EU receives Nobel Peace Price - <AUTHOR> http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/nobels_fredspris/1.8355716 <comment><USER2> Many people seem incredulous, I think it makes sense when you look back at European history. European integration is a major factor that today Western Europe is at peace (and there isn't even the slightest bit of danger of there being a war among Western European nations) and doesn't look like the Balkans.

A war between Germany and France is completely unimaginable, no matter how much the government in France and Germany might disagree, a war wouldn't even make sense. Yes, the Cold War also contributed to that, but European integration helped create a Europe that is not in disarray. Sure, there are heated debates, crises and arguments (as should be expected and is very much normal), but unlike in the past there is practically no danger that those arguments could turn into war.

There are many things I do not like about how the European Union is set up (most of that is historical baggage – creating the EU was a hard, long and necessarily convoluted process), but with a peace prize I can agree.

But why now? The Nobel Peace Prize is supposed to encourage. Sometimes they are a bit early with their encouragement (see Obama), but that's the general idea. This is to say yes, the European project might have flaws, but it has also been a force for good.

</comment><comment><USER3> I used to think that the Peace Nobel Prize was a way to honor someone who did something to advance peace. Then Al Gore got the prize for nothing related to war or peace, then Obama got the prize and now the EU. What a joke.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, slowly nurturing and fostering 60 years of peace on a traditionally war- torn continent through peaceful economic and political integration. What a joke.

<comment><USER3> Ever heard about the war in Yugoslavia? The clock was reset about 20 years ago. Or about the continued involvment of many of its members in Irak, Afghanistan or more recently in Lybia? Or about their enduring support of the industry of armament? The UE never did anything to prevent wars or end them. That's where the joke is.

<comment><USER4> The EU did not end all wars everywhere and create world peace, but between it's members (and the members of the EEC before that) it sure did keep peace pretty well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [http://translate.google.no/translate?sl=no&tl=en&js=...](http://translate.google.no/translate?sl=no&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nrk.no%2Fnyheter%2Fnobels_fredspris%2F1.8355716&act=url)

Translated page for those of you who don't read Norwegian.

The announcement is made at 11 am local time, but the government run media had received confirmation that the European Union will win the price this year.

<comment><USER5> which means it's still a rumor? [announcement is ~40 minutes away]

<comment><AUTHOR> No, NRK would not go out and say that they have it confirmed if it's still just a rumor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In the past I thought Nobel prizes should honor individual accomplishment, or at most the joint accomplishment of three individuals. That has been the rule until now, but it's changing, and I can see the logic of the change -- sometimes what's being honored is genuinely an institutional accomplishment.

Next year, it's likely we'll see a physics Nobel honoring CERN for discovering the Higgs -- another appropriate example of an institutional Nobel.

<comment><USER7> The Peace Prize committee is an entirely separate entity from the rest of the Nobel committee and like to make up their own rules. The committees responsible for the science prizes are still bound by the rule that each prize can only be awarded to 3 people or less.

<comment><USER6> > The committees responsible for the science prizes are still bound by the > rule that each prize can only be awarded to 3 people or less.

ITYM s/less/fewer/

Yes, but there's talk that this longstanding convention may be at least temporarily broken with next year's physics Nobel. Little more than a rumor at this point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I feel like the world would be a better place if everyone who is involved in the decision making process for the peace prize was removed from that authority, and they just started giving the award to the local "good samaritan" in random, incredibly poor places that meet a threshold level of peacefulness. If it was known globally that being a nice person in a peaceful, poor place could get you a million dollars...

</comment><comment><USER9> It's confirmed: EU is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.</comment>


Oculus Rift CV1 Teardown - <AUTHOR> https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Oculus+Rift+CV1+Teardown/60612 <comment><USER2> Those are some very neat "hybrid Fresnel" lenses. I'm curious how they're made (and at scale), as traditional polishing techniques wouldn't do the trick.

<comment><USER3> Molding, a number of plastics, with good optical properties, work in that regard.</comment></comment>


Stockton, California to give $500 a month in basic income to some residents - <AUTHOR> https://money.cnn.com/2018/07/09/technology/stockton-california-basic-income-experiment/index.html <comment><USER2> > Stockton will give 100 residents $500 a month for 18 months, no strings > attached.

This does not seem like enough people to really learn anything about the effectiveness of UBI, but who knows - maybe they'll learn something and some folks will be better off at the end of the experiment.

<comment><USER3> Really? I'd bet it will cover rent for some of the people in this study. It seems larger than other studies I've seen, but I haven't been following all of them.

<comment><USER4> As a college student, this would cover my rent fully and leave enough for a grocery-run. It would lift a good amount the stress off of my shoulders, that's for sure.

<comment><USER5> Nice. Rent was $300/mo in my time, 15 yrs ago.

I still have $8k in student loan debt held by Edu secretary Betsy DeVos' Navient (aka Mom Corp).

<comment><USER4> Yeah finding under $500/mo wasn't easy in the area around my university, especially with the housing market as it is now. I'm heading into my senior year and just might eek by without taking out loans (thanks to scholarships for average-grade receiving students).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Because of the nature of humanity, I have noticed that instead of gratitude for a non permanent income. People tend to retain the memory of being stripped of a benafit, rather than the years of help it provided. My neighbor (a former stripper) has had 8 years of rent paid by a government program. She now blames all of her problems on this subsidy ending. I don't have the courage to ask her why she isn't grateful for 8 years of housing.

</comment><comment><USER7> Let us not forget the implied inverse of this title;

Stockton, California to take $500 a month of income from some residents.

<comment><USER8> What? That's factually incorrect.

<comment><USER7> Please explain. Where does Stockton get $500 to give to a resident other than taking it from someone else?

<comment><USER8> Through $1.2M in philanthropic funding primarily led by a Facebook co-founder, Chris Hughes [1]. It is not funded whatsoever through taxation.

[1] [https://economicsecurityproject.org/](https://economicsecurityproject.org/)

<comment><USER7> And when the govt wants to expand the program beyond the voluntary largess of billionaires where does that money come from?

Moreover, a more honest title would say "Chris Hughes, Facebook co-founder, to give $500 a month charity stipend to residence of Stockton, California."

Whatever the source it is not income, basic or otherwise.

<comment><USER9> Um I'm pretty sure the practical and legal definition of income is simply money received. Why would a stipend not count as income?

<comment><USER7> I would argue that ignoring or evading the distinction between earning your money and it being handed to you or just taking it from someone is the height of the impractical.

> Why would a stipend not count as income?

For the purposes of the IRS perhaps it does count as "taxable income" per the IRS code but that is not what we are talking about here. There are only three possible cases regarding money you receive; you earn it through voluntary trade of goods or services with others, you take money from others without their consent, i.e. theft or you receive a voluntary gift from others for reasons and standards determined by the giver, i.e. charity. That is it.

UBI tries to obfuscate these important _moral_ distinctions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Stockton will give 100 residents

Is it truly 100 random residents, not looking at income, race, etc? I suspect it is not, and they will exclude high wealth individuals. Congratulations they've just reinvented wealthfare.

> In Finland, a monthly stipend of 560 euros was given to 2,000 unemployed > people between the ages of 25 and 58.

Genius, let's only give unemployed people the stipend, thus demotivating people to work. Once again, reinvented unemployment.

> "It is such a fundamental idea behind America that if you work hard, you can > get ahead — and you certainly don't live in poverty. But that isn't true > today, and it hasn't been true in the country for decades."

This victim mentality is exactly what figures such as Jordan Peterson are pushing back against. So the thought process is, it is a rigged system, I am never going to be successful in America, so I am not going to try and do anything. What a preposterous outlook. I completely disagree with this flawed and cynical outlook of America.

<comment><USER4> I think that it is very _easy_ to think that giving people a baseline-income will take the motivation to work away from them, but there's a reason there is so much interest in this area from the most philanthropic among us. Jordan Peterson would not be against the simple research and testing of this idea, in fact he would probably encourage it.

