Government and the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://patrickcollison.com/post/government-internet <comment><USER2> > 2\. Communication and publication can't be censored. Wikileaks, the Arab > Spring, and Snowden's revelations all depend on governments being unable to > prevent mass dissemination of information.

I'm a little scared that if things are allowed to continue, the NSA will get such deep level access to the web, that they will be able to censor information anywhere, in real time. They already say they want to be the "anti-virus of the Internet" or something along those lines. If they will ever be able to do what they claim now, then they'll probably be able to censor information, too.

I don't know if they actually have that capability or not, but at least that's what they say when they lobby the government for new laws and bigger budgets.

So think about what happened in DoD, where they said employees can't read TheGuardian because their computers don't have the clearance level required to learn about those things. Now extend that to the _world_ (given that they have the capability).

How hard would it be for them to say "sorry, world Internet users - you don't have the required clearance level to view those leaked documents", and censor the information for _everyone_. What happened with the Snowden leaks now, simply won't be possible anymore in the future, if their power over the Internet becomes that great.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, real-time data mining is very interesting, however real-time data _manipulation_ is far more sinister. Imagine for a moment if the middle eastern governments could "detect" when an Arab Spring is happening and they had systems that would autonomously respond by (for example) spreading propaganda and censoring _popular_ pages.

The anti-virus comparison is a misnomer as it stands to reason that such systems would be more akin to intrusion detection systems (IDSs) or intrusion prevention systems (IPSs) that are actively monitoring and isolating certain system resources and services.

<comment><USER4> While scary, I think such a system is a long ways off. It's one thing to siphon raw bits flowing through an IXP for later analysis, and another entirely to censor specific pieces of content based on keywords(assuming of course you can't or don't want to simply censor entire domains). It would require a pretty cozy relationship between government and telecoms(already in place in some countries, of course) in the form of some staff to keep afoot of new content that may need to be censored. Automating that part implies that the government would have a list of sensitive, potentially damning subjects that are not publicly known in order to preemptively censor them.

Replacing that content with propaganda would be even more complex(and potentially vulnerable to discovery).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One thing I think worth highlighting is the opening sentence. It is true that the internet and the government have been conflicting in various ways from the get-go. In point 11 he talks about the differences between industry inside knowledge and government's framework for reasoning about tech lacking in several ways. I think there is also an interesting intersection of the public's framework for reasoning about both government and the internet that is finally starting to be a stress point. Only in the last few of years have we seen the general public starting to become aware of how much government (non)action in the internet space is a big deal.

Recent stories on the NSA, Snowden, Manning, etc, and the Arab Spring have really pushed the awareness of government actions in the internet into the general public awareness. I remember previous things like DMCA and ECTRA did not make a real blip on the general public's radar. More recently however, things like SOPA were heavily discussed outside of tech circles.

Public discourse is really a place we should make our industry insider status heard as much as to/within government, and now is the time it matters.

Amusingly, the inverse is also true: more political articles have been finding their way to HN lately, because suddenly general political discourse is extremely intertwined with internet policy and tech issues.

</comment><comment><USER6> I suppose this article puts into words something that I (and I suspect many others) 'feel' without articulating: That we're a global community now and I can't possibly think any other way now†. The things that happen in America or Syria or Egypt or New Zealand or Australia affect me emotionally and they feel personal. They affect me because the web makes me feel like the person who's experience or opinion I an listening to is my neighbour. On the Internet, Syria is a few doors down from my house.

And I think this is a good thing. We all individually exist on a web in which we are all compatible. But we live on a planet of nation states that are incompatible with each other. And if anything had to change in this scenario, I would personally rather see the nation states disappear.

But then (in my opinion) there do need to be laws, and there has to be a model for those laws. So now there's another problem, whose ideals and morality should win out? The USA's? The UK's? China's?

The fact that the web is largely lawless is what I think makes it work. So perhaps the global community can prescribe it's own laws. But this is getting off my point. My point is, perhaps it should be less about "how governments control the web" and more about "How do we transition to a world without governments".

If I'm right in that thinking, the web is not just a threat to nasty nations, it's a threat to the good ones too (if there are any). If there is a transition from nation states to a planet unified by the web, with a governance that is an emergent property of the web, then there will be pain associated with that transition. But considering the shit we put up with these days, I think it's a price worth paying.

† If I hadn't seen such riches, I could live with being poor.

<comment><USER7> > And if anything had to change in this scenario, I would personally rather > see the nation states disappear.

I'd agree with you here, but what I'm afraid is that with the absence of modern nation-states, we'd get a fewer number of more centralized political institutions, rather than moving towards the ideal of more numerous decentralized and autonomous polities.

When you say:

> And I think this is a good thing. We all individually exist on a web in > which we are all compatible.

I get what you're going for here, but there's a great danger that this could be misinterpreted as a call for universalism, as some sort of idea that everyone's the same and distinctions should all be flattened or ignored. If we treat the world as an open space within which we can coordinate our own ad-hoc communities and polities based on mutual compatibility, where it exists, without being constrained by _artificial_ boundaries, we'll all be better off.

But if we don't have the facility for mapping out and adhering to _natural_ social boundaries that emerge from manifest differences in worldviews, values, intentions, and ambitions, then we'll end up with lots of incompatible ambitions attempting to realize themselves in the same space, and that can only lead to stasis and conflict.

> whose ideals and morality should win out?

Everyone's. If the interconnected world isn't a platform in which everyone can construct their lives on the basis of their _own_ values, and evolve new communities whose boundaries are defined by something more substantive than mere geographical proximity, then it just becomes an impetus to all-or-nothing conflict, which will surely ruin the world for everyone.

<comment><USER6> > we'd get a fewer number of more centralized political institutions, rather > than moving towards the ideal of more numerous decentralized and autonomous > polities.

I don't agree with you on that point I'm afraid. There is nothing more corrupt than local politics. Backhanders, bribes, virtually no transparency. I personally prefer to have my politicians in one place where a lot of people can keep an eye on them. Here in the UK, when I see people campaigning for devolution, or independence, I can't help but wonder who is going to keep an eye on these smaller, more secretive and ultimately more powerful political terror cells. I wouldn't look after a hundred kittens by having them scattered all over the place in pods of five. It would be an unmanageable task and they'd run riot.

If you start start with the assumption that every politician will abuse their power, you will a) probably be right and b) have to think differently about how best you can efficiently keep track of thousands of them.

When you describe "a platform in which everyone can construct their lives on the basis of their own values, and evolve new communities whose boundaries are defined by something more substantive than mere geographical proximity" I can't help but think think of African Warlords who have done exactly that, and it's horrific.

There must be free and fair debate, there must be the opportunity for everyone to participate equally in that debate and most importantly everyone should have a say in the administering the decisions that impact on their life. Take for example the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran etc. Their lives literally hang in the balance based on US elections, and yet they have no say in those elections. That is not fair. It is not right. I could argue that people in the middle east have a bigger right to vote in US elections because they are at greater risk form those election results, but i'd settle for them at least having an equal say as everyone else.

Your idea is essentially just a lot of smaller nation states acting in their own blinkered interests, which is the worse than what we already have. People will behave badly. People will give way to hatred. People will cheat and lie and steal and murder. And while I don't endorse a world governed by paranoia about these things, I do endorse a world where we all get an equal say in how we react to these things.

I'm not trying to aggressively shoot your comment down, so please don't imagine me sat at the other side of the internet hammering out an angry rebuttal, I thank you for taking the time to put your view out there, but we do have a clear difference of opinion and we shouldn't shy away from that. I hope I've raised my counter view with respect to you, even if I don't see the logic in your worldview.

<comment><USER7> > I don't agree with you on that point I'm afraid. There is nothing more > corrupt than local politics.

There's nothing more corrupt than _politics_. The great thing about local politics is that localities are small; excessively corrupt politics in one locality can be avoided by dealing with another locality instead, or by playing multiple polities off against each other. Centralization means less variation: no other centers of authority to turn to when the one you're dealing with goes bad, and no gaps between poles of authority to retreat to when nothing is working right.

> Backhanders, bribes, virtually no transparency.

Except for the level of transparency that clues you in to the fact that corruption is happening in the first place. The difference between local and global is in scale and distance: corruption in larger-scale and more distant institutions is harder to discover, but it's silly to suggest that the complex of motivations and incentives that generate corruption close by aren't likewise present further away.

> I can't help but wonder who is going to keep an eye on these smaller, more > secretive and ultimately more powerful political terror cells.

That's the beauty of having multiple centers of power in a society - they all keep each other in check far more effectively than the public at large can keep a single, centralized institution in check.

" _Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?_ " is a question applicable to all political systems, but it becomes more difficult to answer, not less so, as political systems become more centralized and authoritative.

> If you start start with the assumption that every politician will abuse > their power

Well, if you don't start with the more basic assumption that, given the opportunity, some people will abuse others, then what's the justification for empowering any political state in the first place? If it's actually possible to construct our relationships so as to minimize or eliminate the possibility of abuse, then we don't need politics; if it isn't possible to do that, then politics itself will be susceptible to the same flaws as any other human institution.

