Plotnine: A grammar of graphics for Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/has2k1/plotnine <comment><USER2> I feel like a lot of attempts to recreate ggplot2 end up being superficial because they don't recognize / duplicate the power of the underlying Grid graphics that ggplot2 uses.

I know that web technologies are all the rage these days, but at least for static, publication-ready graphics, Grid is really nice substrate, with well thought out lower-level abstractions.

EDIT: I should also add that it's documented within an inch of its life should anyone feel that it's worth recreating: [https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/grid/html/grid...](https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/grid/html/grid- package.html)

<comment><USER3> In what way does eschewing the underlying Grid graphics make a less desirable experience for a ggplot2 port?

<comment><USER2> The ports I see feel like a < 100% enumeration of the plots in the mainline ggplot2 package. However, there are heaps of great extensions to ggplot2 that I suspect are in part due to there being a carefully thought out set of abstractions at the low level of Grid that mesh nicely with the high level abstractions of ggplot.

ggplot2 being built on top of Grid means that modestly complex stuff is easy (in ggplot2 by itself), but that it's relatively easy to drop down into the lower layer (grid) to do more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Surprise to see this at the top, I am the creator* of plotnine. The most common question seems to be, what to expect of plotnine? The answer; a high quality implementation of a grammar of graphics with an API that closely matches ggplot2, and more.

I also want other packages to be able to build off of plotnine, e.g. a package with the functionality of Seaborn could be built off of plotnine. The only constraint should be whether the backend -- in this case Matplotlib -- does stand in the way. Matplotlib is evolving (though slowly) and has a very receptive community so there is lots of hope.

* - Many people contributed to its history.

<comment><USER5> I watched your refactor of yhat's py ggplot branch, and was disappointed when glamp dropped in a totally new implementation out of the blue. Thanks for all your hard work--glad it is it's own package now :).

<comment><USER4> Well, I think it was different priorities. My main objective for contributing was to have a full on grammar of graphics package in python. I appreciate those warm feelings from afar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Recreating and keeping up with Hadley's hard work is challenging, particularly because ggplot2's layout and extensions are really nice and continue to evolve.

As an alternative that preserves the full power of Wickham's implementation, pygg[1] is a Python wrapper that provides R's ggplot2 syntax in Python and runs everything in R.

[1] [https://github.com/sirrice/pygg](https://github.com/sirrice/pygg)

</comment><comment><USER7> Another grammar of graphics: altair[1]. The altair are simpler and easier to read, i.e.

            Chart(df).mark_point().encode(
        x='age', y='height', color='sex')

Also, see Jake Vaderplas's talk on an overview of Python visualization tools at [https://youtube.com/watch?v=FytuB8nFHPQ](https://youtube.com/watch?v=FytuB8nFHPQ)

[1]:[https://altair-viz.github.io](https://altair-viz.github.io)

</comment><comment><USER8> If this is an implementation of ggplot2, what does it offer over [http://ggplot.yhathq.com/](http://ggplot.yhathq.com/)?

I don't mean to undermine your project, just wanted to know about significant differences.

<comment><USER9> \- yhat's ggplot has 256 commits, 13 contributors, last commit Nov 2016.

\- plotnine has 1,283 commits, 42 contributors, most recent commit is 3 days ago.

<comment><USER10> These comparisons are pointless. Would you like to compare loc as well? How about man hours spent?

The only comparison that is important is how well the two projects work. I have no idea how well plotnine works yet (but I intend to find out). I do know that ggplot works OK - and seeing as it leverages matplotlib if there is anything that isn't implemented I can finish the plot off manually.

EDIT it seems that plotnine also leverages matplotlib and produces nicer plots for some common cases :).

<comment><USER11> It's not pointless at all. For long-term maintenance, the community strength and level of active development is just as important (and sometimes more important) than minor feature differences.

<comment><USER12> I would often rather use a decade-old project that was developed solo by a world-class expert dumping code over the wall once every 6 months than a community project being hacked on by 100 amateurs.

Without additional context I find recency of last commit and number of committers to be almost impossible to draw useful conclusions from.

<comment><USER13> I wish this contrarian argument would die already. It amounts to basically this:

"On average, X is better than Y."

"Ah but I would rather have the top end of Y than the bottom end of X, therefore comparing averages is useless."

Yes, a brand new Ford Focus would be better than a Ferrari that doesn't run, but generally Ferrari is the better brand.

<comment><USER12> I wish this both-lazy-and-condescending missing-the-point hand-wavy-analogy argument style would die already.

The earlier poster in this thread implied that number of contributors and recency of commits in one of two competing github projects was evidence that it was better.

My point is that these are inadequate (often totally misleading) heuristics unless both projects are otherwise extremely similar, which they usually are not, and even then are usually not very useful heuristics compared to other ways of comparing the projects.

Unless you know who the authors are, what the project management/organization style is, how the project is funded / what level of commitment the authors have, what the project release cycle is like, etc., or unless you directly examine the code yourself, the only thing that looking at the most recent git commit tells you is how recently someone published public code changes. Which is not something that anyone evaluating two projects cares about directly, but only as some heuristic signal of other features that might be more costly to examine.

But note that commit recency doesn't give a remotely useful sense of how extensible the project is, how readable or efficient the code is, how well designed the API is, how good the documentation is, how friendly the community is, how competent the project management is, .....

If we want to make a car analogy, it's like choosing which car to buy based on how frequently the company introduces new models, or how many engineers they employ, rather than based on customer reviews, reliability estimates, accessibility of mechanics, gas mileage, top speed, or storage capacity.

Your argument is basically analogous to: _"because the average car with frequent updates is better than the average car with infrequent model updates, criticizing that as a primary criterion for choosing a car is an invalid argument"._ Notice that you haven't even bothered to examine whether your premise about the relation between updates and quality is true, or whether that average relationship makes update frequency a practically useful heuristic or not.

<comment><USER13> In the absence of any other information, the more recently updated codebase is preferred to the least recently updated, for the same reason that an abandoned codebase is dispreferable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What is meant by "a grammar"?

Is it the way we concatenate functions to create what's essentially a sentence of what we want the plot to be?

<comment><USER15> ggplot2 was inspired by: [https://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Graphics-Statistics- Computing...](https://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Graphics-Statistics- Computing/dp/0387245448)

and Hadley Wickham wrote about it in [http://vita.had.co.nz/papers/layered- grammar.pdf](http://vita.had.co.nz/papers/layered-grammar.pdf).

I'm no expert, but I think that one of the main ideas is to separate the elements of making a plot from the way that the data is presented. For example, in ggplot2, you have the data that will go into the graph, the type of plot (or "geometry") that defines how the data are presented (scatterplot, bar plot, etc.), and then various "layers" that can be added that affect style.

In order to split a plot into subplots, you simply define how it is to be faceted (what column should be used to define groups). Grammar-of-graphics moves plotting away from the "turtle graphics" model and lets you specify what _should_ be done. Then ggplot figures out how to do it, kind of like SQL vs. writing for loops to retrieve information.

<comment><USER14> Aha! Thank you. So it's kind of like a declarative way of plotting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I get it is ggplot-based, by as it is Python, why not being more idiomatic and using chaining instead of adding?

</comment><comment><USER17> This is nice and all, but the syntax and names are totally unintuitive.

If I'm to dig in the manual, I might as well build my plots with the standard syntax of any random plotting library.

Is this "grammar of graphics" any good if you invest more time in it?

<comment><USER18> I find it the opposite. The syntax is the most intuitive of all plotting applications.

Layers are as follows [1]

1\. Data

2\. Aesthetic mappings

3\. Statistical transformation (stat)

4\. Geometric object (geom)

5\. Position adjustment

Once you get a hang of this, it becomes easy to create new plots purely from the understanding of the layers. In matplotlib or even in Seaborn, I find myself constantly Googling for examples.

ggplot2 is the most beautiful thing to happen in visualization space!

[1] Wickham, Hadley, and Carson Sievert. "4.4.1 Layers." Ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis. Dordrecht: Springer, 2016. N. pag. Print.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This looks interesting, but I find the documentation somewhat lacking. Is the user supposed to know ggplot?</comment>


Even Windows 8 early adopters prefer Windows 7 by two to one - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/even-windows-8-early-adopters-prefer-windows-7-by-two-to-one-7000004927/

<comment><USER3> I have been using Win8 as a main OS for the past 4 months. I can't seem to find anything I need that was there in Win7 and missing in the new version. I love the new keyboard shortcuts (esp. Win+X, A). Metro is by no means a requirement - the old desktop is still there and all programs (even games) run the same.

I guess it's just easier to bash MS than to really see that Win8 is not just Metro/Modern, at least on the desktop. I haven't used it on an ARM device yet so I cannot comment on that.

<comment><USER4> How do you open an application quickly? For instance, in windows 7 I click start, start typing the name of the app I want, press return, and it opens. I thought the start menu in Windows 8 loaded the Metro UI. How do I use that to launch my app quickly?

