Extending "Let It Go" with recurrent neural network - <AUTHOR> http://elnn.snucse.org/sandbox/music-rnn/#hn

<comment><USER2> If you are into this kind of stuff (time series density/probability modeling), there are several places to go beyond this.

The simplest example is the RNN-RBM (restricted boltzmann machine) from the Theano deep learning tutorials [1]. There are follow-up papers by Kratarth Goel extending this to LSTM-DBN, and RNN-NADE (neural autoregressive density estimator) has also been explored in this space. The results for MIDI are pretty good.

Ales Graves [2] has done a huge amount of work in sequence modeling for classification and generation. His work with LSTM-GMM for online handwriting modeling can also be applied to speech features (vocoded speech), and seems to work well. No official publication to date on the speech experiments themselves, but the procedure is well documented in his paper [3]

The most recent thing is our paper "A Recurrent Latent Variable Model for Sequential Data" [4]. It operates on raw timeseries (!) even though all intuition would say that an RNN shouldn't handle this well. Adding a recurrent prior seems to preserve style in the handwriting generations at least - I may try on this "Let It Go!" task and see what happens! We are also exploring conditional controls and higher-level speech features, which should result in samples as good or better than LSTM-GMM.

[1] [http://deeplearning.net/tutorial/rnnrbm.html#rnnrbm](http://deeplearning.net/tutorial/rnnrbm.html#rnnrbm)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yX1SYeDHbg#t=36m50s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yX1SYeDHbg#t=36m50s)

[3] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.0850](http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.0850)

[4] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02216](http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02216)

<comment><USER3> The infinite jukebox[0] is another interesting one to look at.

[0] [http://labs.echonest.com/Uploader/index.html](http://labs.echonest.com/Uploader/index.html)

<comment><USER4> Wow, that is quite good at what it does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's really hard to connect "Let it Go" with the results that the program generates. Maybe if the song starts with a recognisable line of tones and the algorithm buts in some recognisable parts here and there it becomes more clear? Not sure. But for my untrained ears it was not possible to recognise the connection to "Let it Go".

<comment><USER6> My six-year-old identified it as reminding him of "Let It Go" with no prompting from me other than "What does this make you think of?" (He also said "It's great!" about four times before that.)

<comment><USER7> not sure how many songs kids these days are exposed to, but maybe it's easier for young children to be reminded of "let it go" since it's very popular and they haven't heard a lot of other songs?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I found the "Extrapolated art" link at the bottom of that page more impressive: [http://extrapolated-art.com/](http://extrapolated-art.com/)

Starry Night, the very last image, is particularly good. Would love to have that on display and see if people notice anything strange.

<comment><USER9> That page is showcasing examples of Content-Aware Fill in Photoshop. If you have a copy, then it's very easy to try yourself. Edit -> Fill, then select "Content-Aware".

[http://i.lightimg.com/d2112.jpg](http://i.lightimg.com/d2112.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, following this link[1] on their website, some of those examples are pretty impressive stuff.

[1] : [http://extrapolated-art.com/](http://extrapolated-art.com/)

<comment><USER11> Resynthesizer plugin for GIMP [1] by Dr. Paul Harrison lets you do those stuff and more (e.g. removing an object from a scene). Also look at Mathematica's digital inpainting function [2] which achieves the same thing.

[1]: [http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer](http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer)

[2]: [http://blog.wolfram.com/2014/12/01/extending-van-goghs- starr...](http://blog.wolfram.com/2014/12/01/extending-van-goghs-starry-night- with-inpainting/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you just want to "extend" it, there are easier ways. [http://labs.echonest.com/Uploader/index.html?trid=TRDSMSO14C...](http://labs.echonest.com/Uploader/index.html?trid=TRDSMSO14CC9DD2123) I know "easier" wasn't the point of this project, I just think the Infinite Jukebox is cool!

<comment><USER13> I've been listening to Infinite Jukebox's rendition of "Frontier Psychiatrist" for the last 10 minutes. Pretty awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've got on my to do list something similar, feed the raw wave data from some pop songs into an RNN and then see what the resulting music sounds like.

Am I a fool for trying? It would be a lot of data compared to a midi track.

<comment><USER15> I'd suggest feeding the raw FFT transform into the RNN, then translating back to normal sound afterwards. Raw sound has an awful lot of just bouncing up and down... a RNN isn't going to be any better at you than figuring out what's going on from there, whereas the FFT view of a song is much more meaningful... I can glance at one and at least have an _idea_ of what the song is doing.

I'm still not all that optimistic, frankly, but it'll be better than raw data. Some further experimentation with different encoding might be necessary.

That said, I'd put $10 bucks that just putting an FFT representation through wouldn't necessarily produce a new pop song, but it would sound uniquely _spooky_ , I bet. If nothing else you might have something you can hook up to some speakers next Halloween and make some kids cry.

<comment><USER2> This is pretty hard - we use raw data for speech [1, talked about in comment above] but it still needs some work to do really good synthesis. FFT is not really the way to go either - then you still need to deal with the problems of complex data which is very, very unpleasant. Most people use FFT -> IDCT (cepstrum) or a filtered version (mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, MFCC). This can work but it is a lot of domain knowledge.

One thing we tried in early testing, but did not pursue farther was vector quantized X (where X is MFCCs, LPC, LSF, FFT, cepstrum). Basically you use K-means to find clusters for some large number of K, then simply assign every real value (or real-valued vector) to the closest cluster. The cluster mapping becomes a codebook, and your problem goes from input vectors like [0.2, 0.7, 0.111, ...] to [0, 1, 0, ...] where the length of the vector of 0s and 1s is the number clusters K.

This is a much easier learning problem, and closely corresponds to most "bag- of-words" or word-level models. The quantization is lossy but for large enough K I do not think it would be noticeable. After all, we listen to discrete audio every day, all the time in wav format :)

To synthesize, you can either map codebook points back to the corresponding cluster center, or as most people do, map it to the cluster center with some small variance so you have a little bit of interesting variation.

[1] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02216](http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02216)

<comment><USER15> Thank you for expanding on my uninformed, off-the-cuff comment like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This sounds pretty decent actually. I remember Stephen Wolfram's "A new kind of music" project which tried to generate music using cellular automata, with limited success.

This sounds much better in comparison!

</comment><comment> david-given A few weeks ago I used the same RNN that was used to produce kernel source code to produce MIDI files. It wasn't really a success, but it did generate mostly-valid MIDI files and independently discovered avant garde prog jazz.

Try [https://soundcloud.com/david-given/unsigned- composition-1](https://soundcloud.com/david-given/unsigned-composition-1) or [https://soundcloud.com/david-given/procedural-jazz- sting](https://soundcloud.com/david-given/procedural-jazz-sting).

</comment><comment><USER17> This reminds me the fact that makes human brain unique against other systems is the capability of jumping out of the logic system. When composing a piece of song, the best a current AI system can do is to compose by keep adding the most logical (or intuitive, depends on how you look at it) notes. A human composer, on the other hand, can from time to time jump out of that logic, and inspect the notes from complete different perspectives (different than if these notes sequence is logical), such as the emotion it conveys, is it innovative, what style it feels like, etc, etc.

<comment><USER2> These things you mention are conditional variables - from a modeling perspective it would be perfectly plausible to build - think something like text-to-speech but instead of the sentence you input some characters representing the dynamics/feel of the desired song. You also have the issue of RNNs being deterministic - even sampling from the output softmax probably doesn't give enough to have interesting variations if you run the network multiple times from the same seed. Also choosing the argmax(prob(y | x)) at each step does not guarantee that the _path_ generated is maximally likely. For that you need a beam search or something like it. But I don't think any of that is the key problem here.

In this case, an RNN meant for 1-of-K output is not well suited to outputting chords. It worked fine for single notes however! Check out this link from Joao Felipe Santos [https://soundcloud.com/seaandsailor/sets/char-rnn- composes-i...](https://soundcloud.com/seaandsailor/sets/char-rnn-composes- irish-folk-music) . These are pretty cool - and he generated the titles to boot.

For chords you really can't model all possible combinations (2^88 for midi) naively, and you also can't really model notes independently - chords are highly structured and follow specific rules! Even bounding to only chords of up to 3 or 4 notes still makes a pretty large output space, which means more training data is needed, it is harder to optimize, etc. etc.

You should be much better off with some kind of conditional/factorized model strapped to the output of an RNN - this is the idea for RNN-RBM, RNN-NADE, LSTM-DBN, etc. You could also just try to model the audio representation directly using LSTM-GMM or VRNN, but this is pretty hard and an active area of research.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Snazzy.

I've been itching to mess around with dynamically-generated music lately. Can anyone recommend any (js/webaudio) libraries or resources to check out?

<comment><USER19> It's not web based or js but give sonic [http://sonic-pi.net/](http://sonic- pi.net/) a go. Really simple and easy to get started.

<comment><USER18> Thanks! Not what I was thinking of but it looks really interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Yeah, to be honest it's a nice try but it didn't work out.

Maybe all it needs is more training time, lower temperature (and maybe some more disney songs or related ones)

</comment><comment><USER21> If you add K:Ab above the first line, you'll hear it in its actual key. It sounds unmistakably like "Let it Go."

<comment><USER22> This should be the top comment - changes everything.

Makes me wonder if the key change was a mistake, or a deliberate attempt to make it sound less like the original?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does this do any better than a markov chain?