The solution to this dilemma is to realize that (a) it _is_ possible to formulate our interactions so as to minimize the likelihood and mitigate the impact of abuse, and that (b) the way to accomplish that is with more opportunities for _exit_ , so we can disassociate from and insulate ourselves against abusers. Centralization of power reduces opportunities for exit, and mere _voice_ isn't a sufficient substitute.

> I can't help but think think of African Warlords who have done exactly that, > and it's horrific.

I've no idea what you're referring to. Warlordism is, by definition, a repudiation of the principles I'm articulating here. Warlords aren't typically interested in protecting a varied and dynamic civil society against abuses of concentrated power; they're typically interested in concentrating power for themselves, and subordinating others to themselves.

> everyone should have a say in the administering the decisions that impact on > their life.

No; again, mere voice isn't enough. People must have the right to opt out and to reclaim responsibility for _making_ those decisions, limited only by the boundaries between their lives and others'.

> Your idea is essentially just a lot of smaller nation states acting in their > own blinkered interests

My "idea" consists of the empirical recognition that every particular grouping of human beings, no matter how ad-hoc or ephemeral, is effectively a society unto itself, and that the members of each group have the natural right to define the nature of their mutual interactions within that context without being subjected to manipulation by others outside of it.

The use of law - not policy - can function as a failsafe mechanism to prevent disputes from spilling out of their native contexts and harming third parties, or escalating into life-or-death conflicts, but that depends on law not being perverted into a system of active preemptive control over society. The century-long experiment in gradually replacing common law and equity with statutory policy and regulatory bureaucracy has been a clear failure, and one that demonstrably undermined the ability of law to function for its intended purpose.

> world where we all get an equal say in how we react to these things.

You envision a world of continuous, irresolvable conflict, then, as people with drastically different values attempt to realize them by having an "equal say" in a singular undifferentiated conceptual "space".

The real way to enable stability and prosperity in a highly diverse and complex world is precisely to protect people's ability to differentiate their own conceptual "space", as distinct from others, and to allow them maximum control over their own lives within that space, and minimum control over others'.

> but we do have a clear difference of opinion and we shouldn't shy away from > that.

Well, that's the crux of it, isn't it? The existence of this very disagreement demonstrates that universal solutions to problems aren't attainable, and attempting them causes the exact sort of escalation of conflict that we've thankfully avoided thus far precisely because - this being a merely academic discussion on the internet - neither of us is in a position to impose our own preferences on the other.

<comment><USER6> I've not ignored your comment, I've actually been thinking about it quite a lot for the past few days. Can you give me a concrete example of the kind of thing you're thinking about?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _2\. Communication and publication can't be censored._

Except in places it can.

* Turkey vs. YouTube and some Google features

* Iran vs. social, video, and news sites

* China vs. ... well, damn near everybody

* the US is even in on the act (thanks, DMCA)

See this article for more (and of course, that article hasn't been censored ... right?) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship)

This page has a decent map giving a gauge of just how much censorship is judged to be happening in a given location: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_by_country](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_by_country) ... along with a plethora of details about each country's activities. There's a link to a full page for each country, and -- sadly -- it's too much to even try summarizing here.

What's troubling is that the censorship is not decreasing, but increasing. Technologies to get around it are improving, sure, but the technologies to censor in the first places are spreading and improving as well.

The point is - there's no certainty that eventually free speech on the internet will prevail and censors (or even a fraction of them) will give up.

</comment><comment><USER9> People who spend a lot of time working with and thinking about the Internet, and not a lot of time working with and thinking about government, often fall victim to the delusion that the Internet somehow "changes everything."

It's not true in the slightest. Governments have consolidated, maintained, and lost power since the dawn of civilization. They have marshaled popular support, quashed dissenters, and brutalized their enemies. They have taken major societal changes (Industrial Revolution, advent of firearms, invention of broadcast media) and harnessed them for the perpetuation of their own power.

Governments will continue to use their central power, the power of violence, to maintain the general framework under which their power endures. The Internet won't change that at all.

<comment><USER10> I think this is THE crucial point - as long as governments have a monopoly on violence / physical force, the power of the Internet is a mere sliver in comparison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you're interested in this subject further I suggest you pick up 'Networks and States' by Martin Mueller, 2010, MIT Press. I can't recommend this book enough for anyone interested in understanding how the internet is transforming our idea of the nation state.

</comment><comment><USER12> Well laid out. My only quarrel is this: is point 10 really anything new?

<comment><USER5> None of it's really new, or insightful (as the author himself points out), but it is a nice gathering of thoughts on the matter, useful given the recent heavy inclusion of internet in public policy issues, and it's importance to average people's usage of the internet.</comment></comment>


One acre of fly larvae can produce more protein than 3k acres of cattle - <AUTHOR> https://nationalpost.com/news/world/maggots-are-the-answer-to-feeding-a-human-population-thats-heading-to-nine-billion-people#comments-area <comment><USER2> Farming is all about inputs, yes you can grow alot of fly larvie in a small space if your trucking in many tons of spent yeast or organic waste from other places, just as a 1 acre feed lot can fatten up many more cattle than a pasture system. I think there is certainly benifits to using soldier flys to breakdown waste but there is no way you can get 130 tons of protien from 1 acre without taking it from the soil or trucking in waste to feed them.

</comment><comment><USER3> wrong link, it's to the comment section of the article</comment>


Burnout - <AUTHOR> https://unicornfree.com/2015/burnout

<comment><USER2> Persistent "inability to feel it" w/r/t/ achievement and performance level you used to summon for your work can also be an early sign of depression, which is something you might want to be vigilant and proactive about.

<comment><USER3> There's a link at the bottom of the article which is a differential analysis of burnout vs. major depression. The biggest difference seems to be that depression affects all facets of one's life, but people suffering from burnout at work can still experience happiness outside of work (e.g., if they take a vacation).

<comment><USER4> Except it isn't quite accurate. It is certainly possible to experience major depression as a result of burnout. I know because I have experienced it myself. Also, a lot of the things in that differential diagnosis chart aren't correct (e.g. major depression has been shown to affect the immune system and the HPA axis).</comment></comment></comment>


Frab – free and open conference management system - <AUTHOR> https://frab.github.io/frab/ <comment><USER2> There is also Pretalx[1][2].

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

[2] [https://github.com/pretalx](https://github.com/pretalx)

</comment><comment><USER3> Not sure if it's just me:

Anytime you show a product at least include some screenshots of how it looks like somewhere. In my brief search, I couldn't find anything.

<comment><USER4> I found some in the GitHub wiki (last edited in 2013, though).

[https://github.com/frab/frab/wiki/Screenshots](https://github.com/frab/frab/wiki/Screenshots)

<comment><USER5> Look mostly accurate from my last experience with frab in 2018!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is this more geared towards educational/business conferences (where the primary motivation is speakers disseminating information to large groups of people) can it do more entertainment conferences or fan cons with booths and a show floor and the like?

Edit: I just realized that I meant to say "conventions" for the second part, and also that there's a lot more crossover than I would have originally thought.

<comment><USER7> I believe it is more focused on educational conferences. the CCC uses this for all its conferences, including Congress and Camp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thank you for writing and sharing - I especially like the feature for a call for papers.

I'm adding Frab to a list of Meetup alternatives and related meeting software:

[https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/social_network_plan/b...](https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/social_network_plan/blob/master/docs/ideas/alternatives/meetup.md)

<comment><USER9> Pretalx was also mentioned in the comments

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It is so nice to see this on here. I started frab way back for FrOSCon, a german free and open source software conference (which you should totally attend if you can make it!).

I stopped contributing when I stopped organizing FrOSCon, but thankfully Mario, the current maintainer, has picked it up and he does a tremendous job ever since. Also a big thank you to all contributors.

</comment><comment><USER11> This system is regularly used by the German CCC to organize their conferences.

</comment><comment><USER12> From Frab's schema.rb:

      create_table "people", force: :cascade do |t|
        # ...
        t.string "first_name", limit: 255, default: ""
        t.string "last_name", limit: 255, default: ""
        t.string "gender", limit: 255
        # ...
      end

Our schema has a similar table, but with "prefix" instead of "gender", where on the front end a list pops down with Mr., Ms., etc. We just use the prefix to form the full name.

I wonder where the need to track gender comes from in such an app. We manage events and conferences too, but gender hasn't come up beyond the salutation. Since they do care about gender maybe they will soon also want _pronoun_ and _possessive_pronoun_ columns.

<comment><USER13> The "first name, last name" fields are worse, IMO.

\- It doesn't apply for many cultures.

\- The only justification to collect them separately is to link with third- party data.

\- They should stop playing around and just ask me what they want to know, "How would you like to be addressed?"

<comment><USER14> > It doesn't apply for many cultures.

I'm struggling to come up with a list of those.

Middle names are definitely not universal, sure, but I can't seem to find a list of cultures that can't map down to "first name, last name".

Iceland, Indonesia, Turkey, Ethiopia, everything I've come across seems to have adopted some superset of "first name, last name" in the last hundred years.

> The only justification to collect them separately is to link with third- > party data.

In Japan, many organizations are required to collect this for legal compliance.

> They should stop playing around and just ask me what they want to know, "How > would you like to be addressed?"