All the time it takes for the full screen metro UI to animate into and out of view, is time I could be searching for something.

<comment><USER5> 1\. Click start

2\. Start typing the name of the app you want

3\. Press return

4\. It opens

Same exact flow as Windows 7. Typing while on the Start Screen will perform an app search.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Has there ever been an OS release where (at first) people prefer the new one? Windows 7 might be the exception only because the previous incarnation was so awful.

Ubuntu with Unity? we want the old desktop! IOS6? we want IOS5 and our maps! OSX Mountain Lion? We want Lion!

Change is always hard and almost never goes down well - this is not a new phenomenon and occurs naturally at the beginning of most major software versions. People will get used to it and move on with their lives...

<comment><USER7> Yes. Windows XP and Windows 7.

If you don't recall the abortion that was Windows ME, then you are lucky. Windows 98 was so clunky compared to Windows XP. All the little improvements and features were fantastic.

Then came Vista and that was another train wreck. But Windows 7 was a dream. It magically found drivers, everything "just worked."

<comment><USER7> I think you can gauge the success of future OS by the enthusiasts (early adopter) reaction.

Windows XP and Windows 7 had lots of love pre-release. The Windows 8 reception is mixed (as was that for Vista).

Some people are going to love it. I am using it on two machines (a dekstop and an HTPC).

Here's they point though. I _won't_ be installing it on the computers of family/friends (I'm the family tech support).

Watching my wife use it (and the issues with slow user switching, multiple versions of browsers, etc) means its just not worth it. I don't need the extra support calls.

Windows 7 is just fine, especially for legacy hardware (those without touch screens and tablets).

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure early adopters are the easiest people to please... thinking of "antennagate" from iphone4 and now "scuffgate" from iphone5 I would say early adopters (who I suppose are generally experts - or at least technology- orientated) are more likely to pick up and report on things that

a) get viewership (i.e. complaining) and b) are so subtle the eventual mainstream user wouldn't even notice without it being pointed out to them.

I don't have any hard science to back my claim either way ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Poor windows. It is damned if you do and damned if you don't. First they aren't radical enough. Now they are too radical. sigh.

<comment><USER9> Apple didn't remove core features from OSX to create iOS on the iPad. I think that is one of the issues here. The idea that Microsoft's tablet OS will run the same "Windows" that the PCs run. If anything, Microsoft probably should have left the regular mode alone, and done all of the radical stuff in 'Metro- mode' so that people on a desktop PC could ignore it if it got in the way of their workflow.

If Microsoft thought that they could remove some of these things without any blow-back, then they are idiots. If understood the risks, and assume that things will work out for the better in the end? Then good on them, and good luck.

<comment><USER10> I'd take Microsoft's approach with Windows 8 over Apple's tack any day. 10.8 is the most convoluted, user-unfriendly OS X yet. Microsoft is right to strip things down so radically and get the basics of the post-WIMP PC right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Everyone cries and whines and moans about UI changes. It's like facebook changing their UI. It'll keep happening for a while, until eventually people will accept it and realize that they're being stingy.

</comment><comment><USER12> My take on Windows 8 is simple, as a desktop OS - you can't take core features and remove them without a viable alternative.

My biggest beef is the removal of the start menu and the search bar on it - <USER2> could do/find anything from there.

My other beef is that the Metro UI gives you all these "fullscreen" applications, but no way to window them. Windows provided me with a train of thought, but when you make everything fullscreen, it becomes distracting when using multiple applications routinely.

<comment><USER13> Search is still there.

Just press the windows key and start typing. It's all there, sans the textbox which tells you it's there.

Probably not the pinnacle of intuitive design, but it _is_ there ;)

<comment><USER7> The search is broken, unless you remember to do Windows + W, the search by default won't search files or system settings, just apps.

I don't get that, even though there is room on that full paged search screen, they only show a couple of apps.

You have to click on options at the right to have it search settings or files. What a stupid, stupid oversight.

<comment><USER11> It really doesn't matter. The reason this was done is because it fits in better with each application being searchable (you see how this is more consistent?). Once the user realizes this once, the problem is gone. It's really not much harder to search 'settings' if you're looking for a setting than to search apps if you're looking for an app now is it? I don't understand how people make a big deal out of things like this.

<comment><USER13> When you dont have immense amounts of data to search, having to put in effort to pre-filter your search results feels like unnecessary work.

Filtering should only be needed/useful when the result-set is bigger than the user can handle.

There is a fine line here, but I feel Microsoft missed it and stepped on the wrong side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Says a group of people, 20% of which, are on a 12 year old operating system. Is the problem that Windows 8 sucks or that these users are extremely adverse to change?

<comment><USER15> Are you trying to say this is not representative of Windows users?

<comment><USER14> Not at all. I would expect these kinds of numbers and I thought that it was worth pointing out another possible reason for the surmised "conclusion".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> While I happen to agree...a poll on an intranet forum is less than scientific.

Also, I don't think Windows 8 is going to work in a corporate environment. The training, etc is just going to be too costly.

Windows 7 is the next Windows XP, and that's a compliment to Windows 7.

Underneath the UI cruft of Windows 8 is a great, solid desktop just waiting to get out.

<comment><USER16> I agree on on the corporate envirnoment. I wonder if MSFT is even expecting Win8 to penetrate that market. I welcome them taking the big changes and moving forward with Win8. I'll have to wait and see how the hybrid tablet thing works out, but i'm going to give it a go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I installed Windows 8 last week. After hearing all the noise, I was excited to try something so radical. I ended up a little bit disappointed that things were so similar to Windows 7. But it sounds like there are lots of ways to do things. (10 years ago, that was my primary complaint about Windows.)

</comment><comment><USER18> What I really want is to make my Win7 install look like Win8. Not the touchscreen-friendly big buttons, but the flat color style, ala outlook.com

Does anyone have any pointers on this?

<comment><USER19> Install Windows 8 and stay in desktop mode. It's faster and has nice improvements to things like task manager, file copies, etc. There's no need to spend significant time in the "metro" part of Windows 8 if you don't want to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The poll is confusing. Only 26% of the respondents report actually using Windows 8.

So all the others just voted based on what they heard about Windows 8? If that's the case, it's easy to see why the response is the way it is.</comment>


Beyond the Brain - <AUTHOR> http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/article.cfm?aid=2196

<comment><USER2> Thanks to the OP.

It is a very interesting, and divergent point of view [specially from the established status quo], cogently presented and explained.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for posting this. It's an important subject that deserves smart minds investigating solutions and cures.</comment>


Fred Wilson on Raising Kids - Tweet, Blog and Eat Your Vegetables - <AUTHOR> http://www.betabeat.com/2011/06/16/at-fred-wilsons-house-tweeting-is-like-eating-your-vegetables/

<comment><USER2> And can we please let VCs and Tech Luminaries be just that, and not be an authority in how to bring up our children, or the value of college education?

Will it take another bust for us to take them off their pedestal? By all means, lets celebrate the value they have added to the startup ecosystem and the technologies they have enabled in coming to fruition. But for the sake of everything sacred, lets stop taking parental advice from them. Most of us, I am sure, have pretty good parents to look up to, rather than relying on a blog post or a tweet to glean parental advice.

<comment><USER3> I didn't see any advice there. I agree with your point about not taking advice from successful people about everything. It irks me whenever Einstein is quoted on God. Einstein himself probably never intended the quote to be abused the way it is tossed around these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Meh, I'd rather have my kids(if I had any) create something of value, not just be on top of the latest web fad. Will a collection of tweets be worth keeping in 10 years?

Of course, the argument could be made that Twitter/Tumblr are the modern day journal, but I'm not really buying that, primarily because there is no privacy.

<comment><USER5> 100% with you on this.

The vast majority of twitter users are in it for the promotion. Kids don't need to promote themselves to those outside of their core group of friends/school. That's one of the reasons I think Twitter took off with more mature demographics, where as Facebook started off with much a younger demographic. Honestly, I use twitter like a notepad/news feed, not to disseminate information to my few followers in real time and I admit there is no real value to it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Having a great presence on social media platforms clearly helps with networking and building personal projects, whether that's a VC fund or a photography portfolio.

These kids will learn the boundaries of public and private sooner and have a great megaphone for promoting whatever it is they choose to do in life.

<comment><USER6> A megaphone is useless when everyone has one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The new title for this HN submission is a bit misleading. The article is basically a puff piece designed to give an insight into the family of a well known person, it's not designed as advice to parents or Fred Wilson telling people how to raise kids.

