Americans Are Paying $38 to Collect $1 of Student Debt - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-19/americans-are-paying-38-to-collect-1-of-student-debt?cmpid=BBD051917_BIZ&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=170519&utm_campaign=bloombergdaily <comment><USER2> A supposedly college educated American can't make $5 a month payments in order to clear their credit report and set themselves up for _$0_ per month payments from that point forward? And it's the loan servicing companies are to blame?

What am I missing here? Is it too hard to Google "income based student loan repayment" and read for a few minutes to know what to ask for? Or these people would rather have creditors calling them all day and a credit score of 300?

It's a completely separate matter that the Obama administration setup a system where we pay $1800 to debt collectors to collect $45 just so that the payer can default again. What is the point of collecting $5/month? I understand maybe trying to get at least a regular payment setup -- that's probably worth paying the debt collector $50 if they can manage it. But $1,800? Wow...

<comment><USER3> It's not that simple

– parent loans are based on the parents' income, which makes income-based repayment useless

– loan servicers don't want you on income-based repayment, so if you ask them about it they're not helpful whatsoever

– they fuck up the paperwork CONSTANTLY, almost every year I have to apply for income based repayment 2-3 times because they lose the paperwork or make some asinine error

– no one is actively educating grads about the program because there's nothing to be gained from it

– if you get married your spousal income is factored into the payment, even if your spouse also has loans

It's not a one time simple thing and you're done situation. It's a pain in the ass and almost no one will help you figure it out.

This is an industry that thrives on the illiteracy the average American has in personal finance. I know multiple people who ruined their credit because they didn't know the unemployed get temporary loan deferments.

<comment><USER4> > the illiteracy the average American has in personal finance

These are supposed to be college educated Americans.

<comment><USER5> I didn't understand that our tax brackets in the US are marginal (i.e. we don't pay 35% of our _entire_ income if we are in that bracket), until a quarter way into my PhD program.

It never ceases to amaze me some of the basic stuff in life I still don't know.

Luckily I researched how to pay off my undergraduate student loans in the best manner as soon as it was time to start ponying up.

<comment><USER6> > I didn't understand that our tax brackets in the US are marginal (i.e. we > don't pay 35% of our entire income if we are in that bracket), until a > quarter way into my PhD program.

Is this common? How do we educate people about this? How can we have a serious conversation on tax reform when people don't know what system we have now? Personally, I want an end to most deductions and credits (but honestly because there are so many that I'm not using and never will use). However, if wager that the only people who know about them are the people who use them.

For example, the Masters exemption for Airbnb hosts makes no sense.

<comment><USER7> Misunderstanding how marginal taxation works not only seems common in the US, but I suspect it's something that is encouraged, as a way to get poor people to support cuts in taxes on the highest brackets.

<comment><USER8> Also the United States tax code is amazingly complex.

<comment><USER6> Yes and simplifying it involves in pissing off a lot of people. Closing loopholes makes people made. People who have money. People who will spend money to keep things the way they are. And (sometimes) we are those people.

I don't know how we can ever actually simplify the tax code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Close to 80 percent of borrowers who rehabilitate their debt make the > minimum $5 monthly payment, according to a 2015 estimate by the National > Council of Higher Education Resources, a lobbying group that represents > student debt collectors and servicers. That means the Education Department > is paying its debt collectors up to $1,710 per borrower to collect around > $45, regardless of whether the borrower continues to make her payments.

In other words, the government is paying through the nose in order to artificially reduce actual default numbers.

<comment><USER10> Here (Canada) you can get your loan forgiven if you can plead your case. This only applies to government loans and not private ones made directly through banks.

Tuition fees are still outrageous compared to what they used to be, the subsidies are slashed to nearly nothing, but at least you're not going to be bled dry if you can't get a job when you graduate.

<comment><USER11> Don't you see the connection? School fees are high partly because people can get free money to pay them. This of course screws the people who do not take the free money by defaulting on loans.

<comment><USER12> Pretty much, why is an "inexpensive" college over $12k a year, with community colleges charging upwards of $7k a year? Seems crazy that the minimum you can spend on college is $40k, how is that accessible to the average person?

<comment><USER13> Well, when you consider the average car price in the US was $33k in 2016, it doesn't seem that unreasonable.

<comment><USER14> I doubt that students:

1\. Have money to buy a new car

2\. Can buy a new car every year

<comment><USER15> They could buy a new car every year if they give up avocados. But you know college kids, they're all high on guac.

<comment><USER16> That was a story that I found outrageous.

I recall my distant relative and another few of my friends got a house here in Toronto when they were 1/4 - 1/3 of what they are now. All while their salary being maybe 10% less.

And then the older generation starts lecturing us... Completely disconnected with the current reality.

<comment><USER17> Of course, the houses were cheap back then because it was a petty undesirable place to be.

Incremental change tends to be less noticeable if you see it every day, but as someone who visits Toronto just a handful of times per year it blows me away how much the city has changed in even just the last 10 years. Once old and run down neighbourhoods that I wouldn't ever want to live in are now highly desirable places to be. While I'm a bit too young to have much perspective on the situation 20-30 years ago, from what I've learned from those who lived in those neighbourhoods back then, it was even sadder and even scary to live there.

I am surprised they were only 1/4 of what they are now.

<comment><USER10> > Once old and run down neighbourhoods that I wouldn't ever want to live in > are now highly desirable places to be.

There's never really been "scary" places to live in Toronto apart from a few neighbourhoods and housing projects. The places that people describe as scary just have a lot more "character" than other parts. You'll see mentally ill people on the street, those with physical disabilities, those who are dirt poor. In other parts of the city they're swept away or ignored.

What you're describing is gentrification. Gentrification has happened.

<comment><USER17> I'm going to have to disagree with you on your first point. A friend of mine purchased a house from in what is now a bustling tech community with all kinds of money around, but the past is still evident. There were bars on the windows. Visible damage to the home where someone tried to break in. Others who lived in the area in the past also echo similar sentiments of how it used to be.

Of course those are just anecdotes, but the data confirms it. Crime rates have declined meaningfully over the years. Gentrification made these nice places to live, but the decline in crime is why they are less scary. Unless you are trying to imply that crime isn't scary?

<comment><USER10> Most of the crime comes from crackhead types, and those people are allergic to conflict. They like to break into places when nobody's home, grab a few things and bolt. They love garages, they hate homes.

I've known people that have lived in Parkdale for thirty years, and while it's better now, less petty crime, it's never been an especially violent place. "Sketchy" in Toronto means places where you can't leave your bike unattended for six seconds or where your garage will be ransacked by people every couple of years if the door isn't locked properly.

Gentrification pushed the troublemakers further away, jacked up rents, and changed the demographics substantially. It's a whole different town in some places.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It would be much better to send those defaulters to prison where the annual cost is typically more than the most expensive colleges in the country...oh wait, maybe we should just send them to college and pay for it, that might save even more money?

<comment><USER19> Before we start paying for it, we should ask why the costs have increased so dramatically in the last 10 years, and why the benefits of a degree have gone down. Then, neither debt nor debt collection would be an issue.

After all, the reason people can't pay back their debts is 1) even state colleges are expensive, and 2) the job market doesn't reward degrees. It's not like changing the payer of tuition from the individual to the government is going to change either of those issues.

<comment><USER20> > Before we start paying for it, we should ask why the costs have increased so > dramatically in the last 10 years

When I started college in 2000, in-state tuition at my alma mater (a major state university) was $3,021 for 2 semesters. I just looked and it's now $10,968 for the same 2 semesters. In 17 years, tuition went up 263%. From what I can tell, inflation over the same period was 42%.

At this rate, I'm scared that I will literally never be able to save enough to put my daughter through college without taking out loans, assuming tuition continues this trend. Something has _got_ to give.

<comment><USER21> If she's young enough to learn another language well in time, you could consider sending her to Europe. All in all, it's still cheaper and possible to get by with summer jobs and some help from parents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Here's the thing, if you do as many seem to be suggesting and give up on collections for this small percentage of loans, then your default rate will go up as people realize there are no consequences.

It's not as if we are spending $38 for every $1 in student loans - the vast majority of them have no money spent on collections.

$38 seems crazy high to me, and given the fact that it's the federal government in charge I'm sure it's horrifically inefficient, but we can't just walk away from the money or it all goes to hell.

<comment><USER23> > then your default rate will go up as people realize there are no > consequences.

I don't see a problem with that. How about this - in a similar manner to the 'starve the beast' ideological mantra we can starve the student loans beast to force change.

(Just like starve the beast I expect that it wouldn't work and we'd just end up totally messing up some systems that rely on that money, but desperate times right?)

<comment><USER24> It's a very bad idea to train everyone that their debts are optional, and that they have no obligation to pay them back. Loans for people who won't abuse the system will become much more expensive to make up for those who don't pay them back.