</comment><comment><USER24> For some reason it's not working well for me with Safari. I tried it on Chrome and it sounded pretty good

</comment><comment><USER25> This kinds of sounds like Castlevania (i.e. an improvement) with the general MIDI playback.

</comment><comment><USER26> I quite liked the score sheet and playback plugin</comment>


Scientists Have Cloned Monkeys for the First Time - <AUTHOR> http://time.com/5116880/scientists-clone-monkeys-human-cloning/ <comment><USER2> It sounds like some technical barriers have been overcome in terms of cloning humans. I can't even imagine what that would look like.

<comment><USER3> I would imagine it looks exactly the same. Only smaller and younger.

<comment><USER4> I just wanna say - that made me laugh so hard. thx!</comment></comment></comment>


Rackspace Cloud Offers Relational Database-as-a-Service through FathomDB (YC 08) - <AUTHOR> http://www.rackspacecloud.com/blog/2009/12/17/rackspace-cloud-now-offers-relational-database-as-a-service-through-partner-fathomdb/

<comment><USER2> I thought they were in trouble with the release of Amazon's RDS, but it looks like they responded. Great work.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've seen some of the stuff they are working on, fathomdb has some truly awesome technology. Can't wait to see what they release next.

</comment><comment><USER4> JSB has been hard at work on this. Well done, this is going to be a great addition to the Rackspace cloud.

<comment><USER5> I agree. We (Rackspace) have been in touch with Justin quite a bit, and are very optimistic about what this product can offer our customers and our community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anyone else getting a 502 bad gateway through to the actual site? <http://fathomdb.com/>

<comment><USER7> Same problem here. That's sort of discouraging. :)

<comment><USER8> It was working a few minutes ago, seems to have just broken.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Congrats Justin!</comment>


Facebook Introduces HTTPS – Here is how to enable the feature - <AUTHOR> http://www.techsavys.info/2011/02/facebook-introduces-https-here-is-how.html <comment><USER2> Would be interesting to see some stats on how large percentage of the users actually find their way there and enable it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Yeah that will be awesome...don't know about the others but i have enabled the HTTPS feature.

</comment><comment><USER3> Doesn't appear to be active/available for everyone yet...

</comment><comment><USER4> Is chat still not working in HTTPS for others?</comment>


G- (Chrome Extension removes Google+) - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dgpdknjcnmdopmgoajdcphdlcgdfdpfp

<comment><AUTHOR> +1 it here if you find it useful:

[https://plus.google.com/105349419062025895238/posts/LwzR4aJV...](https://plus.google.com/105349419062025895238/posts/LwzR4aJVs3K?hl=en)

<comment><USER2> The irony.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Here's my minimal version. It contains no JavaScript; it only uses the manifest to inject CSS.

<https://github.com/benatkin/g--> [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/elkedplmbnnbofcldj...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/elkedplmbnnbofcldjnejfhfngmfllai)

BlockPlus sounds neat too, but I don't mind the HTTP requests and I find Google Plus no more distracting than my email. Right now I only need this for when I'm searching for programming documentation online, and so I only have it hiding the notification on www.google.com.

<comment><AUTHOR> Add in a few more subdomains to cover the other Google apps (docs and mail are the most important ones to me) and I'll probably switch over to your plugin instead (I mean who needs configuration options?). Also be sure to add 'all_frames' to 'content_scripts' or it won't work in Gmail.

<comment><USER3> Feel free to copy my technique.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> exactly the same as my plugin from the other day:

[http://nikcub.appspot.com/blockplus-a-browser-extension- to-b...](http://nikcub.appspot.com/blockplus-a-browser-extension-to-block- google-notifications)

except mine only attaches itself to google.com requests, not every single tab and page (not sure why they did that)

<comment><AUTHOR> There are a lot of Google TLDs ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It flickers. Is there anyway to inject CSS in the head of web pages with chrome extensions before the body loads?

<comment><USER3> I implemented a more minimal version of this extension that doesn't have the flicker issue.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/elkedplmbnnbofcldj...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/elkedplmbnnbofcldjnejfhfngmfllai)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's actually a pretty good idea...

<comment><USER6> It would be much nicer if google implemented it as an option, which should be the default.

<comment><AUTHOR> Would have saved me time!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is the best extension name. Ever.</comment>


Driving Detroit 2017: Has the renaissance reached the streets? - <AUTHOR> https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2017/12/21/driving-detroit-michigan/813035001/ <comment><AUTHOR> A common theme in Detroit is that sure the downtown area is booming but what about the neighborhoods? I believe they've got it all wrong. You can't bring back the neighborhoods without a strong downtown core at its center.

On my frequent trips the neighborhoods are showing progress with most of it in the past two years. But as the article shows the progress in uneven.</comment>


Accretor Cellular Automata (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://softologyblog.wordpress.com/2018/01/12/accretor-cellular-automata/ <comment><USER2> To me, they look like how I imagined the main alien structure in Peter Watts' Blindsight.

</comment><comment><USER3> The site is gold, thank you.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm sorry, that is some ugly stuff there.</comment>


There's only 2 types of products in the world; which are you building? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@amin_wi/fe27a9136251

<comment><USER2> Sorry, but this article is awful. Google search is an example of "doing something we were already doing, faster and cheaper," but quiscus ("messaging for work") is "pushing mankind into the realm of the unknown"? This is insane. Not to mention that the other examples in this category were "witchcraft, magic, and Tesla's unlimited power generator"\--in other words, nonsense.</comment>


Mashable: Norwegian pants are news.  - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2010/02/25/the-norwegian-olympic-curling-teams-pants-fan-page-randomly-viral/

<comment><USER2> Can anyone suggest how this item might, in the words of the guidelines concerning what is regarded as on-topic, be something that "... gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." ??

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Whats next - North Korean socks?</comment>


Like No One They'd Ever Seen - <AUTHOR> https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/04/23/younghill-kang-east-goes-west/ <comment><USER2> Enlightening article. I find his works take on a new context in the light of the recent rise of Korean art in American pop culture.

The Anglo world condoned Japanese imperialism in Korea and later brought its own influences to Korean culture during the Korean War. This war is as often overlooked and relegated to obscurity as the article's subject himself, but the blood spilt must shine through the heart of America in an inevitable fashion.

The rise of Korean film and pop music in American consciousness is a reflection of the cultural imperialism of the West. This is illustrated in Bong Joon Ho's "The Host" (2006) moments before k-pop and Korean film became so massively popular in America.

Somewhat a reflection of these novels, the film's portrayal of Americans in Korea is not all black and white. The opening scene shows an Anglo American officer commanding a local Korean man to dump toxic formaldehyde into the Han River, leading to the rise of a monster and a mysterious infectious pandemic (sound familiar?). Although the pandemic is revealed to be an American imperial hoax to seize power and quarantine the population, a local Anglo American GI is featured as a hero who fights alongside the protagonist against the monster. A toxic gas bioweapon called Agent Yellow is released in a failed attempt to defeat the monster, even though the gas is harmful to the local population. This may be a commentary on the American use of bioweapons in Vietnam against the cultural threat to American world hegemony (communism).

To summarize this chaotic chain of themes, perhaps as chaotic as "East Goes West", the lasting struggle of asserting a personal and cultural identity in America is very relevant today. What does it take for a man or woman to rise above prejudice and establish themselves as a human being and valued member of society? Why should this struggle exist? Why should Americans be forced to engage with it? It is evidence of evil. The absurdity and irrationality of American racism is very prevalent in its strange and wavering treatment of Asian Americans. I can relate with Kang, not only in his love for America, but also in his frustrations with its politically motivated prejudice.</comment>


Ask HN: how does Google News selects its sources - <AUTHOR>

After the agreement in France between Google and the press (HN thread here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5152443), few observed that Google News only index a subset of the available news sources.
Typically (and sorry for the French-only example), the news source http://reflets.info/ often breaks the national news, though none of its articles do appear on Google news. However, these articles do appears among the organic search results.
Anyone has clues on how the selection is made by any chances ? <comment><USER2> They have special deals with some sources, such as Associated Press. For example, search Google News for "site:google.com" and you'll see addresses like "<http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/...>

</comment><comment><USER3> I suspect it's a human or two, manually selecting RSS or Atom feeds, and sifting out any complainers or problem feeds.</comment>


It's China's World - <AUTHOR> https://fortune.com/longform/fortune-global-500-china-companies/ <comment><USER2> "American companies account for 121 of the world's largest corporations by revenue. Chinese companies account for 129 (including 10 Taiwanese companies)."

Bit of a stretch to include Taiwan here ... sure it is ethnically Chinese but more of an ally of the us than mainland China at this point.

<comment><USER3> It's not just a stretch, it's ridiculous. It's a fact made up to make their narrative fit because it wouldn't work if it was 119 vs. 121

Taiwan is an entirely different entity politically no matter if you subscribe to the one China doctrine. China has little to no control over it and therefore derives no power from its companies.

<comment> yoz-y > China has no control over it

This is quite a stretch too. The relationship and interdependence of the two is very complicated. China is one of the largest market to which Taiwan exports their goods (and in large part, the culture) and China has used this to pressure Taiwan in the past.

<comment><USER4> The argument that ROC may be considered part of PRC because PRC is an important business partner to me doesn't seem to hold water.

How is it different as opposed to, say, Russia and Ukraine? Mutual trade is big and one player may have more leverage (as is almost always the case with two countries in proximity to each other), should we count Ukraine's stats in favor of Russia's?

In both cases there are similarities in language and ethnicity, and in case of Taiwan there additionally are US military troops stationed.