</comment><comment><USER8> afeakejkkkadsjfjkasdjfkjsdfkjsjdfs

Sorry, my two year old was logged into Hacker News.</comment>


IE 9 Beta download - <AUTHOR> http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/internet-explorer/products/ie-9/home?os=win7&arch=a&browser=other

<comment><USER2> I'm reminded of many B-grade Hindi movies I suffered through in my childhood. In Hindi movies, this is what every mother says, with pride and tears, after her son manages to scrape through his exams:

"Mera Beta pass ho gaya!" which translates to "My son passed!" P.S In Hindi "Beta" means "Son" :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Sigh, looks like I'll be installing another virtual Windows machine specifically to test another version of a web browser that doesn't run on my operating system.</comment>


Why we throw away more than 6M tonnes of groceries every year (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://thewalrus.ca/laying-waste/ <comment><USER2> This guy [1] made it across the US on a bike with no cash by simply dumpster- diving and eating nearly fresh fruits and veggies thrown away by grocery stores. Here [2] he is dumpster-diving in San Diego. It's amazing how much foods gets wasted.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7QO-4NjgjQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7QO-4NjgjQ) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_Gn_T1zQFc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_Gn_T1zQFc)

<comment><USER3> I'm no germaphobe but I'm shocked that he went into the dumpster without shoes and just ate an apple straight from the garbage bin!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Suddenly, for many Westerners, the problem with food was that there was too > much of it.

Whenever eating around some friends from South Asian countries who grew up just barely on the positive side of starving, I always make a point of eating everything on my plate (or all the meat off the bone). Because lots of times I've gotten the comment "you eat like a white person."

But I wonder how much of that is cultural and how much is socioeconomic? Do poorer people in the US also waste a lot of food? Do wealthy people in India waste a lot of food?

<comment><USER5> One of the big reasons for waste is the expiry dates I feel many people in the developed countries are willing to throw away good food. Another reason in the developing countries people don't mind eating, buying or selling (ugly ie natural foodstuff. Which is thrown away by the supermarkets in the west.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting to me as recently I founded _Infinite Food_ [0], which hopes to leverage macro-trends like urbanization, apartment living, and the internationalization of culinary consumption patterns to provide cost- effective, highly efficient, fresh and automatically prepared meals on demand. While our initial markets are in Asia (higher population density, less of an established car-commute/supermarket norm), it is interesting to see people attacking the same problems from alternative angles in the west.

One sentence that struck a chord with me in the article was "She insisted we begin serving ourselves at dinner, in order to get our own portion sizes right." as the habit here in China is that people serve themselves from communal dishes. We plan to offer custom portion sizes, too.

[0] [http://8-food.com/](http://8-food.com/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Food waste is very small problem. If it was eliminated there would be 1.5 times as much food.

Bigger problem is eating out (restaurants, fast food) where 90% of money is wasted. Or buying expensive ingredients like meat or very processed foods. 10 times more food can be bought if choosing wisely.

I pay maybe 4$-5$/day for food and I routinely throw away half. That's 2$/day wasted. But eating at restaurant wastes so much more.

<comment><USER8> How much time do you spend grocery shopping and cooking?

If you make 100$ per hour it doesnt take long before eating out is more economical.

<comment><USER9> I think it also depends on if $100 / hr can be extended beyond 8 hrs /day and 5 days a week. Often those high rates are for 40 hrs per week. Any extra hrs are either part of fixed salary jobs or unfinished deliverables for whatever reasons.

<comment><USER8> However much you value your free time then. Which may actually be more than your regular hourly wage. Consider that most people need to be paid more to work overtime.

It also depends whether you consider cooking work or fun. Some people like doing it, others don't.

I don't make $100/hour and I do enjoy cooking, so I don't eat out that much, but I do believe for some people it makes perfect sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think a large part of the reason people waste so much food is that the human mind was designed for a hunter-gatherer way of life. It's hard to get enough food that way, so people ate everything they got. But today we get our food at supermarkets full of far more than we need, and are encouraged in many subtle ways to do so.

Also, I am thinking that if a food conservation movement started to get some real traction, it would cut into food industry profits, and so that industry would start a campaign to undermine food conservation.

<comment><USER11> I'm always sceptical if I see poor eating habits blamed solely on "well that's how the human species works". Yes, much of our biology and preferences are still influenced by the old hunter-gatherer lifestyle (such as our preference for salt, fat and sugar).

However, between the stone age and the present lie many centuries of culture in which humans reflected on their reading habits and changed it in many different ways. As such, blaming the stoneage heritage to solve present-day food problems doesn't seem very useful to me.

Blaming those that exploit that heritage (e.g by producing deliberately high- calorie food so it tastes better) might be more useful.

<comment><USER12> Right. Look at the ways in which the government distorts the economic incentives for food producers in the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The article seems to assume that food that is now wasted by consumers would instead be distributed to needy folks. I don't see why this is the case. From a business perspective, why do food producers care whether the food they sell is eaten or thrown away? It seems to me that reduced waste would mean reduced demand, which would either raise food prices or put some producers out of business. Then again, maybe this is why I'm an engineer, not a businessperson.

<comment><USER14> > It seems to me that reduced waste would mean reduced demand, which would > either raise food prices or put some producers out of business.

No, a widespread shift to selling food which would otherwise be turned into waste would represent an _increased supply_ of edible foodstuffs, reducing prices across the entire food-market, making it less profitable for any one farmer to produce one unit of food, and probably increasing the quantity of food consumed in worldwide markets (depending on the precise elasticities of supply and of demand involved - and it doesn't have to be the same food that was rescued, if vegetables get cheaper people can eat less vegetables than bread and grain farmers can export the grain. Or they can pickle or freeze the vegetables for future consumption. And some farmers could switch crops. There's a lot of options.)

That's Economics 150.

(No, I had it as Economics 150, not 101.)

But an individual food seller is already incentivized to reclaim and sell as much would-be food-waste as possible before it becomes unprofitable to do so: it is likely cheaper for the food owner to dump food than to turn the would-be waste into food somewhere else. (Historically, food recycling of last resort would probably have taken the form of feeding it to local hogs or turning it into compost, but shifts in population and farming patterns have moved the farms away from the food consumption centers where the waste takes place.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> So that's 6M tons by 300M people, or about 54 grams of waste per day per person

Include banana skins and so on and frankly it seems less wasteful than a natural Consequence of the very inefficient means of each family cooking its own meals instead of using a central cooking and queueing system.

I am not saying we are not wasting food, but it's not as if we are say, killing a mammoth and just cutting off the tasty bits

<comment><USER16> No, the article is from Canada. It's about 400 grams/day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The traditional solution to food waste was to feed all the scraps and old leftovers to pigs, and then eat the pigs themselves later.

<comment><USER6> Still very common in much of Asia (eg. China). Chickens too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This could use a summary… I made it halfway through but took away not much more than the author's basic premise.

</comment><comment><USER19> Food waste = Energy. Someone is going to make a nice chunk of change on this if they can solve the logistics problems associated with waste food. WISErg ([https://wiserg.com](https://wiserg.com)) is a promising candidate.

<comment><USER20> Given that producers, distributors and consumers will also be happy to capture savings, how much of the savings will be captured by a fourth party?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's nice (for a European) to read an article with metric measurements. But:

> "Our family of four managed to get our weekly organic waste below the five- > kilogram mark, ... This works out to about 250 grams per week for each > family member"

Isn't that 1250 grams per week per person?

<comment><USER22> There's more than 1 day in a week. Seems they calculated it for a workweek 5000g/4people/5days = 250

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Nations should have mandatory farming practice for half a year or so like they have mandatory military service. I think such practice will be eye opening on how we treat food.

<comment><USER24> There are many reasons why this is a bad idea

\- Because how do you house, feed, care for the health of, and train all of the people, while and keeping them from assaulting each other?

\- Because then you would have a bunch of poorly-skilled uninterested people around dangerous machinery.

\- Because there is not enough land for people to be employed productively in using modern farming techniques.

\- Because forcing people to perform labor is generally frowned upon in our society.

Also see part II of [http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip- subsidies...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies/)

<comment><USER23> Recently I saw it on YouTube - Japanese school children grow veggies and that are eaten as part of daily school meals. Doing this once or many times would suffice. I have to admit that I did not think through enough before I wrote farming as national service. But Idea here could be to get an experience or to know that there is toil behind to get our food on plate. If it can be done in Japan it can be done elsewhere.

Below is YouTube video.

[https://youtu.be/hL5mKE4e4uU](https://youtu.be/hL5mKE4e4uU)

<comment><USER12> I suspect Japanese are generally neater and cleaner because they have to clean their own schools as students. I'm constantly amazed and the amount of schmutz that my housemate leaves behind in the bathroom, that would take literally a few seconds here and there for him to just clean up after himself. I've spoken to him about it, and it's literally invisible to him!

Recently, I went away on vacation for a week, and when I returned, the bathroom sink looked a nightmare. I come back, and it's fixed again. I don't think he noticed at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Too long of a read for me. Yet I do have an opinion :)

In capitalism a business is allowed to throw out what it wants; we have seen many products simply destroy in order not "destroy the market".

