Multi-language Support for the JVM - <AUTHOR> http://openjdk.java.net/projects/mlvm/

<comment><USER2> This seems like it could be complicated - can we decouple the JVM from java? Assuming I have a lisp compiler for the JVM, an important question is how my lisp app will interact with some third party java app. Perhaps the language itself (lisp in this case) will have to come with some library for dealing with java classes and objects, in the spirit of dlls on win32.

<comment><USER3> There _is_ a lisp (Scheme) compiler for the JVM, <http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/index.html> I use it all the time; I think it's great. The hard questions about lisp and java interaction haven't necessarily been solved but earnest attempt have been made to do so.</comment></comment>


The deadly truth about a world built for men - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/feb/23/truth-world-built-for-men-car-crashes <comment><USER2> See meta discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19251903](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19251903)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link.

That result is sadly predictable. Time to repost [https://vimeo.com/96701548](https://vimeo.com/96701548).</comment></comment>


'Mad' Ideas for Cost Cuts at Ryanair - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704533904574547781071607354.html

<comment><USER2> Full article: [http://www.google.ca/search?q=http://sec.online.wsj.com/arti...](http://www.google.ca/search?q=http://sec.online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704533904574547781071607354.html)

<comment><USER3> Article behind paywall, and Google alternative is down. What a useless link!

<comment><USER2> [http://www.google.ca/search?q=http://online.wsj.com/article/...](http://www.google.ca/search?q=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704533904574547781071607354.html)

Click "cached" next to the first link.</comment></comment></comment>


How did SQL get so popular? - <AUTHOR> http://therealadam.com/archive/2009/06/01/how-did-sql-get-so-popular/

<comment><USER2> A more interesting question to me is "how did SQL get so _unpopular_ all of a sudden?" It seems to me it went like this:

1\. modern programming frameworks all abstracted away SQL because people found it hard to understand

2\. SQL written by ORM layers in these frameworks is slow. So people decided this was because RDBMS are slow.

3\. So people decided to stop using RDBMS and use object-oriented data stores instead (which is faster, unless you have relational queries, which a large number of simple web applications do not)

4\. Then when they started needing relational queries again, they started building complicated custom layers on top of their object stores to handle this

I figure sometime in the future somebody will publish a "brilliant" article called "Save yourself thousands of lines of object-manipulation code... by using RDBMS!" and suddenly SQL will be "popular" again.

I'm the first to admit that the default approach to web development for the past 10 years has been "slap all your data into mySQL, then start writing code". It works in a very, very large number of cases, but it's not super- efficient. It never claimed to be. It was just really easy and quick to write.

Now tools are growing up that let you solve these sorts of problems without using RDBMS, and that's great: the huge number of apps that don't need RDBMS can stop using SQL, and let us SQL junkies get on with our lives :-)

<comment><USER3> > 1\. modern programming frameworks all abstracted away SQL because people > found it hard to understand

No. Not because it's complicated. Because they wanted higher level facilities for getting/setting data. In other words, they put in abstraction because abstraction is good, not because they are dumb.

<comment><USER4> Although SQL sucks, it is a higher-level facility for getting and setting data than ORMs are. ORMs don't exist to abstract away SQL; that is counterproductive. ORMs exist so you can store your objects in a relational database, which is not a problem you can solve in SQL.

I suspect that a big part of the problem with SQL is that it's _too_ abstract: it is both hard to predict how fast a query will run and hard to predict whether the query will continue to run fast as the database changes. A big part of the appeal of things like memcached and Redis is that their performance is not only fast, but also _predictable_.

<comment><USER5> > it is a higher-level facility for getting and setting data than ORMs are

No, it's a higher level facility for querying data when you want different result sets back randomly, it sucks most common operations of inserting or updating data.

Forcing me to write a very long statement to insert a row isn't in any way more abstract that saying anObject.save().

SQL continually forces one to write the same boring code over and over. As soon as you start automating the generation of the boring bits, you've started to build an ORM. ORMs exist because programmers get tired of writing the same code again and again.

While SQL is good at what it does, it doesn't do the thing programmers need done most, which is store data structures easily without making them write a bunch of mapping code to translate it first. SQL isn't confusing, it's just frustratingly boring and repetitive.

<comment><USER4> In the comment you are replying to, I said, "ORMs exist so you can store your objects in a relational database, which is not a problem you can solve in SQL." It sounds like you're saying the same thing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The post's argument appears to be that SQL (by which he means relational databases, as noted in the comments) are popular because implementing ACID is too much trouble, and because dealing with random file access is confusing.

It sounds like it _never even crossed his mind_ that the relational model is a good fit for some problems. Wow.

<comment><USER7> _It sounds like it never even crossed his mind that the relational model is a good fit for some problems._

98% of programmers think the word "relation" has something to do with links between tables. I doubt the OP has ever even heard of a concept called "the relational model".

<comment><USER6> Touché.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My first thought was "Popular compared to what? What was the alternative?"

I was expecting to see hierarchical databases, OODBs and alternate query languages mentioned. The claim for "Distaste" for SQL is odd and vague. I agree with the first point - "Relational databases are ACID and that's powerful" but I ask "so what, where's the distaste?"

People who know a bit about RDBMSs know that they do a lot of heavy lifting for you. Is the point that a younger generation don't know that? What are they teaching kids in college these days?

Massively parallel data storage systems are in vogue now, bacause of the very the few very popular web apps that need to scale a lot horizontally, and SQL databases don't really deal with that. But that's not "How SQL got popular". Maybe it's why some have forgotten.

<comment><USER9> I agree with you here. Is there any one here on HN who is not comfortable with SQL? However, the increasing usage of frameworks such as rails/grails/hibernate/JPA makes it easier to access data without having to worry about SQL until something breaks.

The prime time for SQL has long been over, it is a necessary tool most of us don't think too much about.

<comment><USER6> Relational databases are designed for dealing with huge collections of data. Huge like terabytes. (This is, of course, their very reason for existence.)

Every time a framework pulls a big set of data across the wire to do a local calculation on it (a for loop summing a list of values, for example), it's doing a _completely unnecessary round trip_ to do (probably in PHP or Ruby, no less) _a task for which the database has already been specifically optimized_. It could have done all the calculation during the same pass it took to select the records and just sent the answer instead.

Frameworks obscure this.

Just a thought.

<comment><USER4> Relational databases were invented in 1970. The basic design for most of the popular RDBMSs today (Oracle, DB2, Ingres → Postgres, Sybase) was created in the 1980s. In 1982 you could buy a 5MB Winchester disk for US$2000. A terabyte of disk therefore would have cost US$400 million.

This is not what relational databases were designed for.

Otherwise your comment is correct.

<comment><USER6> Hence, "are designed", not "were designed".

Interesting data point, by the way. I have a little USB flash drive that stores 4 GB. It was about $10. That's probably more disk storage than existed _in the entire world_ until Y years ago -- any idea what year?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> SQL is popular because it was the query language that was available in the Oracle and IBM relational databases, which were the first relational database products to come to market. SQL subsequently became an ISO standard. Eventually all relational database vendors switched to SQL. Other DBMSs (Ingres, Informix, Postgres) originally used QUEL which was thought by many to be superior to SQL eventually switched as SQL became dominant/the standard. (Although QUEL can still be used with Ingres). There may be other reasons, but I think that in large part these are the reasons why SQL is dominant today.

Relational databases became popular because the declarative high level query language was less time consuming to write queries in than earlier non- relational database.

SQL is far from the perfect query language though. It's syntax is often bizarre and confounding, and has many non relational extensions (column ordering, duplicate tuples in a relation).

<comment><USER11> Re: non relational extensions I believe it was Ted Codd who said "No real application runs in third normal form".

The relational model is great, and it's important to remember that the things that make it great are that it is simple, dynamic, easy to understand and helps ensure you get correct results. IMO the two most common mistakes people make are being overly worried about breaking the model where necessary, and conversely, not realizing the benefits of things like human readable keys.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There seems to be some confusion between SQL, ACID(Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability), and a RDBMS. And it would have been nice, as StrawberryFrog notes to see these concepts compared to OODB and other query languages.

Missing is the concept that SQL is really quite powerful.

</comment><comment><USER13> SQL didn't really become popular until companies started believing in the benefits of moving their applications from homogeneous mainframe and timesharing systems to distributed heterogeneous client/server networks.</comment>


America Will Struggle After Coronavirus. These Charts Show Why - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/10/opinion/coronavirus-us-economy-inequality.html <comment><USER2> Reminds me of articles showing how candidate Hillary Clinton was certain to become president

<comment><USER3> Things feel painfully normal in spite of the complete chaos of the pandemic. It's like the worst aspects of self-righteousness and amateur-technocratic opinion broadcasting all just amplified x1000. I still actually think social media is a net positive but there's certain aspects that are especially unbearable during disasters.</comment></comment>


Building China's Comac C919 airplane involved a lot of hacking, report says - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/building-chinas-comac-c919-airplane-involved-a-lot-of-hacking-report-says/ <comment><USER3> Unfortunately all Chinese citizens must comply under Chinese law with spying requests whenever their intelligence agencies come asking. That makes every Chinese citizen in your company a potential spy.