<comment><USER5> Ethnic, linguistic, and cultural ties tend to have great staying power (see US-Britain, the unification of Germany and Italy, Balkan conflicts, and on and on). This is all even more true when the countries are close geographically.

Counting the power of Taiwan for China and Ukraine for Russia is likely more predictive of the future than not counting them. Lines on a map and citizenship papers are easier to redo than centuries (millenia for China/Taiwan) of culture/language.

This is NOT an endorsement of China taking over Taiwan, which I do NOT want and think would be a bad thing.

<comment><USER4> > Counting the power of Taiwan for China and Ukraine for Russia is likely more > predictive of the future than not counting them.

More predictive in what regard? The only way I can see it being usefully predictive is if you count on the larger entity annexing the smaller one. An I missing something?

<comment><USER6> You can exert power through hegemony without annexing.

<comment><USER4> In the part that I quoted "power", I believe, stands for economical strength. How can it be useful or at all correct to count economical strength of, say, Kazakhstan (as another example) as part of Russia's stats, if the former is developing and trading independently?

That's why I object to article's angle: it uses "China" to refer to an aggregate in one case (lumping ROC and PRC together), and to PRC in another case (quoting their president and intentions to dominate global economy).

Counting ROC in PRC's favor serves to tip the numbers and make article's premise seem more compelling, but since PRC and ROC are separate economies the premise is false. It almost makes it look like a major business publication is playing a political game.

<comment><USER5> Russia already exerts a lot of economic influence over Kazakhstan, so this example actually goes the other way.

There are MANY ways to derive benefit from a relationship between countries: it's not binary annex/not-annexed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really love the progress China made in very small duration. But does this article sound like promotion/propaganda ?

<comment><USER8> Fortune Magazine is owned by the same family that owns CP Group, Thailand's largest conglomerate. Their economic interests in China are clear.

Hear them boast on Wikipedia:

"When China opened up its economy in 1978, the CP Group was the very first foreign investor in the country and became the first foreign company registered in the special economic zone of Shenzhen, Guangdong. The company is the single largest investor in Mainland China today commanding over fifth of China's entire feed meal market.[5] The corporate registration number was "0001."

\- [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charoen_Pokphand](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charoen_Pokphand)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's interesting that a lot of these Chinese companies aren't really keeping up the pace, for example, tssgroup , [https://www.tssgroup.com.cn/](https://www.tssgroup.com.cn/), I can't even open up their website.

<comment><USER10> You need to switch to `[http://`](http://`) (from `[https://`](https://`)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> From a global production perspective each time I look at the G500 vs. the F500 I'm reminded about the delta between the global economy and the United States.

Global 500 top 10 [1] - 1 Retail/Grocer, 6 Energy (mostly Oil related), 2 Auto Manufacturers

Fortune 500 top 10 [2] - 1 Retail/Grocer, 1 Energy (Oil related), 3 Tech/Telcom (Apple, Amazon, AT&T), 4 Healthcare, 1 Financial Service

[1] [https://fortune.com/global500/2019/search/](https://fortune.com/global500/2019/search/) [2] [https://fortune.com/fortune500/2019/search/](https://fortune.com/fortune500/2019/search/)

</comment><comment><USER12> This is a narrow view. The fortune 500 provides no insight into the level of interest each economy holds in the major companies of other nations. Spoiler: the US owns a fucktonne of the world's capital gains

</comment><comment><USER13> With climate change stalking in the background, I really think it's too early to say whose century - whether China's or anyone else's - this will be.

</comment><comment><USER14> The map in the article hurts my brain!

</comment><comment><USER15> It's not China's World considering how they oriented the map so that only the Americas are oriented in the normal way, while all of Eurasia is upside down.

</comment><comment><USER16> CCP China is the most successful ethno-nationalist/fascist state in modern history.

* With the introduction of a market economy in the 70s and 80s, but retaining full party control of that economy, they fulfilled the economic definition of fascism.

* With their oppression of the Uighur and Tibetan people they have met the ethno-nationalist definition.

We continue to economically support them at our own peril. If you're watching what's happening in Hong Kong and continue to buy Chinese products, when alternatives are available, you're knowingly funding evil.

<comment><USER17> "Economically support them" implies some misleading parent child relationship, where the parent can kick the kid out of the house for misbehaving.

This is more a dysfunctional couple relationship, where both sides are Co- Dependent. Its not just that they have a ton to loose, it's that they can't do any better without each other.

Google, to their credit, tried existing but look at where that story went. Some couples therapy is overdue but given the fear driven info flows on News and Social Media, it wouldn't be surprising for a Brexit like fiasco, which will hit the people at the bottom of the food chain more than anyone else.

Nothing is going to get fixed in the world until Social and News Media get regulated. All they do is produce Red Queen dynamics - keeping everyone running on fear treadmills without going anywhere.

<comment><USER16> The world most certainly supports China, out of the desire for greater profits. When we know much of their labor force is forced labor, we are literally outsourcing slavery to them.

If you can knowingly continue to buy products from a regime that is so evil it preserves and dissects political dissidents, then sends them around the world as "human body exhibits" then that's on you. I've decided to do everything within my power to not support that evil, only buying a Chinese made product if there is absolutely no other option, and if I absolutely need the product.</comment></comment></comment>


Death of the whiz kid: Robert Strange McNamara, 1916-2009. - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2222288/?from=rss <comment><USER2> I have respect for McNamara after seeing the excellent documentry fog of war.

Many despise him for the things he had done during vietnam, but I have great respect for the wisdom he decided to share later in life. We need more people sharing the wisdom of their errors.

<comment><USER3> I wonder if the relatives of the 2,000,000+ or so Vietnamese civilians who died during the war can also respect McNamara. Some mistakes are simply not excusable. LBJ was the commander-in-chief, but McNamara was his right-arm.

<comment><USER4> When I make a serious career level mistake in judgment, software projects might fail. Someone might even lose their job. When people of certain levels make the same order of errors, many people may die. We're both human. I haven't the fortitude to make those decisions (even if I was in the position to), but someone has to and sometimes they are wrong.

Some of them hang banners on aircraft carriers and pretend they are right anyway. Some of them humbly admit they were wrong. The people still die. Bummer.

<comment><USER3> So, you're comparing a software error to the act of initiating aggression and killing millions of people, including 58K of your countrymen????

If so, you need to put things in perspective, imho.

<comment><USER5> I think he was aiming at contrasting the two.

<comment><USER3> I get that. But imho it's a tiny bit distasteful contrasting them, isn't it?

The total number of Vietnamese who were killed was to the tune of 3 million. That's a "semi-Holocaust". No one would compare a software glitch to the Holocaust, right?

<comment><USER4> Ok, let me put the right hand brace on this one before it gets away. My point was simply that humans are going to make mistakes in the course of their jobs. People can be hurt by these mistakes. The difference is a matter of scale, and not intent.

People want to make McNamara out to be Evil with the big e. I think he probably wasn't. His actions later in life point to this. The idea is that if we accept that people make mistakes (sometimes HUGE ones) we can prevent a few of them in the future by learning from the past. If we'd really listened to McNamara its quite possible we might have avoided Iraq. If we just call him evil and forget about it, we miss the wisdom.

<comment><USER3> I entirely agree that one should try to learn from the past. I disagree on the "scale x intent" issue, though. The initiation of aggression is immoral, in my view. Attacking someone who did not attack you is wrong regardless of the death toll. In this case, I believe that _intent_ does matter.

Sadly, McNamara would probably have been remembered as a great man had he left his office after JFK was killed. After all, McNamara played an important role in nuclear deterrence, during the Cuban missile crisis, etc. Too bad he was foolish enough to help start an unwinnable, useless war in Indochina.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> May he rot and burn in hell, and may all the world forget he ever lived.

<comment><USER4> We went to Iraq, didn't we? I'd say we forgot him straightaway.

<comment><USER3> Good point. Only fools fall into the same trap twice.

Millions of Americans served in Vietnam. I think the veterans will never forget nor forgive McNamara. He shall be remembered as the architect of one of the greatest crimes in History.

<comment><USER7> > Good point. Only fools fall into the same trap twice

Fool me once, shame on ... shame on you. Fool me ... you can't get fooled again

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Chomsky on McNamara (1995):

<http://www.chomsky.info/books/warfare01.htm>

Chomsky is rather ferociously critical of McNamara, as expected.

</comment><comment><USER8> Ho Chi Minh is responsible for the Vietnam catastrophe. He would have seen the Vietnamese people go extinct before losing that war.

And, like in North Korea, they run a big song and dance on how they have to reunify their country, but thats not it at all. It's Communism first. Have to reunify _under Communism_

Until then, the hell with the country.

The Vietnam war was a triumph of evil. The bad guys won, and lots of people here helped them.</comment>


APNG support lands in WebKit - <AUTHOR> https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17022 <comment><USER2> APNG is a funny, political beast. It basically evolved after Mozilla decided to nuke MNG support to make Firefox slimmer and then needed to re-invent a transparency-capable animation format for browser "throbbers". There were calls to replace libpng with libmng which purported to support both PNG and MNG at the same binary size, but those never panned out.

IIRC, individuals in the PNG group took the whole thing as a slight and then refused to incorporate it into the official spec, leaving it as a bit of an orphan. The Chrome guys never bothered implementing it and quietly worked on WebP.

I suspect that part of the reason APNG never received widespread adoption was bad blood from MNG never getting proper attention. While MNG was kind of a crappy spec in retrospect, it was still way better than an animated GIF.

