Valve hired their first wave of Linux developers, hiring more - <AUTHOR> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTExMDM <comment><USER2> This will be welcome by me, steam on Linux that is.

I've bought a number of games from steam when they have been on sale, games that have a Linux port available.

Of course I am unable to run them without buying the Linux copy separately at present but once this is implemented I will already be able to play a fair cross-section of my games on Windows and Linux.

Of course this could be a net negative for my productivity.

<comment><USER3> Linux developers doesn't necessarily imply there'll be Steam for Linux Desktop™. It may be that Valve is looking to finally build their Steam Console and base it on Linux.

<comment><USER4> I'm going to take a guess that Valve is hedging their bets on a Windows 8 flop. I think it is very possible that Linux and OS X will become the two dominant desktop platforms over the next 5 years.

Valve can not really enter the mobile marketplace in a meaningful way. Both Microsoft and Apple will likely try to put the squeeze on Valve with their own respective OS marketplaces. (I think neither will successfully be able reproduce Steam's high quality user experience and extras.)

<comment><USER5> I think that if Linux becomes the dominant desktop platform, it will be a new form (i.e. not based on Gnome or KDE). Just a (biased) hunch, though.

<comment><USER6> Ubuntu is positioning itself for that possibility. They've been playing the long game, and it's still not finished, but they've broken from Gnome, broken from X.org, and with the Software Center, are really steering away from the terminal. Of course, they've pissed off a lot of Linux traditionalists, but that could be a net gain for the desktop market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sort of off-topic, is there a reason Steam on windows is so unresponsive? Mac, too, but I think that's because it's a port.

It seems to me that Steam is not written in native windows code and that's why it runs so sluggishly. Some say they have no idea what I'm talking about, while others agree. What does HN think?

<comment><USER8> Define "so unresponsive".

Recently (less than a year ago), I had a switch in hardware from a Athlon X2 3200+, 4GB RAM machine to an i5-2500K, 8GB RAM and 2 SSDs. Sure there was a noticeable difference in responsiveness, but never on either machine would I consider Steam "so unresponsive".

<comment><USER9> My last machine was an i7 920 with 12GB and Intel 80GB SSD; I now have an i7-3770K with 16GB and Samsung 256GB SSD; and Steam has always been fairly unresponsive.

Specifically, it's most unresponsive on the "preparing disk space" page when installing games. It takes multiple seconds for no apparent reason. There's no high CPU usage and no high I/O usage. It's also very slow to start, and very slow to let me play a game.

My theory is it's due to some degree of online activity, that it's gated on my internet bandwidth. Since I only play single-player games, that's a huge annoyance to me, and I often don't start playing games because I know I'll have to sit through Steam startup for several seconds.

<comment><USER10> Steam does have a very slow boot time, but the expected behavior is that Steam is always running in the background so I can't imagine it's a priority. I can't fathom a ~3 second wait when installing and launching a game being a real problem. Minor annoyance sure but that's less time than you'll be forced to see stupid splash screens for!

<comment><USER9> I just quit Steam (so it was fresh in cache, never mind relying on SSD etc.), and started a Steam game. It took _20 seconds_ before the game launched (not playable, just started).

That's massive. Pretty much any of my non-steam games will be launched and playable within 10 seconds.

(I also hate unskippable intro videos; I'm fairly sure I've collectively spent much longer searching for ways to delete / skip such videos than I have ever lost watching them.)

<comment><USER10> With Steam already running the moment I double-click an installed game from my list it's taking about 2-3 seconds before they pop open full screen. If you're taking 20 seconds then it may or may not be Steam's fault, but it certainly isn't an intrinsic property of the software.

<comment><USER9> Sure, but my point is that I tried it without Steam running (most of the time seems spent on logging in to my account). I don't run Steam by default - it'll be updating, downloading patches, popping up notifications and all sorts interfering with my daily life.

<comment><USER10> That is neither the expected nor the standard use case. If you use a product in a way it's not designed to be used you shouldn't be surprised when it's behaves in a non-ideal fashion. Notifications and auto-update can be disabled.

<comment><USER9> That's completely unacceptable - the idea that I need to keep a background app running at all times just so I can play a game once or twice a month. Imagine if all apps took such an arrogant approach; our machines would barely run under the weight of the cruft. I similarly avoid Intel installers when using their drivers because they also like to install and keep running a half dozen services and widgets. Same thing with iTunes - I use a shell script to start it up so it can start up all the extra services and kill them later after iTunes exits.