This is shitty on so many levels, and what is the appropriate response? Should Chinese citizens have lower access in US companies? At universities? Etc. That would be a terrible outcome.

We do need some kind of clear asylum option for any Chinese citizen who gets pressured into this. But that only goes so far when the state back home can punish your family members etc.

<comment><USER4> Chinese citizen here but not a legal expert. I am not aware of any Chinese law requiring compliance with intelligence agencies' request. Can you please give a source?

<comment><USER5> It's part of the 2017 National Intelligence Law.

Although there is debate regarding the circumstances under which assistance can be compelled, it appears quite broad:

 _The Intelligence Law, by contrast, repeatedly obliges individuals, organizations, and institutions to assist Public Security and State Security officials in carrying out a wide array of "intelligence" work. Article Seven stipulates that "any organization or citizen shall support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work according to law." Article 14, in turn, grants intelligence agencies authority to insist on this support: "state intelligence work organs, when legally carrying forth intelligence work, may demand that concerned organs, organizations, or citizens provide needed support, assistance, and cooperation." Organizations and citizens must also protect the secrecy of "any state intelligence work secrets of which they are aware."_

[https://www.lawfareblog.com/beijings-new-national- intelligen...](https://www.lawfareblog.com/beijings-new-national-intelligence- law-defense-offense)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ah yes, the Comac C919, 8 years late and counting, and brought to you by the company whose sole previous model still has trouble landing on wet runways:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_ARJ21](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_ARJ21)

<comment><USER7> China managed to quite quickly absorb the technology transfer from Alstom/Siemens to build high-speed trains. Now their trains are better than anyone else's and they have more high-speed rails than any other country. They even managed to beat competitors and export their trains to Turkey and Argentina...

I have no doubt their airplane will ultimately be successful.

<comment><USER8> But will China be able to make the next leap on their own? It's one thing to copy but another to come up with the design on the first place.

<comment><USER9> The Swiss watchmaking industry was once largely focused on producing cheap copies of English and French watches. Today Swiss watchmakers are renowned for quality and innovation.

<comment><USER10> And going even farther back, the British industrial revolution was built on producing cheap copies of Indian textiles.

<comment><USER11> ... using machines that british people invented.

get the overall point, but not sure this is a good example.

<comment><USER12> US copied british factories by industrial espionage to bootstrap their own industry and eventually became the bigger industrial producer...

<comment><USER13> "On December 20, 1790, water-powered machinery for spinning and carding cotton was set in motion in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Based on the designs of English inventor Richard Arkwright, a mill was built by Samuel Slater on the Blackstone River. The Slater mill was the first American factory to successfully produce cotton yarn with water-powered machines. Slater was a recent English immigrant who apprenticed Arkwright's partner, Jebediah Strutt.

 _Samuel Slater had evaded British law against emigration of textile workers in order to seek his fortune in America._ Considered the father of the United States textile industry, he eventually built several successful cotton mills in New England and established the town of Slatersville, Rhode Island."

[https://www.thoughtco.com/richard-arkwright-water- frame-1991...](https://www.thoughtco.com/richard-arkwright-water- frame-1991693)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The full report can be found here in pdf form:

[https://www.crowdstrike.com/resources/wp- content/brochures/r...](https://www.crowdstrike.com/resources/wp- content/brochures/reports/huge-fan-of-your-work-intelligence-report.pdf)

<comment><USER15> "Forward" lmao.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, with all the effort CrowdStrike took to divide and preface each section of the doc, mark footnotes, and all the formatting junk....it's a very visually "noisy" document, and I really don't want to read it. Whatever happened to double-spacing? Simply godawful UX.

<comment><USER17> They're padding the document heavily is why. That's also why they have a whole section on "we spent time tracking down the Jiangsu Bureau of the MSS's buildings", with the conclusion that they're the buildings with "Jiangsu Bureau of the MSS" written in big letters on the side.

<comment><USER16> Hah! And to think, their client could have paid $50k for this report that I and a few undergrads could hammer out in a Thursday evening after some yerba mate.

<comment><USER17> Lol, well to be fair I know I do some of my best work on Thursday evenings with a good mate buzz going. : P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > In the rare occasions when the hacking team couldn't find a way inside a > target, a second MSS JSSD officer would intervene and recruit a Chinese > national working for the target company, and use him to plant Sakula on the > victim's network, usually via USB drives.

I'm not sure how the US is going to deal with things like this given that we have so many Chinese nationals working in most major corporations across so many industries.

<comment><USER19> Moles are not unique to China, it just happens that China currently happens to be the enemy. Most people whether immigrant or not just want to get the work done and go home.

<comment><USER18> The situation is a bit more unique with Chinese working/studying abroad. Since most of their families, friends, and relatives are still in China, they can be coerced by the CCP to engage in espionage out of fear of hurting their families.

<comment><USER20> I'm confused by your main point. Do you mean, as opposed to other foreign workers and students on temporary work/student visas, who can somehow migrate their friends and family over and therefore be subject to less coercion?

<comment><USER18> No, I was pointing out that China is unique in that they would have no moral qualms in coercing their citizens abroad using violence. I'm sure my coworkers from the EU probably don't ever have to worry about being in a situation where they would have to choose between spying or hurting their family.

<comment><USER21> I agree with you (Someone from France doesn't have to worry about the modern version of China's 9 generation purge[1]), but as a Canadian it's very common to see the Chinese students here wildly supportive of the CCP, including harassing and attacking Hong Kong protesters. I imagine the ones that are outspoken against the CCP have a much harder time going abroad in the first place.

With a billion and a half citizens it's unlikely they lack for fanatics to exploit.

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

<comment><USER22> > I imagine the ones that are outspoken against the CCP have a much harder > time going abroad in the first place.

Resistance against the CCP is a very tiny minority since there is a heavy brainwashing about how great everything CCP does since kids go to school at a young age - and they never get any other version of reality.

<comment><USER23> Disclaimer: I'm french and I'm living in China since my wife is Chinese.

It's not only about brainwashing.

40 years ago 85% of the chinese population was below the poverty line. Today it's between 10% and 15%. Under the party governance, almost everyone saw their life standards go up substantially. A lot of the people studying abroad saw their family starting from the bottom and they can now afford to study in western universities. They think the Chinese system works because economically it is working very well so far.

Just another example: We have some friends who bought a very expensive new apartment in Beijing (around 4.5M US$). This is a brand new residence founded by Wang Jianlin, the founder of Wanda Group (the most powerful estate developer in China). The government allowed him to run this project under one condition: to build 3 apartment blocks on the same field (sharing the same park) which will be _given_ to families under the poverty line. A lot of the wealthy people complained a lot about this, 1/3 of them got a refund and the price of the apartments dropped.

So to get back to my point, this is not only brainwashing. The party is giving its people a new life, and these people will be thankful and loyal for at least decades.

I'm curious about how a long term economic recession could change people minds though.

<comment><USER13> And yet it is brainwashing that they believe the CCP is responsible for the bulk of the poverty reduction, rather than simply opening China to international trade. When one compares the postwar growth of Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan to that of China it might be more correct to say that rather than making them rich, the CCP stopped empoverishing the people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As expected. But from reading the article I think the current plane probably had very little IP theft in the final design. Just your usual clusterfuck of inexperience and poor management.

What they're after ultimately is the ability to replace foreign components in future planes. Software, Hardware, the whole lot. Along with stealing all the management processes for systems integration.

So in this sense, the hacking might have shaved a few years off their efforts.

</comment><comment><USER25> With everyone hacking each other, maybe countries should just openly share IP and avoid the expense/troubles of cyber espionage. The end result is the same.

<comment><USER12> 40% of US company export revenues come from IP. Not gonna happen.

[https://www.uschamber.com/series/above-the-fold/the-state- am...](https://www.uschamber.com/series/above-the-fold/the-state-american- intellectual-property-protecting-american-jobs)

<comment><USER12> These are the statistics that would be referred to by IP proponents should this discussion ever reach a legislative stage. Don't shoot the messenger. Think about counter arguments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't have a horse in this fight, but if I was on COMAC's risk committee I would also make sure that no foreign president could ever cut my company - <USER2> its enormous investment - off from critical supplies with no more than a stroke of a pen.

Especially since that is what just happened to another Chinese company with Western suppliers.

Its not a moral problem.

</comment><comment><USER27> Did they steal MCAS from Boeing?

</comment><comment><USER28> Personally, I think we'd have all been better served by the IPR being available on some RAND basis. There is a reason Buran looked like the Shuttle, which goes beyond spying.

<comment><USER12> Often problem constraints shape form, but Buran is maybe not such a great example of this. Buran looked like shuttle because the program was told to copy the US program to my knowledge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> No wonder the US doesn't want the Chinese to be involved in large scale international tech projects like the ISS.