Unfortunately JNG was also a casualty in this whole war -- a format that could have been both lossless and supported proper alpha transparency.

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=195280](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=195280)

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18574](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18574)

<comment><USER3> As far as I remember, the main difference in point of view was that the PNG guys (rightly so, IMO) saw animations as something different from a still image, and wanted to keep that distinction, also in the face of MIME types, file headers, file name extensions, etc., while lots of other (misguided) people wanted animation as a feature in an image format, because they were used to that from GIF.

There may have been some bad blood from MNG, but that was not the main point as far as I understand. Although I must say that the links you provide are interesting reading.

<comment><USER2> Here's the vote where the PNG group rejected APNG:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20080203042347/http://sourceforg...](https://web.archive.org/web/20080203042347/http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_name=188.8.131.52.20070420132821.012dd8e8%40mail.comcast.net)

And Vlad's message after the vote:

[http://osdir.com/ml/graphics.png.general/2007-04/msg00286.ht...](http://osdir.com/ml/graphics.png.general/2007-04/msg00286.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> APNG support in WebKit is implemented as a thin layer on top on regular vanilla libpng.

So all that stuff is not very relevant.

<comment><USER2> From a technical point of view it's all irrelevant, but I find APNG to be very interesting from a historical point of view. It's both a technical and a political compromise, and all things considered, not a bad standard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Two down (Gecko, WebKit), two to go (Trident, Blink).

I'd love to see more browsers have APNG. Alpha transparency in animation is awesome.

It's not a lossy format like WebP, but PNG offers more sophisticated lossless compression than GIF (after all, it was supposed to be a better GIF, basically), so I wonder if APNG could produce more efficient compression for video with a good encoder.

<comment><USER5> > It's not a lossy format like WebP

WebP can hold both lossless and lossy animations. AFAIK it can even have mixed lossless and lossy frames in the same animation.

<comment><USER4> Oh yes, I'm aware that it also supports lossless. I mentioned lossy because that's what matters for the case of video specifically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Animated GIF's can be lossless optimized with GIFsicle. I went looking for something similar for APNG and found apngopt.

[http://sourceforge.net/projects/apng/files/APNG_Optimizer/](http://sourceforge.net/projects/apng/files/APNG_Optimizer/)

Think of it as pngcrush for each animation frame. Also, it can leverage Google's Zopfli implementation of DEFLATE, which produces much smaller output than zlib's implementation. I haven't seen any other lossless optimization tools using Zopfli, so that's pretty cool. (update: actually it looks like recent versions of advpng can use Zopfli)

Also, some good comparisons of APNG vs. GIF vs. WebP animations are here:

[http://littlesvr.ca/apng/gif_apng_webp1.html](http://littlesvr.ca/apng/gif_apng_webp1.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Would've been great to see this happen five years, seems like it's largely irrelevant now with the prevalence of HTML5 video compression for short clips.

<comment><USER8> For photorealistic video yes, but APNG is much more suited than anything else for animated graphics where SVG isn't a good fit.

<comment><USER9> Do you have examples where APNG wins compression-wise relative to H.264?

<comment><AUTHOR> JPEG usually wins over PNG compression-wise, but in some use cases it makes sense to use PNG.

The same thing with animation/video.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Status: RESOLVED FIXED

It's implemented on top of vanilla libpng.

In practice, only WebKit-based browsers will get APNG, not Chromium-based ones. That's not a big market share. But WebKit and Blink engines are still pretty similar, so there's something to consider.

<comment><USER10> > In practice, only WebKit-based browsers will get APNG, not Chromium-based > ones. That's not a big market share.

Safari Mobile is a pretty big marketshare, if that ever trickles down to it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Safari uses WebKit, except for WebKit image decoders.

The good news is, Apple implemented APNG support on their own: [http://caniuse.com/apng](http://caniuse.com/apng)

So at this point there are 2 open source implementation, plus 1 closed source.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As APNG any good? My uninformed impression is it's kind of crap. Wishing they'd all support BPG instead

[http://bellard.org/bpg/](http://bellard.org/bpg/)

<comment> TD-Linux Unfortunately, BPG is heavily patent encumbered so no one can risk shipping it right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I can't wait for APNG support to become standard. Most of the GIF animations on Wikimedia Commons seem like they'd be more efficiently encoded as PNGs; I wonder what the size comparison (GIF vs. APNG) is like for some of the images on there? e.g.

[http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Color_coded_racetrack...](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Color_coded_racetrack_large_channel.gif)

<comment><USER13> Many would be even more efficiently encoded in <choose your favorite video format here>, I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What are people using to create APNG animations? I have an older version of Photoshop but it doesn't seem to support the format. I tried APNG Anime Maker, but it's really rudimentary and doesn't optimize the image at all the way ImageReady does with GIFs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Try this:

[https://sourceforge.net/projects/apngasm/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/apngasm/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Oh goodness. With retina displays becoming commonplace, the need for a modernized lossy + alpha standard like JPEG2000, JPEG XR or even WebP is stronger than ever. I can't believe they're wasting resources on… better meme cartoons…</comment>


Ask PG: What have I done wrong? - <AUTHOR> tl;dr: Now my votes are broken, and I'm sad. (edited: "dl;dr" -> "tl;dr" - sorry.)
<comment></comment><comment>====
I've seen this complaint made several times before, with people finding that their votes are apparently not having any effect.  I've watched the discussions, not feeling I have anything to contribute, wondering what they may have done to trigger the secretive "vote-ignoring" logic that you tinker with.
I understand that you need to stay on top of the problem of people gaming the system, and that being too open just makes it easier for people to screw around and make the voting system less valuable.
But generally I rely on high-quality items bubbling to the top, so when I see a comment I think is valuable and yet which is low down in the pecking order, I upvote it.  I take care, I try to add value, I invest time.
And now I've found that some of my recent votes haven't made a difference. The comments I thought were worth boosting continue to languish.  The people I thought were worth rewarding haven't got the karma.
I've wasted my time trying to make the site more valuable.
So, while I'll continue to believe that things are partially random, but biased to having better stuff near the top, I'm no longer as confident as I was.  I'll continue to scan the new submissions to see if there's anything interesting, and maybe I'll click on an up arrow, but I'm pretty disincentivized about bothering to spend time trying to add value.
The message is that my time isn't valued.  You've encouraged me into taking without giving back.  You've encouraged me to react without thinking.
If that's the message you intended, I think that's sad.
Here are two links to earlier discussions - there are more.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871202
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=233460 </comment><comment><USER2> A few months ago, because of the mob feel that voting was starting to have now that the site has grown so big, I started experimenting with thresholds for which votes got counted (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871202>). The best test I could think of was the average score of a user's recent comments, so I used that. Currently the threshold is 2. The reason your votes stopped counting is that you dropped just below that. Your average is currently 1.88. (Ironically, it's much higher now because of the comments on this thread, but comment averages are calculated asynchronously, so there will be a lag before yours is recalculated.)

I'm probably going to do away with the display of point totals on comments entirely, because thresholds haven't fixed the problem. In that case I'll just use points internally, e.g. to sort threads, and then I'll probably go back to counting most votes.

Edit: Since I was planning to toss the threshold when I stopped displaying comment scores, I just reset it to 1. Also, since users asked to see their avg comment scores in their profile pages, I just added that.

<comment><USER3> To use the voting average is a _really_ bad way of doing this. I answer a lot of 'Ask HN' style threads, these are hardly ever voted up and they are a ton of work.

If the effect of this change is that doing work like that gets punished then that is really putting the horse behind the cart.

For instance:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1049551>

Essentially you are punishing people for being nice to others.

<comment><USER2> There are always going to be outlying cases, whatever strategy you use. I suppose I could fix this one by making the threshold depend on either average comment karma or total karma. But as I said, my inclination now is just to stop displaying points on comment threads.

<comment><USER4> These aren't outlier cases.

If I wanted to boost my comment score average, I would very deliberately formulate _even more_ bogus opinions about popular "controversies". Oh, I sure would come up with a lot of crap to say about Zynga, the Apple Tablet, and Websprockets.

It would work, because haunting the less popular topics has been a surefire way to get my average to drop.

<comment><USER2> Good point about the orphan threads. I should somehow normalize for that.

<comment><USER5> Dividing comment votes by article votes (or comment votes by parent votes) would be a start.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My guess is you got flagged by possible-sockpuppet. See news.arc in arc3.tar for why some stuff gets ignored.

        (def possible-sockpuppet (user)
          (or (ignored user)
              (< (uvar user weight) .5)
              (and (< (user-age user) new-age-threshold*)
                   (< (karma user) new-karma-threshold*))))

Since your age and karma don't seem to be a problem, I'd guess an admin or editor marked you as ignored, or an admin reduced your weight.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting - thanks. I wish I could upvote you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've had my voting stopped on a couple of occasions. The last one was because I downvoted someone 3-4 times in a row in the same thread (all their comments needed a downvote :) it wasn't anything nasty) and my voting stopped working for a week or so.

I also _think_ in the past I have had it removed for:

\- upvoting different stories in quick succession (came back to the page to vote stories I liked....)

\- downvoting the same person 2-3 times in the space of about 20 minutes in different threads (without realising I must stress!) with no other votes in between

It comes back after X amount of time.

> but I'm pretty disincentivized about bothering to spend time trying to add > value.

Yeh I feel that; I read now but dont bother to contribute many votes.

