Which is the most ideologically diverse American city? - <AUTHOR> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/04/ideologically-diverse-city.html <comment><USER3> First, article is talking more about ideological divide (democratic/republican) than ideological diversity (which would presumably mean many other viewpoints).

Not sure about ideological diversity, and how to even measure it, but ideological divide to me seems as an inevitable result of two party system (and majority voting system), as both parties struggle to get supporters. In order to do that, they often abandon or shift in ideology. The result is that the "ideological divide" is so very fluid that it is not really representative of any particular ideology.

In short, I think measuring the "ideological diversity" in terms of democrats/republicans is probably quite misleading.

<comment><USER4> Yes.

Washington, DC is absolutely not an ideologically diverse place, by basically any measure. 93% (!) of the city voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Additionally, most people there, Democrats included, are extremely dedicated to the status quo. I've live in cities all across America, including DC 2015-2018 -- I actually usually cite it as the least ideologically diverse place I've ever lived.

I generally like Marginal Revolution, but this article is bunk.

<comment><USER5> I work here and I agree. Everyone here thinks that the educated class should run the country. I had to move out to Anne Arundel to get away from it.

<comment><USER6> Was there a time when people thought the uneducated class should run the country? Were most of the founders part of the "educated class"?

<comment><USER7> I would go further and be curious if people think that the uneducated class running the country is a good idea now?

<comment><USER5> Yes. I think the DC mindset that highly educated wonks should tell everyone what to do is intensely anti-Democratic.

<comment><USER6> Who in DC is "telling everyone what to do"? We vote for them, they write the laws. That is how a representative democracy works. Under your vision of uneducated leaders, would those people still be "telling everyone what to do" when they write a law?

<comment><USER5> There is a vast army of wonks (mostly in executive departments and agencies) that are doing most of the "telling everyone what to do."

<comment><USER6> Do you think MBAs should tell software engineers how to write code? Do you consider people who specialize in software development "wonks" or just experts?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wait, this is just someone's opinion? There's no data here! This should be an empirical exercise, why should we trust these cities the author pulls from random anecdote?

One idea would be to use voter registration records and census blocks to measure the polarization of the population wrt political behavior. There's also survey data on attitudes and beliefs that could be aggregated by city. But there's no data at all, it's just the author's personal speculation.

<comment><USER9> Yikes, outside of Hacker News, people share their thoughts and opinions without citations! Those morons!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Given that we tend to over-emphasise the differences between ideological positions that we're more familiar with, and under-emphasise the difference between positions that we aren't, it's hard to see how an exercise like this tells us anything except the author's own political experience and imagination. Even if there were empirical data here, how could we objectively determine the distance between ideological perspectives? And what dimensions of their many differences do we emphasise?

We see this most clearly when we look at ideologies that are dominant today. For example, a fairly core ideology over the last 30 years is that more and more aspects of society either should, or inevitably will, be governed by the market. As a result, ideologies that don't subscribe to this this idea are generally viewed as similar no matter how much they might otherwise be unrelated. Which is kind of strange, since 'ideologies that don't subscribe to this idea' amounts to most of the ideologies adopted over the course of human history.

<comment><USER11> Exactly. Here in Norway e.g. the non-market oriented political ideologies would be represented by at least 5 different parties: communists, socialists, social-democrats, social-liberals, and liberal-Christians.

Although the social-liberals and liberal-Christians are not usually considered pro market, although they don't seem to be the American sense of pro-market. Like they are not actively pushing privatization as a major focus. Rather they are more against state infringement on individual rights.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What I find interesting is that Tyler makes it all about his personal POV. Everyone _he_ talks to in Washington is obsessed with hour-by-hour politics. Everyone _he_ talks to in San Francisco and Seattle are obsessed with blockchain. But only in other places he's apparently never actually visited, he assumes, those people probably have "regular lives". The only thing this post shows is how insulated Tyler's own life is from the vast majority of Americans.

<comment><USER13> You can accuse Tyler Cowen of many things, but accusing him of not visiting any particular place is probably going to back fire. He is quite well travelled, especially to places that aren't generally travelled to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The server seems dead, can't handle the load.

I wonder if the author considered the collision of urban-philia being a political distinction, and geographic boundaries are mostly a political or geographic accident. So statistically the most diverse city will have 100% non-diverse neighborhoods like any other city, but will have weirdly large boundaries for legacy historical reasons such that the "diverse" city includes distant rural farmland and suburbs whereas "non-diverse" city with identical neighborhoods and demographics will have small city limits boundaries.

</comment><comment><USER15> How can this question be reasonably answered?

Maybe places with high numbers of academics and articulate people can be measured but that's about it.

There's multiple dimensions when it comes to ideology and multiple approaches to each dimension. There's even fundamentally different interpretations of the categorical differences on how to subdivide the classifications of these systems. And each of these facets have wide diversity at every nuanced level.

For instance, many San Francisco "lefties" are anarcho-capitalists who want to do away with market oversight along with having drug legalization, amnesty for all immigrants, gay rights, and unlimited gun rights for all. They want to privatize all public services and call that process "progressivism".

Some of them call themselves libertarians, others "classical liberals" and yet others will tell you long stories about how they aren't either of those... It's really quite complicated and throwing them all in a "liberal" column with people who believe entirely different things for entirely different reasons (such as, for instance, those who believe "money"(another debated term) is a fundamentally corrupting influence and the state needs to tame the market through strict oversight), is pretty incorrect. In fact, some socialists I've spoken with consider the entire libertarian project as a form of tyrannical autocracy by the ruling class - so they view those lefties as actually far- righties.

But let's pretend you can map all those out and ignore that perspective matters. Do you need population size? Representation in governments? Places of discussion?

I really can't see how to even approach this question.

<comment><USER16> > For instance, many San Francisco "lefties" are anarcho-capitalists

That seems a bit strange. I know quite a bit about anarcho-capitalism, but I have never, never ever heard anybody claim they were 'left'. In fact generally 'leftism' is associated with socialism and the exact opposite of what AnCaps want.

<comment><USER15> If you use a non-technical approximation of the term as the placeholder for the true bearers of liberty and freedom, then sure.

As far as others considering them "lefties", to some people, a few checkboxes put you in a generalized "leftist/liberal/fascist/democrat/communist" category, which these people consider to all be the same thing. For instance: pro-immigrant, gay rights, and weed-legalization would be the end of the discussion for them. Their analysis is over and they don't care to discuss it any further.

There's a lot of people like that. I meet them frequently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Houston for sure. It's close to a true melting pot. You have everything from cowboys to Marxists, libertarians to La Raza activists. You have an old, tight knit African American community mixed with limousine liberals, George H.W. Bush style globalist conservatives along with large Latin American communities, GLBT flag-wavers and evangelicals. There is even a small, but extremely tight-knit Jewish community along with a large and welcoming Islamic community. I could go on and on. Houston wins by far when it comes to ideological diversity. The ciry itself does trend leftwards, however if you add Harris Coubtry into the mix, it's almost an even split with many people straddling the left-right ideological divide (voting for liberal mayors but conservative county commissioners.)

</comment><comment><USER18> > The proper conclusion may be that intellectual bubbles are a useful means of > moving forward.

Read the last sentence. Unless I misinterpret this grossly, the author is making fun of demands for "ideological diversity", i.e. lack of conservative/Republican mindshare, a la maybe Jonathan Haidt.

</comment><comment><USER19> As long as we are defining this qualitatively, I nominate Charlottesville VA. Yeah, it's much smaller, but the community feel means people are actually interacting across ideaological lines, not just sharing municipal services.

<comment><USER20> Absolutely not. I moved from there in December, and it is the most hostile place I've ever experienced. If you aren't an acceptable class of Progressive, you're a "Nazi."

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> To change an old joke we have all types of politics Democrat (centre right) and republican ( originally centre right but now take over by far right entryists).

</comment><comment><USER22> I'd imagine this would correlate with ethnic and/or economic diversity, which makes it surprising that Sacramento (my hometown, and consistently in the top 15 of the variety of "most ethnically/economically diverse American cities" lists, sometimes venturing into the top 5 or the #1 spot) seems to be absent from the article.

</comment><comment><USER23> Cowen uses intellectual and ideological diversity interchangeably.

I would argue that intellectual and ideological bubbles are only partially intersect and most of his readers are more interested in intellectual diversity.

I also suspect that binary conservatives/liberals division is not bringing enough diversity either ideologically or intellectually. The political diversity is large cities with large universities with lots of students and immigrants far outweighs the diversity in local politics. Smart Nepalese student who is communist may cut trough the conservative/liberal axis in a surprising way that is really new and interesting.

<comment><USER24> Good point. The Left/Right model of politics poorly reflects the complexity and nuance of people's actual views. It is good for encouraging us-versus-them conflict but terrible for real understanding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Well, it won't be any large or mega city. Statistically as they grow larger they'll homogenize. It's far more likely to be some tiny hundreds of person, barely incorporated place no one has heard of. In those the deviation won't be smoothed out.

</comment><comment><USER26> The question is complicated by the fact that a big part of the modern Republican ideology is a hatred of cities and an anti intellectualism. Which, by the way, is historically a very dangerous ideology and led to things like the Khmer Rouge's genocide.

