Star Citizen has raised $94M – where is it? - <AUTHOR> https://www.yahoo.com/tech/s/the-most-ambitious-space-game-in-history-has-raised--94-million--so-where-is-it-213831707.html?nf=1 <comment><USER2> Let's take Grand Theft Auto 5 as a comparison point as it's probably the only game at the moment with a scope comparable to Star Citizen - out of the two Star Citizen likely has the larger scope. GTA 5 cost $137 million to develop and, due to the comparative scopes, it can be estimated that Star Citizen would cost more.

People are unbelievably ignorant about how much a AAA title costs to produce. SC is going to need much more money if it is ever going to meet Robert's grandiose plans.

 _However,_ Chris seemingly has virtually no discipline in terms of product management. The scope of the game is accelerating in the face of decelerating sponsorship.

Where has the money gone? Probably to the features that he has promised - sadly, not enough to any one single feature. $94 million simply isn't enough. If Star Citizen doesn't get more money it might end up being a bag of half- implemented features and is going to be a text-book example of runaway scope creep.

<comment><USER3> I think your comments are spot-on. I'll admit that as much as I would like to play an amazing space sim again, I am sort of munching on popcorn while watching SC development from the sidelines. When the project comes crashing down, I wonder how much it is going to hurt the crowd-funding model for video games.

<comment><USER2> > When the project comes crashing down

Almost guaranteed at the current trajectory, however I still think that there's time to save it: even with the current $94 million (massive scope re- adjustment). Also in truth nobody, myself included, knows what's going on internally at CIG (part of the reason for this drama wave) - I could be very wrong either way.

<comment><USER3> Not that throwing extra people on a project always helps, but $94m can buy quite a bit of developer FTE, even over a 6 year timespan. I wonder how many employees they currently have working on the project?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> People often forget that this is a not a new situation for Chris Roberts, his last game had more or less the same story: after a great but relatively classic game in Starlancer, he set out to make Freelancer, with grandiose claims and everything ever will be in it in a global universe. After years of development with no game in sight his studio ran out of money, was bought by Microsoft and the game was streamlined and released with a lot of features cut. As a (slightly obsessed) fan of the genre Freelancer has the aura of a "great" game, but in truth it was not top of its line, but good space game were already very rare back then and it touched a lot more people.

> The game was initially announced by Chris Roberts in 1999, and following > many production schedule mishaps and a buyout of Digital Anvil by Microsoft, > it was eventually released in March 2003.

> Originally, Roberts promised features such as automated flight maneuvers, > dynamic economies, and a multiplayer mode that could host thousands of > players, but diminished versions of these features were implemented in the > final release. The game's initial technical demos impressed reviewers, but > after the Microsoft buyout and Roberts' departure from Digital Anvil, > critics had doubts about the game. Reviewers judged the final product > technically good but failing to fulfill their initial expectations.

Personally I hope SC will succeed, but I backed for the solo campaign (squadron 42) with lot of nostalgia for wing commander and Starlancer, and I have absolutely no hopes of the promises holding for the multiplayer, never had. In the meantime Elite 4 with all its own flaws scratched my itch for multiplayer (I would have loved for that one to be more solo like First Encounter).

Note that the game draws extreme and usually critics are very aggressive, and defenders of the game as well, I merely wants to point out the parallel to the last time Roberts did this.

<comment><USER5> > In the meantime Elite 4 with all its own flaws scratched my itch for > multiplayer (I would have loved for that one to be more solo like First > Encounter).

Are you talking about "Elite: Dangerous"? Any particular grievances with the "solo play"?

( _My_ grievance is that it looks like they'll never "port" to the most recent versions of the oculus SDK/DK2 -- although I can understand why they'd want to settle for a (solid) proof of concept for now, and then wait with porting until APIs are finalized and consumer ready devices come out)

<comment><USER6> Best Multiplayer game in that era was Allegiance from Microsoft of all people. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegiance_%28video_game%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegiance_%28video_game%29)

It was a multiplayer only game in 2000 with space ships and one commander who played the RTS side of the game. It was a MOBA/DOTA in space with a commander.

<comment><USER7> There are still servers running for Allegiance (search freeallegiance) and some development, since MS open sourced it and allowed the community to maintain it, but you have to check on weekends to get a game going. It was a pretty good teamwork exercise, it actually required players to think tactically and stay coordinated to overpower the other team.

<comment><USER6> I am afraid of the learning curve and being married with kids I usually only play when I am not with any of them (AKA "Can't sleep" after wife goes to sleep) I love being with my family but playing > sleep is an easy decision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Roberts has, accidentally i assume, found a unique niche of selling the game utopia of their youth to people who now absolutely would not have the time and dedication to really dive into a game world as they did.

The product is the dream of reliving a memorable part of the customer's youth, but now in 4k instead of VGA. Obviously, bumping the resolution won't make anybody young again, but that very profitable dream can be kept alive for as long as they can keep the "coming soon" signs standing. A finished game however, no matter how good it would be, will bring the reality shock that people who spend hundreds on virtual goods from a producer who peaked in the 1990ies just are not 14 anymore. Until then it it's the perfect simulation of actually waiting to be allowed to play. Kind of like World of Warcraft, but without the side effects.

<comment><USER9> That is a ridiculous assertion. The game has over a million backers. That is neither a niche, nor is it fair to say the majority of backers fit the demographic you just gave.

And would downvoters actually provide any reasoning to such a senseless assertion? Or is this just supposed to be the cool new thing to say?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> In my opinion SC has suffered from extreme feature creep. They should have stayed focused on a core of space sim functionality (whatever was in the initial KS promise). Talk of FPS functionality, for example, was a needless distraction.

<comment><USER11> Disclaimer: SC backer here.

As I see it, the FPS always was part of the original promise ([https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star- citizen/descri...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star- citizen/description)) and I think it will be good.

To be honest, I'm tired of space games like Eve or Elite:Dangerous where you basically play as the ship.

From the beginning I had hoped, that it would be possible to EVA and fight onboard of a ship - and what was a little hope turned into a solid part of the game.

Do I think my money is wasted because there is nothing to play yet? No, not at all. The goal of crowdfunding is to give the developers the time and money they need and safe them from cutting corners.

Elite, for example. Its great flying, but there is no story and nothing to do besides grinding for the next ship. They rushed the game out of the door and its "nice", nothing more.

Even if everything fails, even if SC is crap or vaporware, I won't be disappointed. Roberts and the others tried and, to be honest, if they pull it off, they might give the industry the kick it needs to get back from yearly updates to FIFA, Battlefield or CoD.

Oh, and BTW: Nobody complains when Blizzard runs late with their games :)

<comment><USER12> "Oh, and BTW: Nobody complains when Blizzard runs late with their games :)"

To be fair, they're not charging you years before the game is actually released

<comment><USER13> That's not really fair because CIG is not charging you, but rather you are pledging for it.

<comment><USER14> Blizzard makes the game on their dime, and then charges us to actually play it. CIG is not making the game unless you pay for it, so it really is a fair comparison.

<comment><USER13> Blizzard doesn't make the game that YOU want to play. You play on their terms, you have no power over the development of the game. Once you bought and played the game and you think it is crap, you cannot get a refund.

Your input is truly valuable in the development of Star Citizen since they are creating the game YOU want. They listen and change features once they get feedback (e.g flight model 2.0). If you don't think it is what you want you WILL get a refund.

<comment><USER15> CIG is not making the game YOU want, they are doing exactly what Blizzard does. Making the game THEY THINK YOU WANT. Sure there was a list of stretch goals and what not up on the kickstarter site, but they are not obligated to check all the boxes. I haven't been following closely, but I'm sure there are some boxes that have already been written off (at least internally).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The Chris Roberts + Kickstarter combo has worried me from day one... But he can still raise more money since a majority of backers still seem to believe in him, quite aggressively so, too. Even if this ends up being a great game, I'm sure many will be sorely disappointed (and the higher the stakes are raised, the more will be) when they learn it is still just a computer game. A piece of software in an artificially constrained sandbox, necessary shortcuts taken during game design, etc., something with a period of excitement, peak, and lifetime.

</comment><comment><USER17> Seems like a very long article based on very little substance and a lot of faux-pondering.

(Disclaimer: Yes, I bought an SC ship and want to see the game, and genre, succeed. I also regard anything Mr. Smart says with a dose of cynicism)

<comment><USER18> Yeah at least the critic on the eacapist magazin had actual sources for their claims. Other outlets are just jumpin on the bandwagon

</comment></comment><comment><USER19>
        Would you pay $15,000 for a bunch of virtual spaceships?

Not for a single ship but I am sure there are people in EvE that did for a couple virtual ships

<comment><USER20> But at least they knew what they were getting and they actually got it. This is not just virtual, for now it's straight up imaginary.(also, I believe that most of the value in EvE comes from the in-game credits that can be collected just by playing rather than direct payments, but I might be wrong)

<comment><USER21> There was a long article about one of the supporters who had paid in $30k towards SC. It was very clear he did not do so purely for the virtual ships but rather identified closely with the project and simply wanted to support Chris Roberts and his vision. I don't think you contribute at that level without understanding that you aren't buying virtual ships but instead supporting a vision that may or may not work out.

<comment><USER9> I've backed roughly $2k (a lot of it which I re-sold to other players, fwiw) and I'm in the same boat - couldn't care less about the actual ships. Game- wise, I worked on a space sim myself and was faced by a lot of challenges I see CIG tackling correctly. Studio-wise, I've explained in my post above that CIG's transparency is the reason I'm rooting for them so hard. I want the model, or at least parts of it, to be successful - not just the game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> People give that much money because they want to feel "they are part of a special experience of making something special happen".I get it.

The game has a budget of roughly 100M now, which is a big budget. (Metal Gear Solid V was 80M , which also included the Fox Engine development).