But capitalism is wrong --IMHO-- and wasting resources I deem sinful. We should try to avoid wasting resources, and we can. Simply put some laws in place that "tax" wasting resources to the extend that businesses become waste- averse.

As for individuals, this is harder, I'd say that a mentality shift is needed. Probably the same mentality shift needed for the afore mentioned laws to be passed. But believe that we can inspire each other to live in a less wasteful way, I believe we have been doing this already for 100s of years.

p.s.: Do you want to know what is probably the most wasteful behavior of mankind? Watch the Cowspiracy documentary.

<comment><USER26> Throwing away food is wasteful. The trick is to find an alternative that is _less_ wasteful.

Thought experiment: Collect all of that wasted food. Get it to poor people in the US, refugees, food pantries, someone who can truly use it. How much fuel does that take, driving around collecting it all? How many people does that take? Once you account for both human and energy expenditures, _is it a net win?_ Is it _less_ wasteful, or _more_ , to fix this?</comment></comment>


How Reliable Are FinFETs? - <AUTHOR> https://semiengineering.com/how-reliable-are-finfets/ <comment><USER2> I'm still amused at how the west coast is starting to pay attention to "those guys in the rust belt". ;-) I'm reminded of when I interviewed at TI and they were just coming across some foreign concepts. Some people have a practice of refreshing peripheral registers (like port direction and such) on a regular basis. What happens if the bit flips, and now that button on your door doesn't work? But then for some reason you disconnect the battery and everything is fine? Why would the bit flip? Transients, latch-up? And you're going to be connected to a battery for 6-10 years right? This stuff has all been seen, and it's not always just a reboot to fix it.

<comment><USER3> At the company I work for, we've been struggling with the fact that nobody has made a new-design CPU or SOC that's suitable for our safety-critical, "high integrity at the source" application with modest radiation exposure (avionics) for over ten years. We finally just gave up waiting and designed our own. We're told by our senior folks that they've received calls from their counterparts at several west coast companies (apple, qualcomm, etc.) expressing interest & best wishes for what we are doing.

<comment><USER4> I don't understand why you would radiation harden a chip...?

Why not just have three exactly identical chips, run the exact same code on them, and compare results? If results ever differ, you power cycle the bad one, self test it, and you're good to go again.

Sure you have to not use on-chip random number generators, and make sure you don't have any non-deterministic things in your silicon (eg. things that depend on PLL locking time), but that sounds pretty trivial.

<comment><USER5> Because there are two distinct types of radiation effects in space: ionizing and upsets. Multiple computers voting solves the upset problem, but not the ionizing one. Ionizing is a measure in krad of how much radiation a part can be exposed to in its life and keep working. Ionizing radiation changes semiconductors in fun ways (e.g., gate voltage thresholds shift). They are fabbed in exotic ways like silicon on sapphire. When you want a satellite to last 20 years at geostationary orbit, you account for this! For example, I believe the Juno probe to Jupiter's life will be limited by ionizing radiation.

<comment><USER6> On a related note, would multiple computers voting also require a higher power draw compared to a radiation hardened chip?

<comment><USER7> Yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yep, "solid state" components are not actually solid state!

<comment><USER9> They're really solid state, ie. they're transistors not vacuum tubes. But "digital" components are not always digital ("digital" is a leaky abstraction).

<comment><USER8> The metal atoms actually move over time simply as a result of electrical current flow! Parts will fail because of this, depending on how they're designed. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromigration](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromigration)

<comment><USER10> It's not just structures within silicon you need to worry about. Lead-free solder is susceptible to growing tin whiskers [0], which can cause short circuits. Often you can't even see the growth of these whiskers as they're under a BGA or on a microscopic level.

IIRC, NASA still requires all space hardware to be manufactured with leaded solder to avoid having a multi-million/billion dollar mission ruined by some tin whiskers.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_(metallurgy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_\(metallurgy\))

<comment><USER11> The same is required for many projects that sit in exceedingly cold environments. In these situations, leaded solder is required to ensure that the solder joints don't decay (or crumble away completely) from tin pest [0] in the low temperatures.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_pest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_pest)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Material Palette - Material Design color palette generator - <AUTHOR> http://materialpalette.com/

<comment><USER2> Sharing this with my design team. Thank you! Great work!

</comment><comment><USER3> This is very nice. Thanks for creating it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Very cool, I'm gonna use it!</comment>


A list of websites that pay you to write technical articles - <AUTHOR> https://catalins.tech/websites-that-pay-you-to-write-technical-articles <comment><AUTHOR> Getting paid to write technical articles is a great way to supplement your income.</comment>


Probabilistic programming from scratch - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fastforwardlabs.com/2017/07/06/probabilistic-programming-from-scratch.html <comment><USER2> Cool! Thanks for sharing.

I would also like to add, Stan is not that hard. Conceptually it's a bit of a jump, especially if you're coming from comp sci not statistics, but I think it's really worth it. Here are some helpful links:

Stan website: [http://mc-stan.org/](http://mc-stan.org/)

A primer on Stan: [http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/stan...](http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/stan_jebs_2.pdf)

The Python interface PyStan documentation: [https://pystan.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://pystan.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

A case using Stan in a real startup's product: [https://www.smartly.io/blog/tutorial-how-we-productized- baye...](https://www.smartly.io/blog/tutorial-how-we-productized-bayesian- revenue-estimation-with-stan)

</comment><comment><USER3> Another good one: [http://dippl.org/](http://dippl.org/)

<comment><USER4> dippl would be a good name for a startup

<comment><USER5> And it should headed up by a Dipl. Ing. Or a Dipl. Inf.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer%27s_degree#Germany_an...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer%27s_degree#Germany_and_Austria)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A similar package is Edward: [https://github.com/blei- lab/edward/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/blei- lab/edward/blob/master/README.md) Which was built on TensorFlow, so it has neural networks goodies, but more importantly is GPU-accelerated! PyMC3 is on the way to using Theano but wasn't done last time I checked.

</comment><comment><USER7> This reminds me of this discussion about AB testing, power statistics & significance: [https://p-value-convergence.herokuapp.com/](https://p-value- convergence.herokuapp.com/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Thanks, got me interested in the subject.</comment>


Tail replacement - allows an entire directory of logs to be watched. - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanheusden.com/multitail/features.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I found myself using this each day more. If you want to watch everything that happens inside a directory (merged into a single window) - like I always do, you will need a command similar to:

       multitail --mergeall -f -iw "apache-tomcat-6.0.18/logs/*" 1

Multitail is smart enough to figure out if files were erased/created/re- created etc - on the fly. This saves quite a bit of time for me. Since I only heard of this recently, I figured it might be a good idea to spread the word...

The software is a big buggy, but I still like it a lot.</comment>


It's A Fork-Off: Tasting The World's Foulest Food - <AUTHOR> http://demislw.com/blog/2014/3/9/its-a-fork-off-the-worlds-foulest-food <comment><USER2> I've had surströmming. Twice. And it's not that bad. There's this pattern of people NOT RINSING it.

First: You're supposed to open the can, submerged in a bucket of water. That'll avoid the spilling AND rinse the fish.

Second: You're supposed to eat it with other stuff. The traditional swedish way is: wrapped in soft bread (think swedish wheat tortillas), with lots of sour cream, mashed potatoes, chopped red onion, ...

Consumed that way, the fish is surprisingly good (it's still a bit.. intensive.. but I'm sure that I'd love it, given enough time). It's the blue cheese of fish.

</comment><comment><USER3> When I visited Sweden I spoke with a friend there who had been born and raised way up in the north of Sweden. He said the people there would bury and ferment all sorts of things, including seal meat, whale blubber, and birds sewn into seal skins. I can understand how such a tradition would arise, as an effective way to store food in the wild safe from predators, though it's hard to imagine digging that up after six months and chowing down on it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I enjoyed reading this. Reminds me of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy describing the worst poetry.

</comment><comment><USER5> Would be funny to use either as a snack on a plane.</comment>


Structured Analytic Techniques for Improving Intelligence Analysis [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/Tradecraft%20Primer-apr09.pdf

<comment><USER2> FYI, a more comprehensive treatment of these can be found in Heuer's book: [http://www.amazon.com/Structured-Analytic-Techniques- Intelli...](http://www.amazon.com/Structured-Analytic-Techniques-Intelligence- Analysis/dp/1608710181/)

I'm curious, why post this to Hacker News?

<comment><AUTHOR> I work as a business/technical analyst. I find some of the suggestions in documents like this applicable to other types of analysis, so I just wanted to share.

Considering it was one of my most upvoted submissions, I believe people appreciated it.

