Larry Ellison reveals shared Oracle database - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/01/ellison_oow_2012_database_cloud/

<comment><USER2> Having read the article it refers to how Oracle in the early days of Cloud said it was was crap in far different words and now offer a cloud solution.

"Ellison has come a long way in a short time on cloud computing. In 2008, when cloud hype was rapidly inflating, Oracle's chief rightly highlighted the term's relativity and meaninglessness, skewering Silicon Valley's mindless recategorising of everything as "cloud".

Saliant part being: "At that time, Ellison reckoned he couldn't see how Oracle could change what it was making or selling in order to capitalise on cloud: "I don't understand what we have to do different, other than change the wording on some our ads," he said (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FacYAI6DY0>)."

Having heard that original insight on youtube I don't blame him/Oracle, he does make some good points back then and now for a `database` vendors perspective. Now they have got the head around there hardware Sun purchase things have changed.

<comment><USER3> This is the right direction for Oracle. Kudos to Larry for doing a Jobs-esque 180.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Remember, Oracle is the master at trying to charge everyone the most that they will bear. If Oracle is managing your database, I guarantee that they will use the data they collect in doing so to attempt to figure out how much they can charge you. I would not touch this offer with a 10' pole.

<comment><USER5> You're defining capitalism, charging what the market will bear is basis of the western economy.

Using the data stored in a cloud database as you suggest would be illegal.

<comment><USER4> No, not charging what the market will bear. Charging each customer what that customer will bear.

Before claiming that it would be illegal for Oracle to use the information that it collects while running a database to figure out how much that customer can afford, I would like you to specify what exactly you consider illegal about it. If you're basing that on a vague notion that discrimination is illegal, then you're wrong. Businesses, by law, are not allowed to discriminate directly or indirectly on a set of protected classes. The standard list is race, gender, religion, national origin, and age. _ANYTHING ELSE_ (eg evidence that you have oodles and oodles of money) is fair game.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't like the title. I realise it hasn't been editorialised, I don't like the original. There is _nothing_ wrong about doing a u-turn.

<comment><USER7> It depends on the style really. It's one thing to say: "We've improved on what's already available, solved problems A, B, C and can demonstrate how. Previous solutions were lacking, but we're giving you something new now".

It's another one to go from: "This just doesn't work" to "This is the first solution that works. Because we've done it this time and we're that good." I know they don't have to respect their competition... and it probably doesn't matter for them what people like me think. But that doesn't mean we can't disagree with the way they're phrasing their announcement (especially when it's incorrect - there were many shared solutions before theirs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> After using Oracle 15 years ago, then mostly using mysql, I had to use Oracle again last year and you know what? It's crap! OCI is a ridiculous, error-prone API that takes a bunch of code to do anything at all.

<comment><USER5> "takes a bunch of code to do anything at all."

I presume you mean the boilerplate code to bind variables and such. If you're not a fan of OCI why not use JDBC, ODBC, cx_Oracle etc, you don't need to use OCI, there are many other interfaces that make life easier. OCI is the low level interface for programmers not scared of a few lines of code. You'll find that you quickly abstract away the boilerplate in your application, and it's really not that hard. OCI has been around for a long time...

<comment><USER8> Oh, if you knew me you'd know that I'm not afraid of a few lines of code, and I'm not afraid of low-level stuff :)

My point is that when you compare OCI to the C API for mysql, it takes a lot less code to use the mysql C API, and it is much less error prone. And it doesn't make sense to either use a wrapper or figure out some framework when it's a one-time project that I'm charging at an hour or two of my time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "We own it. We manage it. We upgrade it. You only pay for what you use"

That might actually be a pretty good model for organisations who have a limited requirement to run the Oracle DB internally (for Oracle applications) without investing in specialized support teams just for that one technology.

<comment><USER10> We are talking about Oracle here, so chances are it's going to cost the same or more than the traditional on-site db server and admins.

<comment><USER11> I'm sure it's not cheap (I haven't been able to find the details yet), but you might be underestimating the cost of operating a large database. Even if we get to amortize and capitalize the expense, there's still a ton of cash that needs to go out the door today. Today, I can license and operate Oracle by the hour with AWS, and I don't need any staff. That's been _huge_ for me. No financing, no cashflow worries.

On Larry's about-face: Oracle's been in SaaS for a while. Now they're getting into IaaS. He's right, though. When it comes to SaaS, going "cloud" meant changing the ad copy. IaaS means self-provisioning and metered billing. That took a little doing. It's a step forward. It may not be compelling for everyone, but there's a market.</comment></comment></comment>


Google: Gmail users 'have no legitimate expectation of privacy' - <AUTHOR> http://rt.com/usa/google-gmail-motion-privacy-453/

<comment><USER2> Wow, talk about taking things out of context, but I guess this is what you get from "consumer watchdog" via RT.

The "quote" in question is that of a lawyer citing a previous ruling (they do that a lot) to counter a specific allegation:

 _"a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over tothird parties." Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735, 743-44 (1979)._

The whole case is built on trying to make physical mail (snail mail) analogies applicable to email, they are accusing Google of "reading" emails when it's computers "parsing" text. That particular part of the motion is in response to the argument that non-Gmail users class action is valid since they didn't agree to the TOS. Google counters that "automated processing" is part of webmail.

Link to relevant page: [http://www.scribd.com/doc/160041493/Google- Motion-061313#pag...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/160041493/Google- Motion-061313#page=27)

It's either the author have never seen a court briefing before or he's just pushing an agenda.

The case is about Gmail "scanning" emails to target ads, Google is arguing (rightly so) that machines parsing emails is not equivalent to "reading" it, and that "automated processes" are responsible for spam filtering, spell checking and other features.

The entire motion, read it and make you own conclusions: [http://www.scribd.com/doc/160041493/Google- Motion-061313](http://www.scribd.com/doc/160041493/Google-Motion-061313)</comment>


Intel's Ultra Low-Voltage Chips for Micro-Servers - <AUTHOR> http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20110315175426_Intel_Unveils_Plans_to_Create_Atom_for_Micro_Servers.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The good: the announced chips support 64-bit, visualization, and ECC, 8MB cache, and plenty of PCIe lanes. Decent clock speeds topping out at almost 4GHz.

The bad: Maximum 32GB ram. Only a single CPU socket supported per system.

Next year there will be Atom-based versions. Overall I these will beat the current Xeons in Performance/Watt but will probably beat them on price judging from the platform limitations.

It seems like a cautious, low-risk move into what could be a quickly growing new market depending on the next moves by AMD/Nvidia/ARM/etc.</comment>


Getting Beaten By A Voting Bot In 50 Minutes - <AUTHOR> http://blog.padmapper.com/2012/04/30/voting-bot/ <comment><USER2> On Apartment List's blog, they are claiming that they asked voters to forward their confirmation emails to them, so that they could confirm votes right before the voting ended: [http://blog.apartmentlist.com/the-2012-peoples- choice-webby-...](http://blog.apartmentlist.com/the-2012-peoples-choice-webby- awards-postmortem/)

Based on the dating, it looks like it was posted _before_ this PadMapper post.

<comment><USER3> Agreed that sounds like bullshit, but assuming they _did_ in fact plan to win the vote in a way which _looks_ exactly like cheating but which turns out to be unorthodox but legitimate, we've got an early contender for marketing gambit of the year.

<comment><AUTHOR> Heh yeah, I would be pretty impressed if it was legit. The main problem would be getting a large number of people to remember and agree to jump through those hoops instead of just confirming it when they got it. Pretty interesting.

<comment><USER4> Seems to me you'd lose too many people to "Just Too Hard" syndrome for the strategy to be worth using too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Welcome to the wonderful world of awards. As you'll find out pretty quickly if you keep going for awards, what happened to you here is nothing more than business as usual. The immense majority of awards out there are 100% bullshit and completely meaningless.

The ones that rely on public votes are very obviously always worthless but the ones relying on a judging panel are, in their vast majority, just as meaningless.

This is actually why entering awards is a great strategy for cash-poor startups who can't afford to pay a PR person. Anybody can win awards. In fact, I haven't personally tried that strategy, but I'm certain that you don't even need to have a product, or a business at all, to win awards. Put together a pretty looking web page for a non-existent product, write a convincing enough description, enter a few random awards and, soon-enough, you should be the proud owner of an award-winning non-existent product.

There are two reasons why it's worth spending a few minutes from time to time entering awards as a startup:

\- Many people don't understand how awards work and believe that they actually mean something (well, they do mean something: that you're better at winning awards than your competitors). So having an award-winning product does increase your credibility with clients.

\- More importantly though, the reason people organise awards is generally to generate PR for themselves. So they'll generally have a PR company lined up to make sure that the award gets covered in the media. Which in turns means that the winners get free PR. And that, for a startup, is priceless.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you visit the Youtube link posted on the Ap. List blog post ([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qY9dAhsWZg&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qY9dAhsWZg&feature=player_embedded)) You'll notice a lot of posts saying they were sent by Ty Moss, Kenny Powers etc. I'm assuming these were sponsored plugs and might have effected the outcome(?). But you'll also notice in the youtube description a link to this page: <http://www.aTrueUnderdog.com> which in turn points to this page > <http://www.organizer.org/webby9.htm> which in turn points to the webby ballot. WTF is going on there and who is <http://www.organizer.org>?