I'm afraid that this episode might kill crowd funding for video games, if the result ends up being catastrophic.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm a backer with extensive game development experience, maybe I can offer some insight as to the game's state.

1\. Feature creep

Most features were announced in the kickstarter. Things such as "hollywood voice actors" or "motion capture" were all part of the initial stretch goals. This is CIG delivering on the promises they made, there's been a bit of feature creep here and there certainly but not as much as people claim. I'm certain not all of it will make it to the release, FWIW, such is life in game development.

2\. Finances

The game is extremely ambitious but it most definitely has the money for it. Its total budget is looking on-par with GTA5 which had a much, much more expensive marketing campaign and added costs. SC has the advantage of being crowdfunded and having an existing userbase, making it somewhat-riskless for anyone who would want to invest into it. CR has a lot of money of his own as well.

3\. FUD

The studio has been repeatedly attacked by various parties that stand to gain if the game fails. One of those parties comes from a personal vendetta against Chris Roberts. If you enjoy drama, I highly recommend reading into it, it's fascinating (and quite depressing as well, you've been warned...). Quite a few mediocre news websites just want to jump on the Star Citizen hate-train because it's an easy shot and drives clicks, I find that appalling. Reading starts here [1].

4\. State of development

The game is just about where you'd expect it to be. It's lacking content but they're pushing out the tech pretty hard. Parts of it are already playable, dogfighting/racing is a lot of fun. I don't play it myself. Most of the tech is out or about to be released; I estimate that, from the point where they'll start adding the actual content, maybe a year to release. I don't think they'll meet their deadline (autumn 2016 iirc?) but they've surprised me before.

5\. Development process

CIG has been _the_ most transparent game studio in the world. The blog [2] is regularly updated with tech, finance, design insights, in-game news etc. This sort of transparency and insight into the difficulties of running a game studio is why I'm rooting for them so hard. It's a model I want other studios to adopt. I highly recommend reading that blog even if you're not into the game, skip to the technical articles, they're great.

[1]. [https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm- link/transmission/14...](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm- link/transmission/14979-Chairmans-Response-To-The-Escapist)

[2]. [https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm- link](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link)

PS: Someone else said in the thread, "even if it's a great game, many will be disappointed". Quite right. I'm very concerned by that; I think SC's greatest flaw is that it makes everybody think the world is being promised to them, and a lot of people are not realistic about the results. I personally think that even if they deliver on 20% of their promises, it'll be a kickass game, so I'm excited either way... but a lot of people won't feel that way.

I don't think the game will "kill" crowdfunding. From an investment point of view, it'll be regarded as a success no matter what happens. Maybe it'll kill high-budget crowdfunding but, remember, the game initially, on KS, asked for about 1% of what it has today. The crowdfunding discussion is a fascinating one to have, but SC is an outlier in every single category so I'm not sure it's fair to judge on that.

<comment><USER23> > CIG has been the most transparent game studio in the world.

They even have a youtube series called "bugsmashers" where you see examples of bugs being fixed, including seeing the code.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6md9QO4DTs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6md9QO4DTs)

<comment><USER9> I just saw it when I read the blog, yes. I don't follow them day to day and I missed those. This is awesome!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Even if he actually completed the game, clearly at this point it's basically pay-to-win. Who wants to play against the guys who spent thousands of dollars on all the best ships? So the gameplay is flawed from the start.

What's sad, there are other ambitious (and actually existing) games, like Dwarf Fortress that could've easily used all this money.

<comment><USER9> It's no more pay-to-win than eve online, where you can also essentially spend $$ on virtual spaceships. I see a lot of people bringing this up but in a game where you don't actually "win", more money doesn't actually make you win.

> What's sad, there are other ambitious (and actually existing) games, like > Dwarf Fortress that could've easily used all this money.

I've never seen the lost sale fallacy _and_ the fallacy of relative privation combined like that, that's fun. Anyway this is completely irrelevant - it's also money that could have gone to cancer research.

<comment><USER25> >I see a lot of people bringing this up but in a game where you don't actually "win", more money doesn't actually make you win.

You don't the guy who spent $30,000 on ships (recent article) is going to win encounters more often than the guy who spent the minimum?

<comment><USER9> Is the guy going to cruise around on an invincible $10000 spaceship? (None exists, fwiw)

What if he bought 300 $100 spaceship, what's his advantage over the guy who has one $100 spaceship + insurance?

Are you able to tell me what the guy's advantage is? I'm sure he has more ships, but that's not useful for an individual. Maybe he'll hand them out to his guild? Who knows.

The economy and ship performance layout of the game is similar to Eve: Bigger/More luxurious ships cost more, but are not necessarily mean they're more powerful. The Banu Merchantman is a trading ship which costs twice the price of a Hornet, the top dogfighting ship. You can bet a Hornet would win against five of the former.

PS: The studio is not stupid, they know they can't just go the pay2win route if they want the game to actually be playable.

<comment><USER25> > The Banu Merchantman is a trading ship which costs twice the price of a > Hornet, the top dogfighting ship. You can bet a Hornet would win against > five of the former.

So when going head to head against another guild to deliver cargo, which guild is going deliver more cargo, the one where everyone bought the bigger more luxurious Banu, or the one where lots of people have the early starter cargo ship?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Spent on development. They'll probably need about $40m more.

Funny thing is that I know of at least one guy they fired for telling them they'd need $100m to release a product anything like Roberts vision. I hope they send him an apology.

</comment><comment><USER27> relevant: [http://www.reaxxion.com/10195/why-star-citizen-is-likely- goi...](http://www.reaxxion.com/10195/why-star-citizen-is-likely-going-to-be- a-complete-disaster)

(previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9840425](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9840425) )

</comment><comment><USER28> perfectionism, you can play it as it is now tho.

<comment><USER29> TFA indicated that only a "dogfighting" portion is currently playable.

<comment><USER30> > only a "dogfighting" portion is currently playable.

for most kickstarters/buyers, it's alpha 1.3 which has the hangar (ship previews/ weapons testing), combat (pew pew), flight (racing) and the social module (running around a small city level and emoting to other players).

1.3 is threadbare, but it's not designed for content, but to test server infrastructure and design choices. The UI is horrendous, combat is confusing, but you can get the sense of the art and an outline of how the game would work, if/when it were finished.

Realistically, it's going to be 3 more years before the MMO aspect comes along, just to handle the scope creep of being a kickstarter project. (There will always be a new feature to test/design/fund, thus the time will get pushed back, sic.)

Alpha 2.0 is being touted as the multi-crew module, but it's also integrating a lot of in development features to flesh out each of the segments in 1.3. The belief is, there'll be a "Persistent Universe" P.U. test solar system with ship movement, open combat areas, travel/navigation, AI crew on ships, trade and quests, before 2016. featuring most of the citizencon demo features from the video.

A FPS combat module which will be a lot less polished, is coming out after that, sometime between january 2016 and the Squadron 42 game.

Realistically, here's some videos of the current state of the game.

i.e. The social Module in 1.3 [https://youtu.be/38gofAbkilE?t=60](https://youtu.be/38gofAbkilE?t=60)

MultiCrew, as demo'd for the con, is not ready. The press demo [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrpeLpQWzTk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrpeLpQWzTk) covers some FPS, travel, and landing / takeoff.

only recently have they refactored the UI i.e. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSNZ6oWAjZ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSNZ6oWAjZ8)

<comment><USER31> Press demo for 2.0 (the CitizenCon content mentioned in the article): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrpeLpQWzTk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrpeLpQWzTk)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Good coders borrow, great coders steal - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/05/20/good-coders-borrow-great-coders-steal/?cb=1 <comment><USER2> I like how the west is worried about copying/pasting some code and whether that would lead to some obscure licensing issue in the future where lawyers battle it out for 4 years, costing $3M in attorney fees; while some engineer in Shenzhen going off and copying stuff without any worries and infact openly teaching others in his team to learn how to cook some copy pasta.

IMO software licensing and patent litigations, all this nonsense of patenting a concept or workflow or some stupid idea someone had, hampers society tremendously.

David Beazley did an amazing and entertaining talk about software licensing litigations and what kind of things happen during this process: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ4Sn-Y7AP8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ4Sn-Y7AP8)

When I write any code, I take 2 options: 1) Don't share it publicly or 2) Completely release it as public domain. No need for MIT license or any of that crap. Here, just take the code and go win the world, I don't need any credit. Ask yourself how you've benefited from someone crediting you if at all it comes back to you. The world is a large place and just let it go. I am gonna die in 40 years and whatever I do will be totally irrelevant - if my name appears in COPYRIGHT 2020 MR. FERMI ENRICO. YOU MUST CREDIT ME. in some notice that a lawyer with thick glasses is scanning through after I am dead. What an amazing legacy that I am leaving behind.

Furthermore, we need have some respect for people that want to keep code private. Not everyone is interested in open sourcing their work - but somehow that's looked down upon. Why!? It is their work and respect it, there are so many people with pitch fork entitlement. Closed source is OK. They deserve it and hope they can be financially rewarded for the hard work. I see the open- source ecosystem as a double sword edge - we got some cool stuff out of it and everyone shares that base to build off of. But then there is also socialism of code - no one wants to improve it because its not their job, then the open source volunteers are blamed for the quality of their library where these guys are just doing it for fun in their free time - literally no right to get angry at them. Now, everyone is sharing the same shitty unmaintainable library 8 layers deep in their package.json file. The devs are overloaded, issues are piling up on Github and the dude in Shenzhen has already finished the project and his gadget is in prod.

We gotta be more agile lol.

<comment><USER3> > Not everyone is interested in open sourcing their work - but somehow that's > looked down upon. Why!? It is their work and respect it, there are so many > people with pitch fork entitlement.

