Programming Contests, Algorithms, and the Real World Steven Skiena - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~skiena/talks/topcoder.pdf <comment><USER3> As an ICPC competitor, I don't even find these tales all that cautionary. It's a well known fact that those who do best in standardized tests do not excel the most in the workforce. Programming contests are no different.

And to be fair, I'm not really sure that I even agree that going off to go work at Microsoft or IBM is all that bad. You're still solving problems, they're just different problems. The claim, I guess, is that they aren't algorithmic problems. But the majority of algorithm-based ICPC problems are combinations or heuristics of already defined algorithms. Ad-hoc problems are where true problem solvers flourish.

<comment><USER4> I should note that some of the Target Topcoders work at top companies (like Google), presumably solving "ad-hoc real world problems". Last time I checked, examples include Petr, Tomek, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This might be better suited for an Ask HN, but he mentions this in his slide on what not to do,

 _"Avoid self-destructive behavior/career-limiting moves"_

In the cautionary tales he gives, I really don't see this, except for the missing going to grad school. What is a career-limiting move, and how would I be able to both identify one and maneuver around it?

<comment><USER6> I'm "L". I love Skiena, and admire and respect him greatly. But at some point, I just didn't think grad school was for me. My first job offer paid considerably well for someone right out of college, and it was nice to finally be able to help the family.

Part of it was also being young and short-sighted. I took a considerable grad- level course load as an undergrad and didn't find the topics challenging or exciting enough (accurately described as a burnout). Probably should've gotten the MS at least though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure if his cautionary tales are that discouraging. That said, I work at a company at which about half of us are yellow+ TopCoders, IOI finalists, ICPC finalists, or something of that nature, so I'm surrounded by people who are very similar to his cautionary tales.

<comment><USER8> lal.com?

<comment><USER7> imo.im

<comment><USER9> Georges Harik FTW!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > "the best student I ever taught algorithms to is female."

Steve Skiena calling someone his best student is a _strong_ statement - <USER2> idea who this is?

</comment><comment><USER11> I competed then coached the ACM contest at my last university. Out of the really solid competitors I worked with, one is a pretty well-respected Microsoft MVP, consultant, speaker and author. Another founded an open-source company and regularly appeared on tech news sites a couple years ago. I've lost track of a couple others, which tells me that they're probably stuck in line-of-business app hell ("COBOL programs" in the article).

Before Top Coder, to me the most famous ACM competitor was Ian Goldberg, who has done some noteworthy things in his career: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Goldberg>

Programming contests are a fun diversion and a tool to sharpen your skills.</comment>


Lessons learned from running a free front-end development course - <AUTHOR> http://www.mattzeunert.com/2016/01/13/running-a-free-front-end-development-course.html <comment><USER2> Good job and great initiative setting it up. If you want some more experience there's also teaching kids:

[https://www.codeclub.org.uk](https://www.codeclub.org.uk)

Admittedly I haven't done it myself yet, but I am thinking about it and near me there are loads of schools who want a volunteer. A teacher will be there with you.</comment>


Modernist Covers of 1930s Fortune Magazine (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/01/beautiful-covers-from-fortune-magazine-in-the-1930s.html <comment><USER2> Reminds me of these science and tech ads: [https://www.flickr.com/photos/bustbright/albums/721576129433...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/bustbright/albums/72157612943324998)

Wish there were more ads like this today - they're much more visually impressive than the ones I see today

<comment><USER3> The massive belief in the curative power of science for all ills is what I find so alluring in the early 20th century posters. They're engaging to me because there's an inherent optimism in many of them!

<comment><USER4> There was reason to be optimistic!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "One dollar a copy"...that must have been a lot of money in the depth of the Depression.

<comment><USER6> > $1 in 1938 → $18.24 in 2019

[https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1938?amount=1](https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1938?amount=1)

> "Despite the Depression, and a cover price of $1 in an era when the Sunday > New York Times cost five cents, Fortune was an immediate success. It debuted > in February 1930 with 30,000 subscribers and by 1937 it had a circulation of > 460,000, with annual profits of half a million dollars..." source: > [https://www.peterharrington.co.uk/blog/fortune/](https://www.peterharrington.co.uk/blog/fortune/)

Today a copy costs $5.99, or $29.98 a year (source: [https://www.magazine.store/fortune/](https://www.magazine.store/fortune/))

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> They certainly got that in the future, our lives are dominated by machines, not nature. And the keyboard is not only on point, There are groups dedicated to re-creating that exact look and feel.

</comment><comment><USER8> These are very very beautiful, real framable art, I must say I really long for that kind of a time.

</comment><comment><USER9> Hmm, I wish they had some sample articles from inside these issues.

</comment><comment><USER10> Modernist design is too tied to fascism to be nostalgic for me.

<comment><USER11> Nazi aesthetics were not really modernist. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_of_the_Third_Reich](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_of_the_Third_Reich)

A lot of hearkening back to "better more pure times"

<comment><USER10> I didn't say Nazi. Modernism is an art movement that came into being alongside Italian fascism: [https://muse.jhu.edu/article/263882](https://muse.jhu.edu/article/263882)</comment></comment></comment>


Breeding the Nutrition Out of Our Food - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/opinion/sunday/breeding-the-nutrition-out-of-our-food.html?pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> The science behind this article (hat tip to DanBC for his top-level comment linking to the author's promotional website) is dubious at best. Much of what can be called in general "phytochemicals" (chemicals found in plants) and that the author specifically praises as "phytonutrients" (chemicals found in plants with nutritional benefits for human eaters) can be, depending on DOSAGE, "phytotoxins" (poisonous chemicals found in plants). The poison is in the dose. Agriculture was pioneered by human cultures all over the world,

[http://www.jstor.org/userimages/ContentEditor/1320774798622/...](http://www.jstor.org/userimages/ContentEditor/1320774798622/v52nS4.pdf)

because people wanted a reliable supply of food later. In many different regions, human beings noticed that planting seeds not only made a crop for the future likely, but also allowed artificial selection of high yield (a crucial concern at first) and better taste. Plant foods from all over the world have been actively selected for centuries or even millennia. In quite a few cases, human beings selected plants so that they were loss toxic and more bearable to eat in larger doses. The author is writing from ignorance of an evolutionary perspective informed by the general biological fact that most plants produce chemicals to REDUCE being eaten by animals, not to be beneficial to human beings in a wild state.

<comment><USER3> Just because plants produce toxins doesn't mean humans don't benefit from them. Humans and plants coevolved over millions of years, and it's not unreasonable for the human body to "expect" certain chemical triggers in the environment, and to go awry without them. It could be that plant toxins turn on specific cellular repair machinery which the body needs. This theory of hormesis is young but promising, and attempts to explain the health promoting effects of vigorous exercise, modest stress, resveratrol/sirtuin activation, and mTOR activation.

For example, restricting calories improves life span, but in high doses (zero calories) is fatal. But just because this strategy is bad at the limit doesn't mean it's bad in small does. Similarly, exposure to the sun results in skin cancer in large doses, but produces cancer fighting vitamin D in small doses.

What is the correct dose of plant toxins? We don't know, but it could well be higher than in bred plants, at least for adults. Children generally hate bitter foods and the reason could well be to protect their small livers from overdose.

<comment><USER4> _...restricting calories improves life span..._

I suspect that your knowledge on this topic has hit its expiry date.

You are probably thinking of the various studies relating to rats and mice. However the correlation failed when we went to monkeys, and there is no reason to believe that it works in humans. See [http://www.nature.com/news/calorie- restriction-falters-in-th...](http://www.nature.com/news/calorie-restriction- falters-in-the-long-run-1.11297) for verification of that.

<comment><USER3> One primate study verified the effect and one did not; see [http://www.davidstipp.com/on-calorie-restriction-monkeys- mag...](http://www.davidstipp.com/on-calorie-restriction-monkeys-magic-and- medicine/) for an interesting, if biased, analysis of the NIH study.

<comment><USER4> Thank you for the additional information. I've updated my mental note from "disproven for primates" to "unclear".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author of this article, Robinson, repeatedly claims that indigenous americans were incapable of and ignorant towards selective breeding. This is false.

He proposes that teosinte _spontaneously_ mutated into maize, which is totally contrary to the accepted history, I've never even heard anyone make this claim.

Samples of maize in its modern form have been found directly dated back 6000 years, and inferentially dated back 9000 years, to the advent of agriculture in the western hemisphere.

Matsuoka showed through molecular dating that maize was likely domesticated from a single source in a single event around 9000 years ago.

Matsuoka Y, Vigouroux Y, Goodman MM, Sanchez J, Buckler ES, Doebley JF. 2002. A single domestication for maize shown by multilocus microsatellite genotyping. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 99: 6080-4.

Robinson's claims here that north american indigenous peoples didn't breed for traits and this was a new thing that only the english did is totally absurd. Various groups developed their own varieties that were attuned to their particular land and territory. Tribes as far north as Manitoba grew vast tracts of land in maize varieties they developed that were frost tolerant!

Boyd recently did an analysis of microfossils from ancient northern pottery to identify ancient maize farming regions and found that nearly every site tested had maize, including multiple sites that were north of the subarctic zone.

[http://anthropology.lakeheadu.ca/personal/mboyd/uploads/Boyd...](http://anthropology.lakeheadu.ca/personal/mboyd/uploads/BoydSurette_2010_AmAntiq_NorthernmostMaize.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> There wasn't much discussion of pre-Columbian plant breeding in this article. Do you have any links to where the author makes these claims?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This opinion piece is by someone who campaigns on this issue. The website has lots of citations to research. I haven't checked those, so I don't know if the journals are reputable or if the research is hooey or not.

