Ask HN: Good books about modern political campaign strategy? - <AUTHOR> I'd like to get a better idea of why political campaigns do what they do, at a deep strategic level.
For example, I volunteered on a campaign a few years ago. I worked the phone bank. My task was to find other volunteers, just like myself, to work the phone bank. At no point did any of us talk with anybody other than registered party members.
From that, I realized that the underlying goal of the phone bank was not to actually call people from outside the party and convince them to change their views, as I had assumed.
Rather, the goal was to increase engagement among probable voters because -- statistically -- it meant they were more likely to show up on voting day.
Are there any books that explain political campaign strategy at this level? <comment><USER2> Think you should look at Sasha Issenberg's The Victory Lab. But - worth noting that you could write an convincing follow up book that Hillary for America and Robbie Mook probably overlearned the lesson of the book and that the 2020 Dem campaign will be run differently.

</comment><comment><USER3> First, I should note that political strategy varies depending on the office. A race for a single seat between a republican and a democrat is very different from a non-partisan city council race that has 5 seats, with two incumbents running leaving 3 open seats.

Second, there's a book recently published that focuses on running for smaller offices and aimed at Millennials. You may find it interesting:

[https://www.runforsomething.net/book/](https://www.runforsomething.net/book/)

</comment><comment><USER4> >> Are there any books that explain political campaign strategy at this level?

Not sure, but I think the last campaign taught us that these books are super important:

1) "What's Your Message?: Public Speaking with twice the impact, using half the effort" by Cam Barber

2) "Make Your Point!:Speak clearly and concisely anyplace anytime" by Bob Elliott

3) "The Twitter Book" by Tim O'Reilly

</comment><comment><USER5> The campaign doesn't call people outside of their base because it is extremely hard to convince people to change their mind. There are a lot of popular articles dedicated to this topic recently if you Google some variants of "difficult to change people's mind" [1]. The vast majority of people have a consistent voting behavior, i.e. voting Republican / Democrat all their lives.

I know of these stylized facts because I'm a political scientist who talks shop with my colleagues frequently. Regrettably I can't recommend a good book, but hopefully this answers your particular question.

[1]: [https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/how-risky-is-it- really/...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/how-risky-is-it- really/201007/why-changing-somebody-s-mind-or-yours-is-hard-do)

</comment><comment><USER6> AFAIK There isn't a huge amount of literature on the subject, in part because of the lack of unification or underlying structure of the field. On the local level, there is very little expertise or time to fine tune strategy, so a plug-and-chug style of campaigning is used: In the UK this can mean - from my experience volunteering during an GE campaign - delivering letters to everyone in a constituency.

Many people working for political campaigns have blogs, which could be useful for you.

For more holistic treatments, one assumes that academic research (e.g. Papers analysing nationwide strategy) may be a good place to look: As to specific (say) Journals, I don't know.

</comment><comment><USER7> A classic, 'must read' book on this subject-- All Politics is Local: And Other Rules of the Game> [https://www.amazon.com/All-Politics-Local-Other- Rules/dp/081...](https://www.amazon.com/All-Politics-Local-Other- Rules/dp/0812922972/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1508507438&sr=8-1-spell&keywords=all+politics+is+local+tip+oniell)

</comment><comment><USER8> This might be a little out of date now, but I read this book in college that covers some of that ground. (My professor was the author)

The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns

By: Samuel Popkin

</comment><comment><USER9> In the book "The Signal And The Noise" Nate Silver talked about political campaigns quite a lot. Definitely worth a look.

</comment><comment><USER10> Did you just read 'What Happened'?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I wrote it. :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> _Hardball_ by Chris Matthews delves into some of this.</comment>


Non-Euclidean Worlds Engine [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEB11PQ9Eo8 <comment><USER3> I researched a similar effect few years ago when I was trying to replicate part of the game `AntiChamber` in Unity.

At the time, I found out about Stencil Buffers, which did let us create a cube with various different rooms on the different faces: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DKIP9N-OB4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DKIP9N-OB4)

Since then, there has been more "Portals" technique released, among which this blog post which seems to achieve a similar result: [http://tomhulton.blogspot.com/2015/08/portal-rendering- with-...](http://tomhulton.blogspot.com/2015/08/portal-rendering-with- offscreen-render.html)

Another game which uses a different type of geometry is HyperRogue: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DtUJ_x_2Hc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DtUJ_x_2Hc)

It has a hyperbolic plane instead of a regular rectangular one.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've played a couple of games that use these concepts for gameplay. They are both very cheap and totally worth the money:

Antichamber [1] is a first person puzzle game. Mind-bending. Overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam.

Unseen Diplomacy [2] is a room-scale VR game using this technique to allow free walking (or crawling) around a much larger area than your room.

[1] [https://store.steampowered.com/app/219890/Antichamber/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/219890/Antichamber/)

[2] [https://store.steampowered.com/app/429830/Unseen_Diplomacy/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/429830/Unseen_Diplomacy/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm glad to see other people working on this kind of stuff. The old Descent games had a related—although more primitive—rendering engine that could be (ab)used to similar effect that was a lot of fun back in the mid-90's. Some of the home-brew levels back in the day exploited this for some pretty mind- bending overlapping non-euclidian level design.

As for myself, I've been working on a 2d-space combat game set on the surface of a Poincaré Disk as a hobby over the past few years, not sure i'll ever do anything with it for real, but it's fun.

<comment><USER6> Duke Nukem 3D/Shadow Warrior and the Build engine also achieved a number of their effects and mechanisms similar to the video. In fact, the very first level in the first episode of Duke Nukem 3D where you're on a rooftop, pick up the pistol, shoot the fan and drop down the shaft is a perfect example - <USER2> rooftop and the street level you drop into are connected seamlessly by a short tunnel that transports you. Water surfaces were also used in this effect and the 'underwater' parts were often entirely other parts of the map.

I always thought of them of as pre 'true' 3D engine hacks, but it was so cool to see them again in that video. Cooler still that it's essentially the same trick being used in Portal and I never tweaked to it

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Marathon engine could sort of do this. It was similar to the doom engine in that maps where laid out as polygons on a flat plane, but different in that you could have overlapping polygons, which allowed the devs to do something like this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WxeeiqWrn4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WxeeiqWrn4)

<comment><USER8> In the Duke Nukem 3D level editor you could also put two rooms in the same space, making the same effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Prey (2006) modified a version of the Doom 3 engine to add portals as well as shifting gravity for similar effects. I don't recall if it did size changes as well.

Demo/trailer [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpQRePtEpRw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpQRePtEpRw)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_(2006_video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_\(2006_video_game\))

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_4)

This tech predates Valve's Portal, although I doubt it is the first attempt at this.

<comment><USER10> > _I don 't recall if it did size changes as well._

AFAIR it did; there was one point at which you emerged inside a semi- transparent container, at ~1/10 of your original size, and a full-sized alien was looking at you.

> _This tech predates Valve 's Portal, although I doubt it is the first > attempt at this._

Portal was inspired by Narbacular Drop (2005).

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The old Unreal engine was based on portal rendering. The game itself didn't use too much in the ways of non-euclidian geometry, but there were plenty of custom maps and demos of it. Most, if not all, of the stuff in this video could probably be recreated in that old tech.

Not meant as a middlebrow dismissal, this is neat stuff and I wished it was explored more in games!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEVSUIECY9Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEVSUIECY9Y)

<comment><USER12> As was Duke Nukem 3D. Here's a video about making a simple demo engine based around the concept, which shows off a little non-Euclidean geometry: [https://youtube.com/watch?v=HQYsFshbkYw](https://youtube.com/watch?v=HQYsFshbkYw)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This was also used in a part of the Stanley Parable. The narrator growing impatient at your insubordination draws a yellow line for you to follow but as it winds down a cluttered office corridor strange things happen.

</comment><comment><USER14> The author outlines a compelling use case at the end of the video definitely worth listening to! VR is limited to the space in your bedroom, so how can you compress an entire level into just one room?

</comment><comment><USER15> I'd like to see something like this used in MMORPG or similar, where non- Euclidean spaces are used to expand and shrink spaces to solve problems like overcrowding/undercrowding/travel times, as opposed to using instancing and fast travel.

I've always thought the "go to" solutions of instancing and fast travel were such immersion breakers for actually feeling you're in a virtual world rather than a glorified lobby.

Although, perhaps a non-Euclidean space would have downsides. It would be an interesting experiment at least. Playing with non-linear time (and not just "bullet time") in a multiplayer scenario would be interesting too.

</comment><comment><USER16> One transition option I was still missing: a tunnel with parity transformation, like stepping through a mirror where you would end up as your mirror self.

</comment><comment><USER17> The code, for all who are interested: [https://github.com/HackerPoet/NonEuclidean](https://github.com/HackerPoet/NonEuclidean)

It unfortunately seems to be Windows-only, though.

<comment><USER18> Shouldn't be hard to port since it uses cross-platform GLFW for most of the input/windowing stuff.

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

The only Windows-specific stuff is a bunch of MessageBox and other minor calls

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The effect of the room demo was pretty remarkable.

<comment><USER20> Yes! I was a bit disappointed when he explained it was just portals and a clever rendering hack rather than actually modeling non-Euclidean space natively, then I was delighted when he showed the room-scale VR example.

<comment><USER16> > rather than actually modeling non-Euclidean space natively

In mathematics such non-Euclidean spaces are called manifolds. A manifold is defined as a set of Euclidean-like regions that are connected by transition map functions. That formalism is basically the same thing as these portals.

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

<comment><USER21> Except that that method wouldn't let you have, for example, a hyperbolic plane that could be traversed without obstruction.