<comment><USER7> from pg's comments elsewhere my thoughts on what behaviour limits your voting might be incorrect - simply circumstances of coincidence (and more related to volume of posting_

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Chill out man. First, it could be a bug. Second, no doubt HN is a special place, but _it's still just a news forum_. Get back to work, go out to play, don't make this your life.

</patronising>

<comment><AUTHOR> First of all, yes, I am fully aware that this is just a news forum, and that there's this thing called "real life."

Secondly, this is a great resource of both contacts and information. It's made great because of the quality of people here, and the time they take to submit, comment, _and vote._ Without that time from people with busy lives, HN will become rather non-special.

I'm pointing out that at least one person here now feels, because of a stated policy, that their time is undervalued, so I'm thinking of taking it elsewhere. I do have an outside life, I was investing time here because I thought it might be valued. I'm re-evaluating that decision

I'm not going to walk away without explanation. When people stop being my customers I'd like to know why. I'm giving PG the courtesy to let him know my reactions to his policies. It's his site and he can and will do as he chooses. So far he's done an extraordinary job.

Think of this as customer feedback.

<comment><USER9> Fwiw I think people who downvote you are reacting to the tone of your writing

Sentences like "I'm not going to walk away without explanation." sound (mildly) pompous and priggish.

You could cut all the dramatics and posturing from your post, state the facts (as you see them) plainly, provide any supporting data and ask a polite question about the effect you want and what you can do to help.

Sentences like "When people stop being my customers I'd like to know why." and "Think of this as customer feedback." have an assumption built in which may not hold.

"user" != "customer".

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback - appreciated.

I could've taken more time to explain that more clearly, and it probably would've sounded better, but I really _do_ have other things to do.

The simple facts are that my votes don't count, I don't know why, I thought I was a useful contributor, I resent the implicit message that my votes aren't valued, and I think it's rude to walk away from a service because of a perceived flaw without giving feedback.

I'd be interested to know what people think the difference is between "user" and "customer." Perhaps a "user" simply doesn't pay in any way, whereas a "customer" does. I prefer to be a "customer." In return for the contacts I've made and information gained, I'm happy to repay by taking time to add value.

Most companies try to turn users into customers. I'm just pointing out that the current situation has turned a customer into a user, and that might not be what was intended.

<comment><USER10> Maybe it's your presumption of malice that's rubbing people the wrong way. Instead of immediately thinking that you are under attack, perhaps a presumption of malfunction would have shown higher regard for people's intentions.

(But then again, given that this is HN, maybe assuming their code isn't bug free is a worse insult? ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> As I tried to point out (and obviously failed - you're not the first person to suggest this) the fact that others have in the past said that they have lost the right to vote, and the fact that PG says he tinkers with the question of whether specific votes count, make me believe it's not a bug or other unintended feature.

(ADDED IN EDIT: PG has said: "I'm experimenting with changes to the code that decides which votes count.")

And in some sense I'm content that for some reason and in some way my votes have been deemed irrelevant. I'd just like to know why. More than that, I spend time thinking before I vote. If my vote has no effect, I won't waste that time.

<comment><USER11> I don't think the intention is "specific votes" as in an editor cherry-picked particular users to ignore. Rather, I think they are trying to code logic that will recognize patterns of behavior and ignore users that exhibit that behavior. That is tricky stuff, and it's going to get a lot of false positives until they settle on an acceptable set of rules.

You're really not giving PG and whoever else develops the HN code the benefit of the doubt.

<comment><AUTHOR>
      > I don't think the intention is "specific votes" as in an
      > editor cherry-picked particular users to ignore.

I'm sure that's true. They write complex code that tries to identify deprecated behaviours, and then take action based on that. No doubt I could've expressed that point to better reflect what I think. I will look at going back and editing the phrasing - thank you.

      > Rather, I think they are trying to code logic that will
      > recognize patterns of behavior and ignore users that
      > exhibit that behavior.

Most likely, yes.

      > That is tricky stuff, and it's going to get a lot of false
      > positives until they settle on an acceptable set of rules.

Yes, and no. Yes it's tricky, and yes there will be false positives, but the rate depends on how aggressive they try to be.

      > You're really not giving PG and whoever else develops the
      > HN code the benefit of the doubt.

I suspect I'm giving them more credit than you give me credit for. This is the sort of thing at which I earn my living, and I really do know how hard automated behavioural analysis can be. I also know that behaviour modification works best when the reinforcement is strongly attached to the behaviour. The problem here is that I have no idea what I've done to have my voting privileges revoked, and that is counter-productive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's the same for me and has been like that for weeks, months(?). Having your votes on hacker news isn't exactly important to life as others have pointed out but it's slightly demoralizing whenever I forget myself and vote on something only to realize the system just ignores me. I'm useless and valued less than even a new user. :(

I'm considering creating a new user because of that as I've tried to just wait for it to work again hoping it's temporary. I have no idea what caused me to loose my voting rights in the first place and there's no way for me to change my behavior if it's undesirable. I've for the record never voted maliciously and this is my username because I've lost my password twice before not because I have several users to vote with.

</comment><comment><USER13> Considering that pg a while back mentioned you specifically on a short list of people whose comments he tends to find interesting, I doubt this was intentional.

It also might've been better handled by a short email to him.

<comment><AUTHOR>
      > pg a while back mentioned you specifically on a
      > short list of people whose comments he tends to
      > find interesting ...

Really? I didn't know. Do you have a reference?

      > It also might've been better handled by a short
      > email to him.

To be honest, I never actually thought of that.

<comment><USER13> I thought it was here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=845938>

...but it's not. Might've been somewhere else, or I might be mistaken.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the reference I found, and I found no others. Never mind, it was a nice thought while it lasted. 8-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I know this may not be the same situation as yours, and it may not be entirely helpful to you; but whenever I've had a problem with my account I've just sent a note to PG and it's gotten taken care of within a day or so.

(I have had voting problems previously.)

</comment><comment><USER15> I think what it boils down to is that the devoting logic is easy to trigger and permanent. I haven't had the ability to up or downvote in about six months.

<comment><USER7> I've not heard of the automatic bans lasting that long???

The longest I ever had was about 2 months (give or take - I was away for part of it). The longest ever someone has mentioned to me has been about 3 1/2 months

<comment><USER15> Then I am your new record! Just checked it and it happily fails.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is it not safer to assume it is a bug first of all before claiming that pg is wasting your time and not valuing you?

<comment><AUTHOR> Often yes, but in this case probably not. PG has stated publically that he tinkers with whether or not to count votes:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871458>

It appears that in this case, as in others before mine, he's decided that he's not going to count my votes. I have no idea why. As I say, it makes me inclined not to bother giving much back to the site, even though it's a great resource.

<comment><USER10> No, that thread states that he tinkers with "changes to _the code_ that decides which votes count". I don't see why you would jump to the conclusion that it's intentional and not a bug when he's publicly said he's experimenting.

<comment><AUTHOR> False positives in complex code designed to detect behaviour are not bugs. I'm not saying I've been singled out and that some editor has said - Ooh, that RiderOfGiraffes, we need to remove voting privileges. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that as a result of the system they have, I've lost my voting privileges, and I think it's a false positive.

And I'm asking - what have I done to trigger the mechanism?

I doubt I'll get an answer, no one else ever seems to have, and given that the site seems largely to work pretty well, I'm not going to campaign actively for it to be run differently.

But I'm not the only one, and I'm disappointed that despite trying to stay within the guidelines, despite submitting stuff I think the community will find interesting, and despite thinking carefully about how I vote and why I vote, somehow I've fallen foul of the system.

Sufficiently disappointed that I don't think I'll take so much care in the future.

<comment><USER17> There's a really interesting subtext about web-apps here. So much so that I think it deserves more follow-up.

Yes, you are correct: you will not take so much care in the future.

People are wonderful pattern recognizers. Show them a system where you vote up and things go up and you vote down and things go down? They grok it. Where you punish people by down-voting them and reward them by up=voting? Makes sense.

But start mucking around so sometimes when you vote up the article goes down? Or sometimes you can vote and sometimes you can't? Or you can't vote now, but you can vote in 12 hours? Or you can vote for this guy, but not this other?

Eventually they just say "Screw it. It's effectively either random or designed especially to piss me off. Therefore I will not take it seriously"

Oddly enough, the more attached people are to the gaming/karma aspects of the site, the more this will annoy them. Also the more annoyed they are, the more likely they are to start gaming the system -- since in their minds the system isn't giving them a "fair shake" to begin with.

Lots of interesting insights into human behavior with complex systems here. Of course I'm just speculating, but it's important stuff for anybody running a public site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Okay, so this topic comes up pretty frequently, so I'm going to go at it again. I, for one, completely support what pg is doing.

The overall goal here is not to make any one person feel like a special snowflake. It's to keep conversation at the absolute highest possible quality. To that end, pg and and the editors curb a lot of behavior they find contrary to that goal. They kill spam. They kill articles that are too far away from our core topics. They ban trolls. They ban people who aren't quite trolls, but still have a negative effect on conversation. At the low end of the penalty scale, they sometimes take away your voting privileges, for awhile, or potentially forever. I'm guessing that means: we like what you have to say just fine, but we think your voting patterns are harming the site.

I've noticed this happening to a lot of people, so I've used that feedback to modify my own behavior. I try to make about four or five comment upvotes for every downvote, at least. I don't downvote anything into negative points unless I think it is _really_ harsh and goes very much against the grain. The details don't matter, but the overall outcome does: I try to behave in a manner that I think is good for the site.