The worst that we could find is that people somehow lose the motivation to be productive in a society that gives them a basic income. The best we could find is that when people have to worry less about surviving, first level of Maslow's heirarchy stuff, that they are free to use their energy elsewhere and in different ways. Imagine the number of potentially influential people out there that are bogged down by the fact that their rent just went up 25$ per month and they can't afford to pay it.

<comment><USER11> Is one of the purposes of UBI, to take people out of the workforce, without horrendous social problems unemployment brings?

<comment><USER4> UBI is not at all aimed at taking people out of the work force. If you had basic food and possibly rent covered every month, would you just stop working? Forever? If so I think that says more about you than it does society as a whole.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A group of 3,000 citizens is making better forecasts than CIA analysts - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/04/02/297839429/-so-you-think-youre-smarter-than-a-cia-agent <comment><USER2> This Economist post[0] addresses some of the many comments about statistical outliers:

> The big surprise has been the support for the unabashedly elitist "super- > forecaster" hypothesis. The top 2% of forecasters in Year 1 showed that > there is more than luck at play. If it were just luck, the "supers" would > regress to the mean: yesterday's champs would be today's chumps. But they > actually got better. When we randomly assigned "supers" into elite teams, > they blew the lid off IARPA's performance goals. They beat the unweighted > average (wisdom-of-overall-crowd) by 65%; beat the best algorithms of four > competitor institutions by 35-60%; and beat two prediction markets by 20-35%

[0][http://www.economist.com/news/21589145-how-sort-best-rest- wh...](http://www.economist.com/news/21589145-how-sort-best-rest-whos-good- forecasts)

<comment><USER3> Could this be simple selectivity? I do not know how CIA selects analysts, but I doubt it is by having large pool of applicants that are evaluated on their predictions. On the other hand we have group of 30 people, selected for their guessing from amongst 3000 population. When put that way, I would expect 30 people to be consistently better.

<comment><USER4> These people are also isolated from the internal agency narrative, I imagine that can help quite a bit.

<comment><USER5> In other words, what if the "taxpayer-funded" forecasts we're permitted to know about are "on the books", so to speak, and so much more is "off the books" and memory-holed beyond even the typical "black magic marker, and white out" form of redacted classification that some times surfaces into the public eye?

Truths so brutal, and predictions so harsh that no one dares write them down.

But now we enter the information age, and certain realities are essentially undeniable, and can no longer concealed from the civilian panopticons like Google.

Sort of like how TV Networks (and even basic cable channels to a degree), with their Standards & Practices departments, waste time sanitizing television destined for the public air waves and radio spectrum, while media on the internet operates with an almost total lack of restraint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I need to know more. If the questions are all yes/no questions ("Will there be a significant attack on Israeli territory before May 10, 2014?"), and the sample set is large enough, you would -expect- there to be some outliers who mostly got things right, by pure chance. And even outside of that, I want to know what sort of average the CIA agents were batting; if they were hitting just 50%, I would -expect- nearly any sample size to have an outlier who did better.

That is, to borrow the old get rich quick scheme, take a list of 1024 addresses. Send to half of them "Stock X will be higher on (date) than today", and to the other half "Stock X will be lower on (date) than today". Repeat with the set you sent the correct 'predictions' to, and continue repeating until you're down to four people who you've sent the correct prediction to every time. Suggest they sign up for your premium stock tips newsletter.

All you're doing is playing statistics, you're not actually demonstrating any predictive ability.

<comment><USER7> "and the sample set is large enough, you would -expect- there to be some outliers who mostly got things right, by pure chance."

According to the article, "In fact, she's so good she's been put on a special team with other super forecasters whose predictions are reportedly 30 percent better than intelligence officers with access to actual classified information."

If they mean that _after_ the team was formed, the predictions are still 30% better, than random chance ceases to be an acceptable explanation. If they mean that the team that they formed was 30% better on the predictions used to grant entrance into the team, then your objection still holds. Unfortunately, I don't think the article makes it clear which is the case.

That said, there are definitely some mechanisms that could lead an outside group to higher accuracy on these sorts of things. The two biggest are: 1. The insiders are simply that bad, for whatever reason, and random chance can easily beat them, and 2. The failures of the insiders are correlated and overwhelm their theoretically superior information, and I'd especially finger potential ideological biases there, which could affect both information filtering and the analysis. (It is one thing to believe the world should be a certain way as a result of one's ideology... it is quite another to believe the world _must already be_ a certain way as a result of one's ideology, even when one is staring evidence in the face that it is not. One is noble and laudable... the other somewhat less so.)

<comment><USER8> As a guess, I would suspect that the researchers who set up the experiment are more careful about their analysis than NPR is with its reporting. NPR needs to popularize its information, thus ensuring that we, the casual reader, can get a grasp of what's going on. That necessarily dumbs down the content.

<comment><USER9> Why did they go half way, though? If you're going to dumb down things, why don't just say "scientists found that" instead of giving a distorted view of the experiment, popularizing a wrong idea of what real science actually looks like?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Now the fun question; are there any anti-forecasters? People who guess wrong so consistently and powerfully they're as good as super forecasters?

<comment><USER10> This is a really interesting question, actually.

In my undergrad ecology class, we were assigned a scent-based laboratory experiment which involved all the male and female members of the class wearing the same white t-shirt for 48 hours in order to accrue bodily odors-- heavy workouts, perfume, showering, etc were all prohibited. At the end, everyone in the class sniffed all of the t-shirts and guessed which t shirt had been worn by what sex.

Most people had a 50-50 chance, and a few guessed slightly better than chance. I was far worse than chance, guessing only 10% correctly. In a way, anti- forecasting is a type of forecasting, too. If someone had asked me for my guess and then guessed the opposite, they'd have had superior guessing power. This paradigm falls apart quickly when the chances of events aren't so clear, however.

<comment><USER11> Ah, the old Costanza maneuver.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For a prediction market anyone can join checkout [https://scicast.org/](https://scicast.org/)

Whats neat about SciCast is you can make predictions based on the assumption of how other questions will turn out.

eg I think that if the price of bitcoin exceeds 1000 by 2015 at least one presidential candidate will accept bitcoin donations. If btc ends up being below 1000 I make no prediction.

<comment><USER13> Just to add, the SciCast project came out of the DAGGRE project, which was a competitor to Good Judgment in the IARPA prediction challenge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Pure speculation: random, untrained and disinterested parties might be better than CIA analysts at making geopolitical predictions because their results aren't politicized. "Are there WMDs in Iraq?"

<comment><USER15> I was having the same thought, at what point/how do you factor in the, "if I make this predication, which is contrary to my boss's expectations, will I still have a job". Surely there is a huge amount of pressure on "rowing in the same direction" towards a predetermined group think (which is terrible, of course).

<comment><USER16> There's also the "if I make this prediction and I'm wrong, will it affect me?" bias too.

The more involved you are, and especially the more accountable you are held for your decisions, the more you're likely to second guess yourself. There's normally a reason your second guess wasn't your first guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's totally unclear what they are actually doing.

Are they averaging everyone's answer (wisdom of the crowd)? Are they looking back at who got lucky and declaring them "super forecasters" (and then seeing large regressions to the mean)? Did they have separate periods of testing to try and control for this? Did they have a control group of similar size just flipping coins?

The way this is written it sounds like someone used a Gladwell book as their entire science education.

<comment><USER18> There are multiple experimental groups in the project, which use different methods. One of the methods is a prediction market, where you can buy or sell shares of any given outcome, with the market price being the group estimate of the probability. For example, if the group thinks something will happen with 35% probability, you can buy shares for $35 (fake money). When the questions are eventually resolved, correct shares are valued at $100, and incorrect shares are valued at $0.

<comment><USER13> There were multiple experiment groups at the beginning, but I'm not sure if any are left besides Good Judgment. DAGGRE, the prediction market group, is out.