(<http://www.eatwild.com/jo.html>)

<comment><USER7> The citations on that site look legit. It's not exactly my field, but the titles and the journal names both scan like mainstream science, i.e. technical and restrained.

However, those references are all about methods of raising animals. This article is on quite a different topic, nutrient content in plants. I'm wary of the way a host of mostly unspecified compounds are lumped together as 'phytonutrients' and presented as universally beneficial. I've never heard that term before, and it's got the same kind of ring as 'detox'. There's plenty of chemicals in plants that really aren't good for us - see for example this review of legumes: <http://tinyurl.com/pydm56o> (email me if you're interested but don't have access).

It roughly fits into the ideas of the 'paleolithic diet', that what people ate ~20k years ago is nutritionally optimal. That's controversial, and it looks like Wikipedia has quite a detailed entry on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "It is now known that many of the most beneficial phytonutrients have a bitter, sour or astringent taste"

Well, thanks evolution...

"A blast of radiation had turned the corn into a sugar factory!"

What a great story, making GMOs before anyone else.

</comment><comment><USER9> > Studies published within the past 15 years show that much of our produce is > relatively low in phytonutrients, which are the compounds with the potential > to reduce the risk of four of our modern scourges

While this sounds really informative, it is a very vague statement. "If we eat different food than we currently do we may not have to deal with these things".

</comment><comment><USER10> Lack of nutrients are not killing us, too much of some sort of X is. (I think it's sugar and high refined carbs, some think it's fat, some believe both)

The reason vitamin pills are consider phooey is because there is no evidence of missing nutrients in our diets (There are some exceptions, ie when pregnant, if you're vegan etc)

End of the day, anything that makes us eat less X is what we need. To me that's fruit and veg that taste great and are cheap, not their nutrient content.

</comment><comment><USER11> And no single word about animal sources

<comment><USER12> The thesis of the article was to contrast our wide-spread belief in the health benefits of fruits and vegetables with the actual (significant) lower health benefits measured by some (significant) measure. It does not compare health benefits of fruits and vegetables with meat.

Having said that, however, just as we have bred plants to our subjective preferrable tastes, wishes, and ideas, we also have bred livestock for specific treats, like docility and size, without any regard for health value for humans.

<comment><USER13> The standard hog has been leaned up considerably, based on the idea that less fat is healthier (also because lard is less valued, but still).

Edit: And consumers can choose healthier animal sources without triggering any breading, replacing beef with chicken is widely considered a healthy thing, fish even more than chicken.

<comment><USER12> Sure, we _now_ care about that. But we've been breeding animals for over ten thousand years. During that process, what did we lose? What of that can we get back with scientific supported breeding?

Or to state it differently, was the prehistoric cow significantly healthier for us than our current cow (or chicken)? And will it be possible to breed that extra "healthiness" back in?

<comment><USER7> As a biologist, my intuition is that there's been little change in the nutrient value of meat. Plants synthesise a very broad array of compounds which affect their flavour and nutrient value. Animal biochemistry is nowhere near as complicated, so there's not so much that can change.

There may well have been a shift in the protein/fat ratio of meat, but I guess that would be dwarfed by changes in what we eat and how we prepare it.

<comment><USER11> Grain-bred animals totally lack omega-3, comparing to grass-fed.

And my intuition tells me that is only a small part.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lode Runner Web Game - <AUTHOR> http://loderunnerwebgame.com/game/ <comment><USER2> My fingers seem to remember that dig-keys were at the numeric keypad too (End, PgDn). So you could play it with one hand. Those Z,X - keys are the worst choice, cause they are not easy to find blindly with left hand.

</comment><comment><USER3> Excellent, feels like the original.

Unlike the vast majority of Loderunner remakes.</comment>


Universities finally realize Java is a bad introductory programming language - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/dd/2017/04/24/universities-finally-realize-java-bad-introductory-programming-language/#.tnw_KJ2HXFao <comment><USER2> Biased projection of hate.

Java helps students get jobs right out of the university.

<comment><USER3> There's a difference between eventually being taught Java for the job market, and being thrown in head-first into the deep end in year 1. Java definitely is a terrible _first_ language.</comment></comment>


Battle of the bulges: Have astronomers been wrong about spiral galaxies? (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/battle-of-the-bulges-have-astronomers-been-wrong-about-spiral-galaxies-all-this-time <comment><USER3> I think that [1] is the paper that this is based on. I don't work on dynamics and I found it pretty readable. Most of what is in the article is in sections 3.2, section 4 (discussion) and section 5 (conclusions).

[1] [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.11436.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.11436.pdf)

<comment><USER4> > I think that [1] is the paper

Sure it is, it is linked in this sentence of the article:

"Now, though, new observations have thrown a monkey in the wrench with all this. Those galaxies aren't the exception. They're the rule."

The other relevant link is:

[https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/research- highlights/citizen...](https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/research- highlights/citizen-scientists-re-tune-hubbles-galaxy-classification)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Huh.

I thought that there was a solid theoretical basis for the density wave hypothesis. But TFA implies that the main constraint was consistency with the Hubble tuning fork diagram.

That would be funny, because I've never really understood the density wave hypothesis.

<comment><USER6> I don't claim to understand it either, but the animations on the Wiki page at least give a feel for it - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Density_wave_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Density_wave_theory)

<comment><USER5> Thanks :)

I get the idea of standing waves.

But TFA at least implies that galaxy structure might _not_ be stable. So there's perhaps a cycle of waves forming, wrapping up, and then reforming. So at any given time, we'd see whatever mix we see.

I mean, I doubt that we've observed any particular galaxy long enough to see whether its structure is stable or not. At least, if the cycle is longer than some hundreds of years, which seems likely.

But then, we do see what galaxies looked like in the past, at increasing distance. And I vaguely recall something about more distant ones not so much being spiral. Even so, that doesn't necessarily constrain ongoing structural stability.

There's also gravitational lensing, which sometimes lets us see events through different paths, and so at different times. However, I recall that the path/time differences were on the order of years at most. But even so, maybe we wouldn't have noticed cases where path/time differences were great enough to see galaxy structure changing. Or maybe such path/time differences are just implausible.

It really _is_ hard when all you can do is look at stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Hubble fork isn't "wrong". It's just a classification scheme. The fork has nothing to do with how spiral structures form or how long they last, it's just a way to quickly describe them.

<comment><USER8> According to the article, it's a classification scheme that doesn't work. It describes categories that real galaxies don't fit in.

<comment><USER9> >Hubble's tuning fork has been more or less the standard for a century now. It's done a decent job, but there have been some galaxies that don't fit the pattern. For example, one might have a small bulge but tight arms, or another with a large bulge and fairly open arms. If there's a galaxy that didn't quite fit, astronomers usually used the arm structure to place it in the diagram.

More specificly, it suggests that there are additional categories that should be added.

The fork used 2 variables to come up with 6 combinations: bulge size( with 3 states) and bar presence (with 2 states). A third variable, arm angle, was assumed to be linked with bulge size.

the data suggests that arm angle does not have the relation to bulge size that was assumed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Given that most cosmology relies on a huge percentage of dark matter, which cannot be detected, and a huge amount of dark energy, with enormous conflicting calculations, I think it's fair to say that astronomers are wrong about a lot of things.

<comment><USER11> You seem to be having a weird definition of 'detect'. The only reason the concepts dark matter and dark energy are on the table in the first place is that we seem to be detecting a lot of both. You might not like that scientists can't really explain _what it is_ that's being detected, but for sure it's being detected. There's pretty good summaries of how dark energy and dark matter are being detected on Wikipedia [1][2].

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy#Evidence_of_existe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy#Evidence_of_existence) [2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#Observational_evid...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#Observational_evidence)

People really seem to be having trouble with the fact that dark matter and dark energy are 'placeholder terms' to account for stuff _we 're actually seeing_. With future discoveries in science the terms will be replaced, superseded or perhaps disappear. But observation or 'detection' of both dark matter and dark energy is in fact _there._

<comment><USER12> Not "stuff we're actually seeing" technically, more _effects we can 't explain using our current theories_.

 _Placeholder_ is the correct term but people tend to leap from "matter" and "energy" to "stuff" (I'm assuming you didn't intend the implication) without understanding those terms (dark matter and dark energy) are preliminary - <USER2> well informed - guesses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> the site is such a crap on mobile, low contrast letters, and that header that pops up and takes 30% of the screen every time you scroll up a pixel</comment>


My Nightly Routine - <AUTHOR> http://adityaviswanathan.com/new/my-nightly-routine/

<comment><USER2> Oddly, the links in this article are missing colons.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just fixed it, thanks for the notice.

<comment><USER2> NP. How late do you sleep?

<comment><AUTHOR> Around 4am usually</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: IQ Test in Software Company - <AUTHOR>

Is it considered a common practice when the management of the software company is asking all existing employees take an IQ test?  I am working almost 20 years in the industry and I've never seen or heard anything like that before. And yes, we have been acquired recently by some venture firm. <comment><USER2> Ask what their cut-off point is. Then do the math to see if their firm is bigger than all of the people on earth who could possibly have that value. It might be illuminating.