<comment><USER23> Debts _are_ optional to repay, and there are legal frameworks to resolve debt disputes if you choose not to. Businesses do it every day why shouldn't people?

Student loans are completely outside of this framework because they're risk- free for the lender and can't be discharged at bankruptcy by the lendee.

Because of this the loan costs for those that present a good and bad debt proposition are basically the same - I'd call this more of an abuse.

<comment><USER24> I completely agree that they shouldn't be risk free - that was probably a harebrained idea to make college cheaper and more accessible to everyone, but it completely messes up the incentives.

And I know they're technically optional. What I was saying is that we shouldn't be trying to build the idea that it's OK to default if you're better off financially not paying people back into our culture. Trust is important to the functioning of society.

<comment><USER23> > _What I was saying is that we shouldn 't be trying to build the idea that > it's OK to default if you're better off financially not paying people back > into our culture. Trust is important to the functioning of society._

I disagree with this. We saw people during the GFC screwing themselves by continuing to pay mortgages that they were underwater on out of some misguided sense of honour.

In that case, they should have walked away and left the bank saddled with the stranded asset. Loans are a commercial proposition with a risk and a reward. Introducing washy hard to define concepts like 'trust' to pressure one side only screws the good guys - the unscrupulous ones will do what they want.

Better to have a clear playing field where both lenders and lendees understand there will be situations in which the loan isn't going to get repaid and have the risk of that priced in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "I don't see how anyone wins from this system other than the collection industry," said Adam S. Minsky, a Boston-based lawyer who represents student debtors.

The thing is, that's precisely the point of the system. The same can be said of health insurance. It isn't to service debt, it is to prop up an industry that has grown around servicing that debt.

<comment><USER26> The collection industry. And presumably Mr. Minsky.

<comment><USER27> Plus, de Vos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Why does the government even pay companies to manage and rehabilitate student loans? Even if a student defaults on said debt, that debt is practically impossible to discharge even if you file for bankruptcy.

<comment><USER29> The biggest problem I have seen is people can get into situations that instead of just owing the government the debt starts getting passed around like a hot potato and it becomes increasingly difficult to get a hold of who owns your debt right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Has anyone actually dealt with a default? Sadly, I have. It's like dealing with a thug, mixed with trying to do taxes on your own with no knowledge of the exact repayment. It's a tricky system they run. I went through default 3 times, once with my payment being higher without any transparency, and when I tried to pay the difference, I was apologized to, and kicked off. I don't know if it's been made better in the past few years, but that was the worst experience for an education I don't even use today.

</comment><comment><USER31> How about we make a website where it is easier for students to pay back your loans? The healthcare.gov for student loan payback?

As one commenter said, it's difficult to pay back your loan when your debt is being passed around to different collectors like a hot potato and it's increasingly difficult to get a hold of who owns your debt right now.

Edit: already exists, it's called Studentloans.gov.

</comment><comment><USER32> Putting the "Student Debt" essential concept and current state aside, I mean, this phenomenon got to get a deep massive reform, but just regarding the topic of the title.

Sometimes, you'll pay $38 to collect $1, cause, otherwise, you will face a reality where you have $100 to collect and not $1.

In other words, enforcement costs and ROI shall not be measured by direct results and achievements, rather by the side effect of prevention.

It might costs $250K to put in jail someone who robbed 10 houses in total amount of goods of $10k. But you'll do it all the way to alram others.

</comment><comment><USER33> Suppose student debt payments were capped as a fraction of income, say 10%. It seems like this would align everyone's incentives correctly toward the student succeeding.

<comment><USER22> Or conversely, it would completely remove some individual's incentive to ever make life choices that would lead to paying that debt off.

<comment><USER34> Only that strange hypothetical person whose entire life goals revolve around avoiding payment of student debt.

<comment><USER35> I have a lot of friends from high school who seem to fit that description

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> On the other hand, if there's no efforts made to collect than no-one would want to pay.

It's like prison and retention. It's not worth it for the people it directly effects, but it is good because it encourages people to avoid it.

<comment><USER37> Maybe? I'm not sure the analogy helps here, as it seems unclear that prisons are an effective way to discourage crimes.

This here govt website suggests is the act of being caught that is the major deterrent to crime, not the severity of the punishment [https://nij.gov/five- things/pages/deterrence.aspx](https://nij.gov/five- things/pages/deterrence.aspx)

Original source: [http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/670398?seq=1#page_scan_t...](http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/670398?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents)

<comment><USER36> Or prisons do discourage crimes, they just don't do so very well if the suspects aren't brought to justice. People are natural gamblers, and will be likely to discount the risk of punishment if there's a decent chance they'll get away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Put another way, Americans subsidize 97% of the financing of assisted post- high-school education, regardless of profitability or how inefficiently such financing is structured.

</comment><comment><USER18> For students reading this, Germany offers absolutely free college & university education to everyone...even Americans coming there and most classes are in English.

<comment><USER39> There is usually a small fee of a few hundred Euros. Or at least, that's what a few German students told me.

<comment><USER40> Yes there is a registration fee, per semester. It avoids people who are not actually studying claiming student benefits (on public transport etc), and helps a little to clean the records for people who have effectively dropped out (and might instead be job seeking).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41>
       The Us government would  be better of using those billions to paying of loans in liu of service.
         You became a doctor or lawyer using goverment loans pay it off by working part time in goverment hospitals, health clinics and legal clinics. You got an MBA or became an Accountant pay it of by working part time in goverment administration or in goverment schools etc.

</comment><comment><USER42> Gotta prove that point, though. One thing I have learned is that, proving points, enforcing some rules, is expensive and wasteful.

<comment><USER43> More efficient to take tax refunds.

<comment><USER44> I know a few that had their wages garnished for non-student loan debt. Between that and tax refunds as you mentioned - there shouldn't be any reason to have collectors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Gotta prove that point, though.

</comment><comment><USER45> Only tangentially related but what is up with the massive increase in URL length?

Taking this one for example:

h t t p s://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-19/americans-are- paying-38-to-collect-1-of-student-debt

If you include the question mark query parameter separator, the tracking parts take up as many characters as the entire reference to the article itself:

?cmpid=BBD051917_BIZ&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=170519&utm_campaign=bloombergdaily

Am I just being an old-man-get-off-my-lawn about this or is there an actual purpose?

<comment><USER46> I am on your side. This stuff annoys me as well and I've posted about it in the past to no effect. The trailing tracking garbage in urls should be algorithmically removed. If this results in a paywall access block, then posts with such domain names should be blocked. It is absolutely not reasonable to post links that lead to paywalls because that is clearly and by definition, spam. Posting a link in the hope that it will result in someone buying something is totally different from posting a link to something that is news or discussion worthy. Posting commercial links such as all paywalls are is fundamentally spamming and is reasonably removed, blocked, and the poster banned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> We need to stop Government backed student loans immediately. Then we can watch tuitions drop like a rock!

If and only if we stop Government backed student loans will I be OK with some debt forgiveness or amnesty program.

<comment><USER48> It would be better if the states didn't treat education like indentured servitude. Society as a whole benefits immensely from an educated populous, and our tax dollars should in turn recognize this. Instead we have a population that's indebted to corporations precisely because there's no other means to pay of their student debt. Why take the risk of a startup or independent venture when you have 100k in debt to pay for an education that makes you a productive member of society.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> This is why a media studies degree is useless (assuming thats what the journalist writing this story got) as they probably don't teach basic math.

The point of collection is that it also acts a deterrent. So the $38 spent are not just to get the $1 back but also to tell others that government will go out of the way to get back that debt.

That $38 needs to be compared with the total $s that come in as repayments.

Also this is the reason why government should not be in the business of giving loans.

<comment><USER50> That's an absolutely insane way to do statistics. You can't just say "it's a deterrent" and then magically assume that anyone who pays their debts wouldn't have in absence of the evidently horribly inefficient debt collecting process.

<comment><USER49> If you think people will pay nevertheless government should declare the payment voluntary and see how many people pay.

<comment><USER51> That's not at all what he's saying. To judge the efficacy of a deterrent, you need to be able to identify the expected payment rate in the absence of said deterrent. The problem with that is that identifying the difference is incredibly difficult. If not damned near impossible.

That said, I'd question the deterrent effect. Per the article, nearly 40 percent of 'recovered' borrowers default within the next three years. Combined with paying debt collectors "nearly 40 times what they bring in," it seems as if there's a measurable problem with the current approach. But is that a problem with current recovery efforts, or merely a symptom of a larger issue? Like with most things student loan-related, there are no easy answers here.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Continued Fraction Arithmetic by Bill Gosper - <AUTHOR> https://perl.plover.com/classes/cftalk/INFO/gosper.txt <comment><USER2> If Gosper's Appendix to HAKMEM interests you, you may want to read some of the continued fraction papers by Oskar Mencer and his collaborators Michael Flynn, Martin Morf, and Wayne Luk. Suffice it to say, continued fractions can be used to replace floating point arithmetic (including some mathematical functions) directly. See, for example, [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2412477](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2412477).</comment>


Is the Google Toolbar a Trojan Horse for Ad Targetting? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/16/is-the-google-toolbar-a-trojan-horse-for-ad-targetting-ballmer-plays-the-privacy-card/

<comment><USER2> Although I don't want to jump the gun with accusations like TC, I'm still happy the issue is now being discussed more at the forefront - I was wondering how long it would be before an accurate perception of privacy reached the mainstream.