<comment><USER2> The reason why I ask is because I was surprised to see tradecraft/methods posted here. I've personally sat through many iterations of this training, and have also taught this course a few times to beginner analysts as well. If you're interested in learning more I can point you to more (unclassified) resources that might help your analysis.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I missed your reply. Yeah, if you can get in touch I'd be happy to find more unclassified stuff on the topic.

You can reach me through the website mentioned in my profile (www.pa-mar.net - there is a "mailto" link at the bottom of every page).

Thanks!!!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Programming Is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic - <AUTHOR> http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/programming-forgetting-new-hacker-ethic/ <comment><USER2> The audio "loss" example sounds plausible in passing (and the diagram looks plausible) but is actually incorrect. The frequency and timing dimensions of analog audio below the Nyquist frequency is preserved _perfectly_ by digital quantization, which in practice for CD/DVD usecase are the full spectrum of the human ear. This counterintuitive result is explored in some detail in [1].

It is true that the amplitude dimension (only) is quantized to (typically, 16 or 24) bits, which you could detect with a very good oscilloscope. However 24 bits is way smaller than any human ear can discern. Visually, it is like looking at two stacks of dollar bills that are 6,000 feet high and trying to discern which one has one extra bill.

I suppose that is technically "lossy", but the only thing we are "forgetting" is something no human could perceive, or remember.

[1] [https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil- young.html](https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html)

<comment><USER3> > The audio "loss" example sounds plausible in passing

Not really. Sure, your debunking is sound, but we really don't need to appeal to Nyquist for this one. Just consider the alternatives; analog media? It begins rotting the moment it's recorded. Some abstract representation? Fine, until you forget how to interpret it. Digitizing is the most robust means we've yet invented to forestall "forgetting;" a technique that enables precise and efficient replication of audio on myriad forms of media now and in the future.

The Unicode case is also naive. Every language suffers change as new speakers/writers and new representations appear; that isn't a feature specific to programming or computing at all. On the other hand, thousands of symbols from hundreds of obscure languages are being permanently preserved for posterity in Unicode; how is this "forgetting?"

<comment><USER4> The argument is not that "forgetting" is fundamentally bad - it's that the choice of what to leave out can be meaningful. Han unification removes some amount of distinction between things that are meaningfully different and instead relies on additional metadata to reconstruct that. What are the wider social consequences of that? I don't know, but it's not clear that those involved in making the decision do either.

The fundamental point here is that hacker culture has often made decisions without considering the effect they have on non-hackers (or even hackers of different backgrounds), and as a result those decisions may result in abstractions that "forget" meaningful data. Uncompressed digitisation of audio is a case where it's unlikely that the difference is important in any way, but there are plenty of examples given where it is. The suggestion that having more information can help us make better decisions shouldn't be controversial.

<comment><USER5> By the way, people seem to think Han unification was forced on CJK users by evil white people from Unicode (there was an article like this in modelviewculture once), but it was contributed by the relevant Asian governments.

And of course China already made much larger changes in real life by creating Simplified Chinese.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really enjoyed this essay, even though I think I disagree (at least partially) with its primary conclusion. I especially liked the discussion of the map/territory problem and its application to programming.

I think I even agree partially that the most literal version of the hacker ethic is a bit flawed. But I think there is still a lot of value there, even if Levy's book didn't necessarily show it in the best light, or deal equitably with all of his characters.

Here i'd say: the map is not the territory. Levy's book is not the hacker ethic, even though he may have made an attempt to map it. The examples he cites may or may not meet the criteria that he himself specified in all cases, but that says more about his choice of example than it does about the ideas themselves.

I think there's a way of understanding these principles that comports well with a, shall we say, more mature view of the world than perhaps some of us had growing up on them:

> Access to computers should be unlimited and total.

I think this one stands on its own. Access should be unlimited and total. For everyone. As the author rightly pointed out, the 'hackers' denied access to Margaret Hamilton. That makes this event a bad example of the hacker ethic, not a good one. But I think the principle fits rather well with the philosophy of the author, provided the definition of 'access' is probably expanded and contextualized.

> All information should be free.

To me, this is more ideal than implementation. All information ought to be free. In an ideal world. Where possible that information should be free, and we should be working towards a world where it is moreso. However, information should never be _more free_ than the maturity and tolerance of the society its embedded within permits at any given time. As free as possible, but no freer, to put it on a bumper sticker.

> Mistrust authority—promote decentralization.

I think this is an unequivocal good not limited to the hacker ethic. Authority should be mistrusted. Decentralization should be promoted where we can avoid compromising the other ideals (e.g. access).

<comment><USER7> Even your modified interpretation has dangerous side effects. We can probably modify the access to computers line to only over computing hardware you own, and that probably works, but the other two lines you comment on are often in opposition.

If all information is free, then it's also free to access to authority. Authority can do a lot of things with information that few hackers would like: Read on what full transparency leads to in a place like Bridgewater. Once it's clear that we don't want authority to have free access to our information, it's clear that the 'all information should be free' line is not an idea, it's just hypocritical. What it really means is that hackers should have access to all the information they want, but they should be able to hide all the information they need from authority: Enough of that, and now you have a new authority, which happens to be the people that have access to the information.

All information should be free is a phrase that gives permission to developers to creates databases that are better at predicting election results than pollsters. It's what allows people to tell if someone is pregnant, has an undisclosed mental illness, can list everyone's favorite kinks, where has their cellphone been since it was purchased, and everything they've bought on the internet the last 10 years. When it comes to information quantity has a quality all to itself, and I don't think that hackers in the 70s had really internalized this.

This breakdown on the hacker ethos builds two camps: One that finds privacy more important, and doesn't really want information to be free, and those that put the freedom of information first, and are happy to hand tremendous guns to authorities, whether they are governments or silicon valley corporations.

And this is why the hacker ethics breaks, and we should be careful about the future. There's a lot of uses to all that centralized, free information: A lot of things become very convenient, computers systems are capable of pretty much reading our mind, and fraud detection algorithms become so very good that many things become cheaper. Unfortunately the same tools can be used for far less friendly uses.

This is a question we'll all be wrestling with for years, as choosing privacy would make most tech giants collapse, while choosing information freedom is just waiting for the right kind of authority to show us that East Germany's Stasi was just a small scale exercise.

<comment><USER6> > Even your modified interpretation has dangerous side effects. We can > probably modify the access to computers line to only over computing hardware > you own, and that probably works, but the other two lines you comment on are > often in opposition.

I wouldn't even make that modification. Illegally accessing computer hardware in pursuit of a higher or better purpose can be good, provided that purpose avoids harm to others.

Of course, people playing God with their own interpretations of when that standard is met can lead to disastrous results. But sometimes it's ok to break something or break into something to learn about it. It's a thin line, but it is there.

A Chinese hacker poking holes in the great firewall, for instance. I'd say that's a good thing, even though they do not own the hardware.

> f all information is free, then it's also free to access to authority. > Authority can do a lot of things with information that few hackers would > like: Read on what full transparency leads to in a place like Bridgewater. > Once it's clear that we don't want authority to have free access to our > information, it's clear that the 'all information should be free' line is > not an idea, it's just hypocritical. What it really means is that hackers > should have access to all the information they want, but they should be able > to hide all the information they need from authority: Enough of that, and > now you have a new authority, which happens to be the people that have > access to the information.

Ya, I couldn't agree more. That's why I added the proviso that information wants to be free only in the ideal case. It is aspirational, not pragmatic. We want to live in a world where all information can be free, and we should all work towards that. That does not, however, mean going around 'liberating' information arbitrarily. And it also does not mean that, in even our most progressive societies, that we are ready for _all_ information to be free.

> This breakdown on the hacker ethos builds two camps: One that finds privacy > more important, and doesn't really want information to be free, and those > that put the freedom of information first, and are happy to hand tremendous > guns to authorities, whether they are governments or silicon valley > corporations.

Ya, you have no argument from me there. I do not think all information should be free in the actual world that we live in. But I do think it's an interesting way of modeling an ideal world. Underneath all forms of necessary secrecy lie blights of some kind. Weapons are secret for war, sexual preferences can be secrets due to shame or even criminalization, etc. Sometimes that secrecy is justified by the faults of the world, and sometimes it is used to further the interests of an individual or group. In the latter case we should strive to reveal it, and in the former to address the justification for that secrecy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> While it was a interesting read and definitely had several good points, I don't agree this is a "new" hacker ethic.

It bears no semblance to the original, and is of a fundamentally different nature.

The original is a short and simple declarative list of principles towards a goal.

This is a looooong list of ambiguous wishy washy questions whose intent is unclear and with little relation to the original.

Trying to brand this as a "new" hacker ethos is just abusing the recognition of the original to push your own (completely different) ideas and agenda.

I'm not going to call it entirely disingenuous, but it does come off with a bad smell of politics.

Count me out.

<comment><USER9>
      Trying to brand this as a "new" hacker ethos is just abusing the recognition of the original to push your own (completely different) ideas and agenda.
      I'm not going to call it entirely disingenuous, but it does come off with a bad smell of politics.