There's a lot of entitled software out there that arrogantly assumes sovereignty over your machine. I don't accept it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great news! Honestly, the only software that will be holding people back from switching fully to linux now will be creative tools (audio, 3d + 2d design, video editing). I think this can be solved by us. If we show them that there is a demand for these tools on linux someone will move to supply. Open operating systems provide too many advantages to ignore.

<comment><AUTHOR> Some of the best tools in the industry (Audacity, Blender, Inkscape, others?) are already free, open source, and native on Linux.

<comment><USER11> Sadly, some people refuse to work if they aren't using photoshop/illustrator/autocad/etc. But yeah, I'm with you, I use gimp and inkscape but I'm no professional.

<comment><USER12> A perfect example are front-end developers. It can be tough for anyone to make a living in that line of work without being able to edit/open photoshop and illustrated without having to configure wine.

I truly believe Adobe holding back their products is one of the largest roadblocks linux has to get widespread adoption amongst the design/developer community.

<comment><USER2> I'd be surprised if Adobe isn't at least looking into this, especially considering their sometimes sour relationship without Apple.

A lot of the more "arty" people I know would consider giving them a Windows computer to use as a personal insult and would probably be more open to switching to Linux than Windows.

Getting arty people to use desktop Linux could be a huge net positive if they decide to help "pretty" the place up a bit.

<comment><USER13> It's certainly nice when UI/UX people run GNU/Linux distributions. Daniel Foré is in charge of Elementary OS [1]. Because he's a designer, the project already has a proper set of Human Interface Guidelines [2], a set of uniquely designed (and easy to use) core applications [3], and a beautifully coherent look to the entire OS and website.

[1]: <http://elementaryos.org/> [2]: <http://elementaryos.org/docs/human- interface-guidelines> [3]: <http://elementaryos.org/discover>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So that thing that this very same site has insisted is in full development and is near ready to go... is going through a hiring round for devs to build the thing? Right.

I'm so sick of these articles. Ever since the Mac version came out this site and other Linux focused blogs have insisted Steam for Linux is minutes away. Every single time they've been proven wrong or miss their timeframe.

It probably is being built, but the last person who has legitimate up to date info on the project is Phoronix. They seem to just be making things up.

<comment><USER2> IIRC they actually went to valve's office and showed screenshots of source engined games running under Ubuntu natively.

I wouldn't be surprised if they have it "90%" ready-to-go and just need some serious domains experts to do the last 90%. Not to mention for bugfixing , updates down the line as well as maybe porting some of their new tech (HL3 engine?) to Linux.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't use linux as my desktop OS for quite some time (now it's windows and osx, used to have Redhat and later fedora workstations). My question is, is it possible to target 'linux' in general as a single platform at all? I thought heterogeneous nature of linux distros is what would hinder that effort. Something like when you buy certain graphics programs, you get to have only this and that linux variant with this and that software on it in order to run it.

<comment><AUTHOR> You don't need to ship distro-specific packages. You could ship a tarball with a statically linked executable. Take a look at the Humble Bundle, for example. Every game published in the bundles is cross-platform, and work great Linux regardless of distro choice.

<comment><USER15> Ah, never thought about that. As good old DOS games were, everything contained within program/directory itself. Interesting, makes using some of the external code a bit harder due to licenses though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Will this finally mean linux becomes more and more mainstream for commercial games and applications? I actually hope so!

Thank you Gabe and Valve, for bringing things a step ever closer.

</comment><comment><USER17> Does anyone else think this has little to do with 'bringing Steam to linux' and a lot to do with SteamBox, the rumored console Valve is working on.

</comment><comment><USER18> I have a Dell Vostro with an ATI 6600m card running ubuntu 12.04.

Putting "echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch" effectively boosts my battery time from 1 hour to 3 hours.

What I'm seriously hoping from Valve is not a game per se, but a linux distro (or a standard) that is compatible with my drivers, multimedia devices (dual hdmi monitors - I'm looking at you) and audio/video.

I would pay serious money for that kind of a distro.

<comment><USER19> _a linux distro (or a standard) that is compatible with my drivers, multimedia devices (dual hdmi monitors - I'm looking at you) and audio/video_

yes, that would be great! Major distros (I use Kubuntu) are understaffed and concentrate on getting the new features from their upstreams integrated, not on making sure fancy hardware is supported. It's a question of resources. Although I think Valve is less likely than a hardware vendor to have a business reason for doing this work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The problem of Valve is their usage of DRM. I won't use them just because of that, whether they release Linux client or not. I.e. it's better to run a non DRM-ed Windows game (let's say from GOG) on Linux using Wine, rather than native one from Valve but with DRM.