Edit: Oops, I misunderstood. Apparently Good Judgment also has a prediction market group inside of it. Thanks nbouscal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> They may be good at prediction, but who writes their questions?

It's probably much easier to reach a successful prediction when a lot of the framing has already been done for them. If you take the Ukraine question, for example, there's already a lot of intelligence encapsulated, such as the City and Date when the CIA is expecting a Russian invasion. As a post mentions below, the questions may even be phrased/biased towards the right answer.

I wonder if they would be as good at prediction if they didn't have the resources and intelligence of the CIA providing them with the correct focus, prioritization, and framing.

<comment><USER20> The CIA is also providing focus, prioritization, and framing for themselves, and is being outperformed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Now I'm really confused. The title of this post was originally "So You Think You're Smarter Than A CIA Agent ", which is consistent with the title of the article. Now it's been changed to editorialize the content? Isn't that the opposite of HN policies?

<comment><USER22> Is this policy written somewhere? The only trend I've noticed is that I always agree with anyone complaining about a changed submission title. (I don't think you're complaining, are you? The NPR title is pretty cheap IMHO.)

<comment><USER23> You can read the guidelines here:

[http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

This may fall under:

" Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait. "

<comment><USER22> I would call it linkbait, cool. Sad to see coming from NPR.

Thanks for the link, it's been a few years since I read those rules.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Now actually selecting the outliers, the people that, on average, made really good predictions despite access to limited information, and data-mining their features set (psychological traits, information diet, background etc.), _THAT_ would be an interesting study...

<comment><USER18> They are doing a bit of that too. They have found correlations with IQ and other metrics. [http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~ungar/papers/forecast_AAAI_MAGG.pd...](http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~ungar/papers/forecast_AAAI_MAGG.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Highly recommend this book, which is on the subject ... [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds)

<comment><USER26> This is a fantastic book and explains most of the questions currently in the thread about the circumstances where large groups of people produce more effective answers than any one of its members and the cases where they do not. If this article was interesting it is worth reading.

The book also briefly covers the Policy Analysis Market, a program to experiment with using a futures market to help predict terrorist attacks. As this program used real money, and offered the opportunity to make money off of terrorist attacks, some members of Congress were outraged and the program was immediately cancelled ([http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3106559.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3106559.stm)). This version discussed in this NPR article seems more publicly palatable. In fact, it looks like the similarity was already reported: [http://articles.latimes.com/2012/aug/21/nation/la-na-cia- cro...](http://articles.latimes.com/2012/aug/21/nation/la-na-cia- crowds-20120821)

By the way, can anyone recommend a more rigorous book than _Wisdom of Crowds_ on this subject?

<comment><USER27> This one [1] is recommended by the guys behind the Radio Lab podcast (specific episode [2]). I left the referral tag on it since it'll go to help them produce more great radio.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385503865/wnycorg-20](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385503865/wnycorg-20)

[2] [http://www.radiolab.org/story/91502-the-invisible- hand/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/91502-the-invisible-hand/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I am a big fan / proponent of prediction "markets" or similar otherwise incentivized crowd prediction tools. Happy to see someone execute it within the government while avoiding the terrible branding and public relations faux pas of past "terrorism market" endeavors.

Hopefully this will scale more broadly, continue to improve its incentives, and increase our capability to prepare for future events.

</comment><comment><USER29> The issue of crowd sourcing answers to questions is a very interesting one. I've recently been reading research in this area with a colleague, and it is far more involved than the article makes it sound.

If you are interested, one of the first people to work on the problem were Dawid & Skene [0] back in 1979. They were trying to solve the issue of clinicians talking to patients and asking how they are. Each time they asked, the patient may give a slightly different answer. The goal was to estimate the "true" answer from the number of various "noisy" answers (sound familiar after reading the OP?)

The general intuition for most future research into the topic is that if you tend to agree with others more often than not, your score goes up. If your score is higher, your answers are trusted more.

Then there are a whole bunch of interesting additions to this principle, such as factoring in question difficulty [1] (e.g. questions which have the most disagreement can be considered more difficult, and hence you may want to ask more people about these questions to get a clearer picture). It is also helpful to seed certain questions for which the answer is "known" (may or may not be possible, depending on the project). Then you can use the answers to these questions to help score people even more accurately.

An even more interesting approach is to take into account people who answer adversarially, that is, they always answer incorrectly (either due to malicious intent, or they consistently misinterpret the questions in a backward fasion). If you have somebody who answers incorrectly 90% of the time, then they provide almost exactly the same information as someone who answers correctly 90% of the time. All you need to do is flip their vote once you've identified this.

The whole field is very facinating, and there seems to be more and more publications coming out with interesting approaches to the problem.

[0] [http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=15953840037809938294...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=15953840037809938294&as_sdt=5,39&sciodt=0,39&hl=en)

[1] [http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=144091158652582285...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=14409115865258228521&hl=en&as_sdt=0,39)

</comment><comment><USER30> One thing that I really enjoyed about this article was its description of "the wisdom of crowds." Typically that phrase shrouded in marketing bullshit that just boils down to the idea that groups are always smarter than individuals because magic. That idea on its own is really counterintuitive and hard to accept.

It was a good call to talk about the scientific basis for the idea; I wish more places that relied on crowdsourcing would do the same thing.

<comment><USER31> > That idea on its own is really counterintuitive and hard to accept.

Not really... For example, have you heard of the Cicada puzzle? That is solved by groups of people, and probably wouldn't be solved if it was just one person.

Multiple people with specialized knowledge > one person with specialized knowledge.

We didn't evolve to be social animals because it would make us stupid...

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> A note on the title change:

When the story title is linkbait and there are no good subtitles, we sometimes draw on the first sentence of the story. In this case I used the description under the photo. The key thing is to use only language that's already there.

</comment><comment><USER33> Doesn't this article seem to contradict itself? It cites superforecasters' amazing ability, then talks about how better forecasting is the result of averaging the noise from a crowd of diverse opinions...

<comment><USER34> That's what jumped out at me as well. First the article extols how the Wisdom of Crowds is smarter than the experts. Then it goes on to say how some of the crowd are superforecasters, (essentially experts), and the rest of the crowd makes no difference.

It would be interesting to see how small the group of superforecasters would need to get before their accuracy falls below that of the CIA analysts.

<comment><USER33> Good test!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is a great topic for a site that uses some "wisdom of crowds" mechanisms as part of the story and comment ranking. Though HN is different in some significant ways: in the experiment, subjects are asked carefully worded questions and give answers without being shown any information from others, whereas here there are several signals available before voting on a story or comment, like prior vote count and previous comments, which can bias a vote.

</comment><comment><USER35> They started off reasonable. Ask ordinary people to assign probabilities to potential world events that can be verified. The next step is also reasonable. With a large enough crowd, the estimation noise around the "true" probability will cancel out. That's how the crowd mean estimated the ox weight so closely.

But then they turned left onto stupid street. They took the people who, perhaps by chance alone, predicted results closest to the crowd mean, and put them on a "team". What the heck is the point of that? It just reduces the size of the crowd and shows a fundamental misunderstanding of statistics.

Past performance does not necessarily predict future results.

Start with 10000 coins, and flip them all. Keep the ones that land heads. Flip those, and keep the ones that land heads. Repeat until all coins land on tails, or one coin remains as the "champion of heads." What is the probability that when it is flipped again, it comes up heads? Still 50%. It isn't a supercoin. You just managed to select it from a giant group by making it the sole outlier from a series of independent trials.

Though you should probably check to make sure it actually has a tails side, just in case.

<comment><USER36> > It just reduces the size of the crowd and shows a fundamental > misunderstanding of statistics.

Why do you assume that what's in the NPR article is all there is to it, that there's no info, technical or other, left out?