EDIT: Apparently the domain belongs to Denis Grosz (<http://grosz.com/about>) who is on the Ap. List team...<http://blog.apartmentlist.com/about/>

EDIT #2: I just had a thought...Grosz may be attempting to increase clicks through the organizer url to make it appear more valuable.

<comment><USER7> Well noted, though it doesn't seem malicious unless the url <http://pv.webbyawards.com/ballot/46> casts a vote directly (can't check since it's offline).

<comment><USER6> No that link wouldn't have voted directly. It would have been the index link for that particular award category. I agree it doesn't appear malicious, just odd.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well looking at Mechanical Turk [1] it seems that Twitter manipulation comes in at about 5 cents a 'hit' so if a Webby was worth $25,000 to you, you could buy half a million votes. I was wondering if you could go 'back in time' but couldn't find that, to see if there was anything like this in it.

That being said, there are lots and lots of bots on Twitter [2]and given how easy it is to program one, and the fact that folks might pay for it, wouldn't you like to have a 'twitter army' in your pocket that for the right price could give you a shout out? Heck people do it with zombie PCs all the time.

[1] [https://www.mturk.com/mturk/viewsearchbar?searchWords=twitte...](https://www.mturk.com/mturk/viewsearchbar?searchWords=twitter&selectedSearchType=hitgroups&sortType=LatestExpiration%3A0&pageNumber=2&searchSpec=HITGroupSearch%23T%231%2310%23-1%23T%23!keyword_list!2!rO0ABXQAB3R3aXR0ZXI-!Reward!6!rO0ABXQABDAuMDA-!%23!LatestExpiration!0!%23)!

[2] <http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/mostactiveusers/>

<comment><USER9> but, why wait until the last minutes? when I cheat ... I mean, if I were going to cheat, I'd want to make it look good. So, I would spread the votes out over a longer period.

<comment><USER8> That is a great question. One could speculate, last minute idea "Hey this is close enough, I bet we could win it with ..." or a feint of obviousness, or any number of things.

The OP speculates a voting robot, however if you did it with Mechanical Turk which uses real people you might find that they procrastinate and only pick up tasks that are about to go off the lists or something. That would be especially true if price per hit went up as it approached the deadline, one could arbitrage the value vs the number of hits you could do in time to meet the deadline.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I added MTurk as a possible explanation in one of my edits before putting up the post. It would be a more expensive, but harder to trace way to do the same thing - MTurk is effectively a human bot. One giveaway would be that most of those IPs are likely to come from outside the US, and since most of these sites only serve US (and Canada/UK in the case of PM), it'd be easy to tell that something was off if you knew that fact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How confident can you be that voting percentages found through a neat hack can be reliable? If the percentages were taken down, the Webby admins could have been doing anything during that period, under the assumption that those percentages wouldn't be seen (and therefor didn't need to be accurate).

Here's an alternate explanation to the events observed: The Webby admins started removing what they considered to be fraudulent votes during the blackout period. Most of these removed votes came from PadMapper and Zillow, which increased (linearly) Apartment List's percentage.

Full disclosure: I have no dog in this fight. I haven't used any of the services mentioned, and I've only really heard of Zillow.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that's possible too. I ruled that out because they weren't going to announce for 5 days, so they'd have time to analyze/tweak the data after the voting was finished, rather than messing with the live data. Their tweak just removed a bit of data from the page, doubtful it was significantly different logic-wise. Even if Zillow and PadMapper were doing nefarious things, it's unlikely that they would have the same proportion of fraudulent votes while AL had far less, though - that would require coordination between PM and Zillow or some outside factor that would cause us to naturally cheat the same amount.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Since you obviously wanted to win, sorry you got cheated, but at this point I think the only people who pay any attention to the Webbys are those who've paid to be "nominated."

<comment><USER12> Does anybody know how much the Webby folks charge for a nomination?

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha I don't think you can buy a full nom, but if memory serves they charge either 200 or 300 as an entry fee per category. I think they get ballpark 10k entries for roughly 100 categories, and make 5*category# noms.

<comment><USER7> They make $2 million from entries only?

<comment><USER11> Slate thinks so, as of 2008:

      Even after allowing for discounted entry fees, the back of
      the envelope says the Webbys could be taking in more than
      $2 million from its contestants.

[http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/press_box/20...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/press_box/2008/04/what_youve_not_been_honored_by_the_webbys.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So ApartmentsList knew they were going to cheat at the end, so they have one bot do everything required to vote, and towards the end, and then later have another bot go through and confirm addresses. And since they know they're going to be called out on their shit, they post a blog post telling everybody to forward the confirmations.

There's no way theyd be able to get a significant number of people to not only go vote, but then forward a registration email

<comment><USER14> Of course there's a way: if there were specific instructions on oDesk, and they paid per vote.

Here is an example: [https://www.odesk.com/jobs/hours-facebook- votes_%7E%7Ef07c72...](https://www.odesk.com/jobs/hours-facebook- votes_%7E%7Ef07c728ee23ae5da?tot=2187&pos=21)

Of course, any of these could easily be them; there are hundreds of anonymous posts paying for votes. It's so easy and common to scam online votes that it happens all the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Honestly - no-one pays any attention to awards.

([http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software- awards...](http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-awards- scam/))

([http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/aug/23/guardianwee...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/aug/23/guardianweeklytechnologysection.it3))

<comment><USER16> Those two just say that it's easy to get fake awards. That's completely orthogonal to how much (if any) attention people pay to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Internet opinion polls are a complete waste of time. Imagine if you had spent the time wasted on this on developing a new feature or marketing copy. Things like the Webby awards are a way designed to separate you from the dollars in your marketing budget by pandering to your ego. The general public absolutely does not care, any more than you care about the Daytime TV Emmy awards (yes, such things exist).

<comment><AUTHOR> Even if you don't care, I think the media does. The cost of entry was pretty low, though (200 or 300, I think) - certainly a lot less than any ad buy. And you get some great ego stroking if you win as a bonus :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Webbys? Why do you care about winning it? This is a joke of an award that doesn't mean anything at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> An excuse to visit friends in NYC?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Apartment List just 'elaborated': <http://blog.apartmentlist.com/webby- strategy-elaborated/>

Note the distorted use of page view statistics to help put the explanation in context. If you have a look at Alexa you'll see padmapper gets substantially more traffic than Apartment List.

For the record I don't think they've used a bot, but I do think they've used outside(paid) help to generate votes.

<comment><USER19> Seems that it would be easy enough to get some voters to corroborate their claim (maybe some screenshots) rather than offer this non-proof elaboration?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> A semi-related question: Isn't padmapper using a bot to scrape websites? Isn't it mapping craigslist, which specifically says, please don't scrape us, we don't want that?

Just wondering out loud some.

<comment><USER7> > please don't scrape us, we don't want that

Those are still murky waters. Copyright law allows the compilation of a third- party's data as long as you are creating something original with it.

<comment><USER21> Just because something is legal, doesn't necessarily make it a nice thing to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Hopefully this will get some attention and they'll do some checking to get rid of fraud votes.

</comment><comment><USER23> Your article has a HN counter next to the Facebook "Like," and Tweet buttons-- where did you grab that from?

<comment><USER24> If you look at the html you will find a url to hnbutton.appspot.com, and if you hit it without any parameters you will get forwarded to:

<https://github.com/igrigorik/hackernews-button>

<comment><AUTHOR> Good detective work! Saved me from having to look up the URL :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So basically AL is claiming they did a mass voting snipe?

Seems a bit disingenuous but then again Ebay bidding seems to have been this way for a while and now the strategy is moving to other areas if this is the case.

</comment><comment><USER26> As is often the case with these awards, the only winner is the site running the contest. Other players in the game have incentive to send traffic to the site running the contest, who gets more traffic. Meanwhile, the sites being voted on spend lots of time trying to win, and in turn asking their users to spend their time voting.</comment>


A Physicist Who Denies That Dark Matter Exists - <AUTHOR> http://cosmos.nautil.us/short/144/the-physicist-who-denies-that-dark-matter-exists <comment><USER2> > "If Newtonian physics can't predict the fixed curves, perhaps we should fix > Newton, instead of making up a whole new class of matter just to fit our > measurements."

I've always felt this way about dark matter, but as a lay person with no background in physics, it's an opinion I'm hesitant to express.

if you have a model that predicts something, but the prediction is off by several orders of magnitude, the model is wrong. no other field would invent invisible stuff to explain that the model is still right. (well, maybe finance)

<comment><USER3> > I've always felt this way about dark matter, but as a lay person with no > background in physics, it's an opinion I'm hesitant to express.