The pitchfork entitlement, to my observation, is reactionary to the force of law backing something that should be an individual's responsibility if they want to keep it secret but not supported by the threat of government- sanctioned violence.

Contrast another industry where secrecy is key. A magician never reveals their secrets, and there's material value in being able to pull off a trick that nobody else can. But what's the ramification if somebody figures a trick out and publishes it? It certainly isn't a crime. The worst of person might face is sanction from a magician's guild.

Given that we have a world where somebody can be sued for taking apart a physical artifact that they own and discovering secrets of its implementation, sharing those secrets, and modifying the thing based on knowledge of those secrets, the pitchforks are somewhat understandable.

<comment><USER4> > But what's the ramification if somebody figures a trick out and publishes > it? It certainly isn't a crime.

Um, actually it can be. Many magic tricks can be both copyrighted and patented.

[https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/teller-wins- lawsui...](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/teller-wins-lawsuit- copied-magic-690347)

<comment><USER5> As the article points out, magic tricks per se are not copyrightable. What are copyrightable are performative works, that may include magic tricks.

The distinction is subtle - it means you're perfectly free to "steal" an (unpatented) method, provided you use it in a _different act_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Something I realized working on a large internal codebase at a company: any line of code you write is liable to be copied-and-pasted at some point in the future.

And that's good! Consistency is a very valuable quality of large codebases worked on by many engineers.

If I want to figure out how to write a unit test for a service call, find an existing example of that pattern and copy that. Resist the temptation to invent a new, very slightly better way of doing that.

There's a big corollary to this: if you find yourself doing something for the very first time in that particular codebase, take the time to do it well. Because everyone else will be copying your code for the future lifetime of the project.

<comment><USER7> I work at a FAANG with a monorepo (or nearly so). For anything that's not blue-sky R&D, stalking around the codebase for working examples and patterns is a big part of the job.

I've felt that there is a potentially a role missing here: a kind of free- floating code librarian who is not attached to any particular team and could be called upon to perform basic research of existing patterns. Part of this role could be to maintain the kind of newbie-friendly documentation that tends to fall between the gaps of tool/infra/product teams. Maybe the job title could be "software informatician".

<comment><USER8> This is usually called an "area tech lead" in FAANGs and "software architect" in more old-line software companies.

<comment><USER7> I'm thinking of a more junior supporting role, separate from development and architectural design. The librarian doesn't write the books.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Making a copy of an example someone has publicly posted to help people and modifying that copy to properly integrate it isn't "stealing". It was offered freely and the original author isn't deprived of the benefits of their original work.

This article just wants to sound edgy.

<comment> kube-system Content on Stack Overflow isn't technically offered freely. It's offered under a specific license with specific conditions.

<comment><USER10> If you're working with more than a couple of people it can be worth running an audit on your code, including the libraries you're using. Even if the libraries themselves have permissive licenses, they may inadvertently include bits of SO code.

<comment> kube-system know of any good tools to help identify those instances?

<comment><USER10> Sorry no, only that it was done by a third party prior to a funding round.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I often incorporate snippets; some from SO, some from SomeRandomDudesMessyBlog.io

I have a rule, though: I _never_ add code, unless I understand it 100%, and I often make tweaks to adjust it to my immediate needs.

One of my best thefts was a simple FIFO queue, from this book: [https://www.objc.io/books/advanced- swift/](https://www.objc.io/books/advanced-swift/)

This is my adaptation: [https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Generic_Swift_Tool...](https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Generic_Swift_Toolbox/blob/master/src/Collection%20Tools/RVS_FIFOQueue.swift)

I really had to do almost nothing to improve it. I think I just extended its utility a bit.

Of course, these weren't your usual SO "academic sample" dudes.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think I might have a few hundred copies of:

```

# From [https://stackoverflow.com/a/246128](https://stackoverflow.com/a/246128)

DIR="$( cd "$( dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )" >/dev/null 2>&1 && pwd )"

```

<comment><USER13> I think shell is the most plagiarized code in existence.

So many sysadmins have rudimentary skills and simply copy what works.

I have seen some folks with huge repos of code snippets like that

<comment><USER14> For sure, and the funny thing is that it can be replaced often by replaced by the simpler and more readable

        DIR=$(dirname $(readlink -f $0))

However OS X doesn't have readlink, so the longer BASH_SOURCE thing makes sense there.

I started using the longer one, and then I gave up on shell scripting on OS X for other reasons, and didn't go back. So yeah there is a lot of random cargo culting.

In Oil I hope to provide an even simpler method that's built in (and it also has readlink builtin to support this)

[https://github.com/oilshell/oil/issues/587](https://github.com/oilshell/oil/issues/587)

<comment><USER12> I think I actually eventually solved this by installing `coreutils` on OS X and using `realpath`.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What is this article actually saying? Sometimes programmers copy-paste things, and that's ok except when it isn't, and something something Van Gogh? Is there more to it that I missed?

<comment><USER16> There is a really good point that I found where it talks about the difference between "borrowing" (bad) and "stealing" (good).

> A borrowed object still belongs to someone else; you copy a style and it > still belongs to someone else. To steal, however, is to make that idea your > own. Taking credit for someone else's idea is borrowing; understanding an > idea and weaving it into your own work, that's what he meant by theft.

So the point is when you 'lift' some code from somewhere and use it, use it fully, own it, have mastery of it. Only then have you 'stolen' it and become yours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I read this article on vice gaming earlier about giving credit to creators for assets used in development that I thought was interesting...

[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qj4pzd/how-we-assign- cred...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qj4pzd/how-we-assign-credit-in- solo-game-development-waypoint-radio)

For me it just comes down to the license, I'd probably credit an artist for their work if I used it in a game but if the license doesn't say that then there's no onus to right?

If I like the stuff enough to use it in my project then The creator deserves some recognition, is there a reason not to?

</comment><comment><USER18> This would be a great title for an article about Rust lifetimes.

</comment><comment><USER19> If you're working on a JavaScript project, do you prefer copying from SO or installing a (micro-) package that solves your problem?

I seem to prefer the former.

</comment><comment><USER20> To be completely honest, if you're smart, and focused on shipping product you really don't care and will find a way to steal while at the same time obfuscate to the point where no one will notice or care. I get there's a moral dilemma for some, and credit etc. comes into play, but I can assure you the people that are solely focused on getting $#!t shipped really don't care, and by the time they have to they will have either sank or have enough resources to handle it.

<comment><USER21> To add to this, I don't think there's any function really that I haven't had to customize/make my own... I mean add a few params, change or transform the output or even convert js to php or python.

I think I can maybe count on 1 hand the times I've literally copied/pasted and left it as is. Usually it's copying some config file for a laravel package or something because there were some changes and I'm combining them on an upgrade or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This applies to ops as well. Most problems we look at have been solved before so it's a case of identifying and integrating (aka opinioinating) the solution not necessarily creating something from scratch.

</comment><comment><USER23> This should be a real book!

It is important -- vital even -- to know how to find the right code, how to understand and test it, how to modify it.

And not just from stack overflow, but also from colleagues and even yourself.

If this were real, I would buy it.

</comment><comment><USER24> Yet one cannot borrow or steal which is not created in the first place. So Great coders are the ones who create or write first.

</comment><comment><USER25> parallels between coders and poets?</comment>


People Are Finally Fighting Back Against the College Textbook Industry 'Scam' - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pajze9/people-are-finally-fighting-back-against-the-college-textbook-industrys-scam <comment><USER2> I spent many hundreds on photocopies... not ones I made, but ones I had to buy at the uni bookstore if I wanted any chance of getting through the courses. Exactly as mandated.

When they sell this way instead of providing actual books I paid for, and still charge full text book prices, I can't not think this is all a big scam.

These piles of university-purchased photocopies I had to tote instead of the real books is a huge embarrassment. They would give real book if they weren't operating as govt-sanctioned versions of Pirate Bay.

Obviously even though I paid for books but got photocopies instead, the authors got ripped off along with me...

The fact that every year you can go to the uni bookstore and rummage through the used photocopy tomes always feels like such a bad omen as to what the program they are offering is really worth. Used photocopies with someone else's highlighter markings throughout for $60??? Sham.</comment>


Design Thinking: Keep your users at the center - <AUTHOR> http://mbadoodle.com/hacks/design-thinking/

<comment><USER2> Oh the irony of this being presented as an "interactive" infographic. Their number 1 takeaway is "Understand my users & their needs".

This information may or may not be useful, but the format prevented me from being interested in finding out. Next time just present this as a body of text and images with some nice typography.

<comment><AUTHOR> Given the amount of text and lack of time we have, I think there is an opportunity to evolve content and that is what we are trying to do. We tried text + images format but found it too limiting. The doodle style is comparatively more readable, share-able and easily consumable in short period of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cool, we're currently making Spacedeck (spacedeck.net) available for the first bunch of private beta testers. With it, you can work with Design Thinking and custom iterative processes online. Here's a rough screencap of how that works: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w296O5hrzqs> Feedback much appreciated.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds interesting, but did not get a clear idea. It would great to have a beta access or any other way to connect. Do let me know

<comment><USER3> drop me a line at firstname.lastname@example.com and we'll get you access.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Designing an 'interactive' infographic is an interesting proposition. Some technical challenges as well as design ones. We shall be working on one soon.</comment>


How does YouTube handle the site's misinformation, conspiracy theories and hate? - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbsnews.com/news/is-youtube-doing-enough-to-fight-hate-speech-and-conspiracy-theories-60-minutes-2019-12-01/ <comment><USER2> Bad headline, but this is an exclusive interview with YouTube's CEO.</comment>


An open source implementation of DeepVoice 3: 2000-Speaker Neural Text-to-Speech - <AUTHOR> https://r9y9.github.io/deepvoice3_pytorch/ <comment><USER2> The "chirping" artifacts are quite distracting. I wonder if they can be avoided by randomizing the alignment of the final piecing together of the audio?