<comment><USER16> I think you could actually approximate an unobstructed hyperbolic plane to arbitrary precision with portals. In this game, the hyperbolic plane is represented as a tiling of hexagons and heptagons: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX5eCfRSCKY&t=742s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX5eCfRSCKY&t=742s)

If you take this model but upgrade each cell to a little 3D euclidean region, then you could completely surround it by portals that connect it to the neighbouring cells. The edges of the portals wouldn't be visible. The smaller the euclidean cells, the better the approximation to the hyperbolic plane.

<comment><USER22> For easy computations assume octagonal cells. Their vertices will have 135 degrees each. The edges of the portal will be visible because the left and right images do not match (since 3*135 ≠ 360). And a object (as long as it is modelled as an Euclidean 3D object, not a point) will not be able to go through such a vertex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> There's a short segment where CNLohr shows how he recompiles the code on the fly by using TCC (Tiny C Compiler). That seems rather useful to me, but I don't fully understand what determines which variables of state are persistent across recompilation. I have never used TCC before, but from a rudimentary search I learn you can pass a flag to compile & execute such that C can be used as if it was a scripting language. He mentions storing the environment in environment variables. Is he literally storing the position and orientation of the camera in the shell environment variables? or am I missing some other way to choose what parts of the state are persistent across on-the-fly recompilation?

<comment><USER24> Here is an example level [0]. You can see some scripts in there enclosed by InitScript { … }, RunScript { … }. This gets parsed, compiled and called in [1]. In [2] you have your scripthelpers.h, defining what parts of the engine the script can see. On a first glance I don't see support for persistence across recompilation for scripting variables, and things like position/orientation of the camera are simply stored in the engine and not recompiled.

For a similar approach, see e.g. Interactive Programming in C [3], which relies on re-loading a shared (recompiled) library. But this step could also be done by recompiling via tcc. There the persistent data lives just in the heap and pointers to it get passed to the next version of the library.

[0] [https://github.com/cnlohr/noeuclid/blob/0831b9ce21620704257a...](https://github.com/cnlohr/noeuclid/blob/0831b9ce21620704257a4b60ce5ae1c65123654e/rooms.txt) [1] [https://github.com/cnlohr/noeuclid/blob/0831b9ce21620704257a...](https://github.com/cnlohr/noeuclid/blob/0831b9ce21620704257a4b60ce5ae1c65123654e/GameMap.cpp#L55) [2] [https://github.com/cnlohr/noeuclid/blob/a8e1e038829686f39d48...](https://github.com/cnlohr/noeuclid/blob/a8e1e038829686f39d489ea0cd6756fef338ea9c/scripthelpers.h) [3] [https://nullprogram.com/blog/2014/12/23/](https://nullprogram.com/blog/2014/12/23/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> You could do the overlapping space part of this in the game Descent/Descent 2 since building the levels involved actually directly creating the space partition data structure. I always thought it was incredibly cool and underused.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is simply multiple Euclidian regions stiched together by portals. Seems very limited compared to _actual_ non-Euclidian renderers like [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pmSPlYHxoY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pmSPlYHxoY)

</comment><comment><USER27> While it can be useful (or not) on the applications described, this is not non-euclidean. It is pure euclidean, but defined in steps.

I agree that is visually exciting and all that jazz, but this has nothing to do with Non-Euclidean Geometry... My surprise is that I though this video will give some 3D intuition on this topic, but nay.

<comment><USER28> This is noneuclidean, in that it violates the axioms of euclidean geometry.

1\. A straight line may be drawn between any two points.

2\. Any terminated straight line may be extended indefinitely.

3\. A circle may be drawn with any given point as center and any given radius.

4\. All right angles are equal.

5\. If two straight lines in a plane are met by another line, and if the sum of the internal angles on one side is less than two right angles, then the straight lines will meet if extended sufficiently on the side on which the sum of the angles is less than two right angles.

It follows from those axioms that the sum of the angles of any triangle is 180°, but in that 3-room house, for instance, you could draw a triangle with 3 right angles, so it must violate the axioms.

<comment><USER22> The phrase "non-euclidean geometry" does not mean "any geometry that violates the Euclid axioms" but specifically that the parallel postulate is replaced. traki is right.

<comment><USER27> I've got to reconsider given adrusi's comment, I think he's actually right. The parallel postulate is what makes the sum of angles of any triangle to be 180º.

<comment><USER22> Other Euclid's axioms should still hold in non-Euclidean geometry, but with portals and walls, they do not. Mathematicians who are experts in non- Euclidean geometry would agree that portals do not yield non-Euclidean geometry, e.g. Henry Segerman [http://twitter.com/henryseg/status/970797060369846273](http://twitter.com/henryseg/status/970797060369846273) (see also [http://twitter.com/marctenbosch/status/301331439725719552](http://twitter.com/marctenbosch/status/301331439725719552) ).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I could imagine something like this being an amazing tool for teaching people about non-euclidean geometries and how things like distance can be so contorted in other spaces. In particular I'm thinking teaching people about special and general relativity where things can very quickly become very hard to visualize.

Really cool.

<comment><USER30> Check out "a slower speed of light", relativistic open source game demo made in unity: [http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of- light/](http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/)

Unfortunately the movement is rather hard on the eyes, relativistic motion is not what you are used to after all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The first time I ever seen this portal gimmick in a game was in the Wheel of Time game (released in 99), although it was used only once in the whole game my mind was blown.

</comment><comment><USER32> What game is the black and white clip at 04:13 from?

<comment><USER33> Fragments of Euclid: [https://nusan.itch.io/fragments-of- euclid](https://nusan.itch.io/fragments-of-euclid)

<comment><USER32> Thanks. The crosshatch shader threw me off, but it looks like that can be toggled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I have a feeling that Jonathan Blow will enjoy playing with engine and work something brilliant on top of it.

<comment><USER35> Considering that all of Blow's games have used his own engine, and he's actively building a new engine using his own programming language, it seems rather unlikely that he would suddenly scrap all that work and use this engine instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> That pillar is like a validation of my OCD.

</comment><comment><USER37> I wonder if there is 3d render for 4d space. 4d space can give such wormholes for free in 3d, same as 2d space can be folded in 3d.

</comment><comment><USER38> I spend too much time with urban politics: I see Euclidean and think of zoning.</comment>


Trapping A Transcendental - Finding numbers that aren't solutions to polynomials - <AUTHOR> http://www.penzba.co.uk/Writings/TrappingATranscendental.html?HN2

<comment><USER2> For extra craziness: you can extend the list argument to list all (finite) programs that produce increasing but bounded sequences. We'll call this the computable numbers. The transcendental number described in the article is computable.

But as I've just mentioned, the computable numbers are still countable. This really hurts my head. There's an uncountable set of numbers that aren't expressible in any closed form whatsoever.

Continuous numbers get weirder the harder you look at them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Problem there is you have to list all finite _terminating_ programs that produce increasing bu bounded sequences. Then you start to have to worry about being really, really careful in your definitions. See here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6967954](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6967954)

That's a classic "paradox" being created by having insufficient care in the definitions.

But yes, most (in a technical sense) reals can't be described or computed, and yes, the reals get more and more weird the harder you look at them. In some sense you never really understand them, you just get used to them.

Mostly.

<comment><USER3> I don't see the problem here. It shouldn't be a surprise that listing the computable numbers is itself uncomputable as it is equivalent to the halting problem - to determine whether an algorithm will either keep on producing new decimals or halt at some point is clearly undecidable.

It's when you introduce things as constructible/defineable numbers that things gets hairy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Um, what?

There are two well-known arguments from Cantor:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor's_first_uncountability_p...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor's_first_uncountability_proof)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor's_diagonal_argument](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor's_diagonal_argument)

Describing the sequence at the end as something that seems like it should converge is a bit unconvincing -- it's a sequence explicitly defined not to land on an algebraic number. So the argument is that if you assume you can always pick an interval that doesn't contain a specified algebraic you won't land on an algebraic. This is hardly surprising and kind of presupposes the result.

And why divide the interval into thirds? This seems to be a result of confusing a different Cantor proof (that the measure of the rationals/algebraics in [0,1] is zero, which involves dividing things into thirds) with the first proof. If we accept the argument at all I don't see how it requires three intervals at each step. At most one interval can contain the posited nth algebraic, so you've always got the other interval.

So it's like a mixture of two badly remembered proofs :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> To take your points:

      > There are two well-known arguments from Cantor:
      > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor's_first_uncountability_p...
      > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor's_diagonal_argument

Yes. And in fact the first uncountability proof comes in two flavours. This is explicitly a re-casting of those two versions of Cantor's first proof.

More explicitly, one version of Cantor's first proof has you list the algebraics, take an interval, find the first two algebraics _a_ and _b_ in the interval, reduce the interval to [a,b], and continue. This has various technical issues. What if there aren't two algebraics in your interval (although there always will be, because they're dense, but the argument goes through for any list, not just algebraics, so we need to consider this possible eventuality if we're using the full generality.) What if the interval doesn't converge to be of length zero? (Which again, for the algebraics, it always will. And again, if we use the argument in general we need to allow for this.) And so on.

The second version of Cantor's first proof avoids some of this by saying: find just the first algebraic in the interval, then choose a smaller sub-interval that avoid it, any carry on. Again, for algebraics the interval will go to length zero, but for a general list that won't necessarily be the case.

      > Describing the sequence at the end as something that seems like
      > it should converge is a bit unconvincing -- it's a sequence
      > explicitly defined not to land on an algebraic number. So the
      > argument is that if you assume you can always pick an interval
      > that doesn't contain a specified algebraic you won't land on an
      > algebraic. This is hardly surprising and kind of presupposes
      > the result.

I think you've mis-read the argument. We produce a succession of nested intervals. For a given algebraic, eventually every interval will not include it. That means that no algebraic is in more than finitely many intervals.

The we consider the left end-points. That's an increasing sequence that's bounded above. The reals are complete, so that sequence must converge. But by construction the limit can't be an algebraic.