Of course they thought of that, and checked. There's no regression to the mean, the elite group further improved, their estimates were 65 % better than the overall crowd.[0]

[0] [http://www.economist.com/news/21589145-how-sort-best-rest- wh...](http://www.economist.com/news/21589145-how-sort-best-rest-whos-good- forecasts)

<comment><USER35> That article is _much_ more informative. Kudos to you, nzp.

<comment><USER36> Heh, actually, kudos to joshuahedlund[0], I found it in his comment.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7515263](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7515263)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> How does the 'crowd' adjust for bias in sources? e.g. if they are all picking the answers to the surveys based on similar methods, e.g. google searches or from listening to the news, how does the crowd avoid the biases from news sources? You can't just 'average them out' if there are systematic skews.

e.g. just because half of the people are watching (say) CNN and the other half are watching (say) Fox News doesn't magically mean that the average of their opinions will be correct. What if both news sources overplayed the likelihood of terrorist attacks? How would the crowd adjust to this?

</comment><comment><USER38> >First, if you want people to get better at making predictions, you need to keep score of how accurate their predictions turn out to be, so they have concrete feedback.

>But also, if you take a large crowd of different people with access to different information and pool their predictions, you will be in much better shape than if you rely on a single very smart person, or even a small group of very smart people."

Both points are clearly true. But it's obvious that the CIA, and probably anything political, has problems "keeping score," not getting more voices.

</comment><comment><USER39> Obviously there are some very smart people working in government intelligence agencies, including the CIA, MI6, etc. However, in my experience working in the private intelligence sector, I found that many former government employees lacked creativity and relied too heavily on 'classified sources' and their network. The best analysts were extremely lateral thinkers who used Google and public databases, but would never have passed a government test on account of their quirks.

</comment><comment><USER40> > In other words, there are errors on every side of the mark, but there is a > truth at the center that people are responding to, and if you average a > large number of predictions together, the errors will end up canceling each > other out, and you are left with a more accurate guess.

This just reminds me all too much of the Twitch Plays Pokémon phenomenon that took place last month. The fact that they actually are completing games is, frankly, astounding.

</comment><comment><USER41> It seems to me that all professional experts are subject to groupthink. However, could anonymous lay forecasters still make such excellent predictions _without_ those groups in place?

Anyway, I think all this argues in favor of Robin Hanson's concept of "Futarchy":

[http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.html](http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.html)

</comment><comment><USER42> Maybe the founding father's "fear" of the ignorant masses and choice of representative government needs to be reevaluated. Go back to direct actual democracy. But with ranges instead of yes/no. So as to capture "average is true signal".

Maybe first step is chance voting of representatives from yes/no to 1-100 how much you wan this person to win.

</comment><comment><USER43> So could I suggest that CIA forecasts are affected by internal politics, perceived needs of political establishment, and afflicted by biases in top secret material that cannot be easily counter-balanced.

Whereas if they put these super-forecasters in the CIA and said "if you dont predict what i want its off to Afghanistan with you" they will soon regress to the mean.

</comment><comment><USER44> Most people in the world only have access to public information so if you think most geopolitical events are brought about by "the masses" instead of by some Platoesque elites (which is of course very much debatable) it may well make sense to base your predictions on the data that is available to most players.

</comment><comment><USER45> Hearing the article, I felt thrown into PKD novel. One of the recurring theme in his work are precogs, normal people with special abilities to forecast the future. Or also to mispredict the future very accurately. Large corporations use groups of precogs to plan marketing campaigns, product designs, etc.

</comment><comment><USER46> The Wikipedia page on prediction markets storied history and interesting bit. Curious that USM had a prototype that was shutdown for being a "terrorism futures market."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market)

</comment><comment><USER47> "The wisdom of crowds is a very important part of this project, and it's an important driver of accuracy," Tetlock said

This part threw me off. But overall, crowdsourced estimates could be a useful tool, provided everyone is actually trying to guess correctly (ie national pride, monetary reward, etc)

</comment><comment><USER48> I went to undergrad with quite a few future CIA analysts. You should not overestimate the average intelligence of CIA analysts. No doubt they have some brilliant people, but you shouldn't be surprised that amateurs with Google News outperform careerists inside a giant bureaucracy.

</comment><comment><USER49> That article felt like it ended far too early. I was left with a "is that it?" feeling. Not that I was underwhelmed by the message of the article, but that I couldn't find a message in it. If it had a point beyond "crowdsourcing works", I missed it.

<comment><USER50> True for far, far too many articles IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Assuming you can do that (ie: forecast world events), anyone know how you can use that for your own advantage, beside investing in stocks (even if not necessarily with the stock exchange, OTC or classic VC/angel investing enters this too) or commodities?

</comment><comment><USER52> John Brunner's book "The Shockwave Rider" (1975), which was heavily inspired by Toffler's "Future Shock", had this concept (called a Delphi pool) as a major and successful component of the future society.

<comment><USER53> Delphi pools were invented by RAND, not Brunner, IIRC, have been studied over the years (Armstrong's _Principles of Forecasting_ has some papers on them), and work differently from prediction markets: Delphi pools collect a small number of experts, asks for written analyses and breakdowns and qualitative assessments (not necessarily the precise numerical probabilities of prediction markets), feeds each expert's analysis to the others, asks them for a new analysis incorporating the others, and repeats this for 2 or 3 rounds until a rough consensus has been reached. This is not very similar to prediction markets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Doug Stanhope has a good rant about these opinion polls:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Ryc...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=RycwYRcm3Lc#t=84)

</comment><comment><USER54> Are the underpinnings of this experiment in line with the idea behind the HyperLogLog story[0] I read about the other day?

[0][http://antirez.com/news/75](http://antirez.com/news/75)

</comment><comment><USER55> See also [http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2014/03/21/independent- decisio...](http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2014/03/21/independent-decision- making/)

</comment><comment><USER56> If you have 3000 people predicting the outcomes of events with say a probablity of 0.3 after 6 trials there would be 2 people who got all of them correct and many others who would have a very good record out of pure chance alone.

Unless they publish the detailed numbers we can't be sure of whats going on here.

If some person with access only to normal sources is able to perform so well against people with access to lots of classified sources and information , what are we to conclude ?

Either they are just lucky or the people at the CIA aren't as competent as we think they are.

If we are unwilling to accept any of these theories then we need to know what makes these people good at it. I don't see how just plain simple analysis can beat people at the CIA.

<comment><USER57> But the point here seems to be to use the group average, not to find outliers with good prediction ability per se.

<comment><USER35> That's exactly it, which is why I was so confused about the "team" of "superpredictors". While you might learn something by comparing their methods with everybody else, you still have to do the same amount of scrutiny on everyone in the crowd to learn anything useful.

With enough data, you can apply an automatic adjustment to even the most horrible predictors, to make their contribution to the final result more useful. If, for instance, someone always predicts exactly 10% more favorable results for Israel, independently of the facts, you can just reverse that for that one person on every question mentioning Israel, to produce a bias- adjusted result. That is tremenddously difficult, though, and not nearly as useful as just increasing the size of the crowd.

Which is the whole point. With a big enough crowd, you don't need to do that at all, because the stupid little biases unrelated to the facts tend to be noise, not signal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> "In fact, Tetlock and his team have even engineered ways to significantly improve the wisdom of the crowd"

Does anyone know what these methods might be?

<comment><USER59> One example briefly mentioned was providing feedback to respondents to let them know when they were getting things right or wrong.

<comment><USER37> And how would that work?

Take their example question - 'Will North Korea launch a new multi-stage missile before May 1, 2014?' That's a yes/no question. But none of the participants _knows_ the answer. They are just trying to forecast the future based upon the balance of probabilities. So if NK does launch a missile, the people who answered 'no' were wrong, but _the reasons upon which they came to pick 'no' could still have been right_. So giving feedback to these people and telling them that they were wrong does not magically aid/improve predictions.