Post-processing by convolving with a short noise burst removes them pretty well, as that randomizes phase vs. frequency.

<comment><USER3> Would it be possible to upload the outputs of this convolution? I'd like to hear how it sounds.

<comment><USER2> Here's the second example convolved with 30ms white noise:

[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WwmCNwWwukhtYXRT4mDHxCUa0sQ...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WwmCNwWwukhtYXRT4mDHxCUa0sQbdy1s/view?usp=sharing)

But it also makes it sound like she's in a closet, so it would be better to fix it at source if there's a way to do that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If I understood it correctly, the datasets being used are all in the order of ~20 hours. Could the results be improved with a different dataset? Say, Mozilla's Common Voice[1]? They are already at 350 hours of labeled speech.

[1]: [https://voice.mozilla.org](https://voice.mozilla.org)

<comment><USER5> Maybe, but Google's tacotron2 also used about 24 hours of speech and gives results that are indistinguishable from humans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Recently I started digging into text-to-speech implementations of which Google seems to have the best know-how.

[https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/global_style_...](https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/global_style_tokens/index.html)

Those samples sound already frighteningly human.

Not to disparage the DeepVoice3 in anyway! There must have been a lot of work put into it.

<comment><USER7> _> Google seems to have the best know-how._

Funny how they publish their "research papers", yet no one else is able to implement their engine with even remotely comparable results.

<comment><USER8> Oh, is it not verifiable?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think when Tacotron-level speech synthesis is feasible to create on mobiles, offline, some really interesting opportunities for new apps open up. Right now you wouldn't want to listen to a long-read article on the web read by speech synthesis, but the moment a system can create realistic, emotionally-accurate speech (especially if you can match quotes/dialogue to correct, gendered voices), you'd probably consider it when you were on the go.

</comment><comment><USER10> Does this mean all banks that are using their customers' voices as passwords are going to have a big problem?

[https://www.nuance.com/en-gb/omni-channel-customer- engagemen...](https://www.nuance.com/en-gb/omni-channel-customer- engagement/security/identification-and-verification.html)

<comment><USER11> A bigger problem than banks using 8 character strings as passwords?

<comment><USER12> 8? When did they double it? And since when can I use anything but digits? /s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hi HN readers, What do I need to learn to make text to speech in my own language?

<comment><USER6> Big data-set, probably audiobooks in your language with full transcript. Then fiddling around with your choice of model for training, this might be a good place to start: [https://github.com/Kyubyong/tacotron](https://github.com/Kyubyong/tacotron)

Just know that the voice will be similar to what Kyubyong or others managed to train meaning it will sound eerily synthetic. Might fit your purposes but it's probably not enough for consumer-applications. Also from what I played around with it optimizing the synthesization is going to be big hurdle if you want it done quickly. Or not I didn't dig that deep into it.

<comment><USER13> Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not bad, for IVRs and the like a smoother, more neutral voice (esp. one that can be tuned based on area) for TTS is extremely handy.

</comment><comment><USER15> Saw this from Deepmind and thought I would share here as found interesting.

[https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/03/introducing- Clo...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/03/introducing-Cloud-Text- to-Speech-powered-by-Deepmind-WaveNet-technology.html)

Suppose to be using 16k samples a second through a NN which seems hard to believe. But gets you a pretty incredible result.

</comment><comment><USER16> The URL says Pytorch by the installation instructions say Tensorflow.

It seems to be all Pytorch in the code though.

</comment><comment><USER17> It it just me that Apple's new Siri voice sound much more human-sounding then Google's wavenet? By a huge margin.

[https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/08/06/siri- voices.htm...](https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/08/06/siri-voices.html)</comment>


About Google's Community Guidelines – Google - <AUTHOR> https://about.google/community-guidelines/ <comment><AUTHOR> So this link is from Ben Evans' newsletter:

Google is trying to get its staff to stop getting into flame wars about politics on the internal message lists. This problem had been building for a while - the company has a culture of open discussion, but it's a lot bigger than it used to be, there's a steady flow of new people ('Endless September') and America's Culture Wars have got out of control.

I would be interested to hear from any (X)Googlers if it is true (for certain values of true)</comment>


Ask HN: Why Apple don't restrict any super-apps? - <AUTHOR> Some so-called "super-apps" are designed around payment system and create their own app ecosystem inside the single app. That is primarily use case for Asian tech - WeChat, Alipay, Go-Pay, PayTM, PayPay Rappi and etc.
How they manage to compile Apple's rules? <comment> wh-uws Short answer: They don't

Longer answer: They don't but they are so important to users in those markets that they would not purchase iphones if they could not use those applications there

</comment><comment><USER2> So does bank apps, there has to be some kind of exceptions.

Maybe because pay apps count as banking? It would be absurd to charge 30% on banking.</comment>


EverQuest's long, strange 20-year trip still has no end in sight - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/06/everquests-long-strange-20-year-trip-still-has-no-end-in-sight/ <comment><USER2> From a hobbyist developer perspective, EQ is very interesting. Unlike most companies, EQ/Sony/Daybreak has allowed emulators (privately run servers) for a very long time. They have come out publicly and made written statements that it's ok, they do not have an adversarial relationship. As a result, there is a very active emu community, you can find the EQEmu source code and tools on github, and there are emu servers that have been around for well over a decade (ex Project 1999). If you have ever been interested in running your own online world, it's not a bad place to start. Some people run very authentic servers, others create entirely new experiences with custom graphics, classes, combat systems, quests, etc (Shards of Dalaya). There is also a very active bot maker community, for example with macroquest and redguides. To the point that I have seen individual operators control 20+ character armies to defeat raid encounters singlehandedly. Some very advanced scripting and tooling required. In some ways the company learned from the emu scene, they saw that people wanted a return to the classic game, so they released time locked progression servers that have been very popular. If you can get past the clunky bits from 20 years ago, there's still some fun and interesting stuff going on with EQ.

</comment><comment><USER3> I played Everquest some as a kid but when Everquest 2 came out I could not stop playing. I spent every extra minute I had playing that game to the point it nearly cost me my wife and kids... it was a low point in my life.

The game offered you a virtual life that was just so interesting that it basically consumed my real life. My wife eventually said it's us or the game and I quit right then. I still play games now and then but nothing has gripped me like that game.. thankfully.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Lusted after EQ when it came out, but didn't have a pc that could run it until Dark Age of Camelot dropped (loved that game). Migrated from that to City of Heroes... then to WoW. Finally got the MMO monkey off my back at that point because it became way too much of a time sink after college.

</comment><comment><USER4> I fondly remember playing the version on the PS2 online before moving to FFXI. So much time wasted ;)

FFXI was the only game I found where you interacted with another country (Japan) so deeply. The game had a built in translator!

<comment><USER5> EQOA is probably my favorite game of all time. I can't tell you exactly why, but I've never been as engrossed in a world as I was in EQOA. I can't fully separate nostalgia goggles with reality, but that was a criminally underrated gem of a MMORPG.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, I felt like I'd been playing EQ forever when I quit (November 2000), but apparently it had only been a year and a half...</comment>


Braintree Takes On Stripe, PayPal With Debut Of "Marketplace" - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/14/braintree-takes-on-stripe-paypal-with-debut-of-marketplace/ <comment><USER2> Meh. Welcome to the party, a couple of years late. I'll stick with Balanced. Fantastic product, incredible support. Not even a question. Braintree's bread and butter is card processing. Balanced's is marketplaces / payouts.

<comment><USER3> \+ 1

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So now there are 5 players in this space (that I know of).

Ordered by the launch date of their marketplace offering: WePay, Balanced Payments, Stripe, Paymill, Braintree.

Edit: Added WePay.

<comment><USER5> Elliott from WePay here - don't mean to turn these comments into a corporate stick-measuring contest, but our API has been able to support this use case since August of 2011.

<comment><USER4> Sorry Elliot I did not know that. I added WePay to the list.

<comment><USER6> Just to keep it historically accurate, PayPal's Adaptive Payments API supported marketplace use case since mid 2010.

Disclaimer: I used to work on it in my past life.

<comment><USER7> To keep this historical accuracy trend going: Balanced has been doing marketplace payment for the likes of Zaarly since early 2011.

But congrats to Braintree on the launch!

(Disclosure: I'm a co-founder of Balanced)

<comment><USER4> Sorry, I googled your launch date, saw some TC posts from 2012 and didn't know you guys were doing beta before that.

Can't edit it anymore...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looking at Braintree's Marketplace docs, it appears you have to "onboard" each sub-merchant you want to send payouts to, which requires entering their name, address, date of birth, and their social security number. It then says "If [the social security number] is not provided, we will attempt to retrieve the full Social Security number based on the other applicant details."

So my question is: How is it possible / how do they retrieve someone's social security number using apparently just a name, address, and birth date? (Maybe I'm naive, but I thought socials were pretty secure)

<comment><USER9> Kristi from Braintree here. We work with one of the major credit bureaus to cross-reference the data provided to match it with a social security number.

<comment><USER8> Ah, that makes sense, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> WePay has had this for years, the title is a bit sensational.

<comment><USER11> So does _Balanced Payments for Marketplaces_ [1]. Facilitating transactions is a huge pain point for businesses, so it's a big deal to see another company moving in to solve it.