</comment><comment><USER30> A better comparison is with China's state-led expansion abroad. While it lacks the EIC's habit of violence, modern China shares both its strategic ambition and its commercial veneer. Asia is still grappling with that awkward mix, four centuries after the EIC's motley crew sailed from the foggy Thames

[https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2019/10/10/the- asto...](https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2019/10/10/the-astonishing- and-violent-rise-of-the-east-india-company)

</comment><comment><USER31> I wonder how much of their hacking efforts have yielded information that is 'salted'. Misinformation that will set them back years.

<comment><USER32> I wonder how salting your own data could set an organisation back. A risky strategy I would say.

<comment><USER31> Not your own data - you know there is a spy, and NSA helps you to isolate him and feed him salted info.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Just for the sake of the argument: would US allow China to buy a controlling stake in Boeing?

<comment><USER34> Absolutely not. Regardless of the commercial side, Boeing makes too many military jets for that to happen.

<comment><USER33> I mean, for all fairness, one side is using non-market arguments to disallow acquisition, another side uses non-market ways to get access to this technology. Am I allowed to make such statement?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> maybe this is connected to the shutdown of wooyun.org

</comment><comment><USER36> I would like to challenge anyone who's immediate response to this is "China are always stealing our intellectual property" to stop, and really consider whether IP laws are providing a net benefit here.

Sure they provide an incentive to innovate, but they also actively prevent others from innovating. This technology will now be available to many more people, and can now be built on and developed.

It's a very capitalistic view to think that the only motivation to innovate is the profit motive. And it surprises me little that an economy which functions on very different principles also takes a very different attitude to knowledge sharing. Even if we don't wish to emulate this way of doing things entirely, perhaps we all have something to learn from this difference in perspective.

<comment><USER37> By "different principles", you presumably mean totally in the service of an autocratic, hegemonistic nation bent on the brutal oppression its own citizens and its rise to become an unchallengeable global power able to curtail the social, political and human rights of anybody, anywhere on Earth, who it deems an enemy?

<comment><USER38> These sorts of comments are what make most online discussions about China seem so out of touch.

If I told you that most people in China generally support the government and don't feel oppressed by it, how would that affect your worldview? Most people in China are primarily concerned with improving their standard of living. For hundreds of millions of people, that standard has improved more than you can probably imagine in the last 30 or so years. That's what they care about.

Sure, they get upset when they hear about governmental corruption, or when wages aren't paid, and young people even care about internet censorship (though they all have VPNs). But if you were to go to them and propose overthrowing the government, most people would be horrified. They don't want chaos. They think that would put the enormous gains in social welfare they've achieved at risk. They want a competent government that delivers economic growth, and maybe some day in the future slowly - gradually - opens up political life.

<comment><USER39> For fairly obvious reasons, "look the other way at the government's indiscretions in exchange for raising per-capita GDP to ~10k USD" isn't an appealing bargain for anyone in the developed world.

<comment><USER38> We're not talking about the developed world. We're talking about a country whose GDP/capita was $300 just 30 years ago. For citizens of that country, increasing GDP/capita to $10k (a factor of 30) and looking the other way on various political issues is an appealing bargain. It doesn't take that much imagination to empathize with that view, which in my experience is shared by many (I'd say most) Chinese people.

It continually amazes me how little effort people make in Western online discussions to put themselves in the shoes of someone who's seen their country go from utter poverty to relative wealth in one generation. That person might want to gain more political freedoms eventually, but they mainly don't want to destroy everything by plunging the country into chaos.

Keep in mind that the catastrophic experience of the Cultural Revolution soured many Chinese people to politics, and convinced them that stability and steady improvement of living standards are the most important things. Many people who remember those times are allergic to any sort of fanaticism.

Also keep in mind that although many things are restricted in China, the country has opened up a huge amount. In contrast to how things were not so long ago, Chinese people are now able to travel around the world, and largely live their lives without experiencing much government interference. The limits on political activism are clear, but most people just focus on improving their own situation and enjoying the modest luxuries they can now finally afford.

<comment><USER40> In a way, it's a type of "first world privilege."

It's often inconceivable for them to understand because their life experiences are just so different. Ask anyone from a poor nation about China, and while they may dislike the government, they also talk with admiration at how many people were lifted out of poverty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> China is powerful.</comment>


Bill Gates: top ten greatest hits (and misses) - the Microsoft years - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2008/06/27/bill-gates-top-ten-greatest-hits-and-misses-the-microsoft-y/ <comment><USER2> Hmm, I don't know if I would call Windows CE one of their bigger successes.</comment>


Ask HN: Software engineers, what do you look for in a good manager? - <AUTHOR> I've been in the startup world going on 13 years with about 8+ of them in a lead,manager,director,BP, and even cto capacity. Lead teams as small as 3 and as big as 30.
So I'm curious what makes a good manager to you? I always took what I liked from old bosses and "disgarded" behaviors I did not like.
So when looking for or working at a job what do you look for in a leader/boss? <comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the insights. Personally as a manager I give as much autonomy as I can trust a person. If you ass kick and get shit done the last think I want to do is hinder you.

In terms of honesty and transparency I feel being open and honest to a fault is the best practice. That and also having.my directs feel comfortable challenging me... I make the final decision but its thoes under me who do the work.

Lastly I personally hate "hands on" management roles... all that does is two things:

\- have two critical paths... one for managment bullshit plus individual contributor work that are always in conflict

\- make me just a god level tech lead as if I am working on a system of course ill.choose tools and processes that fit me best as an IC.

</comment><comment><USER2> Interestingly, the two best managers I've had over my career both had experience as middle school teachers. Not really sure what that says about our profession, but there it is. When looking for a new manager, the most important thing is that they're honest and that they're savvy enough to know if they're telling you the truth or not.

</comment><comment><USER3> Someone who believes in being very particular about defining roles, while providing a great deal of autonomy within the boundaries of those roles. I try to ask questions about their approach to delegating and assigning tasks so that I can gauge their commitment to this ideal.

</comment><comment><USER4> Good communication, honesty, and trust are the three big things I look for. To expand upon trust, trust can usually be observed by watching if she/he micromanages either individuals or the team.

</comment><comment><USER5> Easy communication and understand each other</comment>


Why do tech companies file so many weird patents? - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/amazon-sony-facebook-strange-patents.html <comment><USER2> For money. So they are able to sue people.</comment>


Nurturing India's Next Entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/21/nurturing-indias-next-entrepreneurs/?src=twr <comment><USER2> India has a leadership crisis. This is a nation has been sucked dry by its dynastic political classes. The alternatives India is presented with aren't that different from the systems it seeks to replace. Every decision over the last 60 years has been one of divide, broker, and rule. India's politicians love the caste system, the divisions it creates and the votes that such a system guarantees.The middle classes have no hope and have no real representation today. The poor continue being poor and are treated as a vote bank.

Infrastructure is a daily fight and when American clients look at Indian developers and teams, little do they realize the daily fights teams go through to just get to office. All of this adds to inefficiency and a tiredness that saps any will out of anyone with the dreams to strike out on their own. It's close to impossible.

If nothing else gets you, the goons, the trade unions, the bureaucracy, the queues, the traffic jams, the insane bills for shoddy service, the daily swearing, the disease, the increasing cost of borrowing money, the lack of water, the power cuts, and a million other small things will. India's political upper classes are its curse. They live in $2Billion homes shuttled by helicopters while the country around them festers in one giant sewage pit.</comment>


Family Sues Tesla After Model X Accident - <AUTHOR> https://www.independent.com/2019/05/30/santa-barbara-mom-sues-tesla-after-model-x-accident/ <comment><USER2> "Tesla explained its vehicles continuously record and transmit operational and diagnostic data to the company's servers. The data from Halcourt's Model X showed its engine was actually not turned off, and that soon after Halcourt's toddler entered the SUV through the open back door and crawled into the driver's seat, he first pressed the brake pedal then shifted the gear selector to Drive.

"Over the next 6 seconds, the vehicle continued to be in Drive gear with the brake pedal pressed until the accelerator pedal was pressed and the brake pedal was released," Tesla stated. "In the next 4 seconds, while varying manual pressure continued to be applied to the accelerator pedal, the vehicle speed increase was consistent with the pressure applied to the accelerator pedal. Then, the brake pedal was pressed including activation of the Anti-Lock Braking System, the accelerator pedal was released, and the vehicle came to a stop."

I'm not a Tesla Fanboy or anything but if this is true I don't see how they are at fault.

<comment><USER3> i seriously think people are paid to post these stories to spread fud. they are non-stop on all social media.

this is not interesting at all... she left her car running and her child put the car in gear. this story should be removed.

<comment><USER4> how does a 2 year old reach the brake pedal while shifting the car into gear?

<comment><USER5> It's impossible, right? What could possible happen if you leave the engine on?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >> soon after Halcourt's toddler entered the SUV through the open back door and crawled into the driver's seat, he first pressed the brake pedal then shifted the gear selector to Drive

How is it even possible for a 2 year old? The whole story is just really hard to believe

</comment><comment> swagasaurus-rex > "The data from Halcourt's Model X showed its engine was actually not turned > off, and that soon after Halcourt's toddler entered the SUV through the open > back door and crawled into the driver's seat, he first pressed the brake > pedal then shifted the gear selector to Drive."

