuth's _The Art of Programming_ (TAOCP) are essentially a more terse version of _Concrete Mathematics_. In fact, _Concrete Mathematics_ was originally written as a series of notes and lectures at Stanford expanding the preliminary mathematical material of TAOCP. If I recall correctly, TAOCP covers everything except maybe the basic probability theory in _Concrete Mathematics._ You might find it helpful to read it through the TAOCP coverage, which is something of a whirlwind tour. If you have the mathematical maturity for it, you could work through this much more quickly than a full book on discrete math. But if you successfully complete 5 or 6 exercises rated 20+ from each of these sections, you can be confident that you've essentially learned the subject (perhaps even past the depth of an introductory course).

For a more expansive coverage of the topics with a computational slant, there are two excellent books I'd recommend:

1\. _Engineering Mathematics_ by K.A. Stroud

2\. _Mathematical Methods for Physics and Engineering_ by Riley, Hobson, Bence

Both of those will cover the topics in a very hands on, practice-oriented fashion, albeit with a bit of a departure from some of the theory. They're very helpful as a supplement because you can largely jump from chapter to chapter and practice your problem solving techniques. Since you said you're an Applied Math major: these would be good books for e.g. preparing for the GRE Math Subject Test if you plan on going to graduate school later on.

For a coverage of the material that emphasizes a proof-based approach, you can supplement your reading with a book on general proof strategies, such as:

1\. _Mathematical Proofs_ by Chartrand, Polmeni, Zhang

2\. _How to Prove It_ by Daniel Velleman

The first book by Chartrand et al is more of a traditional textbook and gives a comprehensive introduction to set theory in the context of various types of mathematical proofs. It's very good, especially because it has chapters specifically covering proofs in e.g linear algebra, calculus, elementary number theory, etc. On the other hand, the second book by Velleman is a more informal approach and doesn't tour any type of math in particular. But it does have an excellent chapter on mathematical induction (likely the first thing you'll cover in a discrete math course) that is approximately 50 pages or so of well presented material.

Other than those supplements, _Concrete Mathematics_ should really be sufficient for learning the material (and it's a very fun read since the authors' personalities shine through their writing). As a personal opinion, I'd say you should take a weekend to read through Halmos' _Naive Set Theory_ to give yourself a very strong foundation for the more advanced mathematics. You really want to make sure you _get_ proofs when the time comes. Despite being an Applied Math major, your later undergraduate mathematics courses (like real analysis, abstract algebra, maybe linear algebra and certainly topology if you take it) are likely going to be heavily proof-based. Discrete mathematics, with its beginning coverage of mathematical induction, is specifically designed to tour concepts that will later be used in advanced applied math and computer science.

<comment><USER4> Good idea. I took the class "Concrete Mathematics" at Stanford using the book of the same name (in 1983?). It was memorable - every class was a fascinating look into another discrete topic. I'm not sure I could have read the first 100 pages alone and understood anything - it would be a whirlwind of new concepts. Definitely benefitted from being talked through each chapter by an expert. Not Knuth; it was a guest lecturer, as I recall involved somehow with the computer proof of the 4-color Map Theorem.</comment></comment>


How ISPs can sell your Web history–and how to stop them - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/how-isps-can-sell-your-web-history-and-how-to-stop-them/#p3 <comment> awinter-py My religious view on this is that detailed consumer behavioral data leads to hyperoptimization by marketers.

It's bad for individuals because more of our time is taken up by various flavors of cocaine (e.g. netflix, other products that lead to bingeing), and it's bad for society in general because we end up stuck at local maxima, can't pursue really cool goals like space travel or curing cancer.

My pragmatic view is that if consumers cared about privacy (from their credit card, from their utilities, from voter registration) we'd have it -- it's relatively cheap for vendors to provide. Until people care, we won't have privacy.</comment>


Show HN: Trello-Like Application with WebComponents - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/AkselsLedins/trello-web-components <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

Context: This was the subject of an assignment for a company (tech test).

I created a really (lightweight) version of trello-like board with only web components. It was a fun project to do. I use ReactJS in my day-to-day work and it was really interesting to come back to basics and see that you could build applications from scratch without any framework. Loading speed is amazing, it's like we are forgetting that we can do simple applications without bloated frameworks. In addition, it felt good writing some vanilla js.

[https://caniuse.com/#feat=custom- elementsv1](https://caniuse.com/#feat=custom-elementsv1)

Beware, WebComponents are not supported in every browser

Would be grateful for your feedback.

Many thanks.

(Of course this project has nothing to do with the real Trello, it's only a POC.)</comment>


Apple unveils bigger watch, no innovation - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45502465 <comment><USER2> No innovation? The first ECG on a wearable. That's a Big Deal.

</comment><comment><USER3> The title got changed on BBC to "Apple unveils iPhone XS and fall-detecting Watch" so it's an ongoing, unfinished, news article.

</comment><comment><USER4> Horrible title!</comment>


Make Vim Python plugin 10x faster using Rust - <AUTHOR> http://liuchengxu.org/posts/speed-up-vim-python-plugin-using-rust/ <comment><USER2> Nice post, so you are still writing vim plugin in python but search mechanism is compiled in rust which is much faster.</comment>


Court Rules the FBI Does Not Need a Warrant to Hack a Computer - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/read/court-rules-the-fbi-does-not-need-a-warrant-to-hack-a-computer <comment><USER2> > _"It seems unreasonable to think that a computer connected to the Web is > immune from invasion," Morgan, Jr. adds. "Indeed, the opposite holds true: > in today 's digital world, it appears to be a virtual certainty that > computers accessing the Internet can—and eventually will—be hacked," he > writes, and then points to a series of media reports on high profile hacks. > He posits that users of Tor cannot expect to be safe from hackers._

Holy shit. Is this the equivalent of "if you wore that short tight skirt on a dark alley at night, you should _expect_ to be raped"? Going by the judge's logic, it would probably be _fine_ if it was an FBI agent doing it, too, because hey "it's expected."

<comment><USER3> I agree.

Hacking a computer is illegal, which is why law enforcement agencies need warrants to do it. Being part of a law enforcement agency does not give one automatic authority to violate the laws.</comment></comment>


Show HN: MindForger – Eisenhower matrix, urgency and priority for your notes - <AUTHOR> https://www.mindforger.com <comment><USER2> Is there any plan to support an Android or iOS app? I've been using orgzly + Dropbox to have a personal notebook that syncs between my phone and my desktops, and losing the ability to edit the notes on my phone would be a big step back for me.

I do like that MindForger uses markdown files, as I prefer writing markdown by hand to writing org-mode files by hand.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good work! Are planning to integrate the notes on some kind on spaced repetition system? Exporting a notebook to a Anki deck would be awesome!

</comment><comment><USER4> As somebody who uses org-mode a lot, this looks pretty cool at first glance. Slightly surprised this isn't attracting more comments.

It may be addressed somewhere on the web site, but I'm curious about how well this integrates with git for tracking changes to a set of documents. Working well with git is one of the nicest things about org-mode.

<comment><USER2> How are you combining git and org-mode? Are you using magit in some way?</comment></comment>


Slicing into a Point-of-Sale Botnet - <AUTHOR> http://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/06/slicing-into-a-point-of-sale-botnet/ <comment><USER2> Couple of things. First, I suppose I should have assumed it, but I didn't know botnets had nice admin panels! :)

Secondly, this is at least part of what chip-and- _pin_ was supposed to solve, and here in the US we ended up with chip and signature, which is almost as useless. (Not that it helps much with online transactions, although I'd be more scared of mail fraud charges than anything...)

I wonder if card companies ever go darknet and try to bot the bots, to proactively close and replace those compromised cards?

<comment><USER3> From what I understand, this is exactly what chip and signature solves and adding a PIN does little. The "credit card numbers" a chip produces are one time use, so skimming them is worthless. And if the POS system is really and truly owned, it still gets to see the PIN.

The only thing a PIN protects against is stolen cards. But it also creates the presumption that any stolen card that is used was the users fault because she gave up the PIN. This is problematic especially if coupled with a liability shift. There is a long line of work by [0] about these problems in England.

[0] [https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/banking/nopin/oak...](https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/banking/nopin/oakland10chipbroken.pdf)

<comment><USER4> The ideal thing would be having a pin you enter into a little keyboard on the card itself, meaning physically stealing the card wouldn't be easy. Then have an interface that would let these cards to be used over the net. Then stolen credentials would be hard to do.

<comment><USER5> Note that, if you could dust the card, and be highly likely to get the 4 numbers needed for a typical 4 digit pin, with 3 guesses, you'd have a ~13% chance of guessing the pin for a card ( 1/4! + 1/(4!-1) + 1(4!-2) ). [ed: obviously there are (at most, for 4 different digits) 24 possible combinations, so you'd need 12 tries at 2 guesses/try to be certain you found the correct code].

This does assume you can figure out which digits are in use, but I'd be surprised if you couldn't...

<comment><USER4> Well, if the card could require you to enter first a random code and then your pin, the key board might be kept such that each key was hit equally often.

I'm sure there are plenty more bugs to work out in such a system but if such things were reasonably widespread, it would make overall security much higher.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great article! I love these kinds of reports on the features and capabilities of the latest trojans.

I used to get my fix when I was active (as a customer) in the malware scene several years back, but now I can't follow these developments anymore. Don't worry: I didn't do much, and it's all behind me now.

Does anyone know of good blogs or websites that cover these kinds of things? I currently follow Krebs and a number of subreddits, yet I still feel there's more out there.

<comment><USER7> Which subreddits?

I might add the Malware Must Die blog: [http://blog.malwaremustdie.org/](http://blog.malwaremustdie.org/)

One of the few malware analysis blogs that doesn't have all-Windows, all-the- time blinders on.