<comment><USER27> You are aware that the Khmer Rouge was a leftist Marxist government, right?

Also, the "hatred" goes both ways.

<comment><USER26> I wasn't suggesting that the ideologies are identical, just that they share those elements.

And no, the hatred does not go both ways, but you might think so because another big part of modern Republican ideology is victimization and resentment. Which are also powerful dangerous forces historically.

<comment><USER27> _I wasn 't suggesting that the ideologies are identical, just that they share those elements_

The way you worded your comment obviously made that implication - <USER2> Republicans and the Khmer Rouge, when in fact the Khmer Rouge was a leftist, communist, Marxist government, whose leaders were steeped in academic Marxist "intellectualism" (they studied in Paris, no less).

Deciphering whether you intended it or not is not my motive, so I'll leave that to the readers.

 _And no, the hatred does not go both ways,but you might think so_

I disagree, but I have no horse in this race - my personal politics are boring centrist liberalism.

 _so because another big part of modern Republican ideology is victimization_

Is it opposite day or something?

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

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

<comment><USER26> All that I'm saying is that Khmer Rouge hated cities and Republicans hate cities. The reason it is dangerous is because it creates a hated "other" (urban elites) that can ultimately lead to atrocities.

On victimization and resentment, it's basically the whole appeal of Trump. See [https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/07/21/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/07/21/white- people-think-racism-is-getting-worse-against-white- people/?utm_term=.86552602f574)

The whole point of the anti-urban elites propaganda is to make people feel like they're victims of the hated others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Republicans and Democrats aren't that far apart globally speaking. So probably the answer is the same as what it would be without the word ideological—i.e. NYC and specifically Queens.

</comment><comment><USER11> As a foreigner I must say Americans are rather blinded in their thinking about ideology from having a political system which doesn't allow for more than two parties.

Yes sure legally speaking there can be more parties, but due to the winner- takes all form of voting, there is no practical way for a third party to ever enter politics.

The existence of the republican and democratic party in the US for such an exceedingly long time has created a very ingrained sense of what politics and ideology is in the US.

People naturally have a much wider spectrum of ideologies than those represented by democrats and republicans. Yet there is no way to express that at the voting booth. Hence whatever people vote wouldn't really reflect the ideological divide.

Seen from my Norwegian perspective, if Norway was a city in the US, then Hillary Clinton would likely have gotten 90% of the vote. However that doesn't mean there is a lack of ideological diversity in Norway. There are 9 major parties in Norway and several much smaller ones, representing quite a diversity of opinion. The democratic party would have been quite an outlier politically in Norway, yet Donald Trump and republicans are even more extreme that people would naturally vote Hillary.

That a diverse set of people vote on some common lesser evil doesn't really make them all that similar.

</comment><comment><USER29> Well, I'd guess the most culturally diverse city (Los Angeles) is a likely answer.

<comment><USER13> Toronto is far more culturally diverse than LA, and that's the city that elected Rob Ford as mayor.

<comment><USER30> How do you figure Toronto is more culturally diverse than LA? LA has large communities of people from essentially every part of the world. Maybe they're roughly on par?

<comment><USER13> Toronto is 50% immigrants, LA is 40% immigrants. LA's immigrants are 2/3rds Latino, Toronto's immigrants are very broadly composed.

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

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

<comment><USER31> LA is 40% immigrants because large immigrant populations are already established in LA, whereas Toronto was basically white until a few decades ago.

LA is roughly 48% Latino, 30% "white", 11% Asian, 10% Black, and 30% "other" generally referring to smaller ethnic groups or to multi-ethnic individuals. LA's minority population on an absolute basis is larger than the entire population of the Toronto Metro Area. We have every type of Asian, European, South and North American, African, and Pacific Islander there is. We have ethnic populations in LA that are the only settled populations of those groups outside of their home countries, such as Iranian Jews and Druze.

Toronto is 48% white, 9% Black, 1% Aboriginal, and the remainder is Asian. Not diverse by US standards, unless you're comparing yourself to Cleveland or Indianapolis, maybe.

<comment><USER13> "the only settled populations of those groups outside of their home countries, such as Iranian Jews and Druze."

Rural Alberta has Druze communities, let alone Toronto.

"and the remainder is Asian"

Not true, a significant portion of the "other" category in Toronto is Arab and African. Not to mention the fact that "Asian" itself is a highly diverse category.

"Toronto was basically white until a few decades ago"

Exactly. Toronto's hugely diverse population is quite young, meaning it is much less assimilated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> >2\. Washington, D.C. and environs. The intellectual class in this city is about half conservative/Republican/libertarian and always will be — just don't think too hard about who actually lives here!

Um....what? DC resident here. The only conservatives I see, anywhere, are tourists from the South/Midwest. The "intellectual class" is not linearly mapped to the Congress proportions. While conservative politicians (by the way most politicians live in the suburbs, outside DC) have conservative staffers, there's way more non-profits which are overwhelmingly liberal.

</comment><comment><USER33> It's true that some cities are bubbles without conservatives, but you have to keep in mind that America itself is a bubble without any real left wing to speak of. If you care about getting the full range of ideology that exists in most other western countries, you need to choose a city with a large international population like NYC.

This just goes to show that the idea of 'diversity' is always a value judgement about what the 'right' mix of people is.

</comment><comment><USER34> Well the "diverse" part is mostly choosing one or the other of the two mainstream views.

</comment><comment><USER35> Kind of stupid without a definition of ideological diversity.

Cowen uses "ideological diversity" as a stand-in for Democratic/Republican balance. Which is one kind of diversity, and you would likely find the most balanced distribution of opinion on such questions as "is Mueller biased against Trump?" and "is Paul Ryan's tax plan good?" in the cities mentioned.

But here's a couple other questions that are likely more balanced in e.g. San Francisco than the cities mentioned: Are microstate monarchies the ideal form of government? Did the Constitution establish white supremacy? Should Keystone XL be blocked? Does trans ideology unnecessarily essentialize binary genders? Should we establish a generous universal basic income? Will blockchains lead to utopia on Earth? Should blockchain enthusiasts be sent to the gulag already?

Cowen enjoys occasionally getting under his elite coastal readership's skin, but this is pretty weak tea.

</comment><comment><USER36> I hypothesize NYC

<comment><USER37> Sorry, the groupthink here is palpable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I think Toronto.

</comment><comment><USER39> What is the point diversity for the sake of diversity? What you want is a community of people who can analyze data and have sufficient knowledge of statistics to know how to distinguish valid information from garbage. There's no point in being around anti vaccine people, or people who base their arguments in assumptions (beliefs) from old stories.

<comment><USER40> The point of diversity of opinion is that you have a challenge against the ideas of yourself and of others. If everybody around you agrees with what you say then you may never be thoughtful about your positions and can get away with being wrong.

In academia a paper is written by a human who desperately wants to be right and publish it (because they are self interested of course) and the peer review process is there to challenge the methodology so that the truth can emerge.

It's like if you had two sets of scientists who had opposing viewpoints but could only use objective measure to justify their own side, when placed in opposition to one another their biases will more likely produce a truth.

It's also important to note that being able to analyze data and have knowledge of statistics is not enough. For a hypothetical example if you are a modern American progressive you might have a set of opinions which you identify with like a raised minimum wage, progressive tax, etc. You really want to be consistent in your beliefs so you seek out data which CAN justify your position. Like that minimum wage does not reduce employment or something. You search for any evidence that justifies it naturally and maybe do some shallow research on the opposition but deep down you know what side you are on. You have used data and statistics to justify your positions, but that is not enough to say whether you are actually right or not.

On the other hand, the anti vaxxer which try to figure out if they MUST reject that vaccines cause autism and maybe they find one thing that says there is a reason to doubt and that is sufficient.

In each case exposure to a formidable argument from the opposite side can really challenge their opinion. (Not that minimum wage is as simple as vaccines)

If you have hard evidence against something like anti vaxers then you can do away with their argument scientifically, but if you characterize all conservatives/liberals in that way, they you are lacking exposure to real, formidable arguments against your own positions. Because there are certain issues where both sides have objective measure which justify their own side.

<comment><USER39> If someone is searching for data to support their bias, then they are not qualified to to analyze data and do not have sufficient knowledge of statistics. It's important to know what you're not able to discern from the information you have.

The labels "conservative/liberal" don't mean much to me either. I find that many people are motivates by economics, or supporting their own tribes/ego. Many of these "opinions" come from organizations funded by wealthy people who benefit from the voters having those opinions, and I don't see any point in ascribing them any value.

At least in academia, there is a process that can result in valid results about our world, such as climate change. But there is no reason to consider Jenny Mccarthy's opinion on vaccines, or some oil magnate in Texas's opinion about climate change.

<comment><USER40> Yea then nobody is qualified to analyze the data.

And there is reason to consider opposing opinions on vaccines, and then after the best evidence from both sides are provided a real conclusion can be made (it has already been made) and then it's no longer worth considering unless new evidence arises.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> > Washington DC: The intellectual class in this city is about half > conservative/Republican/libertarian and always will be.