The comment that the sequence "seems like it should converge" is pointing out that completeness is one of the things we expect of the number line, and it's a way into giving that concept a technical meaning.

      > And why divide the interval into thirds? This seems to be
      > a result of confusing a different Cantor proof (that the
      > measure of the rationals/algebraics in [0,1] is zero, which
      > involves dividing things into thirds) with the first proof.

No, it's a way of being explicit in the choice of the sub-interval. I sometimes use fifths. In that way I can discard the end sub-intervals, discard any sub-interval that touches or contains the given algebraic, and thus the end-points are _strictly_ increasing, and not just increasing. I didn't do that here, and you make me wonder if it's worth changing it, so people don't (incorrectly) make the connection with Cantor dust.

But no, this isn't confusing the construction of Cantor dust.

      > If we accept the argument at all I don't see how it requires
      > three intervals at each step. At most one interval can contain
      > the posited nth algebraic, so you've always got the other interval.

The algebraic may be on the boundary, rather than in an interior.

      > So it's like a mixture of two badly remembered proofs :-)

With respect, your comments seem like they are generated from an insufficiently careful reading, filtered through an understanding of the existing explanations. It feels like you know about this material, and were assuming this is a simple re-hash.

But I could be wrong. Your comments might have substance that I haven't recognised. If that's the case I'd be delighted if you could expand more on why you think the article is wrong or misleading.

Thanks.

<comment><USER4> > We produce a succession of nested intervals. For a given algebraic, > eventually every interval will not include it. That means that no algebraic > is in more than finitely many intervals

Going back over the post -- this number only "exists" because of the least upper bound _axiom_.

You're right that I probably didn't read it carefully enough but there's no particular reason why the intervals need share any elements (e.g. [0,0.5) [0.5,1]) or contain their boundary points -- we got division and < from the rationals without violating anyone's intuition.

Personally, I've always found these arguments unsatisfying. The proof is of the "existence" of something but in the end we have no idea what it looks like -- is it >0.5? No clue. And the proof relies on an existence axiom that seems contrived. (I guess at heart I'm a constructivist.) The desire for "completeness" flows from a false intuition of the nature of the world -- the surface of this table is a "continuum" right? But it turns out not to be. In contrast, I really liked the discussion of the Reals linked yesterday which sidetracked into a robust description of the Reals with infinitesimals (and infinites) and no, I repeat no, least upper bound axiom.

<comment><USER5> > in the end we have no idea what it looks like -- is it >0.5? No clue.

No, that isn't true. The proof Colin gives is quite explicit. There's an explicit listing of the algebraic numbers (except that he leaves the order of various things unstated; for present purposes I'll just work with the order of appearance in his writeup). Then there's a procedure that considers these one by one and chooses intervals of exponentially decreasing size to concentrate on. You can get as many decimal places as you like of the transcendental number Colin's constructing, just by doing enough steps.

Let's be more explicit. The first algebraic numbers in Colin's list are 0, 0, -1, 1, 0. (I assume we aren't counting repeated roots of a single polynomial, but also aren't eliminating duplicates between different polynomials in the list.)

So, first we take the intervals [0,1/3], [1/3,2/3], [2/3,1] and the algebraic number 0. We take the leftmost interval not containing 0, namely [1/3,2/3].

Now we subdivide into three again: [1/3,4/9], [4/9,5/9], [5/9,2/3]. And again our algebraic number is 0. The leftmost interval not containing 0 is [1/3,4/9].

(So we've already established that the number is < 0.5.)

In the next three steps we never see an algebraic number inside our interval so we'll just take the leftmost third each time; so we get [1/3,1/3+1/243].

We've now found the first two decimal places of the transcendental number we're constructing, namely 0.33. It would (at least in principle) be easy to computerize the process and find many more decimal places.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've found at least one typo in this, there may be more. Before I fix it, what's the easiest way (other than BitCoin) to offer a reward to people who find errors?

<comment><USER6> Normally I wouldn't look for such things, but since you mention it, there is a period missing at the end of the bullet point "Then we need to know what we mean by "a sequence that looks like it should converge""

Also, at the end of "Later: Build a sequence"

In later bullets too: "We can list them", for example.

<comment><AUTHOR> All fixed - thank you.

I wouldn't normally worry about every last detail of punctuation, especially in lists and/or bullet points, but your comment is perfectly valid, and of value.

So, how can I buy you a coffee?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe i am nitpicking but the existence of transcendentals was proven by Liouville 30 years before Cantor brought up the considerations about countability. (disclaimer liouville was the advisor of the advisor of the advisor of the advisor of the advisor of the advisor of my advisor)

Also if you like that sort of things you would like [http://amzn.com/0201038129](http://amzn.com/0201038129)

Nearly 30 years ago, John Horton Conway introduced a new way to construct numbers. Donald E. Knuth, in appreciation of this revolutionary system, took a week off from work on The Art of Computer Programming to write an introduction to Conway's method. Never content with the ordinary, Knuth wrote this introduction as a work of fiction--a novelette. If not a steamy romance, the book nonetheless shows how a young couple turned on to pure mathematics and found total happiness.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed, Liouville proved the existence of transcendentals, exhibiting specific numbers as examples. That was around the 1840s. Cantor showed in 1874 that pretty much _every_ real number is transcendental, and the linked article is a re-casting/adaptation of one version of that paper. Although it shows how to construct a transcendental, it really shows that every list of numbers is incomplete. Taking the algebraics as the list then gives the result.

And I actually have a copy of "The Surreal Numbers". Still working on how it/they can be presented to a non-technical audience.

<comment><USER8> Both "Surreal Numbers" and "On Numbers and Games" do a not-terrible job of presenting surreal numbers to a (relatively) non-technical audience.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not convinced. I've tried to follow their presentations when talking about these topics with different audiences and found that people really just don't follow. There's a difference between teaching material and exposing people to it - both of those works try to teach the topic to people, which isn't really appropriate in a single lecture format, or a math club, or a masterclass.

<comment><USER8> Well, they _are_ full-length books (Ok, SN is shortish). There aren't many books that can be presented as a single lecture as is. The surreal numbers (as you know, I'm sure) are fairly subtle, and people don't have much intuition for how they should behave.

Even non-technical people have lots of intuition for real numbers (even if some of it is wrong); they know that they can add them, multiply them, compare them, etc, and they even know algorithms to do so. When confronted with the surreal numbers, it's not at all obvious that you _can_ perform those operations, much less how to do so, so there's an enormous weight of basics to build up before you can really do anything interesting (much like how the first week or two of an introductory linear algebra course can be pretty dull).

Games are perhaps easier to motivate and make interesting (in my experience), as you can get to the point of analyzing and reducing simple positions and establishing the addition operation pretty quickly, without getting bogged down in "wait, why would I use this horribly complex approach to what seems at first to be not terribly unlike the real numbers except maybe I can't even do all the operations I know and love". Unfortunately, multiplication of games doesn't really make terribly much sense, so you need to restrict to numbers reasonably quickly to continue developing "conventional" mathematical structures.

TL;DR: for a single lecture format, motivating and defining games and showing that there's a reasonable embedding the natural (or dyadic rational) numbers isn't a bad introduction in my experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The biggest problem I had with this, was convincing myself this method does list ALL the algebraics. Otherwise a great read.

<comment><USER4> All orderings of the rationals / algebraics / etc. are counterintuitive.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, the Calkin-Wilf tree[0] for enumerating the positive rationals is really very good.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calkin%E2%80%93Wilf_tree](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calkin%E2%80%93Wilf_tree)

<comment><USER4> Cute yes. Clever yes. Intuitive?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If all we want to do is prove the existence of transcendental numbers, rather than construct them, that follows as soon as we know:

1\. Algebraic numbers are countable. 2\. Real numbers aren't countable.

#1 is easy -- the number of polynomials with rational coefficients is obviously countable, and they have finitely many real roots each. So pick your favorite proof of #2 and you're done.

<comment><AUTHOR> True. And in truth, the linked article is my favorite proof of #2.

And that's the point. This proof is really showing the uncountability of the reals - nowhere does it use any property of the algebraics other the fact that they're countable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Spivak's Calculus contains a 3-page proof that e is transcendental. I didn't work through it, but it's unsurprisingly based on the famous series expansion of e.

</comment><comment><USER11> So, he likes what is known as the _completeness_ property of the reals. Good. Glad he likes that! One remark is "Calculus is the elementary consequences of the completeness property of the reals.". And, yes, calculus is nice stuff. Newton did nice things with calculus but may not have understood the completeness property, i.e., just took it for granted that his derivatives and integrals did yield _numbers_.

Some of what is true about the reals is bizarre, nearly beyond belief, e.g., as in Oxtoby, _Measure and Category_.

The main reason for being careful with fine details going from the natural numbers to the integers, rationals, algebraics, and reals is a theme that started near 1900 of trying to clean up the logical basement of mathematics and, there, build everything on just _sets_ so that, if believe in sets, then could believe in everything that could be based on sets, that is, hopefully all of mathematics. This goal seemed okay for about 10 minutes until B. Russell thought of the set

         A = {x|x is not an element of x}

so that A is an element of A if and only it is not. Bummer. Seventy years later the gods of axiomatic set theory came out with a lot of work that made set theory look more solid. Okay, that's curious work, and on a good day with four quarters will cover a $1 cup of coffee.

<comment><USER4> There was an article linked yesterday (sorry, don't have the link) which discussed the Reals in considerably more detail and sidetracked into a reformulation of the Reals that rigorously allows for Newton's infinitesimals without being "complete" in the "least upper bound" sense (and indeed, depending on the classes of functions you care about, doesn't even require an uncountable set).