I have always had the same inclination. It seems like a classic candidate for using Occam's razor. Would love to hear someone who knows more about physics weigh in with a more nuanced viewpoint.

<comment><USER4> (I have a physics degree, but it's very rusty at this point)

Particle physics has a _long_ history of noticing gaps in the experimental data that don't match up with current theories and positing that maybe a new particle would solve the problem. This goes right back to things like the neutrino (which was posited to preserve momentum in certain particle interactions IIRC) and even the neutron.

Sometimes the suggestion pans out, sometimes it doesn't. You can see this kind of thing in action - when there was that anomaly in the CERN data a year or two ago there were a flurry of papers suggesting possible particles, none of which panned out because the anomaly turned out to be statistical noise. The various particulate explanations for the observed discrepancy between the spiral galaxy rotation curves and the observed distribution of matter are very similar: Take a gap in the data & speculate about what kind of particle would fill the hole.

When you combine the fact that, historically, speculating about whether new particles could explain anomalies in the observed data has been _very_ productive for C20th physics with the reality that physicists are also loath to toss aside general relativity (which has been spectacularly successful) just because of one observed anomaly that has yet to be explained, it's entirely unsurprising that physicists are keen on new particles as explanations for the galactic rotation curves.

At the same time, every physicist will happily admit that there's a great big hole in the standard model - i.e. that it doesn't include gravity _at all_ \- and that any unifying theory might also explain away the galaxy rotation curves in a way that doesn't require new particles. Indeed, if a unifying theory could pull off that trick it would be evidence that the theory has a good chance of being true. Sadly, to date, no one has managed to come up with such a unification, and we have no real idea what such a theory would look like beyond the obvious: that it should explain the observed facts & match QFT & GR in the regimes where those theories are accurate.

<comment><USER5> My impression was that QFT includes gravity and "only" breaks down when things get extreme, i.e. black holes/big bang/etc.

<comment><USER4> No, there is no quantum theory of gravity & QFT doesn't include gravity at all. The best you can do is add gravitational effects as an after-thought, but the things you might analyse with the full QFT are generally far too small & short lived for gravitational effects to matter anyway.

<comment><USER6> > No, there is no quantum theory of gravity

Here's a couple of examples of quantum theories of gravity.

[http://www.phys.lsu.edu/faculty/pullin/talks/pire1.pdf](http://www.phys.lsu.edu/faculty/pullin/talks/pire1.pdf)

[http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/lectures/erice02.pd...](http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/lectures/erice02.pdf)

[http://einrichtungen.ph.tum.de/T31/seminars-past/seminar- tal...](http://einrichtungen.ph.tum.de/T31/seminars-past/seminar- talks/FrankSaueressig13.pdf)

[http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/research/gr/public/qg_ss.html](http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/research/gr/public/qg_ss.html)

The extent to which these are complete, consistent, natural (in the fine- tuning sense), and so forth is debatable but these are certainly existing examples of quantum theories of gravity, and indeed the first is a perfectly reasonable Effective Field Theory that people work in regularly.

> QFT doesn't include gravity at all

I think you mean "The Standard Model of Particle Physics", which is a quantum field theory (as is e.g. perturbative quantum gravity).

> the things you might analyse with the full QFT

Atoms and molecules have gravitational fields; when you send one through a double slit, which way does their gravitational field go?

[http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v7/n5/abs/nnano.2012.34....](http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v7/n5/abs/nnano.2012.34.html)

A quantum theory of gravity is needed to answer that.

Assemble a huge number of particles in superposition with 1/(sqrt 2) (|M @ a> \+ |M @ b>), with a & b separated. A quantum theory of gravity is needed to describe the gravitational influence of M on a small test object (General Relativity's answer is just wrong :( ).

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure I believe that a mathematical formalism that is unable to make useful real world predictions deserves the "theory" moniker. Hence your list of quantum theories of gravity aren't.

But perhaps that's me being picky :)

> I think you mean "The Standard Model of Particle Physics", which is a > quantum field theory (as is e.g. perturbative quantum gravity).

Sure: I was just quoting the parent comment & using the term informally to stand in for the mouthful that is TSMoPP.

(I'd love to see an experimental setup that was capable of detecting the gravitational field of a single molecule: that would be impressive!)

<comment><USER6> > I'm not sure I believe that a mathematical formalism that is unable to make > useful real world predictions deserves the "theory" moniker. Hence your list > of quantum theories of gravity aren't.

On the contrary, the ones I listed are all _completely_ in accord with General Relativity up to strong gravity and absent superposed sources, which is found from studying the renormalization group flow of perturbative quantum gravity and is four loops of gravitons in a 3+1 dimensional spacetime. Strong gravity can only be found very close to the singularity of black holes (and well _inside_ event horizons, except at the final evaporation), or in the very early universe. So we're good for neutron stars, and have no problems studying things around the event horizons of astrophysical black holes.

The only new mathematical formalism in perturbative quantum gravity is renormalization, and that goes back to the 1980s. Perturbative quantum gravity itself comes from the 1990s.

Sean Carroll has a good explanation of renormalization and effective field theory here:

[http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/06/20/how- quan...](http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/06/20/how-quantum- field-theory-becomes-effective/)

Asymptotically safe gravity posits an ultraviolet fixed point at which one can take a finite number of measurements, producing a strong gravity completion that perturbative renormalzation cannot; this is prompted by asymptotic safety in QCD. Below that limit, ASG completely matches perturbative quantum gravity, and so in the EFT limit it's the same as General Relativity.

There are five or six of other _viable_ families of quantum theories of gravity, where viability means they accord exactly with perturbatively quantized General Relativity in its effective field limit, and thus agree completely with GR in the classical limit and weak gravity, and additionally are candidates as fundamental theories because they do not rely on perturbative renormalization by power counting and thus are expected to be useful to arbitrarily high energies.

Additionally it is not wildly irresponsible to think that mathematical research (perhaps not driven by physics!) will produce a tractable renormalization that does not require nature to select a convenient effect to suppress the explosion of parameters at high energies.

> I'd love to see an experimental setup that was capable of detecting the > gravitational field of a single molecule: that would be impressive!

Everyone would. We're down below milligrams and yoctoNewtons:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.07539](https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.07539)

[http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2014/06/26/smallest-force-ever- mea...](http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2014/06/26/smallest-force-ever-measured/)

I'm not as au fait about how the other side of the tunnel is approaching the ultimate meeting point, but it's not unreasonable to think of nanogram masses in superposition. Experiments were only at thousands of atomic mass units a few years ago, though: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.8343](https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.8343)

Unfortunately General Relativity can only have the whole gravitational influence of these molecules go through one or the other slits. However all of the quantum theories in my previous message have the distribution of the gravitational influence follow distribution of the matter, as one would expect.

<comment><USER4> I _think_ we're disagreeing over terminology rather than the actual physics?

But I'll chase up some of the ASG references. Thanks for those.

(yoctoNewtons! We live in amazing times...)

<comment><USER6> If one can extract practical comparisons between a pair of mathematical formalisms, and map those to differences in observables, I think that qualifies both as physical theories. Between ASG and string theory (with some assumptions about how to get the latter out of the AdS box and ignoring the landscape problem) there are noteworthy differences that are likely to manifest in the detailed accounting of accretion disks around astrophysical black holes. QG phenomenologists (who are sadly rare) are professionally interested in extracting such comparisons among various theories with a view to distinguishing them observationally or experimentally.

Annoyingly, experimental evidence can be hard to come by because any viable mathematical formalism has to reproduce the successes of GR, and it is shockingly easy to depart from GR in a serious way even in very weak gravity.

ASG's main anti-features are that it's not in itself a fundamental ToE; what it would accomplish (if it holds up) is getting the gravity part right to Planck scales and avoiding the incompatibility with QFT. Who knows what beyond-the-Standard-Model physics outside the gravitational sector will look like at those scales?

ASG is not alone in this, though.

String theory, on the other hand, would let gravity and matter emerge from something like a field of strings resembling dark energy, where cooling increases the apparent volume of the cosmological frame at a given scale factor. Slow thermalization in turn produces everything else, like dark matter, baryons, light, and so on.

There are other less popular theories from which matter and spacetime geometry emerge, too.

And of course it goes the other way around too, where matter theories can arise from geometry (Cartan torsion is still viable, and Poplawski still tries to get people to pick up Riemann-Cartan geometry; and quantum geometrodynamics remains viable too).

> We live in amazing times

The amazing thing is that collaboration, simulation, and publication is _hugely_ improved upon even a couple of decades ago. If in the early 1900s people had WWW and message boards, email and message boards, LaTeX, ArXiv, and so forth, who knows what might have been different given the big brains around at the time !

In richer countries we have relative peace, antibiotics and sanitation. Feynman's wife died of TB while he was working on the Manhattan project; that's the trifecta there, just once removed from a theoretical physicist. Henry Moseley was shot through the head on the battlefield at Gallipoli. Many other scientists had their work seriously disrupted during both world wars and during cold war repressions (Sakharov on the one hand, Condon on the other; the former got it much worse of course).