<comment><USER6> Cool, bookmarked!

These are the ones I'm subscribed to. There is unfortunately some overlap in content, and some stuff is not related to malware, but they're pretty good when taken together.

[https://reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/](https://reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/)

[https://reddit.com/r/netsec](https://reddit.com/r/netsec)

[https://reddit.com/r/malware](https://reddit.com/r/malware)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Any word on who is running this botnet? I'm guessing it is not a hacking ring inside the USA, and would guess China or Russia, but that is based on reputation, not any specific knowledge.

<comment><USER2> Admin panel is in English - does that give a clue maybe? Or is English used as the international language for distributed hacker teams, maybe?

<comment><USER9> Russian is typically their lingua franca.</comment></comment></comment>


Tagstand Relaunches NFC Task Launcher App, Makes NFC Way Less Geeky - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/23/tagstand-relaunches-nfc-task-launcher-app-makes-nfc-way-less-geeky/

<comment><USER2> On a side note, I was reading that article from Android phone and immediately searched for their app. Surprisingly, Google Market/Play didn't return any results. Is search broken on Market/Play (especially when accessed from phone/tablet)? Because most of the times I search from their web based store and download from over the air push.

By the way, congrats for releasing the app.

<comment><AUTHOR> hmm, just searched on my android using Google Market and it shows up, a long with a free version. what were your search terms?

<comment><USER2> I searched for "NFC Task", I guess I had forgotten "launcher".

I searched once again with same term and it doesn't return your app. It returns totally unrelated apps and only one related to NFC.

And now I searched for "NFC Task Launcher", it returns some app called "Tasker". Ha!

However, on the web it always returns your app as first result.

<comment><AUTHOR> super weird - can you email us with screenshots to firstname.lastname@example.com please?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This looks completely brilliant! The potential for something like home automation is immense.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you - car automation is happening too: [https://twitter.com/#!/paulwcarlton/status/18294979680862208...](https://twitter.com/#!/paulwcarlton/status/182949796808622080)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Congrats Kul, solid work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Eric.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice job Kul. Way to go.

<comment><AUTHOR> merci

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Clicked the link, alt-tabbed and got concerned as my computer nearly crashed, silly TechCrunch.

I got really excited about NFC before realizing that it's hard to use them for security very well. Found some terrifying things out about the RFID cards that my University (and apparently military bases) use for security (basically they're trivially cloneable), and further, with enough determination and not a whole lot of effort, most NFC "security" implementations are hardly secure at all. Even more sad, to get anything close to a PKI setup, you have to move up to non-contact-less "SmartCards".

If you're willing to make compromises you could do somethings with TagStand's Ultralight C tags, hoping to do something with them soon as I've got a bag of them on my desk.

(Not to be off topic, sorry, this is related in that Tagstand is trying to "bring NFC to the masses" and (maybe erroneously) I had assumed they could have access/auth uses).

<comment><AUTHOR> What sort of security implementations were you thinking of? There are companies out there aggressively working towards "uncloneable" cards and such.

Secure elements for payments I think are pretty secure, more secure than credit cards at least.

Edit: here's one company that claims to it: <http://www.verayo.com/products/unclonable-rfid>

<comment><USER6> I have come up with three different ideas:

\- Ultralight tags (fun because there are cheap wristbands out there that look fairly normal and have these embedded). You could use some sort of HMAC to encrypt a message that is based on the unique ID of the Ultralight tag. The reader could verify that the data on the tag is the encrypted message corresponding to that tag's ID. This is broken if anyone decides to clone a tag down to the serial ID. This would require custom tag fabrication or a misbehaving supplier.

\- Ultralight C tags: 3DES encryption [skipping details] you could have better prevention of cloning the tag. Unfortunately, 3DES encryption is symmetric and if anyone can access the reader, they can remove the key and again clone a tag. (This is how HID Class RFID cards work except they don't use 3DES and there are at least 3 ways of easily retrieving the master key)

\- SmartCard: Actual PKI with assymetric encryption so that someone can provide a challenge and the SmartCard can provide the proper response. Again, sadly, contactless cards and they're expensive.

Other than that, I'm out of ideas. I'm a tinkerer and a student. The thing you've linked to looks like some sort of PKI in that there is a challenge/response scenario going on.

All of this is information I've gleaned from Wikipedia over the past weekend and I would love to be corrected if I am wrong, even if it needs to take place somewhere other than this thread.</comment></comment></comment>


Complete startup list (w/slides & contact info) from 500 startups Demoday - <AUTHOR> http://launch.is/blog/500-startups-demo-day-complete-list-of-companies-and-links.html

<comment><USER2> Would be nice if you put a one liner saying what they're actually doing, or even just used the title instead of url for your launch.is links.</comment>


Feedback on my app: MyJugaad.in, a slideshow for webpages - <AUTHOR> http://myjugaad.in/

<comment><USER2> Ok, this is actually not bad at all. I like the arrow navigation (though you have to click IN to the content to scroll down, as opposed to just moving the container ever so slightly down). Slick. But, there are lots of things I don't like.

1\. What is that domain name? What am I missing? It tells me nothing and will not help your site grown in anyway.

2\. Show me, right on the front page, what you mean. I know what a slide show is, SHOW ME what your app does. This isn't that hard, but I want to see it more than read it. Give me an image of a browser window with the next content to the right and the last to the left. I like pictures.

3\. Get rid of the word "test" all over your home page. Seriously, it should not be there. Put some real content (even if it's just testing content!) in there so I don't see how young you are.

4\. Man, I hate registering for things. Probably not what you want to hear, but do I have to register/login? Can't you just use a cookie to identify me and link me with my list(s) on your end? I'd love to just work as a guest of sorts - forever.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comment.

1\. Domain name actually means something in Hindi. So, I agree with you that it tells you nothing.

2\. Hmm.. So, you think pictures would be more effective? Thanks for this suggestion.

3\. Yeah, got rid of test. :)

4\. Registration is optional. It is only required if you want to create your own slideshows. Cookie is not reliable for this thing. Imagine, you having to upload a youtube video without registering and later wanting to remove it, after your cookie having been deleted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I can't see a reason to use this.

I actually like your homepage (<http://www.paraschopra.com>) better and am more likely to visit that on a repeated basis.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Guys, I would appreciate your comments, feedback, criticism, rants, appreciation, etc. Also, please note that the web app is still being tested, so if you come across any unexpected behavior, let me know ASAP.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have just one question: what pain problem does this app solve? I just can not seem to get it.

<comment><AUTHOR> It solves my pain of having to navigate the top stories on the internet. Plus, I don't like reading stories in my RSS reader.</comment></comment>


JokkoText:Pay active music fans for sharing and Sell music by SMS or credit card - <AUTHOR> https://www.jokkotext.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> JokkoText is the new music service that pays fans for sharing music and artists for adding and selling theirs by SMS in 50 countries or credit card everywhere.

\- When the "Rokki" formula is activated, when the fan shares the music, he receives 2% commission for each sale originated from the link that he shared. \- Fans can download entire albums in zip format

Artists can : \- Make music available for free download and allow those who still want to buy it to do so \- Upload their music directly online \- View their sales statistics \- See which singles have sold the most \- Edit their informations \- Annotate their lyrics and make them available for free download \- Edit details on their singles or albums, \- Sell their singles and albums by SMS in more than 50 countries, by Orange Money SMS or Joni Joni in Senegal and by credit card anywhere in the world \- Refer to the Percentage Grid per Country \- Request payment of their receipts \- Thank their fans with a personalized message after every purchase

This app is therefore intended for artists and music lovers. Both can register.</comment>


CoreOS Image Now Available on DigitalOcean - <AUTHOR> https://coreos.com/blog/digital-ocean-supports-coreos/

<comment><USER2> I love that CoreOS uses lean-startup style voting for biz-dev type decisions (e.g. which clouds should we run on next?); yet can also produce new technologies like etcd, fleet & Rudder through "vision" \- knowing which pieces are missing.

It's not an easy combination to pull off, and it's building to a really great system that seems to be part of all the interesting new developments (Kubernetes, DO, Panamax.io etc)

<comment><USER3> They get points for delivering on time, too: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7723965](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7723965)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> See also the discussion here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8273305](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8273305)

</comment><comment><USER5> Can anyone explain like I'm 5 what this is? I'm a Rails dev but kind of new to the Ops side of things. Thanks!

<comment><USER6> Two super-cool things:

1\. Docker. Essentially, you can make a container around your Rails app and launch it anywhere. Docker isn't exclusive to CoreOS, but CoreOS happens to be really good at it.

2\. fleet. You specify a configuration file when you launch a CoreOS droplet with DigitalOcean, and it teaches the system how to launch your docker container automatically, and coordinate with any other CoreOS droplets you have running.

This means you can teach your machines to, say, not all reboot for updates at the same time and thus bring down your service. They'll argue amongst themselves about who reboots when.

It also means that if you tell certain instances to identify as DB instances, and certain instances to identify as Rails instances, they'll know how to find each other, and you can teach them to fail over to each other if you have redundancy.</comment></comment>


Why Child Care Is So Ridiculously Expensive - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/why-child-care-so-expensive/602599/ <comment><USER2> Goes to show that everything American's NEED is exploding in price (cars, housing, childcare, healthcare, education), while most things they WANT only seem to be increasing slightly (or decreasing with respect to inflation) (entertainment, technology, etc.).</comment>


Why English is such a great language for puns - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21726054-gamers-now-even-take-part-world-champunships-why-english-such-great-language <comment><USER2> Vietnamese humour is remarkably focused around puns and other word-play, much more so than American humour. The reason is presumably because Vietnamese has a ton of homophones, and even more words that differ by only one vowel or tone.