That is a good thing to ask -- and certainly suitable for generating nametags! -- but I can still see many cases for needing to have a legal name. Generating receipts, etc.

<comment><USER15> > I can't seem to find a list of cultures that can't map down to "first name, > last name".

It's the meaning of them that's mainly the problem. In western cultures, the first name is your given name and the last name is your family name. In eastern cultures the first name is your family name and the last name is your personal name.

So without more information, you don't know whether to call them "Mr [first name]" or "Mr [last name]". If you don't know what to call them after they've filled in the name fields in your form, that's a pretty fundamental failure.

> I can still see many cases for needing to have a legal name.

Sure, but first name / last name is not a good way to do it.

<comment><USER16> > In eastern cultures the first name is your family name and the last name is > your personal name.

First name and last name are bad proxies for given name and family name. Anyone from an Eastern culture filling in an English form knows or should know that. If they don't, it's mostly their fault.

> So without more information, you don't know whether to call them "Mr [first > name]" or "Mr [last name]".

You call them "Mr [last name]".

This is mostly an imagined problem, and it goes away if you ask for "first name/given name" and "last name/surname", which removes any ambiguity.

(I happen to have an Eastern name, so I did not call it an imagined problem because I knew nothing about it.)

<comment><USER15> > First name and last name are bad proxies for given name and family name.

It sounds like you are agreeing with me here.

> Anyone from an Eastern culture filling in an English form knows or should > know that. If they don't, it's mostly their fault.

A bad form design collects bad data and it's the fault of the person filling it in? How about we just use better form fields?

> This is mostly an imagined problem, and it goes away if you ask for "first > name/given name" and "last name/surname", which removes any ambiguity.

If you acknowledge that this ambiguity can be resolved by changing what you are asking, why are you arguing this point? Just use better form fields.

> (I happen to have an Eastern name, so I did not call it an imagined problem > because I knew nothing about it.)

I have a western name and my name is backwards on all sorts of documents and I've been called "Mr Jim" a huge number of times because of this issue. It's not mostly imagined, it's extremely common in my experience.

If you want to know their legal name, ask for their legal name. If you want to know what you should call them, ask what you should call them. First name / last name are not good fields for this and the solutions are simple.

<comment><USER16> > If you acknowledge that this ambiguity can be resolved by changing what you > are asking, why are you arguing this point? Just use better form fields.

I mean, it's a very simple cosmetic fix and has no bearing on the schema. I thought you were arguing that the first name / last name model is fundamentally broken, but I guess you were not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Anyone reviewed how it compares to indico or eventbirght?

<comment><USER18> Or easy chair: [https://www.easychair.org/](https://www.easychair.org/)

<comment><USER19> Or OpenConferenceWare: [http://openconferenceware.org/](http://openconferenceware.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> doo people have open source recording gig ? to ensure nice sound and synced slides ?

<comment><USER21> Have a look at what we use at [https://fosdem.org](https://fosdem.org) [0][1]. In terms of software, a crucial component is voctomix [2], using it as a headless video mixer. Another invaluable component is nginx-rtmp [3] for streaming.

We made a heavy push to get all of this packaged in Debian. It's a surprisingly powerful combination.

[0] [https://github.com/FOSDEM/infrastructure/tree/master/ansible...](https://github.com/FOSDEM/infrastructure/tree/master/ansible/playbooks/roles) [1] [https://github.com/FOSDEM/video/blob/master/instructions/FOS...](https://github.com/FOSDEM/video/blob/master/instructions/FOSDEM_AV_manual.pdf) [2] [https://github.com/voc/voctomix](https://github.com/voc/voctomix) [3] [https://github.com/arut/nginx-rtmp-module/](https://github.com/arut/nginx- rtmp-module/)</comment></comment>


IPhone & Apple Mail Privacy Hole - <AUTHOR> https://secure.grepular.com/blog/index.php/2009/10/02/apple-mail-privacy-hole/

<comment><USER2> Responsible disclosure, anyone? I'm all for revealing the details of bugs so that we can learn from each other's mistakes, but at least give Apple a few weeks to patch the thing before blogging about it.

Also, I don't think the iPhone has the option to disable loading of remote content in HTML email at all (IT SHOULD), so no bug there.

<comment><AUTHOR> My iPhone running 3.1 does; Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars -> Load Remote Images -> On/Off

<comment><USER2> Woah, is that new in 3.1? I never saw it before.

It's a great improvement, but I wish there were an option to load images on a per-message basis, like on the desktop.

<comment><USER3> It's in 3.0.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think I saw something like this a long time ago (pre-leopard).

I was running Little Snitch and while reading a specific email message, Little Snitch told me Mail.app was trying to connect using port 80. I denied it, but never tracked it down.

This is different than .mac addresses -- Mail.app will connect to .mac when you receive mail from someone with a .mac address (to verify if they're online, which you can disable I believe)

</comment><comment><USER5> why is this a _serious_ privacy hole?

<comment><USER6> It is my understanding that this is a way for spammers to fish out legitimate email addresses. If the content is pulled from the server, the email address must be real.

At least, this is what I tell my clients when recommending turning off HTML content from untrusted email sources.

<comment><USER7> Correct. If I send a specially formatted email to an iPhone or Apple Mail user and they read it, completely transparently to them, I will be get "notification" of when they read it and what IP address they read it from. Even if they tell their client to not load remote images and to not honour read receipts.

<comment><USER8> And then they just put it in spam folder and what do you do with this information (They read it from this IP)? Sure, you know that email address is live and active, but what good is that info?

<comment><USER2> Actually, they make the request to a unique URL which is tied to your email address and that particular "campaign", letting the sender know that you opened and read the email — and that you're probably a good person to send loads more spam to.

<comment><USER8> The problem of spam email is largely solved though for people who are using the right tools.

I don't see it as a big deal personally if a sender of email finds out if it was opened or not.

<comment><USER2> Regardless of how good spam filters are today, not opening the emails leaves you with less spam, and a lower chance of false positives/negatives in the long term.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


World's oldest intact shipwreck discovered in Black Sea - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/oct/23/oldest-intact-shipwreck-thought-to-be-ancient-greek-discovered-at-bottom-of-black-sea <comment><USER2> I wonder what happened to the previous oldest intact shipwreck discovered by Robert Ballard in Black Sea: [http://press.nationalgeographic.com/2003/01/16/black-seas- ol...](http://press.nationalgeographic.com/2003/01/16/black-seas-oldest- shipwreck-found-on-ballard-expedition/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Do researchers from disciplines like history and marine biology ever pool their resources for missions like this, just to explore uncharted areas of the ocean deep to discover what's down there? It seems like there's so much opportunity across so many fields to discover new things by exploring the oceans.

<comment><USER4> Black Sea is dead below 100-150m due to lack of oxigen - there is no live there, and this is the reason why we can find preserved recks from 2400 years ago.

Edit: so there is no much interest from maritime biology.

<comment><USER5> One more issue is that it's prohibitively expensive and very challenging technically to explore the bottom of oceans and seas properly. Any exploration needs _a lot_ of support from the surface, equipment that can stand a very taxing environment (perhaps more so than in space), and the water covered parts of the planet are _huge_.

Unless it's for oil very few bother surveying under those bodies of water.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The accompanying video shows divers inspecting a wreck, but I take it this is not the wreck from the article: this lies at over a mile deep.

<comment><USER7> The photo of the wreck from the article and the wreck in the video are very different. The video has nothing to do with the latest find.

Note also that one of the divers in the video is silting badly towards the end. I don't think that those are professional archeologist divers in the video.

<comment><USER8> It's weird, they appear to be tec divers, yet you're right.. the photographer (two off-camera strobes) goes ahead and ruins viz with a couple of kicks?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 2400 years ago? That pretty much coincides with the Late Bronze Age Collapse, a time period we have very fragmentary textual evidence from. This could be a very exciting find.

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

<comment><USER10> 1200-1150 BC is 3168-3218 years ago, not 2400 years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How did they find this? It's over 1 mile below the surface, so was this some kind of submarine / automated rover or a scan from the surface?

<comment><USER12> Shipwrecks usually show up well on sonar scans. Lots of the worlds oceans have been scanned looking for good hiding places for submarines, and looking for enemy submarines hiding in said places.

Not many of those scans are public, but sometimes researchers are tipped off where to look for wrecks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Many believe the real reason behind the Trojan War was the control of the Bosphorus Strait that ships like this had to cross to reach the Black Sea from Greece.

<comment><USER14> To add: No

It was the Dardanelles (the Bosphorus is quite far off, though just as important).

You can (as usual) read a bit and find some starting articles on the wikipedia page: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dardanelles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dardanelles)

<comment><USER15> The most interesting thing I learned from that wiki hole you just sent me down: Xerxes apparently threw irons at, whipped, branded, and had his soldiers shout at the Dardanelles. That must have been quite a show.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not to brag about it, but those things get me a little annoyed. Not a single word that this is found near Bulgaria territory, if i am not mistaken. If something is found near Murica or Greatest Britain of all, we will be reading a different titles.:)

</comment><comment><USER17> "The five metre (75ft) vessel..."

Perhaps fifteen feet?