If it turns out that pg disagrees with what I'm doing, I'm perfectly fine with that. If he takes away my voting rights or bans me outright, I will _still_ think he's doing a good job.

Here's why I think so: just _look_ at this place! Have you _ever_ seen an internet hangout that got this old and/or this big, yet remained as civil and valuable as this one? I certainly haven't.

That says to me that pg isn't just doing something right, he's doing something _incredibly_ right. I am frankly a lot less impressed by the community- building track record of any of the complainers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Largely speaking I agree with you. My problem here is that I don't know what I've done wrong. If those responsible (PG and his editors) want to communicate a message to me, they've failed.

I haven't gone around upvoting and downvoting excessively. I've upvoted a few things I think are of value, and I don't remember downvoting anything recently.

I'm just confused.

Feedback works best when it's consistent in direction (but not in frequency) and clearly attached to the action that provoked it. I think PG and friends do a great job on this. I think this is something they get wrong.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, it looks to me like pg is a lot more subtle than most of the techie- types who come here. He is not loud or brash or confrontational. He expects people to observe and figure things out, rather than being told explicitly. That goes against many people's expectations.

On the positive side, he is very responsive to people with problems who are sincere about working with him. Almost everybody who has ever been banned and made a good-faith effort to work with him has gotten unbanned. From what I've seen, this pretty much always happens via email. As others have mentioned, that's the go-to communication method for people with problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I can't believe you made a new submission about this. Seriously. Why can't you email him?

I can't believe you assume there is some kind of conspiracy to render your votes irrelevant. Seriously. It's just the internet.

<comment><USER7> > Why can't you email him?

That would probably be impolite :)

> I can't believe you assume there is some kind of conspiracy to render your > votes irrelevant

Please read Riders explanation. There are automatic triggers which stop your votes counting for an unknown period of time if you trigger them. Not a conspiracy; requests for information on this have been posted a couple of times before.

<comment><USER19> It'd be impolite to email someone something when it only concerns them, and yet it's fine to post on an online news group where _everyone will see it_?

<comment><USER7> What emailing out of the blue on a low priority issue and for which a wider group of people are interested in the answer anyway?

I certainly wouldn't bother him.

<comment><USER11> There is a history at HN of people who encountered problems emailing PG and having the problem solved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The same here. I had started a topic on this before and some people assured me that it will probably get back working, as they had this issue before as well.

Personally, I don't care much about this. Though when I start a topic here asking for help, I feel that I should thank those who helped me by upvoting their comments.

</comment><comment><USER21> I had no idea HN's defense mechanisms were this sophisticated.

</comment><comment><USER22> While we're talking about the voting system - could you please specify more clearly in the guidelines in what circumstances downmodding is appropriate?

<comment><USER23> One example of downmodding that I've seen personally is that someone will post a reference of a link or a book that I had never heard about. When it is particularly valuable to me I like to respond thanking them for posting it. I don't expect karma from this, I simply want to convey my thanks to the person who provided the information and to encourage other people to do the same. I also upvote them, but I think the personal thanks is more valuable. I've had these "that you" comments downvoted consistently, to the point where I no longer thank people and ultimately delete the comment. I find this behavior strange in a "community".

<comment><USER18> what you're describing there is a pretty information-free response, not terribly different from just saying 'me too'. that's what upvotes are for.

<comment><USER23> I see your point, but I don't believe we have the same definition of "information-free". Unless I'm mistaken, upvotes are anonymous. A comment of "thank you" or appreciation is essentially a publicly identifiable upvote. The information being conveyed is to the commenter and that information is the appreciation of the comment from an identifiable individual.

In just about every situation you could say that greetings, salutations, etc. convey no obvious information. But I'm not sure how far we'd get without them. I personally believe that things like this are what maintain and bond a community. But that is simply my opinion. I'd take a thoughtful comment reply, even if in disagreement, than an upvote any day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've got a better one for you: I submitted an article yesterday. Quickly 3 or 4 people upvoted it -- it was basically an "Ask HN" piece. Nothing special.

But the odd thing was that even though the score increased dramatically from 1 to 5 in just 10-15 minutes, the ranking didn't change that much. Used to be that an increase of that much would get you near the top of the front page, if even for a little bit.

I'm not complaining, just figured somebody somewhere was tinkering or it was some kind of effect of karma inflation. However it does bring up an interesting point about UI design and large groups of users -- any non-obvious new system behavior can easily be interpreted in lots of ways, some of which aren't so flattering to the board owners.

FWIW, I've always thought this behavior was a bug. If I thought my vote was being taken and then returned to me at random times depending on the "smarts" of the system without notifying me why, I'd be pretty mad. I understand that it's already happening with deep threads and the first time I stumbled across it I was so mad I was ready to just throw in the towel on HN.

Not exactly a happy user experience, but yes, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one. Just a better job of communicating would salve a lot of these hurt feelings, in my opinion.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently submissions with text as opposed to URLs don't get ranked as highly. Two items submitted at the same time and with the same votes, one with URL, the other as text, the text one will rank significantly lower.

That might explain your observation.

<comment><USER17> Thanks!

But that's my point -- there's all kinds of little nuances and "if X, then Y" in the system and hell if I have time to keep on top of all of it. To my mind, it seems a reasonable assumption that there is a mad sysadmin somewhere just screwing around with me. After all, in the past for most boards limiting voting or tweaking ranking or turning on or off features was traditionally handled by a person, not an algorithm. Maybe it's some super-duper cool collaborative voting checker that's working wrong or maybe somebody just had a bad day. As a user, beats me -- and once I have to start second-guessing who is doing what to me and why the site is totally screwed. In my opinion.

You shouldn't have to be on HN everyday and read all the pages to understand how the site works. That's an idiotic expectation.

By the way, I'm commenting on all user sites with non-intuitive behavior, not just the peculiarities of HN.

<comment><USER24> There are a couple other things that are down-weighted like self-posts... tweets, unembedded images. PG commented about this at one point.

<comment><USER17> _PG commented about this at one point._

(sigh)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If you haven't done so already, why don't you email Paul Graham privately and ask him what you have done to cause your comments to be discounted. If it is for a reason that he wants to keep private then it might be more constructive than raising the issue in public.

<comment><USER26> Not that I disagree, however, I found it interesting to hear about this issue. I wasn't aware it exists before this submission.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > I understand that you need to stay on top of the problem of people gaming > the system, and that being too open just makes it easier for people to screw > around and make the voting system less valuable.

Is security through obscurity really a good idea in this day and age?

<comment><USER28> Its another brick in the wall. As long as you're not fooling yourself into thinking it's all you need, it aids in not making things easier for people to figure out and slightly raises the bar against intrusion. "Defense in Depth" is the only situation where I could consider obscurity a security layer.

Just because I keep my ssh servers up to date (disable passwords, root login, etc), doesn't mean I don't gain anything by having them listen a high port. The moment a 0-Day exploit is found (or maybe another Debian key generation bug) the security of not showing up on every script kiddies initial scans looking for unpatched ssh servers is worth something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Thanks to everyone for their interesting comments. Some of the forms of site behavior mentioned here I don't think I have ever observed. I don't read the code for the site software, so I just use the site empirically. The discussion of trade-offs involved in different kinds of site voting behavior defaults has been very helpful to me.

My overall perspective on any online forum's forum rules is that I just deal with them. I don't take any set of rules personally. I don't assume any kind of enforcement action or limitation on my own forum participation is directed at me as an individual, but rather is a forum management response to forum issues. If I enjoy a forum, I keep right on participating. If I don't enjoy a forum, I take my participation elsewhere without feeling offended. I happen to like HN a lot. To each their own.

As to specific observations of voting behavior, to the best of my knowledge and belief, when I upvote a comment or submission, and when I downvote a comment, my votes immediately change the score of the item I have just voted on. I try in my own mind to upvote more often than downvote, but I have no way to keep track of my actual count of votes up or down. I do like to clean up the comments, so I definitely downvote from time to time, and sometimes in bursts of downvotes in one thread. Unless I am wholly mistaken in my observation, my votes count as ups or downs on those items, in real time. It has been my observation that my own personal karma score will sometimes be stable for hours at a time, even if I have made new comments or submitted new articles, and it may be (I don't know) that I am running into some automated response of the site software such that my karma score is frozen if I have just been downvoting repeatedly. But it often seems that overnight, or after a while, my personal karma score becomes unstuck, and anyway I don't worry about this too much. I look at my threads view from time to time both to see if anyone has replied to any of my comments and to see what the aggregate votes are on those comments. If I am below 1 in aggregate score on some comment I have made, I try to think why readers would decide to downvote it. If I see someone else get a conspicuously high net score on a comment in a thread where I have also commented, I try to figure out what he or she did right to achieve commendation from other participants. As long as the site in general is worth reading and interesting to me, I don't especially worry about how its voting behavior is implemented. It's fun for me to learn from other participants here what kind of rules are visible in the source code and what kind of incentives may be designed by management to keep the conversation worthwhile. Since 1992, I have been a moderator on one or another of a variety of online forums, and I'm always deeply curious about what makes online communities successful and valuable to participants. I think HN is doing a good job.

P.S. I like many of RiderOfGiraffes's submissions and comments, and have certainly upvoted more than a few (and perhaps downvoted none of them). I too recall some thread in which pg mentioned RiderOfGiraffes favorably, although I don't have the link at hand. I would regret seeing RiderOfGiraffes leaving the site or changing his username, because I like to see familiar usernames as a clue that a comment or submission will be worth a read.