I tried to do my economics seminar on the web 2.0 monetization strategies. I wanted to liken the labor-leisure trade-off to a trade off between rent on privacy and monetary rent. [http://joeter.wordpress.com/2008/03/12/a-basic- economic-mode...](http://joeter.wordpress.com/2008/03/12/a-basic-economic- model-on-current-web-business-models/) My teachers shrugged off the idea as impractical.

</comment><comment><USER3> No.

(PS If they wanted to do that, they would just track your interests using the bazillion sites that have Google AdSense, a Google search box, Google Analytics, use Google Charts API, etc., etc..)

(PPS We are to believe the MSN toolbar is more or less evil than Google's?)

</comment><comment><USER4> Well, duh... of course!

So is Google Analytics and every other bit of 'free' widgetry or serving (as with the recent 'AJAX Libraries API').</comment>


Iπstant – Realtime Tweet Notifications - <AUTHOR> I am looking for users to try out my iOS app that provides a notification for every tweet.
One problem I've faced with Twitter is that because I follow a lot of users updates are missed from quite a few of them. Iπstant lets you create micro groups of upto three users and view all updates from these users. Additionally, you can enable notifications on a group and receive a notification for every tweet posted by the users in the group.
Notifications are timed and will automatically stop according to your selected preset interval.
A use case for this is following a live event on Twitter. You pick a few handles that are going to be tweeting about the event and enable notifications. Now, you don't have to be in front of your screen and can let the event updates come to you in the form of notifications. If you have an Apple Watch, you won't even need the iPhone.
There is TechCrunch Disrupt next week. You could use the app to follow along if you don't have time to be in front of a screen or are not attending.
If anyone would like to try the app, please email me at aashish AT pinary.io
Thanks, Aashish
http://twitter.com/aashishpatil <comment><USER2> I'm pretty sure the default Twitter app supports notifications on users tweets.</comment>


Ask HN: Any microISV's willing to share their experience? - <AUTHOR>

If you run a microISV, I would be very interested in hearing about your experiences. How did you get started? What keeps you going? What are some of the biggest challenges you've had to overcome? I am especially interested in hearing about Canada-based businesses, but folks from other countries are welcome to share as well of course. <comment><USER2> startupsfortherestofus.com</comment>


Young engineer launches stair aid  - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7375486.stm

<comment><USER2> Link to application: [http://gb.espacenet.com/search97cgi/s97_cgi.exe?action=View&...](http://gb.espacenet.com/search97cgi/s97_cgi.exe?action=View&VdkVgwKey=GB2440387A&ViewTemplate=gb/en/textdraw.hts)

When a house becomes unlivable, moving to a new home or nursing home can be a heartbreak; especially for an elderly person. I think it's great this device can treat that.

<comment><USER3> Fantastic. Not only is she a smart engineer, but she's protected herself from a business standpoint as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I seem to remember that a similar enterprising young woman who made myspace designs who almost or did have all of her money (~1million) taken from her by the state because of something about child labor laws, taxes or something.

I would just keep this sort of detail (her age) as quiet as possible, if I was her.

<comment><USER5> I don't think that's a problem in this case, the article says she was 16, and it's legal to work at 16.

<comment><USER6> In the UK it's legal to work below 16, but you can only be employed legally for a limited amount of hours. Self-employment doesn't have those restrictions, and you don't pay taxes either (until you turn 16).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's a very clever product, and design. Kudos to her.

</comment><comment><USER8> What I really absolutely love about this device is its simplicity. No electricity, wires, processors, motors or other stuff that can fail.

Just good old fashioned mechanical engineering. Great job!

</comment><comment><USER9> Not only is she going to become a millionaire from it, but she's doing great work helping the disabled. Incredible work.

<comment><USER10> Definitely a good idea, but did she patent it? What's to stop one of many companies in this area from producing it or a variant? Does she have the resources to enforce her own patents?

I don't know, I'm honestly curious as I've been in similar positions before with things I thought I could take the market.</comment></comment>


Coding is Over - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@loorinm/coding-is-over-6d653abe8da8#.kvmwcukqa <comment><USER2> >> Database design is an optimization algorithm, not an area of engineering.

Maybe waiting for a few years before you start making proclamations like this (and the many others in the op) is one way to avoid feeling everything is bland and pointless?

What I mean is that if you think you know everything there is to know, and all that you know is very little indeed, then it's not hard to see how you may think it's all just boring stuff that never goes nowhere.

Or, let's see this another way: just because you feel you're wasting your time creating the same things over and over again, doesn't mean that those are the only things anyone has ever made, or is making right now.

Corollary to which is: it's not the industry; it's your job. You've stopped learning. Time to move on and learn something new.

</comment><comment><USER3> Dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11957544](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11957544)</comment>


A Different Kind of Theory of Everything - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/a-different-kind-of-theory-of-everything <comment><USER2> This article introduces a geometric structure known as an "amplituhedron" as a way to understand reality.

"Some researchers are attempting to wean physics off of space-time in order to pave the way toward this deeper theory. Currently, to predict how particles morph and scatter when they collide in space-time, physicists use a complicated diagrammatic scheme invented by Richard Feynman. The so-called Feynman diagrams indicate the probabilities, or "scattering amplitudes," of different particle-collision outcomes. In 2013, Nima Arkani-Hamed and Jaroslav Trnka discovered a reformulation of scattering amplitudes that makes reference to neither space nor time. They found that the amplitudes of certain particle collisions are encoded in the volume of a jewel-like geometric object, which they dubbed the amplituhedron. Ever since, they and dozens of other researchers have been exploring this new geometric formulation of particle- scattering amplitudes, hoping that it will lead away from our everyday, space- time-bound conception to some grander explanatory structure."

The wikipedia page for amplituhedron provides some kind of simulated visualization but doesn't clarify in layman's terms how reality fits into this particular structure. It seems like an interesting concept, I wish I understood it better.

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

<comment><USER3> I am not a physicist, but when I first read about the amplituhedron whatever article it was seemed to indicate it was an interesting way to do computation. It was also simpler and quicker than the usual way. They never indicated any reason for it, or model of reality, just that computing volumes produced the same results as some other method used by physicists. I don't even recall if they proved it to be equivalent or just showed that in every case they tried it produced the correct result.

I suspect the folks reformulating QM in Clifford Algebras may have (or find) a way to explain why a geometric interpretation works the way it does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The article uses the term "Rashomon effect" without defining it. I hadn't heard of it before, and here's what I found:

 _The Rashomon effect occurs when an event is given contradictory interpretations by the individuals involved. The effect is named after Akira Kurosawa 's 1950 film Rashomon, in which a murder is described in four contradictory ways by four witnesses.[1] The term addresses the motives, mechanism and occurrences of the reporting on the circumstance and addresses contested interpretations of events, the existence of disagreements regarding the evidence of events and subjectivity versus objectivity in human perception, memory and reporting._

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

And here's a short video summary of the film:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BP2MhghDal4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BP2MhghDal4)

<comment><USER5> The so-called "Rashomon effect" is mis-named. The point of the film was not that everyone has a different perception of the truth. It was that everybody lies to preserve their sense of self-righteousness, no matter who else it damns, even when they have nothing left to lose.

It was a depiction of Hell.

<comment><USER6> I think the point of the story is subtler than that, its not so much that people consciously lie, its that their recollections are shaped by their own desire to be in the right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > And the Rashomon effect also suggests that reality isn't structured in such > a reductive, bottom-up way.

Does it? I don't see why. If there are numerous equivalent ways of describing a phenomenon, that seems to suggest that most structures have inherent isomorphisms. I don't think anyone would find this is particularly surprising.

</comment><comment><USER8> Each more complex theory turns into its simpler predecessors jn certain cases. There's no magic in that, it's simple math: if v << c, then the equations of special reativity become much easier and we get Newton mechanics. The same applies to the rest. If you want to discuss why does our world have to obey the math — that's a whole another story.

</comment><comment><USER9> This reminds me of this article (mostly focused on John Wheeler): [https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/do-our- ques...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/do-our-questions- create-the-world/)

</comment><comment><USER10> "I always found that mysterious, and I do not know the reason why it is that the correct laws of physics are expressible in such a tremendous variety of ways. They seem to be able to get through several wickets at the same time."