<comment><USER4> > If one can extract practical comparisons between a pair of mathematical > formalisms, and map those to differences in observables, I think that > qualifies both as physical theories.

That's fair. I wasn't aware that anyone had managed to make any potentially observable predictions at this point, so thanks for updating me on that.

(As an observer from the sidelines of physics I've always had a fondness for Loop Quantum Gravity / Spin Foams over String Theory(ies) personally, but not for any particularly deep reason that I can point to as justification.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So this doesn't actually get into the actual big issue with MOND which is that observational results [1] tend to imply some sort of dark matter so current MOND theories actually include some dark matter, just less of it.

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

<comment><USER8> > actually include some dark matter

They include some non-luminous matter, but only require 1/5th to 1/10th as much as would be required by Dark Matter theories. So I think saying they require 'Dark Matter' is confusing. They don't really require a new class of matter and could easily be explained by the presence of some amount of non- luminous baryonic matter in some cases which hardly seems outrageous.

<comment><USER7> non-luminous baryonic matter has long been a contender for dark matter, I think the technical term is Massive compact halo object aka MACHO (as opposed to WIMPS or Weakly interacting massive particles) so saying it still requires dark matter is accurate we could rewrite it to 'actually include some possibly non-exotic dark matter'.

Because even though it reduces the amount of dark matter required it still has missing matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good read about a contrasting scientific view of dark matter.

I also found this quote very relative to this age.

"Why not? What's the big deal? If something doesn't work, fix it. I wasn't trying to be bold. I was very naïve at the time. I didn't understand that scientists are just as swayed as other people by conventions and interests."

</comment><comment><USER10> Afaik there is strong support for dark matter via gravitational lensing effects of galaxies. Unfortunately it is not mentioned in the article whether MOND can cope with these observations. At least I would expect that there might be some integration of MOND into ART which explains that.

<comment><USER11> Increasingly, observations like the ones you mention, along with galaxy rotation curves and more, have really narrowed down the space that DM can occupy. MOND in particular has only very narrow ranges with which it can remain sound, and increasingly it requires modifying the modification to keep that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > In fact, MOND's constant equals the speed of light squared, divided by the > radius of universe.

That does not sound like a coincidence.

Did the constant change when the universe was smaller? Or does the light speed depend on the size of the universe?

<comment><USER13> There are some theories on variable cosmological constants: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_speed_of_light](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_speed_of_light)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Perhaps somewhere out there, in one of those galaxies I spent my life > researching, there already is a known unified theory of physics, with a > variation of MOND built into it. But then I think: So what? We still had fun > doing the math.

His life's work: we had fun doing the math :)

<comment><USER15> While I was getting my PhD(in History), my advisor told me about meeting Lawrence Stone towards the end of his life (Dr. Stone died in 1999). Lawrence Stone had spent a great deal of his career investigating early modern and late medieval marriages. Grossly summed up, he argued that marriages and child bearing in this era were defined more by convenience than by love and it was only in the eighteenth century that love became the defining prerequisite for marriage (I'm being very broad here). My advisor very gently probed Dr. Stone on how he felt about new research that largely puts the lie to Stone's thesis. It was a big deal, because Dr. Stone's theories had defined how we think about marriage and the family for about a generation.

Dr. Stone said that "no quest for the truth is wasted." (that's a quote from my advisor, not Dr. Stone) And he's right! Even if we've got a far more nuanced view of marriage and the family now, he turned over new stones and raised questions that people had to address. His methodology made further research possible. Even if he was wrong (and he thought that he _had_ gotten it wrong), he still made it possible for later historians to do great things.

All that's to say: I totally respect the attitude of having fun doing the math. (as I think parent does as well) This kind of effort is never wasted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Quantized inertia sounds like a nice theory: [http://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.de/2016/09/mihscqi-vs- new...](http://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.de/2016/09/mihscqi-vs-new-mcgaugh- lelli-data.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> Responding to the title, in case it misleads, such "Denial" isn't rare or controversial for topics as far into the unknown such as this.

Don't mistake it with scientific topics like e.g. Climate science "Denial".

</comment><comment><USER17> The way I see the MOND vs Dark Matter is that there are two philosophies. One is we need to add something _new_ to explain the behavior and the other is we need to adjust the existing theories.

This is key because people (IMO particularly engineers like myself) think when stuff is added it is less likely to be correct which in some cases true but others not so much.

The thing is MOND actually adds a bunch of stuff and doesn't explain a whole bunch of other stuff (yet). What sell me on dark matter is the clustering of galaxies and the universe itself (like how did we get these massive super black holes in the galaxy with MOND?).

On a rather tangental note... do you remember when maverick scientist were shunned and if you go back far enough in some cases heretics? Now days it seems to pay nicely to be contrarian in terms of media coverage (at the cost of being revolted by your peers. There was a SA article on this a while back (famous scientist being hated).

</comment><comment><USER18> Can we retag this "Scientist who denies that dark matter exists exists"

<comment><USER19> Story about scientist who denies that dark matter exists exists exists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Dark matter is probably just practical joke where the rest of civilised universe is looking at us from behind their see-through shields.

<comment><USER21> I always thought that. I imagine a sci-fi story where someone manages to finally observe dark matter and when they flip the switch they realise that the earth is actually on the equivalent of a traffic island.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > when you study textbook material, you're studying done deals. You still > don't see the effort that goes into making breakthrough science, when things > are unclear and advances are made intuitively and often go wrong. They don't > teach you that at school.

Why don't they ever fix that?

<comment><USER23> I don't think that's a fair characterization of how the history of science is taught. There are other examples in these threads, but even in a high school & EECS-biased undergraduate science education I was exposed to "ether" theories of light propagation and Lamarckian evolution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I always wonder if gravity could be a force that runs across infinite quantum universes, but really, while a fun mental experiment I have no idea how to do the maths for what that would mean...

</comment><comment><USER25> Occam's razor surely is with him, and not the Dark Matter/Dark Energy people.

Just would loved more current criticism on his theories.

</comment><comment><USER26> wow what if the electron is like a straw we're looking at through and we're just rolling around on it instead. ALL OF US...

</comment><comment><USER27> Nothing exist unless experimentally proven and replicated.

The way they proved the fact that DNA is the genetic molecule.

<comment><USER28> Okay. Your consciousness doesn't exist. Plz go away you scary philosophical zombie!

<comment><USER27> Weak attempt. The mind is what the brain does. The very same way your browser appears on your screen.

Good philosophers, mostly eastern ones, tried very hard to establish a distinction between products of imagination and adequate representations of what is.

The classic example is how the brain conditioned by hundreds of thousands of years by Mother Nature readily mistakes a rope for a snake. Notice, that there is nothing arbitrary here - just wrong interpretation of an appearance.

Modern, based on statistics hipster's science could be compared to a bundle of snakes.)

<comment><USER28> Don't change the subject. Explain how consciousness arises, and describe an experiment that replicates it.

<comment><USER27> Every single morning one could see how it changes the states. For proper experimental evidences visit any hospital.

<comment><USER28> You said

      Nothing exist unless experimentally proven and replicated.

Describe the experiment that proves you are conscious.

<comment><USER27> I did.

<comment><USER28> What you subjectively experience in the morning is not proof of anything.

Since you continue to evade the question, I will only ask once more time: Describe the experiment that demonstrates the existence of consciousness in a manner which is "experimentally proven and replicated".

I'm forced to interpret failure to describe the experiment as your admission that you don't actually require "experimentally proven and replicated" to believe things, or at least that you cherry pick some propositions to require that standard.

That's OK too, no one is demanding that you be intellectually honest or self- consistent. But you should not be surprised if people call you out on it though.

<comment><USER27> Oh, please, cut this cosplay out. In every surgery room of the whole world you could see how chemical compounds administered to patients would turn them unconscious and back. This implies that the consciousness is a product of the brain, not some immaterial substance, divine presence or other kind of abstract crap. This also implies that it is not mere an abstract idea of so- called pure reason ("soul", "I" and "god" are such idea, "awareness" isn't), but a valid linguistic label associated to a real high-level biological phenomena (a set of coordinated processes).

In every neurology department which deals with brain injures and pathology one could see the evidences that the states of consciousness and even its pretense or absence are bound by particular parts of the brain, which, in turn, is an artifact conditioned by the evolutionary forces and constraints of this particular universe and its physical laws.

The way medical science went from Phineas Gage to modern maps of the brain centers, insights into how the vision sub-system works, etc. constitutes the experimental proofs you are asked for.

The proof could be considered still incomplete (but nevertheless it is valid because there is not a single contradiction in what is experimentally confirmed), because there is no way to describe step-by-step the whole development from a single fertilized egg to you, but there is no doubt that there is _nothing extra_ to that mere "mechanical" process, and that the mind is what the brain does and that conscious, which some people would call primordial awareness, is mere a product of the brain activity, which can be affected by chemical compounds and even switched on and off, which, BTW, happens every time you fall asleep (because it is not required) and wake up.