[1]: [https://www.balancedpayments.com/](https://www.balancedpayments.com/)</comment></comment>


Sometimes We Feel More Comfortable Talking to a Robot - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2018/02/24/583682556/sometimes-we-feel-more-comfortable-talking-to-a-robot <comment><USER2> Personally it freaks me out that people would have robotic relationships. The smart speaker things freak me out for the same reason. They look like idols to me. I'm a loner, I have survived for most of my life completely alone. I talk to myself, at least it isn't a machine. I actually care about myself. A robot is an appliance. God forbid it becomes more than that. Don't personify the damn things, the next step is deification. I don't care if I get downvoted. Personally it freaking pisses me off getting calls on my phone from chat bots trying to manipulate me. Same thing for my these things trying to scam my elders. Pretty soon we're going to need a Butleran Jihad. Not kidding!</comment>


$25 Raspberry Pi Model A now for sale in Europe - <AUTHOR> http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/3215/ <comment><USER2> Compared to the model B: 70% of the price, 0 ethernet, 1 usb†, 256M RAM, same CPU, 1/3 of the power draw, a little thinner.

␄

† Not as much of a cut as it sounds. The 2 on the model B can't supply more than 100ma, so unless you needed exactly two ports with low power on each, you needed a powered hub anyway.

<comment><USER3>
      > Compared to the model B: 70% of the price, 0 ethernet, 1 usb†,
      > 256M RAM, same CPU, 1/3 of the power draw, a little thinner.

I didn't realise that the Model A's power-use was a third of the Model B. While that might not make a huge difference for most people, it'll be a definite benefit to those using them in `always on' situations where connectivity isn't so important.

I'm a little surprised that an addition 256MB of RAM, another USB port, and an ethernet port can triple the power use though...

<comment><USER4> > I'm a little surprised that an addition 256MB of RAM, another USB port, and > an ethernet port can triple the power use though...

That's because you're used to desktops, where Intel/AMD CPUs and screens take the vast majority of power.

But the RasPi has no screen, and the CPU is a small, slow ARM. It's not surprising that it takes so little power compared to peripherals.

Of note, there are low frequency (kilohz to low mhz range) 32-bit arms that can runs for months to years on an AA battery; They're starting to become the microcontroller of choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While I'm sure it's fine for some simple applications, I found the 512 model far more useful. They should have waited to release it until they could get the cost down with 512MB of RAM.

Having used both the 256 and 512 Model B, I found that no amount of tweaking could make the 256 model run a web browser acceptably on a Linux desktop. Modern Linux desktops and browsers have gotten too bloated. LXDE starts to thrash with a few heavy pages, while KDE and gnome desktops are just downright unable. The 512 model runs the heavyweight desktops just fine.

<comment><USER6> There are lots of applications that don't involve the Linux desktop or a web browser though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is also a Chinese version of model B happening: <http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/3195>

<comment><USER8> "we have granted Egoman Technology Corp a licence to produce and distribute Pis in China and Taiwan".

If this truly is a charity, why not go the Arduino route and allow anyone to use the design (but not the trademark)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's too bad people have had a hard time getting these, they look really cool and I love the project's idea. Really looking forward to getting one myself.

<comment><USER7> The Model B is widely available now, at least in the US. Check Newark's RPi product page [1], and click on "Check more stock". The next ship date is Feb. 11th. Not, that's not next day, but every time you buy one of these, the RPi foundation can make more of them, making future availability even better.

[1] [http://www.newark.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry- modb-512m/model-...](http://www.newark.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry- modb-512m/model-b-assembled-board-only/dp/43W5302)</comment></comment>


Why I chose erlang; "The OO straight-jacket is a major hindrance to web-based computing" - <AUTHOR> http://www.erlang.org/ml-archive/erlang-questions/200302/msg00013.html <comment><USER2> Erlang's OTP has got some pretty neat ideas. It's a skeletal structure in place for code that acts as servers, where transactions and hot-swappable code is built in. In addition, you can have a pool of generic servers that you can choose to 'become' a specialized server doing a specific task, and change it back when you don't have a use for it.</comment>


Google Cloud CEO Being Replaced by Oracle's Thomas Kurian - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/16/google-cloud-ceo-greene-being-replaced-by-former-oracle-exec-kurian.html <comment><USER2> Most comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18470501](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18470501).

</comment><comment><USER3> It's possible this guy doesn't like Oracle culture either, and it's why he left Oracle. I mean, in a an infinite universe and all that.

<comment><USER4> Then why would he stayed there for 20 years?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> After the latest google cloud fiasco, this move was necessary.

But I'm not sure taking the "Oracle guy" is a good idea. Maybe I'm wrong. Oracle probably has some good people.

<comment><USER6> What "fiasco" are you talking about? I'm genuinely curious, don't know anything about it.

<comment><USER5> [https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2018/11/major...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2018/11/major-bgp-mishap-takes-down-google-as-traffic-improperly- travels-to-china/)

a lot of users had issues.

<comment><USER6> I can't possibly see how Google Cloud's change of leadership and that could be related.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This ship has sailed

<comment><USER7> which ship?</comment></comment>


Georgia's 127k Missing Votes, Disproportionate to African American Neighborhoods - <AUTHOR> https://coaltionforgoodgovernance.sharefile.com/share/view/sa100c250cf8408e8?skipNativeCheck=true <comment><USER2> Important context from the executive summary that is missing from the headline:

\- the missing votes are from the Lt. Governors race only, not the total ballot

\- many people reported software glitches with that specific ballot item

\- the study blames faulty programming and insists the state not use electronic voting since it apparently is not reliable

Their conclusions are strongly worded but sound reasonable to me.

Quoted from the executive summary:

• Forensic examinations of the machine programming must be promptly undertaken to obtain answers, locate the source of the errors, and, if appropriate, hold officials accountable.

• Electronic voting systems must be immediately abandoned and paper ballots adopted so that no future elections are conducted on Georgia's unauditable machines.

• Governor Kemp, Secretary Raffensperger, and legislative leaders must abandon their plan to adopt a new ballot-marking-device electronic voting system that, like the current system, is unauditable and vulnerable to problems of the type experienced in November's election.

<comment><USER2> I'll add as a reply, since it's a side-tangent:

When I moved to California I was really impressed by the way voting is handled here. Specifically two things:

(1) I was able to vote one block away at a neighbors garage. I don't know exactly how this works, but apparently people can volunteer to host a polling place, go through a training program to get certified to do it, and then the state will give them the equipment to do it. These polling places are just about everywhere, and it made voting exceptionally quick and easy.

The neighbors who ran it were also very courteous and professional. While there, I saw them handle several questions and problems that people had, and they did an excellent job. I was truly impressed.

(2) The ballot system was: you mark a paper ballot with a pen, and then you feed that into a scanner which electronically tallies your vote. It also keeps the paper ballot around as a record. So it would seem to offer the practical efficiency of an electronic system with the auditability of a paper system. I liked it.

Having previously voted in three other states, this was the best experience by far. I have my own complaints about California, but I'd love to see this way of handling elections become more widespread.

<comment><USER3> Glad you liked the mark/sense system, but California voting systems are not state-wide, but are county by county. The county I reside in used to have a system like that you describe (perhaps made by Eagle?), but has now moved to a display screen and paper tape system.

The nice things about the mark & scan systems are that the voter gets immediate notification of an unscannable ballot: stray marks, mis-marks, overvotes, and similar issues are correctable in real time _by the voter_ , perhaps by exchanging the spoiled ballot for a new one, and destroying the spoiled ballot. The scanned paper ballots are also available to be rescanned for a recount or audit.

Creating a voting system for a many-race election that is intrinsically resistant to manipulation is harder that it first appears. I used to (circa 2000) think that electronic voting would supersede paper ballots in a few years. Now I think that paper ballots have a simplicity and durability that outweighs the apparent convenience of electronic approaches.

source: elections official in two states, voter registrar in one.

<comment><USER4> Right. You can get all the supposed advantages of each system, if you want.

Use a touchscreen, fill out a ballot, hit the print button, receive a paper printed ballot, inspect it for errors, drop it into a scanning system that scans and retains it. Importantly, the optical scan is done not by reading any sort of barcode printed on the paper but by reading the same English letters as the voter is inspecting.

All the convenience of electronic systems, hand recount is available and easy. Hand audit some of the machines after every election to ensure accuracy. Doesn't matter how messed up the touchscreens are, since the paper ballot can be inspected by the voter before being cast. No such thing as hanging chad or butterfly ballot problems. Zero bad ballots. Voters who skip races will be doing so intentionally. "LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR: NO VOTE". If they turn that in to be scanned, that's what they wanted.

<comment><USER5> As far as I know, this is similar to the systems Georgia is looking at deploying in our upgrade.

Having a paper audit trail has become a fairly big cause, so I'd be surprised if the legislature recommends solutions that don't satisfy this.

<comment><USER3> Good luck with that: [https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/how- voti...](https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/how-voting- machine-lobbyists-undermine-the-democratic-process)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For anyone who didn't follow the Georgia Governor's race last November, it featured Brian Kemp, the Republican Secretary of State running against Stacey Abrams, the Democratic Minority Leader of the GA House of Representatives, who happens to be African-American.

The race was decided by a margin of about 55,000 votes in Kemp's favor.

Kemp, as Secretary of State, was in charge of Georgia state elections, which presented a conflict of interest for him as he sought higher office. Kemp implemented a voter suppression policy called "exact match," which helped to severely complicate the voting process for about 53,000 Georgians, 80% of whom were people of color.

More info: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/georgias-voter- suppr...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/georgias-voter-suppression- problem-goes-much-deeper-than-brian- kemp/2018/10/20/67dab6c2-cd9b-11e8-a3e6-44daa3d35ede_story.html)

Also, voter fraud basically does not exist in the United States as per this article from the Brennan Center: [https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/debunking-voter- fraud...](https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/debunking-voter-fraud-myth)

In fact, the most notable example of election fraud in the United States in recent memory is in NC's 9th Congressional District, where it looks like the Republican in the race cheated his way to victory: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_North_Carolina%27s_9th_co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_North_Carolina%27s_9th_congressional_district_election#Refusal_of_certification)

 _edit: as burlesona rightly points out below, the article to which this comment is attached is about the Lt. Gov. 's race. My comment is about the general lack of integrity in Georgia's elections, and the deeply undemocratic (small-D) results that emerge from this state of affairs._

<comment><USER7> Wait, voter fraud doesn't exist but hey look it happened just last year?