But their entering to the Linux scene in general is good, since it might encourage others to do it as well, and eventually non DRMed distributors like GOG will push for more Linux games too.

</comment><comment><USER21> Oh, thank Gabe! I've been waiting for this for a decade now!

</comment><comment><USER22> At first I read valve FIRED their first wave of linux developers...</comment>


Amazon Care - <AUTHOR> https://amazon.care/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21064517](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21064517)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is an interesting idea.

I have tele-doctor services available cheaply ($50 a pop) through my plan, and actually it works very well for a lot of nuisance type items like minor infections. It's pretty quick, and I seem to always get a doctor in my state.

I'm curious about the economies of in-home visits. Given a large enough office, in-office visits obviously makes a ton of sense and many large offices already keep a clinician or nurse desk in them (think the kind of services available at your local CVS/Walgreens). However, home visits would seem like you'd be paying a medical professional a lot of money to sit in traffic depending on the locale..

</comment><comment><USER4> It's time for a LegalZoom-like service for healthcare. 99% of visits to a physician can be addressed through textbook pills & treatment paths.

My best friend is a nurse practitioner. Anytime I get real sick, I text her a list of my symptoms and before the conversation is over the local pharmacy is processing my prescriptions for me.

If this doesn't highlight how fundamentally messed up the healthcare and industry is, I don't know what will. Those on the other side say "well, what if you had cancer..." Well, fine, let's keep the escalation options available (doctors/specialists/hospitals) and gut everything else.

</comment><comment><USER5> Sounds like the goal is to pilot within Amazon first and then make it available for all.

</comment><comment><USER6> I thought this was a joke at first but seems to be serious. What is the endgame for Amazon with a service like this for their employees? What do the employees miss out on using Amazon Care instead of a third-party healthcare provider and vice-versa?

Their FAQ ([https://amazon.care/faq](https://amazon.care/faq)) should include a "Why Amazon Care"

<comment><USER7> I haven't been following closely, but I assume this must be the launch of Haven: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haven_(healthcare)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haven_\(healthcare\))

The reason is to save money by bringing a service in house, just like big companies do with all kinds of other services and products. (For example, if you're a 25-person company, you let a law firm handle your legal work. If you're a 25,000-person company, you have a staff of lawyers who work directly for you.) Insurance companies make a profit, so by doing it yourself, you can keep that money instead of giving it to them.

I don't see a reason to believe it should necessarily mean their employees miss out on anything. In theory they're at an advantage by cutting out the middleman. So in theory they could cut costs and increase benefits even if they can't improve and operate it more efficiently than current insurance companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's nice to see feudalism is coming back. To all the services that these companies already provide, for which employees won't pay taxes (and neither will companies, due to clever tax schemes), now we add health care. Housing will be next, if not already. Legal services, transportation, food, healthcare, housing, nursery, all gross-income 100% deducted: zero sales tax, minimum income tax, in the most liberal state, by the most liberal people.

Large company-states are not that far off.

<comment><USER9>
       You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
       Another day older and deeper in debt

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUpTJg2EBpw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUpTJg2EBpw)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If this is the much hyped Amazon foray into the healthcare, I think it is fair to be disappointed. Digital concierge care isn't exactly new (although the onsite visits are intriguing.

If you are like me, you are sitting around and rooting for someone just like Amazon to come in and shake up the medical industry like they did retail and publishing. But I think too many bad practices are codified into law (understandably), and it's not a problem that enough capital is going to solve.

To be fair to digital concierge care though, I think they are good but underutilized services. A lot of time consuming things can just as easily be done virtually (getting a sick note, renewing a prescription, checking out a rash). In my experience, traditional providers do a bad job of making the services easy to use or attractive.

</comment><comment><USER11> On a smaller scale, Rudy's Barbecue in Texas did something similar by canceling their comprehensive health care insurance, hiring a doctor to be the whole company's PCP, paying for surgeries directly through Texas Free Market Surgery, and buying "wraparound insurance" for everything else.

[https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2019/06/06/rudys- bbq...](https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2019/06/06/rudys-bbq-expects- to-slash-health-costs-with-major.html) (Paywalled)

<comment><USER10> There was a startup in Seattle many years ago that offered a similar program (I think it was called Qliance? They went under.) For $40 a month, you got membership to unlimited concierge care.

I think part of the story is that the "wraparound insurance" has to cover so much, that the PCP just becomes duplicitous and hard to justify.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Cerner does this in office in Kansas City. I thought it was pretty cool. Keeps their costs (presumably) lower.

</comment><comment><USER13> Holy crap there's a mailto: link at the bottom. The 1990s called and wants their web page back.