(this makes learning Vietnamese a kind of trying experience, as every mispronunciation is a source of hilarity for native speakers :) )

<comment><USER3> Not only Vietnamese but a lot of languages all over the world, if not most or all. Puns and wordplay exist in any language, and people who say "why English/German/Swahili/whatever is so great for Y" merely have no deeper understanding of linguistics aside folk etymologies and lists of "untranslated words" (which are a joke to people actually into linguistics) and things like that.

Japanese comedians can't go 10 minutes without making a pun, and a lay person could strongly agree that it is the language that uses them the most due to all common similar-sounding words, frequent games with kanji and their different meanings etc. It's common for even business names to be puns in Japan.

<comment><USER4> Examples please. I love puns.

<comment><USER5> There is a sushi shop near me called "Sushi Yah!" the japanese for "sushi shop" is "すし屋" pronounced "sushi ya"

<comment><USER6> There's a sushi restaurant near me called "SushiMe," a pun of "sashimi" I've always assumed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As an Italian native speaker I wholeheartedly agree. It's one of the reasons I love English more.

Not only does English have many more homophones, and nouns can be used as verbs and vice versa, but English also has a much higher "word density" (for lack of a better term). The vocabulary is larger, and words tend to be shorter. The combination of the two means that you can take any short word, and odds are many other words with completely different meanings are just one letter-change away. On top of that, pronunciation is very inexact, which means many vowels and consonants sound alike.

These things make English pretty bad for oral comprehension, but great for puns.

</comment><comment><USER8> > Why English is such a great language for puns

Because one doesn't know other languages :-)

I know a guy who generates them constantly, in Russian. I even started wondering why Russian is so great language for puns?

</comment><comment><USER9> The article provides no evidence about why English, specifically, is great for puns.

>> . It has a large vocabulary and a rich stock of homophones from which puns can be made

Ok. What about the other 6000 languages? Do they have more/less homophones. French sure has a ton of them.

>> It is constantly evolving, with new words being invented and old ones given fresh meanings

Yes, like any other language.

>> And it is mostly uninflected, allowing for verbs and nouns to switch places

Good. But other languages, like German, can keep the suspense until the end of the sentence (where the verb is located), ending the sentence in an unexpected twist. So is this a distinct advantage? Is it so unique?

>> it has no gendered nouns

You would think languages with lots of declinations allow for smart puns too, right?

It seems it has been written by an English speaker with little knowledge of any other language.

<comment><USER10> Chinese also is a great language for puns. I was in Taipei a few weeks ago and saw a restaurant named 糖朝 ( _tangchao_ , Sugar Dynasty), when most people would expect to see 唐朝 ( _tangchao_ , Tang Dynasty).

In addition, many cultural sayings are based off "puns." For example, 年年有餘 ( _nian nian you yu_ , year after year there will be a surplus) is a common saying during the Chinese New Year. However, many families eat fish (魚, _yu_ , fish) during the Chinese New Year because it sounds like surplus. And so, 年年有餘 is sometimes rendered 年年有魚 ( _nian nian you yu_ , year after year there will be fish).

<comment><USER11> There's an entire type of Chinese comedy which is roughly translatable as homophone puns (相声). Few non native speakers ever get good enough to do it.

In fact when I was watching the CCTV New year broadcast in English 7 or so years back, the translation and subtitles basically just gave up for all of the crosstalk segments. They just put a banner underneath saying basically "this is crosstalk now, sorry we can't translate it because it's too hard".

<comment><USER12> The one famous non-native xiangsheng master being Dashan:

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

<comment><USER11> Oh yeah that dude I recognize him, didn't know he could do crosstalk, that's impressive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd like to see the biggest losers at these punning competitions give a talk at the Pun Ted conference.

<comment><USER14> I see what you did there

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Look, I don't pretend to be an expert here but I've dabbled in learning some other languages, most recently spanish.

One thing that keeps coming up is how _economical_ English seems to be compared to at least the other languages I've encountered. By "economical" I mean in terms of syllables. This seems to be a particularly useful property when it comes rhyming and lyrics and the like.

A few examples from Spanish:

nosotros/nosotras = we

demasiado = too

bastante = quite

primavera = spring

verano = summer

invierno = winter

bebemos = (we) drink

Also, as seems to be common in western European languages (other than English) is that more articles are required. Also, English fits the German pattern (being of that family linguistically speaking, this is unsurprising) of appending nouns together to form new words. In English these are separated by spaces still. In German they are not but it is the same construct/idea.

So English: Independence Day

Spanish: El dia de la independencia

Now this is more complicated because the verb forms in Spanish tend to be so distinct you can drop the subject eg (Yo) estoy tarde (I am late). But still "estoy" is two syllables compared to one in English ("am"). Also, some pronouns are so indistinct that they need to be qualified (eg with "a usted" or "a ella").

I'm by no means a linguistics expert so can't say what affect this has on, say, the speed of information transfer (which I expect is _roughly_ the same across languages but variances probably exist) or on poetry, songs or even puns. But I find it interesting.

Another point: what people find funny, even with those that have the same native tongue, varies culturally. There have been studies on this. For example, Americans tend to prefer humour where people get hurt (ostensibly) and just slapstick in general. This seems to explain things like The Three Stooges. Speaking as an Australian, I've never understood the appeal. But as an Australian, our humour is much closer to English humour.

Again, I make no claims about English compared to other languages.

<comment><USER16> Examples from colloquial French with number of syllables:

on (1) = we (1)

trop (1) = too (1)

assez (2) = quite (1) (this one you could translate a few different ways including plutôt, pas mal, très, etc...)

printemps (2) = spring (1)

été (2) = summer (2)

hiver (2) = winter (2)

on boit (2) = we drink (2) [1]

It's also easy to come up with examples where French requires fewer syllables:

hier (2) = yesterday (3)

demain (2) = tomorrow (3)

on se voit (2, possibly 3 if you enunciate carefully) = we see each other (5)

So I think your examples from Spanish are kinda cherry-picked.

At any rate, I'm not convinced that "number of syllables" is a very useful metric, since English syllables are more complicated and take longer to utter than Spanish ones.

[1]: In the formal/standard register this would be "nous buvons" (3 syllables), but in colloquial speech you would hear "on boit" 99% of the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> English grammar is too simple :-) Elaborate grammar gives you a lot of substance to play with. I root for German :-)

</comment><comment><USER18> Because the audience of the Economist is mostly English-speaking and who doesn't like a good ego-stroke, eh?

</comment><comment><USER19> Yeah, let's start with "why English is such a great language for puns", but then explain that it's not actually going to be about puns at all (an extremely difficult kind of joke to make because real puns are either grammatically incorrect, or nonsense without a strong established context or audience) but simply about any kind of play on words.

</comment><comment><USER20> I was hoping the comment section would be a bit more witty! Was looking forward to a few groans

</comment><comment><USER21> Can someone explain the pun in "LIBOR pains"?

<comment><USER22> Labor pains, I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I disagree that puns require exact homophones. Each language (group) has different tools for building puns. English, Chinese, etc. use mostly homophones since they are abundant.

Romance languages, in particular Portuguese and Spanish, and Italian to some extent, use many types of pun-building techniques that do not depend solely on homophones: clever rhymes, heteronyms, homographs and other quasi-homonyms. Having longer words means you can embed and concatenate into portmanteaus and puns. Latin and Greek word root prefix and suffix are also rich and an infinite source of puns.

Portuguese speakers are very found of puns and specially word play. So I think pun is a more of a cultural thing, as noted in this thread by some people, than a language feature.

Here's a few Brazilian "trocadilhos" (puns and word play).

\- "Fora Dilma vez!", instead of "fora de uma vez" \- meaning "Oust [president] Dilma now".

\- "Lula: Presidente da Silva", for "President for sure" where "da Silva" is Lula's last name but also colloquially means "for sure".

\- "Filhos da Fruta", fruit shop in São Paulo. Word play with "sons of a bitch/fruit"

\- "Rock in Rio", rock festival.

Spanish word play culture goes back centuries. Francisco de Quevedo for instance used this device often in his poems, and word play have been present in popular culture ever since. Here's a sample:

\- "El calvario de la alopecia", a title to an article ("the calvary of hair loss"). Word play with "calvo" (bald) and "calvario" (calvary).

\- "Digamelón", instead of "Dígamelo" ("hello?") when picking up the phone, a pun meaning "hello you moron".

\- "Timofónica", portmanteau of "timo" (scam) and "Telefónica" (phone company).

\- "Yo loco, loco, y ella loquita", (I'm crazy, she's crazier) which sounds like "Yo lo coloco, ella lo quita" (I put it in, she takes it out).

\- "La Tapilla Sixtina", a tapas bar, word play with "Capilla Sixtina" (Sistine Chapel).

Hopefully that gives an idea of the possibilities that make Romance languages pun rich.

But I have to say the English and Chinese press (and readers presumably) love puns more than anyone else for even serious articles, like the OP mentions. The former gets in trouble sometimes [1], and the latter was even outlawed [2]!

[1] [http://www.espn.co.uk/football/uefa-champions- league/story/1...](http://www.espn.co.uk/football/uefa-champions- league/story/1773354/bayern-munich-ban-daily-mirror-and-sun-journalists-for- manchester-united-return-clash)

[2] [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/28/china-media- wa...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/28/china-media-watchdog- bans-wordplay-puns)

</comment><comment><USER24> tl;dr Homophones considered charmful

<comment><USER25> tl;dr English is a punny language

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The pun is the lowest form of humor. There is a tendency, especially among educated males of a certain age, to start to feel themselves quite clever. These fellows, in order to demonstrate their cleverness to the world, being to subject their friends and family with an onslaught of puns. If you know such a punner, and you probably do, don't encourage them by saying things like, "I just love how your mind works" or "I never would have thought of that." Such encouragement can lead to years of future punning. These men need your help. I recommend a good hard slap.