While I think the 50 percent figure is high, people tend to only think of DC as a liberal city.

Of course it primarily is, but there is a large population of well-educated conservatives and libertarians living here.

Most of my social circle leans left, but it was always good living in DC to hear different perspectives, rather than shouting into an echo-chamber.

Also an extremely diverse population (51% Black) along with on-going gentrification leads to DC being one of the more intellectually stimulating cities to live in.

<comment><USER17> 51% black doesn't make it "extremely diverse." That makes it "majority black." Hispanics are only 4% of the population, Asians less than 3%. Whites are roughly 43%

I am not sure how diverse that is and certainly questionable to call that "extremely diverse."

<comment><USER39> In my experience, socioeconomic diversity results in different points of view than the color of someone's skin. Many problems people face are economic or financial, so I would expect people that have grown up in similar financial environments to have similar political concerns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> "Mexicans fit along a political spectrum of their own."

Tell me more about this mexican political spectrum. I'm only half can I join? Btw what do we believe in?

<comment><USER40> Americans have a political spectrum, like a range of beliefs that the conservatives have to the liberals. Probably most countries have different political spectrums, Europe in general has done away with gun rights debates and so their political spectrum is different than those in the u.s.

It's definitely not a race thing, it's a nationality. It's just a fact that every nation has their own type of polarization, aka spectrum.

<comment><USER20> > Europe in general has done away with gun rights debates

One side has won, but it's hardly been "done away with". Even in the UK there is support for relaxing gun control. There are some countries in Europe with fairly strong laws protecting gun ownership as well, like the Czech Republic.</comment></comment></comment>


The New Laptop Ban Adds to Travelers' Lack of Privacy and Security - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/03/new-laptop-ban-adds-travelers-lack-privacy-and-security <comment><USER2> Let's hope those dastardly terrorists don't know how to store their secret plans encrypted on Dropbox, buy new laptops once in US, visit hardware stores, or rent a trailer with a kitchen. If they're that smart, we could all be dead in the event the U.S. TLA's are correct.

I feel unconcerned for some reason. Haha.</comment>


Ask HN: What problem am I solving? - <AUTHOR>

Hey there,
So I am sure I'm not the first engineer to build a technology without solving a specific problem, but when you have something you're excited about, it's hard to block that out.
Bashoto was built out based on the ideas developed in the systems used to communicate between Bing Maps streetside cars in real-time. We had the cars drive cities in small groups of 3-5 cars and mounted a tablet each of them. The cars communicated in real-time with only nearby cars to show where everyone was driving, so that roads wouldn't get driven over more than once. The cars would track the unique kilometers they drove (in real-time of course) and drivers would be compensated based on that. With Bashoto, I've generalized that technology into a simple API leveraging WebSockets, an asynchronous backend (Tornado) and some Geospatial knowhow. Cool shit, right?
Well now that I have built out the product in the form of an API (See it at https://bashoto.com), I'm not sure the specific problem I am solving and I'd love some input here. Saying that we're solving the problem of communicating locally in real-time is pretty much a cop out. Even figuring out what the problem statement for other players in the same space are would be super helpful; Pusher, Pubnub, Firebase, etc.
And of course check out Bashoto at https://bashoto.com
If you think this stuff is neat, follow us @bashotoapps
Adios! <comment><USER2> Sounds like it would be awesome for political parties sending out registration\get out the vote crews, power companies inspecting lines after a storm. Maybe search and rescue crews could use it to make sure everywhere is checked and done in an efficient manner.

<comment><AUTHOR> Focusing on the coordination aspect is pretty interesting, since that's the original problem that the tech was made to solve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hmm surely you had some idea of potential use cases before building it?

The website and your description here don't really match up. The website has some social stuff (local chat, music lists, etc) which isn't really hard to do and doesn't make any sense to do through a 3rd party API at the pricing you're suggesting.

Your description in the OP sounds like there is MORE going on behind the scenes. Tracking unique area covered sounds like a more unique offering. Like other posters, I'm thinking maybe it could be useful to things closer to it's original Bing Maps purpose - local services like snow ploughs, mail delivery, drone fleets, etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why concentrate on B2C? Aren't there other businesses that need coordination of multiple vehicles? Police, rescue workers, farmers? Some high end tractors have GPS to store which part of field they worked on.

[http://www.fendt.it/images/939Vario_Multifunktionsarmlehne.j...](http://www.fendt.it/images/939Vario_Multifunktionsarmlehne.jpg)

<comment><AUTHOR> B2B is definitely the way to go. I've been mainly focused on software products that can integrate the API, but looking at more of a general geo-coordination services. I know there are companies that do this, but it seems really fragmented to me. ATT partners with Telenav for this [https://www.wireless.att.com/businesscenter/solutions/indust...](https://www.wireless.att.com/businesscenter/solutions/industry- solutions/mobile-productivity-solutions/telenav-track.jsp)</comment></comment>


The downside of Microsoft's Android dollars  - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2011/10/25/the-downside-of-microsofts-android-dollars/

<comment><USER2> I think there is a gross misunderstanding of Microsoft's approach.

Microsoft's licensing approach means that they already have an established B2B relationship with many major handset makers - and it is centered around the manufacturer's OS.

Not only is Microsoft's approach professional rather than antagonistic, but in addition it emphasizes the critical differences between their product and Android - the support of a business partner and a fair amount of protection against IP litigation.

Finally, the analysis ascribes consumer bias to corporations - let's face it, handset manufacturer's aren't in love with Android, they use it because it was available to compete against Apple. If Microsoft offers a better contribution to the bottom line, there will be no tears shed for Android.</comment>


FBI Plans to Have 52 Million Photos in its NGI Face Recognition Database - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/fbi-plans-have-52-million-photos-its-ngi-face-recognition-database-next-year

<comment><USER2> Now you know why it's called _Face_ book.</comment>


Yanking the power plug should not be part of your business process - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2013/08/13/10441219.aspx

<comment><USER2> Everyone involved in that needs to read [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash- only_software](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash-only_software) and get comfortable with the idea of pulling that plug. It'll help in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER3> The discussion of power loss during the execution of RegFlushKey makes it sound like there's no journalling of the registry hives... is that accurate?</comment>


Money wins Elections - <AUTHOR> http://letsfreecongress.org/

<comment><USER2> Great info site. I don't understand why the US can't simply take one of the many pages from Canada's book on this.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_political_financing_in_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_political_financing_in_Canada#Public_funding)

We don't even do away with Private funding and we're not without our problems up here, but one thing is for certain, we have much quicker, and cheaper elections.

<comment><USER3> they are more boring to follow too :/ (except the last one, nobody expected the NPD to grab the opposition)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Correlation is not causation, and nothing on that site is evidence that money is winning the election. It is not surprising that the most popular politicians (winners) would also be the ones to get the most money, from people who like the official and others trying to buy influence.

According to the following article, large increases in campaign spending have a small impact on the poll results:

[http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/01/17/how-much-does- campaig...](http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/01/17/how-much-does-campaign- spending-influence-the-election-a-freakonomics-quorum/)

<comment><USER5> Also, where is the $30 billion coming from? It isn't a lot of money, but Congress doesn't exactly have a lot of money to throw around.</comment></comment>


Simple rules for documenting scientific software - <AUTHOR> https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006561 <comment><USER2> I manage a team of power plant design engineers writing complex scientific HPC software, mostly in Python (which drives Fortran 77 codes behind the scenes, among other things). It's been a long haul but through the years we've learned a lot of good lessons and are pretty productive at what I consider at least moderately good code. Everyone starts off by reading Clean Code and taking basic proficiency training. We know to try to make code speak for itself because, as we've all seen many times, comments lie. We've slowly learned from the software engineering community how to set up things like Jenkins for CI, black for Python code auto-formatting, Phabricator for revision control policy and code review. We're writing docs in rst with sphinx, watching coverage, and getting pylint 10/10\. We're waking up to the wonders of static types.

Mandatory code review has turned out to be a great way to train newbies, write better code, and make sure code is understandable to at least one other person. It's been an investment (it's slowww) but I still think it pays dividends. That's what I'd add to this advice. And I'd tone down the comments focus. Comment only when you fail to express yourself clearly in the code.

<comment><USER3> One thing I've found even better than code review is pair programming. At the recommendation of the tech lead we all did it for the four years at my last job, and it was a fantastic way to spread knowledge around. For thorny prpblems we'd even "mob" on them, four or five of us sitting in front of one big monitor, rotating who used the keyboard and mouse, discussing and giving high-level instructions to the driver. We collectively figured we produced features about as fast as with individuals programming (because of the intensity and avoiding many dead ends) but that the quality was far superior. Reviewing the process honestly (without getting personal) is key, though, to address inefficiencies and interpersonal issues.

<comment><USER2> I believe that. We pair up on super complex things but have been promising to do more of it having heard of successes like yours.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A really great idea: put DOIs in your function documentation.

Writing things like:

 _Implements equation 3.2 of Foo et. al. (2005), doi:10.2.3 /baz_

has saved me no end of pain in the past.