You didn't say this (and I'm not asserting that you believe it), but it's easy to read this statement and have the feeling that the original "hacker ethos" was devoid of politics or trying to push an agenda. But it was totally politics and it was totally trying to push an agenda.

One may prefer the original to this new ethos, but anyone claiming to speak for a large group of people is engaging in politics. To borrow an idea from the essay, you are forgetting the diversity of that group's opinions when you claim it can be boiled down into short pithy statements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a great talk, and I loved the discussion and criticism of the roots of hacker culture, and also what the author describes as "logical positivism." You can look at something like Bitcoin as a textbook example. The thinking was that by making a simplified model of money, money can be replaced, and the government (authority) circumvented. In reality, money is not just numbers in a ledger, and when you take away one authority you institute others.

That said, mistrusting authorities such as governments is a valid and valuable position, as is standing up for the right to tinker with hardware on principle. Some of the bullet points that are bulldozed in this talk seem to have a philosophical kernel that is sound, if controversial or subversive. It's pretty interesting to me that computer tinkerers in the 70s, before personal computers, couldn't own a computer or take one apart. Is that the lack of "access" the ethic decries? Properly contextualized, is this point just about the inherent value of freedom to tinker? Or is "access should be total" a juvenile rationalization for breaking into computer systems, and "information should be free" an excuse to steal or expose secrets? (And is this ambiguity real or an artifact of Levy's formulation?)

I would separate "philosophy" from "culture." If in a particular subculture like hacker culture, "all that matters is how good you are," this is equalizing in a way -- for example, a man and woman with equal skills will have equal status -- but it can also lead to phenomena such as arrogant rockstars and frequent pissing contests. And what about the people who aren't so good, how are they supposed to feel? So this "ethic" can generate a traditionally male sort of culture that is off-putting or toxic to many people, male and female. The fact is that creating a diverse and inclusive community is its own value and doesn't follow from anything about hacking.

<comment><USER11> > You can look at something like Bitcoin as a textbook example. The thinking > was that by making a simplified model of money, money can be replaced, and > the government (authority) circumvented. In reality, money is not just > numbers in a ledger, and when you take away one authority you institute > others.

Do we believe that the author of bitcoin has any ability to control Bitcoin other than releasing it or any way to compel adoption of bitcoin beyond advocating for it the way any of us could advocate for it?

If they are lacking those abilities they have just provided an alternative which dilutes the authority of traditional money without adding any authority themselves.

I may not understand where you are coming from, if so I apologize.

<comment><USER12> The rules and structure of bitcoin enshrine the values and ideals of a certain culture, and enforce their traditions with ironclad rules. It has just as much "authority" as any government mandated currency, though it might not seem that way if you feel more favorably about the culture surrounding bitcoin vs the standing political structure.

<comment><USER13> Bitcoin the community and Bitcoin the software have rules and authority. "Just as much" is an empirical claim that I disagree with. I don't think Coinbase or Gavin Andreesen have the same kind of authority as the Venezuelan president. It's a set of narrower, diffuse authorities, rather than a central authority.

But even that is just one branch of Bitcoin. What makes Bitcoin truly anti- authoritarian is that even if some body of power controls the dominant branch, a group of people can simply fork it, and run their own currency completely without the blessing of Gavin or Coinbase or anyone.

That doesn't give them all the benefits of holding mainline Bitcoin, but it gives them some benefits. But anarchism never said everyone can have all the power, it says everyone should have the power to do what they want ___amongst themselves_ __. It 's freedom from interference, not guaranteed access.

Ethereum Classic is a fantastic example of this. As is the proliferation of altcoins, many of which are just Bitcoin forks, and in that sense _are_ Bitcoin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think Levy's take on hacker ethic was a bit phony to begin with, typical of journalists who try to describe the spirit of something without practicing it. All information should be free, really? Like your root password? I much prefer the version in the Jargon File:

 _" A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary."_

Basically a hacker is someone who enjoys hacking for its own sake, not as part of some moral crusade. The OP is proposing another moral crusade which is just as irrelevant. Whether you like it or not, most discoveries will be made by those who enjoy discovery, not by those who view it as a means to reach utopia.

<comment><USER15> > All information should be free, really? Like your root password?

A password isn't information, especially in this context, it's data. How the login or encryption system works is information. Of all the misconceptions about hackers this is one of the weirdest to criticize. From the introduction of computers until the mass adaptation of the Internet, access to information was the largest issue in hacker culture. From BBSes to hacking groups and computer clubs, it was all about access.

> Basically a hacker is someone who enjoys hacking for its own sake

Not only isn't that what your quote says, it's essentially just the definition of an enthusiast. Hackers are, even in the most watered down definitions, something different. Doing something for fun is part of hacker culture, but it's not the purpose of it. It's things like curiosity, exploration, exchange of ideas etc.

> Whether you like it or not, most discoveries will be made by those who enjoy > discovery, not as part of some moral crusade.

Rarely. Discoveries (at least "common" ones) tend to be made by people who see a future other people don't. One could argue that people like Elon Musk is very much on a moral crusade and that his motivations are utopic.

I don't really care who calls themselves or things "hacker" these days. But if you don't recognize that hacker culture, or the future of technology in general, is something more you're missing out.

<comment><USER16> While I get your point, I don't think data is clearly not information, it's just that the whole point of passwords is to be secret.

<comment><USER17> Information and data are entirely about the intent of them. The same number can mean a movie file or a math equation in different interpretations, yet still have the same physical representation.

The difference between passwords, DRM, and proprietary software is then intent. They all serve the same function - secrecy - but for different purposes. The secret password is meant to provide security to the holder in regards to the information _they_ hold. Proprietary software and DRM are meant to provide secrecy to the rights holder in regards to software _other people_ hold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is entryism at its finest. It feels like an attempt to subvert an already existing culture to another ideology.

<comment><USER18> In order to be entryism, the speaker would have to be an outsider, right? But that's not the case here. It's a member of the community speaking up about the values they care about.

Presumably, that care is genuine, right? Or do you have some reason to suspect the speaker is being disingenuous?

<comment><USER19> Entryism is the practice of infiltrating an organisation/group to gain trust then using a variety of tactics to try and subvert the politics/ideological premise of the group. Also misdirecting resources to support the subversive ideology and efforts. And ultimately trying to destroy the group and capture the membership into the subversive organisation that was behind the entryism in the first place.

What I gather from the piece and the reactions here point to a fairly clear example of entryism.

<comment><USER18> What evidence do you have of _infiltration_ beyond the fact that you don't like what the speaker said?

It's a pretty extraordinary charge that someone would become a computer programmer and become a teacher of programming purely in order to give a conference talk that seems to suggest, at root, that we consider how our programs treat people. What a revolutionary!

<comment><USER20> The author is trying to replace one system of thought with another, that's a fact. I think it's baseless to assume if the intention of the author was to originally pursue this motive or to suggest improvements after being apart of the community for a period of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'd wager that management denying open access to hackers was more detrimental to Ms. Hamilton's exercises than the activities of said hackers. A good hacker would do root cause analysis instead of picking the most convenient victim to further some personal odyssey.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think Parrish misunderstands a key component of the hacker ethic, which is that the "richness of the world" is overrated and the structured logic of computer systems is something we should strive for.

<comment><USER13> "overrated" is kind of a garbage descriptor. All I have to do to make something overrated is rate it highly.

I suspect you have more concrete descriptors for what you are complaining about, I would be more interested in reading those.

<comment><USER22> Okay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I found it interesting that her big counter-example to Levy's hacker ethic concerned the modification of hardware. And _shared_ hardware at that. There is a difference of kind rather than degree when it comes to modifying software because _software never needs to be shared_. That is, you can copy data, modify it to your heart's content, and never affect the original owner of the data.

This does bring up a bunch of interesting points about shared software and data, like who owns it. But one can imagine a world where all software is open, which means anyone is trivially able to hang a shingle and start a new node, but the only really "owned" stuff is the data users have put into it.

</comment><comment><USER24> Programming is forgetting because forgetting is _abstraction_. On the other hand, abstraction is not always about forgetting, and programming is not always about the real world[1].

But that's always been part of the hacker ethic _I 've_ seen, to the extent it exists at all.

Really, I agreed with a lot of the criticism in the article. There are points definitely worth consideration and reflection. But it also had a couple of peculiarities I've seen again and again in discussions on such topics (whether they're criticisms of programming or some other discipline or science as a whole). It should be considered _carefully_ —dare I say _critically_?

The first problem is that it, by necessity, doesn't treat "the hacker ethic" with the same nuance as its own ideas. That mostly fine—a natural consequence of constrained time and space and effort—but it's a bit concerning if a core part of the argument is that the hacker ethic is insufficiently nuanced. You could say it's a response solely to Levy's book, but its conclusions try to apply to hacker culture as a whole. It's a bit like criticizing science (or scientism) based solely on Neil deGrasse Tyson's hilariously simplistic "Rationalia"[2]. The discussion is still _valuable_ , but not nearly as broad as it tries to look.

