Facebook can track your browsing even after you've logged out, judge says - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/03/facebook-track-browsing-history-california-lawsuit <comment><USER3> Firefox has a pretty neat feature I discovered recently:

[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Contextual_Identity_Projec...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Contextual_Identity_Project/Containers)

It lets you run multiple sessions in one window, where each tab belongs to a specific session with separated cookies and such.

I've got a bunch of tabs where I'm logged in to Facebook, another set where I'm logged in to Google and the rest of them where I'm not logged in to either. Of course they can still use IP matching to track me, but at least it's something...

<comment><USER4> Wouldn't opening several "Private Windows" achieve the same situation? What are the differences?

<comment><USER5> Several private windows share the cookies. Try logging into a website in a private window and open that website in another private window and you will be logged in.

<comment><USER6> In Chrome. Not in Safari.

<comment><USER5> Waoh. Never knew this. I would happily switch to safari, if only it has those amazing extensions that I have in my chrome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have a few questions.

1) "Facebook's intrusion could have easily been blocked, but plaintiffs chose not to do so,"

This seems like a dangerous precedent. So if we can block surveillance attempts and we don't try, then it's our fault?

> "The fact that a user's web browser automatically sends the same information > to both parties does not establish that one party intercepted the user's > communication with the other,"

This makes no sense. Nothing happens "automatically", someone wrote the code for that to happen, in this case, Facebook.

But, at the end of the day it's just an embedded thing in a bunch of websites. I don't see anyone suing Google about AdSense. I mean I despise Facebook, but unless they're doing something more nefarious than getting a GET request on page load, then I'm not sure that I care enough. Get a blocker.

<comment><USER8> > Nothing happens "automatically"

Actually, the problem is [add: after the website is created, and tracking code is put there by someone] that it all happens automatically.

See, there is another perspective into this. Not exactly correct (I admit, there _is_ some stretching and it's not all solid), but just the general idea...

The semi-forgotten term for the browser is _user agent_. Point is, it really should act on behalf of the user. It's an _automation_ that should be programmed to do what _the user_ wants it to do (browsing the web, displaying the pages, etc), sparing user of mundane choices and gory technical details.

If the agent is configured to willingly accept and execute arbitrary third- party instructions, and provide detailed information - and it can be configured differently - isn't the problem with the agent configuration? If you didn't want that GET request, why agent did it? And it's not that the agent was tricked (hacked) into doing so - all the APIs (cookies, XHR, etc) are well-documented. Sure, there is some shady stuff sometimes going on - <USER2> browser fingerprinting, but it's not the core issue.

Maybe we should actually start blaming browser vendors for shipping badly pre- configured software with the defaults that consciously and willingly trade privacy for "not breaking" the web?

Remove the automation and just imagine users themselves would somehow connect to the web, and the site would tell "hey, now go talk to Facebook server and do whatever they say" \- and they do. (And this is what actually happens!) Surely, the tracking would be a non-issue.

<comment><USER9> > Maybe we should actually start blaming browser vendors for shipping badly > pre-configured software with the defaults that consciously and willingly > trade privacy for "not breaking" the web?

This.

The writing was on the wall when the conversation became about "balancing" the interests of users and huge content factories. And now web-DRM is a standard.

Fuck that; my computer, my rules.

I had a funny conversation recently with someone who was arguing that I was breaking etiquette, or perhaps an implied contract (it wasn't clear) by messing with cookies. He realized the absurdity about the time I asked if I was ethically obligated to back up and restore the cookies in case of drive failure, but people have some really odd notions about their right to control state on my machine.

In some ways I prefer the black-hat types; at least they're aware that they're working against my interests and don't become indignant when I point it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article or the judge (not sure which) suggests using incognito mode. While this will keep browsing history private for a particular session, it's only effective locally. Tracking from the server is still possible either through being logged in or through browser fingerprinting, which is surprisingly accurate.

Here's a good demo which uses fingerprinting to show how ineffective incognito mode is: [http://www.nothingprivate.ml/](http://www.nothingprivate.ml/)

<comment><USER11> How does a user defend against this, without resorting to a nuclear option like Tor?

<comment><USER12> html5 canvas blockers / browser fingerprinting blocker for the site linked

your browser is leaking a lot of data, from the plugins you have installed to the fonts & you need to take initiative to patch the holes

here's a website you may find useful: [https://browserleaks.com/](https://browserleaks.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you delete the Facebook cookie (i.e. are completely logged out including username), then click on a link in an email notification from Facebook, it will silently log you in again, restoring the cookie and web-wide tracking. This can be tested by pasting an email notification link to a new private browsing window.

<comment><USER14> If you use PrivacyBadger you don't have more facebook cookie on 3rd party websites, so they dont track you.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/privacy- badge...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/privacy-badger17/)

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/privacy- badger/pke...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/privacy- badger/pkehgijcmpdhfbdbbnkijodmdjhbjlgp)

<comment><USER13> How do you login to Facebook when needed, if there is no cookie?

<comment><USER14> Edited comment to explain it affects 3rd party websites. Facebook works as usually and all content it the same.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the pointer. Wish this worked on iOS, where the only option is to use a dedicated browser for accessing Facebook. Not sure how Brave deals with Facebook cookies on iOS.

<comment><USER14> Why can't you use firefox on iOS? All addons should work normally.

[https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/ios/](https://www.mozilla.org/en- GB/firefox/ios/)

<comment><USER13> Apple does not allow browser extensions. Firefox (any non-Apple browser) on iOS is a wrapper around Mobile Safari.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> That's not all. In NY state, they ruled that can artist can take pictures of you in your home through your windows:

[https://fstoppers.com/photojournalistic/supreme-court- rules-...](https://fstoppers.com/photojournalistic/supreme-court-rules- photographing-neighbors-through-windows-legal-67925)

<comment><USER16> And why not? It would forbid a lot of outdoor photography if I couldn't accidentally catch a photo of someone in their house. Google Street view would be gone.

<comment><USER17> not necessarily, they would be forced anonymize faces.

<comment><USER18> Like Google Street View already does.

<comment><USER19> I don't think they were forced. Google is based in the U.S. where it is legal to photograph people in public, yet Google still blurs the faces of those on sidewalks. That and things like license plates seems to me to be them preemptively trying to appease privacy concerns so that support to censor them legally doesn't form.

<comment><USER17> I believe the principle of the expectation of privacy forced them to blur the faces.

<comment><USER20> Not in the US at least. Expectation of privacy is an element of the test for determining whether a government search subject to the Fourth Amendment has occurred. As such, it only applies to government actors, not private parties like Google. And in any case, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in a public place such as a road.

<comment><USER17> I beg to differ. For example in 12 US States you cannot record a telephone conversation without all party consent.

[http://www.detectiveservices.com/2012/02/state-by-state- reco...](http://www.detectiveservices.com/2012/02/state-by-state-recording- laws/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Quitting facebook is not enough. I recommend blocking all via hosts file. [https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporatio...](https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporations/facebook/all)

</comment><comment><USER22> Sometimes I think people need a little more "Black Mirror" to see how bad this is. One of the episodes has random people basically constantly looking at and filming a woman everywhere; certainly no _less_ than what Facebook does every day, yet somehow it doesn't seem weird to anyone?

<comment><USER23> I can already tell Season 4 is gonna be awesome

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Nice, if i don't lock my door, its my fault they steal my things.

<comment><USER14> > Nice, if i don't lock my door, its my fault they steal my things.

In many, if not most European countries you can get a ticket for not protecting your vehicle. If you leave your car unlocked and someone steals it, it's your fault. Police if have to investigate it etc, but they also give you a ticket, because it not thoughtlessness, they wouldn't have to do it.

<comment><USER25> > If you leave your car unlocked and someone steals it, it's your fault.

Getting a ticket for that does not mean the theft gets blamed solely on the owner so that the thief is not even considered committing a crime. It's just the owner may have violated a law, _too_. How about you a.) quote those laws, and even assuming you are correct in how you put it, show how b.) one instance of victim blaming would justify another. To me that's like drinking a second bottle of bleach because you already downed one. That runs so much counter my own intuition I'm kind of intrigued.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Make today the day you delete you facebook account. Do it! Opt-out of this panopticon as best you can.

Block as many ads as you can, in order the starve the best.

</comment><comment> ryan-allen I think EFF's privacy badger [0] can block this kind of tracking, depending on how sophsticated their tracking methods are.

[0] [https://www.eff.org/privacybadger](https://www.eff.org/privacybadger)

<comment><USER27> Eff's approach often makes me feel they acquiesce that users should be the one hiding from those corporations. Why are we making shields instead of them putting guns down?

<comment><USER28> Is it instead? Since Facebook and their ilk are surveilling us largely out of greed, surely making the work less profitable for them has some merit as a tool for counter? As is often the case, a true solution probably does need to be political, but a technical one is valuable as a band-aid until/unless that can be achieved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Seems very similar to the original Facebook Beacon, which they were forced take down.

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

</comment><comment><USER29> >Australian internet security blogger Nik Cubrilovic first discovered that Facebook was apparently tracking users' web browsing after they logged off in 2011

After reading that (in 2011) I decided to block all third-party cookies.

<comment><USER30> The other side is not stupid, there are far better ways to track users than cookies, and blocking them takes a lot of effort.

<comment><USER31> What better ways than cookies is there to track users ? AFAIK, it's the most unique fingerprint you can get of a user. Everything else is probably going to be a lot less precise.

<comment><USER32> I think browser fingerprints are quite a reliable way of tracking.