</comment><comment><USER30> I've noticed this same effect as well. I thought that it wasn't counted for some period of time + it wasn't counted unless there was a reply to the comment or some such.

</comment><comment><USER31> Try Ctrl-F5 on pages where it seems your vote doesn't count. It's most likely stale cache.

<comment><AUTHOR> Been there, done that, run experiments, and no, it's not a cacheing issue. This has been raised before, and it's not a bug. PG has explicitly said he experiments with not counting some votes. It appears he's decided (perhaps temporarily) not to count mine. Hence the question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> What does dl;dr: mean? I couldn't find it in the urban dictionary.

<comment><USER33> Not sure if you are sarcastic, but I'm pretty sure he meant tl; dr

<http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tl;dr>

<comment><USER34> For some browsers you will need to use: <http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tl%3Bdr>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It's amazing how voting gets pretty complex, pretty fast.

Although, these are more ballot-based, I remember reading about this in my discrete math class (in high school!):

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system>

I second a couple of people's comments about how it's very cool PG is constantly trying to improve the system. I've sometimes read his comments (<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg>), and one can tell he really cares about the level of discourse (even if he just writes, 'Please stop', etc.).

The idea of preventing 'mob feel' reminds me of America's system of checks and balances. A democracy/republic with three branches of government is not a perfect system, but it's been sustainable.

I don't know the right way to do voting, but I'd recommend pg and whoever else is involved in this discussion -- think about it in terms of time (i.e., too many processes running in similar time intervals can get out of hand -- exe, leg and s.ct. are all staggered in terms of their time horizons) and symmetry (i.e., balanced levels of power).

Arguably, in a majority rule situation, the government's checks are in place primarily to protect minority rights (from mob rule). This seems a little different from the 'mob rule' problem being discussed (where people gravitate into two-sided arguments). But anyway, perhaps I'd try to figure out fractional voting. People with more karma (maybe 50% weighted by total karma and 50% weighted by karma velocity over the past couple of weeks) can upvote with maybe something like 1.5 the votes of everyone else.

But if you ask me, everyone's downvote should be significantly less than 1. Though, there could be again a 50% total and 50% velocity function for how each user's posts and comments are treated. I.e, if a user starts posting really bad stuff, then they should be able to be voted down much more quickly. But arguably, this part of the system should be tinkered with much less. Everyone, theoretically, should have a right to say whatever want. Hmm, maybe they could be forwarded to the rules for discussion and be delayed from posting (like a Hockey penalty box?)

I don't know. It's a complex issue. Maybe it's good enough the way it is. As this system moves forward though, it'd probably be smart to build in ways to vote/approve changes to the system. Not for everything, but big things (analog is the presidential election. People would probably feel a lot better about it all. It's strange. Maybe you need a Constitution too.

Update. One last little idea. You could introduce new voting functionality perhaps as A-B tests. Some posts randomly get flagged for voting with feature X, some don't. If you could establish some metric to judge 'satisfaction' with the experience (more good karma in the discussion?), you could, basically, build 'learning' into your system.

</comment><comment><USER36> Just create a new account. I get banned all the time. This is my third account. You can't take it personally. It's either some person being wrong about you or some automated system. Who cares?

I love it when I get banned, it means I won't be back for a while, until the desire for attention overcomes the inertia. This site is kinda like Get Satisfaction for bloggers. "You don't _have_ to create an account. It's just that everybody on this one thread is talking about you right now, and they're all taking your lack of response to mean something."

I hate the karma system. Any site that has one is fundamentally flawed (detailed rant: [http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters- ope...](http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-open-door- heal-or-die.html)). It's an automated, massively parallel abusive relationship, and I hate to kick somebody when they're down, but this guy, with all his sad whining about "I don't know what I did wrong, why don't you love me any more"? That is not the sign of a healthy community. That is the sign of an automated, massively parallel abusive relationship.

Any venture capitalist knows that you run a lot of experiments and some things fail. The karma system is fail. Throw it away.

PS, please ban me.

<comment><USER37> There is no shortage of karma-free forums elsewhere full of flames and junk. The karma system is helpful in providing feedback to people with a lack of impulse control or respects for others. If you're repeatedly banned, you may want to examine how you communicate as doing so would probably increase your ability to affect change.

<comment><USER36> I said I liked being banned. Why would I want to change something I like? It's a reminder to avoid getting into arguments with people who pay no attention to logic and have weird, arbitrary loyalties to systems which present no actual usefulness.

<comment><USER37> >Why would I want to change something I like? It's a reminder to avoid getting into arguments with people who pay no attention to logic

In other words, you are happy to be rejected by those you consider inferior because you consider it a validation of your own perceived superiority.

<comment><USER36> Yeah, exactly. It's a dysfunctional pattern. I enjoy it, but I really think there's a systemic tendency to dysfunctional patterns here. That's inevitable with any social software, so you have to plan for your dysfunctions. Look at Stack Overflow, the dysfunction they get is karma whores answering as many questions as possible, and competing to be first with the answer. That's a pretty great dysfunction. The dysfunction we have here is anybody who polarizes opinions gets banned. The cynical (me) find it amusing and the sensitive (Giraffes) get their feelings hurt. Either way, it's bad. You don't want a community which punishes anyone for voicing controversial opinions, but that's inherent to the design here.

<comment><USER37> I think it's more the the way that opinions are expressed than the opinions themselves which creates blowback (unless one is expressing something truly polarizing, like singing the praises of racial hierarchy). So, if you pay attention to the tone of communication you can express controversial opinions without defensive blowback and have a higher chance of people understanding your ideas.

<comment><USER36> you're making the same assumption I disagreed with two comments ago. to me, getting banned is not the negative part of the experience. the negative part of the experience is the bad habit of coming back to engage in more fruitless conversation when I could be off doing stuff. the more offensive my tone is on this site, the sooner I'll get banned again, the quicker I'll get on with something actually useful to do, and the better it'll be for me.

I should just follow my own advice and devolve into Tourette's syndrome. fuck you, you chinchilla rapist. (nothing personal.)

anyway, ALSO, none of this has anything to do with what I'm talking about, which is that HN's karma system incubates various dysfunctions, and that anyone who sets up any kind of points system on a social site is going to be setting up the rules of a game that people will then play and be emotionally invested in winning.

curious game, the only way to win is not to play. I'm going to throw away my password to this account, log out, and see how long I can last before starting account #4.

<comment><USER37> I assumed that being banned wouldn't be a positive experience if _not_ being banned was more of a positive experience, i.e. if you got more value from communication.

But yeah, communication is often minimally useful. And I get that the pollution of motivation caused by social app incentives make make it even less so. It seems that without these incentives things tend to fall down in different ways, but maybe my experience of qualities communities that don't rely on social app incentives is limited.

[And chincilla is mischaracterizing what happened between us: it was my understanding that it was consensual.]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is a good example of the power of a karma or rating system on your website. Personally, I don't give a shit if I'm being rewarded (or penalized) on websites, and seeing a little number next to my screen name doesn't give me any sense of pride or validation.

With this little rant about feeling like they're 'wasting time' because a counter isn't being incremented with an arbitrary points system, it's obvious there's at least some people out there that absolutely need this add-on to contribute positively.

</comment><comment><USER39> Look at it like voting in America. Yeah, it probably doesn't mean squat, especially if your views contradict the local majority. But you still do it, right?

<comment><USER40> No.

<comment><USER16> I think the root here was complaining about the "First Past the Post System". In that case he has a point, especially when our politicians enjoy engaging in "jerrymandering".</comment></comment></comment>


Has AI surpassed humans at translation? No – here's why - <AUTHOR> https://www.skynettoday.com/editorials/state_of_nmt <comment><USER2> Multiple duplications, all from the same user:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17633619](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17633619)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17627392](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17627392)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17620652](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17620652)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17619026](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17619026)

</comment><comment><USER3> Lately I have been using google translate, which I assume uses AI, to translate a lot of Japanese. Boy, is it terrible. Among other things, it gets pronouns like I vs you vs he/sh wrong almost all the time. And it usually translates what should be she as he. Beyond that, the sentences, if you can call them that, are often ungrammatical jumbles, though I can usually figure out the general drift. Sometimes they are simply incomprehensible.</comment>


Congratulations Jeff: Spawning a New Process - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001168.html

<comment><USER2> Congrats, Jeff!

On a slightly related note, your choice of headline reminded me of this little anecdote: <http://www.utdallas.edu/~asimpson/misc/funny/child.process>

</comment><comment><USER3> Congratulations, Jeff!

(BTW Is Stallman really THAT... inhuman?)

<comment><USER4> _It doesn't take special talents to reproduce -- even plants can do it. On the other hand, contributing to a program like Emacs takes real skill. That is really something to be proud of._

I agree. Contributing to Emacs is hard. If it isn't having to wait for copyright assignment papers in the mail, it's a 1000-message-long thread debating the British vs. American spelling in the docstrings. In the end, having sex is a lot easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Congrats on making a replacement!

Good luck with the programming. I've found the IDE horribly awkward, the API documentation completely lacking, and the debugger to be time-consuming and frustrating.

All-in-all? I wouldn't miss it for the world. Good luck, Jeff.

<comment><USER6> The core dumps are also a nightmare.

<comment><USER7> Did anyone _not_ think of that as a reply?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Quick, does anyone know where Jeff can buy an Extra Small Aeron chair??