</comment><comment><USER3> They may be in very bad legal trouble under the Griggs v. Duke Power Co. decision from the United States Supreme Court

[http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196978&hl=en&as_sdt=2&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr)

unless they have carefully validated that test for that specific purpose (which is not very likely). If you have new management who are taking silly legal risks without a good business purpose, you probably have little to lose by calling them on that. You might win an unlawful labor practices settlement that would give you time to look for a better position at a better company. And you would win your self-respect, which is more important than money even in a recession economy.

</comment><comment><USER4> Will the new managers be taking the test too? I am just curious ;)</comment>


Sidewalk Labs' Plan for Toronto - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vb9nd4/sidewalk-labs-midp-plan-for-toronto-quayside-is-a-democracy-grenade <comment><USER2> On the one hand, I appreciate the level of innovation and forward thinking that Google is doing here. It's a lot of neat ideas and designs.

But on the other hand, I don't like the idea of a private company deciding how a city should develop- especially not my city. No matter what they say, they are a for-profit publicity-traded company whose goal, always, is ROI for investors. And that conflicts with the goals of city management, where the goal is the benefit of the public and not just those with money.

<comment><USER3> Isn't this how almost all redevelopment happens? The city puts out a call for proposals, and various architectural firms and builders submit master-planned mega proposals, and one gets picked?

Why is SideWalk labs any different than redevelopment projects that happened elsewhere?

I mean, this project is for a location (77 hectares) that is barely bigger than the Apple campus (71 hectares). They've proposing to develop a tiny slice of the city, about the size of most large condominium projects that localities approve.

If SideWalk Labs was not associated with Alphabet, but say, one of these ([https://www.cpexecutive.com/post/2017-top-development- firms/](https://www.cpexecutive.com/post/2017-top-development-firms/)) I bet it pretty much would have gone under the radar, and people would be enjoying their new waterfront without batting an eye.

<comment><USER4> Of course they would. But it's an Alphabet company, so it's automatically a distopian nightmare and basically cyberpunk. /s

Which is not to say that the actual project plan shouldn't be heavily scrutinized. But a lot of the comments around it are just FUD.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > This data will be de-identified, the company claims, and much of it will be > made available to residents and planners

I wonder how much of this will be re-indentified.

For example, the path and browsing habits of someone as they travel through a store can be completely anonymous. But when they go to the register, it can be attached to a specific individual.

<comment><USER6> Ideally, this data should be _fully_ publicly available. Zero exemptions for Sidewalk to harvest data that isn't released publicly. This is the only way to ensure accountant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It looks like Toronto might get a modern version of this [https://www.wired.com/2010/08/trash-sucking- island/](https://www.wired.com/2010/08/trash-sucking-island/)

<comment><USER8> A key distinction is that Roosevelt Island does not really operate outside of the existing municipal and state legal frameworks of New York, whereas Sidewalk Labs is asking for changes in legal frameworks for its redevelopment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's eventually gonna be a fundamental disagreement here. Google wants control in order to execute on its vision for this project. Governments don't give up control without bloodshed.

The only wildcard is what the people want and quite frankly that could still turn out to be anything because it seems like the masses are mostly apathetic to both sides at this point.

I'm not sure how this is gonna turn out but I am willing to bet that no matter how it goes "pfffft, yet another boondoggle" will be how we'll look back on it in 10yr.

<comment><USER8> The government is the one ceding control in this instance via Waterfront Toronto, but even then there was an original agreement to what was actually being given up, which seems like it's being pushed aside by Sidewalk Labs.

People at least have a say in how government is run; a lot of times they're not motivated to, but with enough public protest the public has turned the large ship of government around (see: freeway revolts of the 1970s). In general I may not trust the government, but I certainly trust it a lot more than a corporation which I have no stake in and no hope of influencing at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reading through their plan on sustainability: [https://storage.googleapis.com/sidewalk-toronto-ca/wp- conten...](https://storage.googleapis.com/sidewalk-toronto-ca/wp- content/uploads/2019/06/23143305/MIDP_Vol.2_Chap.4_Sustainability.pdf)

I think tracking building energy and indoor ambient conditions in order to optimize the former is a good example of how collected data should be used. There's a lot of subtlety in being able to manage building systems to run passively (i.e using natural ventilation to condition buildings) that are too complex for facility managers or residents. This is a problem domain that desperately requires predictive tools, integrated with effective visual/interactive methods for dynamic feedback from occupants and owners.

One area that could be improved in their write-up, as it stands now, is a better discussion of demand-side energy management (meaning controlling the energy _demand_ that is a function of the architecture, material elements, to be resolved with passive and active systems of energy _supply_). This proposal reflects the kind of thinking I always see from engineers/energy modelers, which tends to tackle energy reduction primarily from the supply-side (i.e with more optimized HVAC systems) and omit strategies to reduce the the demand-side of the energy equation.

There is a section on using Passive House methods which addresses this in terms of building insulation, window thermal properties etc, but that's primarily for small residential use, and starts to show it's limitations once you get into multi-family housing, and commercial buildings. At that scale there's a lot more interesting opportunities to coordinate energy demand trade-offs that they could explore. For example, there's the classic case of optimizing window size and placement to reduce heating loss while increasing daylight, or trying to reduce peak loads, typically associated with cooling energy, versus designing for annual energy reduction associated with heating energy (in Toronto). The pace of the design cycle means most of this kind of optimization is done using rules of thumbs, even though the simulation engines to model this exists.

I also think this is important because proper consideration of demand-side energy forces you to grapple with the building's interaction with the local environment. Therefore it's the most obvious way in which the building energy logic translates to issues of urban identity and scale. Without that nuance, you just end up with abstract, large boxes crammed with hyper-efficient HVAC systems (i.e the worst of modernism). You need the constraining factor of demand-energy to provide some needed traction for the architecture.

</comment><comment><USER11> What could possibly go wrong?

</comment><comment><USER12> Facebook gets to control money, Google gets to control cities.

Seems fair and totally reasonable.

</comment><comment><USER13> In what world is "wood" a novel construction material? What am I missing?

Also, from a legal standpoint how is this any different from the tens of thousands of planned developments put together by other corporations, other than the fact that it's Google and not a traditional real estate developer?

<comment><USER8> Wood in tall buildings is a relatively new development; historically it hasn't been allowed for fire concerns.

[https://theweek.com/articles/816653/how-build-skyscraper- woo...](https://theweek.com/articles/816653/how-build-skyscraper-wood)</comment></comment>


Astute.io – Business Intelligence For Startups - <AUTHOR> http://astute.io/ <comment><USER2> So here is my 2cents. Having built a startup whose target market was other startups, I would say avoid it. Unless you're building a utility platform like say github or attlassian, who are not startup specific, selling to startups sucks.

Figure out how to make this a product any enterprise middle manager can buy and pay $200+/month. Startups won't pay the same rates that even mid-size companies would.

The volume you need of customers to make it a viable business at $50/month or less is ridiculous, and the number of startups limited.

Also they have high turnover, so your LTV of your customers will get halved potentially vs enterprise customers.

<comment><USER3> To be fair. There are already quite a few players in the enterprise space. Eg AgilOne and Splunk.

I don't disagree regards the "startups for startups" point though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No, I will not sign up for a trial of your product when you don't provide me any concrete information on how it's used/how it works. And yes, I am a potential customer for products in this market.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is so vague it seems they have barely started work on their product.

<comment><USER6> I agree. I was trying to find the "more information" button to no avail. Is this vaporware? How does this stuff end up on the front page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What does this even do? Business intelligence is such a vague, abstract terms. Tell me what this can do for me, in plain Engrish terms, please.

</comment><comment><USER8> Does look cool. Love the idea! BI is a tough market, but if you can really provide insights there is real value there.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm very interested in business intelligence for my startup, and am happy to pay a service for this. Alas the OP's site seems premature. No info.

</comment><comment><USER10> Looks great, no pricing though? Also what would be interesting is what the different datasources that I can/need to plugin.</comment>


John McAfee reveals he charges $105,000 per promotional cryptocurrency tweet - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/2/17189880/john-mcafee-bitcoin-cryptocurrency-twitter-ico <comment><USER2> When there is a gold rush, sell picks and shovels, it seems.

<comment><USER3> Yea. It's pretty funny people would pay that much for him just to tweet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does he accept bitcoin?

<comment><USER5> Haha ... I guess I'm not the only one who noticed his pricing is in dollars!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not anymore.</comment>


Uncomfortable AWS Truths - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1173367909369802752 <comment><USER2> > AWS purportedly puts design documents forward in the form of six-pagers. > They start meetings with a 20 minute silent reading session. It's like the > book club from hell.

Not just AWS- that's an Amazon-wide technique. And it's freaking amazing. You should try it.

Look, there's two other options. 1- let someone bullshit you with PowerPoint for an hour and skim over critical details. 2- send out the doc ahead of time for everyone to read before the meeting and have every single attendee say "ah yeah I only had time to skim it, but looks good to me". Wasted time.

The Amazon design review meeting involves no bullshitting, no homework before the meeting that gets skipped. We all arrive. We read the entire doc, on paper, red pens in hand. Then we dive into questions on the important bits and anything circled by those red pens.

Generally takes a lot less time as far as meetings go.

[Bias note: I've been at Amazon, but not AWS, for 7 years. These are my own opinions and not company statements]

<comment><USER3> Perhaps I'm just a particularly slow thinker, but 20 minutes is not enough time for me to read 6 pages of highly technical documentation and consider all of the implications and consequences of the proposed technical design. Even a full one hour meeting is insufficient. I need at least a day. I don't want to come out of the meeting and two hours later have a "L'esprit de l'escalier" about a flaw in the design I just approved come up.