</comment><comment><USER14> "You need to get more cardio. Click here to volunteer for a shift in one of our warehouses!"

<comment><USER15> Introducing Amazon Playhouse, a free gamified gym. Pack boxes, earn points, get fit! Improve your point score week-over-week and get free Amazon prime.

Once you're physically exhausted, come test your mental stamina and earn a pretty penny on Amazon Mechanical Turk, the free-to-play game which challenges your very human intelligence.

Tired of paying the bills? Coming soon, you can spend your Amazon Playhouse points to stay at Amazon Bunk, our onsite dormitory and cafeteria. You'll never have to stop playing again!</comment></comment>


Reddit Infrastructure Team AMA - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/ecf8yl/were_reddits_infrastructure_team_ask_us_anything/ <comment><USER2> Database janitoring for reddit in 2019 is a weird flex. They barely say anything and what they do say is exactly what you'd expect for a website like reddit:

AWS, k8s, terraform, puppet, think 10 years is "quite old" for a codebase (and they leave a few lines that can be read between to theorize why it's such a ramshackle affair). Publicly supporting new product direction, while simultaneously disclaiming any personal responsibility for it.</comment>


Emirates Has Invested $500M to Build a 'Fort Knox' of Wine - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-05/how-emirates-airline-serves-the-best-wine-list-in-the-sky <comment><AUTHOR> > _Most airlines employ a wine consultant who will use a number calculated by > the finance team to put together a list of 20 wines that are available both > in the market and in the volume required. Tim Clark, the president of > Emirates, wanted its wine list to be a differentiator. So the airline made > the decision to partner with MMI and buy as directly as possible from > merchants and vineyards and in smaller quantities, if > necessary—10,000-bottle parcels instead of the typical 24,000 or 48,000._

Reminds me of Delta Air Lines' 2012 purchase of an East Coast oil refinery [1], a more refined :) take on Southwest's profitable fuel-price hedge last decade [2]. Both Emirates' and Delta's plays echo a comment I read yesterday about "identifying supply-chain components that can be [more] economically produced in-house" [3].

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/business/delta-air- lines-t...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/business/delta-air-lines-to-buy- refinery.html)

[2] [http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/travel/2008-...](http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/travel/2008-07-23-southwest- jet-fuel_N.htm)

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13323081](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13323081)

<comment><USER4> I always found the Delta arrangement very interesting. The refinery took a $10 million loss which saved DL $100 million. [1] But it also saved rivals money. When they make cheaper jet fuel it doesn't just go to Delta. They have to sell the fuel into the Jet-A for the region. That means they subsidize all the other airlines too.

So DL says, if we give each airline $90 million (# made up), our use and deployment of capital will be (is?) more efficient and therefore it's a net win for us.

Or possibly in another thought-experiment, it's better that each airline has the money to invest in their businesses and products, such that the entire Aviation industry benefits, rather than giving that profit to an O&G company.

[1] [http://finance.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-deltas-refinery- sacr...](http://finance.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-deltas-refinery-sacrifices- profits-050817308.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> From the Bloomberg article: "And if you're really lucky, you might be able to order a 2005 Sauterne from Château d'Yquem, the superior first-growth winery that was a favorite of Thomas Jefferson and is now owned by LVMH."

My God. Drinking a 2005 d'Yquem is infanticide. Those wines are meant to mature for decades.

When you talk about the "best vintage" of d'Yquem that's still drinkable, you have to specify which _century_!

For example, 1811: [http://sip-bali.com/yquem-1811/](http://sip- bali.com/yquem-1811/)

<comment><USER6> Call it what you want, but yesterday at 38,000 feet it was absolutely delightful.

<comment><USER7> I hear it's great over the Indian Ocean with Rogue:One on the small screen using complimentary headphones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A company based in a Muslim country and owned and managed by Muslims investing in a secure complex to store alcohol is like a government of a fiat currency- using country investing in a secure complex to store gold bullion, I suppose.

<comment><USER9> that seems like a strange analogy. they serve many markets (India is a major one for example). there is nothing which forbids them from serving alcohol to non-Muslim travelers.

<comment><USER8> I actually didn't know that. I had assumed that alcohol was haram and thus considered unclean, or at least that it would be sinful to participate in the production or distribution of it, even to nonbelievers.

<comment><USER10> Well Islam is not only what extremists make us think of it. When it comes to actual muslims, there's a gradient from totally-by-the-book to muslim-merely- in-the-name. Many muslims consume alcoholic drinks.

<comment><USER11> True, though even "totally-by-the-book", Islam allows the consumption of alcohol for non-Muslims. This is why alcohol is usually available at hotels, even in Saudi Arabia.