[https://amiunique.org/fp](https://amiunique.org/fp)

<comment><USER33> Sure, 'quite reliable' beats 'unique' every time!

<comment><USER34> Unique becomes unreliable the moment users delete their cookies.

<comment><USER33> Which they of course do much more often than change one of the finicky parameters that constitute these unique fingerprints (which in reality tend to not be unique to begin with)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> While on the topic of tracking, is there a plugin that lets you delete cookies using rules on a per domain basis? for example, cookies are useful for some sites, and others they are useful for certain periods of time, and thereafter it would be nice to get rid of them (and yet more sites shouldn't be able to leave cookies at all). I know there are some plugins that let you block all cookies, or manage them after the fact, but I want something rule based and automated

<comment><USER12> vanilla cookies in Chrome allows quick cookie clearing (one click) and you can customize rules to save specific cookies. Self Destructing Cookies on FF is fantastic also.

<comment><USER36> I use this [1] -- it's great. I have it set to delete any cookies not on the whitelist 30 minutes after last set. That way I can log into a site that's not on the whitelist and do something and after I've stopped using for 30 mins I'm logged out and cookies deleted. However - it's not perfect. It doesn't delete local storage, local databases, or Flash™ storage. There is a nest of Chromium issues [2] needed to be resolved to make this work. It looks like the most recent related work was done Sep 2016 [3] so maybe there's some hope, even though the issues have been open for 5+ years. Of course I have the option of working on it myself but having looked at the 5-10 related issues I think it would take quite some time to develop an understanding of all the APIs.

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vanilla-cookie- man...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vanilla-cookie- manager/gieohaicffldbmiilohhggbidhephnjj)

[2] [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=78093](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=78093)

[3] [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=589586...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=589586#c38)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> How is Facebook different from other advertising networks. All of them track you across the web, on any site that use them. Why is FB a special case?

</comment><comment><USER38> Meh [https://www.eff.org/privacybadger](https://www.eff.org/privacybadger)

</comment><comment><USER39> Does FB track by IP or cookie or both? I use different browsers for the more invasive tracking sites. For FB (which I use very sparingly these days to stay in touch with people I won't hear about in other circles) I currently use Safari. I log in and out and limit my use of that browser to FB and a handful of other sites.

since Chrome is such a memory hog on macs my principal browsers are opera and brave, both of which work very well on my elderly macbook air.

I have no idea if my somewhat paranoid tracking avoidance is effective against FB though. I see that when I go to the log in page in safari that FB knows how many 'posts' I have stacked up to consume (the little Pavlov's dog red circle with a number in it). I'm assuming I'm being tracked despite being logged out...

</comment><comment><USER40> add facebook to your hosts file per: [https://github.com/erwinbierens/Facebook- Hosts/blob/master/f...](https://github.com/erwinbierens/Facebook- Hosts/blob/master/facebook-hosts.txt)

</comment><comment><USER41> My general fix for web tracking cookies:

HTTP requests sent from my browser page when viewing Foo.com to Bar.com have no cookies. Javascript is available to create an explicit pop-up requesting permission to share your cookies with Bar.com.

When I go to Foo.com, my relationship is with Foo.com. I'm okay with being tracked by Foo.com when I'm on Foo.com, but if bar.com is going to track me then I want to be asked.

That said, Foo and Bar could still share information about me directly without going through my browser, but without the cookie feature it would be very hard for Foo and Bar's profiles on the person Pxtl are the same person.

</comment><comment><USER42> Clearly Facebook "can". The judge ruled that they "may".

</comment><comment><USER43> That is why media struggles making money--it gives its audience for free to Facebook and Google with all that "free" share buttons and analytics. Why would an advertiser pay to a brand name media outlet money for displaying an ad if it could buy exactly this audience on Facebook or via Google much cheaper?

Media did it to itself--it just gave away it's audience for free. No wonder it can't make enough money via advertising.

</comment><comment><USER44> I wish someone would build hardware that protected against this. A router for example that filtered all outbound traffic and blocked specific routes and packets destined for tracking.

Yes, you could do that all on the computer itself, no need to run it on the router. I guess the benefit of having it all on a router is that it would be a plug and play solution for the privacy conscious but technically limited individual.

<comment><USER45> Pi-hole ([https://pi-hole.net/](https://pi-hole.net/)) does something like this. It's not plug'n'play though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I usually stick with Safari as my browser, but Privacy Badger isn't available for it, so I use "Facebook Disconnect." Does anyone know how well it really works? (I don't have an account, and I don't want them tracking my activity for my old profile.) I'm surprised I haven't grep'ed anything about this extension in the discussion thus far, which makes me nervous.

</comment><comment><USER47> Wouldn't something like Pi-Hole be a good network-wide way to manage this tracking? I know plugins are convenient but they all have to intercept and modify css/etc coming in on the fly which can lead to slower page loads. Plus I'd imagine some of those plugins will allow certain domains through regardless?

Or are the sneakier ways sites track users something that can get by the OOTB settings?

</comment><comment><USER48> I don't even know what their logout button does. It puts me on the login page with my profile pic, and it displays the number of notifications I've received while logged out. There is a 'remove account' X overlay placed on the top left corner. I usually click it and hope it does something.

</comment><comment><USER49> If the judge had ruled the other way, would that have been equivalent to ruling that all tracking is illegal?

</comment><comment><USER50> It is interesting that the court was arguing that there are protection measures the plaintiff can take. Makes one wonder that the legal situation is for the folks that are circumventing the default browser protection mechanisms.

</comment><comment><USER51> that awkward moment when the article itself has Facebook sharing buttons

</comment><comment><USER52> Proper English should have been: "Facebook _may_ track your browsing even after...".

The judge can rule about lawfulness, otherwise it looks like they are a investigative reporter that just found out about the technical capability to track users in such a way.

<comment><USER53> Oh, thanks, now I finally understand the title. Should be "may" or "It's legal to..." indeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Not a surprise.

</comment><comment><USER55> Facebook is a company, a superfluous one even, no need is forcing you to use it and there is no need for it. Don't like the don't use it. Don't like tracking configure your browser accordingly and get a blocker. It's easy and free.

<comment><USER56> You can't block if you don't know it happens (or that it even _can_ happen), which is the case for most people. Very few people understand the concept of third-party tracking - nor should they have to.</comment></comment>


Säkkijärven polkka - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A4kkij%C3%A4rven_polkka#Military_use <comment><USER2> The English Wikipedia page, to me, seems to suggest that the record was played to explode the mines in a controlled fashion. In fact, according to Finnish Wikipedia, it was used to scramble the Soviet radio signals to prevent the mines from exploding, and there was a sort of radio war going on for a while.

This is the specific record that apparently was used: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZx1zl_sVTI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZx1zl_sVTI)

<comment><USER3> The English page does say "jamming", but I too originally read it as if they were trying to detonate them prematurely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I read "mine", I thought of anti-personnel landmines and was confused why you'd want to radio-trigger those.

These were demolition charges designed to destroy objects like bridges. According to [https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-the-Finnish-army- used-...](https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-the-Finnish-army-used-the- song-S%C3%A4kkij%C3%A4rven-Polkka-to-prevent-the-detonation-of-Soviet-radio- controlled-mines-during-the-recapture-of-Viipuri-in-the-Continuation- War/answer/Alexander-Denisov-9), there were a total of 25 such mines hidden, with each containing hundreds to thousands of kilograms of explosives.

[https://www.standingwellback.com/russian-ww2-radio- controlle...](https://www.standingwellback.com/russian-ww2-radio-controlled- explosive-device/) is also worth a read.

</comment><comment><USER5> Another Finnish polka more known through Internet culture[0] is Ievan polka: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yh9i0PAjck](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yh9i0PAjck)

I remember having the original Flash clip on loop on for entire days back when.

[0]: Leekspin: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-N1yJyrQRY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-N1yJyrQRY)

<comment><USER6> The Finns contributed more to early Internet culture than we give them credit for. They invented IRC, and about half of the weirder memes on 4chan.

<comment><USER7> And Linux

<comment><USER8> And Git (kind of, although that happened after Linus moved away from Finland)

<comment><USER9> MySQL in the same vein.

<comment><USER10> MySQL is actually of Swedish origin.

<comment><USER11> Well, at least Michael Widenius, the most visible head of MySQL and one of two cofounders, is finnish. He also created the MySQL's fork MariaDB. Both names came from Michael's daughters My and Maria.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As a finn, I did not expect to see this on the front page of HN. Ever.

But did not know about the military use of the song. Very interesting.

<comment><USER13> As somebody who moved to Finland, and hasn't learned too much Finnish, I was just pleased I recognized the language and the words themselves!

Interesting read though, regardless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sakkijarven polkka is (well, was) also famous as one of standard Nokia ringtones: [https://youtu.be/UYSdiQl8BQY?t=54](https://youtu.be/UYSdiQl8BQY?t=54)

</comment><comment><USER15> Interesting. This is basically an early version of the phone bomb where you get a burner phone and just call the number of the sim card to blow it up. Being able to pull that off in the 40's was impressive.

Hard to say what use it has though? Normally a "mine" is something that is triggered by an event such as a person or vehicle passing. Setting one off remotely or on a timer isn't useful.

If the mines were used to rig specific infastructure such as railways or bridges then I can see the use (blow specific bridges at specific points in time, without having to send saboteurs). I remember practicing bridge destruction in the army using dozens of tank mines, simply because they were readily available and easily handled explosives.