<comment><AUTHOR> A couple problems with this statement is that there is no "engine" and there is no notion of turning the Tesla "off."</comment></comment>


The whole city of Florence can fit in one Atlanta cloverleaf - <AUTHOR> http://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/you-cant-set-shop-side-expressway.html <comment><USER2> Again?

1 day ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11908115](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11908115)

493 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9018464](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9018464)

</comment><comment><USER3> Once I rented a car in Florence then went to park near the hotel in the centre for one night. As a Swiss I know how to navigate really narrow lanes, but I did fight with the one-way lanes. It was fun to crack the code.

When after a few setbacks I finally arrived at the parking I gave them the keys, because the parking looked like this: [https://s3-media1.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/NuvJ0F-ZghStb8vVNLYI...](https://s3-media1.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/NuvJ0F-ZghStb8vVNLYIBg/ls.jpg). I paid about $50 for a night.</comment>


Ask HN: How can you "own" code without control over it's quality or design? - <AUTHOR>

Throwaway account, for obvious reasons.
We've been told in our project that we should "take ownership" of some extremely bad code that I have been hacking away at for several months, fixing and finding bugs in the spaghetti. Any attempts to refactor the code gets rejected by management (unless we do it secretly; they have damanded "no secret development") and any new implementation ideas appear to require full working prototypes, a cost analysis and a proposal document before being considered. Of course, we are never budgeted the time to do this. The result is that we are now getting blamed for the results of bad design decisions made many years ago before we even started on this project.
I'm a developer in my 20s (but with several successful projects behind me) so I'm hoping some old HN hands have managed to deal with this problem before and can offer some advice to me and other people stuck in this situation.
In short, how can you accept ownership or responsibility for code that you don't have control over the quality or design of? <comment><USER2> You might be surprised at how large an impact adding unit tests can have on existing code. It makes it feasible to start incrementally fixing the spaghetti while having some assurance that you aren't breaking existing functionality. Granted, it's not a panacea, but it does have a huge impact.

That all being said, the concept of "taking ownership" without having any control of how you do your job is bullshit. The only way to solve that problem is to tell management that they are solely to blame, but the solution you get may be to no longer work for them; you have to decide for yourself if it's worth the risk.

</comment><comment><USER3> You can't successfully own code that you don't control.

I believe that the best outcome for both of you would be 20% of time set aside for refactoring and increasing test coverage. Sure you'd want more but features have to roll out too. Management may not realise that refactoring that much is necessary.

You may have to pad out estimates of new work, and say things like "in order to do that we'd have to understand the guts of the _foo_ subsystem, and make sure that we don't break it while we change it, so we'll have to put tests around it while we change the code" while mentally adding a week's time refactoring and adding unit test coverage to _foo_ to your estimate. Grease the moving parts - things that change once tend to change again, and you'll be happier the second time around.

If you can't even do that, ask them what they mean by "take ownership". Maybe they just want you to the go-to-guy for that particular monster. Say what would do if you really owned it. If you are completely overruled, you may have to be blunt and point out that this is not ownership in any non-bullshit sense.

If that fails, as the wise man said: if you can't change your company, change your company.

</comment><comment><USER4> Take the time to make new stuff as good as you can possibly can and try to make old stuff as usable as you can possibly can.

Even thought they say you now "own" the code, they perfectly know that you haven't coded it. So you can't be taken responsible for bugs that appears in code you don't even know.

Maybe you should work in a startup and be happy instead :)</comment>


Potluck - social link sharing app from the creators of Branch - <AUTHOR> https://www.potluck.it

<comment><AUTHOR> The founders have a post on Medium with more details: [https://medium.com/p/6c2600e7bc38](https://medium.com/p/6c2600e7bc38)</comment>


Ask HN: Did you get the .dev domains you wanted? - <AUTHOR> I was really surprised at how quick a whole lot went today.  I had a list of ones that were available yesterday that I though would be cool, but they were all mostly gone today! <comment><USER2> Until they're $20/year (tomorrow?) I won't be buying any.

I was a little dismayed to see that one I had planned on buying sold this morning, though.

<comment><USER3> They are $12/year, right now. (Non-premium.)

<comment><USER2> Yeah, just checked again, and bought several.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just registered fogbeam.dev, nothing else. Not even sure exactly how we'll use it yet, but it seemed like something good to have.

</comment><comment> huy-nguyen Yes I did within a few minutes of general availability. 3-letter first name dot dev.</comment>


Celebrity Photo Leak: Hackers May Have a Backup of Kate Upton's Entire iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/icloud-hackers-may-have-entire-iphone-backups-via-elcomsoft-phone-password-breaker-2014-9

<comment> xkcd-sucks It's interesting how the article repeatedly mentions how the 'hacking tools' are intended for use by government agencies, as if to legitimize security flaws/unethical access of data.</comment>


Debugging Network Stalls on Kubernetes - <AUTHOR> https://github.blog/2019-11-21-debugging-network-stalls-on-kubernetes/ <comment><USER2> What I am struggling to understand is why is it a good idea to to ip inside ip.

Giving containers their own nic, and IP isn't hard, and in most cases is >> faster than spending time using some immature tunnelling protocol.

I _can_ see that doing multi-cloud deploys with transparent failover _might_ benefit from a VPN, but short of operating on a _hostile_ network I can't see its worth the heartache to deploy an overlay network.

<comment><USER3> This a thousand !

You don't even need to give them actual nics, just veth pairs with routing (some CNI plugons do just that btw).

I think a big part of why overlay nets are so common is that a lot of the engineers deploying these systems have a shaky or non existant understanding of networking and routing, they are stuck in the "local network and a default route" model and if you only have that, overlay it is...

<comment><USER4> Do you know what CNI plugins support veth pairs?

<comment><USER3> It's about routing more than veth pairs (I mean you can also do simple bridging as other comment say, but it's more limited), so look for BGP using ones, mainly Calico, but kube-router too.

I know there is simpler ones that don't use BGP, but I don't remember their names. For example there is one for AWS that uses ENI interfaces and pass them directly to containers (you're obviously limited by the number of ENI you can attach to a particular host, then). There is also one that configures routes in the VPC routing table, and a similar one for GCP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I keep seeing articles showing up on debugging network issues like DNS or something else. Makes me wonder how much engineering effort we are putting in to fight the tool. Have these people considered/investigated other tools like Nomad (hashi corp)? How much value Kube actually adds vs these issue?

<comment><USER6> Kubernetes is CORBA of this generation. It will float around because of few heavyweights preaching it and suckers falling for it. Eventually it will die like all overly-complex, hideously-designed and poorly-implemented things do. You can save your time by just ignoring this nonsense.

<comment><USER7> > Kubernetes is CORBA of this generation. It will float around because of few > heavyweights preaching it and suckers falling for it.

This sort of assertion is oblivious to the fact that Kubernetes does solve a few basic problems that no other orchestration service solves, at least as easily.

I'm referring to problems like cluster autoscaling.

Until there's any alternative to Kubernetes that not only offers these features but it is also supported by service providers like AWS or Azure or GCP then Kubernetes is not a fad but the default tool of the trade.

<comment><USER8> > I'm referring to problems like cluster autoscaling.

When it comes to autoscaling, kubernetes has two levels of scaling - pods and nodes. This introduces pros and cons in itself.

Either your resources are under-utilized and you waste money or you scale as fast as regular scaling of your cloud provider.

I'll just point out that for example AWS ASG TargetTracking scaling policy blasts default Kubernetes HPA/CA scaling out of the water. It's more conservative while HPA is highly susceptible to pod thrashing.

Two-level based scaling introduces a lot of complexity, it gives more flexibility/power to the user, but only if that user has enough experience to not fall into multiple pitfalls it also creates(scaling).

I'm confident enough to say that ANY corporation that is not familiar with Kubernetes - decides to introduce it to it's technology stack will most likely shoot itself in the foot - also increasing the cost of infrastructure for their platform.

I've seen it too many times. Which then results in this corpo to hire some consultant that looks at what abomination their devops created to shake head and spend few months fixing their incompetence.

Doing Kubernetes the right way is hard.

<comment><USER7> > I'll just point out that for example AWS ASG TargetTracking scaling policy > blasts default Kubernetes HPA/CA scaling out of the water.

That doesn't really count as it's a proprietary service controlled by a single service provider.

> I'm confident enough to say that ANY corporation that is not familiar with > Kubernetes (...) also increasing the cost of infrastructure for their > platform.

That assertion doesn't pass muster because a) you're assuming generalized and widespread inexperience and/or incompetence and b) you're assuming that not being able to learn how to use a service is a permanent state of affairs.

Meanwhile, back in the real world cluster autoscaling works well and does in fact let users shut down nodes they are not using which otherwise would have to be up and cost real money. Kubernetes is the reason why this feature is available to the general public. Until a better alternative appears, Kubernetes is by far the best and only option available to the whole industry.

<comment><USER8> > That assertion doesn't pass muster because (..)

It does, because in the same time the corporation could have used the tech stack they are familiar with, focusing on the product, which would directly improve their revenue. In most cases I've been consulting, the move to Kubernetes was strictly pushed by people who did not understand that for their use case it made absolutely no difference and only brought a lot of complexity to their table, which then turned into a year of two of consulting costs and even more operational work they previously had to maintain the new tech stack.