<comment><USER5> This is indeed a helpful thing. And leave a note if you had to rename the variable called "s" in that paper to "x" to work with the 5 equations you pulled of that other paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some good basic suggestions that should be followed when doing softwaare engineering. But they forgot one aspect:

Don't be too smart for your own sake when packaging your software. As an HPC administrator I stopped counting how many hours I spent installing scientific software with broken Makefiles, interactive installers, simple github dumps, unresolvable dependencies. Sadly this is quite prevelant in life sciences (I am looking at you bioconductor)

</comment><comment><USER7> Would be nice to point the scientific community in the direction of basic software engineering practices. Encouraging engineers to read Code Smells and Refactoring.

Most of the scientific software I've worked with is completely unmaintainable by anyone but the original makers. Buss factors of 1 are not sustainable.

<comment><USER8> I write scientific code for a living and my code is very difficult for anyone else to maintain. It is not because my code is badly documented or written, it is because what it does is very complex. Every module is documented why it exists and what it does and the code straightforward to read, yet the interaction of all the modules is very complex as it reflects the underlying complexity of the problem the code is solving. Some code is hard to maintain because it is solving a complex problem that few people understand.

<comment><USER9> Managing complexity is one of the chief concerns of software engineering.

<comment><USER8> Complexity can be managed, but the required domain knowledge is hard to design around. The problem my colleagues struggle with is the domain knowledge I have that they don't. The positive from this is there are few people in the world that can do my job :)

<comment><USER10> In my view, there's only a certain extent to which code can teach domain knowledge. People tend to freeze up when they see any kind of math, physics, or quantitative engineering. And managers want to believe that domain knowledge is worthless because it refutes treating people as interchangeable cogs.

The only solution is to make sure you keep someone on staff who has a hope of understanding the underlying technology, and failing to do so is a business risk like any other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm a 'scientific programmer' who learned how to code basically trial by fire.

My background was mechanical engineering which didn't focus on coding at all other than needing to use/learn MATLAB for several classes. Went to grad school for HPC/CFD and there I was given access to our group's simulation code and was let loose to implement whatever routines I needed to simulate my problems. The shared components were the input/output system and the primary routine drivers (time-stepping and fluid dynamics algorithms and the like), and what I mostly worked with were different constitutive models which hooked into the system. Parallelization was implemented via MPI and was mostly complete, so my only job with respect to parallelization was to make sure that my algorithms would work in parallel.

I ended up taking several programming courses, but these were 100% focused on topics like parallelization with MPI, shared memory parallelization, and optimizing code, and a short stint in GPU programming. I learned nothing about code management or best practices. Oh, and this was all using Fortran and C, though now I'm working with C++ and Python, but that's because the newer libraries seem to be C++ and Python is just easy to glue everything together with.

My general programming knowledge isn't super great, but sometime this year I managed to download an open source iOS app and without any prior knowledge of Xcode or iOS programming/Swift was able to figure out how to implement something that was missing.

This is already a lot of words, but lately I've been thinking about getting out of academia and getting into actual software development cause I figure I _kinda_ do that anyway. Obviously the easiest connections I could make would be to maybe work for companies like ANSYS that develop CFD software, but I feel like my programming knowledge is seriously lacking for that. You can give me a scientific paper that describes an algorithm to do a thing and I'd have no issue implementing it into some existing codebase but I read words written in this discussion like "code smell" and "CI" and I have no idea what these things are.

Anyway, can anyone recommend me some books to read and/or provide some advice and/or anecdotes on jumping ship from HPC/CFD/scientific programming into a general programming developer career?

<comment><USER12> Have you thought about contributing to some open source software? It depends on the project, but often after you submit your code, you will get a code review. And you probably will also learn something about testing.

</comment></comment><comment> a-dub 11) Invariant: Someone should be able to go from a referenced paper or book to your code without scratching their head too much. This can be approached by either fortifying the documentation in the code or by specificity in a methods paper.

</comment><comment><USER13> Also don't forget to document all dependencies and their versions!

</comment><comment><USER5> If there is one thing I have about HN it is how smug they are about software engineering. The leading reason why scientific software stinks (and a fair fraction does) is not because scientists and software engineeres in that field suck, but because there is very strong incentives AGAINST writing better software.

Remember: This is not the 17th javascript framework, but software for problems that we don't understand going in. And often enough we have not understood the problem all that well even after a decade when we write the third code. These codes are research codes. Ongoing experiments. The main goal is NOT to produce long-term maintainable software, but to produce scientific understanding and build intuition about the systems that are modeled. The code is just another tool among experiements, analytic calculations and back-of-the-envelope discussions on a white board.

Rewriting the code every 5 years is an insane proposition in software engineering, but completely ok in some fields of science.

Would I like better language support to check SI units for me? Sure. Would I like highly performant libraries for vector fields, that work with gcc 4.6 on a top 500 machine? Sure. Would I like to be allowed to spend time on fixing yeah-I-guess-it-works code? You bet.

But would I like HN to just up about "scientists just need to learn to code"? Oh hell yes! Because -- believe it or not -- we often DO know better. But fixing code is not what the taxpayers, what YOU, pay us for. We are paided to understand nature. And until you are willing to pay higher taxes and spend more money and science and to invest more into fixing long term infrastructure you really do not get to be so damn condescending.

<comment><USER14> By this argument, chemists should never wash glassware. Keep re-using it until it's too dirty, then through it out and make new beakers.

Your tools affect the quality of your work. Work with shitty tools, get shitty results.

I'll start believing your argument when scientists actually start publishing the code to go with their papers and make it reproducible.

<comment><USER5> Two thirds of the codes in my field are on github. And for most others you can get a copy if you ask politely by email. That said I would appreciate it if journals not only had author, title, date and affiliation in the meta data, but also a git url and commit ID.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Prior work has focused on various aspects of open software development > [1–7], but documenting software has been underemphasized.

This article - like all software engineering - is completely unscientific. Scientific method:

> systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, > testing, and modification of hypotheses

<comment><USER16> It is an editorial not a peer-reviewed research article. Mind the difference.</comment></comment>


Introducing Dash – Reactive Web Apps for Python - chriddyp-plotly https://medium.com/@plotlygraphs/introducing-dash-5ecf7191b503 <comment><USER2> People, we've gotta stop naming things after generic jargon.

This is probably the 5th or 6th "Dash" named product I've seen in the last 2 years.

There's:

Dash, the amazon order button

Dash, the offline API docs

Dash, the prepaid debit card

Dash, the restaurant payment service (acquired)

Dash, the OP's link

and probably a few more I'm forgetting.

<comment><USER3> DASH (Debian Alchemist SHell). I believe it's the default shell for Debian and Ubuntu (I'm a Fedora/CentOS user myself). I remember hitting some edge cases where some bespoke shell scripts don't work correctly on Ubuntu because DASH is a "slim" Bash alternative, so it doesn't have all the "bashisms".

<comment><USER4> > I remember hitting some edge cases where some bespoke shell scripts don't > work correctly on Ubuntu because DASH is a "slim" Bash alternative, so it > doesn't have all the "bashisms".

People say that, but usually the reason their scripts are not working is that they are using bashisms while retaining

        #!/usr/bin/env sh

or

        #!/bin/sh

rather than doing as they should when writing shell scripts that are using bash features;

        #!/usr/bin/env bash

I think it boils down to a lot of people being unaware of the difference between what is POSIX compliant and what is not, or even that there is such a distinction to be made.

I write most of my shell scripts targeting bash, but I always use the hashbang that invokes to bash, and I also name my scripts like somescript.bash when it's a bash script and somescript.sh when it's POSIX shell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find that I waste too much time doing "front-end" development - CSS, HTML, JS all slow me down. I am trying this _right now_! Thank you :)

What is the performance of this when many users at once are consuming the same app/resources?

<comment> chriddyp-plotly The performance of the app will largely depend on the analytic code that you are running inside the Dash callback functions. A few things to note:

\- The dash docs ([https://plot.ly/dash](https://plot.ly/dash)) are itself a Dash app. They're getting a lot of traffic today with the launch and they're holding up OK to hundreds of active users.

\- The state of Dash apps is entirely in the front-end (in JS in the web browser). The Dash app backend (the python part) is really lightweight - it's a flask server (that you run with an application server like gunicorn) that dispatches to the functions that you decorate. If your functions are really resource-intensive (in memory or if they block for a long period of time), then the app's performance will suffer as part of that. However, since this analytic code is scoped inside a function, the memory will free up after the request is done.

\- Since Dash's callbacks are functional, you can pretty easily add caching. Caching will store the previously computed values and serve them if the input arguments are the same. There is some more info in the "performance" section of the docs: [https://plot.ly/dash/performance](https://plot.ly/dash/performance)

<comment><USER5>
        The state of Dash apps is entirely in the front-end

Cool! I develop APIs using Flask so that's good news for me. I want to keep the API as lean as possible. I also try to cache everything I can or simply render stuff into static data if possible. I.e., some data are updated on a regular basis but do not change so rapidly and thus I can just use a Jinja2 template with some {% raw %} blocks to render my jinja2 templates with much less stuff to do, or even static html when I can.