<comment><USER16> These were "mines" used to blow up bridges, roads and railroads. The bigger ones had thousands of kg of explosives. So more like remote demolition over radio. Idea being that you could destroy the critical infrastructure after retreating from the area and if you had vision on it when someone was on it like the first one that killed a couple officers (killed a major who was the chief lawyer for the Finnish General Staff)

Modern equivalent would be cellphone bombs in roads in Afghanistan/Iraq.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wikipedia articles are quickly becoming my favorite type of HN link.

</comment><comment><USER18> Eurobeat remix: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxx5p8KnZ3w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxx5p8KnZ3w)

</comment><comment><USER19> > These mines were set off when a three-note chord was played on the frequency > the radio was tuned to, causing three tuning forks (of which each mine had a > unique combination) to vibrate at once.

so, ehm, what was the soviets' plan? to blow them all at once when the city would be taken by finns?

russian wikipedia page says the plan was to blow them periodically. But it doesn't make much sense, how would the soviets control which mines to blow? hard to imagine they would be aiming radio signal somehow

<comment><USER4> Each mine could be set to a different combination of three trigger frequencies. There weren't many of them in place (I'll write another top-level comment about this - edit: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23089418](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23089418)).

<comment><USER20> Adding to that, even just six frequencies to choose from would let you have twenty distinct targets. (Six choose three.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMszu_VgMfY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMszu_VgMfY)

<comment><USER22> Nice song. Finnish language is part of the Uralic group of languages Finno- Ugric spoken by Hungarians and Estonians too.

These languages don't belong to Indo-Iranian group like every other language in Europe.

I like to speculate the language came to northern Europe with Huns who, according to Procopius (I believe it was him) controlled Scandinavia too and there are many sagas of Norsemen fighting Huns there, such as Hlöðskviða.

The modern Finns show Nordic genetic, yet the language is Uralic and perhaps the first Finns were only the ruling class as it was often the case with Huns.

Obviously, there are other more widely accepted theories.

<comment><USER23> Sorry but that is quack. Replace "Finnish" with "Aryan" and it's almost directly from the 1930s Nazi occultism book.

<comment><USER21> >Aryan language is part of the Uralic group of languages Finno-Ugric spoken by Hungarians and Estonians too.

???

<comment><USER23> No, I mean more generally terms like "Nordic genetics" and proposing fringe linguistic and ethnic theories about modern nationalities.

<comment><USER22> I'm sorry to ruin your imaginations but genetics, linguistics and history are real sciences concerned with tangible facts. Unlike some political theories with no right to claim credibility other than calling themselves "modern." Aryan (term I didn't use) simply means Iranian, regardless of whether nazis abused the term or not. You may find it useful to know that.

<comment><USER24> I do agree with your more general point but I think we shouldn't dismiss changes in usages of words over time. Aryan doesn't simply mean Iranian in a modern western context, just like the swastika isn't just a sign from Buddhism or Hinduism. Both have strong associations with one of the most defining wars of the 20th century and the genocidal regime that started said war. That can't be easily ignored.

<comment><USER25> The Black Death killed a hundred million.

Blood flows like a river.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If you're unfamiliar with Finnish traditional music, they have some great polkas. Frigg are good fun. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77lw3hp9q7M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77lw3hp9q7M)

<comment><USER27> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yh9i0PAjck](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yh9i0PAjck)

<comment><USER26> THAT polka.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> ... hey! [https://youtu.be/q98Y86jfXaY](https://youtu.be/q98Y86jfXaY)

</comment><comment><USER29> This reminded me about the Ride of the Valkyries scene in Apocalypse Now.

<comment><USER30> I guess you haven't heard the action-scene version of Sakkijarven polkka on a kantele; [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1PAy4JZfrE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1PAy4JZfrE)

Bonus violin edition by Linda Lampenius; [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-Skam8GUUU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-Skam8GUUU)</comment></comment>


Berkeley's RISC-V Wants to Be Free - <AUTHOR> http://www.eejournal.com/archives/articles/20141210-risc-v/ <comment><USER2> As much I heard, the ARM instruction set is also not so simple as it could. So a new, fresh and clean instruction set would be great and the comparison of the two architectures looks promising.

I scan-read the paper, but did not encounter any number of registers. Does anybody know, how many registers this architecture has/supports ... is there any implementation yet?

Hope, there will be an implementation soon, and maybe a smartphone or tablet computer based on it... (or a new Raspberry?)

Edit: Now I see, should be 32 registers, based on the 32bit opcode-format (5 bits to address any register).

<comment><USER3> _As much I heard, the ARM instruction set is also not so simple as it could._

I'd argue that's part of why it's been so successful, especially in competition with the other big ISA - x86. Complex instructions are _good_ because they do a lot in a small size, and a small size is good because it conserves cache usage and memory bandwidth; decoding is rarely the bottleneck now. That's why ARM has Thumb, and their latest cores are similar to x86's uop-decoding and decoupled decoder/execution units.

The whole "it can be done faster in software" idea of RISC was mainly based on some early CISC microarchitectures that weren't implemented as efficiently as they could be, which doesn't imply that they couldn't be. Look at all the instructions added by the various SSE extensions, for example; the performance/speed improvements they provide are real, and the cost of the hardware is basically negligible in comparison.

Here's an interesting comparison where ARM and x86 are quite close in power efficiency, while MIPS is relatively far behind: [http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188396-the-final-isa- show...](http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188396-the-final-isa-showdown-is- arm-x86-or-mips-intrinsically-more-power-efficient)

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure that the Extremetech page allows concluding much on its own regarding MIPS efficiency vs. others as the implementations are pretty different and the only MIPS instance is an oddball: it's OoO and 4-wide as the i7, while being on a very old process (90nm) while the all other chips are on better processes, and the 3 or 4 wide ones on 32 nm. 3 process generations tends to have an impact on efficiency ;)

Also on this topic: if the original MIPS was indeed very simple, recent versions added thumb-like code compression, SIMD extensions, DSP extensions... As everyone else does really. And you can get similar CPU benchmarks level as other architectures. Then the very same instruction architecture can have pretty wide power efficiency differences depending on implementations. Just look at Atom vs. Core, A8 vs. 15... Even the same model shows big differences based on implementation choices (optimize for speed vs. area/cost for example).

As someone working on SoC, I believe the key difference in MIPS vs. ARM vs. Intel is not so much the instruction set, but the work effort spent on optimizing the implementations close to the processes. It's pretty obvious for Intel, but ARM spends a lot of time with the big foundries (TSMC, GlobalFoundries, Samsung) to make sure their implementation are well tuned. And they pass on the know-how to their customers through what they call "POPs" (Process Optimization Packages). This is important for ARM, but also for the foundries as ARM is the de facto standard in mobile. A lot of work go in this, and it shows at the high end. MIPS/Imagination recently propose something similar for MIP, but they're far from having the same amount of resources. That's the main difference between MIPS and ARM at the high-end IMHO.

<comment><USER5> It would have been nice if they had a MIPS core actually designed by MIPS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "There are two major products that came from Berkeley: LSD and Unix. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."

Unix came from Bell Labs in the East Coast. Californian Unix is just a non- elegant derivative, in my opinion (e.g. BSD sockets don't follow the "Unix philosophy", and one explanation could be the LSD, I agree with that).

<comment><USER7> Could you maybe expand on your thoughts of BSD sockets vs. what SVR4 came up with?

<comment><USER6> Well, BSD sockets don't use file abstraction. Plan 9 recovered "Unix philosophy" in that regard. In my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone have actual experience using RISC-V? It does come with a gcc toolchain, so it should just run C - but is it of any practical use yet, relative to the enormous ARM (or MIPS, or even SPARC) ecosystem?

<comment><USER9> We were investigating CPUs for embedded use. I am not sure right now if it was RISC or MIPS. The performance was fraction of ARM or x86. But the consulting company would build SOC exactly to our spec. There were zero licensing fees.

So for embedded use if performance is not important, I would seriously consider it.

<comment><USER10> Reading the article, I see no reason why there should be any major performance issues inherent to RISC-V. Lack of an ecosystem looks like the issue, at least initially. But a $1m licensing fee for a CPU with an established ecosystem is an issue too...

<comment><USER11> The reason the chips will be slower in practice is because they are produced in small batches, and need to be produced by smaller fabs and by extension much older process. MIPS is routinely produced at 95nm still.

<comment><USER12> We at lowRISC intend to produce in volume at 40nm or 28nm. [http://www.lowrisc.org/](http://www.lowrisc.org/)

<comment><USER10> Looks really interesting. Where are you guys based? Cambridge, UK I'm guessing?

<comment><USER12> Yes, the core team is based in Cambridge, UK. However we do intend to be a truly open-source project, with an open and distributed development process which would involve arbitrarily geographically distributed third-party contributors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why redesign a new core? We have plenty to choose from that have semi-existing ecosystems.

First, I'd just go with a MIPS core. This is effectively the original RISC core, after all. Most patents have expired, and the Chinese have an implementation.

If I didn't do that, I'd probably go with a DEC Alpha core. A shrunk, voltage optimized Alpha core was what drove the StrongARM series, and people raved about it. The Alpha architecture up through EV5 is quite clean.

Given that most data suggests that ecosystem and optimization is more important than basic architecture, reinventing the wheel is not a good thing here.

<comment><USER14> Unfortunately the Alpha core is unlikely to ever return, much as its fans would like.

Sparc is open back at the T1 T2 era pre oracle takeover. That's not a bad place to go, but MIPS is not really ideal due to a lot of factors that make the Chinese clones less than appealing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is there a picture of RISC-V architecture (with pipeline, ALUs, FPUs)? Couldn't find anything.