<comment><USER18> Seems they corrected pretty quickly, but yeah funny.

<comment><USER19> At this point these ft and weird date formats are more like just annoying...

<comment><USER20> Go on, I'll bite. Which date format in the article is weird?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cell Phones That Learn the Sounds of Your Life - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/09/07/10/1835252/Cell-Phones-That-Learn-the-Sounds-of-Your-Life?from=rss <comment><USER2> This brings me to an off-topic idea along the same lines:

Have your phone record everything with a rolling buffer of the last 5 minutes or so. If you ever have a important conversation, or get in a problematic situation, or just want to remember what someone said... you can just press a button and have the recorded buffer be saved (or listened back).

 _Press to retrieve the last 5 minutes of sound_

<comment><USER3> Assuming your phone is plugged into an A/C charger at all times, sure, why not.

<comment><USER4> They used a jailbroken iPhone to run the app in background, but the paper gives no detail on the battery life they got.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting idea. Better to run it in the background though so you can still use other apps on your phone. Hopefully they'll make an Android or a WinMo version that can do this.</comment>


Homo sapiens evolved within a set of interlinked groups living across Africa - <AUTHOR> https://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/fulltext/S0169-5347(18)30117-4 <comment><USER2> I wish others who know more about this human morphology would comment. It's very interesting and could upset our current understanding about how we all got to where we are.

They posit we did not sprout from a single region of Africa, but rather ancestors of our species interbred across regions at varying rates and all that eventually resulted in homo sapiens.

All the interbreeding happened all thought 500k to 40k ya --which is pretty close to when people began spreading to other continents already.

Pretty wild.</comment>


Let's have no managers, instead of managers with no engineering experience - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/lets-have-no-managers-instead-of-managers-with-no-engineering-experience-e8b7cd29d398 <comment><USER2> Programmer anarchy, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk- CF7klLdA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk-CF7klLdA)</comment>


Google will punish sites that use annoying pop-up ads - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/23/12610890/google-search-punish-pop-ups-interstitial-ads <comment><USER2> Does this mean they'll get rid of their own popup ad:

       Get to Google faster.
       Switch your default search engine to Google.
       Yes, show me.

There's not even a "No" option.

(Google _is_ my default search engine. I just have their tracking blocked, so they can't check this. Lame.)

<comment><USER3> Watch live TV with YouTube Red.

<comment><USER4> Wait, youtube red or youtube tv? Because one of those is a lot more expensive than the other.

<comment><USER3> One of my truisms is that Google is bad at product, so for all I know, pricing aside, those two are the same thing.

<comment><USER4> They're too busy having google music and youtube red already being the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Google is very concerned about ads that visually block text content. But somehow forcing ads in front of videos on YouTube isn't the same exact thing?

Both force an ad to be looked at before granting you access to the content you came for. I don't get the distinction.

<comment><USER6> Not to defend the ad industry, but I don't think these are equivalent. YouTube ads don't block content so much as they delay it, much like inline ads.

The equivalent YouTube ad would be if it started playing and didn't pause the video you're trying to watch.

<comment><USER5> Not sure I understand. Both are an overlay blocking content. I suspect Google would still punish an interstitial overlay with a countdown timer that dismissed it. If you don't click, YouTube sometimes makes you watch 30+ seconds of ads.

Here's Google's post about it: [https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/08/helping-users- easi...](https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/08/helping-users-easily- access-content-on.html)

<comment> vertex-four I've seen a couple of five minute long ads on Youtube. I really doubt anyone intentionally watches them.

<comment><USER7> To be honest I've seen a couple advertisements that I watched the full ~5 minutes. Both were game trailers that were really interesting. I would have rather had a "click here to view the actual trailer video instead of the ad version" button though. I was sold after the first 2 minutes, but couldn't see the full name of the game until the end.

<comment><USER8> Game trailers as ads?

Over 95% of the stuff I watch on Youtube is gameplays, collagehumor and tech reviews, yet all my ads are diapers or clothing softeners. I've no idea why their algorithm sucks so much for my account.

<comment><USER9> Unless they figure you're already going to buy it and don't bother targeting you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Will they also punish those websites with "activate notifications" pop ups?

I'm so tired of those and there seems no way of blocking, even after blocking notifications in Chrome settings.

<comment><USER11> Firefox let's you permanently block a site from asking for the notification permission

<comment><USER12> I've seen a number of sites prompting via a modal that _isn 't_ the browser's built-in functionality. If you say no, it just prompts again in a day or two. If you say yes, _then_ you get the built-in (blockable) "enable notifications?" prompt.

<comment><USER13> Most notably Facebook

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I work for an e-commerce company. This absolutely brutalized our sales until we made significant changes to our layout.

I understand that this instance is seen as a net positive for the end user, but Google should not have the power to force websites to conform to whatever Google decides is the new standard, or become irrelevant.

The end user should be deciding what is and isn't worthwhile content, or where to shop, or what have you. Not Google.

<comment><USER15> Not you either.

If people come in through Google because they are searching for something and instead of arriving at the content that was advertised in search results, see a content covering popup, that's not really informed decision making. I think Google has legitimate right to rank sites that do this lower.

<comment><USER16> That's more ok for a smaller outfit, but now that Google is abusing their monopolistic market position it's not as ok.

Not to worry, the days of the U.S. government busting up monopolies seem behind us.

<comment><USER17> If users heard there were better results elsewhere though, they would switch from Google. However, it is more likely that by doing this Google prevents itself from being taken over by a competitor that creates this feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is from over a year ago

<comment><USER19> Google later confirmed that the update went live in Jan:

[http://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-rolling- mobile-i...](http://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-rolling-mobile- intrusive-interstitials-penalty-yesterday-267408)

I actually just added a full-screen video popup to a site a few days ago, and I made it so that it won't appear to googlebot. This wasn't for deceptive purposes, just because it wasn't relevant. I only show the video once to users, and it doesn't appear when they go back to the site...it's just a walkthrough of our products, which many people seem to need. I suspect many sites will check for googlebot and not show their popups to avoid this penalty.

<comment><USER20> Showing something different to GoogleBot than your users is against terms of service, all good until you get caught.

<comment><USER21> You're not getting "caught", and Google can fuck right off with any "terms of service" that I never agreed to about how I respond when they scrape my site without permission.

I know that there are practical concerns here, but Google has done a _masterful_ job of shaping the conversation so that many people think anything not sanctioned by Almighty Google with regard to SEO (let alone actual "blackhat" tactics) is illegal or immoral.

<comment><USER22> You're giving permission to scrape by way of having a page accessible to the general public. If googlebot is bothering you so much, install a two line robots.txt and it'll go away.

<comment><USER23> robots can ignore your /robots.txt.

<comment><USER22> _Google_ bot, and every other search engine robot of note. Putting a page up on the public internet includes the risk that it may be visited.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> How about the sites with the obnoxious "sign up for our newsletter" pop over?

</comment><comment><USER25> If they can punish those Sumo Me fullscreen popups that ask for your email everytime you're 2 seconds into the page, that would be great.

</comment><comment><USER26> This was something from January (2017) and trailed in 2016.

It also covers the adsense product - so using google product can affect your google rank.

HOWEVER there are many many news websites that have not been penalised despite a full range of pop ups, interstitial and screen take over adverts.

Anyone from Google able to explain why there is such a discrepancy?

</comment><comment><USER27> Any idea what would happen to chat boxes that pop up on companies websites? they don't block the content and are there to interact with customers (think olark). Does anyone know if that would lead to lower search ranking as well?

</comment><comment><USER28> It doesn't matter, ad blocking is here to stay and expand, and it's a ticking clock on this nonsense. How many HN users ever see an ad at this point?

<comment><USER29> If some people get it their way and the web becomes like a binary blob, it might become harder to block ads across the board.

<comment><USER28> That is a terrifying proposition, but it might also be the required impetus for an alternative to the web actually taking off, and eventually, over.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Google will take a shot at a 1990's problem that desktop browsers have done away so long ago, that people hardly remember?

This seems rather analogous to digging up a corpse to give it a spiteful kick in the ribs and bury it again.

Given all the SEO spam in the Google search index, it is a misplaced priority to make a target out of sites with popups.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is good. Also, can they punish sites that download 50MB of bullshit before showing a word on the page?

<comment><USER32> They do that with amp.

<comment><USER22> And people scream about it, even though it's an unambiguously better experience for the user .

<comment><USER5> That's how a trojan horse works. It has to have an outward reason to invite it in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is great. Ideally you look at the % of the page with actual content and % of the page with 'everything else' and sort by % content. Hopefully, this would motivate sites to compete with one another for cleaner UX.

</comment><comment><USER34> i dont know why they always says this and never fulfill. search 'free porn' and youll see pornhub.com and xnxx.com and they have popups but never get deranked.

<comment><USER12> They may well be penalizing those sites, but in the porn world, _everyone 's_ using those sorts of abusive ads, and being _equally_ bumped down in rank.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I wonder how they detect if something is annoying.

</comment><comment><USER29> How can sites punish Google? I guess they could switch to non-popup ads that aren't powered by Google...

</comment><comment><USER36> While I hate ads, I also think google has way too much power already, and this is not a healthy development.