Installing as we speak.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is really similar to the Shiny framework ([http://shiny.rstudio.com/](http://shiny.rstudio.com/)) for R that is dead simple for creating quick and easy data interactives.

Plotly is also an amazing plotting library. If you're using Shiny, you can can create plots in ggplot2, and effortlessly change over to semi-interactive javascript versions with mouseovers and whatnot simply by changing the render type and render output to shiny. No change to your ggplot invocations in most cases.

Where Plotly falls down in my opinion, is in how they communicate pricing. I dig through their website and see that many things are open source, but then I see pricing information that makes me wonder whether I should be using Plotly for fear of getting locked into something that has licensing fees.

IMHO, this is something that RStudio got right. They have a clear model and communication around what is in their community editions vs. what is in their paid professional versions vs. what you are paying for with their Shiny hosting services.

<comment><USER7> I think shinny is awesome, but for online dashboards for my company, Dash seems awesome for one reason: no R. :D

Don't get me wrong, I use R almost everyday in my analysis, but setting up a dashboard that connects to a remote data source is a bit of a hassle and quite tiresome to set an entire R environment.

Ill play around with it, but working with virtualenv + requests + pandas + dash will make it easy to easily prototype some dashboards...

<comment><USER8> Have you used Shiny? It is so dead simple compared to other solutions I have seen. Biased but I love R.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Reminds me of the clever Python integration in Bokeh.

I've been toying with the idea of a front-end framework in Python. I know enough Javascript to be dangerous and React isn't entirely abhorrent to me but using Python just makes me happy in a way that writing Javascript doesn't.

The idea of an abstraction layer where I could write my front-end code on the backend appeals greatly. Like all abstraction layers it would create it's own problems but most of the functionality I want in an SPA is fairly routine and it could all end up nice and sane.

Something based on intercooler.js - of which I have great admiration - <AUTHOR> be enough for the tasks I'm thinking of.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm super excited for this! Good dashboarding for python has been a huge gap in the ecosystem, and none of the existing options (bowtie/pyxley/spyre) really came close to the functionality of shiny.

The closest IME has been ipywidgets+jupyter and the jupyter dashboards server. Jupyter is really nice for developing, but deploying is another question. The dashboards server works but development on it has been stalled, and deploying it is a pain. Also, if dash can leverage the react ecosystem, that could make it pretty compelling compared to ipywidgets.

<comment><USER11> I would agree that pyxley never came close to the functionality of Shiny, but my goal was a little different. My goal was to make a set of reusable components that were also really flexible. I wanted to be able to mix custom things with generic things without too much trouble. I think in trying to be flexible, I introduced too much complexity. Also, I never really got around to making a decent set of widgets and so it's definitely lacking in features.

I wrote a wrapper for the Plotly javascript library and I use Plotly charts in some of my apps. If I ever had some time, I could probably make a pretty decent clone. One interesting difference is how they are turning the python into javascript. I gave up on that and just ship a pre-built javascript bundle that receives props from the flask app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is the intent of this really in the data science/visualization space, or is it really designed to be a complete web application platform?

In other words, is this for quick one-off visualizations, or can you see someone wanting to use it to build a fully-functional web application?

<comment> chriddyp-plotly > In other words, is this for quick one-off visualizations, or can you see > someone wanting to use it to build a fully-functional web application?

I don't think that Dash will replace standard CRUD style websites. It's more for the visualization and data-science space.

The main limitation with Dash is that every interaction has to be through components with pre-named IDs. That means that Dash doesn't support apps that need to bind interactivity or updates on an arbitrary number of items (for example, a TODO app with `N` number of items where each item can be modified). In traditional websites, this is handled through URL patterns, query strings, or client-side through JavaScript. Eventually, Dash might have the abstraction of "ID groups" or "ID patterns", but it doesn't have that quite yet. This type of application is common in standard CRUD websites, less common in data-viz applications or dashboards.

In the visualization space, Dash is for both the one-off visualizations (e.g. add a dropdown to a graph) as well as more complex applications that have drill down and search that you might commonly see in something like Tableau.

Some examples:

\- quick one-off visualization: [https://plot.ly/dash/gallery/stock- tickers/](https://plot.ly/dash/gallery/stock-tickers/)

\- more complex drill down example: [https://plot.ly/dash/gallery/new-york- oil-and-gas](https://plot.ly/dash/gallery/new-york-oil-and-gas)

\- the dash userguide website is itself a dash app: [https://plot.ly/dash](https://plot.ly/dash)

\- a dash app styled like a traditional report: [https://plot.ly/dash/gallery/goldman-sachs- report/](https://plot.ly/dash/gallery/goldman-sachs-report/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This looks so very useful. Also, good timing since we're just about to make a new visualization which could be used for more things in future. I dabbled with Plotly when it was announced, but had trouble with connecting our data sources and ran out of time.

I see the OP is here answering questions. Have you thought about Gapminder like animations?

I'd like to show our statistics with map data from our GIS systems. In the announcement the Walmart demo shows map from Mapbox so there's support for their service. Could you elaborate on what options there is for visualizing geographic information?

There was so much in the announcement from Jupyter to Excel like reactive components. It resembles Mike Bostock's D3.express in this regard [1]. I can't wait to start playing with this!

[1] [https://medium.com/@mbostock/a-better-way-to- code-2b1d2876a3...](https://medium.com/@mbostock/a-better-way-to- code-2b1d2876a3a0)

<comment> chriddyp-plotly Thank you @jarpineh!

> Have you thought about Gapminder like animations?

Definitely. The user guide actually walks you through creating an app with world indicator data. Check out the last example here: [https://plot.ly/dash/getting-started-part-2](https://plot.ly/dash/getting- started-part-2). As you hover over points in the scatter plot, the time series updates with data corresponding to that point. A slider below the chart filters the scatter plot by year.

We recently added animations to plotly.js (the graphing library that's used by Dash) so that points can transition smoothly between states. That's accessible in dash by setting `animate=True` in the `dash_core_components.Graph` component.

One of the neat things about Dash is that you have full control over the visuals and the analytics. So you could easily update this example to display the "trails" behind the scatter plots as they are animating or programatically filter or aggregate the data before plotting it.

> Could you elaborate on what options there is for visualizing geographic > information?

Plotly.js uses MapboxGL under the hood for satellite scatter and line plots. We also have lower-resolution SVG-based world and USA maps for choropleths, line, and scatter plots. You can see some examples of community generated maps in the feed: [https://plot.ly/feed/?q=plottype:scattermapbox](https://plot.ly/feed/?q=plottype:scattermapbox) or just play around in the chart editor ([https://plot.ly/create](https://plot.ly/create)) to get a sense of what's available.

Through the `scattermapbox` chart type you can plot custom shapefiles but we can't yet color those shapefiles through a data array. We're looking for a company to help sponsor improvements like these.

<comment><USER13> Thank you for your answers and thanks so much for open sourcing Dash!

I'll be definitely testing these examples with our data. Plotly seems to have grown leaps and bounds from when I last tried it year or so ago.

I believe we could integrate our data browser's React components into or alongside with Dash. This way data could flow directly from our APIs.

We have our geographic shapes in Geoserver, so GeoJSON would be the easiest way to get them into browser or Python for Dash. I have to see what how this could be adapted. If this were Django based I'd be using GeoDjango, but Postgis should be accessible from Flask as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Writing thin clients that serve data to browsers for charting/tabling purposes is one of my favourite pastimes. So I'm thrilled there's another tool for this job, especially one that abstracts many of the boring aspects of the job. Well done, I look forward to playing with it.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is pretty much what I was looking for 5 months ago. I use R Shiny extensively to prototype, it's a great tool for building quick dashboards and visualisations, but when you want to go further, that's where Shiny starts to get difficult. I ended up building a basic Flask + d3 app to serve production visualisations.

I use Plotly quite a bit right now, almost to the point where whenever I ggplot anything I just turn it into a plotly plot. I love the work that Plotly has been doing, going to play around with Dash on the weekend. Keep up the great work!

</comment><comment><USER16> Totally awesome. My first thought as I started reading was how I'd integrate this with Flask, and then I got to that section of the post - it's built on Flask - and we're all set.

</comment><comment><USER17> Naming aside, this will finally get me into web programming and React.js as I can do this with my first love (Python) and the HTML/JS is abstracted away for me.

</comment><comment><USER18> This made my day. I am definitely going to try this. Hope they develop this and not abandon it for a long time like the other ones.

<comment> chriddyp-plotly I hope so to! We learned a lot since the prototype and, more importantly, secured some corporate sponsors to help fund the work and ensure its long term success.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This with Phoenix as backend and Vuejs for frontend would be the killer. Thanks anyway for this very nice publication!

<comment><USER9> This with Django as the backend and vanilla js, jQuery or intercooler.js for the front-end would be awesome. ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is "Reactive Python" the same as "Reactive Java"?

</comment><comment><USER7> How easy is it to embed custom D3.js visualizations with Dash?