<comment><USER12> You're asking for a picture of a particular RISC-V implementation and its chosen microarchitecture. The RISC-V ISA has a range of different implementations each hitting different points in the design space and different trade-offs in terms of area/performance. See for instance the 'Sodor' teaching cores [https://github.com/ucb-bar/riscv- sodor](https://github.com/ucb-bar/riscv-sodor) [https://github.com/ucb- bar/riscv-sodor/wiki](https://github.com/ucb-bar/riscv-sodor/wiki) which demonstrate 1-stage, 2-stage, 3-stage, 5-stage, and micro-coded implementations.

<comment><USER16> Oh man, that's cool. I must have just missed out on this when taking CS152, we played with simulated SPARC when I took the course IIRC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This could be used for stuff like Arduino at least.</comment>


Massachusetts: 21,000 drug cases could be dismissed - <AUTHOR> http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/04/massachusetts-21000-drug-cases-dismissed-170419055444412.html <comment><USER2> Three years. This is utterly insane. She should serve every minute served by the individuals she illegally incarcerated. Abuse of power for personal gain should be punished by the strongest means possible.

<comment><USER3> It also probably shouldn't be possible for a single person to fake results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Prosecutors said Dookhan admitted "dry labbing," or testing only a fraction of a batch of samples, then listing them all as positive for illegal drugs.

Her motive, they said, was to lift her productivity and reputation. She was sentenced to three years in prison and was paroled last year."

This is sociopathic level of aspirations. Law enforcement seems to keep gaining power by justice system hasn't improved too much. I would like it if governing systems also improved like some softwares with iterations over time. Release patch every tuesday or something.

</comment><comment><USER5> And our new U.S. Attorney General has moved to end the program tasked with examining the scientific basis and credibility of forensics tests.

Providing a new image for associating Justice with a blindfold. (We're just missing the two other monkeys, now -- Hear and Speak.)</comment>


I downloaded an app and was part of the Cajun Navy - <AUTHOR> http://www.houstonchronicle.com/local/gray-matters/article/I-downloaded-an-app-And-suddenly-I-was-talking-12172506.php?cmpid=twitter-premium <comment><USER2> Powerful stuff here. Honestly amazing how quickly this whole thing materialized with no real planning for it.</comment>


My startup's first press article - <AUTHOR> http://www.techjournalsouth.com/news/article.html?item_id=4399

<comment><USER2> Congrats Matt. We received a huge amount of press when Fantasy Congress was first created. You probably already know this, but my advice from the media cycle world is that you should not get distracted. Just keep on focusing on your great product and you'll do great!

PG's comments on press help here: <http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> Glad to see it getting off the ground Matt. I remember when you told me about it a few months ago over lunch.

likewise, the first press article for a startup I work for (excluding a pre- launch techcrunch post): [http://www.techjournalsouth.com/news/article.html?item_id=42...](http://www.techjournalsouth.com/news/article.html?item_id=4290)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, which we'll be using shortly on our blog. Nice work on that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm all for Atlanta-area startups, but...

What the hell does it do? I've read the elevator pitch three times and I can't figure it out.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're a software company building an on-demand web application to deliver Business Intelligence Extranets. Most traditional products like Business Objects or Cognos are primarily focused on internal audiences at a company. We're doing something that's built for a company's customers and suppliers.

<comment><USER4> This phrase has about as much caloric content as a tic-tac:

"on-demand web application to deliver Business Intelligence Extranets"

What's the problem that you guys are solving? How are you solving it? (And don't just tell me, put it on your website)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very hard to understand what it is about, but good luck anyway!

</comment><comment><USER6> Did you write this yourself?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, was interviewed by the author.</comment></comment>


How to learn data science - <AUTHOR> https://www.dataquest.io/blog/how-to-actually-learn-data-science/ <comment><USER2> The actual problem with learning "data science" is making inferences and conclusions which _do not violate the laws of statistics_.

I've seen many submissions to Hacker News and Reddit's /r/dataisbeautiful subreddit where the author goes "look, the analysis supports my conclusion and the R^2 is high, therefore this is a good analysis!" without addressing the assumptions required for those results.

Of course, not everyone has a strong statistical background. Except I've seen _YC-funded big data startups and venture capitalists_ commit the same mistakes, who should really, really know better.

"Data science" is a buzzword that successful only due to obscurity and no one actually _caring_ if the statistics are valid. That's why I've been attempting to open source all my statistical analyses/visualizations, with detailed steps on how to reproduce. (see my recent /r/dataisbeautiful submissions on reddit: [https://www.reddit.com/user/minimaxir/submitted/](https://www.reddit.com/user/minimaxir/submitted/) )

<comment><USER3> Roughly 80% of data scientists I know have PhD in something very math heavy. Rest have masters degrees. There are programmers who can assist them doing the grunt work but it's just basic programming to assist analysts to crunch data.

If you want to do data science for real:

1\. Get Masters of PhD from statistics, computer science, economics, physics or some other heavy field and specialize data analysis in that field. You must learn lots of statistics when doing so.

2\. Learn programming, statistical machine learning and tools of the trade.

Good data science is not based on collecting large amounts of data passively and then mining it mindlessly. You need to ask right questions and design data collection and modeling process based on those questions.

<comment><USER4> No. A phd in statistics or economics means almost nothing at this point. Even if it did, truly, signal mastery of the content, which it doesn't anymore, it would signal to most people who do this kind of work that you're way overqualified while simultaneously being totally ignorant of the day-to-day work of actual data scientists.

If you want to be a useful data scientist, do a lot of work with data. If you have strong programming skills and are flexible and a quick learner then you will do well.

Spending the better part of your young adulthood getting a phd in statistics, unless you want to go into academia, just makes you look like a fool.

<comment><USER5> I've had complete opposite experience. Do the people who hire for this kind of work often bet on non-PhD candidates? Do they trust themselves to separate the wheat from the chaff?

Don't you want a colleague who is able to mention seminal papers for specific problems? Who is able to read and understand these papers and can distill useful features and optimizations from them?

People with PhD who go into business, usually end up in the better positions. They hire other PhD's for the good positions to keep the signal (mastery of the content) stronger.

As someone who did a lot of work with data I have little problem with my usefulness, but a lot of problems opening doors to the really interesting data companies (lacking a proper academic network). I wish I had gotten that PhD, because right now applying to Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo or eBay for data science positions makes me look like a fool.

<comment><USER6> I've met a lot of fools who've quoted all the right works, in both Computer Science and Data Science. Computer Science fools usually get fired. Data Science fools seem to get promoted to Yes-man status. It's a lot harder to lie about your code than it is with statistics; As the old adage goes, it right behind Lies and Damned Lies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good article for beginners. A couple thoughts, just to build on what the author said:

First off, data science == fancy name for data mining/analysis. Wanted to clear that up due to buzzwordy nature of "data science."

Learn SQL - this is the big one. You must be proficient with SQL to be effective at data science. Whether it's running on an RDBMS or translating to map/reduce (Hive) or DAG (Spark), SQL is invaluable. If you don't know what those acronyms mean yet, don't worry. Just learn SQL.

Learn to communicate insights - I would add here to try some UI techniques. Highcharts, d3.js, these are good libraries for telling your data story. You can also do a ton just with Excel and not need to write any code beyond what you wrote for the mining portion (usually SQL).

I would also go back to basics with regards to statistical techniques. Start with your simple Z Score, this is such an important tool in your data science toolbox. If you're just looking at raw numbers, try to Z-normalize the data and see what happens. You'd be surprised what you can achieve with a high school statistics textbook, Postgres/MySQL (or even Excel!), and a moderate- sized data set. These are powerful enough to answer the majority of your questions, and when they fail then move on to more sexy algorithms.

Edit: one more thing I forgot to mention. After SQL, learn Python. There are a ton of libraries in the python ecosystem that are perfect for data science (numpy, scipy, scikit-learn, etc). It's also one of the top languages used in academic settings. My preferred data science workspace involves Python, IPython Notebook, and Pandas (This book is quite good: [http://www.amazon.com/Python-Data-Analysis-Wrangling- IPython...](http://www.amazon.com/Python-Data-Analysis-Wrangling- IPython/dp/1449319793))

<comment><USER8> But how do you become a good data scientist, instead of a technical person, that knows how to apply an algorithm in Python/R.

What I am trying to ask is how do you become good at setting your start point(formulate your hypotheses), communicating your insights and selecting which tools apply where, because if your are good at coding and have experience in things related to computer science you have the abilities to handle a dataset(SQL Knowledge) and the data tools(Python, Pandas, etc), but that doesn't earn you the title of data scientist.

<comment><USER9> Practice. And education, but mostly practice. This is the kind of thing that is typically taught in formal educational settings (at least in engineering, which is my experience). As an example, I learned more about probability & statistics in 1) AP biology in high school, and 2) a "simulation systems" class in my industrial engineering master's curriculum. We spent much of the former class learning basic statistical analysis techniques (ANOVA, chi- square, etc) to apply to our lab data, and the latter class was all about statistical analysis of process flows (aimed at the real life problem of factory production planning & scheduling and manufacturing process optimization).

So, do I consider myself a data scientist? Absolutely not. But do I understand basic statistical concepts and know how to apply them to several categories of real life data analysis problems.

I'm a terrible coder, btw.

<comment><USER8> Would you recommend any approach or I should go undust my high school and college books in the search for study material. Or is this too basic material.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Definitely agree that those long lists that tell you to first become awesome at combinatorics, linear algebra, then learn all about statistical inference (that is, not actual statistical procedures but the mathematical underpinnings of statistics that would enable you to construct and evaluate methods you invent yourself), then move on to stochastic optimization... those are really more about machismo than about actually helping people to learn data science. Sure, linear algebra is helpful, but whether it's fundamental really depends on the kind of data science you're keen to do.