<comment><USER27> To quote a better man than me:

>The assumption that puns are _per se_ contemptible, betrayed by the habit of describing every pun not as a _pun_ , but as a _bad pun_ or a _feeble pun_ , is a sign at once of sheepish docility and desire to seem superior. Puns are good, bad, and indifferent, and only those who lack the wit to make them are unaware of the fact. [0]

[0] Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 2nd Edition

<comment><USER26> Those who possess the wit but refrain, are the most admirable.

<comment><USER27> Ha, who said that? Stating your opinion as aphorism doesn't make it true.

The application of wit seems to me to only be a positive. Humor brings joy. Adding wit to a conversation makes it _strictly_ better.

<comment><USER28> Fowler stated his opinion in his book and you used that as an aphorism. Do you accept that as truth just because you know who said that, but don't even consider something that a pseudonymous user wrote? I have to say that you are a dumb sheep, even though I agree with you in the pun/humor matter.

<comment><USER27> First off, Fowler's lines aren't an aphorism. If they are, then all quotes are aphorisms. Was it an appeal to authority? Sure. Fowler was a genius. I'll more readily accept his authority than some pseudonymous user's.

Secondly, I did consider our grandparent's comment (see the second half of my reply). Should consideration be measured in word count or something? Should I have written him a paper?

I called him out on the comment because I see such pithy writing as fundamentally intellectually dishonest. Writing your (unsupported) conclusion with the trappings of a well-known adage misrepresents your (possibly personal) opinion as something already widely believed, staving off further argument.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Extraterrestrial craft existence 'proved beyond reasonable doubt' Pentagon chief - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/23/existence-ufos-proved-beyond-reasonable-doubt-says-former-pentagon/ <comment><USER2> No evidence has been given to sustain this claim other than the usual collection of videos and photos with artifacts that can be easily explained as natural phenomena, weather balloon, foreign experimental aircraft or -more embarrassing- a bug or dirt in the camera lens.

The person making the claim has a personal interest in promoting this idea since his department budget and now his civil career after retiring depends on it.

A particular red herring on this is the tiny budget this department had. Contact with an advanced alien civilization would have incredible consequences for our society and the country leading it would secure a privileged position in the international community. Yet this department operated under a budget of 22 million dollars, basically peanuts in the military, a quarter of the price of a single F-35A.</comment>


GpuScan and SSD-To-GPU Direct DMA - <AUTHOR> http://kaigai.hatenablog.com/entry/2016/09/08/003556 <comment><USER2> There is no explanation how it works. Does it work on top of existing APIs in user space? Or is there a custom kernel driver bypassing user space?

I've done some high throughput streaming from HD/SSD to GPU before, and it's pretty easy to beat the naive solution but getting the most out of it would require kernel space code.

I was doing random access streaming of textures using memory mapped files for input and copying to persistent/coherent mapped pixel buffers on the CPU with memcpy with background threads. This was intended to take advantage of the buffer caches (works great when a page is reused) and intended for random access. If I would have been working on a sequential/full file upload, my solution would be entirely different.

Edit: here's the source: [https://github.com/kaigai/ssd2gpu](https://github.com/kaigai/ssd2gpu)

It has a custom kernel module.

<comment><USER3> Its kernel module provides some special APIs. The userspase application (PostgreSQL) is enhanced to use them. From the point of user view, SQL still has been the interface to access the data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is very interesting in the light of recent AMD announcement of their "Solid State Graphics", ie GPU with SSD ducktaped on: [http://www.anandtech.com/show/10518/amd-announces-radeon- pro...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/10518/amd-announces-radeon-pro-ssg-fiji- with-m2-ssds-onboard)

</comment><comment><USER5> This would be incredibly useful for distributed machine learning - imagine a Tensorflow implementation that almost entirely bypasses CPU.

<comment><USER6> I was thinking the same thing, but is SSD to GPU faster than RAM to GPU? In many (not all) cases you buy a tonne of RAM and load your entire dataset into memory once and then iterate over it as necessary.

You also lose the flexibility of doing any sort of data modification or augmentation. One domain where your data usually doesn't fit in RAM is image recognition, but often you want to do things like apply random flips, crops and change hues before training to make the neural net less sensitive to those changes, which you can't really do with this.

<comment><USER5> SSD is probably not as fast as RAM, but it's much much cheaper, in the order of 10x per gigabyte. With SSD-GPU bridge you can have fast access to a multiple TiB training set, on a single machine.

Data pre-processing is indeed an issue, but hue adjustment/flipping/cropping could be implemented as Tensorflow operations, on the GPU. Similarly with input decompression - it would either have to be done on GPU, or the data would have to be stored uncompressed.

<comment><USER7> As long as the average bandwidth isn't a bottleneck, it's not going to matter - at worst, you're just going to need to prefetch (and due to SSD latency, that's likely optimal regardless).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So, if I understand correctly, data is being loaded directly from the SSD to the GPU and then filtered by the GPU before the CPU handles the more difficult queries.

Neat.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is very awesome. If further developed + made into a feasible option for PostgreSQL, this has potential to do interesting things to TPC benchmarks. :)

</comment><comment><USER10> See also [https://developer.nvidia.com/gpudirect](https://developer.nvidia.com/gpudirect) and to some extent [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVLink](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVLink).

NVLink is in the Power9 servers Google is using.

<comment><USER11> Do we have any data that Google is actually using their POWER9 boxes? I always read that as investing in anything not Intel (see also RISC-V), just to be in a better negotiating position with Intel for the vast number of CPUs that they buy.

<comment><USER10> Allegedly they have Power8 servers in their data centres:

 _Maire Mahoney, engineering manager at Google and now a director of the OpenPower Foundation, confirmed to The Next Platform that Google does indeed have custom Power8 machines running in its datacenters and that developers can deploy key Google applications onto these platforms if they see fit. Mahoney was not at liberty to say how many Power-based machines are running in Google's datacenters or what particular workloads were running in production (if any)._ [1]

It's pretty unclear what that actually means, though.

[1] [http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/04/06/inside-future- google-...](http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/04/06/inside-future-google- rackspace-power9-system/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm really hoping that Optane delivers on the hype, in which case our durable storage could be just 10x slower than RAM. At least, I imagine that it would be really helpful for speeding up even this approach.

</comment><comment><USER13> I hope this brings us closer to widespread external GPUs, where you could use a slower-than-PCIe bus like Thunderbolt 3 or USB 3.1 to upload all assets to the EGPU's SSD during a one-time loading screen.

</comment><comment><USER14> Amazing results! We need more of that kind of thinking - GPU/SSD accelerate all the things!

</comment><comment><USER15> Who is providing the DMA engine in this case? Has the GPU access to PCIe device memory?

<comment><USER3> NVME-SSD performs as DMAC in this case. All GPU doing is mapping its own device memory on the PCI BAR area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Direct Direct Memory Access? That's pretty direct.

<comment><USER17> Redundancy makes it pretty indirect

<comment><USER3> My headache is painful. It might be called "SSD-to-GPU P2P DMA".</comment></comment></comment>


Professors create free research-backed games to train your brain - <AUTHOR> http://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/january/train-your-brain.html <comment><USER4> Game 3 (All you can E.T.) which I just installed is 267.7MB on iOS, for what looks and plays like a flash game. The Android version is 39MB, so they should probably compress their textures or something in the iOS build.

Looks like it was built with minimal playtesting. Took me a couple tries to figure out how to play, for which I had to read the article.

On initial launch the game asks if the user is OK with their data being collected for research, but the 'No thanks' button/label is too tiny and too close to the large 'YES' button. I had meant to choose 'No thanks' but I think I clicked 'YES.

<comment><USER5> > _" On initial launch the game asks if the user is OK with their data being > collected for research, but the 'No thanks' button/label is too tiny and too > close to the large 'YES' button. I had meant to choose 'No thanks' but I > think I clicked 'YES."_

Perhaps with more traning, your brain will be better at helping you avoid aggressive 'YES' buttons :)

<comment><USER6> That sounds plausible, but a little speculative. Perhaps a follow-up study is in order?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _So far, no solid research has been able to show that brain training exercises change your thinking or behavior in measureable ways once you leave the smartphone screen_

[https://www.inverse.com/article/34018-lumosity-brain- trainin...](https://www.inverse.com/article/34018-lumosity-brain-training- games-does-it-work)

<comment><USER8> Interesting, and I also remember similar results from other studies, where essentially playing the game would make the subjects better at the game with no other provable benefit.

Now, the control for these experiments was amusing:

for one of the sessions:

> which played regular, dumb computer games

What would be a 'dumb' game is fascinating.

You'd have to find something that provokes no brain stimulation at all, no skill evolution while still being a game. Then if the 'game' was really completely void of content but the players kept playing it, would they end up in a kind o meditative state, potentially causing their abilities to increase ?

Another control group were doing crosswords, I guess to get a "well known quantity", but aren't crosswords also pretty demanding games depending on the people doing it? I'd be worse at crossword than building raiding strategies in an RPG for instance.

Somewhere I have the feeling these studies are deeply flawed with a lot of unchecked assumptions. Not by laziness per se, but it just seems that cognitive fields are inherently hard for rigorous studies.