<comment> chriddyp-plotly If you can wrap up your D3.js visualization in a React component with a declarative API, then you can turn it into a Dash component. Here's the tutorial on creating custom Dash components: [https://plot.ly/dash/plugins](https://plot.ly/dash/plugins) and as a reference example, here's how we're wrapping up the plotly.js library as a Dash component: [https://github.com/plotly/dash-core- components/blob/master/s...](https://github.com/plotly/dash-core- components/blob/master/src/components/Graph.react.js)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Python + D3 ... that really is an awesome combination!</comment>


Pantagruel: An Unambiguous, Undefined Program Specification Language - <AUTHOR> https://hexdocs.pm/pantagruel/readme.html <comment><USER2> This involves a whole lot less ass-wiping[1] than I was expecting it to.

1: [https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/r/rabelais/francois/r11g/book...](https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/r/rabelais/francois/r11g/book1.13.html)

<comment><USER3> What did I just read? O.o

<comment><USER2> An excerpt from "Gargantua and Pantagruel". It's a classic of French literature!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm curious how the parsing must work because I can't unambiguously see how this line is parsed

fib x ← fib x − 1 + fib x − 2

Why is that parsed to behave correctly like

fib x ← fib (x − 1) + fib (x − 2)

And not,

fib x ← fib( x − 1 + fib ( x − 2 ))

Or even this, though it wouldn't produce a sane program

fib x ← fib ( x ) − 1 + fib ( x ) − 2

<comment><USER5> I think the idea is that something is ambiguous if it has more than one meaning. This language avoids the problem by having no meaning. It may be a very dry joke. I'm not sure.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think to be fair I can't even claim the joke.

Yes, in the first place there's no defined semantics and thus no meaning.

It's also not particlarly appropriate to claim that the language is 'unambiguous'. The intention of the language is to create a notation that allows for the unambiguous expression of relations that would be ambiguous in English, that is, to present a logical or mathematical specification rather than a natural language one. So the ambiguity or lack thereof is entirely in the mind of the reader.

I do have a semantics in mind for it; I have thought about things like operator precedence and currying and stuff. And that matters because you want to be sure that the person reading the specification and the person writing it had the same thing in mind as far as the order of the marks on the page goes.

So there will hopefully be a much more concrete realization of those semantics in a way that still leaves wide open the question of _expression evaluation_. In other words, it should be an objective fact that `a b c` is evaluated as `a (b c)` - and indeed it is, because the program has parsing rules for function application - but the specifics of what it means to apply `b` to `c` will never be enforced or evaluated on the machine level.

\---

In fact, the parent comment's example is a good one because `fib n - 1 + fib n - 2` _would_ be parsed as `fib (n - (1 + (fib (n - 2))))` which is not the intended reading. Right now, that's fine, because it doesn't _actually_ evaluate them. It just pretty prints them back out in the right order and trusts that if you didn't put parentheses there, then the intended meaning should be clear enough to the human reader.

So what, ultimately, will be the relationship between the parsing rules in the program and the semantic openness of the language? Similarly, if I've decided that the language should have implicit currying, such that `f a` where `f` is a function of two arguments, should resolve to a partially applied function of one argument - does that have any meaning aside from a sort of 'suggested reading'? One potential direction for things to evolve is that the language will consist of a set of rules which are enforced by the interpreter and will result in a syntax error if not followed, and a set of rules which are explained in the documentation as a suggested convention but enforced nowhere. In that case the question of something like function precedence is still an odd grey area where the parser _does_ have rules associated with it, but the symbols can flow in and out of the parser without being affected by those rules.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm interested.

And: I'm still attempting to understand copatterns, but this is quite reminescent of copatterns. That's all I have.

</comment><comment><USER7> Finally someone who writes a proper and honest "Who would be interested in this?". Thanks.</comment>


How to use Bitcoin's low price to make huge profit? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@coinbaseclaim/how-to-use-bitcoin-low-price-to-make-huge-profit-9bbe422207d2 <comment><USER2> I love bitcoin but if you think I'd recommend buying it at this specific instant? Hell no.

Between now and a couple of weeks even maybe a few months after aug1 there are a lot of questions that very smart people don't know the answer to with regard to the architecture and maintenance of the current blockchain. There is a very real struggle going on right now with regard to who has support as to potential changes to its architecture.

<comment><USER3> The title is misleading. He is not recommending to buy. He is only advising to use a loophole in an sing in offer in coinbase to invest $101 to get $110. It's not related to the prize at all. It's not a good article.</comment></comment>


Former Reddit Director & Harvard Fellow Charged With Hacking MIT Computer - <AUTHOR> http://bostinnovation.com/2011/07/19/reddit-cofounder-harvard-fellow-charged-with-hacking-mit-computer/

<comment><USER2> It seems like he was accessing the MIT network simply to get an MIT IP address that would authorize him in the JSTOR application. He then was running a scraper, which was probably just a python script with a bit of metering to avoid slamming them too hard. Does anyone know if that's correct, that if your organization has a site license you can access the service without additional credentials?

If that's all true then the description of the events and charges seem to reflect quite a polarized view. It's somewhat understandable, though, that JSTOR would want to "throw the book at him" given his previous public comments - it seems very likely he intended to distribute the large cache of documents widely. Whether or not that's ethical, it's clearly not in the firm's best interests - I doubt a similar situation without any intent to distribute would be referred to law enforcement at all.

<comment><USER3> I'm not specifically familiar with JSTOR or MIT's network, but I am familiar with other services that allow free access from anyone coming via a school's network block, and I'm also familiar with networks that will allow guest access for a short period of time so as to not inconvenience true guests.

Lots of services do this because it's far less hassle than distributing traditional credentials and typically it's less likely to be abused because unlike name/password pairs, you can't post an IP address to usenet and have somebody else use it. The abuser also has to be physically present, which makes them much easier to find.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The actual indictment with details of the hack: [http://web.mit.edu/bitbucket/Swartz,%20Aaron%20Indictment.pd...](http://web.mit.edu/bitbucket/Swartz,%20Aaron%20Indictment.pdf)

Also JSTOR's statement: [http://about.jstor.org/news-events/news/jstor- statement-misu...](http://about.jstor.org/news-events/news/jstor-statement- misuse-incident-and-criminal-case)

35 years in jail sounds insanely outside all proportions of the damage done by downloading scholarly articles!

<comment><USER5> 35 years is crazy; if they wanted could MIT do something about that? I mean; it seems far more reasonable to give me a fine.

<comment><USER6> Demand progress makes it sound like MIT asked the gov't not to pursue the case. But the gov't went forward anyway

<http://demandprogress.org/aaron>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is not the first time he has done something like this if memory serves me. In late 2008 Mr. Swartz and Carl Malamud went to select libraries, ones with free PACER access, and proceeded to download ~700 GB of information that was behind a paywall. After which they made all of it available on Mr. Malamud's website.

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/case- against...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/case-against- pacer.ars)

</comment><comment><USER8> He wasn't a co-founder. Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian founded Reddit. They acquired Aaron's company half a year later.

<comment><USER9> from pg

> Aaron's not wrong to call himself one of the founders. The company behind > Reddit was a merger of two startups, one that made Reddit and one that made > Infogami, and in that situation the founders of both startups are considered > founders of the combined company.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/1octb/reddit_cof...](http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/1octb/reddit_cofounder_aaron_swartz_discusses_how_he/c1okmc)

<comment><USER10> alexis doesn't seem to agree

<https://twitter.com/#!/kn0thing/status/93374221685755904>

one talks about a merger and the other of an acquisition

<comment><USER11> They seem to still be pretty pissed at him.

<comment><USER12> What's the backstory there?

<comment><USER11> He went to europe while they were in the middle of crunch time, then promptly took a week of sick time upon his return. They fired him shortly thereafter. Steve talks about it here:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/d2njs/til_the...](http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/d2njs/til_there_was_a_third_cofounder_of_reddit_who_was/c0x40yz)

In Aaron's words: "Yeah. I was unhappy working in an office and didn't hide it. So I'd come in late and set up lots of off-site meetings and stuff. And my boss wasn't really thrilled about that. Also, I think he was upset about me disappearing for so long on vacation. One of the places I went to in Europe was the Chaos Computer Conference. And while I was there I hung out with my friend Quinn Norton, who was reporting on the event for Wired. She took my photo for one of her articles and it was featured on wired.com's front page. "Heh," I joked. "I bet the first time my boss finds out where I am is when he sees my photo on the front page of his own website.""

So yeah, he earned his firing and the emnity of his coworkers the old- fashioned way.

Edit: Also, there's some speculation on the thread I linked to that Aaron was a cofounder who received a payout in the CN deal. He wrote web.py, sure, but if he walked away with $1MM+ without showing up to work, that could explain why they still hate his guts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A statement from demand progress, which Swartz is the former exec director of: <http://demandprogress.org/aaron>

<comment><USER13> Does Demand Progress realize how creepy that logo is?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Main discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2781615></comment>


K-Nearest Neighbors Algorithm in Python and Scikit-Learn - <AUTHOR> http://stackabuse.com/k-nearest-neighbors-algorithm-in-python-and-scikit-learn/ <comment><USER2> > As said earlier, it is lazy learning algorithm and therefore requires no > training prior to making real time predictions. This makes the KNN algorithm > much faster than other algorithms that require training e.g SVM, linear > regression, etc.