I also generally dislike /r/machinelearning and /r/statistics because they seem to have been taken over by people who will tell you to either get a PhD or get out. But, for me, just learning whatever I thought I needed to help me solve the problem at hand got me stuck really fast. There's so much statistics where you really just have to learn it first before you can start to see when and why you'd like to use it.

It never occurred to me to use hierarchical modeling and partial pooling for a certain set of problems until after I'd read Gelman & Hill. I never thought that inference on a changing process might require different techniques from the techniques for stationary processes until I had to study Hidden Markov Models for an exam. Heck, when I got started with data analysis I didn't even realize that the accuracy of most statistics improves proportional to sqrt(n) and so the next logical step in my mind was always "get more data!" instead of "learn more about statistics!" (If you look at the industry's obsession with unsampled data, data warehouses that store absolutely everything ever and map/reduce, my hunch is I'm not the only one who lacks or at some point lacked elementary statistical knowledge because it just never came up on their self- motivated, self-directed learning path.)

So I think the ideal learning path incorporates a bit of both: learn more about what excites you and about what's immediately useful right now, but also put aside some time to fill out gaps in your knowledge – even things that don't immediately look useful – and make some time for fundamental/theoretical study.

(x-posted from DataTau)

<comment><USER11> +1 for DataTau, I didn't know about that.

[http://www.datatau.com/](http://www.datatau.com/)

Check out this too: [http://www.pyquantnews.com/](http://www.pyquantnews.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Data science is a stupid buzzword. The ideal candidate knows enough about IT to massage data, the more the knows about the domain to investigate the better, and for sure some statistics. Most of all always do sanity checks .. does it make sense? Can it be? Is the data correct?

It is an art. Like writing awesome code, etc. practice, practice, and working with experienced people is key.

<comment> SG- At least it's not something engineer like every other job in the tech field.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "You need something that will motivate you to keep learning." This is so true and often forgotten. I am always learning new things, but the concepts that stick, beyond just the basics, are tied to specific projects or solutions to real problems. I'm typically ok with being a "jack-of-all-trades" for most technologies, just to stay aware of new things. However, when it comes to applying new concepts, skills, or tech to solve problems, a deeper understanding is required; usually obtained through motivation.

<comment> liviu- >"You need something that will motivate you to keep learning." This is so true and often forgotten.

I'm surprised that both you and OP seem to think this advice is rare, as I've personally seen it mentioned more than a few times. Professors always brainstorm ways to motivate students, employers always seek methods to motivate employees, etc. The answer always seems to be something in the lines of 'do what you love' which is so overused it loses its impact.

Anyway, as someone new to data science, I did not feel like I gained any new information after reading the article, and all the advice seems either intuitive or rehashed. Looking forward to read the HN discussion though.

<comment><USER14> > Professors always brainstorm ways to motivate students, employers always > seek methods to motivate employees

Uhh.. You must have quite a fortunate streak of having great teachers and great employers. Speaking for myself, I had some great teachers, but finding a boss who seeks to motivate employees with the right challenges is rare. Bosses and companies generally assume your salary is the primary motivator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you want to learn about data science, read this book: [http://www- bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/](http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/)

I have been going through it and I cannot think of a better resource.

</comment><comment><USER16> As someone who uses "Data Science" to teach "Computational Thinking", I think this blog post hits on a lot of really valuable pedagogoical notes. Getting motivated, learning things through doing, and having a strong context for your learning.

For those wondering why I put my buzzwords in quotes, it's because I don't want to sound like I'm a huge proponent of either of them. CT is the term I use to describe how I teach my students about abstractions, algorithms, and some programming. DS is the term I use to describe how students learn all of that in the context of working with data related to their own majors. I'm not trying to claim some crazy paradigm shift, just that it's a great way to convince students that CS is useful to them.

</comment><comment><USER17> Anyone interested in data science should first study cognitive psychology. The CIA has a manual on the psychology of intelligence analysis that is a must read for anyone pursuing any analytical job.

If you dont understand how your mind sees, processes, retains and recalls data...how can you possibly analyze it accurately?

<comment><USER18> You have a link to where to obtain said manual?

<comment><USER17> [https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of- intellig...](https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of- intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/psychology-of-intelligence- analysis/)

<comment><USER18> Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> These principles are useful when learning anything really: human language (immersion), programming (build something), sports (practice), etc.

That said, as someone who worked in software engineering for 5 years without a degree, and recently returned to school, I would say be careful not to discount studying theory at the same time you're practicing your craft. I really think a combined approach of structured university courses and MOOCs, including reading textbooks, along with applying the knowledge has been the best approach for me.

I was arrogant about "not needing" a degree for years, feeling justified by the fact that I was making very valuable contributions as an engineer, until I finally went back to school and realized how valuable theoretical knowledge can be.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've been working as an analyst for 7 years, it's only last couple of years I've heard of statistical analysis referred to as data science.

Am I missing something or is it just a new word?

<comment><USER21> In many ways it's just a new word for the same thing, but there's a few key differences. The main difference between traditional statistics and data science is strength in programming. Data scientists are also expected to be more well versed in statistical modeling than your average programmer or data analyst.

With that said it's not really a new thing, people have been doing data science for decades. The demand for people who can program and also do more complex statistical modeling has skyrocketed so I think that's why there's a new name for it now.

Part of the problem is that even with this definition there's a wide range of abilities present in data scientists. A long time computer programmer who has dabbled in statistics and a long time statistician who has dabbled in computer programming would both be data scientists even though they bring very different strengths to the table.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I am doing this course and find it really good : [https://www.edx.org/course/scalable-machine-learning-uc- berk...](https://www.edx.org/course/scalable-machine-learning-uc-berkeleyx- cs190-1x)

It is about creating a linear and logistic regression + pca using spark (python api).

</comment><comment><USER23> Here are some topics. Are they considered relevant to _data science_?

Matrix row rank and column rank are equal.

In matrix theory, the polar decomposition.

Each Hermitian matrix has an orthogonal basis of eigenvectors.

Weak law of large numbers.

Strong law of large numbers.

The Radon-Nikodym theorem and conditional expectation.

Sample mean and variance are sufficient statistics for independent, identically distributed samples from a univariate Gaussian distribution.

The Neyman-Pearson lemma.

The Cramer-Rao lower bound.

The margingale convergence theorem.

Convergence results of Markov chains.

Markov processes in continuous time.

The law of the iterated logarithm.

The Lindeberg-Feller version of the central limit theorem.

The normal equations of linear regression analysis.

Non-parametric statistical hypothesis tests.

Power spectral estimation of second order, stationary stochastic processes.

Resampling plans.

Unbiased estimation.

Minimum variance estimation.

Maximum likelihood estimation.

Uniform minimum variance unbiased estimation.

Wiener filtering.

Kalman filtering.

Autoregressive moving average (ARMA) processes.

Rank statistics are always sufficient.

Farkas lemma.

Minimum spanning trees on directed graphs.

The simplex algorithm of linear programming.

Column generation in linear programming (Gilmore-Gomory).

The simplex algorithm for min cost capacitated network flows.

conjugate gradients.

The Kuhn-Tucker conditions.

Constraint qualifications for the Kuhn-Tucker conditions.

Fourier series.

The Fourier transform.

Hilbert space.

Banach space.

Quasi-Newton iteration and updates, e.g., Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno.

Orthogonal polynomials for numerically stable polynomial curve fitting.

Lagrange multipliers.

The Pontryagin maximum principle.

Quadratic programming.

Convex programming.

Multi-objective programming.

Integer linear programming.

Deterministic dynamic programming.

Stochastic dynamic programming.

The linear-quadratic-Gaussian case of dynamic programming.

<comment><USER24> The topics you mention are maths or applied maths topics. "Data Science" is a bubbly term that roughly means "take that big dump of data and give me some advice on how to make more money", so your list, very sadly, has little relevance with it.

<comment><USER23> Most of those topics I listed are supposed to be good at taking data and saying how to "make more money"!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Also learning R Language and using RStudio is a great way to get into. RStudio has so many packages to help you do any data analysis. The learning curve is quite steep though.

</comment><comment><USER26> Read this (free) book: [http://mmds.org/](http://mmds.org/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Moving data around is just grunt work.

Real science requires a creative and critical mind, which takes years to mold.

<comment><USER10> Sounds like you've also spent years molding professional disdain for everyone who's not a Real Scientist.

<comment><USER27> No I've just seen too many people spin their wheels on "analysis" that is not hypothesis driven.

You got to start with questions to get answers, and the hard part of science isn't crunching data, it is asking the right question!

<comment><USER28> And how does the Right Question appear if not through exploration and manipulation of the data?

Theory can obviously be very useful, but much of this stress on advanced statistics and phds is just a smokescreen for academics who suck at programming.

If you can't program and manipulate data, statistics won't save you because you won't have the ability to dig deep enough to find valuable insights. On the other side, if you know how to slice and dice data quickly and reliably, you can learn a huge amount by applying only the simplest statistical techniques. Generally the simple techniques are better anyway because they make mistakes less likely and your findings are easier to communicate.

<comment><USER27> >And how does the Right Question appear if not through exploration and manipulation of the data?

Questions don't magically come out of a data set. Doing so is called a fishing expedition and usually results in boring, descriptive results which have no impact.