<comment><USER28> I didn't ask whether consciousness is abstract crap, nor did I ask about vision subsystems (which aren't even unique to brains), nor did I ask you to explain the whole process of development from fertilized egg to me. Well, unless that has something to do with the experiment that would show that consciousness exists, which it may or may not, at least you drew no apparent connections in your post.

I asked you to describe the experiment which proves that consciousness exists.

Merely saying that consciousness is a product of the brain is like proving dark matter by saying it's a product of the universe. I hope you can understand why that is not a convincing argument.

<comment><USER27> > Merely saying that consciousness is a product of the brain is like proving > dark matter by saying it's a product of the universe.

This statement is nonsense. The presence or absence of consciousness could be empirically verified and experimentally tested. The presence or absence of dark matter could not be empirically verified because the concept which is referenced by this pair of words belongs to the category of abstract ideas.

Notice, that consciousness is not an abstract idea, it belong to the category of biological processes. You have here a logical error of assuming existence of an abstract concept, which neither could be empirically verified nor experimentally tested.

There is a subtle difference between a product of the physical brain and a product of group-thinking or sectarian beliefs. While the concepts which form the basis of this or that system of beliefs are certainly exist inside the consciousness of the individual believers and certainly are presented in their shared vocabulary, the phenomena which these concepts presumably accurately and completely capture does not exist anywhere in the universe.

<comment><USER29> > The presence or absence of consciousness could be empirically verified and > experimentally tested.

No, it can't; there are various behavioral traits that are conjectured to be indicative of consciousness that can be tested, but consciousness itself can either be tested nor observed in anyone except the observer.

> Notice, that consciousness is not an abstract idea, it belong to the > category of biological processes.

No, consciousness is not a biological process, it's a phenomenon which is assumed to occur as a _product_ of biological processes, though it's often conjectured that it could also occur as a product of other processes as well.

<comment><USER27> Yes, consciousness is a product of various behavioral traits, but its presence could be empirically tested. There are simple quick medical procedures which could tell whether a man (or even a dog) is conscious or not, and there is an ultimate test in a fMRI scanner which could _prove_ that the patient has no consciousness. Any religious nonsense about validity of the fMRI test is plain stupidity.

Some limited artificial consciousness is obviously possible, even artificial self-consciousness, at least in theory. But possibility does not imply existence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> There is another possible explanation instead of dark matter and that is electric charge and currents (plasma flows).

Electric force is many orders of magnitude stronger than gravity. So, if the objects in the universe are charged, the repelling force between them could account for the expansion acceleration in a very simple way.

<comment><USER8> Except that electrical/magnetic forces are vastly more powerful than gravitational forces. Any such force that's noticeable at the cosmic scale would be powerful enough at the object scale (star, planet, even galaxy) to tear them apart or cause them to collapse.

Lets suppose the Earth and the Sun were both positively charged sufficiently that their repulsive force was enough to noticeably affect the orbit of the Earth. For that to be true, the repulsive forces due to the positive charge on earth itself would have to be so great that it would blast the planet to fragments.

<comment><USER31> I don't think this is true. Let's assume every matter is our solar system is actually not neutral, but slightly positively charged. For Sun-Earth, let's say this reduces the effective force by 1%. Since both Coulomb and gravitational attraction has the same power law, this fixes the change everywhere, or in other words, you could absorb the change into the gravitational constant. Same goes for making everything 1% less dense.

<comment><USER32> That's not how physics works.

We've measured the charge of base particles, we know their charge to 8 decimal places. (e.g. for electrons).

There is simply no way for the force of electromagnetism to be different at the scale of solar systems.

Even MOND is a _tiny_ modification to Newtons laws, and only a modification in extreme circumstances.

<comment><USER31> I think you misunderstood my post. My parent post argued that a mass- proportional charge imbalance big enough to cause a measurable change in gravitation would have catastrophic consequences for planets. Indeed, this is not true, the effects on the planet are of the same scale, i.e. ridiculously small.

Of course, as I wrote, both laws follow the same power-law, so this can not solve the dark matter problem. Indeed you can absorb it in the gravitational constant.

I also did not suggest that electromagnetism should be different at the scale of solar systems.

A test of the charge equivalence of protons and electrons to 8 digits is by far not good enough to rule this out. You have to probe the proton charge to ~1E-20 for a 1% change of the gravitational effect. This is beyond the reach even for atomic level measurements. More interesting are the bounds on charge conservation.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Java/Ruby does not generalise to static/dynamic - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tmorris.net/javaruby-does-not-generalise-to-staticdynamic/

<comment><USER2> This article is vitriolic and unhelpful, but the one it links: <http://www.pphsg.org/cdsmith/types.html> is actually a very good read if you're interested in type systems.</comment>


A man's tattoo left doctors debating whether to save his life - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/01/health/dnr-do-no-resuscitate-tattoo-medical-debate-trnd/index.html?sr=fbCNN120117dnr-do-no-resuscitate-tattoo-medical-debate-trnd0124PMStoryLink <comment><USER2> A standard medical ID bracelet is probably a better way to handle this for anyone out there that has a DNR signed.

</comment><comment><USER3> The pen is mightier than the sword?</comment>


PSn00bSDK – An open source PS1 SDK that doesn't suck - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5A96-pRF2w <comment><AUTHOR> Source here: [https://github.com/lameguy64/psn00bsdk](https://github.com/lameguy64/psn00bsdk)

Since the N64 programming guide showed up on the front page, here's a good PSX SDK that I stumbled upon the other day.</comment>


The Top 7 Startups From Y Combinator's Winter '13 Demo Day - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/26/top-y-combinator-startups/ <comment><USER2> "If it can sell a $12,000 a year license to just the top 1 percent of the 2 million U.S. e-commerce market, it could start earning $240 million a year and help a new wave of commerce entrepreneurs succeed."

I thought that the 1% fallacy had been busted well and truly by now. Not sure whether this was added by TechCrunch or was in their presentation.

<comment><USER3> This also ignores reality; the top 500 retailers account for around 75% of the market, the rest make up a really long tail. After the top 1000 or so you're looking at retailers who make around $12,000 in revenue a month. Optimistically you're looking at $6MM a year vs. $240MM.

I'd also worry that this data is more valuable if all your competitors don't have it. If you look at the Amazon Marketplace it's commonly a race to the bottom.

<comment><USER4> > fter the top 1000 or so you're looking at retailers who make around $12,000 > in revenue a month.

From our experience as a CSE, these numbers are way off. There's a lot more than 1000 retailers making a lot more than $12,000 per month, even in smaller markets than the US where not the top 500, but the top 20 or so account for 75% of the (e-commmerce) market. There's a huge number of (more than $12,000/month revenue) brick & mortar stores out there with a humble online presence but whose investments are focused on increasing e-commerce revenue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As disappointed as I am that FlightCar isn't actually a flying car startup, I love the idea. I would love to see the monetization of more of my unused resources in the future. Why does everyone on my street own their own lawn mower? I think this company orchestrated co-op idea is the future of a lot of resource sharing.

I'm amazed they've gotten it off the ground considering all the potential legal/insurance hurdles. I'd use this tomorrow if it were at my home airport.

<comment><USER6> "I would love to see the monetization of more of my unused resources in the future."

AirBnB for storage of furniture and household goods?

<comment><USER7> That's what Sparefoot does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm really surprised not to see Zenefits on this list. We've been working with them for the past few months and they've been absolutely incredible to work with. They also had cheaper quotes for us than SimplyInsured.

I'd be more than happy to chat with anyone else about it, but I can't say enough good things about Parker, Zenefits, and the crew over there.

Just my $.02.

<comment><USER9> Same. I just started working with them a few weeks ago and they're awesome.

I would speculate that a Techcrunch writer has probably not felt the pain of administering payroll and benefits for a small and medium sized company. Nothing is worse than logging into ADP of Paychex, and that's one of many functions that Zenfits makes suck less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm a big fan of flight-car. Not only you make money renting your car you also save money not paying for parking or a cab! They "killed two birds with one stone" (sorry for the morbid idiom)... They mention in this article that they are tapping into two markets, "airport parking" and "car rental" market but I actually think that a lot of people taking a cab or a Uber could use this service instead.

I'll try it next time I travel...

One thing is not clear to me : does a "valet" pick up my car at the airport of do I have to drop it off at their parking near the airport?

<comment><USER11> Great to hear you're a fan of our service! Yes, you come to our location ~5min away from the terminal, and we'll have a black car drop you off right at the curb. We're working on a valet option; it's a bit more complicated as it requires infrastructure at the airport itself, but we're working on it.

<comment><USER12> i just signed up today for this thursday at 6AM - will someone be available to drop me off at the airport then? will the parking lot be open also?

<comment><USER13> Yes! We're open 24/7!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would be interested to see how TCs top startups from demo day have actually fared over time.