<comment><USER7> Right, but then if 'Brain training' games are shown to be no different from other games that dont have that label then the label is still revealed to be bullshit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Simply put, I don't think the engagement is there with the entire genre of "brain training" games. They don't feel like "play" in the same way that one could easily slip into Stardew Valley and lose hours at a sitting. Forcing oneself to interact for 30 minutes a day is not feasible. Even if the benefits were are as palpable as actual exercise.

Contrast with the "Math AR" tool GeoGebra. The interface is not perfect yet. But it does give a glimpse at what a truly interactive geometry lesson would look like. As well as a medium that invites life-long learning ;)

[https://www.geogebra.org/](https://www.geogebra.org/)

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure about learning games, but video games in general have definitely improved my skills in life. Especially when it comes to problem solving and persistence. I tend to work at difficult problems the same way I work on tough levels in games.

I do think many games today don't teach this though. You need to be able to lose. Old games made you lose constantly, you had to learn the patterns and build up your reflexes and coordination. Much of life is actually like this. It's a valuable skill to be able to keep going at something until you get it. I've seen a lot of people just give up on things at the first hint of difficulty, video games taught me not to do that and because of this, i'll push and keep learning skills even when it gets frustrating and not so fun. There's a lot of things I would've given up on if I hadn't learned that the rewards for pushing through are usually worth it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> They have wrong control.

The control they should have is a group that lift weights [1], walks [3], swims or runs [2] for two hours.

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3448565/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3448565/) [2] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14628975](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14628975) [3] [https://www.nemours.org/content/dam/nemours/www/filebox/serv...](https://www.nemours.org/content/dam/nemours/www/filebox/service/preventive/nhps/pep/exerciseactive.pdf)

Also, I think they did not test transience of effect observed - how long will it last?

<comment><USER12> Interestingly, people have run wm training studies with these control groups!

(Historical caveats about trusting the results of a single training study apply)

[http://www.academia.edu/download/36902540/2015_ActaPsych_Mor...](http://www.academia.edu/download/36902540/2015_ActaPsych_Moreau.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > "We found replicated evidence across multiple experiments that playing our > games for two hours causes improvements in executive function skills as > compared to a control group that plays an unrelated game," said Mayer.

Christ what a low bar. That's like having your treatment group do jazzercise while the control watches TV, and then concluding that jazzercise is the most effective form of physical activity.

Your control group should be performing some sort of non-gaming intellectual exercise: reading a passage and answering some questions, having a group discussion on a serious topic, etc.

<comment><USER14> Low bars get you positive results. Positive results get you published.

<comment><USER15> The joke when I was in academia was that there were two ways to get lots of citations: publish a state-of-the-art model that gets cited because it's state-of-the-art, or publish a bad model that gets cited a lot because everyone wants to show how much they beat it by.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > The first game, Gwakkamolé, was designed to train inhibitory control, a > subskill of executive functions. Inhibitory control is the ability to > control one's attention, behavior, thoughts, and/or emotions.

A really simple way test/train your inhibitory control is play this "game" with partner. Have them hold up either 1 or 2 fingers. When they hold up 1 finger, you have to say "2" and when they hold up 2 fingers, you have to say "1". Try to do this as quickly and accurately as possible.

</comment><comment><USER17> I guess this is as _research-backed_ as movies are _based on a true story_.

<comment><USER18> Or the same way cosmetics are _science backed_.

Backed by a single simple study with too small a sample size and little or no control group, paid for by the group currently making the claim (a group who may have commissioned several other studies but didn't have them published because the results were not as complimentary to their cause).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Their study of adolescents[1] did not use a control group. This is an issue, as adolescent executive performance is likely naturally improving over time, and said improvement may be non-linear.

[1][https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036013151...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131517302154)

</comment><comment> geek-advised This isn't new. Games are proven to help a lot of things in the brain. For example reaction time: [https://www.futurity.org/video-games-speed-up- reaction-time/](https://www.futurity.org/video-games-speed-up-reaction-time/)

Maybe it's just me, but this gives me an ad feeling.

</comment><comment><USER20> The article sounds like an ad, and 2 out of 3 games listed doesn't sound like anything new.

That being said, I think what is being said is that these 3 mechanics in the games are particulary suited to improve your brain activities.

The 3rd game is reimplementation of one of the games that is proved to improve your cognitive abilities - and I'm sorry, I cannot remember the name - <USER2> was about forcing your brain to work on disonnanced tasks.

<comment><USER21> > I cannot remember the name

That's all the endorsement we need.

<comment><USER20> :) I would like to clarify that I didn't pursue using it for learning, so that's why. I believe the app was probably worth time investment if that's what you are looking for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is fascinating to me because I get the sense that this is the beginning of a movement that will fully legitimize video games.

I've played lots of games that require quick decision making skills and working memory, and perhaps it will become increasingly clear that when I played them, I wasn't just wasting my time.

As younger generations gain power, traditional wisdom will change and maybe people will start to see video games as productive. Really, the only downside I see with them is that they can displace exercise and face-to-face communication -- I know games can be social, but you really just need time talking to other people with no distractions. But if you balance your life appropriately, why not?

<comment><USER23> I am from a younger (ish) generation, and I think video games have been really destructive in some ways. They offer an incredibly seductive and easily accessible way to waste enormous amounts of time, and the worst aspect is that some of the brightest minds I know are the most affected. They, unlike most traditional hobbies, fill a human desire to exert control over their sphere of influence in a totally artificial way. In that way, I definitely think they've siphoned off some productive time from our most talented and otherwise ambitious.

I quit playing videogames when I was about 16 or 17 and I still look back on that as one of the best decisions I've ever made.

<comment><USER22> I'm a millennial, I've grown up with video games every bit as much as you have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Android versions:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.CREATELab....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.CREATELab.Gwakkamole)

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.CREATELab....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.CREATELab.CrushStation)

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.CREATELab....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.CREATELab.AllYouCanET)

</comment><comment><USER25> It sounds like they've literally just reimplemented Whack-a-mole, Simon Says (or something similar), and... OK, the third one sounds newer, although it reminds me of the pizza trolls in that Zoombinis game.

</comment><comment><USER26> I have a hard time believing an app is more beneficial to cognitive health or motor skills, especially for kids, than actively exploring the world outside.

<comment><USER27> Where does it say these improve motor skills? I saw no such claim being made.

Also I don't really get your point anyways. I'd think expanding one's mind would be accomplished by routines with good variety, and see no reason why there needs to be a choice between play outside and play on a tablet. Especially when a child is too young to really do much without supervision...

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Cool! I always wished somebody would create something like BrainWorkshop but not boring. In fact I myself implemented the BrainWorkshop-like 2n-back game (and it helped me a lot) immediately as the paper behind it got published, when no publicly available implementations existed but I'm not good at graphics and game design so a non-boring version was not something I could make.

<comment><USER4> It is still controversial whether n-back games improve working memory outside of the game context.

From [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-back](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-back):

> Two studies published in 2012 failed to reproduce the effect of dual n-back > training on fluid intelligence. These studies found that the effects of > training did not transfer to any other cognitive ability tests.[12][13] In > 2014, a meta-analysis of twenty studies showed that n-back training has > small but significant effect on Gf and improve it on average for an > equivalent of 3-4 points of IQ.[14] In January 2015, this meta-analysis was > the subject of a critical review due to small-study effects.[15] The > question of whether n-back training produces real-world improvements to > working memory remains controversial.

<comment><USER28> That's curious to know, so I thank you for the reference, yet I don't care much as it made and makes a huge difference for me personally. Perhaps that's because it may be really effective for just a portion of people with specific conditions in specific circumstances (e.g. I have ADHD and I also take nootropics which are meant to increase neuroplasiticy, neurogenesis and cerebral blood flow so the result is synergetic, nootropics alone don't give a boost so profound) or maybe what gets improved is not the working memory but something else playing important role in cognition. By the way it seemingly has also improved my emotional intelligence, not just analytical one - <USER3> didn't expect that.

<comment><USER4> Fair point, but may I ask if you feel there is an improvement intuitively, or if you also measure it in some way (other than the game score itself).

<comment><USER28> I don't really measure but I also wouldn't label it "an intuitive feeling" \- it's an observation (not just a feeling like when you're stoned and feel genius), although not scientifically credible. I have a well-developed self- observation skill and can always tell when my cognition is less (for an extreme example - avoid sleeping for some 36 hours, drink some booze and try to be smart - you'll notice it's hard and you don't really do well, no need to measure digitally) or more efficient. I believe I could measure if I knew a good way [to measure fluid intelligence] and was interested enough but that's not the case.

So, I recommend everybody to try n-back exercises for some time [and see if it helps them] and I usually mention that's kind of proven to help scientifically (at least in some papers) and empirically but avoid saying its efficiency is anything close to an unquestionable fact. As a result people (including very smart and educated already) immediately report feelings like stains have been removed from their brains and their mental gears got greased.

<comment><USER4> > I usually mention that's kind of proven to help scientifically (at least in > some papers) and empirically but avoid saying its efficiency is a strict > fact.

All good but I must disagree with "kind of proven". Things can be either proven or not proven, and this is not proven.

<comment><USER29> > Things can be either proven or not proven, and this is not proven.

On the contrary, nothing in science is ever proven, only disproven. We can have less or more confidence in a particular model; and whether you should use a particular model depends on the cost/benefit analysis.

In this case, there is some evidence that it might be helpful, although somewhat disputed; but playing the game certainly doesn't hurt, and doesn't cost much, so it might make sense to give it a try.

<comment><USER4> > On the contrary, nothing in science is ever proven, only disproven.