Conjecture: because this conversation is necessarily taking place in a universe where a certain level of intellectual and technological development was able to happen, which means one in which there is an evolutionary path to attaining such, which means one in which you can build a series of models of the universe, each progressively more accurate, but the early ones still give usefully accurate predictions.

</comment><comment><USER11> I spent a week or so (in 2013 or so) trying to understand the notes and I believe also a youtube lecture. Novel named concepts were simply used without any introduction, now I don't mind naming some new mathematical object with a relevant name (used to calculate amplitudes), but only after rereading the notes and rewatching the lecture did it eventually click: the diagrams depicting schematically the amplituhedron with a bunch of points ... it's a convex hull. Any sane person would introduce each new concept - and I really don't mind giving it a pet name - as long as it is defined in terms of well known objects or concepts. If one can't bring up the effort to just write: "the amplituhedron is defined as the convex hull of a set of points" how can you expect your audience to put in the effort to understand what you are trying to say? Also define what the points represent, give concrete examples, what are the coordinates of these points? etc... After multiple times finally realizing what the author was referring to with a new concept or procedure or so, and then always realizing he could have said the very same in much simpler terms I just gave up _trying_ to decode the rest. Now we are about 6 years later, and there is a wikipedia page, but unless there is a clearly written text that starts from well known concepts, and introduces new ones _in terms of known ones_ instead of using them without introduction and assuming the reader can read your mind... unless there is a clear text I see no point in even trying. If anyone knows if the situation has changed please point me to some clear explanations, otherwise I have no choice but file it under the "suspiciously obfuscated: either malicious or inept" category...

</comment><comment><USER12> Not that I have any real answers here (re: theories of everything), but I do have something to add regarding "laws".

Charle's Law states that Pressure * Volume = Temperature.

That's true and you can do a million experiments with a million balloons and liquids/gases to validate it - until you find a non-newtonian substance, try to apply it to a solid, introduce moving fluids, etc.

Charle's Law isn't a fundamental law of physics, but a consequence of the material properties and statistical outcomes of a large number of interacting molecules. Before atoms and molecules are characterized, it _does_ look like a fundamental law to an experimenter.

It doesn't seem to me that looking for "lower layers" of theoretical physics (holographics, quantum foam, strings, whathaveyou) is an infinite regress and doomed to never be a completed project. I do think that the project may reach some point where the theories fail to be scientific (read: falsifiable) because it could be possible that reaching deep enough through layers of physical abstraction can not be achieved / no physical instrument can provably be built to look deeper (as an analogy, no instrument can be built to probe the full amplitude space of a quantum state).

</comment><comment> bubble-07 We tend to prefer simpler theories that still manage to make good predictions. Is it really a surprise that our best theories are simple in light of our aesthetic preferences? The "true laws of physics" could be god-awful, and we could find ourselves in a universe where we're literally incapable of knowing that due to practical constraints. It's also not surprising at all that theories that are aesthetically-pleasing to us manage to have multiple different mathematical formulations -- if we're assuming from the outset that they're not very arbitrarily-defined theories, it seems perfectly natural that multiple interpretations would exist. Nature could be more horrifyingly complex than we could ever imagine, and even if that were the case, it's conceivable that all of the laws "good enough" to make testable predictions would have a nice mathematical structure. Even then, we're nowhere near the "end of physics" \-- how are we supposed to know that we've not just been wading around in the shallow part of the pool, only to find a bottomless pit waiting for us just a few meters away?

</comment><comment><USER13> Same writer, longer articles:

Visions of Future Physics [https://www.quantamagazine.org/nima-arkani-hamed- and-the-fut...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/nima-arkani-hamed-and-the- future-of-physics-20150922/)

A Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics [https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-discover- geometry-...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-discover-geometry- underlying-particle-physics-20130917/)

Nima Arkani-Hameds Lecture: The Doom of Space Time: Why It Must Dissolve Into More Fundamental Structures [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTx98PUW6lE&t=860s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTx98PUW6lE&t=860s)

</comment><comment><USER14> I do wonder if we're just a bunch of drunks looking under a lamppost for our keys because that's where the light is.

We've discovered a bunch of phenomena that happen to be able to be described by the mathematical tools we have because those are the only way we can understand them.

There's no reason to believe that any of them are fundamental to nature. There may be an uncountably infinite number of phenomena out there which are fundamentally unable to be formulated in any way which we can understand or predict them.

Our minds aren't constructed to understand reality, they're constructed to help our bodies survive in a savannah a few hundreds of thousands of years ago.

<comment><USER15> >Our minds aren't constructed to understand reality, they're constructed to help our bodies survive in a savannah a few hundreds of thousands of years ago.

I agree with your main point, however I don't find this a compelling argument. Regardless of what our brains are constructed for, with pen and paper and a set of rules we can roughly approximate a turing machine. Everything we as humanity know about computation suggests that at minimum this is equivalent to any computation possible using all known physical properties & interactions with some amount of overhead (even quantum can be simulated classically).

Thus, while it's possible there is an unknown kind of interaction that we cannot understand or simulate classically, the fact that our brain is more or less designed around survival and reproduction is irrelevant; change or optimize our DNA and the new super-human will still be at best roughly equivalent to a turing machine in terms of computation.

<comment><USER16> There are computation devices more powerful than the Turing machine, which is why we have complexity classes. (P, #P, #BQP are some examples described by different kinds of Turing-like machines.)

So calling humans equivalent to standard Turing machine is ultimately wrong if you even start to assume quantum processes are important in our thinking. (which is actually unproven as of yet)

Then you need to start with a more intricate parallel quantum Turing machine, high end mathematics required already. It is already non-deterministic.

And no, quantum effects cannot be simulated efficiently classically. That is the difference between P and #P complexity classes. Add parallelism, you get #BQP. You would be able to tell something about the nature of reality by building physical instances of those problems and timing them. Timing attack on the structure of reality, structure of time itself, anyone? (Of course the required energies would be ridiculous.)

To falsify any Turing model, you need to answer the question: what cannot be done by any given machine? Or by any machine? It is possible that there's a Goedel trap in this question.

A parallel would be to find and answer to what cannot be computed efficiently by best human geniuses ever. Hard introspective question might I add. Answer probably requires building or finding something more than human.

<comment><USER15> >There are computation devices more powerful than the Turing machine, which is why we have complexity classes

Equivalent meaning computability, not complexity. The two machines can simulate each other (even w/ exponential slowdown) then it's equivalent.

> cannot be simulated efficiently classically

Efficiency isn't really the point. The OP is suggesting there's a literal wall which makes something impossible to understand. This would require a computational behavior that _cannot_ be programmed as a turing machine.

> To falsify any Turing model, you need to answer the question: what cannot be > done by any given machine?

Correct. The answer is that a turing machine can't decide a turing-complete decision problem, so hypercomputation is achieved by equipping a turing machine with an oracle for a turing-complete problem. This actually leads to a hierarchy that is each strictly more powerful than the previous ones by using oracles for problems that are "more undecidable" so to speak (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetical_hierarchy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetical_hierarchy) )

Either way, we have no evidence that suggests theres a natural process that lives higher up on the arithmetical hierarchy. An example of a physical process that would fulfill this criteria: suppose there were a type of particle that only sometimes collide with each other, and it turns out that they only collide not just by running into each other but also when the sum of their velocities encode halting turing machines, otherwise the particles pass right through each other. A classical turing machine cannot decide the halting problem, so it's impossible to simulate a system with these particles because you never know if they will collide or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This should be an article about mathematics not physics.

</comment><comment><USER18> "What if that's not the point?"

Euclid will turn in his grave.

<comment><USER19> Euclid's lost 6th Postulate:

"To draw a line from any point to any non point"

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> TL;DR; anyone?

<comment><USER21> It's (sort of) discussing the work of Nima Arkani-Hamed and his Colleagues, and their attempt to reformulate quantum field theory so that it doesn't refer explicitely to space-time, in analogy to how the principle of least action of Lagrangian mechanics doesn't refer explicitly to the causality/determinism of Newton's formulation (modulo some subtitles). Here's a bit more about their technical work.

The motivation for doing this is as follows. When the principle of least action was discovered, it was philosophically very puzzling: why should this equivalent, non-causal formulation of newton exist? The reason of course turned out to be quantum mechanics! (it's a kind of stationary phase approximation to the path integral formulation of quantum theory, roughly speaking). Now in the early 21st century, there is a whole bunch of hints that space and possibly time are not truly fundamental quantities (in analogy to how newtonian causality was not fundamental). So how do you proceed?

Method 1: make random guesses.

Method 2: attempt to extend existing physics in non-random ways (e.g. string theory)

Method 3: take a lesson from history

Method 1 never works, method 2 is apparently too hard this time, so they are attempting method 3: if you need to get rid of space-time, don't MODIFY existing physics, but REFORMULATE it so that it doesn't depend explicitly on that concept, in analogy to how lagrangian mechanics reformulates newtownian mechanics to not depend explicitly on causality ( & quantum theory is then a simple deformation away). And if you can reformulate state of the art quantum field theories so they don't depend on _space-time_ explicitly, perhaps a deeper theory will just be a simpler deformation away as well.