</comment><comment><USER37> That is laughable. They push full screen pop-up ads within AdSense itself...

<comment><USER38> Is this true? Afaik I've never seen full screen Google ads (or perhaps I have, but just didn't identify them as such).

<comment><USER26> They do and have said it would be a negative ranking factor.

So yes, one google product can result in a penalty with another. You will probably make a few quid more on adsense though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Can they please also punish sites that cover whole page with that stupid cookie warning, thanks.

<comment><USER40> The legally required one?

<comment><USER23> ...that wouldn't even be necessary if they didn't try to mine the marrow out of you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> 2016 story FYI.

</comment><comment><USER42> Like this one I get every now and then across all of their services? [http://i.imgur.com/f5NS6GQ.png](http://i.imgur.com/f5NS6GQ.png)

<comment><USER43> I wouldn't call that an ad. Nor would I condemn Google occasionally reminding users to check their privacy settings. In fact, I encourage it.

<comment><USER44> That's not google reminding you of privacy settings (in fact if you want to change those this menu is highly impractical with a lot of nesting). This is google making you agree with their T&C to go any further.

<comment><USER43> Isn't that effectively a legal requirement? That users must make some sort of actual confirmation step to acknowledge the terms for them to be legally enforceable?

I mean, look at my submission/comment history, I'm literally _the_ voice of Google criticism on this website. But it's hard to see how this little diversion has to do with pop-up ads. It's not advertising, first and foremost.

<comment><USER42> I don't know of any websites that force me to agree to a privacy policy so I can access it while logged off.

<comment><USER45> Most websites aren't being fined billions by your government!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Coming weeks after headless Chrome is released, wonder if there is a connection.

<comment><USER47> Not sure what you mean. Google using Chrome headless for crawling? I'm sure their crawling infrastructure was already more than capable.

<comment><USER46> How else would they detect popups?

<comment><USER47> I'm sure by now Google wouldn't need Chrome headless to be released for them to have that capability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Not as bad as Google punishing sites that host conservative/controversial authors and viewpoints:

[http://www.thelibertyconservative.com/google-issues- ultimatu...](http://www.thelibertyconservative.com/google-issues-ultimatum-to- the-liberty-conservative-censor-your-content-or-lose-all-ad-revenue/)</comment>


Jogger accidentally crosses U.S. border from B.C., gets detained for 2 weeks - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/jogger-accidentally-crosses-u-s-border-from-b-c-gets-detained-for-2-weeks-by-authorities-1.4717060 <comment><USER2> We really need to figure out how to get to a stateless, borderless society, and end this kind of absurdity. There is NO justification, none, zero, zilch, nada, for somebody being detained for two weeks for crossing an imaginary line while running on a beach. It's not just absurd, it's beyond absurd.

<comment><USER3> > _...crossing an imaginary line..._

But it's not an imaginary line, it's a line that two democratic countries agreed to create to separate them. She inadvertently crossed _one of the most important lines that exists_ , a line that demarcates two sovereign countries that hold wildly different world views. Until such a stateless utopia manifests itself we still need these lines.

I agree on the two week detention being absurd. It should have taken less than a few hours to sort things out.

<comment><USER2> _But it 's not an imaginary line, it's a line that two democratic countries agreed to create to separate them._

Sorry, but I can't help but read that as "it's not an imaginary line, it's an imaginary line".

 _She inadvertently crossed one of the most important lines that exists, a line that demarcates two sovereign countries_

A case can be made that "sovereign countries" are imaginary constructs that should be abolished, along with their imaginary lines of demarcation.

I mean, I understand where you're coming from, but what I'm saying is that elevating that line to some concrete status is rooted in a worldview which has no objective reality. We _can_ abolish borders, we just need to come together and muster up the will to do it. Which means, in part, finding solutions to all the problems the statists will use as arguments for preserving their lines.

<comment><USER3> > _A case can be made that "sovereign countries" are imaginary constructs that > should be abolished_

An exceedingly weak case can be made. It makes for a fun thought experiment but it falls apart really quickly.

Say someone did manage to abolish all the states, why would that not just be the conqueror establishing a new global state? How would you enforce the rule _no states allowed_? Who would enforce it? If there was no global state to enforce the rule, what stops someone like me from organizing a state and easily conquering the stateless?

> _...elevating that line to some concrete status is rooted in a worldview > which has no objective reality_

I'm curious what worldview you think is rooted in objective reality? To me a world where everyone just gets along and lives in cooperative communes is lacking a foundation in reality.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of the state. I do however view it as a necessary evil. Remember, ultimately the state is still just people. Any gripe you have with the state is just a gripe against people with power. Saying that nobody should hold power is a cop out.

The hard part of organizing the human race is trying to determine who should organize us. To that end it seems like a democratic state is more desirable than a hopelessly disorganized commune.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can't help but feel like there's some missing information here. One piece of information that's missing from the headline but not the article is that the jogger was not a Canadian citizen, which may have complicated things, but doesn't seem like it should have complicated things so much that she needed to be detained for two weeks.

One possibility is that the jogger not only wasn't a Canadian citizen, but may not have been a fluent english-speaker either.

This still seems screwed up though.

</comment><comment><USER5> Sounds like the kind of stunts Iran pulls on tourists from time to time when they try to make a political statement.

</comment><comment><USER6> >>Roman, a citizen of France who had travelled to Canada to visit her mother in B.C. and work on her English, didn't have any government-issued ID or travel permits on her.

Ok. Free legal advice: If you a citizen of country A visiting relatives in country B, don't go anywhere near country C without your passport. US authorities acted very reasonably here. Two weeks is not a long time considering she needed confirmation from multiple countries.

<comment><USER7> Two weeks is _not_ reasonable for someone who presumably could've walked over & back, at an official crossing, with instantaneous review of her passport/eligibility.

Sure, an improper entry adds some complication. But if her story checks out – passport available for review, low signage at the crossing, in jogging wear, video shows no suspicious packages, well-established addresses/education/career – then perhaps 24-48 hours would be reasonable.

I'm not uniquely blaming US border authorities here – if Canada wouldn't take her back within 24 hours, as someone with proper documents who had just previously been there legally, they share the blame in creating an unreasonable system.

<comment><USER8> Except she "didn't have any government-issued ID or travel permits on her." Her passport was not available for review.

They let her contact her mother, who brought her passport. All that was left was for Canada to say she was in Canada legally.

So, Canada does deserve part of the blame. The article says her mother rushed to the detention center with her passport and was told to submit it to Immigration Canada. I have no idea why it took two weeks for officials on both sides to determine she could go back to Canada; but, it sounds like there was some sort of delay on the Canadian side. Of course, neither side will comment on the case.

<comment><USER7> The passport was available as soon as the relative reached the detention center – strongly implied to be the same day as the arrest. That's when I'd consider the 'reasonableness' clock to have started.

The Google Map attached to the story, with photos and annotated positions of the beach and nearest border sign, are highly suggestive her explanation was credible, and should have been self-evidently so to agents on the ground.

As w citizen of a country with visa-free travel to the US, the only question of Canada that seems reasonable would be something like: "Let us know if this person is a fugitive; if we don't hear from you in 12 hours, we'll set them free in the U.S." Then she could walk back to Canada at an official crossing with her passport, and Canada could object to that re-entry if necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This looks more like a case of entrapment. There was no indication that there is a line not to be crossed and this is a large public beach.

It makes me angry to see a guest of our country (yes Canada) treated this way by our neighbor. You people have to get your shit together and stop treating your friends like criminals.

</comment><comment><USER10> How is this hacker news?</comment>


A data science investigation of IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic and Fandango - <AUTHOR> https://medium.freecodecamp.org/whose-reviews-should-you-trust-imdb-rotten-tomatoes-metacritic-or-fandango-7d1010c6cf19 <comment><USER3> I have many problems with this analysis, perhaps enough to write my own blog post, but I am lazy so I will just outline my disagreements here (at least for now).

First: I claim that what we seek in a movie rating is information about whether we will like the movie, and that this can be formalized as the expected KL-divergence (information gain) between the Bayesian posterior distribution (probability of enjoying the movie conditional on its rating) and the prior distribution (probability you would enjoy a randomly selected movie). Of course, this will depend on your taste in movies, especially how much it correlates with others. But, we can _bound_ it by taking the Shannon entropy of the rating distribution: there is no way we can get more information from a rating than this! It is this bound that allows us to penalize the distributions that are heavily biased towards one side of a discrete scale, like Fandango. However, the "ideal" shape in this context is far from a Gaussian - it is uniform! The uniform distribution can also be justified as being calibrated such that the quantile function is linear - <USER2> score of 90/100 from a uniform distribution means a 90th-%ile movie. Determining a quantile is often a transform we try to perform intuitively on ratings so such a transform being trivial seems useful.

Second: The Gaussian distribution does not have bounded support! That is, a rating scheme with what you claim as the "ideal" distribution would have _some_ ratings with values that are negative or otherwise "off the scale". Not so ideal! If you wanted to model movie-goodness on an unbounded scale such that a Gaussian would have sense, then you should transform that scale into a bounded scale, eg with a logistic function, yielding an "ideal" shape of a logitnormal distribution, which incidentally can fit the strange bimodal Tomatometer distribution quite well. Even if you specifically wanted a unimodal, bell-shaped distribution, at least pick a bounded one like the beta distribution.