To answer impactful questions, you must go into your data collection with the questions in mind. To understand what questions to ask, you need a trained, critical, and creative mind. That is something you don't get from pushing bits.

>If you can't program and manipulate data

Programming, and manipulating data is easy. Almost every new statistician these days can, and does do this routinely.

What's hard is the years of intuition about what is meaningful and what is noise.

I know. It's hard to hear, and career programmers most of all hate to hear it, but its the truth.

<comment><USER28> Anyone I've ever heard say "programming is easy" is without fail a terrible programmer.

I'm not really sure how to respond to the idea that exploring a dataset isn't a useful way to help develop questions about it. It's only a "fishing expedition" if you have no idea what you're doing.

<comment><USER27> >Anyone I've ever heard say "programming is easy" is without fail a terrible programmer.

Development of a worldclass application, is difficult because of the complexity built into a program of large scope.

Knowing enough programming to competently move a data set around, is easy. Hell you could do most of it with just bash.

>I'm not really sure how to respond to the idea that exploring a dataset isn't a useful way to help develop questions about it. It's only a "fishing expedition" if you have no idea what you're doing.

Well I've seen a lot of it, in both science and business. People who spend a lot of time and money to generate a large data set simply because they lack a question to ask. They expect meaningful answers to just tumble out of it like mana from heaven, and end up confused and dismayed when the answers aren't impactful.

Fishing expeditions are looked down upon because they can only describe the data you generated. That is minimally useful, and can be done without grabbing a huge sample.

Good science starts with a question, then puts data to work to create new insight by removing confounding factors through careful design.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Learn biology, chemistry and physics, question yourself often and use your instinct.

</comment><comment><USER30> if I had some type of practical application that I knew could benefit from data science, like learning RoR to make a marketplace app for example, it would help a lot as I have a clear goal and route to achieve that. However, data science, machine learning, these are so broad, and seemingly complicated (my fear of complicated math formulas and statistics) and worse I don't know what I want to achieve out of it nor do I know what I want to make which really hinders the learning process for me. I need some incentive or reward at the end of the goal.

<comment><USER31> Yes, the step 1 that nobody seems to mention is that you need to have a question that you're curious about, which data analysis may be able to help you answer. The reward is having some answer to that question, with an argument for its validity. Instead of links to a bunch of datasets, I'd love to see a site that collects questions with the potential for data-driven answers. This perhaps exists somewhere.</comment></comment>


Recommended reading/watching list for community builders - <AUTHOR> http://tour.businessofcommunity.com/resources

<comment><USER2> Wow, what an extensive list.

Alex, what are your top 5 (or so) resources? The best of the best for someone who wants to get a jumpstart, so to speak.</comment>


SX (easy storage cluster) - <AUTHOR> http://www.skylable.com/products/sx/ <comment><AUTHOR> Stumbled upon this when searching for an easy way to give my docker containers data volumes, that can move to another host, when the container moves to another host.

I wanted to go with Flocker (although it is a bit complex) seeing it has some nice features, but it only supports rather complex block device backends ([https://docs.clusterhq.com/en/latest/flocker- features/storag...](https://docs.clusterhq.com/en/latest/flocker- features/storage-backends.html)) and I'm not on AWS / GCE. I have free space lying around on some servers' disks (not extra devices or partitions, mind you) and there was no easy way to make this space accessible as / to a cluster.

This blew me away! Setup was a breeze, just add an apt repo, install a deb + maybe 6 deps and answer some prompts, done. The docs are easy to read and not cluttered, see [http://www.skylable.com/manuals/sx/manualch3.html](http://www.skylable.com/manuals/sx/manualch3.html) (use sxsetup --advanced to change the port, if needed).

They have support for mounting a volume from the storage cluster as a normal directory via FUSE ([http://www.sxfs.io/#install](http://www.sxfs.io/#install)).

Did I mention it's free and has Users and basic ACLs for volumes?

A basic web GUI is also available (as an alternative to the enterprise version) here: [https://github.com/skylable/sxconsole- lite](https://github.com/skylable/sxconsole-lite) (runs via docker, just answer some prompts)

But wait there's more! Some other goodies include an S3 compatible API ([https://www.skylable.com/products/libres3/](https://www.skylable.com/products/libres3/)) and Dropbox like apps ([http://www.sxdrive.io/](http://www.sxdrive.io/)) - which I haven't tested, yet.

Bonus: One founder of Skylable is the author of ClamAV.

So my curent plan is to just create a volume or several, mount them on each docker host via sxfs (FUSE) and bind them into the containers, where needed. I'm curious if anyone has other suggestions on how to make use of spare space on servers for multi-host data volumes.</comment>


Take a virtual tour of OpenDNS offices in San Francisco - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/opendns-2010-10

<comment><USER2> I started using OpenDNS years ago and I'm glad to see you continuing to do well. Congrats on the office...that's an awesome milestone.

<comment><USER3> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> And obviously, we're hiring: <http://www.opendns.com/about/careers>

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm very curious as to what they are going to do about the slow but steady rollout of DNSSEC around the world, given the main point is to stop spoofed responses (i.e. their business).

<comment><USER3> DNSSEC will not have a negative impact on our business.</comment></comment>


Ghibliotheque: podcast that leafs through the films of Studio Ghibli - open-source-ux https://www.acast.com/ghibliotheque <comment><AUTHOR> I always love Myazaki's films. I'll take a listen!</comment>


$1.1 billion raised by AngelList alumni - <AUTHOR> http://blog.angel.co/post/29005977778/1-1-billion-raised-by-angellist-alumni <comment><USER2> At first, I didn't understand why well-networked entrepreneurs, like the founders of Uber and DuckDuckGo, use AngelList.

Now that answer is clear. So many investors use AngelList, that it just opens more doors. Even for the super connected. This is a _BIG_ deal. Proprietary deal flow (read: relationships) defined venture capital success in Silicon Valley. Until now.

Well done AngelList.</comment>


Making it easier to invest in cryptocurrency - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/bitwise-asset-management/making-it-easier-to-invest-in-cryptocurrency-8978c898723 <comment><AUTHOR> A 2-3% annual management fee is egregious for a market capitalization-weighted fund that only holds digital currencies.

For comparison, there's a gold trust that only charges a 0.25% expense ratio and actually holds physical gold in vaults around the world[1].

Fortunately, competition will inevitably drive down the fees for digital currency index funds.

P.S. These are the top ten cryptocurrencies and their corresponding weights, as of Oct 2017, according to the benchmark "HOLD 10" index[2]:

        1. Bitcoin: 54.5%
        2. Ethereum: 20.4%
        3. Ripple: 6.9%
        4. Bitcoin Cash: 5.9%
        5. Zcash: 2.8%
        6. Litecoin: 2.6%
        7. Dash: 2.6%
        8. NEO: 2.1%
        9. Monero: 1.2%
        10. Ethereum Classic: 1.1%

[1]: [https://www.ishares.com/us/products/239561/ishares-gold- trus...](https://www.ishares.com/us/products/239561/ishares-gold-trust-fund)

[2]: [https://www.bitwiseinvestments.com/index](https://www.bitwiseinvestments.com/index)</comment>


Ask HN: Why use adblocker? - <AUTHOR> I'm having a debate among friends: if websites wouldn't display ads and other website owners wouldn't buy ads, how would end-users find out about products, content, apps, etc? Wouldn't that take us to a "medieval age" of browsing the internet?
Why do you block ads?
Please don't include answers like "saving bandwidth" or "keeping my ram unused", i'm looking for ^real^ reasons for which ads are bothering.
Disclosure: I'm launching a product which monetizes through the use of ads. <comment><USER2> > _how would end-users find out about products, content, apps, etc?_

I've never, in my life on the internet, seen an ad and said, "Hey, I'll check out _that_ product." I've been conditioned to see them as scams, and I don't think that will ever change.

The great thing about the web is that it's a "pull" system. When I want something, I'll go look for it. The days of throwing random things in front of my face in the hopes that some basal impulse will sucker me into buying your product are, thankfully, going away.

So, "saving my bandwidth", "keeping my ram free", and "personal sanity".

<comment><AUTHOR> Reply everyone: thank you for being so supportive, i've never asked anything on HN before and I wasn't aware of the issues regarding ads before I asked. Truthfully I think everyone should be aware of what they browse before they block everything (look at countries that block through DNS, users not speaking for themselves) and embrace ads as a form of information instead of blocking sites as scams. This is not over, but thank you all for taking the time to write this. Much appreciated!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "Saving bandwidth" is a very real and good reason. If you don't believe this, book a trip to places like Leticia in Colombia (or any other small town deep in the Amazon). Or just move into an area where all you have is a satellite uplink. Or do the math on mobile internet options in countries where your connection is throttled after reaching some ridiculously low bandwidth limit.

<comment><USER4> You don't have to go any further than the US of A for that.

If you accept that there is anything "real" about the $10 a GB that Verizon and AT&T charge for LTE data, zero rating doesn't make sense at all. That is, there are very few services that make anywhere near $10 a GB. For instance, it costs maybe $10 of mobile data to watch one movie on Netflix and that is what a monthly subscription costs.

In particular, if you add up all the money spent on advertising it is a fraction of what the customer pays for mobile data (less than 5%) and if the carriers just rebated 5% of the data charges to the web sites they'd be doing much better than they do now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For all the usual and related reasons that you list.

Also safety.

Also privacy through reduced tracking.

Also just plain curmudgeonly contrariness. Harumph!

But after doing so, I've seen an unanticipated benefit. It's a much quieter internet. I really dislike being bombarded with messages to "Buy! Anything! Just buy it!"