If I'm being abusively frank, if you can't be trusted to read a 6 page document the day before a meeting and put some serious thought into it, you're not doing your job.

<comment><USER4> Typically a 6 Pager is:

1 Page of Press Release and FAQ

2 pages of arch overview

2 pages of business justification

1-2 pages of appendix

Or some mix thereof. 20 minutes is a bit short but doable. Generally at 20 minutes the person running asks "need more time" and it can go longer.

For a design review I ask for at least 2 hours for the meeting. Or more.

Doing everything in the meeting greatly respects everyone's time. It's a thing I'm trying to get evenly applied at the subsidiary I work at as often we don't as people have trouble scheduling the meeting.

<comment><USER3> See, that's what I don't get. A 2 hour synchronous meeting, to me, is a waste of resources. (side note: If you're going to destroy an engineer's morning (or afternoon) with a 2 hour meeting, you may as well make it a 4 hour meeting and jam out a POC.)

A day (or week) to review on their own availability, plus the asynchronous feedback during that day (or week) means that the synchronous meeting can conclude in 20-30 minutes (if its necessary at all), with more thought put into it than any two hour review.

In the end, the asynchronous method of syncing state between people may take more overall time, but that time is taken from when an person is naturally not engaged with their current project. A meeting, on the flip side, occurs whether they were in the zone or not.

<comment><USER5> Yes and no. In theory the asynchronous mode is more efficient, but then it might mean you never get the ACKs from all the people.

If the async mode works, no need for the meeting, after all do it over email or in GDocs.

The problem with the sync mode is that inevitably you're wasting someone's time, at best only yours as you wait for others to read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Despite no fewer than 6 attempts to patch the Open S3 Bucket problem, it > remains. You can't patch people--legally, anyway.

Heh, I use S3 for hosting static sites only.

2 weeks ago they sent an email saying "[...] your AWS account xxxxxxxx has one or more S3 buckets that allow read or write access from any user on the Internet."

And I go "oh shit, what has write access set up?".

But nothing did. When they said "read or write", they meant 1, the other, or both. They just sent the same ambiguous email to everyone.

<comment><USER7> That's so AWS it hurts.

"Surely this AWS service can't be as poorly integrated with that other AWS service as it seems, because if it were that poorly integrated, it would be almost completely useless."

"Oh. It is. FML."

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Most businesses can probably run on a single server from OVH (see Paul Tyma's Mailinator architecture for inspiration: 1.2 billion emails on a single server, [http://highscalability.com/mailinator- architecture](http://highscalability.com/mailinator-architecture)), but I suspect a lot of folks in tech want to pad their resume with cloud buzzwords, so they recommend overcomplicated architectures to business that they absolutely wouldn't spend their _own_ money on. So much of tech design, nay, tech thinking, is based on following fashion trends, it's shocking.

<comment><USER9> It's really good machine sympathy for keeping the unfunded service cheap to run, but it's one bad fan bearing away from losing a _lot_ of messages, so I wouldn't say its design assures four nines. And the optimization work to get all the way down to n=1 wouldn't have paid off if Tyma needed to hire someone at market rate to build that and maintain it, because an engineer-month costs hundreds of instance-months.

<comment><USER10> Honestly physical servers have better uptime than some of amazon's regions.

<comment><USER9> YMMV. I've seen an adtech company who purchased hardware to install in colos, and a couple of years later their failure rate was almost 5%/year. I would never bet on four nines from a single commodity box.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Amazon's managed ElasticSearch offering is awful because it's ElasticSearch.

Had I never used ES or ELK I wouldnt even bat an eyelash. But man... This one hurt me in the tech feels. I already dont like ES when its on premise, I cant imagine on the cloud where you have even less control of it.

<comment><USER12> Is ES one of these necessary evils? I have been looking for a product similar to it, but it seems ES is always recommended.

<comment><USER3> The problem with ElasticSearch is that it does multiple things at once. It indexes documents. It stores documents. It searches indexes. It serves documents. The indexing and searching should be separated from the storage and serving at any kind of reasonable scale.

But, ES makes it "just work" at the proof of concept and low volume stages, and you can't easily back out of it when you reach its limitations.

<comment><USER13> For all that people (rightfully) give them grief for being expensive, this is something Splunk got right. You _can_ put your entire Splunk infrastructure on one host: like stem cells, a single Splunk box can perform any of the required functions (ingest, index, search). But you can also separate out each layer into separate hosts and then cluster them, so you have clusters of ingesters feeding clusters of indexers, accessed by clusters of search heads. That should be the architecture ES aims for, where people are given the flexibility to take whichever function is currently a pain point and break it out to a separate set of nodes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > If you've got an old account charging you 22¢ a month, don't get mad. Start > a snarky Twitter account and make sure you cost them orders of magnitude > more than that in doing damage control each month instead.

I use S3 for hosting static sites only, and only in North American zones.

Some time ago, I see some billing lines stating:

"US West (Oregon) data transfer to Asia Pacific (Tokyo) 0.001 GB $0.01"

I had no idea why I'd be paying for transfer to a zone outside my own. Obviously I don't care about the 1cent, but my small problem may be someone else's big problem.

Instead of looking into it, they refunded me a month of service (a few dollars).

I guess that's the opposite of @QuinnPig's thought, but seriously, what was the charge for? Someone running their own crawler on EC2 so I paid for internal DC-DC charges?

<comment><USER14> I saw that too and figured it was due to Cloudfront.

<comment><USER6> Not using Cloudfront though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> ' "AWS stole our open source project and turned it into a service!" is the rallying cry of people who suck at business models. '

Thanks, @QuinnyPig. I needed that laugh today.

</comment><comment><USER6> > If you're a GM of a service at @awscloud, and you price it at a simple fixed > fee of only $X per month, you can expect to be walked out that day.

As a micro-customer, I like the "Only pay for what you use" model.

But AWS charges fixed fees for Route53. You have to pay 50 cents/month/domain when hosting static sites. My volume is small enough that I pay 4x$0.50/month for Route53 DNS, and like 29 cents total for the actual storage/transfer.

The profit margin on that 50cents/month must be 99%.

<comment><USER16> Why use route 53 vs your registrar's dns? Or use Cloudflare, it's free

<comment><USER6> I thought I couldn't use my registrar's DNS unless I wanted it to redirect to the weird URL for the s3 bucket. But maybe I've got it all wrong and just took someone's S3 static site build instructions too literally 5 yrs ago.

<comment><USER16> no, you can set your cname to the s3 bucket's url in your registrar's dns settings...

[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/VirtualHosti...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/VirtualHosting.html#VirtualHostingCustomURLs)

You can also use cloudfront to do SSL if you need it.

Note: If you're really only need to host a static website and want SSL for free, Github static hosting will give you all that for free. [https://pages.github.com/](https://pages.github.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Corey Quinn is my spirit animal. He calls himself a stand-up cloud comedian.

</comment><comment><USER18> For the uninformed - myself included - Who is this guy?

Is or was he ever affiliated with AWS?

<comment><USER19> > Is or was he ever affiliated with AWS?

Does not appear to be affiliated, but launched "Last week in AWS" more than 2 years ago so may know a thing or two.

[https://www.linkedin.com/in/coquinn/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/coquinn/)

[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/last-week-aws-corey- quinn/](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/last-week-aws-corey-quinn/)

[https://www.lastweekinaws.com/](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/)

<comment><USER20> I have never worked at AWS, largely due to my personality.

<comment><USER21> I think I'd currently have trouble working for AWS as well...

<comment><USER20> [https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/why-i-turned-down-an- aws-...](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/why-i-turned-down-an-aws-job- offer/) Same. Same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Best takes (so far):

      - Nobody has figured out how to make money from AI/ML other than by selling you a pile of compute and storage for your AI/ML misadventures.
      - "AWS stole our open source project and turned it into a service!" is the rallying cry of people who suck at business models.
      - Amazon's managed ElasticSearch offering is awful because it's ElasticSearch.
      - A major reason to go public cloud that @awscloud can't say outright is "you people freaking suck at running datacenters."
      - Route 53 isn't really a database, but then again, neither is Redis.
      - MultiCloud is a good idea if you're tetched in the head; it treats cloud solely as "a place to run a bunch of VMs." If that's all you're doing, go you I guess. Bring money!
      - Reserved Instances are the best way to take the on-demand promise of the cloud, and eviscerate it completely by forcing customers to think of it like it's an ancient datacenter. "Enjoy your three year planning cycles, schmucks!"
      - Baby seals get more hits than the [AWS] forums do.
      - "You should deploy everything to be HA across multiple regions" is the rallying cry of armchair architects who don't pay their own AWS bills by a long shot.
      - "What does AWS have that GCP doesn't?" "A meaningful customer base"
      - There's only one place to see every resource in your AWS organization, in every region: the AWS bill.
      - DocumentDB isn't a perfect MongoDB clone yet, and can't be until it's just as good at trashing your production data.
      - Netflix has assembled many of the most brilliant engineers on the planet so they can... use @awscloud to stream movies. Draw your own conclusions.

<comment><USER23> My favorite, although one I have to take with a grain of salt:

"Despite all of the attention Serverless, AI/ML, etc. get on stage, the _majority_ of AWS's income comes from EC2."

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> > The purest form of "static site" is the @awscloud status page

I'm convinced every companies status page is just static content hosted from an S3 bucket.