Perhaps a simpler example could be used. 'Will the next roll of this dice score 3?' Well, it's obviously more likely that some other result will happen. But if the 3 does come up, you can't say that all those people who said 'no' are worse at predictions...

<comment><USER60> Even trickier - it sounds like the participants are giving probabilities. So if you guessed some possibility was 42% likely and then it did in fact happen - are you right or wrong? I don't think there is an answer to that question.

<comment><USER61> Simple math applied to a large enough set of predictions will let you know whether or not your probabilities are accurate. It is the same as playing poker - every hand you are essentially betting on probabilities multiple times (okay right now I thing I have a 50% chance of winning this hand and the pot is X and I have to put in Y to keep playing, I'm going to continue). In the short term it is very hard to know whether or not you are putting money in when you "should" because of variance. In the long term, the variance disappears and you can see that, for example, you are making an estimated 2 bets/100 hands you play which means you are "more correct" than the people you are playing against at estimating the odds. A little more complicated than that of course because you are also using bets as weapons to drive better hands out through bluffing and semi-bluffing, etc but the general point holds that a large enough sample size of actual results versus compared results means that your probabilities will hold or they won't

<comment><USER37> Works great for poker, where you play lots of hands. Works less great for the situation in the article. Just how many North Korean missile launches do you need a person to predict before you know they are lucky or not?

<comment><USER61> Doesn't matter, as long as they predict a large enough sample of events. Just requires an assumption that they will be as accurate on every type of event, which probably isn't true, but close enough for statistics

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I did exactly this in high school:

I set up an experiment to find the people best at guessing Zener cards picked at random.

I surveryed 100 people and the best 5 did notably better than the others. I dubbed these people "clairvoyant". (Spoiler: on retesting, they weren't, but then again I only followed this process once...).

Wisdom of the crowds will work just fine for anything modestly obvious, and it will fail for any black swan events that intelligence actually needs to be aware of - if the predictors even get asked about those.

</comment><comment><USER63> This reminds me of the future predicted in Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge.

Where he explores the ability to spin up pools of analysts like a cloud server.

</comment><comment><USER64> Same rules apply to other institutions e.g. investment banks and recommendations. Everybody sticks close to the herd.

</comment><comment><USER65> Was the project shut down? (the website is not working, sorry if I haven't missed that in the article)

<comment><USER53> GJP is still running and just added some new IARPA questions today. Registration for the next season may not be open yet, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Crowdsource prophet. This is not new, that happened before with the "peak oil community".

</comment><comment><USER67> The formatting of the questions and answers could contribute to a candidate's success as well. Unlikely events could be phrased differently than likely events with the intention of skewing the success rate to the positive.

I would hate for data from this organization to be used for any sort of real decision making process. You might as well hire a psychic.

</comment><comment><USER68> Inaccurate headline. Citizenship is not required for participation.

</comment><comment><USER69> How does this forecasting market compare to something like Intrade?

<comment><USER70> Intrade is a futures market where people with insider knowledge can buy into a position. So if you know of a scandal for a political candidate that will cause him to withdraw, you can go buy up all the other candidates and make some money when he does. This will alter his price, becoming a predictor before the news actually comes out.

Additionally, there is the "put your money where your mouth is" aspect of it. While every candidate in the primaries, is announced as, "the next president of the United States", you can see who the people really think will win based on which futures they purchase.

The CIA effort is more like taking a whole lot of people, asking them to predict something and seeing who is good at it. There appears to be some manipulation of those guesses across the breadth of the crowd but it is not mentioned. In contrast to futures markets, the players in the CIA effort have no stake in the game.

<comment><USER61> Right, so one would expect something like Intrade or other prediction markets to leverage both the statistical "wisdom of crowds" and insider information to be even more accurate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> I noticed this phenomenon alot when I used to work at Intrade.

</comment><comment><USER72> I sometimes have good runs in blackjack.

</comment><comment><USER73> Where's the API?

<comment><USER74> It might be possible to put something together using Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Intuitors.

</comment><comment><USER76> False classified information might actually work against the analyst who has access to it.

The same piece of info, if public, will have to stand on its own, without the bias introduced by restricted access / multiple levels of filtering / the attached opinions of people wearing suits.

<comment><USER48> Even true classified information can cause problems if overvalued. The questions seem to be rather general predictions so publicly available geopolitical context likely matters more than any individual bit of inside information.</comment></comment>


Is it time to swap your Mac for a Windows laptop? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/07/mac-windows-pc-macbook-pro-microsoft-surface-book <comment><USER2> Besides landing on a page from a quality paper The Guardian with a popunder banner at the bottom and a normal banner on the right (quite intrusive). This article confirmed my suspicions: MS making great hardware but is still not quite there yet.</comment>


B.C. vows crackdown after investigation reveals money-laundering scheme - <AUTHOR> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/investigations/real-estate-money-laundering-and-drugs/article38004840/ <comment><USER2> There is a missing step in the transaction that the article does not explain.

1\. Bad person sells drugs for cash.

2\. Bad person has cash.

3\. Bad person lends borrower cash to buy real estate.

Step 3 is the mystery.

— Bad person could give a bag of cash to the borrower. Now the borrower has a banking problem. How does that cash get into a bank account so the real estate purchase can happen?

— Bad person masquerading as a legit lender could give a bag of cash to the seller at closing. Now the seller has a banking problem.

— Bad person masquerading as a lender can give a bag of cash to the closing agent who is facilitating the real estate transaction. Now the closing agent has a banking problem.

There will be a huge pile of cash that must somehow enter the banking system. Someone must do this. How does it happen?

And no it doesn't not suffice to tell the seller or the closing agent "I brought a giant bag of Canadian currency with me when I flew in from China to buy this property." Banks didn't fall off the back of the turnip truck yesterday.

As the article notes, this is a money laundering problem. But the article postulates a moment of magic — the moment where a bag of tainted cash becomes a recorded mortgage lien on real estate.

I'm saying this as an international tax lawyer who has structured hundreds of millions of dollars of US real estate purchase by foreigners. Maybe I just deal with legit people. We always get wire transfers from real banks, whether the investment is debt or equity.

<comment><USER3> _> >— Bad person masquerading as a legit lender could give a bag of cash to the seller at closing. Now the seller has a banking problem._

Not necessarily. If the price in cash makes up for the inflation losses you can easily pay for most things in cash. Or buy a money order when you can't. You can launder maybe as much as 60% of your income. Cash is spent and your legit salary goes to the bank.

Eating out? Cash

Vacation? Cash

Babysitter? Cash

Buy a used car? Cash (maybe even a new car...go to a like minded dealer)

Furniture? Cash

Home improvements? Cash

Clothes, jewelry? Cash

Obviously gotta do it in stages or else you stand out.

<comment><USER4> Ban cash. Most people use cards in the UK. We should push for that in North America.

<comment><USER5> a guy i knew used to say something like "the british are a slave people without the torch of liberty in their hearts." i used to think it was funny and weird but it just seems more true as time goes on.

<comment><USER6> Say it into the CCTV camera.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One other thing, notice at the start of the article they say "the cash was contaminated with fentanyl and other street drugs". Back in the 80s and 90s, this was used as an excuse for why the cops would seize people's money in the us - often it was a poor person without ability to challenge it. One of many problems with this was that all cash was "contaminated", having some trace of drugs. Canada should strive not to fall into the civil forfeiture hole we have in the us, where the govt seizes people's property separately from charging them with crimes, because it dirty drug money or something. of course they should stop money laundering, but the govt should strive to use factual reasons for taking someone's money.

<comment><USER8> Civil forfeiture is already a huge controversy in BC. There's a big court case brewing on this topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> After so many years of government indifference the housing situation in Vancouver is so incredibly screwed up. Hard to say whether it'll be possible at all to undo the damage.

The expectations for action on housing in the first budget of the new NDP government tomorrow are sky-high.