Lose-Lose situation.

> Kubernetes is by far the best and only option available to the whole > industry.

No it isin't. And the sooner people understand that the better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Fantastic write-up. I'm curious how many people were involved in the investigation and how long it took.

<comment><USER10> This is a great question, thank you for asking!

Initially a few teams around the org had folks investigating poor performance from different perspectives of the applications that were observing issues. Once it was clear that it wasn't the applications themselves or their configuration at fault, the team that runs our Kubernetes infrastructure started collating information together (in github issues) and getting to the point of having a clear repro (the Vegeta test) and what to look out for. This was the slowest part of the process because we needed to understand that something non-application-level was going on (and because "random network latency" is a very difficult thing to narrow down) - it probably took on the order of months from the first sign of an issue to fixing all the other issues that were contributing to small amounts of latency and being sure we still had an underlying problem to find.

At that point it became clear that something more low level was going on, we put together a focus team from a selection of teams to investigate the underlying cause - that was a group of about 5 engineers actively working on it, with another 5-10 interested engineers following along and helping out. Folks were typically working in pairs or solo to dive in to different potential leads, looping in everyone else in Slack as they go. Most of the work here was finding signal in the noise, we found a lot of other smaller system-level issues along the way that got ruled out and/or low priority to fix. There were other DNS related issues at play, fixing those also improved things, but not the specific underlying issue in the post here. Going down the specific path in the post took just a few days once the first few steps showed something was wrong at the packet level. The remediation from there was also just a few days, because we already had infrastructure in place to detect a known issue and mitigate in a safe/graceful way. The focus team was working on this as a primary task for around a few weeks overall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There has been issues with Kubernetes and NAT reported from Xing engineering.

12 min into the video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoIdU0J0f0E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoIdU0J0f0E)

<comment><USER10> This insert_failed issue described in the video was one of the ones we discovered during investigations as well, but it was already well understood because of this excellent Xing blog post which was extremely useful and referenced internally a lot: [https://tech.xing.com/a-reason-for-unexplained- connection-ti...](https://tech.xing.com/a-reason-for-unexplained-connection- timeouts-on-kubernetes-docker-abd041cf7e02)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Would these zombie cgroups be able to be detected in any of the kubernetes statsd metrics emitted?

<comment><USER10> We didn't find any metric that surfaced zombie cgroups, presumably because the kernel mostly tries to hide them from user space since they have been deleted, but haven't been cleaned up. The only way we found at the time to track them was via a BCC script and observing the latency on reading the /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/memory.stat file.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Awesome deep dive ! I wonder how one can debug this without deep insights into the networking stack. I hope i ll never have a problem like this myself ;)

</comment><comment><USER14> I read the article with great fun. The question is, how do I run the bcc script in the article? Is it on a sidecar container or on a worker node machine?

<comment><USER10> The bcc script was run on the Kubernetes node itself directly over SSH, but it should be possible to run it in a privileged container as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Super interesting, thanks for sharing!

These things are always my favorite to deal with - the feeling at the end when you figure it out is amazing, and you usually learn a ton on your way there, too.

</comment><comment><USER16> Is the tunneling protocol really IPIP for these overlays? Oh boy - that's going to really suck on wide multi path networks like the ones used by cloud providers.

</comment><comment><USER17> I learned a lot reading this writeup, thanks for posting!

</comment><comment><USER18> This does not really have anything to do with either kubernetes or networks. If your computer is busy, it won't be able to process packets. Accessing certain kernel stats via proc, sys, or other special files may be really expensive. For example /proc/pid/smaps of a running mysqld takes 2 seconds on a computer I happen to have on hand. Sometimes when you have many cores it is expensive to produce some of the fields of /proc/pid/stat because the kernel has to visit numerous per-cpu data structures. /proc/pid/statm is better for this reason, if it contains what you are looking for.

TL;DR reading kernel stats can take a long time and cost a lot of CPU cycles. It costs more for more containers, and more on bigger machines.

<comment><USER7> > This does not really have anything to do with either kubernetes or networks.

The article is literally about an issue that was experienced while operating kkbernetes clusters.

FTA:

> Essentially, applications running on our Kubernetes clusters would observe > seemingly random latency of up to and over 100ms on connections, which would > cause downstream timeouts or retries.

Sounds like a problem affecting Kubernetes to me, and an important one.

More importantly, it sounds like a non-trivial problem that others operating Kubernetes clusters would be interested in learning how to identify and how to search for the root cause.

<comment><USER18> It has literally nothing to do with K8s. An equally suitable title would have been "Debugging network stalls on the Intel Xeon processor" or "Debugging network stalls on planet Earth".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Inefficient Linux cadvisor implementation causes unexpected latency. Also this affects buzzword compatible technologies.

<comment><USER20> What makes you say it was a cadvisor issue? Isn't it clearly a kernel issue?

<comment><USER21> It looks more like _Docker_ is pushing the Linux kernel in unprecedented ways. You can't blame Linux for having a cache there for (so-far) normal workloads. And cadvisor was pushing the problem further by reading constantly stats.</comment></comment></comment>


New visa program aims to lure entrepreneurs to Canada - <AUTHOR> http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/start-me-up-new-visa-program-aims-to-lure-techno-brainiacs-to-canada-1.1128762

<comment><AUTHOR> While US is focusing on increasing temporary H-1B visas ([http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon- valley/technology/279227-b...](http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon- valley/technology/279227-bipartisan-group-of-senators-to-introduce-high- skilled-immigration-bill)), Canada introduced a new startup visa that will bring entrepreneurs (not temporary workers) to Canada. Very smart move for Canadians.</comment>


The 'pre Arc' Arc (a.k.a. 'rep') - <AUTHOR> http://sean-ross.blogspot.com/2008/02/pre-arc-arc.html

<comment><USER2> Seeing that sawfish was using a Lisp was the thing that convinced me Lisp was never going to go away and I should start using it again.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sig is a subset of apropos.</comment>


While we blink, we lose the Web (a rant on WebKit/Blink monoculture) - <AUTHOR> http://andregarzia.com/2018/12/while-we-blink-we-loose-the-web.html <comment><USER2> Complexity builds in a thing until it becomes too heavy to operate in its original environment, a lighter thing more adapted to the current ecosystem replaces it.

You see this in Wikipedia pages on Mathematics, they start small and succinct. Then the Mathematicians move in and make it correct and thorough. And then they keep doing this, until only Mathematicians can understand and edit it.

This exactly mirrors browser evolution. It would be nearly impossible to create a new engine, because the existing ones have accreted over time and staffed > 10M/Y in salaries. Developers are like complexity sponges. Budgets, timelines, cpu cycles, memory, latency. Any resource will be consumed by even a small number of developers on the corporate dole.

The web spec maintainers should have a total complexity budget for the thing they are specifying.

The next browser that comes out, will run in a browser using WASM and render using Canvas. It will have to, there is no other way.

<comment><USER3> All of that's bullshit when you realize WHATWG and W3C are controlled by browser marketshare majorities.

Create a browser that people want that sheds 99% of the bullshit APIs and now you have momentum. It doesn't matter whether or not your browser supports WebGPU or WASM when no one cares to use it because they enjoy a browser with built-in ad blocking or resource limits that prevent idiot developers from offload 10s of megabytes onto them.

Protect users and make them your number one priority and everything else is bullshit.

Firefox forgot this and lost to Chrome. Microsoft woke up too late and played catchup, and they're still playing it, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Everyone who is old enough appreciates what Firefox did for the web.

But I'm not convinced that a Chromium monoculture is the same as an IE6/Trident monoculture.

Largely because Chromium is open source. Apple has successfully forked it to Blink when it wasn't meeting their needs. Opera/Brave/Electron have used it as a base for their product.

So I'm left wondering what people expect will happen. Is it that the standards will no longer be relevant because people only care about one implementation?

In some sense, Microsoft decision is basically irrelevant to that because we're already there since web developers were not testing Edge, leading to compatibility challenges for the Edge team.

<comment><USER5> > Apple has successfully forked it to Blink when it wasn't meeting their needs

You mean Google?

<comment><USER4> You're right, thanks, I had thought it was the other way around.

That's a slightly different narrative to what I had in my head, but I'm not sure it matters a lot, since it's basically Apple & Google not being able to agree on what to do resulting in a split.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not to diminish the severity of the problem, but I was under the impression WebKit and Blink are actually quite different nowadays, even though they were originally one and the same.

That said, three engines is not all that much better than two, especially given FireFox's marketshare.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here, not assuming they are the same, just they sprouted from the same tree. And even though they diverged a lot, they are still more similar than different. I am basically afraid of a monoculture of that family of engines, specially given chromium dominance in terms of browser vendor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> We don't need diversity in browser engines anymore. Not that much. We've got Firefox, Blink, WebKit (Blink was forked off WebKit but is not WebKit. They also has different JavaScript engines. Chrome is called V8 and I think WebKit has one called SpiderMonkey). And we've also got Opera.