</comment><comment><USER9> he's gonna get introduced to a new way of programming</comment>


Fighting Fake News – Proof and Probability - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@gutjahr/fighting-fake-news-proof-and-probability-74009dfa8cdf <comment><AUTHOR> Rootclaim wants to calculate if a story is true by taking all the evidence, consider its reliability, put it to the probabilistic test and come up with the most likely conclusion.

> However, people may sometimes have "context-based rationality"… If you are > clearly and emotionally on one side of an issue, I don't think we will > convince you otherwise.

So true.

</comment><comment><USER2> Unfortunately the Website [https://www.rootclaim.com/](https://www.rootclaim.com/) is not available at the moment.</comment>


The Greatest Movie Ever Sold - <AUTHOR> http://thegreatestmovieeversold.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> A little more about the movie: "The biggest surprise for me in the making of The Greatest Movie Ever Sold was that we actually got brands and companies to not only agree to be in the film, but to actually pay for it."

[http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/news/2011/01/the- greatest-m...](http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/news/2011/01/the-greatest- movie-ever-sold-co-writer-director-morgan-spurlock/)</comment>


The Bitcoin Lottery - <AUTHOR> http://cryptome.org/0004/bitcoin-lottery.htm

<comment><USER3> There I stood in front the infernal machine. Crumbled, soggy paper in hand. It fell to pieces before I even had the thought to preserve it somehow. Sixteen random characters, gone in the wash. My thesis, gone in the wash. A decade, gone in the wash.

I could try to rewrite it. But I wouldn't even know where to start. Of course all my research was encrypted too! I'm no idiot! This was work, this was hard work. I'm not even sure I could remember it all. "I wrote them down in my diary so I wouldn't have to remember."

I did the calculation. Brute forcing the password would take more than my lifetime with all the machines in the lab. Would Moore save me? Could I stand the wait? Later on, I stood on the roof of the math building (a quiet escape a few grad students shared) contemplating my next move. Looking out, late at night, it came to me. I couldn't do it, but the _they_ could. Even just a fraction of the computers out there could get me my thesis back.

But how? I could create a distributed computing project, it was something I had worked on before. But there was no way to attract the required users. I needed something as least as big as the largest projects that already existed. I needed to give people something. A bounty isn't enough, the prime project has a great bounty, but I need more users. They _all_ want money. But I had no money. So, I gave them the next best thing: the promise of money.

<comment><USER4> What's your pen name so I can buy your books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Bitcoin should be rewritten to be some function of something "useful" like the SETI@Home project. Consider if you could have "solving sha256 problems" be simultaneously "computing the next largest prime" (arguably useful, at least, more so than what its currently doing) or "computing patterns in DNA".

<comment><USER6> The difficulty is that the problem must be of a predictable complexity. In other words, you must know ahead of time how long it takes a given amount of processing power to find the solution.

<comment><USER7> Would predictable statistical distribution of complexity not be enough? As in, you get a randomly assigned job, that takes on average a given amount of processing power, and is proven to not need more than some upper limit - <USER2> even, you time out after a given amount of processing power and request a new job. And ideally have each unit small enough that mining will completing multiple jobs so difference in complexity starts averaging out.

<comment><USER6> You'd also need to be pretty certain that no-one's going to come up with a faster algorithm for solving the problem. I can't think of any real-world problems to which all these criteria would apply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Someone please do the math on the energy lost in GPUs calculating hashes compared to the dollar value of the bitcoin rewards. The average miner might be better off just powering down their machines.

<comment><USER9> Never mind the energy; think of the capital expenditure. If I have US$1,000 lying around, I could either put it in a mutual fund, getting a certain number of dollars per month (with which I could buy bitcoins), or I could buy a kick- ass GPU card and become a miner, generating a certain number of bitcoins per month (which I could then sell in exchange for dollars). At current interest rates, which is a better investment?

<comment><USER10> Paypal's money market yeild is currently .06% per week. At that rate, with $1000, you make .6 dollars a week, and buy maybe a bitcoin each month and a half...the discussion here is about earning a bitcoin a day mining, so I'm assuming you're down under a third of the mining return.

Assuming the cost of the electricitiy is 1.26 cents per kwh, and your machine is running at around 800 wats, constantly, that's 720 hours and 576 kwh, seven dollars a month...so the cost of running doesn't seem to be that high either.

Edited for bad math. May continue to do so. Please point out errors.

<comment><USER11> Long-term average stock market return is 5-8% depending on who you ask. So an index fund or balanced fund of funds would yield much better returns than bitcoin.

<comment><USER12> The (S&P 500) stock market return:

1) Since 1971 (40 years) is roughly 1300%, which is 19.63% annualized (1.1963^40 = 1300).

2) Since 1950 (60 years) is roughly 7680%, which is 16.08% annualized (1.1608^60 = 7680)

[http://chart.finance.yahoo.com/z?s=%5eGSPC&t=my&q=l&...](http://chart.finance.yahoo.com/z?s=%5eGSPC&t=my&q=l&l=on&z=l&p=s&a=v&p=s&lang=en- US&region=US)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Related: here is how to calculate the expected number of days. Though I did not add in BitCoin specific parameters. But suppose you need to have zeros in the first k bits, I suppose the probability for each lottery ticket/number is (256-k)/256 (I assume that SHA256 has 256 bits, too lazy to look it up).

[http://blog.blinker.net/2011/02/08/expected-number-of- coin-t...](http://blog.blinker.net/2011/02/08/expected-number-of-coin-tosses- until-you-get-tail/)

At the moment I generate about 5BTC/day with my dual-core ATI graphics card. Two months ago (when I started), it was twice that.

<comment><USER14> You could also use the bitcoin calculator: <http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php>

<comment><USER13> Of course, my blog post just explains how to implement something like the bitcoin calculator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sounds like the people running large botnets could just farm the crap out of this.

</comment><comment><USER16> To me, at least, bitcoin isn't about a lottery and it isn't about winning. It's about laying the framework for the foundation of an open and secure currency. Who cares, in the long run, who won the most coins right now? I don't think many people have large stakes of bitcoins that they're hoping to get rich off of.

The mining cost should eventually be reflective of the value of the _features_ of the cryptocurrency. In other words, if you want pseudoanonymous secure p2p transactions, buying bitcoins is like paying for that service. Who's providing the service? The miners, which are just the people keeping the network running so that others can use it.

<comment><USER9> _Who cares, in the long run, who won the most coins right now?_

In the long run, people with a lot of coins tend to get even more coins. I don't see why I should participate in an "open and secure currency" that benefits people who let their hardware run wild doing mathematical operations which, outside the currency system itself, are pointless. At least gold has some aesthetic and industrial value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Every post hyping Bitcoin increases the value of the Bitcoin held by those making the posts.

<comment><USER18> But every new miner decreases the output of each mining rig. Posts about spending and using bitcoins benefit those who have bitcoins far more than "Free money" posts do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Countdown to Goldman Sachs and then all of Wall Street jumping in ... 5... 4... 3...

<comment><USER20> Nah, there isn't enough money to be stolen here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wait, seriously? And people trust this system?

<comment><USER5> What's not to trust? It seems that the clients determine what they trust, and so long as the majority of clients agree, all is well.

There are economic problems with bitcoin as a currency (its a fiat currency, effectively, except without the fiat - it has scarcity with no intrinsic value), but the algorithm component seems solid to me.

<comment><USER21> The gamble. Earning bitcoins is based on -luck-.

I don't gamble. This is not some religious thing, but simply because I like to have control over my fate, and gambling takes that control.

<comment><USER22> _I don't gamble. This is not some religious thing, but simply because I like to have control over my fate, and gambling takes that control_ Bu Interesting attitude. But of course you _don't_ have control over your fate. One day you're going to contract the disease which kills you, and you don't have any choice over when that happens or what it is. And between now and then, dozens of major events will happen in your life which you _also_ didn't choose.

Maybe you like to have the illusion of control over your fate?

Personally I like to keep my life exposed to some randomness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is there a point to these hashes? Does bitcoin just encourage people as a whole to make a trillion trillion hashes? I hope there'll never be a green bitcoin, it would be such a lie.

Can't someone adapt it to look for md5/sha clashes?

<comment><USER24> The whole point is to verify that transactions are legitimate: <https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Category:Mining>

<comment><USER23> I think I get it, but it could be a lot more accessible. Law-makers (not lawyers) would be less wrongly opposed to something they understand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Anyone care to adapt this system for e-voting, in general?

<comment><USER10> Why on earth would you want to base votes on who has the most computing power?

<comment><USER26> Assuming Hardware = Wattage Output = Voting power;

US power sources overlayed on 2008 Electoral Map. Too close to call.

<http://i.imgur.com/d1Fyf.jpg>

I was too lazy to fix Alaska and Hawaii.

Source: [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1109973...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=110997398)

<comment><USER10> Please explain the intent of that graphic? Or, rather, what does where the electicity is have to do with voting power, aside from the congruence with cities?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


China's Rapid Rise: Backward Agrarian Society to Industrialisation in 35 Years - <AUTHOR> https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/april-2016/chinas-rapid-rise-from-backward-agrarian-society-to-industrial-powerhouse-in-just-35-years?&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=SM&utm_term=output&utm_content=pub&utm_campaign=7012_1 <comment><USER2> "Backward" \- by whose definition?

Generally happy and sustainable subsistence for hundreds of generations.

Our current profligate lifestyle may well be considered backward in the future.</comment>