Linear regression is way faster than KNN as the dataset grows beyond toy data. Both training and especially testing. In practical applications, test speed often trumps train speed.

> The KNN algorithm doesn't work well with high dimensional data because with > large number of dimensions, it becomes difficult for the algorithm to > calculate distance in each dimension.

KNN works fine on high-dimensional text. From something simple as Hamming distance on binary tokens, to euclidean distance on TFIDF, to cosine distance on 900-dimensional word vector aggregates.

> There are only two parameters required to implement KNN i.e. the value of K > and the distance function (e.g. Euclidean or Manhattan etc.)

Also implement distance weighing (you probably want to weigh the 1-th nearest neighbor label higher than the 5-th nearest neighbor label).

> The KNN algorithm has a high prediction cost for large datasets. This is > because in large datasets the cost of calculating distance between new point > and each existing point becomes higher.

This is why you "fit" something like a K-D tree during training.

> Finally, the KNN algorithm doesn't work well with categorical features since > it is difficult to find the distance between dimensions with categorical > features.

Hamming distance works fine on one-hot encoded categorical features. If not, embed/reduce the dimensionality. If not, use feature selection first and do KNN on top 10%-20% features. Remember that you don't have to use the same distance measure for every feature column.

> If one of the features has a broad range of values, the distance will be > governed by this particular feature. Therefore, the range of all features > should be normalized so that each feature contributes approximately > proportionately to the final distance.

You can skip this step (and feature selection) by learning an additional weight for each feature to multiply with before distance measure. It is rare for each feature to contribute proportionately to the target.

<comment><USER3> All of your claims call for citations. Its not that they are untrue. But they are not as sweepingly true as they might seem to an uninitiated reader. For example, you can try KD tree on a 50K dimension data set and judge for yourself.

<comment><USER2> I just tried this with 50k dimensions and 2 rows and it worked fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very informative and well written article about KNN classification. However, as a data scientist it always pains me to see the iris data set being used. It is linearly separable and gives no indication of whether or not you actually want to use the given methodology on your problem since almost every technique can achieve these results on this data. I'd recommend using something from kaggle or even the UCI repository to make these types of articles even more useful!

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. You have a very good point. I tend to default to using Iris for articles like these because of its simplicity, ease of setup, etc., but you're right that it isn't as informative in showing readers the algorithm's capability. I'll have to try out some different datasets for upcoming articles :)

<comment><USER5> +1

Recommend the wine data set or the PIMA Indian diabetes dataset.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A very informative write-up. I believe that KNN is a great intro project for anyone getting into machine learning. I recently wrote an MNIST KNN classifier with numpy and pandas, this post certainly would have been helpful. [https://github.com/ShahZafrani/machineLearningPractice/blob/...](https://github.com/ShahZafrani/machineLearningPractice/blob/master/knn/knn_classifier.ipynb)

</comment><comment><USER7> Instead of finding the K nearest neighbors and averaging their y values, which is effectively fitting a 0th order (constant) mode, I wonder why fitting a multiple linear regression using those neighbors is not done. Since a linear model can approximate a function over a wider range than constant can, one can use a larger value of K.

I know that local linear regression is often used in one dimension, but I wonder if it should be used more often when there are multiple predictors.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm new to ML and currently looking at building a recommender system using KNN on a site based on what users have read. I'm struggling to select the optimum feature set. Should I use the article ids or tags as the features? Also, how do I go about the high dimensionality curse with potentially thousands of articles or tags?</comment>


Youtube - / geek week - <AUTHOR>

Go to youtube and search

  / geek week
 <comment><USER2> Was hoping for ASCIIfied videos too... :-D

<comment><USER3> Me, too!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How important are titles for freelancers / self-employed - <AUTHOR>

I'm nearly finished with my bachelor of computer science and am unsure whether to go for the masters degree afterwards or not. I've been working with a fellow student for severals months now with reasonable success and if I would stop studying after the bachelors degree I could concentrate on work full-time.
However, I would like to know before whether or not these degree titles play an important role in the life of a self-employed or as a freelancer.
Are my future potential customers going to factor in my title in their decision making whether or not to do business with me?
Please let me know your oppinion on this subject. <comment><USER2> The sheepskin is utterly irrelevant for selling consulting engagements. If you develop a particular skillset which happens to be commercially useful in graduate school, such as machine learning or whatnot, that can potentially be helpful. It is neither necessary nor sufficient to study a subject in graduate school to make that subject commercially useful.

With regards to selling software, the only time in eight years that I've had anything about my college education matter was when an insurance company asked me whether I was formally trained in systems engineering, since they believed it decreased their risk for writing professional liability policies. My answer was bachelor's in CS at a good university, but they told me they also would have accepted "Have done this for five years" (which I have).

</comment><comment><USER3> A. Nobody cares about your degree.

B. If you ever find yourself in a position where A is not true, you can go back and get the masters degree. Schools will very happily sell you degrees at any point in your life, never fear.

(Interestingly, this advice doesn't apply to medical school, where a friend once cautioned me that, if this were a universe where I wanted to achieve the life goal of having one of every degree, I'd better sign up for the M.D. portion before turning 35. But the other degrees are open to anyone who's ready to take on debt.)

Take the work. Work, work, work. School is a great thing to do when the market turns way, way south. This is not that time in our field.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have a high school diploma and one semester of college.

</comment><comment><USER5> While the advice you get here is likely to lean towards devaluing formal education, let me take a different tack.

Masters programs in CS at some universities can offer courses, research, and experiences that you can't get in some undergrad programs. Probably a lot of this could be picked up 'on the job' or with some self-study, but I learned a lot in my master's program and enjoyed it immensely.

So, if you have the means and the time and the interest, consider master's study. It's much easier to do when young and unattached than later. But of course this depends a lot on your life and work situation.

</comment><comment><USER6> As a batchelor's degree with a very satisfying career in the past, the value to me was not the degree itself, but the very specific knowledge and skills that I picked up in engineering school, such as

      * learning a problem-solving attitude
      * exposure to highly useful engineering practices
      * learning some things that I didn't think were useful at the time
      * deep exposure to computer programming, largely outside of class

The degree is somewhere at the bottom of my resume, but is never discussed in either job interviews or consulting engagements.

What is discussed is are the projects that I have done.

</comment><comment><USER7> Google made some splash not too long ago by stating they really do not even care about Grade Point Averages in their prospective employees. I can say that in the 18 years I've been supporting myself, through a wide range of jobs, I have never had a reference called on my behalf. I think that the education itself is all that matters. Don't worry about degrees or titles or any of the paperwork. The best way to show you can do the work is just to do the work, with no sales pitches for your abilities warranted.</comment>


WebServius - Amazon SimpleDB based, data focused API service - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/12/webservius-monetization-system-for-data-vendors.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+AmazonWebServicesBlog+(Amazon+Web+Services+Blog)

<comment><USER2> That looks very cool and useful. I just looked at the docs and it is not just for raw data. Any "raw" APIs that you have can be wrapped and Amazon does the billing, keeping 10%.

I think that Amazon is the most interesting company on the planet. If I wanted to work for a company I would apply there for a job.</comment>


Nuclear Power Will Replace Oil by 2030 (1967) - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-will-replace-oil-by-2030/ <comment><USER2> How would climate change have been affected if we eliminated coal usage 2 decades ago?</comment>


Ask HN: What is your 1 biggest business challenge or frustration? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for startup ideas, or an idea to practice my newly acquired coding skills. So, what's your 1 biggest challenge or frustration for your business? <comment><USER2> Coding. I wish I could just tell a computer what I wanted my app to do and it would write the code. I mean actually tell it, Siri style. My second biggest challenge is selling. Finding the right people to call or email, finding their contact info, keeping track of who I have called, who has responded, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> Keeping track of everything I do/need to do. I've tried a lot of web apps from every major and minor player out there, but nothing works for me. I'm about to start to write my own CRM/TODO/PM app because its the only way I will get what I need. I might even open source it if it doesn't end up too "hacky".

<comment><USER4> A Todo app, with a timetracker that opens up on the mac status bar would be perfect... I have faced the same problem for a long time, let me know if you are working this app, I would like to contribute

<comment><USER3> Thank you. I will keep it in mind. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Marketing - by far the most difficult phase to tackle if you don't have experience with it. Breaking through the noise is a major factor to success.

</comment><comment><USER6> coming up with a business idea that will make me money.

<comment><USER7> +1

I've had a few ideas, only seen one through to release and it was successful. It's made me believe I can do it, so it's just waiting for that next idea...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> traction. if your product isn't inherently viral, you need to be out hustling</comment>


Lorenzetti's Allegory of Good and Bad Government - <AUTHOR> https://flashbak.com/lorenzettis-allegory-of-good-and-bad-government-a-revolutionary-painting-for-then-and-now-373579/ <comment><USER2> wikipedia has more images[0], as somehow the article doesn't show "The Effects of Bad Government on the Country" (barren fields, burning farms, brigands/soldiers raids etc). Also, a part of the "bad government in the city" is not captioned appropriately.