Having less diffferences to code against is good. Yet there are still different browser engines from different comapanies. If Google did something stupid Apple could counteract them, etc. Thus I feel the author's sentiment but don't think this will matter at all from a practical perspective.

<comment><USER8> SpiderMonkey is from Mozilla.

<comment><USER7> Right, my mistake. Apple's is called Nitro.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The argument that you can escape Google monoculture by going with Mozilla never resonated with me, given that Google ads pay for both.

It always felt like a Pachinko prize situation, where adding an extra step to the process lets us sweep human incentives under the rug.

<comment><AUTHOR> If Microsoft drops EdgeHTML, Mozilla will be the only remaining browser vendor using an engine that is not from that family. It doesn't matter if Google is paying for it, they pay to be the default search engine, and thats it. They don't get a say on what Mozilla does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> We fought against IE supremacy for over a decade, now we have to fight against Chrome, which does even worse and evil than IE

<comment><USER11> It features proprietary add-ons that only work on one platform and can't be easily implemented in other platforms?

How? Since when? Which ones?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Isn't this a paradigm shift more than anything? Both companies will contribute code to the browser. There will be more eyes on one quality code base. It will become the standard just like railroads had to standardize. It's about time to be honest. Now we can all focus on something else.

<comment><USER13> We already did standardize. With standards. By a standards body.

This is more like, "and all cars on the road have a Toyota motor."

Gonna be waiting a while for those figurative Teslas...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> In practice, IE has been ignored for years as far as compatibility from what I can tell.

But I didn't realize that IEs market share was so small. I would think it would be larger by virtue of it being the default on Windows.

But without IE, what could possibly drive traffic to Bing?

<comment><USER15> Bing is "Google Search but not Google and cheaper".

The cheap bit is easy to understand, Google has APIs for GSearch, Translate etc but they are quite expensive. Microsoft on the other hands has much lower costs for services that are usually not that far off.

The "not Google" bit is probably the reason why it will always have at least some traction though: It's used by Google competitors (eg. Alexa uses Bing, Siri used to.)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Interfacing Jython with Kafka 0.8.x - <AUTHOR> http://mrafayaleem.com/2016/03/19/interfacing-jython-with-kafka/ <comment><USER2> The spirit of "Show HN" is for for people to share their creations that can be tried out or played with. This appears to be more of a blog post and should perhaps be a regular submission.

<comment><AUTHOR> How can I change it now to remove "Show HN"?

<comment><USER2> I don't think it is possible.</comment></comment></comment>


Customers are getting caught up as banks de-risk due to money laundering laws - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/jan/22/barclays-took-my-440000-customers-caught-up-banks-de-risking-money-laundering-laws <comment><USER2> > ...if criminal behaviour is suspected, facilities can be legally withdrawn.

This is unacceptable. The UK government has pushed all the risk to the bank, and this quasi-legal removal of the rule of law with respect to citizens having control of their own money is the result.

It should not be legal for the bank to withdraw access to funds for an extended period of time without a criminal standard of evidence.

<comment><USER3> It's a direct result of the regulatory and reputational risks that banks now face. Threatened with multi-billion dollar fines for facilitating money laundering they're not taking any chances.

<comment><USER4> I suppose the many banks that have been fined for _actively_ laundering money shouldn't have done that then, casting a pall as it has over the entire industry.

It's always 'boohoo the Banks are so troubled' but how hard is it to refrain from actively laundering money for drug cartels or third world despots or any number of other illicit sources? How hard is it to refrain from rigging the LIBOR or selling sub-prime CDOs to your clients to clear your own books after marking years of profit building up another debt bubble?

I have very little patience or sympathy for the modern banking industry and their travails screwing the rest of us over, and getting off with rather unimpressive fines, if we're honest.

This guy had his entire account seized. What if the banks were fined commensurate to their profits and they really started to feel the pinch? That, combined with personal liability for the officers involved with these scandals would certainly clean the problem up expeditiously.

<comment><USER3> You realise that no bank was fined for _actively_ laundering money? And by that I mean there was no institutional conspiracy to do so. The money laundering that occurred was facilitated by a very small number of low-level staff who hid what were doing (e.g cashiers in branches), plus a slightly larger number who didn't pick up the activity.

What the banks were fined for was insufficient controls to detect laundering, not laundering itself. Banks process 100s of millions of transactions a day, including taking large numbers of cash deposits in developing countries like Mexico. It is _incredibly_ hard to build a framework which reliably detects suspicious activity without a lot of false positives. But given the potential repercussions, banks are being very cautious. They cannot afford more scandals.

<comment><USER5> That is absolutely not true. There is evidence from HSBC at executive levels that they knew exactly what was going on:

[http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/outrageous-hsbc- se...](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/outrageous-hsbc-settlement- proves-the-drug-war-is-a-joke-20121213)

"As a result of the government's investigation, HSBC has . . . "clawed back" deferred compensation bonuses given to some of its most senior U.S. anti-money laundering and compliance officers, and agreed to partially defer bonus compensation for its most senior officials during the five-year period of the deferred prosecution agreement."

Faced with a lot of this knowledge, HSBC officials stated that to implement more AML would reduce profitability, and as such, they should "change their position".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This isn't just the government changing laws... Barclays has recently shown a very blasé attitude towards closing accounts. I was a victim of this:

Being an existing customer for many years, I opened a shared account with my partner for paying bills etc. It's used for very specific purpose, with regular payments in and out and a stable balance. never more than 2k.

After a few months with the account Barclays sent us a letter notifying us that they will be closing the account due to us ignoring multiple requests for proof of identity (we never received any, and also needed to give this to open the account in the first place a few months ago anyway).

The letter ended with "we will not be able to offer you any services in the future"... In branch - no explanation, they told us we can only continue to hold the account if we provide identity (again) and gave no explanation as to the "final" nature of the letter or what prompted it.

This is what happens when you automate account management and just plug some new rules in without thinking... Roll on bitcoin for utility companies.

</comment><comment><USER7> The most important points in the article seem to be summed up in just a few lines:

"Customers making and receiving genuine transactions have absolutely nothing to fear," a [Barclays] spokesperson says.

Except Rahman is not a criminal and has spent three months without access to his money. He might still be without it if the _Observer_ had not intervened shortly before Christmas.

The rest is a sad but educational story of how much we now depend on big business to live normal lives and how the big, automated systems used by those businesses make no allowances for the human consequences when they make mistakes.

<comment><USER8> >>"Customers making and receiving genuine transactions have absolutely nothing to fear," a [Barclays] spokesperson says.

the problem with this statement is exactly the same as with the "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" argument. What if you get flagged up as a terrorist in some database somewhere, because you sent an email to a friend from Iran that you met at uni? Suddenly, your entire life is turned upside down, and there's no easy way to fix it. But hey, if you have nothing to hide, you wouldn't have this problem, right??? /s

<comment><USER7> _Suddenly, your entire life is turned upside down, and there 's no easy way to fix it._

Yes, this is a real and apparently increasing problem in our increasingly impersonal and automated society. It's not just malice that can get you, it's also incompetence, and everyone has something to fear from that.

<comment><USER9> Incompetence? Try randomness. 'There is only a one in a million chance of wrongly detecting fraud' means it happens every day. The incompetence starts after this!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> torrent-of-ions So people are starting to realise that they can't actually trust the organisations that control their money. I wonder if this sort of thing will raise awareness about who we actually trust, and whether we should be trusting anyone at all.

<comment><USER10> If the purpose behind is is to get the government to force banks to responsibly handle money ... you forget it's the government that requires these rules in the first place. Barclays obviously carries the biggest part of the blame, but when consulting for a bank, we were constantly reminded that there are EU regulations stating that any transaction above 10.000 euros is to be automatically flagged and reported, and if such a transaction is "unusual" (yes that's what the government rule says), it is to be blocked, along with all other transactions on the account, until evidence is provided that the transaction was (a) legitimate (b) not made with the purpose of evading tax. Note that the owner of the blocked account needs to prove the tax department has no issues (for instance a letter stating no outstanding debts).

If Barclays is anything like my local banks, it sucks, but chances are they're not doing this just to spite their customers.

Since that job I carry 1000 euros in cash in my wallet, and never again shall I have a single bank account again. I managed to have a third account in a separate country last year under a not-identical name (if you're married in the EU chances are you have the right to use any combination of yours and your spouses names, including both of them with or without a dash in between).

<comment><USER11> Notice that 10,000 euros is nothing; as a free lance consultant, you can invoice easily much more than that monthly. So basically they're tracking everybody.

<comment><USER12> While I agree it's not a high amount claiming that accounts to "basically tracking everybody" is ludicrous. Someone billing 10k Euro a month would easily be in the top 10% earners pretty much everywhere.

E.g. in the UK, assuming thats 10k of income before tax would place you in the 97th percentile [1]. Even half that would place you in the 90th percentile.

Most people never transfer amounts higher than that other than as part of e.g. a house or car purchase.