Third: setting aside which distribution you want to penalize distance from or why, dividing the space into three arbitrary intervals to facilitate the comparison seems ridiculous. There is already a perfectly good metric on probability distributions, the mutual information.

<comment><USER4> Along the lines you suggest, a while ago I took IMDB's ratings and used their emperical cumulative distribution function to "flatten" them into something more useful, percentile scores:

[http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2006-01-17-mining-gold-from- th...](http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2006-01-17-mining-gold-from-the-internet- movie-database-part-1.html)

This was about a decade ago, so I'd expect the resulting decoder ring to be somewhat miscalibrated for today's movie ratings. But the same process would be straightforward to apply to a more up-to-date data set of ratings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another pitfall to be wary of in analyses like these is that imdb's ratings _change_ over time. New releases typically have inflated scores that regress over time. Ideally, this sort of analysis shouldn't use anything under a year or two old, so using _only_ movies from 2016 and 2017 puts this particular study off to a really bad start.

<comment><USER6> But isn't that the case for all of these websites, not just IMDB?

<comment><USER7> Rotten tomatoes/meta-critic ratings don't change anymore after a month or so, unlike IMDB where newer movies are trending downward for at-least a year or two.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was disappointed by the 'data science' in this article. From selecting distribution as a criterion for the qualitry of a metric, for using Pearson correlation with non normal data, for using non correlation with Fandango as tie-breaking criterion, for failing to use external criteria (e.g. ticket sales) to validate or compare metrics, and to be picky, for failing to discuss (for example) generalized lin models with link functions to deal with non normal error distributions.

</comment><comment><USER9> I did a similar analysis a year and a half ago in which I found that yes, IMDb movie ratings are not uniform while RT/MetaCritic are, but that's only part of the story. All forms of movie ratings are actually poor predictors of box office success (especially with Indies/Documentaties; I'd love to look at rating/BO data again while faceting by genre of movie) (full blog post: [http://minimaxir.com/2016/01/movie-revenue- ratings/](http://minimaxir.com/2016/01/movie-revenue-ratings/))

The Four Point Scale ([http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FourPointScale](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FourPointScale)), while a problem from a utilitarian point of view, is still practical from a _consumer psychology_ point of view, which is why the popular ratings systems won't change easily.

<comment><USER10> I guess it doesn't surprise me that a fan rating site like IMDb skews high. While there are films that elicit strong negative reactions, on average I would think that people see and rate films that they expect to like. I know that there are a vast number of movies out there I would never expect to enjoy; mostly, I just ignore them. If I'm going to spend a couple hours watching something I almost certainly have at least neutral to mildly positive expectations going in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So, the question I would ask is does Metacritic include reviews of movies that are not in IMDB, or vice-versa? That could definitely skew the scores.

The second question I would ask is whether or not there is a relatively simple transform that could make the IMDB and maybe even the Fandango scores more uniform in their distribution, over the same set if movies?

<comment><USER12> Seriously doubt that Metacritic would have movies that IMDB would not, as Metacritic entries exist, ostensibly, when a movie is reviewable. IMDB has listings for every kind of movie project (in-development, pre-production).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm not sure that the justification for normality applies when considering that movies across different historical periods may be regarded as having a different average quality. Therefore the distribution across historical time would not be stationary.

That said, I've always preferred metacritic's scores over the others.

</comment><comment><USER14> Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB and Metacritic are owned by content distributors/creators, Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes are owned by Comcast/Time Warner, Amazon owns IMDB while CBS owns Meta-critic.

It's no coincidence the accuracy of ratings sites have deteriorated over the past few years, one of the most glaring violations of trust has been Rotten Tomatoes pre-certifying movies as "Fresh" and keeping it so despite aggregated reviews which would contradict a "Fresh" rating. And the even more troubling trend of "Sponsored" movies like Step receiving the certification.

It should come as no surprise the number of newly released Certified Fresh Films is increasing despite the quality of films at the box office decreasing

<comment><USER15> Sadly... so much of what we get these days is manipulated. Can hardly wait for how big business plans to tweak "AI" to further muddy the info we receive./s

I usually first go to Wikipedia and get a summary of the critical reviews, length of film, some other stats. Head over to IMDB for a synopsis of the film (wikipedia doesn't do summary very well, focusing instead on entire plot). Maybe skim over a couple of user reviews (both positive and negative).

If it looks interesting, I'll head over to Youtube and watch the trailer. It's always the trailer that decides for me. Having watched plenty of films over the years, I pick up a tremendous amount of info from a 2-3 minute trailer.

<comment><USER16> You might as well watch the movie instead of doing all that then :-)

<comment><USER15> Honestly, it takes all of 5 minutes:) Saves me from throwing time and money away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Cinephile here and I cannot follow any ranking for a non popular movie and for blockbusters I can't either. I don't buy that you can have a good ranking for everyone. You should separate in different clusters. For example, Wonder woman score at Metacritic? 76. Are you kidding me?

BTW this is my shared ranking: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ojCTmnu8-uIXxnas142M...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ojCTmnu8-uIXxnas142MAksw38qBJjgkmdDtU4YQ2OU/edit?usp=drivesdk)

EDIT: changed 7.6 to 76 based on the comment below.

<comment><USER10> Clearly the less mainstream your tastes are, the less useful a mainstream rating is going to be. A site can, as Netflix tries to do, adjust ratings based on expressed individual preferences but it's marginally effective in my experience.

For myself, it's fairly rare that I find myself way off from the critical consensus. I'm more likely to not care for big box office action films but, then, these aren't usually at the top of critics lists either.

<comment><USER17> The problem I see is that mainstream films scores are trivial to calculate and are pretty unusable because you just need to the see the list of the few successful films worldwide. Then you have a lengthy list of films that should be weighted in a different way.

<comment><USER10> Worldwide box office definitely skews to big budget action film though. Unless that's your thing, critic ratings are probably better.

Recommendations is a really tough problem even within a fairly narrow problem domain like film or music. I find Amazon and Netflix to mostly be pretty bad and you can be sure they've invested heavily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Whenever this sort of analysis shows on the homepage, I like to put a link to my favorite movie statistical-ranking site: [http://www.phi- phenomenon.org/](http://www.phi-phenomenon.org/)

I like it a lot and have found it valuable in figuring which movies to watch in my limited free time.

</comment><comment><USER19> There must be platforms that try to do 'graph-matching' i.e. ask a new user to rate 25-30 popular movies. Compare against scores of other users who have rated the same movies. Identify a cluster of users who rate similarly; our new user is matched with this group. So, for other movies, the user can check the mean/modal score by members in this cluster. Sound familiar?

<comment><USER20> You are loosely describing collaborative filtering [1], a very common recommendation technique.

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

<comment><USER19> Thanks for the tip. Is there any media recommendation engine that implements it?

Note though that I'm not talking about the engine itself recommending movies. It places you within a group and shows you the scoring data of like-minded reviewers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> [https://www.cinesift.com/](https://www.cinesift.com/) lets you sort by combined rating.

source: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14964701](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14964701)

</comment><comment><USER22> Can anyone explain why he preferred a lower correlation with Fandango scores as a tie-breaker between Metacritic and IMDB? I couldn't follow the argument that a lower correlation shows Metacritic has more reliable results.

<comment><USER23> I'm pretty sure there is no sound explanation. If he wanted to pick the one that was most normal he should have just found the distribution that was quantitatively most correlated with a normal distribution.

The only rub in doing this would have been deciding on what an "optimal" value for the standard deviation in a 10 point rating system is, which would have been an interesting discussion. To me, this is the most important question of this whole approach. If really big standard deviations are fine, then Rotten Tomatoes uniform distribution might turn out to be the most "normal". But he seems to have totally glossed over this important fact, which is the real difference between IMDB and the other systems. With IMBD, the standard deviation of the scores is small compared to the range of possible scores. As a result, if a movie is rated 9.0, you know its gonna be pretty damn great, and a high 9 or 10 would suggest this is one of the greatest movies ever made by some distance. That's the kind of information you can't get on a rating system where 5% of movies get 5 stars.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Byte – the game. How quickly can you translate 8-bit binary in 30s? - <AUTHOR> http://ghostsnstuff.github.io/byte/ <comment><USER2> I'm trying to look at this in Firefox 17.0.9 and am not seeing anything.</comment>


The Mondragon experiment - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

<comment><AUTHOR> The documentary about this extraordinarly successful COOP [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-obHJfTaQvw](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-obHJfTaQvw)</comment>


Dune allows running privileged instructions in userland using VT-x on Linux - <AUTHOR> http://dune.scs.stanford.edu/

<comment><AUTHOR> From the paper:

This paper introduces a new approach to application use of kernel hardware features: using virtualization hardware to provide a _process_ , rather than a _machine_ abstraction. We have implemented this approach for Linux on 64-bit Intel CPUs in a system called Dune. Dune provides a loadable kernel module that works with unmodified Linux kernels. The module allows processes to enter "Dune mode", an irreversible transition in which, through virtualization hardware, safe and fast access to privileged hardware features is enabled, including privilege modes, virtual memory registers, page tables, and interrupt, exception, and system call vectors.