The other problem is even more classic: the criticism is relevant and natural, but the alternative solution pulled in is arbitrary and does _not_ flow naturally from the criticism. Her suggested alternative questions pull in _a lot_ of baggage unrelated to the shortcomings of the "hacker ethic" that just reflects her particular philosophical abstractions for understanding social systems, power and morality—abstractions that are by no means universal. For example, the focus on "labor" immediately stood out: why single out _labor_ of all things? There is an answer to that question of course, but that's not the point: the point is that the answer to that question _does not_ naturally emerge from the perfectly reasonable criticism in the rest of the talk. The same about most of the other things she wishes to change—or not to change—in the hacker philosophy.

As an illustration, it's not hard to imagine somebody with totally different views agreeing fully with the problems outlined in the body of the talk, but coming up with a totally different replacement for the "hacker ethic". Think about a hardcore utilitarian, or somebody with a strongly individualistic bent or a full-on anarchist or whatever else. Or perhaps just imagine the smallest change needed to address the problems of Levy's hacker ethic while keeping the "hacker spirit" however you see it. All those could come up with exactly the same _problems_ in the fist part of the talk, but end up with totally different conclusions.

My point, ultimately, is not to address those conclusions in particular. Rather, I just want to point out the disconnect: it's perfectly possible to agree with the setup without admitting anything about the proposed alternatives. Just like it's possible to admit to shortcomings in science without going full-on postmodern about it :).

 _footnotes_

[1]: I say this coming from a particular perspective where the real world is, if anything, an enemy—perhaps you could call it programming language idealism :).

[2]: It's an idealized government based solely on reason and empiricism which is hilariously unrealistic: [https://www.facebook.com/notes/neil-degrasse- tyson/reflectio...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/neil-degrasse- tyson/reflections-on-rationalia/10154399608556613/)

<comment><USER11> The whole article seems to have only the argument of, "Hackers as a whole should think the way I want them to."

This is the new authority to be questioned.

<comment><USER25> I'm not seeing any particular claim to authority here? In a critical essay, it's customary to argue in favor of your own beliefs.

<comment><USER11> I feel like nothing about the conclusion follows from the problems. If I say that LA has a public transit issue and my solution is radical libertarianism I should guide my audience between those two points.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I would suggest that computers don't necessarily make your life better, but following value does, and using computers in certain ways necessary follows added value.

</comment><comment><USER26> I like the article. Replace "forgetting" by "abstracting" and it becomes even more reasonable.

</comment><comment><USER27> If you buy into personality types, the hacker philosophy in part comes from the fact many "hackers" are of ISTP type or similar. These personality types learn by taking things apart and are far more likely to simply ignore rules if they can see a way to solve a problem. As tech expands and becomes comprised of a broader range of people with different takes on how things should be done, then there is room for conflict and it's valid to question how we will overcome this. However, replacing statements with questions feels like a philosophy class. If the author has an effective counter argument then they should be able to define it clearly and succinctly.

<comment><USER18> Is "you should be asking these questions instead of making those assumptions" such an unclear argument?

The questions are the whole point – that's what the speaker wants us to keep in mind as we make choices as professionals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Start bracing youselves _now_ for the Eric Raymond counterblast.

<comment><USER8> I'm not so sure, but if he decides to write one, I'm looking forward to it.

Eric usually makes for an interesting read.

<comment><USER29> Eric can be good, especially when his writing is purely technical. However, his politics are off-the-wall insane, so his response to this might be similarly so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> >> "if somebody calls you a hacker that's kind of like a compliment"

Being called a hacker has never felt like a compliment to me.

<comment><USER31> You frequent a site called Hacker News so at least you don't see hacker as a terrible insult.

<comment><USER30> Actually, I really dislike the site's name and I would never infer that because someone visits a site that some label applies to them.

<comment><USER32> This site is just misnamed, is all. "Startup news" would be more apt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Stewart Nelson decided to rewire MIT's PDP-1 as a prank. Later, Margaret Hamilton tried to use the DEC-supplied DECAL assembler on the machine and it crashed repeatedly. The transcript points out that Hamilton is generally credited with doing brilliant work for NASA on the Apollo project. Did Nelson go on to do anything notable? Just curious.

<comment><USER33> If the length of one's Wikipedia page is any indication, Hamilton kicked a bigger dent in the Universe than Nelson.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Nelson_(hacker)
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> "And it's a privilege…if somebody calls you a hacker that's kind of like a compliment. It's a privilege to be able to be called a hacker, and it's reserved for the highest few. And to be honest, I personally could take or leave the term."

This feels so passive aggressive and subtly mocking.

This entire article is ridiculous pedantry to me. By default everything a HUMAN DOES is a simplification/abstraction of an unknowable mysterious reality. A better catchphrase is: "EXISTENCE IS FORGETTING"....Human language doesn't communicate our complete feelings, ou4 system of time doesn't capture the fullness of the 4th dimension, our structures are a result of our crude ability to shape the infiniteness of matter...and on and on...

Then the author claims: "Programs aren't models of the world constructed from scratch but takes on the world, carefully carved out of reality"

Insane! Programs are tools. Is a hammer a 'carefully carved out version of reality?

Our societies perceptions give it whatever 'take on reality' it embodies and that is constantly shifting! Our views on Myspace changed pretty fast...the program actually failed because it didn't adapt to societies version of reality.

And the authors alternative to the hacker ethic is pretty unusable. It's a pedantic restatement of the golden rule....

<comment><USER35> > Is a hammer a 'carefully carved out version of reality?

Yes. The construction of a hammer takes a particular view about what is to be done with it. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The article does a wonderful job in hiding its actual point, probably because the point is very inane - the semi-serious playful "hacker ethic" must go and be replaced by a moral imperative in the form of a list of questions.

</comment><comment><USER19> Can someone do an executive summary or tl,dr please,

I honestly tried to read it but found it impenetrable.

<comment><USER37> The phrase "Toward a new..." is very nearly a sure sign of relativism at work. I don't know why so many quacks pick it. I guess they think they're revolutionizing the world.

This article pushes for an ethics and feelings based redistribution of programming effort. That's bad. Because resources remain finite, we won't lose less data, we can only shuffle around what we lose. What we need to make this decision, is not feelings or vague ethical codes. We need hard data, especially in an age of big data and machine learning where the detailed pieces involved in making a deep statistical analysis may well be out of the realm of human comprehension.

For example, this article targets the evil gender binary. If only we would think more carefully about our choices. Meanwhile, clinics are scratching their heads trying to figure out how to map rates of ovarian cancer to "demisexuals", or how a local rise in "non-binary asexuals" might affect rates of testicular cancer, and what should be done about funding for screenings.

We lose data because we come from an era where space was limited, and cycles were counted. Sure we made some dumb mistakes like 2 digit years, but 2 digit years still work in a broad array of cases so we still use them all over the place today. They are sometimes good to use, sometimes bad, sometimes they're superfluous and unused anyway.

By all means rethink what fields should be compressed or expanded based upon business needs. But do it based on data and business use cases, not on feelings and someone's personal bias- even if that person promises their ethics are better than the old ones.

<comment><USER4> > Meanwhile, clinics are scratching their heads trying to figure out how to > map rates of ovarian cancer to "demisexuals", or how a local rise in "non- > binary asexuals" might affect rates of testicular cancer, and what should be > done about funding for screenings.

This is a great case in point! Simply classing people as male or female already loses data that's therapeutically relevant. The important thing in determining whether someone's at risk of ovarian or testicular cancer isn't whether they're male or female - it's whether they have ovaries or testes. Some people have both, some people have neither and some people do not have the set you'd expect from their gender. Assuming that "Male" or "Female" accurately describes this is exactly the kind of "forgetting" discussed in the article, and people lose out on appropriate healthcare as a result.

<comment><USER38> > Some people have both

I don't think _this_ particular combination is possible, for the record.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Oh boy. I can taste the flames already.

Others have aptly tackled the "computing is forgetting" part of the article, so I want to discuss the Midnight Computer Rewiring Society section.

The argument is that they denied somone access to a computer by re-wiring it. But that's not true, anymore than changing the ITS login screen to say "5 losers online" was denying anyone access to that routine. The functioning of the computer had been altered, but Hamilton could have simply popped the front panel and re-wired it back, or translated her program to use the other assembler.

She wasn't denied access, the hackers just broke something.

There is also the claim that Hamilton's access was considered umimportant without even looking at the code, with the implication that it was because she was a woman.

As stated above, Hamilton's access was ininhibited. Her program wouldn't run, but not because the hackers didn't consider her important: _they had never considered that someone would use DECAL_. It wasn't Hamilton's code they disregarded, it was DECAL itself. In this case, wrongly.