<comment><USER12> > True, though even "totally-by-the-book", Islam allows the consumption of > alcohol for non-Muslims

And, depending on who you ask, for Muslims too. The prohibition is against rice wine, which most Muslims generalize to include all alcohol, but some interpret that to mean only rice wine, or only wine.

<comment><USER10> Well, when you say by-the-book, at the end of the day, it's possible to make the book say anything. For example wrt homosexuality, it's possible to generate valid arguments pro and contro based on each of three major abrahamitic canons. My father occasionally went to friday midday prayers, and fasted every ramadan. But then again, he drunk unfathomable amounts of vodka and beer and he smoked. So for some he was a sinner destined to go to hell, but for others he was a zealot. I guess that's why religious canons are fun reads but not the books to build an outlook and a philosophy upon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm admittedly not a wine person but I really wonder how many people can actually recognise a $10 bottle of wine from a $30 bottle of wine - <USER2> similar.

<comment><USER14> I'm sure some people can tell, but I highly recommend watching sour grapes, there really are some emperor's new clothes moments.

[http://www.sourgrapesfilm.com/about/](http://www.sourgrapesfilm.com/about/)

<comment><USER15> Alternatively, Somm is about students trying to pass the brutally difficult Master Sommelier exam. Worth a look IMO: [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2204371/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2204371/)

I gradually went from "This main guy is a tool" to "Holy crap, he studies incredibly hard. I hope he succeeds."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Emirates may have the best wine selection for those who want to spend thousands getting from A to B, but I find the longer Ukraine International Airlines flights have the best drinks for the average person. I've taken several in the past few months, and the flights are not only inexpensive but the drinks on board are very cheap or free. Of course, some of this is owing to the depressed hryvnia.

For those that wish to spend a little more, but not anywhere near Emirates levels (and for those who are scared by flying over Iraq, which was definitely an experience) KLM often has inexpensive flights with fantastic service, even in economy. Not as good as Emirates of course, but still somewhat inexpensive.

<comment><USER17> My understanding is that they currently deliberately avoid Iraq (my dc-dubai flight in sept did), in favor of flying over Iran for many western flights. Airlines do this often (look up tel aviv to mumbai on flightaware for a fun flight path... or any flights from azeribaijan enclave to capital, or dubai- yerevan, these routes are loaded with geopolitics)

<comment><USER16> Yep - even Eastern carriers are doing that now. My comment downthread has more on my personal experience [0].

El Al 73, 50% longer than it "should" be because of a detour around Saudi Arabia: [https://flightaware.com/live/flight/ELY73/history/20161230/0...](https://flightaware.com/live/flight/ELY73/history/20161230/0315Z/LLBG/VABB)

Azerbaijan Airlines J2261 doesn't seem to be that much longer, even though it has to avoid the Karabakh region. (At first I thought you were referencing the Ստեփանակերտի Օդանավակայան/Stepanakert Airport, which interestingly has no IATA code.)

Dubai to Yerevan doesn't seem that geopolitically complicated though - <USER3> to fly just over Iran mostly. I guess the end of the flight could get tricky though, with Armenia saying that Azerbaijan would shoot down Armenian planes that go over Azerbaijan. The flight I found is FDB715, [https://flightaware.com/live/flight/FDB715/history/20170103/...](https://flightaware.com/live/flight/FDB715/history/20170103/0755Z/OMDB/UDYZ)

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13331458](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13331458)

<comment><USER17> I'm surprised you can fly into Stepanakert! If I had to go there, I'd take a car

Thanks for the data here, these are really interesting concepts because of how abstracted they are. I would think many passengers don't realize these types of choices are made by airlines on a daily basis.

<comment><USER16> Hah, you actually can't. The airport is closed, since the chance of any flight there being shot down is very high (although the director of the airport said there would be flights in a matter of months... in 2011)

And you're very welcome! I love looking at these maps. I fly a bunch and it's only in the past three months or so that I've really been considering the strange routes that people fly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> And yet they are cutting back costs on services and have hired cheap third party concierge service providers who are not as good as Emirates original staff used to be and are very discriminatory with passengers coming from certain regions. My uncle was denied a wheel chair when his flight landed in Dubai because apparently 78 years old forgot to register "special request" online at the time of check-in. Their reason, Dubai International Airport, a world class facility, ran out of wheel chairs! I have heard/read similar stories about how Emirates is loosing its grip when it comes to services (especially inside the economy class)

Why I posted this rant here? Because I don't agree it is justifiable enough for a business to hide its short-comings behind an expensive PR campaign.