Sure, but science is a specific case and I was talking about the all-or- nothing nature of the meaning of 'proven' itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> A number of studies have demonstrated cognitive improvement from playing video games: [https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom- learn/201502...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom- learn/201502/cognitive-benefits-playing-video-games)

> Improved visual contrast sensitivity. Successful treatment of amblyopia. > Improved spatial attention. Improved ability to track moving objects in a > field of distractors. Reduced impulsiveness. Overcoming dyslexia. Improved > ability to engage in multiple tasks simultaneously. Increased mental > flexibility. Reduction of mental decline that accompanies aging.

Mainstream culture doesn't really want to accept this, for...a variety of reasons. And I still limit my son's screen time, even with games, because too much turns him into a dickhead and other activities are also important. But I don't doubt that for challenging games, there are cognitive benefits.

</comment><comment><USER31> There doesn't appear to be a link to the "eight research articles reporting on the effectiveness of these games" and google scholar doesn't show any relevant publications by these authors - has anyone come the actual data?

</comment><comment><USER32> Are those games FOSS?

</comment><comment><USER33> so play more memory games? gotcha</comment>


Is "junk DNA" essential for evolution? - <AUTHOR> http://www.murdoch.edu.au/News/Shaking-up-the-theory-of-evolution/?cid=rss <comment><USER2> It's fairly well-established that non-coding DNA regions are important for biological function. From regulatory elements that work via DNA and RNA bending, to the catalytic RNA molecules that are essential for genome maintenance, the portions of the genome that don't actually code for genes are full of interesting stuff. So the title is a bit sensational, really.

That said, transposable elements are really not the more interesting parts of the non-coding stuff -- we understand them well, and they don't _do_ much of anything except disrupt genes during reproduction. To draw a rough analogy: if you have a chunk of code with lots of changes in whitespace, it's probably also under heavy development. You would be wrong to conclude that _"whitespace is essential for software evolution"_ , but you might well be able to quantify the software development progress by tracking only the whitespace.

<comment><USER3> >the portions of the genome that don't actually code for genes are full of interesting stuff.

Thats true, but if you estimate that 2% of the genome is genes, perhaps a further 1% is regulatory elements and catalytic RNA. That still leaves a heck of a lot of 'junk'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ok, while I understand that this sort of article might be interesting, honestly it's only scratching the surface of the current state of the art (and the idea of TE's acting as fodder for evolution isn't exactly new).

Short reply -- Get Martin Nowak's book _Evolutionary Dynamics_

Long reply -- Even Nowak's work is just the beginning (disclaimer: my current Ph.D. thesis work is building off of Nowak's start). Let's start with this notion that TE's are vital for evolution. Real answer: sort of. You see, there's an awful lot of species that don't have an overabundance of "junk" DNA, yet are still able to adapt and evolve. The reason that TE's at least _seem_ to be more important in higher order plants and animals is because of how such organisms organize their genomes.

Ok, before I get carried away on a long rant, here's the heart of the matter for the hacker audience:

Proteins fold into domains. These are compact structures with a rough upper limit to their size that typically can carry out one biochemical function. In _E. coli_ , most genes code for proteins with only one domain. So, _E. coli_ can evolve by grabbing new genes, turning genes on or off, or in some circumstances, evolve new functionality from existing domains through random mutation. (In reality, random mutation takes a long time to produce anything useful, and the creation of novel domains appears to no occur. There's a theory growing in prominence that all of the protein domain folds that exist today were present when life began, and may even represent independent life originating events...but I'm getting off track.)

In humans, most of our proteins are multi-domain. Not all of these domains, however, are catalytic. That is, in a human protein with 5 domains, maybe only one actually has biochemical activity. The function of the rest is to modulate that activity or localize the protein to one part of the cell or another. Also, the mechanisms controlling when genes get turned on and off in humans is much more complex than in bacteria. Therefore, evolution in higher order plants and animals is much more likely to occur through a "shuffling" of domains and regulatory elements. Because TE's are good at "shuffling" DNA, it's not surprising that having a healthy dose of this sort of "junk" DNA is advantageous. Of course, that's not all...there's also neutral evolution and pseudo-genes and epigenetic inheritance, etc. Biology is really on the cusp of exploding (oh, and I'm writing a book about that too ;-).

tl;dr -- The genetics of higher order plants and animals is not unlike a program which relies heavily on many libraries. If you swap out one XML parser for a better XML parser, you'll get better performance (and more customers!). Transposable elements function (sort of) like biology's equivalent of a linker, and can help organisms swap in and out libraries/protein domains.

<comment><USER2> _"There's a theory growing in prominence that all of the protein domain folds that exist today were present when life began, and may even represent independent life originating events"_

Who in the world is advocating for _that_ theory? It sounds silly, on its face...one has only to spend an afternoon browsing the SCOP or PFAM databases to see that there's been a huge amount of recent evolution at the fold level, and that the domains that we know about have appeared over a very long time.

<comment><USER4> Gah! Ok, apologies. I have to learn to stop over-oversimplifying!

What I mean there was this: Mathematical modeling of the evolution of protein folds points toward the impossibility of convergently evolving folds (but not convergently evolving functionality). This implies that two proteins with the same fold can reasonably be assumed to have evolved from a common ancestor protein, even if that conclusion cannot be reached from sequence information.

Unfolded proteins (at least, above a certain length) cause problems for living things. Thus, the ability of evolution to freely explore fold-space is constrained. There is some interesting work going on in this space looking at the possibility networks of interrelated folds that don't pass through unfolded intermediates, but I think it's too soon to say, for certain, that these networks are sufficient to generate truly "novel" folds.

As for the SCOP classification system, my personal view is that it tends to be on the restrictive side. Of course, that's the point of SCOP: to robustly categorize folds. As for PFAM, it's been a while, but last I looked they still don't consider any 3D structural information in their classifications. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that, whether or not "novel" protein folds are actively appearing depends on your definition of "novel". If I mutate a residue in the middle of a helix that breaks the helix in two, is that a novel fold? If I then insert a few more amino acids and turn that one helix into a helix-turn-helix, is that a novel fold?

The theory I alluded to is not my own, but I can admire the logic behind it. The idea is that it is possible to group many folds through sequence and other (i.e. threading) means into derived folds. However, even when you do this, you don't arrive at a rootless tree. Instead, you find that there are somewhere (depending on who you ask) between 800 and 1300 "roots" to the fold family tree.

Presumably, these roots represent novel abiogenesis events. At the very least, these root folds must have existed before "modern" biology (i.e. the sort that cannot tolerate unfolded states) began. Whether they all have a common ancestor or not is very much up for debate, but so far I don't know that we have conclusive evidence one way or the other.

To be clear, though, I am guilty of oversimplification in the line you've picked out.

<comment><USER2> Nice post. (For the record, the simplification is understandable...I got my PhD in this stuff, so I'm not exactly the target audience.)

I agree that convergent evolution of protein folds seems unlikely to have happened frequently, but I'm not willing to dismiss it as impossible over the course of evolutionary time-frames. More importantly, I'm not willing to extend that idea to the conclusion that all protein folds must have been extant at the beginning of evolutionary history. There are simply too many ways for new protein folds to be produced -- and not necessarily by stepwise point mutations through stable intermediates.

You're right that PFAM isn't a structural classification system _per se_ ; they do what you describe a bit later, and build massive sequence profiles to detect homologies. But at the sequence identity levels used to build PFAM, you can safely assume that any sequence within a family that has a solved structure will probably share that structure's overall fold. The details will be different, but the fold will be conserved. That's really the point of PFAM (and why it has a symbiotic relationship with SCOP).

But here's the problem with drawing too many structural conclusions from sequence analysis: with state-of-the art algorithms, we can detect structural homologies out to about 25-30% sequence identity. Beyond that, we just don't know how to call two structures "similar" or "dissimilar", without having the structures themselves.

Point being, you can't really say that those 800-1300 "roots" of the evolutionary tree are independent starting points. All you can conclude is that our tools aren't good enough (or there isn't enough data) to trace back the evolutionary tree to the point where those "roots" may have converged.

For the record, I'm not trying to be pendantic or argumentative. This is one of those few fun debates that makes the field interesting. ;-)

<comment><USER4> Thanks. I'm always game for a good debate. As I mentioned, my thesis-in- progress (T-minus 3 months...fingers crossed!) is in a related field (evolutionary dynamics/computational biochemistry), but I used to be more involved in protein structure/bioinformatics back in the day (worked, for a time, in the lab that maintains ecogene.org).

The last debate I had regarding convergent evolution of protein folds got rather heated. This is one of those classic problems that can't be approached without some amount of hand-waving, and depending on which way you wave, you can arrive at different results. In some respects it boils down to Levinthal's paradox, except with evolutionary moves in place of topological ones. The one big unknown that you would need to find before you could make any sort of educated approach at the issue is what fraction of all possible protein chains of a certain size have stable, fast-folding structural minima. If that number is high, then short hops from one to the other could very likely result in convergence.

As for the SCOP/PFAM part of the story, the 25-30% "twilight zone" for sequences yielding related structures has a counterpart with structures that are topologically related but with low (or I've even seen cases of essentially no) sequence identity. That is, if you look at a group in PFAM, then take all of the members with structures in that group, gather all of the corresponding SCOP groups, add the members from the SCOP groups, then for each of those look for related PFAMs or other sequences...essentially, what you're doing is a structure informed PSI-BLAST (sort of what ESPRESSO is to T-COFFEE).

Now, if you attempt to fill the gaps from lack of structures by running each of your sequences through something like Skolnics TASSER threading algorithm, and using the best predicted folds to grow your group, this is how you can use distant sequence and structure homologies to construct "master" fold groups. This is, roughly speaking, how the 800-1300 number is arrived at.