[1] [https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile- points-f...](https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points- from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax)

<comment><USER13> You obviously have never worked as a freelance consultant. 10k per month is not unusual. That figure includes all cost and taxes, usually even VAT. It also includes all travel-related expenses which can easily exeed thousand EUR if you need to be on-site for a month. It's not even close to 10k personal income in the end

<comment><USER12> I _do_ work as a freelance consultant right now. I agree that 10k per month is not unusual for consultants, but that was not what I disagreed with.

I disagreed with the conclusion that this means tracking basically everyone, and I gave evidence of this not being the case for the UK, where if your gross income before tax is even half that, it puts you in the 90th percentile of earners.

Even _1 /3_ of that would place you in the 77th percentile. I've never been close to taking out less than 1/3 of what I invoice. But just in case:

The 50th percentile for the UK is GBP 21k/year, or a bit over 24k Euro/year according to the source I provided.

<comment><USER14> It's more common than you think. Many poorer populations don't trust or understand banking, or work under the table. Either way, they stash pipes of cash.

It's not uncommon for these folks to make huge cash deposits to buy a car or whatever.

In the US, the $10,000 threshold is a formal number that requires a specific form. $5,000 transactions are reported, and a bank official can flag any transaction. Former NY governor Spitzer was caught patronizing escorts when a bank official flagged a smaller transaction as a potential "structuring" attempt.

<comment><USER15> > _It 's more common than you think. Many poorer populations don't trust or > understand banking, or work under the table. Either way, they stash pipes of > cash._

If you're poor, you're probably not stashing tens of thousands in cash. I bet the percentage of people who both qualify as poor and have $10K in cash on hand is low single digits.

> _It 's not uncommon for these folks to make huge cash deposits to buy a car > or whatever._

Why would you deposit $10K to buy a car instead of carrying your cash to the car dealer? Also, why are you buying a car that costs >$10K if you're poor?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I personally think he should seek with his solicitor if there is a way to claim that the bank withhold his legally acquired money for 3 months and have them pay way more than the around £9k they are trying to get away with.

Barclays is bad with legalities I had issues with them in the past but I guess every bank is... They asked me to come in and proof my address while I have an account with them for over 10 years, money comes in and out every month from my employer, I got a credit card with them as well etc etc and generally I bank with them for 10 years without ever doing anything suspicious... I found it very odd that they asked me to go in and verify me address after that long... then I read online they've done it to many others including a guy working as a bank manager with them.

<comment><USER17> I know people who have had the same experience (e.g. having to prove their identity on multiple occasions.) Mentioning the words "Bob Diamond" seemed to be the most efficient way to resolve the issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> A few years ago a few researchers started using math to map inter-corporate board ties and ownership structures and came out with the conclusion that there were 147 mega corporations with more power than imagined.

At the top of that list, was Barclay's. When you are that powerful, with that much money, consequences essentially don't exist.

Welcome to the future, neo feudal corporate oligarchy.

<comment><USER19> Link/Source?

<comment><USER18> [https://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf](https://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wow this is bullshit government doesn't want you to use cash but then if you keep your money in a bank the bank is allowed to take it.

<comment><USER21> Precisely, if your money is in a bank, the government controls it. We need to bring back the gold standard ASAP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It hurts but I've just accepted I need to go and see my bank in person if I'm doing anything 'unusual' in the near future. The alternative is ending up in this situation where they _cannot_ talk to you because your account is subject to ongoing fraud investigation and the people investigating you _do not_ care because the potential fraud is so inconsequential.

<comment><USER23> I went to my bank in person to tell them I was going abroad for some time - gave them dates, locations, etc. The rep put a note on my account, but it was still frozen due to suspicious activity. I could only reopen it by visiting a branch in person. That was 10 years ago.

<comment><USER24> I had the opposite experience - I worked on cruise ships for two years without telling my bank. Drew money out and used my card, sometimes in different countries on consecutive days, without a single issue.

Came home, got a day job, and my card got flagged for 'suspicious activity' when I started following the same pattern every day of buying a train ticket and lunch from the same shop. If that's suspicious, there must be some really unimaginative fraudsters out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is why I believe Bitcoin can succeed.

<comment><USER26> If Bitcoin succeeds, out totalitarian governments will find a way to control it.

There is no longer any banking secrecy, no telephone secrecy, and there won't be computing secrecy if the civil servant parasites fear that their pensions are at stake.

<comment><USER27> In order for socialism to work, it needs access to every bit of money a worker earns so the part of it can be successfully redistributed. Because countries that implement socialism sooner or later will run out of money (as socialism by its nature is not sustainable), they will go to enormous lengths to discover any funds that are not declared and can be redistributed. Some countries are so desperate they want to stop using the cash at all. Humanity will always find solution to the oppression, one is the Bitcoin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> nommm-nommm In the US a while ago Citibank had a promotion that required signing up for a new account and depositing $15,000. So I did. My account was then frozen for "suspicious activity" due to a "large transfer into a new account" until I called them. Luckily a phone call was enough for them to unfreeze my account.

I just found it so odd to consider doing a promotional requirement as suspicious... and I didn't know how long they could just keep my funds frozen like that. Seemed sketchy. What if I had checks that needed to clear?

</comment><comment><USER28> One more reason to use Bitcoin.

<comment><USER29> yeah, because we can introduce a max cap of 5 transactions/second. Sounds like a great idea :/

Bitcoin isn't the answer. Sane banks with good laws, however are.

<comment><USER30> did you not notice how this 'good law' suddenly became racist?

<comment><USER31> It's not racist, it's nationalist. I'm sure it's not flagging Japanese because they come from a low crime country despite they're being of non Northern European descent.

Not necessarily defending it, but please name the bigotry correctly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I've been discussing basic cash solvency with my small circle of influence for years. My credibility went up with the folks when I had to wire thousands of dollars to them when they were vacationing in Europe.

And, if I were in this man's situation, my second stop would have been the local FBI office to report bank theft. ACTUAL bank theft.

</comment><comment><USER33> So first he received £500000 in compensation benefits, and now he receives yet more £8000 as compensation for compensation.

</comment><comment><USER34> Analogy.

This is a problem in telecommunications as well. You broadcast a strong signal and foreign stations pick up your message. A solution is to use spread- spectrum and go below the margin of spectral noise.

In this case, random, small transactions much less than the threshold for scrutiny.

<comment><USER35> Note that, unlike anything the guy in the article did, what you're suggesting actually _is_ illegal. He at least got his money back eventually because he was demonstrably 100% above-board. If you get caught structuring transactions to avoid scrutiny - and your strategy is probably not nearly as sophisticated as you think - then you will not be so lucky. Do not try this.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Live collaborative pixel art, on a 100x100 grid, as a social experiment - <AUTHOR> http://editfight.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> This was inspired by reddit's r/place experiment last year, I never tried it but read about it after the fact. It looked fun and I like social collaborative creative things, so I wanted to make a kind of replica of it. That's how this came about.

</comment><comment><USER2> This is neat. I want a hardware version of this.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you mean by hardware version?

<comment><USER2> A dedicated device for this website. I'd hang it on the wall like a painting, and it would have a new picture on it every day, and you could even change it if you wanted to.

I don't think I want it enough to actually buy an iPad and do it, but I really like the idea...

<comment><AUTHOR> That would actually be amazingly cool. And since it's just a 100x100 grid with a fixed 32-color palette, it's actually pretty feasible with something like Arduino with a Wifi connection and a small LED screen or something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Could use a walkthrough, or indicate why clicking right away does not appear to do anything.

<comment><AUTHOR> Part of the social experiment of it is that it's supposed to be so minimalist that there's no need for instructions. That said, clicking a pixel is supposed to change it to your current color, kind of like in mspaint. What browser/device are you using?

<comment><USER3> Safari Mac doesn't work. Grey-on-grey checkers.

Chrome Mac does work.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just tried it in Safari 11.1 on macOS 10.13.4 and it works. Grey checkers is when it's loading. It initializes the board by sending everyone about 10kb of data which on slower connections can take a few seconds. Other than that my only guess is that it only works on the latest version of Safary and Mac. I used lots of ES6 features natively in the browser with no Babel/compiling/etc phase.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pre-checked cookie boxes don't count as valid consent, says adviser to EU court - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/22/eu_cookie_preticked_box_not_valid_consent/ <comment><USER2> This was pretty much clear to anybody who read the regulation.

Recital 32. [...] Silence, pre-ticked boxes or inactivity should not therefore constitute consent. [...]

It can't be more explicit than that.</comment>


Algorithms that select which algorithm should play which game - <AUTHOR> http://togelius.blogspot.com/2016/08/algorithms-that-select-which-algorithm.html <comment><USER2> While interesting, this research is not on the path to "true" artificial intelligence. It may solve playing a majority of video games given enough effort, but that is not the author's stated goal. Why do I think this?

The representations of the various algorithms are not unified. The answer to the question "what algorithm lies halfway between JinJerry and YOLOBOT" is difficult to answer. This is because they are discrete solvers who's implementations cannot be seamlessly blended. It is only at the level of their decision outputs that they share a common language.

The strength of natural intelligence derive partly from the fact that all strategies are implemented using the same components. Strategies can be described as sparse activation patterns of a neural substrate. Any strategy can be added to, subtracted from, or otherwise combined with another because the activations have a common representation language. The choice is never "either/or" for natural intelligence but "how much of which?"