<comment><USER25> I mean, that's what it's supposed to be, except the joke is that AWS uploaded their page once in 2004 and never changed it since.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> How many retweets will it take to get this for GCP?

<comment><USER27> I just retweeted it just for that

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Lets see how far he gets

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder if the snark well will run dry. Hope not.

<comment><USER29> Corey's business partner here. I can attest: it does not. I sometimes wish it would...

<comment><USER20> Half of it's trying to get your humorless stoneface to crack a smile. We're approaching dangerous levels of snark, with limited success to date...

<comment><USER30> I optimized costs by replacing my face with a static site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm really here for the dunking on IBM Cloud. Five months there stole literal years from my life through the power of condensed frustration.

And it still ain't a real cloud.

</comment><comment><USER32> > [https://totes-not-amazon.com](https://totes-not-amazon.com)

It's like the Git Man Page Generator [0] but trained on the AWS docs. Each time you click the "ASW" home page logo, it regenerates the docs.

[0] [https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/](https://git-man-page- generator.lokaltog.net/)

</comment><comment><USER33> As this thread will draw people that know 'the cloud' I'm wondering if I could get experience learning 'the cloud'?

It it as simple as taking each individual service listed in the AWS console individually and learning exactly how they work, or is there something more in-depth that matters?

<comment><USER34> Integration between the various services. Any individual service is pretty straightforward, but bringing all the pieces together can be a challenge (security, networking, etc.) Billing is also a big deal - your solution can end up being very expensive.

A better way to learn it, IMO, is to come up with some project, and implement it. For example, a typical webpage with a backend db, some storage, DNS, maybe load balancing. Avoid EC2 options, only because that's too easy (it's just a VM).

It won't be incredibly difficult, but it isn't as easy as spinning up a VM on your local machine.

Hope this helps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> > Nobody has figured out how to make money from AI/ML other than by selling > you a pile of compute and storage for your AI/ML misadventures.

Thinking more about it, have companies made much with ML other than in analytics/self driving companies/Google?

</comment><comment><USER36> This is really funny, but I'm curious for people in the know on this: if you were starting from scratch (so no legacy), would GCP or Azure be better? As far as I can tell AWS's main advantage is cost -- is that fair?

<comment><USER37> Depends on your budget, your risks, your technology sophistication, your location, your variation / cylces of in compute & storage requirements.

Recently from the same person this story[1] on the minefield that is AWS costs for data transit.

So, whether the 'Main advantage is cost' is accurate for you is very much an 'It depends' proposition.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20972687](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20972687)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> My most uncomfortable truth about AWS is that bandwidth is crazy expensive and it does not get cheaper over time like just about everything else does.

</comment><comment><USER39> Wow ... this is like the AWS portion of my subconscious mind spilled out all over Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER40> >Everyone likes to make fun of outages in us-east-1 that break the internet, but Azure takes outages and everyone's websites all stay up. One wonders why.

huehuehue, doesn't the have i been pwned service use Azure? I can't recall that ever being down due to Azure outages...

</comment><comment><USER41> We use autoscaling groups and spot instances.

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

</comment><comment><USER42> Great marketing</comment>


Show HN: eBay rounding error results in incorrect credits - <AUTHOR>

About a month ago, I tried to sell a few items on eBay including a Nexus One phone. 2 items were left unpaid since the buyer's tried to scam me (fake PayPal payment emails, cancelled PayPal eChecks).
Once an item sells, eBay charges a Final Value Fee (FVF) that is a percentage of the total proceeds. However, if the item is never paid for, you can request eBay to credit you the FVF.
Yesterday I called eBay to get my credits, which they gave promptly. However, I noticed that the credited amount was off by one cent. I explained to the representative on the phone that I was able to see the credit, but was curious as to why it was $.01 less than the FVF. I asked if they kept a penny, assuming they did, but she assured me that the full amount was refunded in both cases. Again, out of curiosity I pushed the issue and she insisted that the full amounts were credited ($13.48 and $14.55) even though I explained that what I saw on my eBay account was different.
I was being incredibly polite and merely inquisitive (it's 2 cents for god's sake) but she rudely stated "I can't help you anymore, if you have more questions, then you need to use the eBay help menu online" and hung up on me.
Ouch.
$13.48 charged, I was refunded 13.47. $14.55 charged, I was refunded 14.54.
Since we're literally talking pennies here, I don't care enough to call eBay back, but I'm curios as to what caused this.
I assume this is a rounding error from taking a percentage of the amount (possibly a floor function being used for credits). This all reminds me of Office Space, and made me wonder how much money eBay makes off of these penny differences, if this indeed happens all the time.
Has anyone ever come across this before, or am I an anomaly? <comment><USER2> You should ask them if they have a programmer named Michael Bolton.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've never seen this. I wish there was an easy way to recreate this, without almost getting scammed or abusing the Ebay system.

You could be on to something though. How many people have been wronged?!

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, it's tough to recreate. I thought about filing a bug report with eBay. Steps to reproduce:

\- List a high-dollar item like a computer with an artificially high buy it now price.

\- Allow any type of buyer.

\- Wait until it's bought and you get the first scam correspondence.

\- File a non-paying buyer report.

\- Wait 2 months.

\- Call eBay to request a credit.</comment></comment>


Facial Recognition Is Getting Incredibly Powerful–and Ever More Controversial - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/608832/facial-recognition-is-getting-incredibly-powerful-and-ever-more-controversial/ <comment><USER2> Facial Recognition should not be controversial. What should be controversial, is the shaming of "unapproved behavior". Instead, we should praise wholesome behavior.

Those "bad" effects of widespread and precise facial recognition (and other privacy intrusing systems), should be to realize that if not everybody, the vast majority of us are sinful, and that instead if pointing the finger at some selected scape goat, (now we'd have to point the finger at everybody! thanks to bigdata), it might be better to point the finger at the few saints amongst us.

In the end, this might turn out a very good thing, instead of showing us all the time bad people in the news, to show us good examples!

</comment><comment><USER3> I work with Big Data, and some buddies were working with WalMart on their secret facial recognition software for all their stores. They told my buddies that it was to catch shoplifters, but the news stories about WalMart at the time were about Union-busting -- since WalMart preemptively fires anybody they see talking to other employees who might be involved with union organizing. Basically, the software will search the entire internet to find all associated information on everybody in their stores. Obviously, they are trying to keep the entire project secret (as well as all their hidden cameras throughout all their stores and properties.)</comment>


VisitorVille: SimCity meets Web Analytics - <AUTHOR> http://www.visitorville.com/

<comment><USER2> i've installed and used it in a few years ago at a previous organization. it's alot of eye candy and nothing more. very limiting in terms of analytics (you're better off with google's offering). if i recall correctly we dropped it shortly after signing up.

despite it's shortcomings it's kinda fun to watch for awhile if you have significant traffic.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this real?!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, apparently they have been covered on Wired, PC Mag and other high profile blogs (way back in 2003)</comment></comment>


Sartalics - Sarcasm Missed No More - <AUTHOR> http://sartalics.com/ PG, please implement on Hacker News. <comment><USER2> This is _so_ necessary.</comment>


How Google hires - <AUTHOR> https://careers.google.com/how-we-hire/ <comment><USER2> Where's the part where the recruiters keep bragging about how often they reject qualified people?</comment>


Ask HN: How are some startups able to offer life-time membership fees? - <AUTHOR> I've come across a few side projects as well as startups that offer users a pricing scheme which goes something like this: monthly, yearly or a one-off life-time membership fee.
By buying a life-time membership, a user is basically assuming that the company will stick around for a while. I appreciate that some users would get such a membership to support the maker.
But if the company were to fold within a few years, what's their liability? <comment><USER2> It's a growth hack. Once they take off, startups usually drop the lifetime tier.

I don't think you have any guarantees in general. I emailed one YC startup offering a lifetime tier asking what would happen to the lifetime subscription (before buying it) if they went out of business. Their response was that it would be refunded.

In the average case, something like this seems reasonable to me:

        refund = cost_of_unlimited - years_of_usage * cost_per_year

</comment><comment><USER3> IANAL but you should not use that word lightly and a lot of marketplaces[1] recommend against doing that because lifetime it's vague and may create liability.

[1] [https://jvzoo.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/115004072793-Lif...](https://jvzoo.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/115004072793-Lifetime-Products?mobile_site=true)

</comment><comment><USER4> I am assuming their only liability is the one they agree to.

They very likely have terms that say no refunds if the company goes bust, changes hands or pivots.

On the financial side, it is just the lifetime value of a user upfront. Even in a SaaS, most users will churn and stop using it so it is in the businesses best interest to collect all the money upfront.</comment>


Coronavirus: Historic $3.1T aid package passes US House, becomes law - <AUTHOR> https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/coronavirus-us-house-approves-us22-trillion-bill-sends-to-trump <comment><USER2> There is a nice Sankey diagram of where all the money is going from DataIsBeautiful on Reddit .... >

[shameless plug] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22708372](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22708372)

<comment><USER3> Which may well be useless since in his signing statement Trump noted they would be ignoring the oversight requirements which means they are treating it as a slush fund.</comment></comment>


Rhino horn camera 'could save rhinos from extinction - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-33590436

<comment><USER2> I liked the idea of poisoning the horns a bit more as it would reduce the demand rather than forcing the poachers to find new tricks to avoid being caught.</comment>


Ask HN: When is Wordpress the right choice for a website? - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> Most of the developers I meet look down on Wordpress but when it comes to getting up and running quickly and support ecosystem Wordpress still seems hard to beat. Looking for balanced perspective from those both building and maintaining front-end/landing sites.