I remember this from my history book in high school, it's an interesting painting, but like much of the medieval stuff it may be hard to understand with modern eyes.

A vaguely similar "good vs bad" depiction is Beer Street and Gin Lane[1], intended to show how good life would be if we just stuck to lighter alcoholic beverages.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Allegory_of_Good_and_Bad_G...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Allegory_of_Good_and_Bad_Government)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Street_and_Gin_Lane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Street_and_Gin_Lane)</comment>


Vanishing Points - Awesome Computer Vision Work - <AUTHOR> http://covector.blogspot.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Check out this video from his augmented reality post: <http://perception.inf.um.es/%7Earuiz/dynamic.avi>

</comment><comment><USER2> Great find! This sort of thing gets me really excited..</comment>


High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas: The Race to Save the Cougar Ace (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-03/ff_seacowboys?currentPage=all

<comment><USER2> Wired used to have fantastic long forms like this, I wonder what happened. Some of my favorites:

Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street [http://archive.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant?...](http://archive.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant?currentPage=all)

The Untold Story of the World's Biggest Diamond Heist [http://archive.wired.com/politics/law/magazine/17-04/ff_diam...](http://archive.wired.com/politics/law/magazine/17-04/ff_diamonds)

Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine [http://archive.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/17-10/mf...](http://archive.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/17-10/mf_deadhand)

Art of the Steal: On the Trail of World's Most Ingenious Thief [http://www.wired.com/2010/03/ff_masterthief_blanchard/all/1](http://www.wired.com/2010/03/ff_masterthief_blanchard/all/1)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I thoroughly enjoyed this article in the Wired years ago. I see that it was submitted way back when, but never gained traction.

Beyond the general drama and unique work described the inclusion of a laptop wielding naval architect as part of the team was just fascinating to me.

 _' They're a motley mix: American, British, Swedish, Panamanian. Each has a specialty — deep-sea diving, computer modeling, underwater welding, big-engine repair. And then there's Habib, the guy who regularly helicopters onto the deck of a sinking ship, greets whatever crew is left, and takes command of the stricken vessel.'_

 _' Again, the Dutch called for cranes, but Titan won the contract by proposing a novel approach: It hired a naval architect to create a computer model of the ship. The model indicated that the vessel would float again if water was pumped out of the holds in a specific sequence.'_

<comment><USER3> The idea of creating the model more or less in real-time as they walk through the ship is what I find most compelling.

I want to know what laptops they're using. No way your standard sissy macbook pro is being taken out there where it can get wet and batteries might not be charged for a while.

Toughbook maybe?

<comment><USER4> I was not a salvage guy but in cargo measurement it turns out I had one of the first "laptops" on the Gulf Coast.

We used "regular" 16-digit hand calculators for regular calculations from ships' calibration tables, but when a vessel (especially heavy oil tankers) was far enough from even keel then the tables would not apply, and hand modeling was very tedious, so I developed a more realistic model on the "PC".

Radio Shack PC-2 (Pocket Computer) with accessories and case was about the size of a small laptop, including a 4-color printer-plotter, and RS-232 interface:

[http://www.trs-80.com/images/hw- pocket2-carrying.jpg](http://www.trs-80.com/images/hw-pocket2-carrying.jpg)

This was way before IBM-compatible laptop PC's were developed.

You have to board the vessel for access to its dimensional drawings, and if they were inadequate then you would take hand measurements.

My application was fundamentally way more advanced than the few oil companies doing it on a TRS-80 themselves, and that was just the calculations and conversions.

I can look back without embarrassment at my UI/UX, computer-experienced marine gagers did not yet exist, home computers still very uncommon, and most offices not yet having a computer either. Gagers still have a fairly challenging job but most are not very academically oriented, even more true decades ago.

So I made it where you just hand the portable to the gager, he hits the "ON" button, it asks the questions on the one-line LED screen, then prints the questions & his answers on the little printer and the ticket advances as the calculations proceed for each compartment.

You finished hours before the company gager, and could go back over all data & results just by looking through the ticket.

The real excitement was boarding an offshore platform in the Bahamas one time with 20' waves and the crew boat was only about 30' long. They had multiple wooden landings to accomodate the tides, one was virtually submerged, the next was slightly below the waves' crest and the third was out-of-reach at the time. A knotted rope descended from the main metal platform at the top of the ladder, draping all 3 landings. Each worker waited for the pilot to sync a wave properly, then he would quickly reverse the boat to within inches of the target landing, you step off the back of the boat grabbing the wet rope, hang & swing onto the landing as the boat drops a dozen feet the next second and he powers away to a safe distance to repeat it for the next person. Climb the ladder quick before the next wave submerges the landing you are on.

Here's the rest of the page about the TRS-80 portables:

[http://www.trs-80.com/wordpress/trs-80-computer- line/pocket/](http://www.trs-80.com/wordpress/trs-80-computer-line/pocket/)

I never had to worry about recharging my portable, it ran on AA batteries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of my favorite early long-form web journalism, along with Mother Earth, Motherboard ([http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html](http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html)) and The Untold Story of the World's Biggest Diamond Heist ([http://archive.wired.com/politics/law/magazine/17-04/ff_diam...](http://archive.wired.com/politics/law/magazine/17-04/ff_diamonds?currentPage=all))

</comment><comment><USER6> This is an amazing story. I'd totally forgotten I'd read it years ago until I clicked through. The pictures brought the whole story back to mind.

</comment><comment><USER7> i feel like this would make an amazing movie. it has everything, manly men, fast cars, technology, huge machinery, massive risks for massive rewards, officials ineffectually trying to stop the heroes, drama, pathos, a dude with a funny accent who curses in a not-quite-correct manner...

on the other hand, very few giant robots destroying exquisite cartoon cities

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure what the current status is, but it was being developed by Dreamworks. I'm sure they can Bayify it if it moves forward.

<comment><USER9> [http://www.joshuadavis.net/salvagemovie.html](http://www.joshuadavis.net/salvagemovie.html) \- can't find any better info than that, other than it'd been optioned in 2008.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This was a great article-- I originally read it on Epic magazine, which in my opinion has amazing graphics and a very interesting format:

[http://epicmagazine.com/2013/08/deep-sea- cowboys/](http://epicmagazine.com/2013/08/deep-sea-cowboys/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I remember when this article came out. I found it fascinating and engaging, although the ending was very disappointing (what happened in reality).

<comment><USER12> You mean the shredding of the cars? Those were mere pieces of recycleable metal. The good part is that the salvagers were able to prevent the leakage of 176,366 gallons of fuel into the sea.

<comment><USER11> True, there was still value in their operation. It was just a sad thing that someone died in the recovery process (only for the whole batch of cars to be written off).

<comment><USER12> Yeah, the death ofJohnson shocked me too, since it was so preventable and unnecessary. The story mentioned that every crew member had two carabiners, to be able to stay connected to a safety rope at all times. Apparently there was some moment that both Johnson's carabiners were loose the moment he slipped. It shows that in mountaineering, there is no margin for error.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Program Uses Interactive Genetic Algorithm to Help Witnesses Remember Criminals - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091005161328.htm

<comment><USER2> Our memories are notoriously unreliable, and subject to outside influence. I want to see how this would hold up in controlled experiments. Simple experiment: have a person briefly appear in a room full of students. Run each student through this process. Quantify how close the produced images were to the person's actual face.

If the faces are more fleshed out but not accurate, then that's just as bad as having a generic likeness.

There's an academic paper on the work (George et al., EFIT-V: Interactive Evolutionary Strategy for the Construction of Photo-Realistic Facial Composites, Genetic And Evolutionary Computation Conference 2009, <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1389095.1389384>), but it only mentions using the software as a trial with police departments. There's too many variables there to give me confidence in the results.

</comment><comment> a-priori If I were a clever defence lawyer I'd argue it would invalidate any later line-ups. This sounds like a stellar way to destroy a memory of a face.

Each time you show a person a face, you're adding new memory trace that will conflict with the real one. This will reduce the confidence in a later recognition task. You're also re-activating the real trace, allowing it to be disrupted. This would increase the false-positive rate in a line-up.

<comment><USER3> All good points and a subject to an experiment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A possible (somewhat sci-fi) future extension to this idea would be directly monitoring the brain of the subject, in conjunction with eye movements, in an attempt to quickly detect a subconscious signal of 'recognition' while scanning the computer-generated faces. Might be that certain signals in the brainwave (e.g. the P300 or something similar: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P300_%28neuroscience%29> ) could be used for this purpose.

</comment><comment><USER5> I bet that a web application built from this would be enormously popular.

It would also be useful as a way to create and share an online avatar likeness.</comment>


Apple please remove the WiFi download enforcement - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/kautoh/status/1153554386502737920 <comment> java-man good luck with apple listening to their users.

what clearly should be an option (disabled by default, sure) will never be one. same for headphones jack, only two ports on the wrong side of mac book air, etc.</comment>


Health Reform, taking the wrong risks? - <AUTHOR> http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2009/12/health-reform-taking-the-wrong-risks.html

<comment><USER2> True, but unfortunately not going to happen at this time.</comment>