<comment><USER11> My view is that _infinitesimals_ were a mistake, a long, festering sore in math and some of its applications. Can think intuitively about infinitesimals if you want, but I see no need to mess up the now very clean situation on the foundations of the reals.

Indeed, as a grad student, I had some results and went to see a world famous prof to show him what I had and ask him if my work seemed new to him. At one point he suggested an improvement, and, curiously, as a high end pure mathematician in _analysis_ did his first cut, intuitive reasoning in terms of infinitesimals! Fine. But Dedekind cuts, Cauchy sequences, etc. make a rock solid foundation for the reals, and now can we just get on with, say, Fourier theory and the rest of _analysis_ and their applications?</comment></comment></comment>


Vimeo Bans Project Veritas - sahin-boydas https://twitter.com/Project_Veritas/status/1144003696369577985 <comment> sahin-boydas 1\. @YouTube bans @Pinterest investigation 2\. @Twitter suspends Veritas for Pinterest story 3\. @reddit bans Project Veritas 4\. @YouTube bans @Google investigation 5\. @Vimeo removes Project Veritas account

DO THINK BIG TECH IS WORKING TOGETHER?

<comment><AUTHOR> If it quacks like a duck...

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> This sounds like a group boycott if not restraint of trade. Is any authority looking into this?</comment>


Scientist Finds PageRank-Type Algorithm from the 1940s - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24821/?ref=rss&a=f

<comment><USER2> PageRank is essentially a version of the "stationary probability distribution of a discrete markov process" applied to web pages being states and link being transitions. I remember learning the math back in '96, and it was old then -- perhaps 40 years old.

What is interesting about this finding, is that it was _already_ applied to evaluating scientific papers and quotes.

</comment><comment><USER3> Everybody knows about Markov's work in this sense. The reason it worked so well was not just Google's application of Markov probability distributions, but their integration with the then predominant search strategy of vector space models for page retrieval. The key insight Brin and Page had was to incorporate Markov's work as a scoring metric along with the results from a vector space search (it's all matrices anyways) and then generalize that to include other metrics to help weight pages to the top that are more likely to be what people are looking for.

PageRank != Markov processes only, it's not even just Markov + Vector retrieval, if it was they'd be good to go and their staff of search quality engineers would be in the single digits. But Google has a large number of engineers who's sole purpose is to find ways of tweaking that basic weighting formula, using the user's query (and a handful of other metrics like custom search preferences, language, etc.) to float up good pages and sink down bad pages. I wouldn't be surprised if even Kleinberg's HITS hasn't made it into the formula in some way.

</comment><comment><USER4> very cool, i like how the author didn't do any trollish editorializing like "lulz brin and page were soooooo unoriginal, omgz pagerank is so not innovative it's been around for 60 yearz, anybody could've built googlez"

scientific discoveries inevitably build off of prior work, so it's nice to see this sort of article acknowledging predecessors to seemingly-modern ideas without denigrating them.

</comment><comment><USER5> Makes you wonder why none of these people made their own search engine.

<comment><USER6> In the 40's? By the time they would have had an opportunity to apply this to making a search engine, its unlikely that they would be in a position to drop everything they were doing and create a startup, assuming they would even remember the research they did so long ago _and_ realize the insane value of making a search engine like that.

<comment><USER7> I think ruang was referring to Kleinberger, who applied the idea directly to web pages, as opposed to scientific journals or economies. He did it only short while before Page and Brin, and they even cited him. As to why he didn't make a search engine, I'm guessing it's because CMU is in Pittsburgh.

<comment><USER8> Kleinberg, not Kleinberger, and he's a prof at Cornell, not CMU. I'd guess it has less to with geography, and more to do with the fact that Kleinberg is a (brilliant, celebrated) academic who probably wasn't very interested in doing a startup.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, basic research is worlds different than business.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Xoom off to a rocky start after slow sales - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/xoom-off-to-a-rocky-start-after-slow-sales-20110311/

<comment><AUTHOR> An $800 device competing with a $500 one, with bizarre wi-fi usage rules and weird purchasing paths for consumers didn't do well? This is my complete and utter lack of surprise.

<comment><USER2> More than that, it's an unknown/unproven $800 device and OS competing with a well-established, well-known $500 one.

"Hey, we know you've never heard of this product, but it's just like the iPad and costs a lot more!"

<comment><USER3> ... And the manufacturer has a reputation for producing subpair products with subpair updating schemes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Xoom just looks embarrassingly out of touch with everything that's happening around tablets.

Motorola keeps advertising features that the average user doesn't care about whether that's their specs, (currently non-existent) flash support or (currently non-existent) support for 4G networks.

If anyone is going to take market share away from Apple they sure as hell won't do it by checking boxes on some feature list.

Think about this, have you ever seen a single Xoom ad featuring a person actually using and enjoying the tablet?

<comment><USER5> "Think about this, have you ever seen a single Xoom ad featuring a person actually using and enjoying the tablet?"

Agreed. The only commercial I keep seeing for the Xoom has a man walk up to the Xoom and touch it and then some soft of robot/alien ship materializes around him (transformer style), then it looks like he is piloting the ship somehow but he is really just swiping the Xoom with his finger. It looks like it is in the future, but it's dark and depressing.

The iPad commercial show grandparents laughing while they watch their grandchild open a present on their birthday via facetime on their iPad.

I honestly can't see why people aren't relating to the Xoom.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, that ad is just depressing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> ok, you can't produce inexpensive hardware, ok, you can't do software, it is all understandable deficiencies ...

but why couldn't you make rounded corners of the tablet a little bit more pointy (ie. of a lesser radius) so it wouldn't look like a thick black pancake with small screen in the center where my butter piece usually is?

I'm not a fun of Apple, i'm just embarrassed that the whole world couldn't produce anything even close comparable.

</comment><comment><USER8> Funny how quick people are willing to believe a random analyst when it aligns with their viewpoint.

I wonder if they'd feel the same after hearing that the same guy just touted Blackberry as a strong buy due to the Playbook.

<comment><USER3> The reviews have not been good. It's not hard to believe the public isn't buying. Geeks want this product, not the public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I blame it on the fact that the buttons are where your thumb rests. :) I wonder how long that will last before they are moved.</comment>


A new JPEG format - <AUTHOR> https://actu.epfl.ch/news/a-new-jpeg-format-for-virtual-reality-drones-and-s/ <comment><USER2> That's not a replacement nor a competitor for the popular "JPEG" format. The only commonality here is that it's coordinated by the Joint Photographic Experts Group.

You'll never see JPEG-XS images stored on disk or sent over the web. This is a special-purpose format for video signals on the wire (e.g. for transmission between your graphics card and a 4K monitor). Currently if your cables don't have enough bandwidth for the full uncompressed RGB signal, you get lower FPS, or lower bit precision, or subsampled YCbCr. This is an attempt to make something a bit smarter and apply cheap nearly-lossless compression on the fly instead.

<comment><USER3> >You'll never see JPEG-XS images stored on disk or sent over the web.

I don't see why not. The image quality is near perfect, according to the article, for not even double the average file size, and it uses much less energy to encode and decode, so it's better for your battery life on mobile devices.

<comment><USER2> Because this would be at least 5 times slower to transfer compared to regular image formats, and on mobile a lot of energy goes to power the screen (while user is staring at a blank one, waiting for data) and radios (which now have 5x more work to do).

JPEG XS has severe restrictions of realtime encoding and a 30-line buffer, which are necessary for its goals, but make it a bad choice for anything that doesn't have such limitations.

<comment><USER4> Is it a bad choice, or an _impossible_ choice?

Because if it's possible to send one over the web, I would like to see it rendered with my own eyes. Speed be damned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _A new JPEG format for virtual reality, drones and self-driving cars_

The only buzzword missing from that list is blockchain, and I'm sure they would add it if they could.

<comment><USER6> _A new blockchain-based distributed image format for virtual reality, drones, and self-driving cars, delivering maximum company synergy with minimal downtime, vis-a-vis cloud dependency concerns_

Someone invest in me.

<comment><USER7> You got a vote, in exchange I want 10% of all your karma for the next year, or your account password retain the possibility of "correcting" the growth path of your account.

Also: shit, you're penniless, why did I invest? Whyy?

<comment><USER8> Yeah, he has only 40 karma. That's why you gotta do your due diligence. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So excited for JPEG 2000. It's the future!

So excited for JPEG XR. It's the future!

So excited for JPEG XS. It's

<comment><USER10> Don't forget JPEG with 12-bit color depth. It's not clear to me if anything supports it or not, and I haven't been able to find any image files that claim to use it.

<comment><USER11> _Hand-assembles on from raw bytes_

 _Upon receiving the file you discover no program will open it_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting concept. That said, I don't think the world needs yet another patent-encumbured image format.

<comment><USER13> The patent will kill it in its tracks. mp3 is dead now because of the patent (well, also because of streaming).

The open source community tends to provide a lot of the system-level technology for using things like this and I'd expect them to completely ignore a patented format.

<comment><USER14> MP3 was arguably among the most successful format in history, surpassed only by html.

If it is dead now, which it isn't, the patent has nothing to do with that, because it actually just expired.

MP3 becoming less important is simply a result of incremental improvements on its fundamental ideas, like AAP.

<comment><USER15> I would have to say that jpegs were more successful than mp3s

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In the introduction paper [1], there is no mention of handling of raw images which haven't been turned into RGB. I.e. it assumes an RGB image, not a colour filter array (Bayer) image.

This is odd because the use case for this is sending the image from the sensor, and the de-bayer step would therefore need to be done before the image is sent, which is a lossy step and also can be quite slow and complex to do well, which sort of compromises the point of this effort.

This is very much needed and I appreciate that it's happening. Looking forward to a reference implementation.