Frankly, I find the continuing undertones of sexism accusations frustrating: firstly, it was the 50s, and secondly, none of them seem to be in any way accurate. And if you're going to claim sexism, at least have the guts to say it straight up.

Hacker ethic and culture may be flawed, but it's the only set of computer ethics and culture that I'd want to be a part of.

<comment><USER39> _> I find the continuing undertones of sexism accusations frustrating: firstly, it was the 50s_

It is possible to regard the historical period (and by implication, the social context) of the events as an _excuse_ of the pervasive sexism (but given the vaunted propensity to distrust authority and disregard social conventions, it is quite weak as excuses go), but it certainly does _not_ make the events any less sexist.

<comment><USER29> Fair enough. It doesn't. However, it does change our expectations of how sexist the events would be.

But this doesn't nullify my second point, which is that the article here _doesn 't actually demonstrate any sexism at all_.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the daily life of a careered data scientist like? - <AUTHOR> I envisage the life of a data scientist with no practical experience of what it's really like. Would you help clear my rose colored glasses?
I'm a careered Mechanical Engineer with a background in data analysis, and I've been considering a career pivot for sometime now.
Somethings I wonder:
What routine tasks and skills of yours have become so second nature, you sparsely think about them anymore?
As a careered data scientist, what separates industry practice from academia? What project, or task helped you realize this?
Did you wear rose color glasses before practicing in your field? What cleared them?
What is the monotony or grunge work of a data scientist? What is the kind of work that makes it all worth it?
What other questions should be seeking answers that would help me understand what life as a data scientist is really like?
Thank you! <comment><USER2> > What routine tasks and skills of yours have become so second nature, you > sparsely think about them anymore?

Noticing hypotheticals. I think this is similar to being paranoid about possible bugs in your code. In the same vein when you do statistics and obtain some result (i.e. something between group A and group B is different by x%) you start automatically imagining scenarios that could have caused this result as a false-positive. Maybe the groups were somehow imbalanced, maybe the methodology used did something differently for both of those groups, maybe there was a sampling bias.

> As a careered data scientist, what separates industry practice from > academia? What project, or task helped you realize this?

In industry your result is typically subservient to some other purpose (i.e. making decisions, increasing sales, reducing costs, predicting customer loyalty). In academia the result is typically at the forefront (i.e. an observation worth writing a paper about)

> Did you wear rose color glasses before practicing in your field? What > cleared them?

No, I started working with statistics before the term "data scientist" became popular. I did have some hopes after the articles with "statistics will be the sexiest job of the 21st century" appeared. But it quickly waned. The hype brought a lot of noise to the field and the focus shifted from what (in my opinion) is most important - working with open eyes. Today a lot of "data scientists" don't have fundamentals in statistics, use methods they don't understand, focus on secondary things like programming languages and tools, and think of themselves as having an "imposter's syndrome".

(this part turned out to be quite ranty but I want to leave it like that).

> What is the monotony or grunge work of a data scientist?

Staring at a computer. Preparing the data, cleaning the data, combining the data, looking for more data, presenting your results.

> What is the kind of work that makes it all worth it?

Getting insights and intuitions that other people don't have. Being the first to discover something novel, interesting, or valuable. Reflecting back on what you do in a more general way, i.e. asking questions "what it means to know something", "can data really speak for itself", "does every kind of analysis require having some initial assumptions". And if you are good then you can get to work in a variety of different areas, from predicting the results of an election, to analysing 3d scans of brain patterns in schizophrenia.

> What other questions should be seeking answers that would help me understand > what life as a data scientist is really like?

Talk is cheap. If I were you I would try to experience it myself. Volunteer somewhere or start participating in some open competition (like maybe Kaggle) and see how your day will look like.</comment>


Pentagon Buys Microsoft Products For $617 Million - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasdaq.com/article/pentagon-buys-microsoft-products-for-617-million-20121229-00001

<comment><USER2> And then they wonder why they get cyber-attacked.</comment>


Xi's crusade on food waste triggers rare anxiety over supplies - <AUTHOR> https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2020/08/24/2003742181 <comment><AUTHOR> > Livestreamers who film themselves eating huge amounts of food have been > censured,</comment>


Cd Is Wasting Your Time - <AUTHOR> https://olivierlacan.com/posts/cd-is-wasting-your-time/ <comment><USER2> Duplicate. See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16693274](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16693274)</comment>


Ask HN: What are your startup ideas that you aren't pursuing? - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> Heres mine:

My proposed business is a centralized website similar to Kickstarter that does the financing for new music albums. With the spread of streaming services, many artists are now making an insufficient amount of money through record sales.

Bands would list the albums they could potentially release (ie their next album, a live album, b sides etc) on a website where once the band has reached their asking price, they will start working on/or release that album. The price listed is not how much the album costs the band to make, but the amount of money that it would take the band to feel sufficiently incentivized to make/release the album. Once the album reaches this point, the band would release the album for free online.

This creates two new streams of revenue - fans who really love an artist (or have lots of money) can contribute proportionally. Additionally, cheap fans that otherwise wouldn't pay for the album would be incentivized to with the hope that the album comes out sooner, or out of fear that it won't be released at all.

You can read more details here: [http://danfrank.ca/startup- ideas/](http://danfrank.ca/startup-ideas/)

<comment><USER3> Interesting idea. Perhaps the differences are nuanced, but would you expand on why the artist(s) just wouldn't use Kickstarter or a service like PledgeMusic?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A middle-out compression solution. Decided to make video chat software instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you expand on what this means? I'm curious to learn more.

<comment><USER5> [http://www.piedpiper.com/](http://www.piedpiper.com/)

EDIT: Not sure why this was downvoted? If he's genuinely not familiar with the show, it answers his question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I had an idea for an indoor mapping app. Basically Google Maps for inside multi-unit buildings like hotels, apartments, office buildings, malls, etc. Existing maps and navigation can get you to the street address, but there is no easy way to find building 3 or suite 240. I built a prototype Android app for data collection (I used WiFi hotspots as reference points to tag the location of landmarks inside). The big question is how to monetize something like that. You could maybe license the data to delivery companies but I'm not sure how big that market would be.

</comment><comment><USER6> A CRM solution for small businesses delivered as a facebook chatbot - <USER2> businesses have customers who "live" on fb, and in many cases have no web- presence other than a fb page. Such a system would not require them to install/maintain any additional apps, and in theory they would be saved a lot of manual data entry by leveraging your fb page's existing graph connections.

However, I'm not sure it would work within the confines of the current facebook graphi api restrictions though, they really seem to lock down getting data out. They seem to want you to build chatbots for facebook without using facebook data, which seems pointless, and in all likelihood a bad user experience.</comment>


Seeing how long it takes to read a book with a paper clip and an extension - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mortenjust/how-thick-is-that-book-in-the-window-a98e0db08a0e

<comment><USER2> I'm left both pleasantly surprised - it's a neat solution, and disappointed - I was hoping for a more extensive treatment of a question like:

 _' How can a web interface impart more of the experience of browsing for an hefting or flipping through a book.'_

I love browsing book stores, it's part relaxing, physical experience and part practical information gathering. There's a lot you get in a relative instant by flipping through a printed book that online product pages and samples do a terrible job of.</comment>


GitHub-rendered diffs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/github/gollum/commit/c7875704971be998a5399ce83e66a5dada03aad4?short_path=04c6e90#diff-04c6e90faac2675aa89e2176d2eec7d8

<comment><USER2> This looks like a commit from four years ago. I don't understand what, if anything, is new here, or why the main url of the project wasn't posted instead: [https://github.com/gollum/gollum](https://github.com/gollum/gollum). What am I missing?

<comment><USER3> As far as I can see it's about the rendered diff feature, which was introduced a couple of months ago [https://github.com/blog/1784-rendered-prose- diffs](https://github.com/blog/1784-rendered-prose-diffs).

<comment><USER2> Thank you. In that case it's a dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7240122](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7240122).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Could you at least give an example where we would see insertions, deletions, and changes?

<comment><USER5> An updated readme of one of my projects, featuring all 3:

[https://github.com/p3lim/dotjs- universal/commit/6ec3b0f15264...](https://github.com/p3lim/dotjs- universal/commit/6ec3b0f15264ad9c9c2bca373f9c19a0337253dc?short_path=04c6e90#diff-04c6e90faac2675aa89e2176d2eec7d8)

<comment><USER6> That just shows me "Oh My

Sorry, this commit took too long to generate."

<comment><USER5> Traffic does that, here is the actual commit: [https://github.com/p3lim/dotjs- universal/commit/6ec3b0f15264...](https://github.com/p3lim/dotjs- universal/commit/6ec3b0f15264ad9c9c2bca373f9c19a0337253dc)</comment></comment></comment></comment>