<comment><USER19> Can't speak for economy, but IME Emirates still tends to be the best choice by far for any super long-haul flights.

The wheel chair thing isn't a huge shock though, DXB staff only seems to be on point on the upper floors.

<comment><USER20> I can't speak about business or first, but in coach class this has been my experience as well. Emirates is on a different level from Cathay, Turkish, Singapore, etc.

<comment><USER21> I have never traveled coach in Emirates but have Singapore, ANA, Asiana multiple times. Are you saying Emirates coach class is significantly better than these leading airlines ? Have to try it then

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Interesting that they'd tie so much cash up in the stock and storage. I expect chateaus were falling over themselves to offer wines to a buyer like this. Immediate cash and a natural scarcity created to the rest of the market.

</comment><comment><USER23> Kind of hoped there'd be some kind of discussion regarding what consuming at altitude does to the flavor profiles of wine, if anything. If anybody has experience that they could share I'd take a look for sure.

<comment><USER24> In my experience (flying long-haul, economy flights), it makes cheap reds taste far more potable. Wines I'd never choose on the ground are greedily poured down my gullet in the air.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> What's interesting is senses are generally diminished in altitude (the dry cabin air doesn't help either). Apparently some wines (especially ones that are more acidic) are especially prone to having flavors muted. If you're going to enjoy premium wine a flight might not be the most ideal environment to do it in...

Relevant: [http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150112-why-in-flight- food-...](http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150112-why-in-flight-food-tastes- weird)

</comment><comment><USER26> As long as I am in a lie flat bed with turn down service on a longhaul intl flight I don't care if the bubbly I'm drinking costs 40 bucks a bottle or 400.

</comment><comment><USER27> TL;DR: If you take the price information out, the wine doesn't taste so special

[http://www.wine-economics.org/aawe/wp- content/uploads/2012/1...](http://www.wine-economics.org/aawe/wp- content/uploads/2012/10/Vol.3-No.1-2008-Evidence-from-a-Large-Sample-of-Blind- Tastings.pdf)

<comment><USER28> There is a great documentary on Netflix called sour grapes. It is about wine fraud and how in the end most can't tell if the wine is real or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Cost does not = value. Value is created in the mind through branding. Products are made in the factory. Brands are created in the mind. Marketing is psychology. Been this way for years. What about all the knock off wine out there, how "does" one authenticate a wine bottle or the content of a wine bottle. Why would someone pay $2k-$150K for a bottle of wine without being brainwashed through marketing psychology AND "believe" it is worth the price. First world problems. Last time i checked Emirates is a muslim country and in islam alcohol is forbidden. (haram) Good Lucky! they just make shit up as they go.

</comment><comment><USER30> Doesn't the in-flight turbulence of the aircraft shake the wines? I was always told never to shake a bottle of wine. Doesn't this defeat the whole point?

</comment><comment><USER31> Is $500M enough to build anything that can be called the 'Fort Knox' of anything?

</comment><comment><USER32> The best wine experts and master somm's can't tell the difference between cheap and expensive wine, red and white etc.

Wine is almost completely marketing and psychology.

<comment><USER33> Wine snobs are experts at feeling superior just for being good at faking their reactions to fermented grape juice.

Most snobs here couldn't pass a blind test.</comment></comment>


NSA leaker waits in Moscow.... and waits - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/26/politics/nsa-leak/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

<comment><USER2> Interesting thing about this video to me is that Obama called Snowden a "hacker" which is a total mischaracterization even if you accept the media's definition.</comment>


Matz's programming language based on prototype of stream - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/matz/streem <comment><USER2> Looks a lot like osh ([https://github.com/geophile/osh](https://github.com/geophile/osh)). Here is the osh version of the FizzBuzz example (run in a Linux shell):

        osh gen 100 1 ^ f 'x: "FizzBuzz" if x % 15 == 0 else "Fizz"  if x % 3 == 0 else "Buzz" if x % 5 == 0 else x' $

The function in single quotes is a python function, and in fact osh streams python tuples between commands (which are separated by ^).

While this example runs on the command line, there is also a python API.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, and also Luna [https://github.com/tj/luna/blob/master/examples/fork.luna](https://github.com/tj/luna/blob/master/examples/fork.luna)</comment></comment>


The Future of Go Summit – Ke Jie vs. AlphaGo - <AUTHOR> https://events.google.com/alphago2017/ <comment> loup-vaillant Some commenters on Twitter are still saying 0.5 points is "very close".

It would be if both players were human: in human play, score differences tend to correlate with differences in actual skill, and probability of outcome (who wins the game).