<comment><USER20> Wow, that's not as short, as I expected, but nailed it.

A TL;DR; of TL;DR; : they are talking about reformulating laws of physics, so that formulas would not be dependent on space and time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wish physics would explore the theory of a simulated universe a bit more. What if these incomplete laws of physics are flaws with the simulation, maybe dark matter is just a hardcoded variable or a hotfix to an existing problem. Is this something physics can tackle or does it lie more in the philosophy realm?

<comment><USER8> I don't think the simulation theory is falsifiable therefore there's no practical reason to dig into that. You can explain almost anything with it, it's very close to religion and creationism in that sense.

And although we still haven't found the dark matter directly, we notice its effect in the stars motion, galaxies' gravitational lenses, large-scale structure of the Universe and even notice the coinciding data in the cosmic background radiation. Sounds like too much for a "hotfix".</comment></comment>


Richard Stallman Answers Your Questions - <AUTHOR> http://features.slashdot.org/story/13/01/06/163248/richard-stallman-answers-your-questions

<comment><USER2> _> I object to the requirement for visitors to give their fingerprints. I refuse to go to any country which has that policy, and I hope you too will refuse to go to any country that would demand your fingerprints._

Since the U.S. demands fingerprints of non-citizens entering the country, I was curious to see if RMS has said more about this.

Indeed, and he mentions the U.S.:

> _I know of seven countries that everyone should refuse to visit, because > they demand the fingerprints of visitors. These are the US, Argentina, > Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Ghana and Saudi Arabia. Don't stand for such > treatment — refuse to go!_ [1]

[1] <http://stallman.org/bad-border-policy-countries.html>

<comment><USER3> > Since the U.S. demands fingerprints of non-citizens entering the country

Not entirely true, I know that Canadians can enter with nothing but a passport (and a non-biometric one, at that) or enhanced drivers license.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Stallman writes well. I wonder what portion of his influence is attributable to that.</comment>


The most Kafkaesque paragraph from today's NSA ruling - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/12/27/the-most-kafkaesque-paragraph-from-todays-nsa-ruling/ <comment><USER3> This is taken wildly out of context. The sentence right after the quoted text is just wrong. The quote is in response to a statutory argument. Statutory arguments are evaluated by reference to the text of the statute and Congress's intent in drafting the statute. The court is not saying that the ACLU has no claim because Congress did not intend the targets to find out, but rather that Section 215 doesn't create that claim because it would be inconsistent for Congress to intend to create such a claim when Congress did not intend for targets to find out. The court is rejecting one possible basis for the ACLU's claim, which is that Congress intended to create an avenue recourse in the statute. Its not a general point applicable to other possible bases for the ACLU's claim. In particular, the court is not saying that the ACLU cannot mount a Constitutional challenge for that reason, which is what the article implies. That would be Kafkaesque, but that's not at all what the opinion says. The Constitutional basis is separate from the statutory one, and does not depend on Congress's intent.

It helps to think about this analogously to other kinds of suits. Say you feel like a school district is discriminating against African Americans. There's a constitutional dimension to that case, but also a statutory dimension. Congress has created legislation that people can rely on to address such discrimination. To defend a suit under such a statute, a state might argue that a particular suit does not fall within the scope of the statute: that Congress did not intend for the statute to serve as recourse in this situation. But that sill leaves the broader Constitutional issue on the table. Whether Congress intended for a statute to serve as recourse is irrelevant to the Constitutional argument. There are two separate bases.

<comment><USER4> Which are the laws for which Congress must explicitly create an avenue for recourse?

<comment><USER3> In general, a suit must be based on either a cause of action at common law (tort, contract, etc), a state or federal law, or in limited circumstances directly under the Constitution. Federal statutes must demonstrate some Congressional intent to create an avenue of recourse. In fact, Congress can make something illegal, yet not create a cause of action. For example, with the securities laws, there have been many disputed related to when Congress intended to create avenues of recourse for private parties and when Congress only intended the government to be able to enforce violations.

<comment><USER4> So which is it: Warrantless search has no recourse unless the law says so, or is the judge buying in to the idea that section 215 data collection isn't "search?"

<comment><USER3> Neither is true. The mistake you're making is treating the ACLU's challenge as a single abstract thing. Instead, its a set of distinct, self-contained, claims argued in the alternate. And the court is obliged to address the distinct arguments on their own merits. Its a more systematic process than "is this good or bad?"

One claim is that Section 215 creates an avenue for targets to challenge days collection. The court rejects the idea that Congress intended to create an avenue in the statute for targets to challenge data collection, when Congress didn't intend targets to even know. That's the statutory argument. The court rejected the Constitional argument on a _separate_ basis. They applied Smith v. Maryland, which approved warrantless collection of phone metadata in individual cases, and concluded it didn't become unconstitutional just because the NSA did it to a whole bunch of cases. This is a straightforward application of the third party doctrine. The fact that Congress didn't want targets to know had nothing to do with this part. It was rather based on how the boundaries of the 4th amendment have been interpreted.

<comment><USER4> Don't talk down to me. I pointed out two absurdities in this case: That secrecy is a magic spell that make due process go away and that it isn't a search if it's only machines looking at data. The judge has apparently gone for a third absurdity: Pen registers for all! This now supposedly is no different from from an investigation requesting a pen register on an individual as part of a specific investigation, never mind the dubiousness of warrant-less pen register requests in the first place.

<comment><USER3> I'm not talking down to you, I'm trying to get you to understand the opinion. The whole point of the legal analytical process is to cabin what would otherwise be total judicial discretion. It limits the analytical process by which judges can reach a conclusion. You can't understand opinions without keeping track of the context which limits the scope of every statement. Its like lexical scoping of variables in a program. When you take one paragraph addressing statutory standing and pretend that it says "secrecy is magic that makes due process go away" its like trying to understand a statement in a program while ignoring the lexical environment at that program point.

Judges aren't empowered to simply say "NSA is bad, ACLU wins!" In this case you wouldn't even like that, because the judge is clearly very sympathetic to the anti-terrorism backdrop of the whole case. You might think that warrantless pen registers are an "absurdity" but the judge isn't entitled to draw that conclusion. He is required to accept the premise of Smith v. Maryland, that collecting pen register data doesn't require a warrant because its third party information in the hands of the telephone company.

<comment><USER5> Precedent changes (with respect to Smith vs. Maryland). This judge's bias is evident from the first sentence of his ruling when he invokes the memory of 9/11.

The problem is that to the lay-person, this reads like, "well, you weren't really supposed to know about it, so you can't do anything about it." Whether or not the ruling is legally sound is basically irrelevant now. It is a PR problem and no amount of "trust me, I am a lawyer" is going to convince people who know how to read that this ruling does not sound like total garbage.

<comment><USER6> > The problem is that to the lay-person, this reads like, "well, you weren't > really supposed to know about it, so you can't do anything about it."

That's exactly what it says.

> Whether or not the ruling is legally sound is basically irrelevant now.

Its relevant in understanding where the problem lies on the particular issue of the statutory claim being made by the ACLU (i.e., not with the court here, but with the Congress that wrote the law specifically to exclude this type of claim, and even more broadly with the entire principle of sovereign immunity and the way it stands in direct opposition to the idea of limited government, since a government that is only as accountable as it chooses to allow itself to be is not in any meaningful sense limited.)

> It is a PR problem and no amount of "trust me, I am a lawyer" is going to > convince people who know how to read that this ruling does not sound like > total garbage.

The ruling sounds like total garbage _because_ it is legally sound and the law underlying it is garbage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yesterday in a talk at 30C3, a historian discussed article 10 of the German 'Grundgesetz' (our constitution) whose logic is similar and which reads as follows:

> (1) The privacy of correspondence, posts and telecommunications shall be > inviolable.

> (2) Restrictions may be ordered only pursuant to a law. If the restriction > serves to protect the free democratic basic order or the existence or > security of the Federation or of a Land, the law may provide that the person > affected shall not be informed of the restriction and that recourse to the > courts shall be replaced by a review of the case by agencies and auxiliary > agencies appointed by the legislature.[1]

The logic sounds alike to me: Victims cannot know that they are being surveilled, and should they, under some circumstances obtain knowledge of the fact, take any real legal recourse against it. Fun fact: That article was imposed by the US.[2]

[1] [http://www.gesetze-im- internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.ht...](http://www.gesetze-im- internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.html#p0054)

[2] [http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Notstandsgesetze](http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Notstandsgesetze) (sorry, the English article doesn't cite any sources)

</comment><comment><USER8> If I understand this correctly, it is the simultaneously the most absurd and scary thing I have read in a very long time. So now crimes committed by the government cannot be challenged because the government never intended anyone to find out about it - thats a horrid peace of law.