Admittedly, the more structures we solve and genomes we sequence, the better this sort of technique will get. In many ways, this is biology's analog to cosmology and the big bang: we can look further and further out into space, but at some point, we can know what happened any earlier than some small time after the big bang without recreating those conditions. Likewise, we can sequence and solve more structures, but I don't doubt that at some point we will hit a wall and need to start attempting to recreate abiogenesis.

Interesting times!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What the meltdown looks like - <AUTHOR> http://www.2020hindsight.org/2008/10/02/what-the-meltdown-looks-like/ <comment><USER2> That is so sad.

I wish the best for all the working people of US, specially California, affected by this incredible situation.

It's unbelievable that the people who caused this are getting bailed out or walk away with their past few years worth of bonuses.</comment>


SHA-3 Finalists Announced - <AUTHOR> http://jonkatz.wordpress.com/2010/12/10/sha-3-finalists-announced/

<comment><USER2> Well, CubeHash didn't pass, keeping Daniel J. Bernstein (mostly) out of the running for SHA-3. Oh well. Meanwhile:

* BLAKE combines DJB's ChaCha stream cipher core with Eli Biham's HAIFA framework; HAIFA, like Merkle Damgard (MD), isn't a hash function but rather a scheme for turning things like the core of another cipher into a hash function; HAIFA is a response to MD that (among other things) eliminates length-extension attacks. I hope BLAKE wins.

* Grøstl (meaning "hash", in the "corned beef" sense) is a hash that borrows heavily from the internal components of AES, and includes among its contributors one of Vincent Rijmen's (of AES nee' Rijndael fame) gra students.

* JH is a Singaporean design similar to Grøstl in the sense of borrowing AES machinery, and is optimized for hardware.

* Keccak is a hash built on "sponge model", which (like HAIFA) is an alternative to the classical MD construction, and was co-designed by Joan Daemen (also of Rijndael fame). Keccak looks like the most interesting design in the contest.

* Skein is Furgusen and Schneier's design, based on their Threefish block cipher function (which they designed for the hash). Threefish is said to be similar to DJB's Salsa20 stream cipher; the Skein hash combines it with "UBI", a custom version of the Matyas-Meyer-Oseas compression function (which is _extremely_ simple; just Wikipedia it). Skein appears to have more real cryptanalysis results against it than the others, and maybe a little less theory and a little more practicality.

Colin will I'm sure chime in with more math details, which go right over my head.

SHA256 is widely considered sound as it stands today. The big problem with it is that it's bulky and slow. So the first thing you'd hope to get from SHA3 is speed.

SHA256 is a classical Merkle-Damgard design. The MD construction is widely considered outmoded. So the other thing you expect to get from SHA3 is a cipher that uses a different fundamental construction for taking a block function and turning it into a hash.

A nice side effect of getting rid of MD is that you no longer have length- extension attacks. It's shocking when this sinks in, but the output of (say) SHA1 is simply the internal state of the SHA1 hash at the point where the input starts. The SHA1 design starts with a series of 32 bit registers and grinds plaintext through them; a SHA1 hash is simply the resulting 32 bit registers, catted together. What this means is that attacks can feed _more_ plaintext to through SHA1, without knowing what the original plaintext was, simply by using the output of a SHA1 hash as the initial values of the SHA1 registers. Bad! This, by the way, is the reason you use HMAC-SHA1 and _never_ SHA1 to authenticate messages.

I hope BLAKE wins, but if it doesn't, I hope Keccak wins, because its design seems to be the furthest from what we have today (HAIFA seems like a direct evolution of MD, and Matyas-Meyer-Oseas basically seems like calling CBC-MAC a hash function). But I am not the least bit qualified to hold this opinion! I just break shit.

Interesting how likely it is that either Vincent Rijmen or Joan Daemen (or both) will have their fingerprints on _both_ AES and SHA3.

<comment><USER3> So I haven't been keeping track of the SHA-3 competition as well as I have been. Do you (or anyone else who happens to wander by on HN) happen to know if all of these finalists are using non-MD constructions that are resistant to length extension nonsense? Is there a possibility among these choices that NIST could still possibly pick a SHA-3 vulnerable to length extension?

<comment><USER2> Resistance to length-extension attacks is one of NIST's requirements for the competition; a hash that had that vulnerability would have been disqualified.</comment></comment></comment>


The end of capitalism has begun (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-capitalism-begun <comment><USER2> But will anyone actually currently alive actually see it? If the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay liquid, how are we supposed to be able to predict when this is going to happen? Also, surely change is inevitable, but who is to say it's going to become as the article says. Reads too much like a prophecy for my liking.

<comment><USER3> Read an article recently here on Hacker News that with capitalism being based off the notion of growth, and many places experiencing a stall in population growth there essentially won't be new consumers for capitalism to work since there won't be new growth and might actually be diminishing growth.

Also wonder if that is why all those companies signed that letter today saying that shareholder value isn't paramount. Maybe it is acknowledged that growth can't happen forever because it can't.

<comment><USER4> This sounds like an invitation to AI consumers, Douglas Adams talked about clones to buy things culminating in the shoe event horizon.

However connect up some AI's with bitcoin and a penchant for personalising their avatar funded by web extortion and you've got something which is far more buzzword compliant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > It means driving the wages, social wages and living standards in the west > down for decades until they meet those of the middle class in China and > India on the way up.

It bears repeating that this is only possible because borderless corporations using free-moving capital can arbitrage border-locked labour - people for whom meaningful freedom of movement (including the freedom to work) is not possible.

EDITED to correct spelling.

</comment><comment><USER6> Perhaps worth noting that the author is very left-wing and used to be a member of a Troskyst group. The end of capitalism is a matter of ideology for the author.

<comment><USER7> Love to know the thought processes of the folk who downvoted this undeniably factual observation. As Wikipedia points out "In another New Statesman article published the following year he (Mason) described himself as an "actual Marxist".

<comment><USER8> Hi, I'm the downvoter.

When I downvoted the post, the phrase "The end of capitalism is a matter of ideology for the author" wasn't there, or I just missed it entirely (in which case, my bad), so it looked to me like a simple ad-hominem with no rhyme or reason.

Now I see what the message meant, so I retracted the downvote. Next time I'll make sure to ask for clarification before hitting the down arrow.

As an aside, Mason can say whatever he wants, but every time I read him I get the distinct impression that while he may have some left-tinted idea, an a whole I wouldn't define him as "very left-wing". He looks more like a proponent of some sort of "humane capitalism".

> As Wikipedia points out "In another New Statesman article published the > following year he (Mason) described himself as an "actual Marxist".

Not that it matters much, but I can't find it on [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Mason_(author)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Mason_\(author\)) (I also checked if someone removed it today, but there's nothing in the article's history that removed that phrase).

<comment><USER6> It's Paul Mason: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Mason_(journalist)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Mason_\(journalist\))

I did add the second sentence later, but I think that the first is clear enough in making the point that Mr Mason's take on capitalism is ideological.

<comment><USER8> > It's Paul Mason

Ok, it's now clear I need some coffee. Sorry for all this mess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Let me guess _another_ Paul Mason article?

That guy is absolutely obsessed with Capitalism like it abused him as a child.

</comment><comment><USER10> This article is from 2015. Is the beginning of the ending of capitalism done beginning?

<comment><USER11> The opposite actually; we're seeing the downfall of socialism.

Syriza was defeated by a capitalist right-wing group.

Just sticking to that area of the world: Turkey, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Italy, Germany, and Poland is conservative or right wing.

Russia is controlled by a super majority of anti-communists. Russia is being falsely portrayed as big bad in the media because they are anti-commie; because of their recent experience with communism.

Socialism/communism is being thrown out the door.

<comment><USER12> Socialism/communism are not the opposite of capitalism, and this is the strawman that the US government has been using for decades to fleece their own citizens.

<comment><USER11> I would love you to explain it to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One problem with all of those ideas about "the end of capitalism" is that they are missing the core point of capitalism itself, which is having money (i.e. financial assets, i.e. the "capital") as a store of value.

The article uses the comparison with the end of feudalism, but feudalism only ended once one form of value store -- the land -- was replaced by another -- the capital. As long as some form of society exists, there will be a need for a way to store and transfer value.</comment>


Where the Console.WriteLine Rubber Meets the Road - <AUTHOR> https://www.akridgetech.com/blog/2017/11/18/where-the-console-writeline-rubber-meets-the-road/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello, everyone, first time poster, long time reader. I got the idea for this post after reading HostileFork's excellent look into the printf function, and thought it'd be interesting to take a look at the .NET equivalent.

Please let me know if I got anything wrong!</comment>


Scala has now one of the highest relative job trends in Indeed - <AUTHOR> http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=scala%2C+ruby%2C+python%2C+c%2B%2B%2C+c%23%2C+clojure%2C+java%2C+javascript&l=&relative=1

<comment><USER2> The absolute version of the graph, as opposed to the growth version, shows a different story:

[http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=scala%2C+ruby%2C+python%2C...](http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=scala%2C+ruby%2C+python%2C+c%2B%2B%2C+c%23%2C+clojure%2C+java%2C+javascript%2C+php&l=)

The fastest growing languages also happen to be the languages with the least jobs. I imagine Scala's growth will tail off a long time before it can compete in sheer number of jobs with javascript or java.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, known and painful, but the point of the post is to show it's _relatively_ growing, and doing so very fast. Many people (such as myself) look at the absolute number and get discouraged, so this is a little good news to Scala fans

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Try adding Objective-C to to the chart and then see which looks the highest.