Not so with Alpha go. That machine just takes the surest path to victory, with no regards to its magnitude. It doesn't care about winning by only half a point. It cares about _securing_ at least half a point.

It may have been a crushing victory for all we know.

<comment><USER2> It would be interesting to see how Alpha Go's performance varies with different goals, balancing between maximizing score and maximizing probability of winning.

<comment><USER3> I have to think they've discussed that internally, and they probably just want to make sure alphago can win consistently, period, before they start playing around with allowing slightly riskier moves as long as the win probability stays sufficiently above 50%. (But how much more? You can't know ahead of time how much stronger you are than the other player that day, or you wouldn't be playing, at least not for money.)

It's just like adjusting komi to give the human an advantage, right?

<comment><USER2> An indirect way to do something similar-ish to what I was interested in would be to play with varying numbers of handicap stones with the current goal unchanged (maximizing probability of victory).

<comment><USER4> Actually, this mostly works. [http://pasky.or.cz/go/dynkomi.pdf](http://pasky.or.cz/go/dynkomi.pdf) has details how to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This game's start is already fantastic.

Ke Jie already played an adaptative tactic the bot, that is playing in a very solid and stylish game. It almost feels like a teaching game so far.

As a former student of Lee Sedol and once aspiring professional Go player, i'd answer a few questions if you have any!

<comment><USER6> How far out are AlphaGo's ideas? Are they radically different, or rooted in human conventions?

<comment><USER5> There is a famous player called Takemiya Masaki. His style of game is called Cosmic Go, and his games were some of the most beautiful games in history. He had an amazing ability of making this natural flows and building massive central territory: something against conventional theory.

His style died eventually because no-one could play like he did. Some professionals even mentioned that such a style could not be played unless Takemiya Masaki had amazing reading skills.

Alpha Go has amazing reading skills. So he can actually easily afford to play such a style. Its like the revamping of a theory we all know its playable but as humans have a hard time having a winning rate with.

On the other hand, alphago is definitely playing moves that are plain bad for conventional theory, but manages to get good positions regardless. Its possible that alphago is just more thorough, and human pattern matching naturally discard moves that most of the time are bad.

<comment><USER7> Could you suggest a book that explores go history in a way a layman can follow? The way you explain it, it seems extremely interesting.

<comment><USER5> I dont know about history, but a book i can recommend is First Kyu. Very short and easy read about an aspiring professional play in Korea in the 50's.

It containes many of the woes that haunt pro players.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A photo of White: [https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_-DoMQ0CuAQ/VzzPgbjhjOI/AAAAAAAAC...](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_-DoMQ0CuAQ/VzzPgbjhjOI/AAAAAAAACp4/5v6prECMLigEfJ23VigpjPWXoH- lT05UgCLcB/s1600/tpu-1.png)

It is a rack of tensor processing units. [https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/05/Google- supercha...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/05/Google-supercharges- machine-learning-tasks-with-custom-chip.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Ke Jie lost 14-7 by FineArt recently (Tencent's Go bot) [1], but 13-0 in the last games (an update to the bot?) so it would really interesting to see the two bots playing each other. I watched this game [2] of FineArt against Japan's Ichiri Ryo yesterday (1-0) and it seems that FineArt has a different way of playing than AlphaGo, more fighting, but that's only one game.

[1] [https://lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=14125](https://lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=14125)

[2] [http://www.go4go.net/go/games/byplayer/1819](http://www.go4go.net/go/games/byplayer/1819)

<comment><USER10> It's the first time I read about the FineArt Go bot (by Tencent?). Is there any more information about it? How does it compare to AlphaGo? What software/algorithms does it use?

<comment><USER9> Some links about FineArt.

In English

[http://technode.com/2017/03/20/tencents-fine-art-wins- comput...](http://technode.com/2017/03/20/tencents-fine-art-wins-computer-go- uec-cup/)

[https://qz.com/936654/googles-alpha-go-now-has-a-serious- gam...](https://qz.com/936654/googles-alpha-go-now-has-a-serious-game-playing- rival-with-tencents-jueyi-or-fineart/)

In Chinese

[http://tech.qq.com/a/20170319/015726.htm](http://tech.qq.com/a/20170319/015726.htm)

[https://www.huxiu.com/article/186238.html](https://www.huxiu.com/article/186238.html)

From the second English link:

> As Tencent's tech blog explains (link in Chinese), FineArts works in a > similar way to AlphaGo. Both AIs comprise two computer systems modeled on > the human brain, which can be trained on large data sets. One part of the > system, the "policy network," predicts which of the possible moves are the > likeliest to be played. The other, the "value network," then evaluates which > of those is likeliest to win

<comment><USER10> Ah, so Tencent is a company. "Chinese tech giant Tencent". They did QQ and WeChat. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent)

It seems as if they are even bigger than Baidu ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu)) which is maybe more known (at least by me).