And you know, the internet and web were here long before advertising took hold. I acknowledge sites' right to publish whatever the hell they want, including advertising. But I don't have to listen or watch.

I could just ignore the ads, as I used to do with magazines, and I'd be fine with that, even fine with the subliminal awareness that ads inevitably bring.

But I absolutely reject the intrusiveness of what makes ads really valuable, tracking. And I will not take the risk of ad-delivered malware. And if it costs a site money or existence when I view their site but not their ads, well, good. They're fucking things up, being complicit with the dangerous nature of current ad practices.

If ads were static, served by the site and not an ad network, I'd be less resistant. And if there were something like an Underwriters certificate that a site wasn't passing on viewer data to static ad sellers, then this argument would be over for me.

Reform or die. The internet will still be here.

Good luck with your monetization.

</comment><comment><USER4> Saving Bandwidth. Seriously.

In my neck of the woods I have a 2Mb/sec DSL line, and ad blocking makes a visible difference in how fast pages load, what my blood pressure is, etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> Once in a whole when I have to browse the Internet an a friend's or a public computer, I realize that websites look so much cleaner with adblock turned on!

Also, I pretty much never click an ad, so no point displaying it.</comment>


The Original Bike Shed Email - <AUTHOR> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=506636+517178+/usr/local/www/db/text/1999/freebsd-hackers/19991003.freebsd-hackers <comment><USER2> _Your email is about to be sent to several hundred thousand people, who will have to spend at least 10 seconds reading it before they can decide if it is interesting. At least two man-weeks will be spent reading your email. Many of the recipients will have to pay to download your email._

I wish HN had this warning next to the "add comment" button. It would improve my posts.

<comment><USER3> On HN, it's more like:

 _Your message is about to be sent to several hundred thousand very bored people that have nothing better to do. At least two man-weeks worth of time will be spent reading your message instead of looking at lolcats._

It's fun to think everyone is participating because they value everyone else's commentary, but HN is really just a bunch of talkative people mentally in between other tasks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A related, and fun implementation of the Bikeshed email:

      http://blue.bikeshed.com/
      http://yellow.bikeshed.com/
      http://red.bikeshed.com/
      http://gainsboro.bikeshed.com/

Lots more colors to choose from, my favorite is Blue, because blue is the best.

<comment><USER5> It even supports hex colors. And this is much better than blue:

<http://ff3323.bikeshed.com/>

<comment><USER6> <http://ff00ff.bikeshed.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Poul-Henning Kamp is an incredible FreeBSD hacker, started the varnish project, and was a fantastic person to follow when I subscribed to the freebsd-* mailing lists. He's one of my hacker superstars.

</comment><comment><USER8> I love examples like the Bike Shed.. Another good one is the "Chicken and the Pig" story.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicken_and_the_Pig>

<comment><USER9> Mine is Shaving the Yak. [http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/03/dont_shave_t...](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/03/dont_shave_that.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The most common bikeshed problem with web development is with design and user interface. We nicknamed this the 'cornflower blue' problem (fight club reference). Everybody thinks they know what good UI and design is, and they will certainly let you know what they think is right.

I am sure many of you have had the exact same problem, and have also resorted to hiding a new project from various staff members just to prevent the project from becoming a quagmire.

<comment><USER11> My heart goes out to all passionate, dedicated graphic designers. Who would do this job? Not I, for all the tea in China.

Not only does everyone think they know what good design is, and let you know what they think is right, they'll be looking at you thinking 'what do we need you for? why are we wasting money on you?'

You need to first justify your existence, then justify your abilities to people who know better anyway. Who needs this grief?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The bikeshed email (I knew of it before I knew of Parkinson's work) was a defining moment for me in software development. I refer to it often. It was even the subject of my longest blog post: [http://softwaremaven.innerbrane.com/2010/03/why-you-care- abo...](http://softwaremaven.innerbrane.com/2010/03/why-you-care-about-color- of-bike-shed.html).

</comment><comment><USER13> It is interesting that this email came up today on HN, along side the article from Zed Shaw on how he is dropping the Python requirement from Mongrel2 and the debate it has sparked.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1712035>

</comment><comment><USER14> So this is why the sleep[1] function from Python accepts floating point numbers: to avoid any future bike shedding.

[1] <http://docs.python.org/library/time.html#time.sleep>

</comment><comment><USER15> Is there an inside joke here?

Because I'm quite certain that Parkinson's bike shed allegory was commonly used among software development teams well before 1999.

<comment><USER16> As the article (email) says, it's from a book printed in the 1960s.

<comment><USER15> Yes, it's an allegory related by Cyril Parkinson, originally in his lectures, and then eventually in his eponymous book. I'm familiar with it.

My question is: why is the subject of this thread "The Original Bike Shed Email", when there were undoubtedly lots of Bike Shed emails prior to October 1999?

<comment><USER17> Because this was the "Original Bike Shed Email" that gave rise to, oh, <http://www.sheddingbikes.com>.

I think this was posted more in response to Zed's popularity now than because of Parkinson's idea as demonstrated on the FreeBSD discussion.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I posted it because somebody linked it earlier today in a comment and it was the best (and earliest) explanation of the Bike Shed phenomena (in a software context) I'd seen.

<comment><USER17> Gotcha. I must have been influenced after having just read the "why I booted python from Mongrel2" article. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I could have sworn that was the submission where I found the comment, but I couldn't find it again for my reply, so who knows?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is ironic, right?

(I jest, but in-depth meta-analysis of community remains solidly, eternally and earnestly hilarious.)</comment>


Demand for medical equipment is making air cargo fees 'crazy' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-30/-absolutely-crazy-air-cargo-fees-highlight-supply-chain-squeeze <comment><USER2> I'm a bit confused. Shouldn't chartered flights go down in cost now that there are lots of airlines with planes, costs, competition, and virtually no passenger demand?

I realize passenger and cargo planes are different, but probably don't understand just how different in terms of effort/cost of adapting passenger planes to haul cargo primarily vs passengers and what the typical revenue is for a given flight (total revenue for passenger tickets). Even if it makes any economical sense to repurpose existing passenger jets for supplies unless of in dire need (which this may be the case for).

<comment><USER3> There was a discussion on the economist podcast about this.

1\. Passenger jets often take a bit of cargo, but even if they rejiggered, it'd only be half full of cargo.

2\. Many companies already hedged the price of fuel so the oil glut isn't really helping them any.

3\. Demand is unidirectional: medical supplies are made in a handful of countries (ie China) but there isn't a huge demand for air freight the other direction. See also the container problem.

4\. The airline network is a complex emergent system. Passengers from one international flight often connect into another domestic one. Cancelling an international flight has unpredictable knock-on effects for downstream flights.

5\. Cancelling a flight can lead to losing your 'slot'. Similar to how google will kill non performing ads, airports have a system to allocate arrivals / departures to airlines that factors in usage. If you shift a passenger jet flying EU to US into doing cargo hauls, that slot is jeopardized.

<comment><USER4> > 3\. Demand is unidirectional: medical supplies are made in a handful of > countries (ie China) but there isn't a huge demand for air freight the other > direction. See also the container problem.

This has got to change. Why is everything made in China? Anyone not coming to grips with the national security implications of not creating critical equipment in your own country (or region) is praying for doom.

<comment><USER5> > Why is everything made in China?

Part of me wonders how serious a question this is. The ridiculously cheap manufacturing costs is why anything is made in China. When the Chinese get unions to negotiate $45/hour salaries, require fair working conditions, time off, medical/dental, and on and on things might be different.

You can take advantage of the situation and develop a 100% robotic assembly line that does not require $45/hour workers so that you can manufacture critical equipment in your own country. Be the hero the world needs, not the one it deserves.

<comment><USER6> Proximity to the raw materials is another important factor. Latex gloves are mainly made in Asia, because that's where most of the rubber trees are.

<comment><USER7> I tried getting into 3D printing filament business in India and result? I couldn't find raw pellet providers which are manufactured locally and had to import the pellets, after paying duties even cheap labor couldn't make me competitive as prices as some American or European or Chinese brands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For people wondering why we can't just convert spare passenger capacity to air cargo easily:

I do supply chain: everything is handled in pallets. If we filled all passneger space up with individual small boxes that's a lot of extra "touches/unit" which equals labor cost and quickly drives price of delivery up.

Instead of 1. load pallet at warehouse -> 2\. transport to airport -> 3\. plane flies pallet -> 4\. unload pallet -> 5\. move to warehouse -> 6\. unpack/distribute, we have:

1\. load pallet -> 2\. transport to airport -> 3\. unpack pallet -> 4\. load into system that's compatible with passenger seat constraints -> 5\. plane flies stuff -> 6\. repack individual boxes into pallet, 7. move to warehouse -> 8\. unpack/distribute

Right now pallets are the "unified language" of shipping; so once you break things down the units are super variable and not meant or resistant to non- pallet circumstances.

</comment><comment><USER9> According to the Loadstar [1], this may be true for medical supplies, but demand for airfreight on a macro-level into Europe/US is dropping - a complete reversal from 3 weeks ago. The bullwhip effect [2] in action?