</comment><comment><USER15> On FlightCar, I would suggest:

First, we have to notice the nature of the customer 'load', e.g., on their shuttle car/bus, front desk, rental operation, etc. That is, this load has peaks and valleys, some fairly predictable based on airline schedules, some based on weather, and some just 'random' things independent of anything in the past available to be used as a predictor.

Second, for such a load, there nevertheless will be a strong effect from the law of large numbers that as the load increases the standard deviation of the load will become a smaller and smaller fraction of the average load. That is, a large load is much more predictable than a small load.

Third, then, for efficiency in staffing, shuttle cars/buses, happy customers, etc. want a large load.

Fourth, notice that the customers who leave their cars are likely residents of the area surrounding the airport. I.e., if Joe lives in Kansas City and flies to Los Angeles, maybe that means he wants to leave his car at the Kansas City location, that is, use the service in Kansas City, but does not much mean he wants to use it in Los Angeles.

Fifth, notice that a location of FlightCar in Kansas City is not in much competition with a competitor in, say, Cleveland. That is, this business is heavily geographically local.

So, net, for a large load, for repeat customers at a location, and to defend against competition at a location, want to concentrate on that location and do well there before moving to another location. So, this business can have a fairly strong geographical barrier to entry. That is, it is basically a local business. So, a 'big national or international rollout' should be delayed in favor of just doing well one city at a time.

</comment><comment><USER16> Does YC plan to make a financial return on its Watsi investment? If so, how do they plan to do so given that it's a non-profit?

<comment><USER17> No. The money we gave them was a donation, not an investment in the sense of buying stock.

<comment><USER18> Do you anticipate having more non-profit startups in YC in the future? Are you curious to see any other specific charity model put to work that we maybe haven't seen before?

Watsi was pretty novel I thought (and wonderfully implemented). You must be very proud of what it was able to accomplish.

<comment><USER17> Yes, probably. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I really like FlightCar in theory, but I'd never actually allow my car to be rented to someone I don't know (and even to some people I DO know). I realize they provide wear/tear and mechanical insurance, but I don't think $10/day in gas money is worth the hassle of potentially having to have my clutch repaired or new brake rotors installed for someone who rides both my clutch and brakes. But maybe this is geared more for someone who buys an econobox and doesn't care?

<comment><USER20> I doubt they'd LET you rent a manual out. Generally rental places only allow automatics. If you have a special car that you love, probably not great. If you're one of the great majority that buys a Civic/Camry/Focus/etc. then it's not like driving your car takes any special skill.

<comment><USER21> They actually do rent manual cars: I searched a random day in April and 3 of the 10 cars available are manuals ([https://flightcar.com/cars/SFO/2013-04-02%2012:00:00/2013-04...](https://flightcar.com/cars/SFO/2013-04-02%2012:00:00/2013-04-03%2012:00:00/)). This seems like a great benefit if you're looking to rent a manual car, since car-rental places don't usually offer them.

<comment><USER20> Huh! Shows I should look before I speak!

That's very cool. I wouldn't rent my manual though, heh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> No one who's met the Thalmic guys thinks they're going anywhere but up.

</comment><comment><USER23> My favorite would have to be Watsi, which PG described as YC's first company that's "intentionally" not-for-profit.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm really glad to see YC investing in more health startups. Paul, given the heavy regulations and liabilities, are there any areas of health/medicine that you guys try to steer clear of? You guys have invested in startups doing both EMRs and health insurance, so my guess would be not really.

<comment><USER25> I've never seen YC fund a regulated medical device (well, other than IT systems, which are very very loosely regulated vs. something like a stent or ortho screws), let alone a drug company.

<comment><USER26> My guess would be this is more for capital reasons than legal ones. It is extremely expensive to form a company of either type. I think the standard drug pipeline costs somewhere between 10s of millions to billions of dollars per drug. I'd imagine that the cost for medical device development and approval is similar.

<comment><USER25> Medical devices are 1-3 years vs. 5-15 years (orphan drugs are actually pretty fast now), and 1-2 orders of magnitude less capital.

Medical devices would be just on the upper bound of what I think YC could do. The right way is probably to do an unregulated "fitness" or "convenience" product, which later has regulated-medical-device functionality. Defer the compliance parts until the product itself is proven.

There are plenty of "small business" ($1-5mm in personal-recourse debt) type medical device entrepreneurs. US and Israel seem to be the two big markets for developing them. Surprisingly, a lot come from people outside the medical professions.

<comment><USER26> Ah, thanks for that info, I wasn't aware that the time from development to deployment was that low now.

<comment><USER25> There are ways to fast-track in the US and other countries.

A medical device which had applicability to the military (specifically, IEDs, TBI, PTSD, eye/hearing protection or remediation of damage, traumatic amputations, or prosthetics) would largely avoid the FDA, too. There is going to be _so much money_ in improving the lives of wounded veterans from Iraq/Afghanistan for the next 50 years, and it's going to be one of those cases where money you earn is also related to a societal benefit.

If I were in biotech/biomed or robotics, that'd be what I'd want to do; the only comparable-scale problems are reducing cost of care for everyone and dealing with an increasingly elderly population.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Anyone has any rationale why some companies still prefer to remain in stealth mode on demo day? I'm confused by the "ideas are dime a dozen, execution is all that matters", "do not sign NDA" and the fact that in almost every batch of YCs, some companies still remain in stealth mode on demo day.

<comment><USER28> It's not because YC companies are in stealth, but announcing you're a part of YC is a newsworthy event, and that can be used tactically in coordination with something else. For example, launching a new product or campaign.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Surprised PayTango didn't make the list - seems to be a great way to both reduce fraud and increase convenience.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'd be interested to know what specific things YC helped Watsi with.

</comment><comment><USER31> Does anyone have any idea as to the companies that remained in stealth on demo day?

<comment><USER32> Well they are in stealth... so commenting on them on hacker news or in public forums would go against the whole stealth mode concept PG put in place.

<comment><USER31> Fair enough. My bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> What's with all the hype around Watsi? A non profit oriented approach to poverty is doomed to forever be nothing more than a vanity exercise. The scale of resources needed to attack the problems of poverty can only come from two places: governments or capital markets. Historically, governments have shown themselves to not be terribly able in this regard.

<comment><USER17> They're not trying to fix poverty itself. They're trying to fix the medical problems of people who are poor.

<comment><USER33> The same criticism applies: attempts to solve the problems (e.g., medical) of poverty in non-scalable ways are futile at best.

<comment><USER25> There are a lot of people who are economically marginal but potentially rising with the tide, who suffer a medical ailment or other specific setback, and then end up essentially doomed (along with their kids, etc.). I mean, look at the...50% (? I forget the real number) of bankruptcies caused by medical bills in the US, where even poor people are essentially rich.

Solving someone's one-time problem for $500-1000 and letting him and his family get back to growing along with the rest of their economy seems anything but futile.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


BBC Sound Effects made available to download for use under RemArc Licence - <AUTHOR> http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/ <comment><USER2> We can leave the whether or not publicly-funded work like this should belong to the public (no not the Crown) so I understand that this is _theirs_ to license how they see fit... but this license stinks.

It's non-commercial. It has huge moral use clauses. It basically limits your use to the same standards the BBC is required to keep at broadcast.

And you have to give a credit. And you can't use too much of it (lest somebody think you're sponsored by the BBC). And you cannot denature the collection or remove tracking or branding from it.

AAAAAnd you have to remove files from your copy when they ask. This is a revocable license.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow! Decades ago when I was a theatre sound designer I had those on vinyl and used them all the time. This brings back memories.

<comment> ryan-allen I wonder if there's a mass download of all these sounds?

I'm just lazy. These are epic!

EDIT: Working on a one liner :)

EDIT: I'm sure it's like some curl and xargs and sed, it's been a while...

EDIT: Oh yeah, I win at internet:

curl [http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/assets/BBCSoundEffects.csv](http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/assets/BBCSoundEffects.csv) | grep -Eow "[0-9]+.wav" | xargs -I % curl [http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/assets/%>%](http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/assets/%>%)

EDIT: Wait I suck that doesn't work. This does:

curl [http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/assets/BBCSoundEffects.csv](http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/assets/BBCSoundEffects.csv) | grep -Eow "[0-9]+.wav" | xargs -I % curl -O [http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/assets/%](http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/assets/%)

-O for dOwnlOad

<comment><USER4> Thanks, seems to be chugging along fine in an MSYS2 terminal on Windows.

Now to give them better names than the numbers used by BBC. Any solutions/suggestions?

<comment><USER4> Actually, some of those transfers ended up timing out, and I have no way to know which files are incomplete.

Ended up using Notepad++ and a simple regex in the find/replace dialog to prepend ########.wav with the URL, then chucked it into JDownloader's link grabber. 283.83GB, BTW. I may end up compressing these with FLAC to save the space. If anyone is curious, the regex I used was: (([0-9])+.wav) and replaced with [http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/assets/$&](http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/assets/$&)

Now for the naming and splitting by CD name...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What a weird license... it's not a free one though.