<comment><USER6> Exactly! what happened last year is _election fraud_ , which is why I called it "election fraud" instead of "voter fraud."

An explainer: [https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2018/12/11/18134636/...](https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2018/12/11/18134636/north-carolina-9-election-fraud-voter-fraud)

<comment><USER7> FYI, any attempt to steal an election is both (a) fraud and (b) treason, and I don't even understand why you're trying to rules-lawyer a distinction here.

<comment><USER8> Because it's an important distinction. OP is using "voter fraud" to refer to _voters_ acting fraudulently, and "election fraud" to refer to _election officials_ acting fraudulently. Of particular importance here is that the former is relatively rare (despite scaremongering by one side of the political spectrum) while the latter is decidedly less so.

Also, legally, neither one is treason.

<comment><USER7> > Also, legally, neither one is treason.

Haha ok man but no for real that's actual treason.

<comment><USER9> It's both undemocratic (small-d) and un-American, but it doesn't fit the rubric of "providing aid or comfort to the enemy" for treasonous behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> People have said it before, and it will be said again, but until we have much more accountability and transparency, electronic voting machines are NOT to be trusted and should not be used in any official capacity.

<comment><USER11> Paper ballots disappear too though, don't they? What do you do when elections are expensive and you detect an error, and you can't find who cast the ballot?

<comment><USER12> It is resource-intensive yet viable to track every paper ballot throughout the process. Digital ballots have no such guarantees.

The best option to me seems to be scanned paper ballots, which offers the ability to perform analog recounts when there is suspicion of problems with the digital count.

(Disclaimer: only a distant observer of this, there may be better options.)

<comment><USER11> For context like 2018 congressional elections, or 2020 elections, what does it mean to track down paper ballots, such as to make sure the final count is complete? At least it sounds like de-anonymizing votes.

Or does it mean it's so logistically unpalatable that you can bet on it not happening? Same thing with recount as a remedy to detected anamoly; it's theoretically possible. But is it so unpalatable that a gambler may gamble well on an event?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder what will come of this now. Is there any way to have a 'redo'? If there isn't, how could there ever be justice in the event this was intentional?

</comment><comment><USER14> Ask anyone if their vote was counted. The only honest answer is, "I'm not sure." That is concerning.

Seems like a good kind of work to spread, thanks for sharing.

<comment><USER15> What if every vote had an ID / random number attached to it, identifying you, and then when they are counted every number that was read and counted gets posted up on some database or broadcast, or even in paper form to be collected at another polling station, so you know for sure your vote counted?

Just spitballing here, because it seems like an easy problem to solve, the US is just notoriously stubborn when it comes to mixing up the election process.

<comment><USER16> >What if every vote had an ID / random number attached to it, identifying you

Votes must not be attributable to any given person, or else the potential for coercion exists.

<comment><USER17> I read GP as simply verifying that a particular ballot made it into the count, _not_ verifying what the votes on that ballot happened to be. That seems less problematic with respect to buying or coercing votes. I'm not convinced that "lost ballots" are a big problem, but such a system would be a way of checking that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A stylistic point perhaps, but the mention of Georgia makes me think of the country, not the state. That's further reinforced by the missing votes (sorry Georgia (country)), so its only by the time I got to 'African' that I got an inkling that something was wrong, and instantly went back to reread the title again, before noticing the last 2 words.

Shouldn't there be a convention of writing Georgia (US) or (state)?

</comment><comment><USER19> I can track my mail in ballot (as a resident of SF) on the SF elections website...one reason among many why I prefer vs going in-person.

</comment><comment><USER20> If I were the one overseeing the election while also running for governor (as Brian Kemp was, and now, successfully attained), I would do everything in my power to make the election be as transparently fair as possible. But as far as this Californian can tell, that was definitely not the case:

1\. the voting machines used were known well in advance to be badly vulnerable [0]:

 _He said hackers could infect election computers by first gaining access to a state employee's computer, possibly by tricking him or her into clicking on a dangerous link in an email. Once the malware is on one machine, it could reach central election systems through internal networks, USB devices or memory cards._

 _J. Alex Halderman prepares to demonstrate Monday at Georgia Tech how easy it is to hack Georgia's electronic voting machines. In a hypothetical election, Halderman changed a 2-2 vote between George Washington and Benedict Arnold to make Arnold the winner by 3-1._

 _Election computers could also be subverted in person, by someone like a janitor or a temporary worker, Halderman said. Individual voting machines could be tampered with if someone unlocked the latch that protects the memory card port._

2\. He _reported security researchers_ (hired by state Democrats) _to the FBI_ for trying to 'hack the system' [1], whereas...

 _In 2015, Kemp's office inadvertently released the Social Security numbers and other identifying information of millions of Georgia voters. His office blamed a clerical error._

 _[...]His office made headlines again last year after security experts disclosed a gaping security hole that wasn't fixed until six months after it was first reported to election authorities. Personal data was again exposed for Georgia voters — 6.7 million at the time — as were passwords used by county officials to access files._

<eyeroll/>

3\. Georgia implemented a use-it-or-lose-it policy for voting. People found out that because they didn't vote in the past that they had been purged from the register of voters. That's insane to me, but apparently the Supreme Court determined it was constitutional. Georgia also implemented extremely strict name-matching (i.e. make sure that you did not use a hyphen when writing your name one place and a space when writing it in another, because then they won't match). [2]

 _But voting rights advocates fear that "use it or lose it" purges could be used as a voter suppression tactic — along with voter ID requirements, gerrymandering, polling place changes or closures, and registration obstacles — that often help conservative candidates, because infrequent voters tend to be younger, poorer and people of color who are more likely to favor Democrats. For instance, the APM Reports investigation found that such purges in Ohio disproportionately affected urban, Democratic-leaning counties._

[0] [https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt-- politics/how-...](https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/how- hack-elections-georgia-electronic-voting-machines/K4s5F935330BS6fGDm3CVI/)

[1] [https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/a-look-at-the- election...](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/a-look-at-the-election- security-charges-in-georgias-governors-race)

[2] [https://www.wabe.org/georgia-purged-about-107000-people- from...](https://www.wabe.org/georgia-purged-about-107000-people-from-voter- rolls-report/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Surrrrrrprise!</comment>


U.S. Reels to a Meat Shortage and Prices Are Getting Weird - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-22/tyson-foods-to-indefinitely-suspend-waterloo-operations-k9bbgnr9 <comment><USER2> This is what concerns as many people have acted like the economy only effects rich people, or any move that trades the economy for lives is inherently immoral.

Food falls under the economy, the economy isn't just the stock market or things rich people do rich people things in. The economy is the vast network stretching across the globe that works to supply goods and services in the places they are needed, when the economy starts shutting down so do a lot of things we need for daily life. All the government stimulus in the world isn't going to help anyone if there aren't goods to purchase.

<comment><USER3> In fact, government stimulus will just cause hyperinflation as more money chases less goods and services.

<comment><USER4> 1\. We would need to print quadrillions of dollars to get hyperinflation. Hyperinflation is a boogieman, unless this administration completely loses its mind.

2\. Recessions cause the destruction of money (Due to defaults, and lack of new loans). This causes deflation. If the new money created by the printing press does not exceed these deflationary pressures, you won't even get inflation, let alone hyperinflation.

3\. Deflation is horrible, and is much more dangerous than mild inflation.

4\. The printed money is currently chasing investment assets (Mostly stocks), not flour and ground beef. Our previous experience with QE did not result in the prices of commodities inflating - only the prices of investments.

Inflation is not the problem.

<comment><USER5> >1\. We would need to print quadrillions of dollars to get hyperinflation.

Is there actually a mathematical equation that proves this or is that your conjecture?

<comment><USER4> Look at the MZM, which is a good proxy for 'all the money in the economy'. [1]

There's ~20 Trillion of it.

Hyperinflation is, by definition, 50% monthly, ~600% annual inflation.

The Fed has, so far in this crisis, printed ~2 Trillion that is staying in the economy (The rest goes into very short term liquidity). It's not a hyperinflationary scenario, even if they print another 2, or 4, or 6 trillion.

If they printed 20 trillion, that would be another story.

[1] [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MZM](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MZM)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> More stories about how covid19 is really screwing up other parts of the supply chain

Farmers being forced to pour milk down the drain:

[https://twitter.com/freshairfarmer/status/124787620556452659...](https://twitter.com/freshairfarmer/status/1247876205564526593?s=21)

Retail toilet paper manufacturers not setup to handle load from people pooping at home instead of work (and corporate TP factories don't know how to sell to grocery stores):

[https://marker.medium.com/what-everyones-getting-wrong- about...](https://marker.medium.com/what-everyones-getting-wrong-about-the- toilet-paper-shortage-c812e1358fe0)

Covid testing blocked because of equipment regulations:

[https://twitter.com/paulmromer/status/1249115887413743616](https://twitter.com/paulmromer/status/1249115887413743616)

<comment><USER7> Obviously you got to distinguish between problems that are going to get better over time and those that are going to get worse. It seems like people are just randomly assigning things to those categories. I mean, switching products from B2B to B2C (toilet paper, milk, flour, etc) is obviously something that can't happen instantly, but must be taking place as fast as humanly possible, right? So if you're writing an article about impending doom in the coming weeks and months, surely you need to pick a different topic, I would think.