<comment><USER10> Hello from a fellow white hot property market (London). The probability of anything worthwhile being done in BC is approximately zero. The govt will do stupid shit like issue cheap loans to young people to "get them on the housing ladder" which just inflates prices more. If you're rrally unlucky, your lot might even invent new and more stupid ways to heat up a too hot market.

<comment><USER9> Yep! Issuing cheap loans to young people is literally what the previous neo liberal government did. Of course local economists which warned against the plan found after that it increased prices.

Now however the province has elected a labour government which has mentioned numerous times to expect action on the demand side and expectations are sky high that they'll be a bit different.

Here's an article about people are expecting today. A tax on foreign capital is expected. [http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-ndp- govern...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-ndp-government- housing-affordability-1.4542462)

<comment><USER11> Additionally, the new Solicitor General is a tough as nails guy who previously sued the conservative federal government into allowing supervised injection sites for addicts, and then beat the former premier in her own riding, forcing her to move 350km.

<comment><USER12> If I had to pick one politician out of the whole country that I trust the most it would without a doubt be David Eby.

<comment><USER13> I can't say this quote (from the article) inspires a lot of faith.

"This story confirms our government's commitment to taking action to crack down on money laundering and criminal activity in B.C.," David Eby said.

I'm not even sure how to parse it. In my mind this story does anything but "confirm" the government's commitment to stopping this; in my mind it confirms that someone was asleep at the wheel. Perhaps he meant to say "this story has inspired us to crack down..." but the cynical part of me thinks that a politician would never admit there was a problem that they did not already know about.

In any case, I will pay more attention to what David Eby does than what he says.

<comment><USER9> The context is that this is a new government. The old BC Liberal government didn't care about any of these problems at all and allowed them to fester for years. The new NDP government suspected there were severe problems and were starting to act on them. The article "confirms" that indeed the problems _are_ severe, and the new government is correct in their belief that it's an important issue for their government to address.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _" They weren't charged with any crimes"_ and yet... _" The Zhangs did lose their cash, though, for good: A judge ordered it forfeited to the provincial government as "proceeds of crime."_

The government should not be allowed to just declare the money was obtained illegally and seize it without due process, never to be returned. That's the Canadian equivalent of civil asset forfeiture. I don't know Canadian law, but it seems they are falling into the same morality pit that the US has been engaging in. Yes, I realize that these people are guilty. But this kind of thing is what leads to this: [https://listverse.com/2015/06/29/10-egregious- abuses-of-civi...](https://listverse.com/2015/06/29/10-egregious-abuses-of- civil-asset-forfeiture/)

<comment><USER15> There is one big difference - Canada does not have the same heavy-handed legal punishment system that the US does. Possession for distribution doesn't run the same risks for (essentially permanent) jail time like it does in the US, but costs as much or more to the legal system.

I don't agree with the civil forfeiture policies but I can certainly see how & why they are developing here. It's an attempt to remove the profit motive of crime without adding to the already clogged and expensive legal system. Again, I'm not judging the "rightness", just understanding the logic behind it.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I understand the logic as well. In the US it was designed to put a major dent into organized crime by seizing what amounts to their working capital. The problem, though, is that it's the easy way out and due process was specifically designed to keep government from overreaching in exactly the manner which they are doing. They are simply circumventing due process by separating property from its owner. The huge amount of law has to do specifically with property rights and torts against it. People (in the US) supposedly have a 4th amendment right to help protect their property. I'm sure Canada has a similar law. But now, they are separating property from the person who owns, removing the 4th amendment protections. How the SCOTUS hasn't struck this down with extreme prejudice boggles my mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The reporters have found a connection between real estate and the fentanyl crisis but I fear they're going to jump to the conclusion of banning all foreign ownership. Which is not going to stop the drug trade. It is such a sexy narrative that the real estate crisis and opioid crisis can be blamed on Chinese foreigners which leads the reader to conclude that banning them is the solution. The piece is pushing all sorts of buttons.

<comment><USER17> Sexy yes, but also true. Or do you think the Fentanyl and other criminality is spread evenly through all demographics? I'm curious where you might you have picked up this idea, because it certainly didn't come from the newspaper - perhaps intuition?

<comment><USER18> The article makes no assertion about the demographics of Fentanyl dealing or trafficking, just that these Chinese lenders are involved with these activities.

Are you saying that the opioid crisis can be fully blamed on Chinese foreigners? Is that really what this article is saying? Or is that your intuition.

<comment><USER17> It's been routinely reported on in the newspaper, I can't be bothered to post any proof as no enforcement = anecdotal evidence only = checkmate, racist.

If you'd like to pretend that is controversial, you're welcome to it, it is an utter waste of time to try to convince people, but there are still some people in the world who like to know what's actually going on instead of believing what they're told to believe.

<comment><USER18> > but there are still some people in the world who like to know what's > actually going on instead of believing what they're told to believe.

I'm confused, is that the people who listen to what is routinely reported in the newspaper, or other people?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _The Zhangs charge interest rates of up to 39.6 per cent, with some private lenders demanding up to 120 per cent. Court records show that one of the Zhangs ' associates is among those allegedly charging that extortionate level of interest, which is double the maximum legal rate._

OK, this I don't get. Why would you charge someone to launder your money? Typically you pay them.

EDIT: Never mind. It's in the article. This seems less like a money-laundering scheme and more like loan sharking. Getting clean money in the end is just icing on the cake.

<comment><USER18> The article makes it sound like an amazing cycle of selling drugs, money laundering, loan sharking, and profiting from the real estate rise.

<comment><USER16> I believe the connection to real estate is incidental. Drug dealing, laundering occurs everywhere, including places without a hot RE market. Take the Hells Angels for instance. They seem to survive without a connection to the RE market. Criminals will find a way to launder money. The money from selling drugs is too irresistible to pass up for them.

<comment><USER18> True, it sounds like profiting from rising house prices is icing on the cake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Fix: Government refuses to enforce a foreclosure until the lender proves the money loaned came from a legitimate source.

</comment><comment><USER21> Government: "We will crack down VERY VERY HARD (to the extent that it doesn't stop the flow of cash pouring into our real estate market)!" Visualize a very very serious and determined politician at a press conference.

Governments know that the massive outflow of cash from China into global real estate markets is bound to be corrupt and in many cases the proceeds of crime but they really have no interest or incentive in any way in preventing that.

Governments will express ourage and a rock solid determination to ensure all Chinese money is clean but will in fact do nothing because at so many levels that cash is wanted. Consider for example that most politicians will own multiple houses. They don't want the real estate prices to drop, they want them sky high. Chinese cash, corrupt or not, still results in the best possible real estate dollar so the politicians will speak loud and act quiet on this.

The irony is that investment in share markets requires some level of proof that the money being invested is clean but there is no such regulation on real estate cash.

<comment><USER22> When I read the article, it doesn't seem to say that Chinese cash is propping up real estate prices.

Rather, Chinese drugs get smuggled into Canada, the Canadian proceeds from selling those drugs then get loaned to homeowners who don't have Canadian money themselves, and then when the home sells, the Canadian money goes back to the lender. If the lenders can be paid back, they don't get paid back with Canadian cash or Chinese cash in Canada. They get paid back with Chinese cash in China.

Of course, the question might arise how did the homeowners get enough money to buy the property in the first place. Well, that's probably Chinese money. Getting enough money out of China for a down payment should only take a few years with a $50,000 per year limit.

OK, so maybe Chinese money is paying a lot of down payments, and maybe drug money is being loaned out to homeowners. But where does the money to buy the home when it's later sold or foreclosed come from? Drug money, Chinese money, or other? That's the real question for figuring out what's causing real estate prices to soar.

<comment><USER17> > When I read the article, it doesn't seem to say that Chinese cash is > propping up real estate prices.