"The Loadstar warns air freight demand is expected to plummet as consumers in Europe and the US are forced to stop buying by shops closing. The automotive industry has already stopped requesting components as plants have closed; retail has cancelled significant volumes of orders - "Shopping is just not a priority," said one forwarder. "The only real air freight demand now is medical equipment and some urgent products. "Just-in-time may be changed for ever. "There is also no cashflow." He said air freight demand was now "the absolute reverse of two to three weeks ago; the dynamic has changed". Another forwarder noted that while demand was, perhaps 15% of what it was three or four weeks ago, supply is at about 10%. "So there is still high demand in a relative sense." [3]

1 [https://theloadstar.com/change-of-dynamic-air-freight- demand...](https://theloadstar.com/change-of-dynamic-air-freight-demand-now- the-reverse-of-three-weeks-ago/)

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

3 via reddit r/SupplyChain daily update -- highly recommended: [https://www.reddit.com/r/supplychain/comments/fqlh9a/covid19...](https://www.reddit.com/r/supplychain/comments/fqlh9a/covid19_update_saturday_28th_march/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Ireland has started sending its flag-carrier passenger airline to China for PPE. [https://www.rte.ie/news/2020/0329/1127076-ppe-equipment- chin...](https://www.rte.ie/news/2020/0329/1127076-ppe-equipment-china/)

<comment><USER11> Same in Hungary with Wizz Air.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Well, now finally all those military cargo planes could be put to good use...

</comment><comment><USER13> Does that mean there is a market where if I paid enough, it would bump a cargo flight of medical supplies? That is a bit disturbing IMO.

<comment><USER14> Although it's disturbing, economics shows that this is the best way to optimize a complex system.

People with more needs are willing to pay more, generally.

There are caveats, but these are generally built into economics models. Best to let the experts in government decide on how capitalism should play out. A lot of arm-chair socialists around here demonstrating their lack of education.

<comment><USER15> > Best to let the experts in government decide on how capitalism should play > out

I'm having a hard time parsing that thought. It seems self contradictory, at least if you view capitalism as primarily defined as voluntary trades free from government interference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Below triple the price? Relatively non-crazy.

</comment><comment><USER17> Last week I got rates of roughly 0.06 € pet mask from Shanghai to Frankfurt. Equals somewhere just shy of 8 € per kg, all handling charges included. Rates were valid until last Sunday, bo idea where they are now.

But even double that would still be on the cheap side of things compared to the price increase for masks. Offer doubled within three days last week, and the 4 € per mask from Saturday aren't valid anymore.

That the German government basically put out calls for offers under conditions that don't involve price negotiation certainly didn't help.

Good thing, so, as long as money isn't the driving factor, air cargo capacity is available. What hurt a lot as well, was the shutdown of passenger flights. These covered a considerable share of air freight.

</comment><comment><USER18> Imagine if there was a country with an "Air Mobility Command" having 50000 airmen and fifty gigantic aircraft (among hundreds of smaller aircraft), each of which can carry 40 pallets. Wouldn't that seem useful at this moment?

<comment><USER19> It is happening.

 _But this week, the White House did get into the shipping business, when the Defense Department sent a C-17 cargo aircraft to an air base in Italy to procure 800,000 swabs from Copan, a medical device manufacturer, and take them to Memphis._

[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/us/politics/swabs-for- cor...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/us/politics/swabs-for-coronavirus- testing.html)

<comment><USER20> Czech Republic has been doing something similar since about March 19. to get emergency medical supplies (mostly personal protective equipment for medical personel) quickly from China:

[https://news.expats.cz/weekly-czech-news/ukrainian-plane- to-...](https://news.expats.cz/weekly-czech-news/ukrainian-plane-to-bring- five-million-face-masks-two-million-respirators-from-china-to-czech-republic/)

[https://www.nspa.nato.int/en/news/news-20200319-7.htm](https://www.nspa.nato.int/en/news/news-20200319-7.htm)

[https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/03/20/world/europe/20re...](https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/03/20/world/europe/20reuters- health-coronavirus-czech-masks.html)

It's using the An-124 cargo planes (100+ ton capacity) via the NATO SALIS partnership (2 planes on long term lease from Ukraine stationed in Leipzig) as well as regular cargo flights, comandeared airliners with boxes on seats an even the few (2?) small airliners owned by the state/army, normally used for officially duties. Apparently even some of the repatriation flights have been used to bring back supplies when possible.

Also some of this material (I suspect where there is sufficient stock for local use available) is now being sent to Spain and Itally, where it is sorely needed:

[https://www.radio.cz/en/section/news/coronavirus-czech- state...](https://www.radio.cz/en/section/news/coronavirus-czech-state-to- offer-italy-and-spain-10000-protective-suits)

[https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_174623.htm](https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_174623.htm)

In any case, USA using airlift to get critical supplies is certainly a good sign! But I'm confused why only now ? It has been clear for at least a month bad things might happen, so why not stock up at least a bit beforehand ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This article's title seems to imply global shipping and logistics infrastructure can't keep up with the incremental demand for PPE, but doesn't provide any further arguments or evidence to establish that.

<comment><USER22> It also goes on to say:

"An unprecedented collapse in passenger demand is prompting airlines to use their fleets to transport more cargo, including medicines"

shouldn't this, if anything, bring down the cost of chatering a plane?

<comment><USER23> I imagine the cost of using passenger planes as cargo planes is at least 4x more than dedicated cargo plane.

Probably at least 70% less storage capacity. Probably can only handle smaller packages, probably not as easy to load/unload, and weight distribution without passengers might even make it so the full (available) space cannot be used.

However, it probably has similar fuel requirements (slightly reduced from less load), and still requires a pilot to transport a much less valuable trip.. making the fixed costs still very high

Just my simple guesses. I'm no expert.

<comment><USER24> Most passenger airplanes also takes cargo containers (of a size specific to a group of plane types) below the passengers. Not that many of course, compared to a cargo plane. E.g. even a A321 takes 10 LD3-45 containers.

Depending on the density of what's being transported the lower volume might or might not matter. E.g. the a321, according to Wikipedia, has a max payload 25t (I assume with reduced range). That's not that hard to fill with 10 containers of 3.7m3 each.

I'd assume that one significant reason the flights are that cheap is that they have contractual cargo obligations requiring them to fly some flights anyway. A handful of additional passengers won't reduce the payload capacity meaningfully, but will still bring in more than the increased fuel/service costs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Fly from Florida to California for $13:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22731785](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22731785)

</comment><comment><USER26> Crisis is opportunity. Welcome to an antisocial brave new world where death is profitable.

BTW we have 20% off in coffins.

</comment><comment><USER27> There'sa lot of demand and also reduced supply from what I understand.

</comment><comment><USER28> What about all those grounded commercial flights?

<comment><USER29> Yup, commercial airlines have started running cargo flights: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesasquith/2020/03/28/commerc...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesasquith/2020/03/28/commercial- airlines-are-now-operating-cargo-only-flights/#772ff98b6f0e)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The image from the article, is from a UA flight (passenger craft).

I would imagine that the airlines come out of this shining through. They just got 'grants' to pay their employees not to show up to work, they are in discussion with the US DOT to merge low volume flights across competing airlines and they are picking up cargo flights. The cost of jet fuel is likely just icing on the cake.

There will be reorg costs, but they will be offset by not having to pay workers for 2-3months and the extra work to support the supply problems.

Unidirectional flights problem will get solved through [1] reconfiguration of flight hubs and [2] aggregation of passengers across airlines. These will shore up enough margin to make this sustaining or profitable.

Airlines are logisticians!

</comment><comment><USER31> So, price gouging?

Pretty shameful in a time like this (unless shipments of medical supplies are getting the normal rate from a few weeks ago).

<comment><USER32> Cargo transportation is probably one of few true free market sectors in the world economy. The Cargo hauls can't all get together and fix prices. There are just too many players and they all rely on Governments not getting angry that bunch of companies are artificially driving up prices during a pandemic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The Law of Supply and Demand, as always and as ever, is working exactly as expected.[a]

And that's not necessarily a good thing right now.

It sure doesn't feel "right" :-(

\--

[a] [https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/law-of-supply- demand.as...](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/law-of-supply-demand.asp)</comment>


Are Too Many Students Going to College? - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/article/Are-Too-Many-Students-Going-to/49039/ <comment><USER2> I think too many students are getting watered-down educations in high school which _necessitates_ further schooling just to get to the level of education they are aiming for.

<comment><USER3> When I compare the curriculum I had to the one my father had... well, there is no comparison.

Granted, he was a bit on the far edge of things. But, they were machining amateur rocket engines in high school. In junior high, he ran a printing press for the school paper, casing type, etc. -- the whole nine yards. He had the opportunity to perform on the stage of Chicago's Orchestra Hall.

Pure academic work also appears to have been of a higher caliber. This was a public school system. albeit one of the best in the area. I think he graduated with probably the equivalent of what would these days be considered a couple of years' worth of college level work.

<comment> barry-cotter In your father's day a hell of a lot more people didn't finish high school, and that was okay. Now everyone is supposed to finish high school, so there's pressure to ensure everybody can actually pass the required curriculum, i.e. water it down.

Then there's a countervailing pressure, like in CA the state graduation requirements were set by reference to the entry requirements for the UC system (which is supposed to be for the top 12th of CA students)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yes. University should be intrinsically leet. Top 10% only.</comment>


Bitcoin snack machine (fast transaction problem) - <AUTHOR> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=423.0 <comment><USER2> No internet connection, no sale. That's why cash will always rule.</comment>


Using physics to describe social phenomena can work, if it's the right physics - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/33/attraction/describing-people-as-particles-isnt-always-a-bad-idea <comment><USER2> One major issue with models is how do you model when people have an understanding of the world according to some model? Ie if everyone believes in wage-price spirals, does that affect the model? What if some people believe it, and some have an alternative view?

IMO that's the fundamental issue with modelling people rather than inanimate processes.</comment>