<comment><USER6> I don't think this license makes sense at all for a sound effect library.

> 4.a Not removing content from your device or systems when we ask you to.

Use sound effect in a short film, BBC take down the sound effect library, your film is now illegal.

> 4.b Don't use our content for (…) promoting (…) tobacco (…) anything that > would harm the BBC reputation (…) social campaigning purposes or > fundraising.

Also no ads next to or over the content.

Also, from paragraph 4.h you are not allowed to share the content.

<comment><USER7> Real scenario: a friend was asking me a few weeks back if I had any audio clips for the theatrical show in his kid's school. Not much, just a clock ticking, a car honk. The show was of course free (parents were acting for their kids to enjoy). All non-profit. That library would be helpful (and will be helpful next year when they'll have to perform again).

And oh how I miss GetRight. I remember it was able to jump-around and download from linked web-pages. While IDM doesn't seem to be able to crawl like this (or at least I haven't found a way).

Edit: _snap_ if you got an Android/iOS app and want to add some sounds (e.g. "Lion roaring (inside cage)") then you fall under '8\. a) for commercial purposes – to make a profit' you need permission, which sensibly one can obtain without jumping through too many hoops.

<comment><USER8> freesound.org would be safer for the school show I think

<comment><USER9> Another vote for freesound. FS' licensing is also much more reasonable

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if the monster disc is missing?

</comment><comment><USER11> That licence is written in some very nice plain English. Congratulations to the people that did it.

<comment> Digital-Citizen The RemArc license [https://github.com/bbcarchdev/Remarc/raw/master/doc/2016.09....](https://github.com/bbcarchdev/Remarc/raw/master/doc/2016.09.27_RemArc_Content%20licence_Terms%20of%20Use_final.pdf) clearly attempts to appear friendly and aimed at being understood by non- lawyers but what the license says is not nice at all. This license purports to cover software (among other things) and it is clearly non-free (and a clear illustration of how open source is not free software). That's bad enough to reject the license and all covered works in itself. But the license is worse for using unclear and rights-limiting language.

Open source and software freedom are not the same thing:

This license claims to cover many types of "content" (see [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to- avoid.html#Content](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to- avoid.html#Content) for why that's a bad idea) including "Technical stuff such as metadata and open-source code (please see point 7)". The Open Source Initiative started over a decade after the free software movement began and promotes a 10-point development methodology built to reject the ethical underpinning of the free software movement. The Open Source Definition is not at all the same as software freedom (the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify published software). Open source advocates sometimes reject that 10-point methodology altogether and adopt whatever proprietary work is available if that work is sufficiently attractive (see [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the- point....](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html) for more on this). The RemArc license is an example of papering over the limitations of proprietary control by using a term people think they understand.

The RemArc license is highly prejudiced against commercial and educational use. Section 7 tells us RemArc-covered works are "only for non-commercial, personal or research purposes". Using the covered work "substantially to do your job – as an employee, contractor or consultant" might require you to pay a fee not listed in this license. And that personal or research use (however that is meant to be interpreted) is further limited to "formal education purposes while you are a student or a member of staff of a school, college or university". So if you're doing your own research/education work or if you're home-schooling, you are not licensed to use the covered work. I can't say if this qualifies as "open source" as the license says, but these restrictions absolutely disqualify this license from being a free software license.

RemArc license is very unclear:

"Don't mess with our content" seems to mean let the copyright holders dictate when you must remove the work upon request. So you are being kept from keeping a copy of the work thus censoring you.

"Don't use our content for harmful or offensive purposes" is defined using vague and undefined terms such as being "insulting", "promoting pornography" (precisely what pornography is or what 'promotes' pornography is doubly- unclear), "putting children at risk" (of what? They don't say), "anything illegal. Like using hate speech" (which, is not defined in the US and not defined in this license, and would not survive 1st Amendment scrutiny in the US if used by a state-funded institution akin to coming from the state-funded BBC). Also one is not licensed to use the work in a "harmful or offensive" way such as "Using our content for political or social campaigning purposes". Not only is that unclear it could include doing things I don't find offensive, harmful, insulting, or illegal such as educating children about software freedom.

RemArc license is referred to as a contract ("This is a contract between you and us.") and also a license (2nd line). I don't know how English law defines these terms or what the consequences of those terms are, but in American law they don't mean exactly the same thing.

It makes real a myth propagated by anti-software freedom campaigners:

"You have to [u]se the latest version of the content and, where we have it, don't remove any tagging or tracking" so if they change something, they demand you change your work that includes theirs (presumably without notice). This implements a myth used to argue against strongly-copylefted software covered under the GNU GPL. Ironically, the GPL allows anyone with a copy of the covered code to edit out anything they don't like, so there's no obligation to pass along "tagging or tracking" nor is there any obligation to keep up with changes made in other copies of the same work. But the RemArc license requires you be a bolster for privacy-busting tactics such as tracking. Hardly a nice way to treat people!

It's remarkably restrictive:

"English law governs these terms, and only English courts can make judgments about them." Why would anyone outside this court system want to have their rights determined by English law?

It makes no sense why BBC fee payers would want to be compelled to pay to have taxpayer-funded workers to make works which are so restrictively licensed.

I suspect this license might be someone's well-meaning but poorly chosen attempt at being approachable by non-lawyers. I cringe at the thought of that just as I do when I hear non-technical people describe computer-related problems and say things that make no sense leaving me to try to guess at what they really meant ("I put the floppy disk in the hard drive and switched the monitor on but the game didn't play." which might mean they put something in their computer and only turned on the monitor but not the computer therefore no program ran).

This license and everything covered under it should be avoided.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Really interesting to scroll through and play random sounds. Seems very comprehensive, although it is a bit UK centric (not surprisingly). A good source for a project I've been contemplating to deconstruct sounds in the same way a picture can be represented by SVG.

<comment><USER13> Yep, don't go searching for elevator when what you really need is the lift.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> One can hardly make a good ringtone if search results for "tardis", "sonic screwdriver" and "dalek" yielded nothing.

</comment><comment><USER15> jQuery and a 2MB CSV, gets the job done I guess. Makes batch downloading the whole library trivial too :)

<comment> ryan-allen If you gots bash you can do this in the dir you wanna download 'em all too, for education:

curl [http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/assets/BBCSoundEffects.csv](http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/assets/BBCSoundEffects.csv) | grep -Eow "[0-9]+.wav" | xargs -I % curl -O [http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/assets/%](http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/assets/%)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Quite relaxing listening to the atmosphere ones.

<comment> ryan-allen If you're looking for more things to listen that are atmospheric I recommend checking out this site: [http://mynoise.net](http://mynoise.net)

The author and sound designer has had a long history of making patches for famous Roland instruments, and he designed his own microphones for a lot of these recordings. They are top notch.

I listen to Rain on a Tin Roof and Steel Mill at work as white noise. Very good for focus!

<comment><USER17> Love this site, been a supporter for some time now.</comment></comment></comment>


Organize Your Notebook With Nothing But A Pen - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/productivity-design/9e22483abaff

<comment><USER2> One simple organization method is: Dated entries, linearly from the front, and a sparse dated table of contents, linearly from the back, that refer to front section notes for important items. They grow toward each other.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. That's actually exactly what I described, if you look at point 1 and 4. It works well indeed.</comment></comment>


Tesla Patent – "Good Faith" – What are they not telling? - <AUTHOR>

The news is about their patents being opened up to competitors using them in "good faith" - but what does that mean?  What would be a "bad faith" situation where Tesla could enforce one of their patents? <comment><USER2> They opened because there is no big player with a e-car strategy ... if ford/daimler/bmw starts with massive production of e-cars this will change elon's mind. The time will answer the question.</comment>


Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and PepsiCo are the Top Plastic Polluters - <AUTHOR> https://www.onegreenplanet.org/environment/coca-cola-nestle-pepsi-top-plastic-polluters/ <comment><USER2> I'm going to beat this drum again. When you have a product with negative externalities, like plastic packaging or fossil fuels, price those into the product through a tax. Then, for bonus points, take that tax revenue and put it towards incentivizing greener solutions. The market will then solve your problem remarkably quickly and efficiently. Markets are fantastic, but they don't account for externalities so we need to add that in through regulation to keep a level playing field.

<comment><USER3> Internalizing the costs would make the commodities much more expensive. But expensive sugar drinks is better for our health.

<comment><USER2> And expensive plastic and oil is good for the environment. Conversely cheaper things with positive externalities, like vaccinations would also be beneficial.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Consumers are the top plastic polluters on the planet. These products aren't without demand.

<comment><USER5> Demand is created by these same companies.

<comment><USER6> The tail does not wag the dog. Consumers must take responsibility for their collective actions.

Blaming evil megacorps for all of societies ills is neither productive nor ultimately correct.