Try this one on for size:

[http://www.timescolonist.com/news/b-c/explosive-b-c-court- ca...](http://www.timescolonist.com/news/b-c/explosive-b-c-court-case-details- seven-migration-scams-1.23144703)

And the only reason it came to light was because it is a civil suit between individuals, the Canadian legal system most definitely isn't trying to catch anyone breaking laws as described in this story. Despite confessions on record in Canadian court, there will not even be an investigation of these people, as there won't be for those laundering hundreds of thousands of dollars in casinos in broad daylight, or paying people (and getting reported to the media with extensive reporting in the newspaper) for phony job offers for immigration scams.

All of this very clearly has the blessing of all levels of government in Canada. Whether it is merely for the much needed economic boost or if there's something more sinister in play, we'll never know.

<comment><USER22> I believe Chinese cash is contributing to soaring real estate prices in specific cities worldwide, though I do not believe it's the sole root cause. That being said, I was attempting to clarify what the article was discussing, not my personal perspective on what causes real estate prices to soar in Canada.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Took me a while to find out that B.C. = British Columbia.

<comment><USER13> Speaking as someone who lives in the Vancouver area, I don't know why this story was posted on this site. I generally come here to avoid reading about politics and the toxic discussions that inevitably follow.

<comment><USER16> Sigh, I agree. Ironically this article came from the Globe and Mail which has turned off all commenting for now. Which I like.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Looking for a rails mentor - <AUTHOR>

All I need is access to someone that has a really good grasp on Rails to be able to give me some advice every now and then (specifically to do with building my app) - and explain a few things to me that are confusing.<p>Any takers? <comment><USER2> Jump into #rubyonrails on irc.freenode.net - it's very oriented towards the newbie, and it's generally easy to find answers there if you ask good questions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great idea. I think I will try this also.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> <http://www.railsmentors.org/>

</comment><comment><USER4> You're welcome to contact me anytime with questions. (emails in profile)

<comment><AUTHOR> Email sent :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Happy to help if I can as well, details in profile..

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks ayb. Will be in touch. There is no email in your profile...just a twitter link. Do you mind either sending me an email (marcamillion @ gmail) or putting your info in your profile.

Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Grokking Ruby itself is more important. Rails is just a bunch of DSLs for web development. Anyway, feel free to contact to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am grokking ruby, but it's difficult getting used to everything at the same time.

I definitely am not l33t enough to understand your email address.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> i have some rails skills, though i'm sure others are more qualified. are you in the bay area?

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, not in the bay area. International based.</comment></comment>


The Scientific Reason Incompetent People Are Often So Confident - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-why-incompetent-people-often-seem-so-confident <comment><USER2> While I like seeing the Dunning--Kruger effect pointed out here as much as the next man, I have to comment that the original study was not as simple as it is often described.

There's a great description on the [citation needed] blog: [http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the- dunning-k...](http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning- kruger-effect-is-and-isnt/)

Here's the money quote in my opinion:

> So the bias is definitively not that incompetent people think they're better > than competent people. Rather, it's that incompetent people think they're > much better than they actually are. But they typically still don't think > they're quite as good as people who, you know, actually are good. (It's > important to note that Dunning and Kruger never claimed to show that the > unskilled think they're better than the skilled; that's just the way the > finding is often interpreted by others.)

<comment><USER3> Overtime, I have come up with the following formula. This is just from personal observations, but did not find it really wrong, yet.

obnoxiousness = ambition - competence</comment></comment>


Are there any hacker houses in israel? - <AUTHOR>

After seeing all the threads about hacker houses in the states, I got an itch to find one around me in tel aviv.<p>Are there any? Would anyone be interested in starting one? I'm looking for a new apartment for November anyways. <comment><USER2> I'm curious (not Israeli, but have toyed with the idea of Tzavah/Aliyah)

<comment><AUTHOR> I made aliyah and am about to finish my army service. Email me if you have any questions.

<comment><USER2> ...where's your email address?

<comment><AUTHOR> should be in my profile

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Would anyone be willing to start one?

</comment><comment><USER3> good question</comment>


Paper, by MiSoft - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/02/04/paper-paper-paper

<comment><USER2> It's almost as if there needs to be an entire regulatory scheme for dealing with naming disputes, which would allow app developers and startups to protect their brand.

Oh wait, there is, it's called Trademark Law! As such, it's getting really old seeing a bunch of angry parties writing open letters and rants on social media trying to claim they're the morally superior party for [BS REASON HERE]. None of that matters. What matters are statutorily defined factors such as likelihood of confusion, levels of distinctiveness, date of first use in commerce, etc that set forth who gets to use a mark as a matter of law.

As such, it really doesn't matter what these MiSoft people tried to do in iTunes Connect, as Apple is/should not be the gatekeeper when it comes to naming disputes (see the handful of stories posted by app devs who are mad about takedowns). Nor does it matter if FiftyThree is particularly pouty that Facebook came in and tried to use their brand, because their original mark application really only has to do with stylus based drawing apps.

tl;dr: Nothing to see here until the parties in question actually lawyer up and assert infringement.

<comment><USER3> Frsnkly, I'm sick of companies -- software companies in particular -- trying to own plain English words. I was sick of it when Microsoft registered "Windows" as a trademark (they actually had the trademark challenged and lost it in Australia -- as a common use term in computing), and "Word" and "Excel" and "Access" and "Money" and on and on. If Microsoft wants to sell "Microsoft Word" then good luck, but I should be able to sell "BillyBob Word" or whatever. (Yes, I guess this means I kind of don't like "Apple" as a registered trademark either. I have no problem with the Apple logo (now they've bought it from the Beatles) or "Apple Inc." or "Apple Computer".)

Imagine if Boeing owned the trademark "Airplane" or if Southwest owned "Ticket" (but only in the domain of air travel...). People would think that was ridiculous.

MiSoft is angry because they tried to squat on the name "paper" and failed and now "paper" is "owned" by someone else. The sensible option is to allow anyone to call their app "paper" (but underneath it's com.foo.paper or com.bar.paper) and users will be annoyed if your name or icon are utterly indistinct. OTOH if you somehow actually own the name Papr or whatever then good luck to you.

Incidentally, "Paper" by 53 is _the_ most annoying iPad application I use. It works well -- I like it a lot -- but its tools are all in-app purchases, and if you accidentally touch a tool you don't own (because they're all there, dimmed out) you get an ad for the tool. After I first got the app I decided I liked it enough to pay for "all" the tools. Then they added a new (expensive) tool I didn't want. So I have this annoying tool I can't remove and don't want to pay for out of principle, but every time I touch it, the frickin' ad appears.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I honestly have to say that i find myself highly amused by people appropiating the names of everyday objects for their products, exhibiting no common sense or creativity, and then getting upset in true kindergarten style when others do the same thing.

<comment><USER5> > exhibiting no common sense or creativity

I think it makes perfect sense to name products with words that exist (like "Sprite", "Mustang", and "Tide"), or a compound word made up of 2+ words. Making up new words ("Pepsi", "Camaro", and "Clorox") can be a lot more risky, especially if it's a consumer brand.

What would you have named Facebook Paper instead?

<comment><USER4> I don't even know what Facebook Paper is and don't care. However as you mentioned, compounds, even of the simplest kind, are a GREAT idea. The important thing is that, even if you lack the common sense or creativity, it is completely and fully unreasonable to not expect someone else to make the same bad decision. Open letters, heartfelt emotional addresses and displays of surprise are not a thing that should happen and instead, if one feels the need to go ahead and use one of the top 300 english words, one should be fully prepared for legal battles ahead.

In short: Hire a gaggle of lawyers before using any of these verbatim: [http://simple.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Most_frequent_1...](http://simple.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Most_frequent_1000_words_in_English)

<comment><USER5> Compound words can cause the same consumer confusion, which is why I don't see it as any different from one word. You'll definitely get a call from corporate counsel if you launch a truck called the F-151, a burger named the Huge Mac, or an energy drink named Blue Bull. Naming things is hard.