...Our evaluation shows both performance and security benefits to Dune. For instance, we built a sandbox that approaches zero overhead, modified a garbage collector to improve performance by up to 40.7%, and created a privilege separation system with 3x less context switch overhead than without Dune.</comment>


Gone Forever: What Does It Take to Really Disappear? - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/vanish/2009/08/gone-forever-what-does-it-take-to-really-disappear/

<comment><USER2> When a scandal broke shortly after 1900 to the effect that John D. Rockefeller had a notorious family secret in the form of a bigamist/swindler father still living in the United States, Joseph Pulitzer offered an $8,000 reward to a press corps that utterly hated Rockefeller as a monopolist to go and locate the father. After a frenzied 18-month search, they failed to find him before he died. A Wikipedia write-up on this appears at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Avery_Rockefeller>.

This is equivalent today of the press being unable to find Bill Gates's father even after being offered a rather large monetary reward and after applying all of its vast resources to the effort - even as the father continued to live in the continental U.S.

It was a lot easier to "disappear" 100 years ago, before the advent of modern technology, than it is today. There is something vaguely _creepy_ about how one's whereabouts can so easily be tracked with the modern tools at hand.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting article, but you have to consider that the people that you'll _never_ hear from are the ones with the success stories. So they may be a lot more prevalent than you'd think!

Also, I really wonder if 10 years in jail is the right way to punish somebody that tries to reboot his life in the wrong way. His kid needs him more than he needs 10 years worth of punishment. Garner the guys wages but set him free.

<comment><USER4> Yeah what exactly are the charges? I'll I noticed were insurance fraud, and possibly identity theft (from someone who presumably wasn't at all hurt by it), plus the theft from the company. Sometimes I wonder if the punishment is a function of how hard the authorities worked to catch him and how angry they were at his antics. If he were caught the next day (even after committing all the same crimes) would he have still gotten 10 years, or a slap on the wrist?

<comment><USER5> "All" you noticed is $1.3 million in insurance fraud‽ Stealing $1.3 million dollars all by itself is up there beyond "slap on the wrist" territory. I mean, what are you proposing for stealing roughly 30 years' worth of the median American's wages (before taxes)? Six months community service?

<comment><USER3> Well, that depends on how you look at it. There are more parties whose well being here is at stake then just this guy, and besides that he is now a drain on your society, whereas if you'd put him to work you could garner his wages.

Locking him up for 10 years is just going to ruin the life of one child and cost a fortune in maintaining him.

Six months community service would be a net gain for the community, 10 years of prison is a net loss.

The function of a jail is not to take revenge, it is to keep harmful people out of society. This guy did a great job up to the point where he cracked. I'm sure he could be made to do a great job again given half a chance, and keep him under the breaking strain this time.

<comment><USER6> >The function of a jail is not to take revenge, it is to keep harmful people out of society

There have been countless words written on the subject, but one of the functions IS deterrence.

Look at it this way: you can try to launch a startup and guide it to a successful exit. If it succeeds, you get some nice cash in the bank. If you fail, you spent a few years and have no material gain to show for it.

Or, you can try to get away with a large-scale fraud. If it succeeds, you get some nice cash in the bank. If you fail, you spend 6 months doing community service and have no material gain to show for it.

Yes, it's obviously oversimplifying (ethics, experience/learning from a failed startup, what do you enjoy doing, etc.) But there has to be a significant cost of failure to prevent people from deciding it's worth a try.

<comment><USER7> You're missing a few things. The punishment of 10 years in jail _didn't_ deter him. Why? Because he was desperate and viewed this as his only way out of a desperate situation. I'm sure there are many people that attempt the same things that he did for same/similar reasons. This punishment isn't going to deter someone that thinks: (1) They have the 'system' beat (2) This is their only option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How legal is it for Amazon or Airlines to give out this information?

How legal is it for schools/companies/etc to give out information about contacts to the Police? Why is it illegal to give out the record but legal to say that there was activity?

It seems that these tactics are quite shady in terms of legalities. Why should I get a warrant for X if I can just ask his vendors?

Why would someone have to subpoena your bank records but have Amazon up for grabs so to speak?

<comment><USER3> It did say the school was subpoenaed.

But only _after_ they alerted the authorities based on a previous request for a heads up. I'm not even sure that would have held up in court here (nl). I'm sure a competent lawywer would have used that if it was possible statesside though, so what with him being convicted I take it that it is legal.

<comment><USER7> IIRC, there wasn't anything in there about him pleading guilty or not guilty... maybe there was no lawyer/trial?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What a coward - he racks up $40,000 in personal debt on his corporate account and then puts his family through the agony of mourning his death? Such a disgrace.

<comment><USER10> Not only that, he made his wife _witness_ his death. The low just got lower.

<comment><USER11> >Prosecutors accused her of being involved from the beginning, but Roberson says he isn't sure

I think I agree with the prosecutors. The set-up sounds like she was in on the plan, taking a stroll with her husband (without the child) so as to be the eye witness in the charade but I reckon they probably made a pact that if he was found out, they would protest her innocence and say he did it behind her back and swam below the frigid water until he reached another dock down stream out of sight. That would be hard to do especially for someone who sounds like he was fairly out of shape. I doubt he got his toes wet. I'd say the dog got a dipping and they said their goodbyes.

<comment><USER7> Yea. I was thinking that too. Especially his comment about 'a larger body of water.' I was thinking, "So you're a 300lbs out-of-shape guy in the middle of a friggin' lake, and you're going to swim to shore entirely underwater so that no one sees you? Gimme break!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm surprised all of these ppl stayed in the US. I would imagine it's a lot harder to track someone down if they disappeared to the other side of the world.

<comment><AUTHOR> I suppose it's quite hard to cross a border without some kind of ID.

<comment><USER13> It's also harder to blend in as a foreigner, and as an undocumented immigrant you'd have extra problems if you get into any trouble with the foreign authorities. In your home country you can blend in just by acting like everyone else.

<comment><USER14> > as an undocumented immigrant you'd have extra problems if you get into any > trouble with the foreign authorities

Pick the right country and that's not a problem at all; a couple of strategic bribes can get you out of trouble in most of the world.

<comment><USER15> I'd be interested in seeing your proof for this claim. My experience has been the opposite: a stateless individual must entirely vanish from the map.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I enjoyed reading the article, and the resulting recognition that to "really disappear" is diametrically opposed to what we'd normally seek around here:

      - Brand Ownership vs Brand Abandonment
      - Search Optimization vs Search Pessimization
      - Collect User Metrics vs Stay Out of Site Logs
      - Networking/Meetups vs Self-Imposed Exile

It was intriguing to look down that alley, but I wouldn't want to live there.

<comment><USER17> Yes, this interesting look at how hard it is to hide in a networked world. The rumor has it that at one time, the CIA manufactured new identities for their agents. I wonder how possible that would today - and especially how possible that might be tomorrow, when not only is everyone online but everyone has a record from being online a long time.

<comment><USER18> Might be easier. The more we rely on social networking, the less identity you have to manufacture by actually going out and planting evidence, and the more you can manufacture just by procedural generation at the target site.

<comment><USER19> On the other hand, the more manufactured background you have, the more likely something is to trip you up, either because you misremembered it when talking to somebody or you ran into somebody who was involved in the real world situation and knows you were not. The best way to get away with a fake past is to be vague, but not so vague as to arouse people's curiosity or suspicions.

<comment><USER20> Inconsistencies are not such a big problem. A lot of real people are inconsistent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Mr. Canoe - disappeared <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7512487.stm>

Here's some disappearing tips:

Plan before you go

Do research from different internet cafes or libraries

Tell no-one your plans

Use pay-as-you-go phones

Apply for no memberships

Cash is king

If you believe you are compromised, you are

Nice of the BBC to help us out with this information

</comment><comment><USER22> Does this article really need to be over 6 different pages?

</comment><comment><USER23> Marcus Schrenker stole his idea from an episode of the simpsons!

Good to know the navy will get to you really fast if you're really in a pickle though.

</comment><comment><USER24> Has some basic info about Steven Rambam in it, who gave an awesome talk at Last HOPE about tracking down a guy many times, many ways.

</comment><comment><USER25> It doesn't take much to disappear if you're willing to live like a pauper in the cash only economy, and you don't defraud anyone in the process of disappearing.

</comment><comment><USER17> One answer - "don't use the phone registered to you" after you "die"!

<comment><USER26> If you keep reading past the first page, it turns out that he didn't: he deliberately left it in a gas station in the hope that somebody else would pick it up and start using it -- that way the police would wind up pursuing that person and give up when that line of inquiry led to a dead end.

The first part of the plan worked, but the second part didn't -- they never tracked down the guy who picked up the phone, but the fact that the phone was being used was enough to convince the police that he was still alive.

I guess the real lesson here is that simplicity is the best policy. His plan probably sounded brilliant in his head, but made too many assumptions about the way other people would behave.

<comment><USER27> If he had just destroyed the phone (broken in the water?), then his death would have been much more plausible. Why would he leave it somewhere if he had drowned?