<comment><USER4> >. I mean, switching products from B2B to B2C (toilet paper, milk, flour, etc) is obviously something that can't happen instantly, but must be taking place as fast as humanly possible, right?

No, because half the business world thinks that we're going to all re-open in two weeks, and isn't willing to spend money on any kind of retooling/restructuring for such a short period of time.

<comment><USER8> Certainly it is happening. My local stores have small amounts of yeast in little beverage cups with improvised seals, made by yeast manufacturers that usually sell large quantities to restaurants and industrial bread producers.

They've also briefly had shitty 1ply commercial toilet paper with big plastic bag and twist-tie packaging.

<comment><USER9> But is it "taking place as fast as humanly possible"? I believe vkou's comment is that 1/2 of the companies are not switching products, not that none are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One pet peeve I have with this article is that it doesn't explicitly state the cause of the shutdowns are Corona virus infected employees until half way through. I was 90% sure, but there was still a chance of coincidence.

Anyway the meat industry isn't special. The whole economy needs to run on stocked up supplies and skeleton crews for a while. That's why its so important to get this right the first time. If the lock down only consists of half-measures and the crisis is prolonged there aren't enough supplies to take another shot at it. Scarily, I'm seeing a whole lot of half-measures right now.

<comment><USER8> That's not how it's going to work. There's no reasonable way to extinguish this in one swell foop.

We need to move (ASAP) in jurisdictions where the virus is largely under control, to half-measures that are hopefully sufficient to prevent another large incident wave and that provide economic output/lets us "stock up again". This will allow a slow reduction in population susceptibility. And we need to be ready to tighten again if it looks like we're going to run out of ICU capacity.

As bad as New York's response has been, treading right next to disaster/health care overload, they may have attained a magical proportion of the population where Rt is greatly reduced. I'm betting that when we have the serology study, we'll find 15-30%, or even more-- of the population of NYC has antibodies-- a good chunk of the way to herd immunity and enough to greatly reduce the amount of control measures needed to control the virus.

<comment><USER11> > a good chunk of the way to herd immunity

Herd immunity isn't a solution if your immunity only lasts 6 months. This is _NOT_ a flu virus--this is a Coronavirus--immunity is generally limited for Coronaviruses(virii?).

If it's under 12 months, every flu season will likely also be Covid-19 season.

Cornavirus immunity seems to top out at about 24-36 months--if you're lucky. SARS seems to be 24, IIRC.

<comment><USER8> I think a reasonable somewhat pessimistic (but not worst-case) assumption is that immunity is similar to common-cold coronaviruses; lifelong partial protection, total protection for 24-36 months, some degree of cross-strain reactivity.

Kissler et al published a really good analysis of kinematics and transmission dynamics in Science based on what we know about human coronaviruses, cross- immunity, etc. (Now that we are beginning to believe infection rates are even higher in comparison to case counts than we believed before, it looks pessimistic in various ways).

The research I've read on SARS-COV-1 shows a slower fall in antibody titers than other human coronaviruses. Though, unfortunately, I'm unaware of any study that followed patients past 3 years.

I believe that if you took one of the existing common cold coronaviruses, and introduced it to an immunologically naive population, you'd get a huge incident wave and a whole lot of excess death.

<comment><USER11> > I believe that if you took one of the existing common cold coronaviruses, > and introduced it to an immunologically naive population, you'd get a huge > incident wave and a whole lot of excess death.

Doubtful or you'd see waves of death in children from cold viruses. Common cold viruses have had lots of time to evolve so that they transmit well but don't kill very much.

Presumably it's also why our immune systems don't waste time building up permanent immunity against them. There's much more of an evolutionary pressure to be permanently immune to something that can kill or maim you, if you survive.

<comment><USER8> > Doubtful or you'd see waves of death in children from cold viruses.

We don't see waves of death in children from COVID-19. The juvenile immune system is different. Children right now have the opportunity to pick up SARS- COV-2 antibodies without a whole lot of personal risk. Elderly adults, not so much.

> Doubtful or you'd see waves of death in children from cold viruses. Common > cold viruses have had lots of time to evolve so that they transmit well but > don't kill very much.

Everyone assumes that viruses evolve towards lower virulence, but this is only one direction that things can be pressured to evolve. COVID-19 manages to have a very high R0 by a high latent period. Producing a higher viral load enhances spread / R0 but also causes eventual severe illness.

COVID-19's fatality rate is only a disadvantage inasmuch as it causes population-wide behavior changes. It doesn't make people get excessively sick and stay home in a way that they spread the disease less, so we can't really be sure that it will evolve towards lower pathogenicity/virulence.

> There's much more of an evolutionary pressure to be permanently immune to > something that can kill or maim you, if you survive.

We have plenty of things we don't build permanent immunity to that kill or maim us-- including SARS-COV-2, MERS, malaria, etc. I doubt this is mankind's first encounter with a really nasty coronavirus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One thing no one has mentioned in all these articles I've read. Everyone mentions we have about a week of meat in cold storage, and that the level of meat production is falling below typical demand.

But it's not like the spigot is turning off / we're stopping all production. What's it falling to? If it's 85% of typical demand, that storage will stretch for awhile, especially because many people may be choosing cheaper staples to consume.

</comment><comment><USER12> I am concerned that efforts to mitigate the damage from Covid-19 might open a window for African Swine Flu to spread to the US. China has culled 40% of their 440M pig population fighting the virus. There are promising vaccines in the works, but until they come to market a domestic pork viral outbreak could easily get out of hand while we are focused on C19.

[https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00742-w](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00742-w)

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if a meat shortage that causes people who previously hadn't eaten plant substitutes, will be enough to let plant substitute companies take a bigger chunk of the meat market for good.

<comment><USER14> Are any of those plant substitute companies in a position to help offset a meat supply shortfall in any meaningful way? Are the substitutes less labor- intensive to produce or otherwise less affected by the coronavirus?

<comment><USER15> Impossible Foods is expanding its grocery store presence right now, and says that its production plant is less susceptible than meatpacking plants due to increased amounts of automation....

[https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/amp/Impossible-Burger- comes...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/amp/Impossible-Burger-comes-to-Bay- Area-grocery-15205534.php)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks like I'll be doing a lot of fishing this summer...

</comment><comment><USER6> Ramadan is starting just in time

</comment><comment><USER17> "the economy" is not any one thing, and this additional story is not enhancing any "the economy" argument. It correctly means everyone should be getting in line to sacrifice. And quite seriously HNers haven't sacrificed near enough. Most are working from home. Most are getting paid. Most have decent health care plans they don't have to worry about.

I've been reading HN for six years, and near as I can tell the vast majority don't support any health care rights, let alone universal health care. It's generally acceptable on HN that companies can fire people for being sick for too many days. There's no federally mandated sick leave at all. HNer's don't care about that.

I have more sympathy for HN interns who have lost their internships, except about 10 seconds later I remember just how young they are. They'll be fine.

And there are all the delivery persons, sacrificing more than most anyone that has the luxury of reading or writing here.

Very little is made on HN about how disproportionately health care workers are sacrificing family, sanity, health, and their lives. For no extra pay. They don't tend to get things like bonus pay at the end of the year, common among the HN crowd. Essential workers, most especially the ones stocking grocery stores full of jerks who refuse to wear masks or socially distance, likewise have no health care rights. They don't get bonus pay. If they get sick and are out of work for two months, they aren't assured they will be paid for time they didn't work. HN doesn't care about that. Routinely arguing against "socialist" laws that should try and make life actually fair, as contrary to the free market. Whatever that is.

And very little is recognized on HN about the consequences about "reopening" or "resuming" the economy on health care workers. It is a defacto demand: we own you; you are our slaves; you must work to protect us; work harder; sacrifice your lives; and above all, when the inevitably higher case load explodes you will choose who lives and dies. That is your job. To decide. And live with the scar of having chosen who lives and who dies. Deal with it. That is the demand behind every single "reopen" argument.

Maybe let's try to avoid freaking out about maybe not having dead pig on our sandwiches? It's degrading.

Those workers at shut down plants? They should have unemployment benefits pay them in the vicinity of 80%, at the least. That is not the system we have. HNer's don't care about that. It would be a competitive disincentive to free markets if the government were to compete with shit jobs no one really wants.

You know, and then there's the minority who consider universal basic income and universal health care from time to time. And I'm not talking about them. They're they minority on HN, near as I can tell.

South Korea has twice the population of NY state, and yet NY state has 62x the deaths. ROK and the U.S. had their first confirmed cases a day apart. It should humiliate every American what has transpired. Federal, state, parties, free market - across the board the result of deaths proves a culture wide incompetency. It's embarrassing.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's not commonly known but Vegetables, Grains and Beans are extremely excellent sources of protein. Most of them have between 10-20% or more of their calories from protein. if you want exact numbers, check out this: [https://kale.world/c](https://kale.world/c)

And, if people reduce their meat consumption form these shortages, it could have excellent results on people's health. The last time a country went completely without meat or dairy was in durring the world war, when the Nazis took all the dairy and meat from Sweden. Their rate of heart disease went down dramatically for many years. As soon as the war ended and meat returned, the rate of heart disease sky rocketed back to the original numbers. (source: Forks over knives, a netflix documentary).

<comment><USER19> Protein from those sources are not as bioavailable, and are therefore not "extremely excellent sources of protein". Also, forks over knives has been disproven a hundred times over. Not saying everything in that doc is wrong, but it has enough wrong that it is not a credible source of information.

<comment><USER18> The China Study, one of the largest ever undertaken has been vetted and reviewed by 100s and thousands of scientists.

The case studies presented in the documentary are accurate and credible, with numerous historical facts.

As for bioavailability, the difference isn't very huge and you'll get more then enough amino acids from plant based sources without all the carcinogens that come from animal based sources.