<comment><USER5> Look around - simple people (like me) can't do much against masses of psychologists that in the last 50 years studied how to trick the human brain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> First of all the people that throw the trash in the river/sea are the polluters.

Second the question is whether their products are disproportionately represented in the sample sets

<comment><USER8> Except that doesn't tell the whole story. You can toss a plastic bottle in a trash bin and still have it end up in the rivers. Animals get into bins all the time. Along with imperfect collection mechanisms -- bin too stuffed? A bottle or two falls out of the garbage truck? Landfill exposed to the elements?

Relying on humans to do the right thing with the bottles is a good intentions solution. And in tech, at least, we don't like good intentions solutions. If relying on good intentions worked, we'd already have solved the problem because people already have good intentions.

Instead, we need to make it impossible to do the wrong thing. How do we make it impossible for plastic bottles to end up in the river? One way is to stop making plastic bottles.

<comment><USER9> additionally - even with the best intentions (in Germany for example, we have a great deposit based system where you return bottles for recycling / reuse at your local supermarket and get the deposit back) - it turns out that recycling just does not work as it should. DW (1) recently did an expose which showed that significant amounts of plastic that's sent through the recycling process actually ends up in south east asia (many companies are now banning this) - where it ends up getting burned / dumped into the ocean etc.

If we stopped it at the source - and forced these companies to spend a fraction of their massive revenues into innovating around more sustainable alternatives (effectively just pricing in the externality that they are currently getting a free ride on). You'd end up with a much better scenario where consumers can still enjoy the products and don't even have to deal with the cognitive overload of sorting 12 different types of waste.

I think one of the biggest coups that governmentes & corporations have pulled off is to let the burden of environmentally friendliness get shifted to the end consumer. This means that it requires masses of people to first get informed, then get mobilized and then start boycotting or putting pressure on these companies to change something. Pretty wasteful cycle if you ask me, easier to price it in much earlier at the source.

(1) [https://www.dw.com/en/dumping-plastic-waste-on- others/av-494...](https://www.dw.com/en/dumping-plastic-waste-on- others/av-49451092)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Discussed previously:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21373401](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21373401)

</comment><comment><USER11> > 43% of collected plastic was marked with a clear consumer brand, like Coca- > Cola or PepsiCo. Break Free From Plastic blames our "throwaway culture," for > much of the consumer waste. They argue that this throwaway mindset is at the > core of many companies' business model.

Looks like they didn't verify that Coca-Cola et al were the ones actually doing the polluting?</comment>


If you don't know how to program - <AUTHOR>

and you have a relatively simple web app you want to make, where do you start.  What scripting language would be best to learn on?  All the RoR buzz started to lead me in that direction and I bought the agile web dev book, but now I'm not sure if that is the best place to start.  Now I'm more thinking about PHP.  It's simple and very forgiving.  From an unexperienced programmer, it seems much easier to just hack something together.  <p>Any other input?  Thanks! <comment><USER2> SEIA, "Software Engineering for Internet Applications".

\- online, free <http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/>

\- in print [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262511916/pgreenspun...](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262511916/pgreenspun-20)

\- test crashed dummied by armies of MIT grads

\- smart authors

\- easy to read, lots to master

More suggestions from similiar question ~ <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=58927>

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd learn Python honestly. It's very concise and can take you from nothing to something without needing to change languages.

RoR might be a little difficult for a newbie, and PHP is going to give you a lot of bad habits that you'll eventually need to break.

</comment><comment><USER4> The most important part is to just start, as soon as possible somewhere. Cause you'll pick up on common practices as you go along, plus you need as much experience as possible to produce a good app.

</comment><comment><USER5> What do you want to gain from it?

If you want to learn a lot of good practices and maintain and extend your codebase in the future, RoR is fantastic - but may be a steep learning curve due to all the new concepts and levels of abstraction involved, and is somewhat harder to deploy, and probably somewhat more expensive to host.

If you want to "hack something together quickly" to deploy cheaply on any of a wide range of hosting providers, PHP provides a famously productive way to make a mess^H^H^H^H simple web app.

</comment><comment><USER6> When I first learned a scripting language I learned from examples, go here for lots of free examples: <http://www.codango.com/>. Besides scripting learn sql and how to normalize tables.

</comment><comment><USER7> Lets start from the beginning: It's a Webapp right?... so, I asume you already know HTML and CSS, or maybe Flash...

If you don't, start learning it.</comment>


Clang is now feature complete for C++14 - <AUTHOR> http://llvm.org/viewvc/llvm-project?view=revision&revision=194194 <comment><USER2> We shouldn't worry about C++11 / C++14 compiler support, which will eventually come, but rather standard libraries. It's a pain that libstdc++ still does not support some C++11 features[1] (no std::move on streams, for example).

They probably have good reasons, such as keeping the same ABI as long as possible, but it's sometimes very frustrating.

[1] [http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/status.html#s...](http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/status.html#status.iso.2011)

<comment><USER3> Good point, I believe clang + libstdc++ is a much more common combination than clang + libc++.

One thing I really don't like about libc++ is that it doesn't support anything from TR1 - makes it needlessly difficult to use in existing code bases.

<comment><USER4> The only sore thumb in libstdc++ is the regex library. It doesn't work and the headers exist. There are no warnings while compiling the code too. So, it'll appear like everything is dandy and it blows up at run time and usually developers don't think the fault lies in the library code...

This has led to a few hours down the drain...

<comment><USER5> I share your pain. Fortunately, gcc 4.9 will have <regex> support: [http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.9/changes.html](http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.9/changes.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> GCC is behind in the race [http://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cxx1y.html](http://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cxx1y.html)

Anyone recommends a good book, or any other dense/complete material, on C++11/C++14? I barely got C++11, never really practiced, and I could use a good material to dive deep into it.

<comment><USER7> For some videos I would recommend Going Native videos ([http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/2013](http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/2013))

Also there is The tour of C++ ([http://www.stroustrup.com/Tour.html](http://www.stroustrup.com/Tour.html)) which offer a fresh start to the language.

But the one book I am waiting for is Effective C++ 11/14 which should coming up next year.

<comment><USER8> In addition to the Going Native videos, Microsoft's STL wrangler, the conveniently named Stefan T. Lavavej, has a couple of terrific series on the STL itself[1] and the core C++ language[2]. The second course is newer, and thus covers more finalized C++11/14 features.

The more technical videos on Channel 9 are terrific stuff, and hooray for download links! Kudos to Microsoft.

[1] [http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/C9-Lectures-Stephan-T- Lavave...](http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/C9-Lectures-Stephan-T-Lavavej- Standard-Template-Library-STL-/C9-Lectures-Introduction-to-STL-with-Stephan-T- Lavavej)

[2] [http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/C9-Lectures-Stephan-T- Lavave...](http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/C9-Lectures-Stephan-T-Lavavej- Core-C-/Stephan-T-Lavavej-Core-C-1-of-n)

<comment><USER7> True, Stefan is awesome... C9 is a great source for videos.

Also I forgot to mention C++ and Beyond ([http://cppandbeyond.com/video- gallery/](http://cppandbeyond.com/video-gallery/))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is great :). On another note, I'm surprised that they're not using git or another dvcs.

<comment><USER7> They actually do[1]:

git clone [http://llvm.org/git/llvm.git](http://llvm.org/git/llvm.git)

[1] [http://llvm.org/docs/GettingStarted.html#git- mirror](http://llvm.org/docs/GettingStarted.html#git-mirror)

<comment><USER10> That's actually a mirror though, all commits are through SVN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> No template constraints yet?

<comment><USER12> concepts are not finalized yet, AFAIK

<comment><USER13> There's some proposal people are calling concepts-lite that is more or less a cleaner enable_if. There won't be a static_if in 14 from what I hear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Destination C++17 :)

</comment><comment><USER15> 194 194 ? any reason except pure luck ?

<comment><USER16> Why, is there any reason to consider 194194 significant?

From 100100 to 194194 there are 194 of those kind of numbers (e.g 133133).

Even more if you count other symmetries as "significant", e.g 100001 or 123321

<comment><USER17> Every number is interesting [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox)

<comment><USER18> Or no number is interesting. The argument never proves the base case. ;)

<comment><USER19> If there was a number of interesting numbers, that number should include itself in the count, since we clearly have some interest in this topic. So if the number of interesting numbers is 0, then zero is an interesting number hence the number of interesting numbers is at least 1.

<comment><USER20> Alternately: if there are no interesting numbers, that fact is itself interesting. But that fact can be encoded as a number (see Gödel), and the number must be interesting if the fact is interesting. Thus there is at least one interesting number.

<comment><USER21> The fact being interesting doesn't mean its encoding is interesting. I might find a movie interesting but looking at the raw bytes of the MP4 file much less so ;)

<comment><USER20> Does such a thing actually exist outside of the encoding used to represent it?

Uh oh, I think we may have run into... PHILOSOPHY!

[http://xkcd.com/903/](http://xkcd.com/903/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>