</comment><comment><USER2> If you're building a blog and/or product sales site, it's pretty fast to get up and running. I wouldn't recommend it for an actual product web app.</comment>


Commons-based peer production - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons-based_peer_production <comment><USER2> >Second, the granularity of the modules is essential.

I think this is a huge point that most open-source projects neglect. It's vastly easier on contributors to open-source projects if there are highly granular tasks to complete.

I think the open-source ecosystem is very short on people who are good at what is effectively project management: that is, breaking up tasks into smaller ones. Imagine if major projects had a big list of thousands of short several- hour tasks they needed completing (e.g. "create a menu option for this tool"). This isn't always feasible due to e.g. background knowledge requirements, but it would be super nice.

One area where this approach could actually work super well is in collective theorem proving. It doesn't matter how people do whatever they're doing so long as it has the right top-level type signature. The list of outstanding tasks would just be a big list of type signatures (as-of-yet unproven theorems) waiting to be completed.

<comment><USER3> Most of the best OSS projects seem to be run by one over-worked individual. I believe it's up to the contributors to try to find small tasks and propose them via Github issues. These can be discovered by using the product themselves and breaking up the problems they find into manageable smaller issues.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: It's better to have social media account for every product you have? - <AUTHOR> As a company, if you have more than one product is it better to have let's say a twitter account for each of them or keep just one social media account for everything?<p>Thanks! <comment><USER2> gt565k gave a great, succinct answer that I think is correct.

There's a lot of ways to do it, and I think it just depends on the type of product you have and your overall strategy.

Some brands have different accounts divided by region: one account for USA, one for Europe, one for Asia.

Some might do it per country or language. One for Germany, one for France, one for UK. Or one for English, one for Spanish, etc.

Some might do it per product.

Some might divide accounts based on the type of content: one account for news, one for pics, one for links.

Some might do it all under one umbrella.

Some might have one main account, but have some smaller additional accounts for different purposes.

There's too many factors that go into it to give just one answer.

</comment><comment><USER3> Depends on your marketing strategy and how you want to establish your brand.

If the different products will live under different brand identities, then it makes sense to use separate accounts.</comment>


You need 16 times the sample size to estimate an interaction than a main effect - <AUTHOR> http://andrewgelman.com/2018/03/15/need-16-times-sample-size-estimate-interaction-estimate-main-effect/ <comment><USER2> That 16x number is specific to a set of assumptions in the article. Is this just the Curse of Dimensionality in action? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality)

<comment><USER3> Andrew calls it the blessing of dimensionality: [http://andrewgelman.com/2004/10/27/the_blessing_of/](http://andrewgelman.com/2004/10/27/the_blessing_of/)

Multi-level modeling's concept of partial pooling is really a killer feature.

<comment><USER4> Bob Carpenter did a great case study on the this topic, for anyone new to it: [http://mc-stan.org/users/documentation/case-studies/curse-di...](http://mc- stan.org/users/documentation/case-studies/curse-dims.html)

Check out the graphs, especially of the euclidean distance from the mode of a random point as dimensions increase.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The most important part of this article is the way that Gelman derives the value. He writes a simple R script to simulate the outcomes. Many, many introductory stats classes will teach you a variety of formulas to estimate the "statistical power" of various experiments, and it's easy to get intimidated and worry if you know the right one to use. But if you know how to program, and you have a reasonable set of assumptions you'd like to test, then you can do a similar analysis in about 10 minutes. These analyses can often save you months of work when you figure out that your exciting study idea has no hope of detecting a difference or that you actually don't need 10000 subjects to detect a 10% lift in conversion rate. Thank you, Professor Gelman!

</comment><comment><USER6> _Further suppose that interactions of interest are half the size of main effects._

Why make this assumption? I'm hoping to see more justification as to why the main effect should be assumed to be exactly 2x the interaction effect.

Edit: In comments he wrote - _I think it makes sense, where possible, to code variables in a regression so that the larger comparisons appear as main effects and the smaller comparisons appear as interactions._

<comment><USER7> This is an exam question, so the author is free to assume whatever he wants. But, more importantly, the interaction as large as half of the main effect is already pretty large -- in real world, many studies look at much smaller interactions. The point here is that if you need 16 times sample size to get enough power to detect the interaction at half effect size, you will need even larger sample size to detect smaller interactions.</comment></comment>


KaiOS - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS <comment><USER2> > As of February 2018, KaiOS Technologies has partnered with Airfind, > Facebook, Google, Twitter...

The Nokia KaiOS devices come with built in Google services, which instantly disqualify them for me. I don't trust that information from those phones aren't being seeded to Google.

<comment><USER3> Can't upvote this enough.

There is already very little accountability or awareness about what Google Services do behind the scenes. You make a call, your phone connects to 1e100.net; you change some settings, your phone connects to 1e100.net. It's insane that no one seems to be paying attention to any of these.

<comment><USER4> Where did you get this from? I just checked my local DNS server and my home devices have never attempted to connect to this domain even though I have quite a few android devices.

<comment><USER5> It's an internal domain. The user-facing stuff uses vanity domains (google, youtube, etc) but the servers' "true" hostnames reside in 1e100.net.

[https://support.google.com/faqs/answer/174717?hl=en](https://support.google.com/faqs/answer/174717?hl=en)

For example, here's the IP I get for "google.com":

        $ dig google.com +short
        188.8.131.52

A reverse lookup on that IP resolves to...

        $ dig -x 184.108.40.206 +short
        lga25s59-in-f14.1e100.net.

So, you're most certainly connecting to things in that domain, which is just a roundabout way of saying you're connecting to some Google property.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I used the Nokia 8110 with KaiOS as a digital detox phone during holidays. It has working email, whats app, google map, hotspot. It has enough features to "survive" and answer or triage the occasional fires from work. And it is unusable enough that i don't use it for non important stuff (chatting, browsing, etc). Ironically its bad UI/UX is it's main selling point.

<comment><USER7> And that's exactly detoxing you from what? I mean it's got email, whatsapp, a browser, facebook probably... so what's the point?

<comment><USER8> you _can_ do these things, but there's enough friction that you won't do it unless you have a good reason

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's remarkable what KaiOS has achieved when the behemoths like Microsoft, Blackberry who tried to become the 3rd player in the smartphone OS wars failed. KaiOS is now holds the 2nd position in India.

Cyanogenmod had a slim chance to pull off what KaiOS did, as it took a similar first approach but failed miserably with its exclusivity agreement with two companies (OnePlus & Micromax)!

But the growth of KaiOS came from Reliance Jio telecom in India, which sold for ~20 USD returnable deposit, cheap LTE data, upgradable to newer models and of course unlimited voice calls. The feature set in Jio Phone may not be comparable to even decade old android, but the target population were getting their first Internet/computing device.

Reliance Jio has invested in KaiOS with 16% stake, KaiOS probably had no choice. WhatsApp was 'THE' most 'missed' app on JioPhone 1 which was eventually rectified in the future iterations. Reliance likely has an exclusivity with WhatsApp on that, since WhatsApp doesn't seem to be available on KaiOS in other regions.

Reliance Jio might access developing market outside India in the future, bringing with itself the JioPhone and the KaiOS.

<comment><USER10> You miss the point, Kaios would be killed in any situation if it were part of Microsoft or Blackberry or Google. Their appetite has no minor project like this...

<comment><USER9> I didn't suggest it was/wasn't part of Microsoft or BB, I suggested it pulled of something which they didn't; Google was not even in that statement.

Even Firefox itself wouldn't have been able to pull this off because it's FSF philosophy would have been in conflict with exclusivity agreements which KaiOS offers to the carriers & also it being a closed source.

Although FSF supporter in me wishes FireFoxOS had survived even at enthusiast level like Ubuntu Touch does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The interesting takeaway here is: maybe Mozilla gave up on Firefox OS too early?

It apparently found a market after all, albeit as a fork.

<comment><USER7> Mozilla took the slowest HTML rendering engine there is and created a whole OS using it. Then they proceeded to run it on the worst mobile hardware there was at the time.

Then competent engineers forked it into KaiOS and it became a success.

<comment><USER12> Same engineers in notable cases, e.g., Fabrice Desre. Also same engine. This refutes your first sentence above.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can we just build phones with a basic x86/AMD64 architecture and a small BIOS so we can load any OS onto them easily from a micro SD? I recently tried to get Halium boot running for my mobile, it's nigh on impossible if it's more than a few years old. (This was in an attempt to load Ubuntu OS onto it.)

Why does it have to be this difficult to try a different OS, when loading an OS onto a new laptop is so relatively easy? It shouldn't be so difficult to get basic functionality up and running.

<comment><USER14> AFAIK PinePhone first edition will run like this. A MVP OS in NAND and in- development Linux Mobile distros (UBPorts, Plasma Mobile, KaiOS et al) running directly from MicroSD

<comment><USER13> They have a guaranteed customer if this is the case. PineTime also makes me quite excited.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I imported the 8110 4G from Singapore or Vietnam (got it off eBay) last year for like $80 US. The 4G doesn't work on most US bands so it's basically just a wi-fi device, but it was a fun thing to buy to try to play/hack around with. I had visions of using it as a controller of sorts for some IoT/smart home stuff, but haven't done much with it.