[1] [https://www.ibc.org/download?ac=3823](https://www.ibc.org/download?ac=3823)

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm genuinely not seeing the usefulness here. There's always been a tradeoff between image quality and the rate of compression. What they're basically saying is that they are worsening the compression ratio for better image quality, but they want to be the ones to slap a name on this 'new' paradigm shift? Sure they're also making their own compression scheme, but it doesn't matter all that much. We can pretty much gain the equivalent of what their saying from just streaming images encoded with pre-existing lossless compression schemes like png.

</comment><comment><USER18> Low-quality, buzzword-filled blogspam for [https://jpeg.org/jpegxs/](https://jpeg.org/jpegxs/)

Some presentations and/or papers:

[1] 'Introduction to JPEG XS - The New Low Complexity Codec Standard for Professional Video Production', Fraunhofer IIS & intoPIX SA, [https://www.ibc.org/download?ac=3823](https://www.ibc.org/download?ac=3823) (pdf)

[2] 'JPEG XS, a new standard for visually lossless low-latency lightweight image compression', Fraunhofer IIS, [http://publica.fraunhofer.de/documents/N-479925.html](http://publica.fraunhofer.de/documents/N-479925.html) (login and/or paywall) (pdf)

[3] JPEG XS workplan from 2016, JPEG, [https://jpeg.org/downloads/jpegxs/wg1n71031-REQ- JPEG_XS_Call...](https://jpeg.org/downloads/jpegxs/wg1n71031-REQ- JPEG_XS_Call_for_proposals.pdf) (pdf)

Essentially, a low-loss, partially-wavelet _video_ format heavily implied to be applicable for pro video, in the vein of VC-2/Dirac.

<comment><USER19> It's just different article aimed at a different audience, it's not in any way 'blogspam'.

<comment><USER18> It's an article from a school whose faculty member leads JPEG. It namedrops VR, space agencies, 5G; vaguely alludes to some upcoming work, links to nowhere of interest -- it's university press release mixed with quasi- marketing undertones you'd find in a business magazine.

I think we should strive for better sources than this, so I provided some.

<comment><USER19> Striving for better sources doesn't mean misrepresenting sources. The university press release might not be to your taste but it's not 'blogspam' \- it's not a lifted copy of the sources you are suggesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> How does it compare with MJPEG, which performs very well on even low-end devices and is supported in most web browsers?

</comment><comment><USER21> Are files going to have .jpg extension?

<comment><USER22> This is not an on-disk format. There will be no files. It's for low-latency on-the-wire transmission.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Can we just skip JP2?

<comment><USER24> JPEG2000 is currently used in digital preservation and archival digitization, and I'm not entirely sure if JPEG XS will supersede it.

<comment><USER25> I'm entirely sure that it will not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Just use PNG

<comment><USER27> For streamed video? Don't be daft!</comment></comment>


Is Mozilla being forced to buy Adwords to protect their users from malware? - <AUTHOR>

For a while I've been moaning about the fact that paid results on Google search for terms like "firefox" or "download firefox" lead to dodgy download sites with versions of Firefox full of malware[0].
After reading a comment mentioning the issue again today[1] I did a few searches to see if anything had changed. I was surprised to find that the ads that show up for the search term "firefox" are links to Mozilla's own site: https://i.imgur.com/F9Ct4Tf.png although sometimes the malware ads still show up as well: https://i.imgur.com/oRpU5Mq.png
It appears that Mozilla, faced with a situation where many users were unable to install Firefox safely without getting malware, have decided to outbid the malware ads themselves, to try and ensure that their users get a clean download. The real Mozilla link is always the top organic result, so I can't see what other reason they would have to start bidding on expensive Adwords  keywords.
Do Mozilla folk here know if the decision to start buying Google ads was discussed publicly? Is this a new policy? How much are they having to pay for this? Have they asked Google to take down the malware ads?
I find it hard to see this as anything other than extortion by Google: "pay us or your users get infected".
[0] e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8879229 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7335401 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7971201
Screenshots: https://i.imgur.com/Ote9c2k.png https://i.imgur.com/lzKU3FO.png and an older screenshot from back when the ads were more clearly marked: https://i.imgur.com/jX5Lt9F.png
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9193250 <comment><USER2> I used to subscribe to planet Mozilla. I remember blog posts talking about user convertion of paid advertisement on Google and they concluded it was a good deal. Other blog posts have discussed lawsuits in Germany against Firefox impersonators.

It is not a new policy.

When reading planet Mozilla I rarely notice who writes what and it's been a long time since I subscribed anyway, so I can't get you source, but those are my 5 cents for what it is worth.

</comment><comment><USER3> Mozilla's EULA also prevents commercial distribution of Firefox binaries, which seems a little unusual to me.

<comment><USER4> This is not really surprising to me. Have you seen Chrome? It's being bundled with heaps of malware for profit (PPI garbage).</comment></comment>


Anonymous Pledges to Take Down Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20090328-71/anonymous-facebooks-going-down-november-5/

<comment><USER3> Am I the only one who thinks this sounds completely out of character for LulzSec / Anonymous?

They aren't stupid. They surely know that waging war against Facebook would be silly.

I'd bet this is someone completely different, looking to pose as Anonymous. Try looking at the sources --- you won't be able to trace it back to an announcement by Anonymous. So who are these guys?

<comment><USER4> No, you aren't. In fact if I'm not mistaken, this notice was first released yesterday, in spanish. I'm not 100% sure though.

<comment><USER5> Can you link the original one in Spanish?

<comment><USER4> Not sure if it is the first one but: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp-V47iFoDo> It's seems it's even older than I thought.

EDIT: Rough translation:

\----

Greetings, world. We are anonymous.

In this short time lapse, we've heard and saw the panic of Facebook progrmmers. It seems that now they are offering US$ 500 to find errors on their webpage. It is clear that nothing of this is real. They only do this to make the world believe that they have the power, and nothing can be done against them. As we have said before, we are tired of Facebook stealing people's information and selling it to powerful people like pieces of paper. This regime has come to an end.

Facebook will cease to exist.

In November 5th the Facebook Operation will take place succesfully, and nothing will be able to stop it.

We are anonymous, we are legion. We don't forget, we don't forgive. Expect us.

\----

Now that I listen to it carefully, the way they put it sounds pretty weird, to say the least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From #AnonOps: "TO PRESS: MEDIAS OF THE WORLD... STOP LYING! #OpFacebook is just ANOTHER FAKE! WE DONT "KILL" THE MESSENGER. THAT'S NOT OUR STYLE #Anonymous"

That's not to say that Facebook won't be attacked, but most likely not by the people that form that Anonymous that WE think of when we think Anonymous. Although I suppose that any one or group could be Anonymous because of how they define themselves.

<comment><USER5> Link to the tweet: <https://twitter.com/#!/anonops/status/101152229087657984>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really don't buy this as a... 'full force,' if you will, attack by Anonymous. I would want to see this confirmed by sources like <https://twitter.com/#!/anonymousirc> before I believed it to really be an 'Anonymous' 'movement.'

Of course, their strength is also their weakness. Without any names, what is and is not 'Anonymous' can forever be questioned. Like others, I want to say "they are too smart for this," but then they ('they') also attacked Amazon a few months back and that certainly did not go as well as the Visa attacks...

<comment><USER5> AnonOps said it's a fake: <https://twitter.com/#!/anonops/status/101152229087657984>

<comment><USER8> Except for a later tweet saying some are involved but not all:

"#OpFacebook is being organised by some Anons. This does not necessarily mean that all of #Anonymous agrees with it."

<comment><USER5> Link to the tweet: <https://twitter.com/#!/anonops/status/101194056008351744>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was yesterday at their IRC, prepared to laugh at them, but it was quite interesting.

First, they try to look united on twitter and to media, but they quite aren't. Second, they are INCREDIBLY naive. Third, they are OBSESSED with attention of the media.

They were actually planning the attack on #OpFacebook channel (so no, it was not fake - and the channel still exists, but they probably realized it is a joke so they turned it into a joke). After they realized they quite can't attack their servers, they thought it would be better to get people passwords by "botnet keylogger" (and I am not making it up), steal about 1 million accounts and then DEACTIVATE THEM ALL, which would I guess do something terribly evil to Facebook.

Someone brought the question if this doesn't give media and police the right to label them as terrorist, and someone else replied that "police and media are the real terrorists". After that sentence, I laughed too loud and had to leave the IRC.

edit: and apparently, it is still going on - <http://pastebin.com/nzaNLWfF> . Or maybe not, who knows

edit2: ....and they closed the channel for speaking now. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

<comment><USER10> > _they thought it would be better to get people passwords by "botnet > keylogger" (and I am not making it up), steal about 1 million accounts and > then DEACTIVATE THEM ALL, which would I guess do something terribly evil to > Facebook._

That is not a bad approach. If you assume Facebook's network infrastructure is rock solid, then attack Facebook's _human infrastructure_ by flooding them customer services calls.

I don't think you need a botnet keylogger to grab Facebook passwords because their users are easily confused or duped. For example, ReadWriteWeb wrote about Facebook's plans for login federation and many Facebook users, googling for "facebook login", found this blog and tried to login there!

[https://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_y...](https://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_your_one_true_loginpage2.php)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This group calls itself anonymous as well, and uses the same 'branding', but it is useful to note that the people behind this may have no affiliation with the previous anonymous operations.

The 'original anonymous press release' was Uploaded to youtube by FacebookOp on Jul 16, 2011, and picked up by media only recently.

None of the usual anonymous twitter accounts (<http://twitter.com/anonymousirc> <http://twitter.com/youranonnews> <http://twitter.com/anonops> <http://twitter.com/#!/AnonymousPress> etc) or the irc channel (irc.anonops.li) have any mention of the operation.

It is of course not impossible to create a new youtube user and a new twitter account called 'facebookop' and post a video proclaiming to attack facebook in the name of anonymous. Anyone can do it.