[http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=scala%2C+ruby%2C+objective...](http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=scala%2C+ruby%2C+objective-c&l=&relative=1)

Edit: I'm sure there are tons of other examples of this, too, but Objective-C seemed like the grossest omission.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops you are right, good point, I am not a mobile developer so only web and desktop crossed my mind (also Indeed already has iOS on top 3 top trends on the front page of /trends) How should I change the title to reflect it? (though I think for non mobile developers it's still an important insight)

Edit: changed the title to be a little more correct, feel free to suggest how to make it better

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> ColdFusion, a language derided by many, has more absolute job postings than Scala, Clojure, and Groovy:

[http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=scala%2C+coldfusion%2C+clo...](http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=scala%2C+coldfusion%2C+clojure%2C+groovy&l=)

(Of course, the obvious growth trend shows that won't always be the case)

This means .. absolutely nothing. The original linked chart showed little more. I doubt Scala developers are excited by the day they finally catch up with ColdFusion. The relative trend chart might lead one to believe that they'd be better focusing on Scala than Java, even though there's about 100X more jobs postings for Java. (per Indeed's data)

<comment><USER5> now add html5 [http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=scala%2C+coldfusion%2C+clo...](http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=scala%2C+coldfusion%2C+clojure%2C+groovy%2C+html5&l=) (yeah, i know it's not a programming language, but hey it's basically javascript in recruiter speak)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Most of the search results for "scala" in my area (seattle) are not actually Scala jobs, they just mention it, as in "experience with scala and 3 other languages we don't actually use is a plus", so not sure how accurate the graph is.

<comment><USER7> Yeah this is pretty important to note, it seems like most Clojure this job posting are like this too unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> On LinkedIn Skills Scala grew 30% and Clojure 48%:

\- <http://www.linkedin.com/skills/skill/Scala>

\- <http://www.linkedin.com/skills/skill/Clojure>

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, those percentages are people with those skills, so it means Clojure has higher _supply_ growth than Scala, and (according to Indeed) Scala has more _demand_ than Clojure (both in absolute numbers and in relative growth) As much as I love Clojure, this moves the needle a bit toward Scala regarding where I should put my focus on.

<comment><USER8> No, this numbers are year by year change, so putting your efforts on Clojure seems the best option.

<comment><AUTHOR> Still if Clojure has higher growth than Scala in people knowing it, but lower growth than Scala in companies wanting to hire people knowing it, then sadly I still have to disagree. Is my logic completely flawed?

<comment><USER8> Sorry, I don't think this is a 100% correct logic, but may be the grow in LinkedIn shows some information that is not gathered at Indeed and the reverse is also true.

LinkedIn shows that more people were adding the Clojure skill, it can be a new skill within people who was working on a company for long and it doesn't appear on Indeed. At the same time Indeed captures recruiting alternatives but when the job was published (not on alternative and important channels like presenting an acquaintance)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Substitute jQuery for Javascript and the graph's trend becomes very different.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but I tried to focus on Languages, not libraries / frameworks.

The reason I posted it was

1) most people think (at least I did) that Scala has no jobs (well, absolute job count is still low, but it's encouraging to know it's growing fast)

2) my surprise, as it seems that Indeed changed the algorithm of the graph, few months back it was a different picture (Scala was behind Clojure for example)

3) seems the trend is faster than Ruby, which is interesting

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> That chart is statistically meaningless.

It just shows % change since an arbitrary date in the past. Obviously, since different languages are on different parts of the growth curve, it results in a pretty unfair comparison. In particular, it will give very high values for any language that happened to be starting from a very small base at the beginning of the time period under consideration.

log of absolute values would be a _much_ more interesting chart.

</comment><comment><USER11> Since the length of the sample is small the variance is big, so the numbers obtained for the conclusion are noisy, (random effect has a big impact).

Sea reference hear for some comments are the law of small numbers, the most dangerous equations and the like <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893258>

</comment><comment><USER12> If you add node.js to the end of list, the graph will be more interesting [http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=scala%2C+ruby%2C+python%2C...](http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=scala%2C+ruby%2C+python%2C+c%2B%2B%2C+c%23%2C+clojure%2C+java%2C+javascript%2Cnode.js&l=&relative=1)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but as I said, I tried to limit this to programming languages, not frameworks or libraries.</comment></comment>


Visualising dependencies in Go - <AUTHOR> http://dave.cheney.net/2014/11/21/visualising-dependencies

<comment><USER2> Wasn't the original goal 'Reducing the coupling between our core packages'? How is a fully display of all the transitive dependencies necessary for that?

The goal already implies, that what's important here, are the (both direct and indirect) dependencies between their packages. To understand those better, you do not need to draw a dependency to any Go core library or other 'uninteresting' library, which would be a leaf in the directed graph or whose transitive dependencies are only 'uninteresting'.

I think those chord graphs might actually be the way to go, if you'd just restrict the amount of packages to the relevant ones.

It might be nice to automatically add references to source lines where those dependencies are needed to the tooltip.

</comment><comment><USER3> You should try Dependency Structure Matrix. In my experience they are more scalable than other forms of software visualization. See [https://github.com/facebook/pfff/wiki/CodeGraph](https://github.com/facebook/pfff/wiki/CodeGraph)

</comment><comment><USER4> If anyone's trying this at home, I'd suggest scoping down the problem a bit:

\- Trying to get rid of a specific problematic dependency? It's easy to filter a DAG to only those paths that lead to a particular node.

\- Trying to reduce the raw number of dependencies? Consider collapsing clusters of transitive dependencies down to a single node. (If one of your direct dependencies pulls in 20 unique deps of its own, you don't really need to know what they are or how they're connected to each other -- just that there are 20 of them.)

</comment><comment><USER5> I tried something similar with Julia packages [1] but I only tried force graphs - with similarly poor results for the most part. The data I used is already out of date (got another 80 packages since then! [2]) so maybe a good reason to revisit with these other graph styles.

[1]: [http://iaindunning.com/2014/pkg- deps.html](http://iaindunning.com/2014/pkg-deps.html)

[2]: [http://pkg.julialang.org/pulse.html](http://pkg.julialang.org/pulse.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Yikes, this post made me realize how I've never seen a chord graph that I liked or coherently communicated data. Is there anything they're actually useful for?

</comment><comment><USER7> Any implementations of this for Python?

</comment><comment><USER8> are there any good dot implementations in js?

<comment><USER9> [https://github.com/cpettitt/dagre/wiki](https://github.com/cpettitt/dagre/wiki)

<comment><USER8> perfect, thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Why is there no Facebook for programmers & hackers? - <AUTHOR>

Designers have Dribbble, Behance, etc. Businessmen have LinkedIn. HN is nice for simple article links but is hardly a robust network. Where are the social networks for programmers/hackers? <comment><USER2> There is, it's called github ;). More seriously, we don't feel the need to update our status every day. pushing code is our status, isn't it?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't see the need for that either; I'm referring to sharing things in a more visual way (Pinterest), making new code available (Github), adding friends and likeminded folks (Facebook), discussing topics in groups (LinkedIn).

<comment><USER3> The obvious answer to why is, no one's built it yet. Forrst supposed fill the showing off things in pictures void (plus it's exclusive, just like Facebook used to be). Github comes pretty close, you can even have a personal page (though updating has be done via pushes).

A feature I'd like to see in such a site is a repository/tool for defining syntax rules & colorschemes for editors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> in a way, google+ is a facebook for programmers, designers, geeks and startupers. nobody else gives a damn.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you can remove the word "else" from the last sentence. ;o

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Answer: <http://dialog.gs> Launching this week :)

<comment><USER6> do you have an invite?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Do they need it? There are twitter, reddit, HN, irc, stackexchange, Github, and facebook itself. Why programmers & hackers need special social network if they can interact with many networks?

<comment><USER8> I think most hackers and coders are on Twitter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> <http://versioneye.com/> is a community around Software Libraries. They will release a news wall with comments and statuses in the next weeks.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Github is a glorified repository. Sorry, but any "social network" that requires code pushes isn't intended for that. :)

</comment><comment><USER9> StackOverflow and StackExchange. I consider HN a social network for hackers too.

</comment><comment><USER10> <http://geekli.st>

</comment><comment><USER11> Forrst is supposed to be that.

</comment><comment><USER12> how are programmers and hackers different?

<comment><USER13> That's obvious. Programmer is somebody who create source code. Hacker is someone who learn alot about IT stuff and knows multiple times more than typical coder. Someone who can solve real problem. Programming is a craft, hacking is an art.

<comment><USER12> It's not obvious. The word has become ambiguous. It was once used to describe a certain sort of programmer, but can mean just about anything now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Isn't this it?

</comment><comment><USER15> Github.</comment>


Is CoreOS still working on Torus - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/coreos/torus <comment><USER2> See the project status posted in Feb. 2017: [https://github.com/coreos/torus#project- status](https://github.com/coreos/torus#project-status)

tl;dr no further work has gone into the project.</comment>


Why Google IS afraid of Microsoft, big time - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zdnet.com/micro-markets/?p=1191 <comment><USER2> He he, yeah, I'm sure Sergey and Larry are having lots of sleepless nights over at the googleplex ;)</comment>


Show HN: Video Hub App is now open source - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App <comment><AUTHOR> Previously:

Show HN: Video Hub App – like YouTube for videos on your computer

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17587992](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17587992)

<comment><USER2> Seems a bit pointless to me. But then again, we are in a world where we have the _exercise bike_ – like a bicycle but without going anywhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unsure I follow. What's pointless?

<comment><USER2> > like YouTube for videos on your computer

Instead of saying "It's just like going online to watch videos, except you are not actually going online", you might as well say "Watch videos".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Wanchour, a web application to manage your deployments - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/youknowriad/wanchour

<comment><USER2> Looks great! looks like capistrano</comment>