<comment><USER4> You're confusing things here, this is about the reaction to someone else introducing a product named the same, or similar to your own badly named product. You're describing the situation where one is the person who does the introduction of the second product. Related, but different things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> More to this story [http://figure53.com/notes/2014-02-04-david-and- goliath/](http://figure53.com/notes/2014-02-04-david-and-goliath/)

53 looks more and more like a jerk here

<comment><USER7> So, they make a claim i'm having trouble substantiating (but may or may not be true, of course :P).

They state the PTO has a problem with fiftythree's mark, but actually, the PTO approved it for publication (yes, after some discussion). It was published for opposition (IE the PTO approved it) A request for extension of time to oppose has been filed.

But it hasn't been "refused", or else it would not have issued to the stage it did.

I can see some correspondence going back and forth with the USPTO, which i imagine related to figure53 in some way, but hard to say.

Despite claims otherwise, the _goods /services_ this mark applies to is still the same on the approved mark:

"Computer hardware design; computer software design for use in graphics, namely, software for use in writing on smart phones and tablets with either a stylus or a finger; technical support services, namely, troubleshooting of computer software problems; updating and maintenance of computer software"

and "Computer graphics software for mobile applications, namely, software for use in writing on smart phones and tablets with either a stylus or a finger"

SO i have trouble with the "USPTO thought it was confusing and refused it". From what i can see,t hat did _not_ happen.

Also note as of right now, _nobody_ owns a trademark on "paper", though FiftyThree applied for a mark on 1/28/2014, citing use back to 2012.

<comment><USER8> Figure53's claim is that FiftyThree's original application was not

"Computer hardware design; computer software design for use in graphics, namely, software for use in writing on smart phones and tablets with either a stylus or a finger; technical support services, namely, troubleshooting of computer software problems; updating and maintenance of computer software"

But in fact:

"Computer graphics software; computer hardware and computer programs for the integration of text, audio, graphics, still images and moving pictures into an interactive delivery for multimedia applications; computer software to enhance the audio-visual capabilities of multimedia applications, namely, for the integration of text, audio, graphics, still images, and moving pictures."

<comment><USER9> Edit: Removing my original comment because I was reading the PTO's site backwards. Note that document #1 is the most recent while #20 is the first chronologically.

The "technical support services" part is also problematic, because it's so general in scope as to cover all software companies that support their products (as Figure 53 does).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> FiftyThree just posted this on Twitter:

.@daringfireball please don't take the bait. Paper by miSoft V1 was launched Sep 20th 2012, 5 month after us.

[https://twitter.com/FiftyThree/status/430845528805756928](https://twitter.com/FiftyThree/status/430845528805756928)

<comment> k-mcgrady Wasn't their point that they registered the name Paper with Apple before anyone else? You can register an app name and have it held for a couple months I think before actually launching.

<comment><USER11> You have 180 days after registering the name to use it - and then you can never register that name again under that developer account.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a loophole. If you register it, submit a binary, and then reject the binary you get unlimited time.

<comment><USER11> That's actually awesome to know. I've lost an amazing name because of this - and wish I still had it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> tl;dr iOS Developer whining because he thought he could lay a special claim on a dictionary name ( _). Serves him well.

(_) Yes I know you brands do this all the time. It's bullshit.

<comment><USER13> There are so many companies that do this its outrageous. Target, Apple, and on and on. I don't even comprehend how they can even think they can own the word Paper in an app market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Names should not be distinct like on Google Play and let the best 'Paper' win. There is no reason why app naming needs to be unique like domains only the id and bundle. Unique names are always better but noone should be stopped from using the same name unless it is launched first and there is a trademark etc.

<comment><USER15> Hold on, let me rename my racing game "IceOne Racer" :-)

<comment><USER14> Hehe, may the best one win, the race is on!

Once someone is out in the market then that is pretty lame but the name squatting on iOS/iTunes sucks. You have 90-120 days to use a name but if you upload a binary/app build you can keep it for a long time. Games people play. If everyone was allowed to use the same names and the first out out gets it or has a trademark then we are back to fair. Google Play solves this by again letting the free market decide the best, allowing names to compete. Remember the two Tetris games on the 8-bit NES?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Imagine how angry Dunder Mifflin must be. When do we get to hear their version: "Paper, from Dunder Mifflin"

</comment><comment><USER17> Paper is a generic term when it comes to publishing. If you want trademark protection, there are laws for that, and they don't apply to these guys.

</comment><comment><USER18> So...if I name my app after an extraordinarily common item, I shouldn't expect somebody else to perhaps do the same?

What's the point here? Why should I care if more than one developer uncreatively names their apps after the same commonplace thing?

I hope daringfireball posts are on the list of things that drop off the front page quickly.

<comment><USER8> The point is that the guy complaining about someone much bigger trampling on his app's good name actually did more or less the same thing to someone else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> For many years I successfully defended our trademark in the app store(google play too), was even called a trademark troll. But hey we have owned said trademark for the past five years and if you don't defend it it's worthless. If you do defend it faithfully it could possibly be worth something you can sell.

Well that was my theory until one of the biggest celebrities on earth created a semi similar app and used our trademark. We tried to defend it but they didn't have any respect for our work and started to lawyer up. We had to back down!

</comment><comment><USER20> Can you file, receive, and enforce a trademark on the app store? Presumably Apple respects that? It's a messy situation and resolving it at the trademark level seems like a fair and reasonable solution.

</comment><comment><USER21> My tip is to be more creative and figure out a decent name for your product. "Browse your Paper with simple, natural movements." Does this product name makes sense for native english speaking people?

</comment><comment><USER22> Word, Apple, Windows, Pages, Paper, Reader, Brackets.

Noun.

</comment><comment><USER23> I defended FiftyThree really hard in the other thread on this topic but I guess I have to eat crow because they really come across as jerks by doing this to another smaller company and now what looks like initiating the start of legal proceedings on this very issue.

<comment><USER24> Disclaimer: Co-founder of FiftyThree

Please see my response here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7181910](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7181910)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wonder if it's just awesome publicity to complain about it.

<comment><USER15> I'd never have given it a first look otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm having a really hard time understanding the sense of entitlement and indignation carried in these name gripes.

Personally, I tend to think of names as a fraction of what makes up an idea multiplier [0].

0: [http://sivers.org/multiply](http://sivers.org/multiply)

<comment><USER27> We're discussing fully implemented businesses and products here, not pre-code proto startups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> tl;dr Silos suck. Inevitably the farmers that control them them make people angry. Money talks. Capricious decisions are made. Today's winners become tomorrow's losers.

</comment><comment><USER29> "Apple"

<comment><USER9> "Windows"

It all depends on the scope you're trying to claim.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> From their open letter: "There's a simple fix here. We think Facebook can apply the same degree of thought they put into the app into building a brand name of their own."</comment>


Full-Size Lego Bugatti Chiron Powered with Power Functions S Motors - <AUTHOR> http://legoexternal.23video.com/video/35403689/first-ever-life-size-and-drivable-lego-technic <comment><AUTHOR> While I love software, I was a LEGO head first. Seeing this today just shows what an awesome era we live in. Here's the URL where I found the video--it has more details on the car:

[https://www.lego.com/en-us/aboutus/news- room/2018/august/tec...](https://www.lego.com/en-us/aboutus/news- room/2018/august/technic-bugatti-chiron-build-for-real/)

From the article: "The model is the first large scale movable construction developed using over 1,000,000 LEGO Technic elements and powered exclusively using motors from the LEGO Power Function platform. Packed with 2,304 motors and 4,032 LEGO Technic gear wheels, the engine of this 1.5 tonnes car is generating 5.3 horse power and an estimated torque of 92 Nm."

<comment><USER2> And 130 comments on hackernews [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17875409](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17875409)

<comment><AUTHOR> My bad--I got so excited when I saw this, my brain forgot to check if it already made it here first. I also learned that the delete submission feature is not a thing. (Clearly I should spend more time on HN).</comment></comment></comment>