<comment><USER5> Have any of the "official" (whatever it means) Twitter accounts said anything against FacebookOp?

I'm wondering if this is an spinoff from Anonymous, a false flag, or even both things at the same time (possible).

<comment><USER12> _Have any of the "official" (whatever it means) Twitter accounts said anything against FacebookOp?_

No. FacebookOp has gone entirely unmentioned by #AnonOps. Not because #AnonOps is unable to post - both Twitter and the blogspot account have posted multiple times about the London mess today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hahahahahaha. Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha. [breathe in] Haha. Hah. Hahahahaha.

Best of luck, Anon!

I'm not sure if Anon fully understands the level of infrastructure and the level of preparation Facebook has... They'll need to come up with something a _lot_ more compelling than a bunch of guys at home with LOIC.

<comment><USER12> This attack is scheduled to come soon after anon switches from LOIC to a "new cannon" dubbed #RefRef ([http://anonops.blogspot.com/2011/08/new-hacking- tools-by-ano...](http://anonops.blogspot.com/2011/08/new-hacking-tools-by- anonymous-new.html)). They're probably way overconfident in their abilities (#RefRef's description is thoroughly unconvincing), but at least they don't think they're going to DDoS one of the best-prepared sites in the world, AFTER telling them exactly what day the attack will occur on.

<comment><USER14> So if we assume these people have any idea what they're talking about, it's some kind of SQLi attack... presumably mySQL? I wonder at what point it'll occur to them that Facebook mostly serves data from memcached.

Uh... did I get something wrong here? A correction or something would be nice.

<comment><USER15> "RefRef is a revolutionary DoS java site. Basically, by using an SQL and .js vulnerability, you can send a page request packet from your home computer with embedded .js file, because of the vulnerability in the SQL/Javascript engine on MOST websites, the site actually TEMPs the .js file on its own server. So now the .js is in place on the host of the site. Next since you still have the request, it picks up the .js file, and all of the requesting for packets power happens on the server, not the requestee. I send two packets from my iphone, and everything else happens on the server. Basically eats itself apart, because since both are on the server, its all a local connection."

"The tool is very effective, a 17-seconds attack from a single machine resulting in a 42-minute outage on Pastebin yesterday. As expected, the Pastebin admins weren't very happy with their platform being used for such tests and tweeted 'Please do not test your software on us again.'"

"The effectiveness of RefRef is due to the fact that it exploits a vulnerability in a widespread SQL service. The flaw is apparently known but not widely patched yet. The tool's creators don't expect their attacks to work on a high-profile target more than a couple of times before being blocked, but they don't believe organizations will rush to patch this flaw en masse before being hit."

[http://www.thehackernews.com/2011/07/refref-denial-of- servic...](http://www.thehackernews.com/2011/07/refref-denial-of-service-ddos- tool.html)

<comment><USER16> I'm disinclined to trust any source that doesn't know the difference between Java and Javascript

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hi anonymous, I work at facebook. If you manage to hack us and grab our data, perhaps you'd like to apply for a job? It's not trivial getting the data even with full access, so you could really help our team! Plus the free lunches are pretty good.

<comment><USER5> Apparently it's a fake: <https://twitter.com/#!/anonops/status/101152229087657984>

<comment><USER18> I thought Anonymous is an unstructured "organization" and that anybody can do anything under their flag without authorization from a central body. How is it that there is apparently a central Twitter account?

<comment><USER5> Maybe it's a bit of a meritocracy? It seems some Twitter accounts are somewhat "official" in the sense that they are followed by most of the people involved in the Anonymous movement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Village Voice has more information than CNet:

[http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/08/anonymous...](http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/08/anonymous_wants.php)

tl;dr: The action is motivated because of the poor privacy policy of Facebook.

As said in other comments, it isn't clear if this is Anonymous because their twitter accounts didn't echo the manifesto. It could be a spinoff, a false flag op, or anything in between.

</comment><comment><USER19> So somehow cutting people off from playing Farmville, talking to friends and family, and generally wasting time is going to endear a small group of "hacktivists" to those users?

Perhaps as effective as cutting those users off from playing PS3 games they'd already purchased.

<comment><USER20> You don't really understand protests do you? You could say the same about street protestors, endearing themselves to motorists trying to get home, or bus driver protestors causing chaos to those who use their services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fake according to AnonOps:

<https://twitter.com/#!/anonops/status/101152229087657984>

</comment><comment><USER12> Anonymous posted to twitter concerning OpFacebook. The three posts that (I think) are relevant:

 _#OpFacebook is being organised by some Anons. This does not necessarily mean that all of #Anonymous agrees with it._

 _We prefer to face the real power and not to face to the same medias that we use as tools. #OpFacebook #Anonymous_

 _REMEMBER THIS ARTICLE: "Are Hacker Attacks Government Operation To Push Internet Censorship Laws?"_

The last one doesn't specifically mention FB, but it does seem that that sort of event - where the MSM attributes X to anon when anon isn't behind X - <USER2> beginning to worry them.

</comment><comment><USER21> Now that anon denied it, I have a suspicion whoever released this announcement also sent a security resume/bid to Facebook. Looks like someone creating a need for himself.

</comment><comment><USER22> The only way I could see this going down is if they have insiders already at Facebook

<comment><USER23> Perhaps even at the very top? I mean this could just be a viral marketing campaign __for__ Facebook. Something to help them regain the street cred they are losing, something to prevent the inevitable myspacing of their business. Or maybe just a cover for planned downtime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> You all assume its going to be a traditional DDOS or SQL Injection or whatever attack.

Look at [http://news.yahoo.com/anonymous-targets-norway-killers- manif...](http://news.yahoo.com/anonymous-targets-norway-killers- manifesto-114923977.html) That's an attack on something, but not by technical means.

Maybe they are planning something they need lots of people to help with and so want the publicity in advance?

Not a clue what that could be tho.

(Yes, I have seen the tweet saying its fake but as others point out there are many anonymous, and in fact the whole anonymous thing is that everyone is anonymous, so who knows?)

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm guessing this is partially a response to a talk given at DEFCON by 2 people trying to unmask anonymous and lulzsec members. They highlighted how they use social media to track people down, especially FB.

</comment><comment><USER26> I would hope the real Anon understands the magnitude the challenge they just set before themselves.

"Facebook has been selling information to government agencies and giving clandestine access to information security firms so that they can spy on people from all around the world. Some of these so-called whitehat infosec firms are working for authoritarian governments, such as those of Egypt and Syria."

^ Besides, if Anonymous wanted to disgrace facebook, I think a better way to do that would be to show evidence backing up this claim.

<comment><USER27> Totally agree. This would be quite a coup causing self-destruction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Unstoppable force meets immovable object!

As much as I admire anon's technical prowess, I seriously doubt that they can take down significant portions of FB which seems very well prepared (unless, of course, some former employee reveals a trapdoor or something to them). Up to now, their targets have been clueless corporations (i.e. Sony) or government agencies mostly.

</comment><comment><USER29> Having seen their previous releases, for me this doesn't sound like Anonymous. I might be wrong, but it smells like faked for me.

<comment><USER30> Conspiracy theory in play: discredit Annon being all mighty if they fail in this Facebook attempt. Anyone can claim to be Annon, it is also a way to spot the real Annon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I just hope these nerds stay on their computers and don't attack any actual people.

</comment><comment><USER32> While reading my fav blogs in the AM, anytime someone mentions Lulz/Anom the f'n comments stop abruptly!

So there is much FUD involved here.

After seeing what they did over the summer,if I were FB...I would take a very guarded position over this latest claim.

</comment><comment><USER33> What would be really awkward is if they released logs of profile/picture views. I'd be willing to bet I'm far less of a stalker than most FB users, but I'd still be pretty uncomfortable with that data out in the open.

<comment><USER12> Highly unlikely, except perhaps in Jake Davis's wet dreams.

Remember that an actual hack requires a both a great deal of skill and great deal of luck, especially when reasonably secure installations (FB obviously qualifying as "reasonably secure") are the target. If this group had the skill required, they would know enough not to be counting on getting lucky. Thus, either they already have knowledge of some vulnerability, or they're not going to find one. The former is highly unlikely - if they had that knowledge, it would require a great deal of stupidity to count on FB not discovering it for nearly three months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> _CRAZY THOUGHT_ : If this <http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2011/Aug/76> , then they might have network access to Facebook?

</comment><comment><USER35> Going after Facebook goes against a lot of Anon's principles. Sure they do have a pretty bad rep in the privacy department but Facebook was an invaluable tool for young people during the Arab Spring

<comment><USER36> _Anon's principles_

Very droll sir. Very droll.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> First rule of war: Don't give notice to your enemy of when or where you're going to attack.

This is something they do to be on the news.. that's all. They're not going to be able to shut it down.

<comment><USER38> Well, there's a few ways they'd do this, right?

(1) availability - DNS or route hijacking. With https they may not be able to fake their own copy, but redirecting to a 'AnOnYmOus ownz yoo' page may be possible.

(2) privacy - a pretty big profile dump, maybe of key facebook employees?

(3) quality - have the news feed, groups, walls, etc flooded with (even more?) crap. A few cracked apps could flood a lot of users.

Sorry, the terms I'm using are pretty bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Remember when the mydoom worm took down google for a bit due to widespread and distributed searches for itself/targets? I wonder if database resources are infinite?

</comment><comment><USER40> Looks like Nov 5th is the target date. So in ~85 days, they are going to concoct a plan to destroy a $100 billion (allegedly) company? This should be interesting.

</comment><comment><USER41> Those guys really need some PR adviser... Taking Facebook down (assuming they can do it) certainly won't make them popular.

</comment><comment><USER42> Will a DDOS attack affect a website that gets billions of pageviews per month anyways?