Animals do Not make their own protein. They all get it from plants. Plants make the protein. Then the animals eat it. When you eat an animal, your just eating recycled protein. So, why not just cut out the middle man.

Meat has many problems. Dr. Milton Mills a stanford doctor, explains it here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nti7JrBOQAk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nti7JrBOQAk)

Also, the people who live in the blue zones (the 100yr+ zones) typically eat very little or no meat/dairy.</comment></comment></comment>


Simple social skills that will make you more likable - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/social-skills-that-make-you-likable-2015-11-3 <comment><USER2> The article includes active listening. That means giving the other person your full attention, and saying back to them their key thoughts and emotions.

I just want to add that if there was one thing that I could do that I think would make the world a better place, it would be to teach everyone active listening. Just to give one example, I have done several workshops where I paired up people on opposite sides on political issues, and just had them active listen to each other. It was simply amazing how much more civil and productive it made the discussion.</comment>


Spreadsheet technology (2011) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.itu.dk/people/sestoft/funcalc/ITU-TR-2011-142.pdf <comment><USER2> Source code (C#) at [http://www.itu.dk/people/sestoft/corecalc/](http://www.itu.dk/people/sestoft/corecalc/). Doesn't look actively maintained ( _" A dump of the Funcalc 0.14.0.0 source code as of 27 September 2014, as a Visual Studio 2012 solution. Binaries and examples are in SDFCalc/CoreCalc/bin/Release/. You will need NET 4.5 or later to run Funcalc.exe. When I find the time, I will further clean up the source code, add more method documentation, and move the source to Github to facilitate sharing and branching."_)

</comment><comment><USER3> Also of interest:

* EuSpRIG (European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group): More about the application than the tech

[http://www.eusprig.org/](http://www.eusprig.org/)

* Ray Panko's Spreadsheet Research Website: Outdated, but some interesting stuff

[http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/SSR/](http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/SSR/)

EDIT: Edited a little

</comment><comment><USER4> Thank you. I was looking for something just like this on spreadsheet implementations, inner workings, models etc.. If you have any more resources like this please post them as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> The author has written a book (MIT Press), which seems to be a newer (maybe longer?) version of this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The first couples of chapters looks like a nice resource to introduce the fundamentals of spreadsheets.</comment>


Lattice Quadrilaterals on Project Euler - <AUTHOR> http://projecteuler.net/problem=453

<comment><USER2> Mind blower #2: How many different shapes can a brain with 4 neurons recognize? 94. Evolution of vision neurons actually would have started out using a "chance built" circuit that could solve this 94-item 'recognition' problem. Then the DNA that solved the 94 would run repeatedly to recursively form the rest of the retina, giving the brain higher resolution, but using only one 94-pattern-solving DNA recursively. I think the major advancements in neural nets will come about once we start "wiring up" brains in interesting ways like this rather than the current "layer training" approach...The brain is recursive, and needs recursive wiring to be simulated.

</comment><comment><USER3> Basically, you're looking for the rectangular equivalent of A189414 ([http://oeis.org/A189414](http://oeis.org/A189414)).

Tricky problem, even for PE. I started to retool some earlier success with it towards a quasi-DP approach, but have since got caught up in other things.

</comment><comment><USER4> Suggestion: use rot13 if you say anything potentially spoiler-y.

<comment><USER4> Frgf bs sbhe cbvagf ba gur ynggvpr qvivqr vagb sbhe qvfgvapg tebhcf:

1) Gubfr jvgu n ercrngrq cbvag

2) Gubfr jvgu ng yrnfg bar tebhc bs cbvagf ylvat pbyvarne

3) Gubfr jvgu bar cbvag va gur (fgevpg) vagrevbe bs n gevnatyr bs gur bgure guerr

4) Gubfr juvpu ner rdhny gb gurve pbairk uhyy

Lbh genafvgvba sebz (3) gb (4) ol zbivat gur vagrevbe cbvag bhg hagvy vg uvgf gur rqtr bs gur gevnatyr (glcr (2))), naq shegure hagvy vg rkgraqf gur pbairk uhyy, vagb n dhnqevygreny (4).

<comment><USER4> Gubfr bs glcr (4) lvryq bar cbyltba bs gur glcr gur ceboyrz fcrpvsvrf -- n pbairk dhnqevyngreny. Nalguvat ryfr jbhyq sbepr n yvar pebffvat.

Gubfr bs glcr (3) nqzvg rknpgyl guerr cbyltbaf (aba-pbairk).

(1) naq (2) tvir lbh abguvat.

<comment><USER4> Bofreingvba: Gurer'f ~83 zvyyvba ynggvpr-nyvtarq evtug gevnatyrf, zbqhyb genafyngvba. Lbh pna rnfvyl rahzrengr gubfr naq pnyphyngr xrl cebcregvrf, (v) gur ahzore bs ynggvpr cbvagf ba rnpu bs gurve rqtrf, naq (vv) gur ahzore bs ynggvpr cbvagf ba gurve vagrevbe.

Bs pbhefr vg'f rnfl gb nppbhag sbe genafyngvba: gurer'f (O+1-N) genafyngvbaf bs fbzrguvat bs jvqgu N va na vagreiny bs jvqgu O. Fb (oebnqyl), lbh pna pbhag gur cbffvovyvgvrf vaibyivat jvqgu-N bowrpgf, naq whfg zhygvcyl gung pbhag ol O+1-N.

<comment><USER4> Rahzrengvat gur pnfrf; nal sbhe cbvagf qrsvar n erpnagthyne "uhyy":

[(zva n_k, znk_k)] K [zva n_l, znk n_l)]

('n' enatvat bire gur sbhe cbvagf)

Va gur pnfrf bs vagrerfg (3) be (4), ng yrnfg guerr bs gur cbvagf yvr ba gur rkgrevbe rqtr bs guvf uhyy. Vs (naq bayl vs) nyy sbhe qb, vg'f pnfr (4). Gur pbhag bs cbyltbaf sebz guvf vf fvzcyl gur pbhag bs havdhr frgf bs 4-cbvagf ylvat ba fhpu erpgnatyrf (pbzovangbevny sbezhyn: ovt grez vf N^2 O^2 (bar ba rnpu rqtr -- # vf whfg gur cebqhpg bs rqtr yratguf), cyhf gur pnfrf jurer cnvef bs cbvagf ner ba gur fnzr rqtr (funer k- be l-) (cbffvoyl _gjb_ cnvef -- guvax (2,0) (1,0) (0,1) (0,2)), zvahf gur pnfrf jurer gurl uvg gur fnzr pbeare).

Va gur bgure pnfr, (3), guerr bs gur cbvagf ner ba gur erpgnatyr uhyy (cbffvoyl jvgu n cnve ba gur fnzr rqtr). Va rnpu pnfr, gur vagrevbe ertvba vf gur fhz+qvssrerapr bs frireny evtug gevnatyrf. Fb vs jr xrrc n ybbxhc gnoyr bs gur ~83 zvyyvba eryrinag evtug gevnatyrf, jr unir na B(1) pnyphyngvba sbe gur # bs cbvagf ba gur vagrevbe. (Jr trg guerr fbyhgvba cbyltbaf sbe rnpu bs gubfr, bar sbe rnpu cbvag vafvqr gur erpgnatyr ohg bhgfvqr gur gevnatyr, naq abar sbe gur barf juvpu yvr ba na rqtr).

Fb gung'f n fznyy B(1) pnyphyngvba sbe rnpu erpgnatyr. Jr pna whfg rahzrengr guebhtu nyy erpgnatyr fvmrf (nyfb ~83 zvyyvba) naq gung'f vg.

<comment><USER4> Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Btw, the problem was solved by 61 people so far.

Random thoughts:

I think the mod is just there to distract or for hinting that you shouldn't come up with a brute force method.

Observations:

1\. Assume an infinite grid. Add 3 random points _not_ on a line. Clearly, they'll be a convex set (a triangle).

2\. Add a 4th point such that it is not on an existing line.

You've now a quadrilateral.

So for the case of Q(2,2) = 94 = choose(9,4) - 32. 32 is the number of points that would make 3 of the 4 points lie on a line.

Come up with a recurrence relations and solve it.

<comment><USER4> _You 've now a quadrilateral._

Or possibly three. If one point is in the interior of the other three, you get three different, nonconvex quadrilaterals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Traveling Salesman Problem... Will this algorithm work?

Algorithm:

1) Take a square space and divide it into 4 squares.

2) Find all 94 quadrilaterals that the 'nodes' can form.

3) For each quadrilateral, that has points in common with the original, do recursion (I.e. go to step #1 for each of the 94)

4) Keep repeating until some minimal square size (resolution) is reached.

Find the path with the shortest 'Error' and that's an approximation to the traveling salesman problem.

'Error' is defined as the sum of the distances of all travel waypoints to the nearest quadrilateral path line.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've solved about 60 problems on Project Euler but I've no clue about problems where a mod suddenly shows up in the question. How do these type of questions work?

<comment><USER3> Usually, it either implies a possible simplification step (using something like Fermat's little theorem), or its to reduce a huge answer to a range that can feasibly be pasted into the input element on their site.

<comment><USER7> It also may mean that there is some recurrence relation in a sequence that

For example, the Fibonacci sequence, taken modulo 3 repeats every 8 numbers:

       1  1  2  3  5  8 13 21 34 55 89
       1  1  2  0  2  2  1  0  1  1  2

That makes it easy to answer such questions as "What is fib(3567^368857) mod 3?". Just compute 3567^368857 mod 8, and be careful to do the lookup right.</comment></comment></comment>


Linus Torvalds is back in charge of Linux - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-is-back-in-charge-of-linux/ <comment><USER2> Active discussion here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18273213](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18273213)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not a dupe. None of the discussion there is about Torvalds coming back.</comment></comment>