<comment><USER4> > thats a horrid peace of law

It isn't law. It's one judge's tortured (Nah. Blackmailed?) logic. He isn't reading the law. He is stuffing caulk into a big crack, and inferring that the flaw should never have been there.

The logical consequence of this is that all the cases from targets that can infer they are targets based on the Snowden documents will have to result in courts that simply ignore the crime. That goes way beyond Gonzaga.

<comment><USER9> I would love to see someone take the speculation of blackmail further. It's obviously speculation and not fact, but it's reasonable speculation that is entirely possible and no longer in the realm of tin-foil hattery and that's why it matters. We no longer required a tortured conspiracy theory to consider blackmail a likely explanation of why this horrific judgement was made, and that's frightening in and of itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Pauley is essentially saying that the targets of the order have no recourse to challenge the collection of their personal data because Congress never intended for targets to ever know that they were subject to this sort of spying."

No.

Pauley is saying that the targets of the order have no recourse to challenge it. That Congress never intended for them to know about it may be true, but it's otherwise neither here nor there.

<comment><USER3> Not quite. The court is saying that the statute does not itself create that avenue of recourse.

<comment><USER11> Except that one of the arguments, if not chiefly, should be that the actual actions (collection, spying, what have you) were unconstitutional - not that any legislative or executive action were passed which Congress has not authorized recourse to. It's as simple as that - fight the behavior directly as it violates privacy rights, regardless of what Congress or the Executive has done.

It's true that Congress holds two very powerful jurisdiction stripping abilities but the ability to interpret the Constitution will never be subject to that. Interestingly, the Supreme Court may be stripped of that ability but a State or inferior Federal Court should always be able to hear such a case if there is standing otherwise.

(Starting with "Except..." sounds wrong b/c you ^ are correct in regards to statutory recourse, it just shouldn't have been dismissed based on other grounds available which you actually explained pretty well below)

<comment><USER12> Well, the problem -- though not necessarily the specific problem here -- is that "the government did something unconstitutional" is not enough to make a lawsuit. The deeper issue is whether someone has "standing" to sue, and federal courts (and especially the Supreme Court) have a history of using that to sweep inconvenient issues under the rug when they don't want to make a decision.

For example, a standing-based argument against an NSA surveillance lawsuit might admit that, if someone were able to sue, they would certainly prevail on constitutional grounds, but then dismiss the suit anyway because the person suing can't demonstrate they've been harmed by the government action. If the only way you can find out that the action took place is through an illegal disclosure of classified information, for example, it may be there's no evidence you can legally present in court to show you were harmed (this is a variant of the "you weren't supposed to know you were targeted" argument).

And that's without getting into the thicket of sovereign immunity (which is not the state-secrets doctrine, but rather the idea that you can't actually sue the government directly unless the government lets you; instead you have to find some specific government official who you can argue exceeded constitutional authority. Good luck doing that when everything that's happened is classified).

<comment><USER11> Standing is not a legal barrier, it's a functional (unilaterally created) one. It's main purpose being to prevent taxpayer suits and therefore a level of suits that might be unmaintainable by the justice system (weak). So I may be mistaken but I don't believe though that the rules of evidence apply so that standing could be denied on the grounds as you hypothesized them. The question is whether the matter should even be heard as a "case" so I would think it would be odd to conduct it as if it were a case when making that determination.

<comment><USER3> The standing doctrines are legal barriers and serve important purposes. Statutory standing ensures that when people sue under a statute, as one of the ACLU's claims purports to do, that the statute was actually intended to allow that sort of suit by that sort of plaintiff. Standing also ensures that the proper parties bring suit rather than people with a tenuous interest in the case. Finally, standing had an important Constitutional dimension, partly jurisdictional. Article III courts are only empowered to hear concrete cases or controversies. This ensures that courts actually resolve individual legal disputes, rather than infringing on the territory of the elected branched and getting into political disputes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That's not crazy. When faced with a law, terrible or otherwise, judges have two main choices:

1\. Rule that the law should be followed. 2\. Rule that the law is unconstitutional.

The article provides strong reasons for believing the law is terrible, but that doesn't mean the judge is wrong on any grounds except constitutional ones.

<comment><USER14> 3\. Rule that the plaintiff lacks standing to sue because the only evidence that the plaintiff has that they have been a target of this law is a result of whistleblowing, and if the evidence of a whistleblower, although both true and confirmed by the defendant, is accepted, this would encourage more whistleblowing, which is the worst possible outcome imaginable. Instead, the only parties who have standing are the ones who had been directly and secretly served with the order (to monitor all of the plaintiff's communications), and those parties only have standing to secretly challenge the order in a secret court.

You could rule that, too.

<comment><USER13> Well, standing is usually a matter of law. But yes, I was oversimplifying, and anyhow IANAL.

<comment><USER14> My point was that your oversimplification was deceptive. You state that the judge only has two choices, and it's a matter of record that the actual judge in question chose neither of them.

>Well, standing is usually a matter of law.

The constitutionality of the concept of standing was not in question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A hypothetical:

"The principal called. He said that you cheated on your exams."

"Yeah, but I never meant for anyone to find out, so why am I in trouble?"

Seems legit to me!

<comment><USER16> It's more like " The principal says you confessed and agreed to serve detention, because your friend told him you said you'd serve detention if you had to."

The specific statute does not provide victims an avenue of relief, so the victims cannot seek relief from the courts under that statute.

The real problem is either (a) the law is unconstitutional, or (b) the Cnstitution is not strong (well-written) enough to give justice in cases where the government is concealing its actions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's not a crime unless you get caught! .... Or apparently if you didn't intend to get caught.

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't think any of this really matters. If the Supreme Court decided tomorrow that anything the NSA does is unconstitutional then the laws would either be rewritten immediately or the government would challenge the ruling and force the justices to change their minds. The Us government answers to no one, and that includes the Supreme Court.

<comment><USER12> _If the Supreme Court decided tomorrow that anything the NSA does is unconstitutional then the laws would either be rewritten immediately or the government would challenge the ruling and force the justices to change their minds._

"John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!"

(this is not a new problem)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder what kind of dirt the executive branch has on the judicial branch..

<comment><USER20> I'm so sick of this claim. The NSA fucked up based on what we know, there's no need to wildly speculate that actual blackmail is occurring too.

It's just plain unnecessary.

<comment><USER21> No, its reasonably implied.

If the NSA has the information its claimed to have, then its reasonable to suggest that anyone in power has every little thing they ever did wrong in the past in the back of their minds, knowing the NSA _might_ know about it. Recent revelations can only make that feeling stronger. So, while it is unlikely that every judge, politician, whatever, has been literally visited by a NSA goon, it is quite reasonable to suggest that such people rationally decide not to oppose the NSA, and act accordingly.

That is the whole reason why industrialised, comprehensive data slurping is a direct threat to any notion of freedom.

<comment><USER20> You can't get this for free, given how big of a deal it is.

You have to prove it's happening or stop saying it all-together. It's just that big of a deal.

<comment><USER22> It's happening. You think they developed scruples after LOVEINT or whatever it was they called it? Have people forgotten Hoover in your country?

It is guaranteed. There's no way it's not happening. Maybe not everyone, but many people in the US Gov't have dirty laundry. And some of that laundry has been discovered. And some of what's been discovered has been used for blackmail.

I've never been more confident of any opinion I've ever held.

<comment><USER20> If you've ever wondered what religious people feel like in relation to God's existence, you now understand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I should point out that the person who argued for the petitioner - Doe - <USER2> Gonzaga v Doe, was John Roberts - this may not go the obvious way if it reaches the supreme court.

</comment><comment><USER24> Imagine that the KGB informs Putin that Edward Snowden is holed up in Moscow airport. What would Putin ask.

Probably, "What information does he have that we could use?".

What would you as a KGB leader say to Putin. Probably "Well he stole a huge amount of sensitive information from the NSA but he apparently hid it all on the Internet and gave copies to several other people. But he doesn't have it with him."

And then what would Putin say? Perhaps "If he has already passed on this information, then could he do anything else other than what he has already done?"

I suppose the KGB leader would say "No, other than to hide away so that they can't hold a big show trial hoping to cover up the real story."

"Good says Putin. We will give him refugee status if he promises not to do anything else to further harm the USA. After all, it will take time for all the information to filter out to the media. We will hide him so that the media has to focus on the facts.

And then Putin adds, "Do you think he discovered anything that we don't know already?"

And the KGB leader replies "We have known of this lax security for years. Our team of sleeper agents set up many channels of information for us years ago, so we think this only means that the world will learn what we already know."

<comment><USER25> Except the KGB hasn't existed since 1991. It's the Federal Security Service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Wait, what? There's no way that's a valid legal argument. That's insane.