KaiOS is interesting, but from a pure usability POV, going back to T9 is terrible. Simple acts of logging into services is genuinely painful -- which makes it a fun toy but absolutely not anything I would use for anything other than hacking/ROMs/potential IoT stuff.

I did take the 8110 4G to Europe/Asia this year to use as a cheap way to get a hotspot overseas (eSIM on iOS for dual-SIM stuff was just rolling out and since I often still need to use my actual phone number, I have to pay the $10 a day for .5GB of data from Verizon plus whatever the pay as you go SIM costs.). With this, I just bought SIM cards with big data plans and used it as a hotspot with my laptop/iPad/iPhone)

</comment><comment><USER16> While I really like the idea of a feature phone that can has some smarts, can function as a WiFi hotspot, and has battery life to allow charging only once a week, if there's no ability to write apps that are compiled to binary code then I have to wonder how much the JavaScript VM powering aps is going to drain the battery compared to an app that was written in C/C++.

<comment><USER17> Given the target devices for KaiOS, wouldn't AOT compiled apps have the problem of not being sure which CPU will be supported? It's probably not as big of an issue today but at the inexpensive, low-power side of the spectrum there might be a diversity of CPUs within a year or two... is KaiOS going to host compiler services in the cloud to dynamically compile apps for the myriad possible CPUs out there? While consuming more battery, using JavaScript to power the apps not only lowers the barrier to entry for app developers but creates a common target for all hardware vendors to support. That said, I do like the idea of these devices having the ability to run native code as that would get more like from the battery.

<comment><USER18> Probably more like what happened on Symbian where the market fragmented but nobody cared as most apps weren't very compelling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have an Alcatel GO Flip stuck on KaiOS 1.0. It's terrible. I have to reboot the phone at least once a day or it slows down to the point where the UI doesn't respond to certain events, such as initiating a call.

The UI and functionality would be nice if not for the bugs. Maybe they have fixed a bunch of them in later releases, but my provider isn't providing updates.

<comment><USER20> I recently got the same phone! Mine doesn't crash, but what amazes me is how slow it is -- The flip phone(s) from circa '05-'08 that I had been using weren't fast, but this Alcatel / KaiOS feels like it's running an interpreter in a virtual machine and waiting for network roundtrips on every keystroke ... I mean i'm exaggerating but the lag for all my actions is a real bummer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not a KaiOS user, but I am a daily flip-phone user on a Kyocera DuraXTP running Brew MP. In my flip-phone dreams, the features I would love out of an OS would be:

      * Obviously, calling/texting.
      * A fast, minimal app that served as a phone book.
      * GPS with voice assistant.
      * An Uber or Lyft app.
      * That's it.

In short, the things that are very useful in an emergency-type situation.

I can't imagine there are that may others like me, but the lack of GPS and ride-hailing are the two things that occasionally make me consider going back to having a smartphone.

<comment><USER22> Phones like this already exist. See, for example, The Light Phone: [https://www.thelightphone.com](https://www.thelightphone.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> KaiOS supports WhatsApp in India, but not everywhere else yet. That's probably the one application keeping me on a smartphone.

<comment><USER6> It is supported now and installable via the Kaios AppStore. I got Whatsapp running on my nokia 8110 4G, after some fiddling and updating.

<comment><USER23> Thanks, it didn't seem to be last time I checked. I should see how it works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The new Nokia tough phone has just what I need: 4G, GPS, water and dust proof, minus all the distraction of a smart phone. It's a pity I can't build my own version of Firefox OS for it, the close integration of Google service makes me wary of using it ..

<comment><USER25> I'm in the same boat. That phone looks physically perfect for my needs but I don't use WhatsApp, Facebook or most of the Google ecosystem (the exceptions being gmail and calendar for work). I would pay more than what they're asking to have a build without all of that.

</comment></comment><comment> m-p-3 It feels wierd to see that Google Assistant app on it, knowing it runs a fork of Firefox OS.

</comment><comment><USER26> If only there was a nice feature phone with KaiOS in Europe.

Nokia 8110 sucks because of the sliding panel which makes it much harder to type on the bottom key row. T9 seemed to be worse than on other Nokia phones.

I would love to see a new Nokia 3310 with KaiOS.

<comment><USER27> omg yes, the typing is terrible, it even produces repeating keys somehow.

Just got one and sent it back within 24h, turns out that the battery life was a lie too. I drained 70-80% in 20 hours while not being actively used.

They are coming out with a few more feature phones soon btw: the 2720 Flip, 220 4g & 800 Tough.

Look nice, but I suspect the battery life is shit too. And you get a lot of crapware you cannot remove. (Game demo even)

<comment><USER28> I don't know if it's your case, but I think battery charge usually isn't reliable fir the first 2 or 3 charges, until it's calibrated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> What was Firefox OS licence? Shouldn't KaiOS share their source code?

<comment><USER30> Firefox OS had components under the MPL (Gecko) and some under the Apache license (all the UI). KaiOS publishes changes to MPL code at [https://github.com/kaiostech/](https://github.com/kaiostech/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Nokia.. I would not trust it again after microsoft takeover.</comment>


Paralang: An Attempt to Solve the Parallel Computation Problem - <AUTHOR> http://jaekwon.wordpress.com/2009/10/09/paralang-my-attempt-to-solve-the-parallel-computation-problem/

<comment><USER2> not sure what the closest language is. it's a smashup of lisp/javascript/python, and maybe one day erlang.</comment>


What's Happening with the Coronavirus - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/coronavirus-latest-developments-8b8990c4-6762-494a-8ee0-5091746bda9b.html <comment><USER2> Linking back to that live-updated map, which I find pretty good: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22168451](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22168451)

<comment><USER3> I think this Baidu map is updated faster as they have access to more China news compared to any Western news outlet. But they lag behind a bit for the international count. This link works mostly fine with Google auto translate. [https://voice.baidu.com/act/newpneumonia/newpneumonia](https://voice.baidu.com/act/newpneumonia/newpneumonia)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This might actually be the best summary I've seen: includes the map, statistics, and highlights of most recent news. Take note BBC, NBC, NYTimes, Fox, etc!

<comment><USER5> And every other article on the main page pushes an email newsletter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So humble numbers of people infected outside China, why is the whole world panicking?

<comment><USER7> There were 6 cases in China 2 months ago now its closing to 20k.

Maybe that's why.

SARS killed approx 800 in span of 1.5 year.

There are over 300 confirmed deaths from Corona roughly after 2 months.

The numbers are growing quickly and I for one am starting to feel a bit uncomfortable about this.

Edit: Its 360 deaths, that pretty much half od SARS now :/

<comment><USER8> Note that these are only the confirmed deaths, which is a lower bound. We know that the true number is much larger.

<comment><USER9> Yes, but it is the same for total number infected. Outside estimates are that there are more than 100k infected. That would put the mortality rate ~= the flu.

<comment><USER8> Current estimates (based on official, massively undercounted figures) suggest that 2019-nCoV is both more infectious (higher R_0) and has a higher fatality rate. So not really, no. If your estimate is ~100k infected, don't assume that your number of deaths is the same either.

Consider also that fatality rate depends on demographic and access to healthcare. That second factor is highly dependent on how stressed the health service is. So if you're lucky enough to live somewhere with both high quality healthcare and low infection rate, then your chances of dying will be lower. Not everyone is so lucky. This is why measuring fatality rates outside of China can be misleading as an indicator of what the true fatality rate might be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> We're rapidly approaching the need for a logarithmically scaled color map.

</comment><comment><USER11> Does anybody find surprising that India only has 3 infected? Out of 1.3 billion? And they are a neighboring country?

<comment><USER12> While the border between India and China may be long, it is sparsely populated. It's not like the Canada-U.S. border, where the vast majority of Canadians live within a hundred miles of the border.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Am I wrong to find it concerning that Africa and South America has yet to report a single case?

<comment><USER14> 2019-nCoV targets ACE2 receptor cells in the lung.

Current estimated death rate is 15% (based on now slightly out-of-date Lancet articles).

Asian men are the most susceptible group.

Male / female infection rate currently about 3:1 (but based on low statistics).

Ratio of ACE2 cells in Asian men to Asian women is about 4:1.

Ratio of ACE2 cells in Asian men compared to whites or African-Americans is 5:1.

[https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.26.919985v1....](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.26.919985v1.full)

See some criticisms of the methods and results in the comments. Interesting correlation of ACE2 to stress and high blood-pressure, so could be strongly affected by some treatments for hypertension.

It is just about possible, in some qualitative hand-waving way, that reducing susceptibility by 80% could drop R0 from 5 to 1, hence reduce the threat of an epidemic in other regions.

<comment><USER15> > We also noticed that the only Asian donor (male) has a much higher > ACE2-expressing cell ratio than white and African American donors (2.50% vs. > 0.47% of all cells). This might explain the observation that the new > Coronavirus pandemic and previous SARS-Cov pandemic are concentrated in the > Asian area.

 _the only Asian donor_ , n=1. It's too bold to claim that Asian men are the most susceptible group.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> just in case someone didn't have the link [https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...](https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6)

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder how we could use viral outbreak data to better understand the cohesion between nations?