<comment><USER7> If you read that part of the article, it says that he abandoned it prior to his faked death (a week prior he left it at a gas station or convenience store, iirc).

(No one reading the article? what is this? slashdot?)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


In Mysterious Pattern, Math and Nature Converge (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/20130205-in-mysterious-pattern-math-and-nature-converge/

<comment><USER2> Is the evolvability of complex information systems that this article speaks of related perhaps? (was shared on here a while ago as well)

[http://nautil.us/issue/20/creativity/the-strange- inevitabili...](http://nautil.us/issue/20/creativity/the-strange- inevitability-of-evolution)

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting! Reading a bit more on the Wikipedia article, my understanding is that 'Universality' is an appropriate name because it describes classes of extremely diverse systems that can be described by the same abstract model—which also always happens to be a scale-invarient model that resembles a physical phase transition. Is that right, anybody? I thought this list of systems with the same 'universality class' was interesting (from the Wikipedia article[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale_invariance#Universality]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale_invariance#Universality\])):

"Avalanches in piles of sand. The likelihood of an avalanche is in power-law proportion to the size of the avalanche, and avalanches are seen to occur at all size scales. The frequency of network outages on the Internet, as a function of size and duration. The frequency of citations of journal articles, considered in the network of all citations amongst all papers, as a function of the number of citations in a given paper. The formation and propagation of cracks and tears in materials ranging from steel to rock to paper. The variations of the direction of the tear, or the roughness of a fractured surface, are in power-law proportion to the size scale. The electrical breakdown of dielectrics, which resemble cracks and tears. The percolation of fluids through disordered media, such as petroleum through fractured rock beds, or water through filter paper, such as in chromatography. Power-law scaling connects the rate of flow to the distribution of fractures. The diffusion of molecules in solution, and the phenomenon of diffusion-limited aggregation. The distribution of rocks of different sizes in an aggregate mixture that is being shaken (with gravity acting on the rocks)."

<comment><USER4> Close but not quite. The term "universality" is different in phase transition theory from what it means in random matrix theory (which is what's at play here), but they've got some similarities too.

In phase transition theories, you've got two different states (like liquid water and water vapor), and when you vary some high-level parameters (like pressure and temperature) you can go from one of these states to the other. This means that the only "interesting" physics (in the sense of "distinct from the well-understood liquid/gas behavior" can only happen right as you get near that transition, so that liquids are seamlessly becoming gases which are seamlessly becoming liquids again. The "transition" allows a lot of behavior not seen elsewhere, in fact all of the behavior "in the middle" between the two regimes. Because you've got this considerable mixing of the two states, often "zooming in" is the same as, say, adjusting the proportion of liquid to gas -- so since it all happens in the same space, you look for these "scale invariant" theories that are the same upon zooming in. Those theories then can't depend on too much particulars, but just depend on various symmetries, so they become "universal". See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_exponent](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_exponent) .

Random matrix theory is similar, but for a different reason. The issue is, if you have a very complicated system that you can represent as a huge matrix, often the eigenvalues of the matrix tell you something concrete and physical. The example given above was the eigenvalues of a Hamiltonian matrix in quantum mechanics, which gives you an "energy spectrum" (discrete energies that the system can be at, so that it can e.g. absorb a photon of energy B - A to transition from a state of energy A to one of energy B).

Why would a Hamiltonian be random? You have to imagine a big molecule with lots of parts, not entirely under the control of the experimentalist. Maybe you've got a carbon nanotube hanging over a trench that you've etched under it, but the etching has caused other atoms to be stuck to the tube in unpredictable ways, and maybe the "islands" on either side couple to the nanotube in complicated ways.

Wigner discovered that very often these random variations break the symmetry between certain levels, so that where you once had 3 states at the same energy, now it's like those "energy eigenvalues" have "repelled" each other. He realized that the right way to start to think of the problem involved taking a matrix and adding random elements to it; this led to a nice set of models where you take it to the extreme and just randomize the entire matrix and look at its eigenvalue "density" rather than the exact levels. Wigner in particular discovered that this density function tends to look like a semicircle.

The essential similarity between these two is, you get to some point where "there's nothing more to say". With random matrices, when you specify how you're building the matrix and what sorts of properties it has to have, then you get the eigenvalue spectrum, and there's no other details to fixate upon. Similarly when you have a phase transition, the "we're taking on all the states in between gas and liquid" status of what you're doing means that the particulars of those states cannot matter. So in both cases it becomes just, "what's the configuration, what symmetries does it have" that determines how macroscopic parameters (whether critical exponents or eigenvalue densities) ultimately behave.

<comment><USER3> Hey, thanks a lot! Didn't expect such a great reply. I was still a bit fuzzy on a couple points, if you don't mind. I'm visiting another country and haven't found reliable wifi yet, hence slow reply time.

I think I get the scale invariant theory concept from a mathematical perspective, but I don't see why this would be the case: "Because you've got this considerable mixing of the two states, often "zooming in" is the same as, say, adjusting the proportion of liquid to gas"

Regarding random matrices, my understanding now is that given a random matrix of sufficient size, under a suitable definition of "random," if we look at the eigenvalue density function it's always going to be (roughly?) the same--we at least know it will be semi-circular. Further, there exist physical systems that can be modeled by random matrices; and there's a mapping between eigenvalues of the matrix and certain physical characteristics of the system. So, knowing the density function is always the same for these random matrices, we can assume certain shared characteristics of any systems that can be modeled by a random matrix.

In random matrices and phase transitions we would like to know how certain macroscopic parameters will behave, given some data like a matrix, or state of a phase transition. But, in both cases our starting data contains a lot of essentially irrelevant data that these theories prescribe a method for filtering out, since it assures us that knowledge of the symmetries involved are all that will matter.

Am I close? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Loved the article, but wonder why this pattern, as ubiquitous as it may be, merits the name 'universality'. For all of the universally applicable laws in science, it feels like naming overreach to christen this particular result 'universality'.

<comment><USER6> I kind of imagine that it's named so, because Complex systems (at least the systems that have no closed form solutions -> they can't be solved by an equation, they can only be modeled and simulated) end up displaying this type of state and pattern.

These types of systems are basically anything from the 3-body problem (3 particles interacting via gravity), to the system of all the particles in this universe. And everything that falls in between.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This paper has 7 explicit examples of the universality phenomenon, including the bus scheduling.

[http://arxiv.org/abs/math-ph/0603038](http://arxiv.org/abs/math-ph/0603038)

It's moderately technical, but really interesting.

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting article, but this reminds me of the whole "power laws and long tails" that was big 10 years ago, or the perennial Golden Ratio. Seeing commonalities of pattern can be insightful to modeling a system, but ultimately promises that "it's all connected" are far overblown.

<comment><USER9> Here are the slides of a talk on universality that Terry Tao gave some time ago: [https://terrytao.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/universality.pd...](https://terrytao.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/universality.pdf)

It's basically the observation that large systems converge to exhibit rather simple behaviors. It generalizes other reoccurring patterns such as power laws, Euler's number, the normal distribution and the fibonacci sequence. For some reason nature is surprisingly frugal regarding the forms and behaviors that she allows. I think the simpest explanation for that comes from the anthropic principle and the multiverse hypothesis which state that all possible physical laws are realized in different universes and we happen to be in the one that has the necessary conditions to bring us into existence (universality being perhaps one of them).

<comment><USER8> Well, sure. I say "oh look, when animals breed, it has this curve" and then I say "oh look, when money is invested it grows with this curve." The insight is that "multiplication works".

This helps, because I don't need to re-invent logarithms and e to study animal population growth. And of course, different rules lead to different math (be it power laws, the Normal distribution, universiality, Phi, whatever).

This is interesting philosophically. HOWEVER, these models are still simplifications of reality. What happens with slight departures in animal population trajectories can be very different than perturbations in interest rates, so it would be a mistake to say "these things are truly connected" beyond the practicality of using similar math.

<comment><USER9> I'm not too familiar with all of this (perhaps I'm even misinterpreting it), but I think they do realize that it would be problematic to throw population trajectories and interest rates into the same pot. I think the motivation is rather to find reasons why things do not behave completely unpredictable at larger scales and I cannot think of good reasons against efforts to find more and more general descriptions of that.

<comment><USER8> I agree with the motivation and interest! The issue comes when people try too hard to find patterns to fit a preconceived hypothesis.

I maintain a large (publicly available) ecological dataset, and my data have been drawn into several meta-analyses of this type. Often the idea is to simply see if my data empirically fit the "right" distribution. And they fit it and say "wow, it's all connected".

But then I look at the Bus data in this example (the +'s that represent actual data). I'm guessing I could fit a lognormal distribution, a Gamma distribution, or the Dyson distribution that they actuall use, and the data wouldn't be enough to distinguish between them.

Now, all of these distributions result from "simple" rules, but they are three very different sets of simple rules. For the Bus data, the "repelling" by little slips of paper makes sense as the mechanism, so it's a good hypothesis.

But then to flip that around, and say "since this distribution fits the ecological data, the underlying mechanism must be Bus Repelling" is wholly unjustified (as there are other possible fits). And there's a _lot_ of junk science that does that.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>