<comment><USER43> It really depends how they attack. They might have found some URLs that require a lot more resources (CPU or I/O) than your normal user behavior.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I am beginning to think Anonymous is a fictitious entity made up by the mainstream media to divert attention. They sound too hippy-dippy to be of serious intent.

</comment><comment><USER45> I don't think this is true. We'll see, but I think it's a joke.

</comment><comment><USER46> Facebook is too big & has resources to fight off _any_ kind of DDOS attack. I think, Annon's plan won't work. Those kids are going to get disappointed

<comment><USER5> So did VISA and MasterCard ...

<comment><USER47> The traffic Facebook pulls is orders of magnitude greater than Visa and Mastercard's websites have ever had to deal with.

Hell, according to Alexa, Hypem gets more traffic than Visa. <http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/visa.com> <http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/hypem.com>

<comment><USER43> Alexa doesn't count the internal traffic, like financial transactions. Their website is a tiny tiny share of that traffic. Just think of all the credit card transactions happening all over the world.

<comment><USER48> And yet it's the web site, not the transactional infrastructure, that was selected for the attack [http://www.infoworld.com/d/security- central/anonymous-takes-...](http://www.infoworld.com/d/security- central/anonymous-takes-down-visacom-in-wikileaks-protest-925)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Liberapay is in trouble - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/liberapay-blog/liberapay-is-in-trouble-b58b40714d82 <comment><USER2> I have been following this issue for a while, and I am happy to say that things are moving, but I'm also sad to say that some people are feeling uninspired by the movement here. I know that in terms of the money that we have been getting for our accounts (0.25 euro) is no big deal, but the big donation that we were giving, the person is leaving. Though not quite sure what level of "leaving" this is.

It may be OK in the end, but I'm disappointed that they are deciding to say "it is closing" when things haven't been anything like that from what I can see. I've seen similar problems with people going "oh my god the sky is falling" and making pretty overstated claims about things...

<comment><USER3> I never saw the amount of the donations as a limitation in the platform. Maybe the fact that it is so easy to setup many donations push donors to spread out their money too much? The amount of the donations was always the number one complaint I saw against getting donations through this platform...

Personally I don't think I want to use them anymore if they move away from recurring donations to giving it all at once, like the blog post suggests.</comment></comment>


Magical thinking in Software Development - <AUTHOR> http://wrongsideofmemphis.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/magical-thinking-in-software-development/ <comment><USER2> An important point missing from this article is that Python speed can be measured in two distinct ways -- how fast the code runs, and how fast the code gets written.

If a program needs to be up and running yesterday, then the fact that it's not as fast as C/C++ may not actually matter.

I think this issue should be mentioned more often in discussions of execution speed -- the time required to write the code in the first place. For that, Python excels.

<comment><USER3> All these measurements should be considered in the same light: what is the projected TCO of the software? And this includes a number of metrics:

\- programmer productivity

\- hardware costs

\- speed

\- flexibility

\- ease of maintenance

\- barrier of entry

\- interop with other software

How easy will it be to maintain the software in ten years? Wrt to Python, it's a fantastic language, but I've become scared of large codebases in dynamic languages.

<comment><USER2> > I've become scared of large codebases in dynamic languages.

Fair enough. It seems to me that if an application has high performance demands and is expected to be in service for years, it should eventually be rewritten in a faster language. I find myself designing/developing programs in Python because development is so fast, then rewriting the result in a faster language after the design phase is over.

The rewriting phase is basically a translation, not a redesign. In most cases I know exactly how the program should behave, so there's no design taking place.

<comment><USER3> Python is absolutely great for prototyping. And I like it for smaller, more self-contained apps where you don't have to worry too much about mission creep. And of course, you have sqlalchemy.

But all in all, it's more the safety you get from static typing I'm interested in than a pure speed boost. Though pylint is not too bad, it's still not the same.

<comment><USER4> I've work (and continue doing it) on quite big and complex projects in Python, and it works really well for that. Of course, it can depend of the context, but in general I don't think that safety is much more and issue on a dynamic language (and in Python in particular).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there a solution to the Bitcoin blockchain growth problem? - <AUTHOR> Is there a method of purging old transactions from the chain, or will it continue growing forever? <comment><USER2> The blockchain is the history of every transaction. If transactions are purged then transfers from 1 account to another would dissapear from the history and it would essentially be like the transfer never happened.

I won't say there is no solution to the problem but purging transactions is not at the top of the list.

<comment><AUTHOR> So the chain will continue getting longer and longer, with no end, as I understand it. At some point this is going to be a problem because it will exceed normal storage sizes. Is there a solution to that?</comment></comment>


Show HN: The Idea Machine - <AUTHOR> http://www.ideamachine.io/

<comment><USER2> Awesome idea! However, most of what I saw was a flash in the pan type of idea. App ideas are a dime a dozen. If you could refine this and filter it a bit more it would be great! Maybe start with filters for b2b or b2c ideas?

Nice work, good luck!

<comment><USER3> Hi paul, dev here. Thanks so much. I do agree and I have had some problems with idea quality. I've found the site most useful for inspiration, for example taking multiple ideas and combining them to create something new.

<comment><USER2> Yep, I agree 100%. It's a great way to get inspiration. There are some solid ideas in there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I saw a lot of ideas that either already exist, or are in my opinion just plain stupid. The latter I suppose is subjective, since they still had some upvotes. It also does not seem to link to the tweet directly, so it doesn't seem possible to inform anyone the idea already exists (one of the tweets is basically asking for trakt.tv). It could use some way to hide specific ideas & search through the rest.

edit: Retweets seem to also be featured as "fresh" ideas.

<comment><USER2> Chances are, you or I won't invent a new product. The fact that a product exists, is a good indicator of possible revenue. Use these "ideas" to explore new topics and improve on existing products.

You said, "one of the tweets is basically asking for trakt.tv". I, for one, have never heard of trakt.tv. Obviously, never had the person who posted it. That should show you that there is plenty of room for you to create a competing product, compete and profit.

<comment><USER4> I am aware, and I instantly got the desire to tell them about it. However I couldn't figure out how, so I just left a comment here. I know I likely won't invent a new product, but people need an incentive to submit their ideas, and one of those incentives could be "being told about your idea already existing, and here's how you can make use of it".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Neat implementation. I've been working on something in similar spirit for a bit now and hope to have it around here on ShowHN at some point in the near future. Nice to see at least a little concept validation and support around here.

Might get in touch later this summer. While there are some similarities, the ideas (no pun intended) are different enough to be more complimentary than competitive and may be worth chatting about.

cheers

<comment><USER3> Thanks! No problem glad to know other people are thinking around the same lines. I have lots of ideas (pun intended) for new features such as

Comments Better filters Automatic twitter feed.

Problem is I have so many projects on at the moment I just don't have the time.I'm actually selling the site on flippa as I just don't have the time to do the site justice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think it's working well by mixing real ideas with funny ones, it's inspiring and entertaining. My thoughts don't sell it.</comment>


The Machine Learning Canvas – template and handbook (free download) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/louis-dorard/new-book-the-machine-learning-canvas-45bb860307f5 <comment><AUTHOR> I created the Machine Learning Canvas to make it easier to ask the right questions at the beginning of an ML project, and to save people from wasting time and money due to a poor design of their ML system. I'm now releasing the first draft of a book that contains everything there is to know about this framework, in a 1-hour read.</comment>


Why Diablo's Auction House Went Straight to Hell (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2013/09/diablo-auction-house/ <comment><USER2> Excerpt:

 _" But Diablo doesn't have more dungeons, more bosses, etc. Players just play the same procession of levels on harder and harder difficulty levels, picking up better and better loot. In other words, the loot isn't just a helping hand towards their ultimate goal – better loot is the ultimate goal. And with the auction house, players found that the best way to obtain it was to just buy it.

And the next thing you know, they're not playing the game anymore. Why would they, when the reward structure that would otherwise motivate them to play was no longer there? Without the promise of better stuff, Diablo was all stick and no carrot."_

This problem is already solved in World Of Warcraft - basically players can't buy specific items -- until they're of a certain level... But the items attained at a new level are only good/worthwhile to have - for a few levels after that one. That is, after a few levels of advancement, the advantage gained by possessing an item attained at a lower level diminishes (relative to other new/more powerful items attainable at those newer, higher levels), such that after a few levels, the item diminishes in its utility, and eventually it must, of necessity, be discarded as a piece of junk!

(Side note: Compare this to how upwardly economically mobile people will discard items that they once purchased that once served them well, because as they attain higher incomes, newer/better/more expensive replacement items can now be purchased by them! When that happens, the old, yet once-useful items, are "crap", by comparison, so they get discarded as trash...)

The problem is already solved -- in World Of Warcraft.

<comment><USER3> Diablo 3 took a few hours to get to max level on the first character, an hour max on the second, even less if you had friends. Items are already level-gated in the game anyway, so you'd need to come up with a convoluted gear-score system to judge power-level of gear.

D3's auction house made the game suck because the combination of game difficulty at Inferno and the way the loot dropped meant that the fastest way to gear up was to do chest runs where you ignored all the enemies. The extreme imbalance on the AH also meant that top end gear was stupid expensive and everything else was dirt cheap, limiting mobility for those who chose to "play the AH".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Degrade attributes of the object when the object is sold. If you want an unmolested version with 10-15% more power, earn it yourself instead of buying it.</comment>


Facebook Launches Standalone iPhone/Android Messenger App (And It's Beluga) - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/09/facebook-launches-standalone-mobile-messenger-app-and-it%E2%80%99s-beluga/

<comment><USER2> Wow, this is one of the best results of an early-stage acquisition I've seen. Not only did they preserve the original app, but they incorporated all of its awesomeness into the core product.</comment>


CosmoCrate – A monthly delivery of awesome stuff for space enthusiasts - <AUTHOR> http://cosmocrate.com

<comment><USER2> Seems like a product to target pseudo nerds.</comment>


2013 Data Science Salary Survey - <AUTHOR> http://www.oreilly.com/data/free/files/stratasurvey.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> Unsurprising: having stronger programming skills (Hadoop, D3, Python) pays more.