</comment><comment><USER18> This is why the Coronavirus is becoming such a scary disease: 1) it's unknown, 2) it's swiftly transmitted, and 3) it's a virus that's killing people.</comment>


Flush with anti-Trump donations, ACLU gets Y Combinator's mentorship - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/01/aclu-turns-to-y-combinator-for-leading-edge-tech-skills-to-battle-trump/ <comment><USER2> That's a shady area, a very shady area Y</comment>


A Bionic Mushroom That Generates Electricity - <AUTHOR> https://www.newswise.com/doescience/?article_id=703273&returnurl=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubmV3c3dpc2UuY29tL2FydGljbGVzL2xpc3Q= <comment><USER2> *Bacteria and graphene nanoribbons 3D printed on a mushroom generates 65 nanoAmps.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the energy it produces over the lifespan of the mushroom is several orders of magnitude less than goes into manufacturing the 'bionic' bits.

I can't find how long A. bisporus lives after it caps but I'm guessing weeks at best. I'm not paying for the paper so I have no idea if they mention voltage and I have no idea what voltage might be capable of being produced by I'm guessing it's going to be considerably less than a boiled potato (5ish volts)... sooo...

Almost certainly less than 3.25e-7 watts, so you're talking tens of thousands of weeks to even get a watt hour.

Just the two of us visiting the link likely used more electricity than one of those would produce in a century, if not a millennium or more.</comment>


Careful with that Koolaid - <AUTHOR> http://www.mistakesmademag.com/peter-reinhardt-learned-this/

<comment><USER2> I'm curious to hear more about the 'reality distortion field'. You say 60-80% of people failed to use the tool - what was the basis for continuing on? Did you have a plan to mitigate the visits to other sites? When was the next time you tested and what were the results?

</comment><comment><USER3> It also might have a huge point where just because you thought you were in MIT that you weren't there by luck and was smart enough.

<comment><USER4> Luck only gets you into MIT after you pass the cut of it deciding you can do the work, most especially a term of the calculus past the AP BC sequence, and calculus based mechanics and E&M. When I last had figures (since then I gather applications have increased), about 13,000 applied, and about 3,000 were judged to be able to do the work, from which MIT had to extend enough offers to get a class of ~1100.

MIT does a good job of this, as a rule students who choose an appropriate major make As and Bs, unless they're having personal problems.

However these sorts of smarts have no bearing on the failures experienced by this guy; heck, he would have been better off staying longer and rubbing shoulders with people who've had success in business. There's plenty of opportunity for that, from the professors who are given one day a week for their own business pursuits to all sorts of formal entrepreneurial stuff.

But it's not something MIT cares about in admissions, besides looking for evidence you can do projects, which has no bearing on projects producing stuff people will buy; note this guy did not fail from an inability to make something work _per se_.

<comment><USER5> > as a rule students who choose an appropriate major make As and Bs, unless > they're having personal problems.

This is grade inflation, not a badge of pride to MIT.

<comment><USER4> Nope, I've carefully looked at MIT's history of grade inflation (the info is online), and there's been none except for a "'60s" period that coincides with the draft, a widespread phenomena of the time. Heck, since I attended in the '80s, they've reduced the pass-fail period from your entire freshman year to just your first term.

What's happening is that MIT very carefully matches its student body to the demands it places on them, something that's worked out well since the post- Sputnik reforms in K-12 science and math education (for more historical perspective, when it started, post-Civil War, a large fraction of students would only be mastering the calculus at the end). There's many levels of oversight including the "outsiders" in Visiting Committees, feedback in the system, etc.

And MIT _really_ cares about undergraduate education (which I gather is all too rare except at "low end" higher education where the school has no pretenses about doing a lot of serious research; one of my chemistry TA came from such a school). All classes are taught by tenured or tenure track professors, with exceptions that prove the rule such as SF author Joe Haldeman, and professors don't get tenure unless they're adequate at teaching.

I once witnessed the EECS department head make a professor read every student evaluation (i.e. students providing feedback) for a course he'd just taught, all but one of which were negative (and the positive one was a special case), and at the end told him he'd never again be allowed to teach that particular course. Etc. etc.

ADDED: MIT tries very hard to be a meritocracy, and since it's focus is on "you can't fool Mother Nature" engineering and science, that's practical.

Semi-disclaimer: I have a lot of ties and history with the EECS department, but being an EECS major is not one of them, I was science track.

<comment><USER6> > Nope, I've carefully looked at MIT's history of grade inflation (the info is > online)

Citation? Every source I can find shows that a) they haven't released average GPAs since 2000 and b) from 1950-2000 they inflated grades at or above the average national rate.

<comment><USER4> Source was as I remember _The Tech_ , MIT's student newspaper, but I can't find it right now, it was a raw data series. This '75 article starting on page 5 [http://tech.mit.edu/V95/PDF/V95-N11.pdf](http://tech.mit.edu/V95/PDF/V95-N11.pdf) covers '62-'72, but the data I looked at went quite a bit further. If you're really interested I can try harder.

Note that you should throw out results from the '50s and a bit further, when science and especially math education was poorer and MIT had to accept and weed out students. If one was really serious about this, you'd have to find the transition to when they could send acceptances to students they were quite sure could do the work, which had long been the case when I was got in in '79.

Can't say anything based on data about this century; do wonder why they stopped releasing them, but there are reasons that wouldn't touch on grade inflation _per se_ , e.g. the dot.com crash resulted in a great discontinuity for the EECS, which lost more than half its students, after having 40% of them for decades. That resulted in the panic which replaced SICP/6.001 with _harder_ introductory courses (it's even less a place where a pure CS type can slide by on two pure EE courses after the first required course), and it was some time before EECS enrollments returned (and not just at MIT, e.g. Stanford experienced this).

Hmmm, I'm not at all sure what that period might have done to the outside of EECS student body, but I could see many mathematically strong students simply not going to MIT, and my source on what's going on, who would definitely know in at least the School of Engineering, hasn't mentioned any grade inflation problems, I'll ask if that's changed.

There's also one discontinuity before this century, when a professional admissions director actually followed the faculty's official guidelines/rules/whatever on who to admit. There are two classes that were _much_ less strong, this was fixed when e.g. physics faculty members made a big fuss and admissions got realigned with reality.

As for "every source", there's plenty that talk about MIT "suffering" from grade _deflation_. Actually a problem with others interpreting MIT GPAs vs. schools with notorious grade inflation, pre-meds are understandably very concerned about this; search on mit grade deflation.

<comment><USER6> Yes, there are plenty of articles discussing MIT and grade deflation. Unfortunately, none of the ones I could find have any data - its all anecdotal from students. The hard data I did actually find ([http://www.gradeinflation.com/](http://www.gradeinflation.com/)) shows grade inflation at MIT matching that at Harvard (the media's favorite grade inflation target) almost perfectly from 1950-2000.

I never thought this before, but now that I've actually looked at what little data is available, it looks an awful lot like the MIT grade deflation thing is a myth.

<comment><USER4> Ah ha, _this_ site is where the data series is, specifically: [http://www.gradeinflation.com/MIT.html](http://www.gradeinflation.com/MIT.html) and my memory about _The Tech_ is from where they got a lot of their data.

So, you're telling me, the GPA going down 1/100 of a point in the quarter century of 1976-2000, is evidence of grade inflation???

If you can seriously look at this time series, accounting for the two factors of better post-Sputnik math and science education and Vietnam War avoid the draft, or simply limit yourself to the period after both of those ('73-75 for the draft, by which time the upper level post-Sputnik reforms would have hit the applicants), then factor in that freshmen went from pass/fail to grades in their second term during this period, and say MIT has statistically significant grade inflation, we have no basis for a discussion.

<comment><USER6> If we're allowed to pick and choose our time series, the quarter century before that MIT saw inflation at almost double that of the grade inflation poster child, Harvard.

Yeah, you can rationalize based on outside events, but without real data on how much of the change is actually attributable to those things, you're just fitting facts into your worldview. How do we know there aren't similar events in the quarter century you've chosen that are forcing deflation?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Meta to the article itself but this SumoMe stuff is incredibly annoying. It breaks the flow of reading. There are highlights on here which end in the middle of a word [[http://i.imgur.com/6zQjwvW.png](http://i.imgur.com/6zQjwvW.png)]. And now I just had an email-newsletter popup occur halfway through reading the article.

<comment><USER8> I'm one of those guys who randomly clicks or highlights text while reading, and it's dead annoying if doing clicks on a text with the normal text mouse cursor causes an action!

Please, website owners: provide visual cues if the behavior of your website differs from normal websites.

<comment><USER9> Must maintain maximum APM while reading articles

<comment><USER10> Look, if I'm going to get out of Diamond in Starcraft 2...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What do you think of my blog? - <AUTHOR> http://hassankhan.me/

<comment><AUTHOR> I meant contentwise, not designwise. Its just a fork of Syte, so don't mean to take credit for that. I'm just curious to see what other people think of what I've written so far.</comment>


Can anyone create an app like this? - <AUTHOR> http://www.timstravelog.com/lifelist/

<comment><USER2> Cool idea. I'd give it a shot. I do my own 6 month goals and bucket lists but it's a great idea to think even broader. I like how some of your items have rich expanded options. Even without all those widgets it could be cool.

There's an obvious social aspect of crossing off personal accomplishments and getting your friends to help and cheer you on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just to be clear, its not mine. I am looking for something like this for myself. I currently only use a txt file but I am looking for something more dynamic and simple looking like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks like Tim has either forgotten about the list, or he's dead...

Last Updated: 08/27/2009

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> or atleast an editable html I can use for my personal use? I am not a programmer so I can't help myself.

<comment><USER4> Save the page, open it in a good text editor (eg jEdit) and see how easy it is.</comment></comment>