This problem is also found in the meta-selection problem. The decision tree used to choose a component algorithm (even if applied repeatedly throughout the course of a game) doesn't allow for strategic blending, and itself is not implemented in a language common to the strategies.

In contrast, biological strategies are selected by competition between signals from many lower level systems and top down control and predictions. Ultimately a decision such as "fight or flight" comes down to how strongly a sparse set of neurons if firing and which motor paths are suppressed and which are activated. Because both the strategies and the evaluation of those strategies are implemented in a common substrate, you can blend, adapt, compare and update all aspects of the system. This is crucial to the adaptability and speed of natural intelligence.

Edit: I should note I am in full agreement with the author that simulated environments (of which video games are an example) are going to be essential for the creation of "true" AI. My comments relate specifically to the line of inquiry in the papers described.

<comment><USER3> Why do you think human cognitive processes don't resemble "discrete solvers who's implementations cannot be seamlessly blended"? Humans often get 'caught half-way' between a fight-or-flight response and a calm, analytical solution to a problem, and end up doing nothing. There's no strategy-blending there.

Humans can _learn_ blended strategies by practice, but by doing so they're neuroplastically creating a single new blended-strategy strategy (which can poke at subgraphs of its component strategies' synapses), rather than simultaneously activating two strategies. You can learn to play a game that combines Tetris and a platformer (e.g. Wario's Woods)—and you'll become skilled at this _faster_ if you've played both Tetris and platformers before—but learning this skill won't help you at all in becoming better at _multitasking_ two separate, concurrently-running games of Tetris and a platformer. The synthesized strategy is its own concrete node, not an enhancement of the original nodes to enable efficient blending.

\---

ETA: I suppose that it might be that "poking at subgraphs" thing that you're getting at, though? When a human learns a game, it gets better at playing all games, because there are individual "subroutines" that can be retried and, if successful, reused to accelerate the learning of other games.

Adding this feature to a GGP model wouldn't require "blending" (i.e. fluent instantaneous synthesis of strategy-components), but it would achieve a similar gain in performance. Programming the GGP algorithm to factor the decision-algorithm implementations it generates into hierarchies of _small, modular_ black-box implementations, rather than large, monolithic black-box implementations, would get you a gradually-building "library of functions" that the GGP algorithm could attempt to "slot in" in new algorithms as it's synthesizing them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a great post. (EDIT: Great Blog all around!). The grid of how different algorithms perform is particularly nice. I would love to see how that grid with new algorithms (specifically those new algorithms that make use of multiple algorithms).

Also, the name hyper-heuristics sounds like a recently made up term to stand out in search queries. The more long established name for it has been meta- heuristics (which is included as a keyword in the paper linked as "hyper- heuristics"). Meta because they are heuristics of algorithm selection rather than heuristics of solving a specific problem and heuristics because, as iandanforth mentioned, this is not a low dimension continuous differentiable problem space that lends itself to an optimal solution.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, appreciated!

The difference between meta-heuristics and hyper-heuristics is that the former is a much broader concept, including such things as genetic algorithms. Hyper- heuristics is specifically about selecting among heuristics, which excludes e.g. evolutionary algorithms. Graham Kendall, one of the inventors of the concept, explains that they would have called it meta-heuristics if that name was not already taken.

<comment><USER4> ... so hyper heuristics is meta-heuristics except leaving out one of your most promising options -- genetic algorithms? Or just refusing to use that at the meta stage? The difference still seems dubious. Your paper with the grid includes genetic algorithms to select from, so I guess it is not using GA at the meta level. Hyper as in a hypercube selection space of options? Maybe not because you use a decision tree for selection. It seems like the field could benefit from a regularization of terms. I still don't see what separates it from meta heuristics except for a name the limitations don't seem established. It seems hyper-heuristics is to meta-heuristics like the cloud is to network computing. Market speak does change -- not much you can do about that. The terminology is a nitpick -- fascinating papers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Meta-heuristics as conceptualized by many (most?) does not include selection among algorithms. Hyper-heuristics does. It's fine if some of the algorithms selected among are meta-heuristics. Yes, this is very confusing, and yes, better terminology is needed. In particular, we should probably stop using the term meta-heuristics, because it has too many incompatible meanings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Glad you submitted this as I've needed an update of game AI field. A bit different than it was in my day but still shows what I argued all along: hybrid methods will be the best. Far game generation, I agree that generating many new, unpredictable experiences for the algorithm is ideal. I also agree it's within computational reach. Doesn't necessarily take AI, though.

For instance, much of that could be done with declarative, dynamic programming with templates, aspects, or constraint solvers. Idea being you create objects with relationships, attributes, and constraints. Let's look at an item object. It might have physical properties such as shape, size, movement speed, acceleration speed, ability to phase in/out, invisibility, and area of effect. It might have reactive properties where any of that changes in a specific way upon physical interaction, game event, or global setting. It might have effects on players that changing any existing attribute's value, remove one, or add one. It might cause a pre-registered event in game or for player with specific or random values input. Any of this can be programed using available languages as taking inputs, performing a computation on them, and producing output. Declarative aspect means that, after each is created with constraints or types, inference algorithms (even if-then's if you're masochist) can produce an imperative implementation that lines them all up properly for an actual game.

I'm not sure what the difficulty will be to do such things for an entire game rather than one item. However, one item on a map interacting with global & one, player's state trying to do all of the above might make a nice testbed. Then a number of items. Then a number of players. Whatever method works easily to solve it and generate efficient code gets used when approach is expanded to apply a similar range of attributes to player, map, NPC's, or even passage of time itself.

Just some thoughts on that. Haven't read your papers about specific algorithms yet. Did download Panorama for later reading. So, is anything close to what I described for generating a game engine from descriptions of parts in a way I described items? I think that, once enough stuff was loaded in, would generate a combinatorial explosion like wannabe AI's have never seen (and couldn't cheat easily).

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you liked it! We have done some work on trying to generate complete games - an overview of it can be found in this book chapter: [http://pcgbook.com/wp- content/uploads/chapter06.pdf](http://pcgbook.com/wp- content/uploads/chapter06.pdf) The most similar to what you describe is probably the ASP approach to game generation.

<comment><USER5> Answer-Set Programming is here:

[http://pcgbook.com/wp-content/uploads/chapter08.pdf](http://pcgbook.com/wp- content/uploads/chapter08.pdf)

Thanks for link anyway. Yeah, it's a subset of my approach but a good one for clear intro to subject. As they were describing it, my mind drifted back to attempts at automated programming. I've seen recent work under banner program synthesis. In any case, I was thinking how they specified facts & constraints to force generation of results could be applied to software-rewriting. You start with unsafe code expressed with certain meaning/semantics, extract those as abstract rules, and then use them + safety heuristics to synthesize equivalent program that's safe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great post.

OT: I accidentally swipe left/right _every_ time I'm on blogspot, taking me to the previous/next post. Maybe I'm just fat-fingering all around, but this is a horrible UX.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! And wish I could do something about the blogspot UX.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For those of you interested in this general area, I suggest taking a look at General Game Playing. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_game_playing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_game_playing)

Disclaimer: My PhD advisor was the originator of this idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> And general video game playing :)

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> On the grid graph comparison of how different algorithms perform on different games, two questions:

1) What is the source data for that plot?

2) You specify "lighter = better", but how are they normalized across games and algorithms? How is better and worse quantified to get a "lightness"?

Edit: Found #2 in the second paper. Still don't know what 25 wins is white and 0 wins is black means? How do you "win" some of these?

Two papers are here:

[http://julian.togelius.com/Mendes2016HyperHeuristic.pdf](http://julian.togelius.com/Mendes2016HyperHeuristic.pdf)

[http://julian.togelius.com/Bontrager2016Matching.pdf](http://julian.togelius.com/Bontrager2016Matching.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> The source of data is a lot of simulations we ran ourselves. All of the games can be won or lost - there's also a score measure as well, but that was not used in producing that graphic.

<comment><USER4> So something like digdug being black means that no algorithm has progressed through all levels to completely beat the game? That seems like a high bar to set for a "win".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great article and great paper. Similar set of questions that get asked as part of AutoML, including the idea of hyper-heuristics, but in the AI community instead of data science. Thanks for the insights.

</comment><comment><USER9> To summerize iandanforth's longueur:

Togelius' work ignores a core paradigm, of which we are aware of the human brain; neuroplasticity.

If one of togelius' solvers fails, all bets are off, the artilect is lobotomized.

See deepmind's "self-encoding" work: [http://www- personal.umich.edu/~reedscot/iclr_project.html](http://www- personal.umich.edu/~reedscot/iclr_project.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> Link to paper needs to be fixed.

Thanks togelius for the survey of the current state of the art around GVGAI! It will be interesting to see how adversarial methods influence future game design. Is a perfectly "instinctual" game possible? One that can never be beaten by any machine but that even a two-year old can master immediately?

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops, thanks for spotting the broken paper link - fixed now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looking forward to the algorithm that selects which of these algorithms to use</comment>