</comment><comment><USER27> We should be reminded that neither Kafka nor Orwell should be regarded as designs for law. The more time goes by the more we seem to live in their world.

</comment><comment><USER28> Well, in a way this is a similar kind of right as the people have to not be prosecuted after an un-warranted search.

Can we get a warrant to search every portion of the government for illegal activity? We just have to find some sort of suspicion that they might be doing this...

</comment><comment><USER29> The ruling seems to have put the kibosh on legal redress. Now the question becomes of what to do next. So how does one neutralize something like an NSA? Where are their pressure points?

</comment><comment><USER30> If I understand this correctly, is it really that worrying an argument? One can't use covert telephone recording (i.e., without two-party consent) as evidence in most states, and it's important that the person being recorded didn't intend for the conversation to be recorded and available in the future as evidence. Similarly, one would _expect_ leaks to not hold up as evidence.

Much as I also dislike the ruling, the argument here seems quite reasonable to me.</comment>


Incredible CSS background patterns library - <AUTHOR> http://codepen.io/html5web/full/HDCrK

<comment><AUTHOR> CSS background patterns library. I've tried to create more CSS background patterns not included on <http://lea.verou.me/css3patterns/> by Lea Verou

</comment><comment><USER2> Awesome work!</comment>


How Bellingcat outfoxes the world's spy agencies - <AUTHOR> https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/10/how-bellingcat-outfoxes-the-worlds-spy-agencies/ <comment><USER2> "MI5 would just hold them back, almost certainly if researchers strayed into illegality, says the source. Bellingcat's willingness to buy information on the black market or scoop it up from pirate sites makes them better than governments at gleaning information from open sources in 'almost all' cases, he says."

Intelligence services trying to make you underestimate them. Classic disinformation campaign.</comment>


3D scatterplot of an image - <AUTHOR> https://alexander.engineering/imagescatter/ <comment><USER2> In the late '90s I was asked to do image segmentation of multispectral data of brightfield microscope data. That is, given a picture of a bunch of cells, find all of the cells. There were two problems: image segmentation of sick cells is really hard (they're very blobby & fragmented), and the computer I had available took more than 20 minutes per image.

It was literally both cheaper _and faster_ to have a grad student count the cells.

Let's be clear though: the researchers weren't interested in the _cells_ ; they were interested in having a pretty-darn-good count of cancerous cells vs. non-cancerous cells. Turns out, cancerous cells were a different color (brighter blue * brighter green) than healthy cells. So, instead, I just converted every image into RGB 3D space, counted all the pixels near 'dark green * dark blue', all the pixels near 'bright green * bright blue' then divided by the average area (in pixels) of each type of cell. The resulting counts were within 1% of the value the grad students could get, and the ratio was even more accurate.

We could get the cell count in a single linear, forward pass, as fast as the camera could take pictures.

<comment><USER3> Sorry if this is a stupid question, but can't you do this without converting the image into an RGB 3D space? (i.e. iterate through the pixels and count the ones within a certain range of what you want)

<comment><USER4> How would you determine if they were within the range? That's effectively converting it into a 3D space.

<comment><USER2> A few plane equation evaluations—then a few ands, and a sum. Plenty of horsepower on a pentium pro to do that.

<comment><USER4> Those plane equations are describing the pixel in 3D space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This reminds me of a machine vision application for large-scale bakeries. When you bake bread, the color of the surface changes as the bread rises and completes the baking process.

In the application I remember, the average color of a loaf was tracked on an RBG plot as a function of time. The idea was that the baking process followed a trajectory in the RGB space that was dependent on the temperature of the oven and the elapsed time. This can be used as feedback for process control-- to signal when to pull out the bread or to change the temperature.

In a similar way the color of paintings change as they age. The individual points in the OP's plots could be parameterized in time and according to paint's chemistry. It might be possible, after some calibration studies, to accurately simulate aging. Or better, simulate the reversal of aging to show what an old aged painting looked like when it was new.

<comment><USER6> I did the same thing for browning of french fries. It turned out that RGB was too highly correlated to be efficient so I mapped into an "application specific" color space where the rate was pretty much along a straight line. Kind of like HSV but more specific to the actual cucumber shape of the RGB distribution.

[https://www.google.com/patents/US5818953](https://www.google.com/patents/US5818953)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is really cool! I'm a painter and have spent a long time doing gamut analysis of paintings.

Thank you for including both HSV and HSL. Not enough people appear to understand/care about the difference between the two, and for painters the distinction is _everything_.

<comment><USER8> Why is the distinction important for painters?

<comment><USER9> I'd guess it's because mixing colors in paint is subtractive—if you mix every color you get black. Whereas with light, mixing colors is additive—if you mix every color you get white. In HSL, fully saturated colors have .5 brightness, and adding white or black changes the brightness but not the saturation. My guess is that works more similarly to paint than HSV does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Would it be possible to make a human recognizable 3D-object in the colorspace that also is a pretty picture in 2D?

<comment><USER11> The answer is quite obvious. You could start off with a grayscale 2D image on one side, and a pretty dotted 3D object on the other side. You'd then read the coordinates of the 3D object in a specific color space to obtain color values which you can pretty randomly (or even judiciously) apply to the grayscale image.

Now I would pose another question: would it be possible to make a human- recognizable 3D-object in all the four color spaces that is also a pretty picture in 2D?

<comment><USER10> Clever to start out with a greyscale image! But it still poses some constraints, let's say if we start with an all black image for an edge case to demonstrate the limitations, we can only have a 2D pattern in the 3D space, right?

However the luminance component of the image could probably be adjusted within certain error margins and vice versa. Perhaps by some form of bruteforce!

To know for sure I suppose coding is needed!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Funny to see this, I made more or less the same thing in Processing for the google devart interactive competition a few years ago: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaA3dAJz6sI&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaA3dAJz6sI&feature=youtu.be)

Has a few extra features like being able to see different visualisation methods and how basic colour correction influences those - also animates the visualisation while going through the image

Realluy caught me off-guard because I used both the starry sky and the monalisa painting back in the days as well!

<comment><USER13> Very neat! I like how you aggregate the points with larger objects -- sort of a 3D contour plot.

Do you have an online demo handy?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> There is a really cool use of clustering with these scatterplots to do color quantization (i.e. reducing the number of colors).

If you want 16 colors, just find 16 clusters and their centroids (e.g. let k=16 for k-means clustering). Replace each pixel with the closest centroid. Then, your image is quantized (and can perhaps be stored more efficiently)!

<comment><USER15> There is nothing specific about color here - the same approach can be used for intensity re-quantization for example.

Effectively you are non-uniformly resampling based on distribution, so relative values/distances go out the window but you keep "detail" in the lower fidelity signal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is cool, but I wonder why most of the demo images - and a lot of the images I uploaded - seem to have their colors aligned in a single plane.

<comment><USER17> Hmm, I guess someone would have thought of that, but this could probably be used for compressing images by reorienting the color axes so that one of them is perpendicular to this color plane, and then sending less information about that coordinate.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, you can use principle component analysis to figure out the transform to make the colour space "optimal" for compression of a specific image. I tried that once:

[https://bainbridgecode.wordpress.com/2012/04/24/beating- png-...](https://bainbridgecode.wordpress.com/2012/04/24/beating-png-part-2/)

and

[https://bainbridgecode.wordpress.com/2012/05/07/beating- png-...](https://bainbridgecode.wordpress.com/2012/05/07/beating-png- part-3-remembering-a-level-maths/)

There are plots at the end of part 3 showing the image channels separately for YCrCb and my custom PCA derived space. They clearly show that there's a lot less duplication of data between channels with the latter. And that in turn is obviously good for compression.

<comment><USER19> Finding the first primary component also appears to be a pretty good way greyscale an image.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Some interesting images to upload

"One Million Colors" [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d6/1M...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d6/1Mcolors.png/800px-1Mcolors.png)

"RGB HSV Image" [https://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Digital_Black_and_White_Conve...](https://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Digital_Black_and_White_Conversion/rgb- hsv.png)

</comment><comment><USER21> Nice visualization, although an option to show HSV/HSL in a cylinder might help to better understand the distance between colors.

</comment><comment><USER22> So what's the insight behind such visualizations? Can it be used to separate photographic pictures from paintings for example?

<comment><AUTHOR> One thing it can be used for is to easily see what kind of palette a painter is using.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm not sure if they are mapping every single pixel or using some average pixels, but it's pretty fast.

Here is a shameless plug for one of my color extracting library: [https://github.com/jathu/UIImageColors/](https://github.com/jathu/UIImageColors/)

It currently takes around ~0.3s on average to extract the colors. However, with my new PR ([https://github.com/jathu/UIImageColors/pull/54](https://github.com/jathu/UIImageColors/pull/54)), it takes around ~0.14s on average. IMO this is still slow, I would like to bring it below 0.1s.