Surprising: there are more data scientists who responded to the survey that are >60 years old than <30 years old.

Interesting: SQL is used by ~70% of survey respondents, R and Python are approximately tied for second with ~40% each.</comment>


Is the Internet destroying our culture, or is it just annoying our snobs? - <AUTHOR> http://www.reason.com/news/show/123523.html

<comment><USER2> Mu</comment>


Show HN: Jelpy – Assist Your Users - <AUTHOR> https://jelpy.io/?ref=hn <comment><AUTHOR> I run several web projects and need a tool to collect feedbacks, bug reports from my users. I don't want to have a dedicated person to manage messages (too expensive) and cannot offer real-time communication (I don't do sales). I know there are many apps like Jelpy but, in my opinion many of them are focused on real-time messaging or costly for the features I need. So I've built my own tool.

Jelpy offers you canned responses, virtual mailboxes to forward mail to, team members, multiple projects, autoresponder, customer tags and details (location, time).

As a developer I like to have control over tools I use. When using jelpy you control the widget via JavaScript API. You even can submit feedback from your custom form without using a widget. Sure REST API is also a feature.

As a product owner I want to have more project specific customer information (is it premium, is it authenticated, etc). That data can be sent with every submission. This really gives you a good context.

What's planned: * filters (eg. process messages before they get to inbox - delete, archive, assign, auto reply) * Shareable link to the form.

And many other sweet things.

It is in beta stage so bugs and issue may happen but I already use it for four months.

I invite you to try it. And I am open for you feedback :) Don't hesitate to ask for features.

Here is a link: [https://jelpy.io](https://jelpy.io) Twitter: @jelpyapp</comment>


Ask HN: What's the best architecture for a websocket api? - <AUTHOR> I haven't find a definitive answer for a java/c# websocket backend api. <comment><USER2> For _API_ the best architecture is flat file. For _service_ , it's a totally different thing.</comment>


SQuery medical semantic search - <AUTHOR> Hi everyone, previously we announced the advent of next generation semantic search engine - SQuery. SQuery digs deeper into the meaning of your search query rather than stupidly matching the text. SQuery now has stepped into the medical area. The demo site contains 4 records on hypertension, insomnia, obesity and hepatitis. SQuery recognizes medical related words/phrases and expands them into semantically related terms. The demo site is live at http://126.96.36.199/ Please email email@example.com if you would like to test SQuery with your data or have any questions. <comment><AUTHOR> Here's an example output

Query:

insomnia

Terms:

insomnia - C0917801 sleeplessness - C0917801 Documents:

NEW_PRL_ID49617 a new insomnia med, Belsomra (bell-SOM-rah, suvorexant) Persistent insomnia (disorder) Groups:

drug(12)

Zolpidem tartrate(1) zolpidem(1) zolpidem Disintegrating Oral Product(1) zolpidem Disintegrating Tablet(1) zolpidem Extended Release Tablet(1) zolpidem Oral Liquid Product(1) zolpidem Oral Product(1) zolpidem Oral Spray(1) zolpidem Oral Spray Product(1) zolpidem Pill(1) zolpidem Sublingual Product(1) zolpidem Sublingual Tablet(1) disorder(28)

Benzodiazepine sedative adverse reaction (disorder)(1) Benzodiazepines(1) Difficulty sleeping(1) Difficulty sleeping (finding)(1) Drug inhibition of cytochrome p450 CYP3A</comment>


MongoDB Random? - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mongodb/mongo-java-driver/blob/master/src/main/com/mongodb/ConnectionStatus.java#L213-L215

<comment><USER2> By a quick glance, they are only logging 10% of exceptions, so if there's a lot, logs don't get clogged.

<comment><USER3> Also, the first exception is logged regardless.

<comment><USER4> So, log first exception, then a random 10% sample of the following instances of the same exception?

IIF the approach of limiting the number of logged exceptions is valid, does it make any sense to randomly choose which ones - other than it was an easy one- line hack?</comment></comment></comment>


Apple stock plunges $30. Sky IS falling. - <AUTHOR> http://finance.google.com/finance?q=AAPL <comment><USER2> This article:

<http://www.thestreet.com/pf/newsanalysis/media/10399930.html>

Talks about how Apple consistently sandbags its estimates, so it can blow through them later. It sounds very much like Steve Jobs's MO:

"Jobs is incredibly and famously promotional when unveiling products, but when he talks numbers he has always been just the opposite -- a conservative player, sandbagging like there is no tomorrow. His dual nature throws people off."

But it looks like underpromise/overdeliver has bitten the stock.

Time to buy!

<comment><USER3> "But it looks like underpromise/overdeliver has bitten the stock.

Time to buy!"

\--Not really. It just sound that the market is saying: "in time a recession, people have hard time to justify spending 1,700 in a useless laptop, or more money on expensive stuff." Since apple represents the medium and higher end spectrum on personal computers, people will be much much more price sensitive to pricing.

The cheapest usable windows laptop, about $400. The cheapest Mac, about $800, making it almost a luxury good. In hard times, it is the luxury stocks that gett the beatings. Apple will have to either sell less laptops and gadgets (fewer people will be able to afford or justify the extra $$), or drop the prices (and margins) to the current products.

<comment><USER4> You don't understand! The MacBook Air fits in a manila envelope.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We're an educated bunch. Could we not talk about stock price changes in percentages? AAPL fell 17% today.

</comment><comment><USER6> ZOMG! Apple stock is going in the the wrong direction! The interwebs will crash! Start buying bottled water and stock your bunker!

Seriously, who cares. Markets move in more than one direction.

</comment><comment><USER7> Please.

I bought appl shares at $130 just 6 months ago. 6 months of gain is lost, not 3 years.

</comment><comment><USER8> GOOG <http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:GOOG> and JAVA <http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:JAVA> too, brace yourself people.

</comment><comment><USER9> APPL has been due for a correction for a long time. Their main product achieved market saturation while their P/E ratio continued to soar.

Too bad I didn't have the cojones (or the faith in investor intelligence) to short it.

<comment><USER10> Their main product as in their computers? Oh, you're talking about their mp3 players. Yeah, those are quite oversaturated, but funny thing being that they keep pushing refreshes continuously and people still buy them, 22 million of them in one quarter. You heard of this other thing they're selling? iPhone? Their P/E ratio in the past a couple of years have been soaring because of the optimism and momentum people think Steve Jobs bring to the table. Even if it's self correcting it'll just go back up again as Apple cranks more products throughout the year.

<comment><USER11> Like their $1800 laptop that has about as much utility as the $300 ASUS EEE PC? (ducks)

Steve Jobs has done an amazing job turning around the company and much of this enthusiasm is warranted. However, the stock got way ahead of itself.

I considered shorting the stock also, but that is just way too risky. A stock only has to double to wipe out the entire investment. And, if a stock is already irrationally high, it could very well go substantially higher in the short term. However, put options may be a good way to bet on the downside while limiting risk.

At this point, I do think they are pretty close to an appropriate valuation. If they get another hit with their iPhone and their computer market share increases, they will do very well. But, I think this is far from a sure bet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I see a trend that indicates flattening of revenue + growth

Net Sales | Profit

1996 $ 9.8B | -$0.8B

1997 $ 7.1B | -$1.0B

1998 $ 5.9B | $0.31B

1999 $ 6.1B | $0.60B

2000 $ 8.0B | $0.79B

2001 $ 5.4B | -$0.03B

2002 $ 5.7B | $0.07B

2003 $ 6.2B | $0.06B

2004 $ 8.3B | $0.27B

2005 $13.9B | $1.33B

2006 $19.3B | $1.99B

2007 $24.0B | $3.50B

*Data from SEC database:

<comment><USER13> That's a joke, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Pssh, that's alright, I got in around $7.50 / share back in '03.

Also, it's "only" down $16.75 at the close.

</comment><comment><USER15> if you bought aapl stock 1 yr ago and sold it today after the crash you would only be up 65% on the year :) i feel bad for you son

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if the OP is short AAPL ;)

</comment><comment><USER17> Two words: buying opportunity.</comment>


Hottest tech skills could pay off the most in 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/02/10-hottest-tech-skills-that-could-pay-off-most-in-2020-says-new-report.html <comment><USER2> As someone new to web development and looking to learn to build some personal projects, any thing worth learning from the list?</comment>


Too Busy Bailing to Plug the Leak - <AUTHOR> http://blog.slickedit.com/?p=250

<comment><USER2> Nice blog post. At a previous job, I saw all of these factors at work on the core product. I had a fight with the CEO where I told him, "You're screaming about cracks in the plaster, I'm telling you it's because the whole foundation's rotten. If we keep plastering over it without fixing the real problem we'll never stop having these stupid issues."

Didn't happen. I couldn't begin to total the amount of time, energy, and money wasted, but I know it went on for two years after that conversation until the company had to do a new financing round and abandon the project.</comment>


Instapaper Extended Outage - <AUTHOR> http://blog.instapaper.com/post/157027537441 <comment><USER2> "After spending multiple hours on the phone with our cloud service provider, it appears we hit a system limit for our hosted database that's preventing new articles from being saved."

ouch.

<comment><USER3> did somebody make the id column an int rather than a bigint? good luck running that alter table query on 2 billion rows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I use this multiple times a day. Not convinced its going to come back up :( Maybe time to try out pocket or something...</comment>


Sad stories of Iranian students at the borders of the US - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/25/us/iran-students-deported-border.html <comment><USER2> [http://archive.is/6FWjg](http://archive.is/6FWjg)</comment>