I tried to optimize this with k-means to reduce total number of colors, but the result was slower and worse color choices. If anyone has methods to improve the performance, please make a PR.

<comment><USER24> What takes so long in your approach? I would think extracting simple statistical values from an image is a very easy to vectorise and parallelise task.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Sounds cool, I will check it out on a laptop.

Just in case the author is here, I tried on an iPad Pro, and got "WebGL is not supported by your browser". WebGL is in fact supported by mobile Safari, so I'm guessing this site is using a user agent whitelist or some other fallible method of detecting WebGL. The best way to detect WebGL support is to attempt to create the 3d context and wait until after it actually fails. That, or simply do not check for WebGL failure; the browsers all handle it anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here, not sure if I can easily fix this. The WebGL check is handled by the third-party scatter plot library.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is a good illustration of why this algorithm which reorganizes paintings into 2d color palettes works Using these scatter plots ou can see how you would use the principal components to lay out the pixels on a 2d surface [https://github.com/ardila/paintingReorganize/blob/master/REA...](https://github.com/ardila/paintingReorganize/blob/master/README.md)

</comment><comment><USER27> Relevant: [https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/7584no/3d_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/7584no/3d_rgb_scatterplots_of_colours_used_in_famous/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That was actually the inspiration for this project :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is beautiful. It's interesting to see how much of the space is not occupied — even by images that feel like they have a lot of colors.

Next up: Finding patterns in the graph for certain artists, themes, styles, etc.

</comment><comment><USER29> "based on the pixel values"

I daresay technically this applies to all useful visualizations of the data. I don't think they'd be very useful if they weren't, in some way, based on the pixel values.

<comment><USER30> Sure, but here the pixel values are directly used as spatial coordinates, so it makes sense to mention this.

<comment><USER29> I was trying to make a point about phrasing. "Based on" is wordy and nebulous. Just saying "of" would clearer, not to mention shorter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is really cool! Is there a source repository we could explore?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've now published the source of the website on GitHub as well:

[https://github.com/Overv/ColorScatterPlot](https://github.com/Overv/ColorScatterPlot)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This could be a fun add on for an art museum's online collection browser. "Investigate the collection by scatterplot."

</comment><comment><USER33> How much JS knowledge does one need to start plotting with D3.js or Plotly.js ?

<comment><USER34> For simple data visualization, Plotly.js is easier to use with another data- friendly language like Python or R, which has libraries which push the data into a web-friendly format (including 3D WebGL charts like these)</comment></comment>


Introduction to Mean Shift Algorithm - <AUTHOR> https://saravananthirumuruganathan.wordpress.com/2010/04/01/introduction-to-mean-shift-algorithm/ <comment><USER2> For all those struggling to understand the mean shift algorithm, it's much easier to understand in pictures. Here's an article that explains it with some diagrams: [http://eric-yuan.me/continuously-adaptive-shift/](http://eric- yuan.me/continuously-adaptive-shift/)

Basically, it goes like this:

1\. Select a data point of interest.

2\. Draw a circle of a specified radius around the point of interest.

3\. Collect all data points within the circle and compute their mean.

4\. Move the center of the circle to the mean.

5\. Repeat 3 & 4 until convergence. Each iteration will move "uphill" on the density gradient of the data distribution until it reaches the top of the hill (a local maximum).

6\. Repeat 1-5 for all data points. Points that converge to the same local maximum are members of the same cluster. The number of clusters is the number of local maxima.

For higher dimensions, replace "circle" with sphere (3-D) or hypersphere (4 & higher dimensions). Obviously, this algorithm depends on a choice of radius, which determines the granularity of the search for local maxima.

<comment><USER3> Do I understand correctly that you run the converging process on every single point?

Couldn't you have a situation where points really far from a cluster would still converge to that cluster by this method? Something like a long string of points slowly getting closer and closer?

Does the mean shift algorithm have any guarantees on running time and/or the quality of the clustering it finds?

<comment><USER2> > Do I understand correctly that you run the converging process on every > single point?

I don't think you have to run it on every point in the data set. If your data set is very large, you could run it on a random sample of points, or a define a regular grid of starting positions at the resolution that you require.

> Couldn't you have a situation where points really far from a cluster would > still converge to that cluster by this method? Something like a long string > of points slowly getting closer and closer?

Yes, that's the idea. For each point, you're basically asking "If I start here and keep walking up the density gradient from here until I hit a maximum, where do I end up?" If the shape of the probability density function has a very long ridge, you could end up walking the entire length of the ridge until you hit the highest point. This means that you can have arbitrary-shaped clusters, within the smoothness bounds imposed by your chosen radius. This feature is considered a potential advantage over k-means clustering, which can only produce convex clusters.

> Does the mean shift algorithm have any guarantees on running time and/or the > quality of the clustering it finds?

I haven't actually used it in practice, so I don't know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool writeup. This is part of sklearn, which has a great visualization of how it performs on some different clustering tasks, including comparisons to other algorithms: [http://scikit- learn.org/stable/auto_examples/cluster/plot_cl...](http://scikit- learn.org/stable/auto_examples/cluster/plot_cluster_comparison.html#example- cluster-plot-cluster-comparison-py)

<comment><USER5> Based on this plot, my naive reaction would be to decide that DBSCAN is the best algorithm, as it recovers the (qualitatively) best clusters in each case. Anybody has experience with DBSCAN? What are the downside?

<comment><USER4> The Wiki page has a nice writeup of a few downsides: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBSCAN#Disadvantages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBSCAN#Disadvantages)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This sounds similar to k-means - pick some points "at random" and iteratively move them to the average location of all nearest neighbors until you stabilize. But mean shift goes in the opposite direction, giving each point a window and grouping them on overlaps. Can someone who understands both confirm this is the case, or correct my understanding?

<comment><USER7> The article includes a comparison with k-means. From the article, mean-shift:

> does not assume anything about number of clusters

> can handle arbitrarily shaped clusters

> is fairly robust to initializations

> not very sensitive to outliers

> time complexity mean-shift: O(Tn^2), k-means: O(knT). (k: number of > clusters, n: number of points, T: number of iterations).

[Edit: formatting]

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was expecting a more intro-ey layman explanation. This was pretty hard to understand.

<comment><USER9> I agree, these are basically the lecture notes for the course.

</comment></comment><comment> m_y-n_a_m_e Mean Shift in R [https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/MeanShift/MeanShift....](https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/MeanShift/MeanShift.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER10> I love this blog. whenever I want to learn something cool I open Chrome in my Android and type: saravananthirumuruganathan.wordpress.com

</comment><comment><USER11> > For each data point, Mean shift defines a window around it and computes the > mean of the data point.

This makes no sense. A clearer explanation would go a long way.

<comment><USER12> For each data point, Mean shift defines a window around it and computes the mean of the data points within the window.

Better?

<comment><USER13> Not really.

 _Given an estimate of the mean_ ; for each data point, Mean shift defines a window around it and computes a new estimated mean _weighting each point by the probability density at the previous estimated mean calculated using the window_

The (weighted) 'mean of the data points within the window' makes sense if you use the other perspective of looking at the window _around the current estimated mean_ \- you'll get the same answer, and to me this explanation is easier to grasp - the PDF only depends on the distance between the point and the estimated mean so you can think of either as the 'center'. But saying you calculate the mean of the data points within the window _for each data point_ mixes up two perspectives and makes no sense.

<comment><USER14> daveguy's explanation is correct. It's the simplest form of the Mean Shift algorithm.

<comment><USER13> Nope. It would be correct if it said 'For each estimate of the mean, Mean shift defines a window around it and computes the mean of the data points within the window, then repeats the process with this new estimate.'

Suppose we had 500 data points. Daveguy's process calculates a separate mean for a window around _each data point_. Now we have 500 means...and?

<comment><USER12> I was clarifying the sentence which the poster had pointed out as confusing, not the entire description of the algorithm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I just got out of a genome talk that uses the Mean Shift algorithm to find gene clusters, which speaks to the broad applicability of the algorithm.

</comment><comment><USER16> mlpack has a nice command-line-accessible implementation: [http://mlpack.org/docs/mlpack-2.0.3/man/mlpack_mean_shift.ht...](http://mlpack.org/docs/mlpack-2.0.3/man/mlpack_mean_shift.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> This sounds an awful lot like Expectation-Maximization

<comment><USER18> I don't think so, at least I can't figure out what would correspond to the expectation step.

It seems to be a gradient ascent on a smoothed density function, so there's only a maximization step, no expectation step is involved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> this algorithm looks interesting.

any chance you could move it to github?

<comment><AUTHOR> This article is not mine I found it looking for articles about Mean Shift for my thesis but you can find a cpp implementation in OpenCV libraries: [https://github.com/opencv/opencv/blob/master/modules/video/s...](https://github.com/opencv/opencv/blob/master/modules/video/src/camshift.cpp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> (2010)</comment>