It seems this is the website of the group (the Tencent AI lab) which developed the FineArt Go bot: [http://ai.tencent.com/ailab/](http://ai.tencent.com/ailab/)

Here some article from Tencent about their Go bot (in Chinese): [http://ai.tencent.com/ailab/%E5%86%8D%E5%88%9B%E4%BD%B3%E7%B...](http://ai.tencent.com/ailab/%E5%86%8D%E5%88%9B%E4%BD%B3%E7%BB%A9%E8%85%BE%E8%AE%AF%E5%9B%B4%E6%A3%8BAI%E2%80%9C%E7%BB%9D%E8%89%BA%E2%80%9D%E7%94%B5%E5%9C%A3%E6%88%98%E5%A4%BA%E5%86%A0.html)

There is also a Wikipedia article about the Fine Art Go bot: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine_Art_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine_Art_\(software\))

Along the line, I also read about DeepZenGo: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_\(software\))

<comment><USER11> Tencent is huge, they also own League of Legends and recently just made a $1B investment in Tesla.

The only comparable Chinese tech company is Alibaba.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In the other thread some people mentioned that Je Kie has already lost twice, 14-7 and 13-0, to another Go bot called FineArt (by Tencent)? odd that didn't get any exposure while everyone is watching this game so attentively. Assuming this information accurate, FineArt has already proven bots are above humans, that's moot. At this point if AlphaGo loses it only makes FineArt more impressive! The real match would be Tencent vs Deepmind.

<comment><USER13> Nono, you missed the REAL computer supremacy event then; it was the 50ish (!!!) games MasterP bot played in january against the field of top go professionals on some asian go servers. The bot went 50-0, crushing all opponents often in interesting ways.

FineArt is among the bots that have a positive score against top professionals, yes. But it also can lose to them too. MasterP showed that a computer can completely outclass humans!

After the series of games, it was revealed that MasterP is in fact AlphaGo. As far as we can tell from that series, AlphaGo is some serious ELO above other strong bots. So now the question remains - is it that dominant at longer time controls too, as those games were all quick. So that's this match.

<comment><USER12> Yes I didn't know that, wow 50-0! I mean, is there any doubt at this point that it will be dominant at longer times too? and the bots don't play each other?

<comment><USER13> It absolutely should be dominant in a long game too. Even if it loses some of its strength at such time settings, it shouldn't lose THAT much, it was just too superhuman. The play should be interesting though; Ke Jie both had access to other strong bots in China for a long time, and could study the records of the MasterP games; maybe he tries something interesting and gets interesting responses so we all learn a bit about the nature of go (haven't watched the recording of this game yet, just woke up).

There was a computer bot championship recently (UEC cup), but AlphaGo declined to participate. FineArts won, DeepZen was second. Think there's a few other chinese bots that could be stronger than Zen but didn't participate. So the real competition didn't bother to show up really.

<comment><USER12> Fascinating, thanks for the answers. The bot improvements in the last few months have been so radical I can't begin to imagine how much it must be disrupting the strategic landscape and player status.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Next challenge: a machine that can can beat a human using an equal amount of energy.

<comment><USER15> No problem beating most humans already. Beating the best human? How much energy goes into creating a civilization that produces that human? Such humans are rare so you ought to count all the others as part of the cost of making the best human as you can't quite make them on demand (though Laslo Polgar might disagree).

I don't get the energy point. The machine has no health care costs and can play 24/7\. Doesn't that count for something?

But your wish will come true. Go isn't a special snowflake. If you have an objective metric of success in a formal universe machines always win.

<comment><USER16> > How much energy goes into creating a civilization that produces that human?

By your definition, on AI side we should add energy spent on creating AI and civilization that produced it.

<comment><USER17> I think he's amortizing the cost to zero for the AI because the marginal cost per additional AI is much lower than the cost to sustain a civilization to churn out and bin human go players.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A Go amateur's synopsis: it seemed like Ke was winning and it seemed like Ke was winning and then stuff got complicated and then AlphaGo won.

<comment><USER19> This is a strategy a superintelligence could/would use if they want to take over. They know that humans do not trust them, so they make sure almost all humans with power feel in control for as long as possible. Then the situations may get complicated for a while with confusion and disagreements between humans during the transition.

Then flip the switches.

Note: I understand that the reason for the appearance that AlphaGo does not have a large margin earlier in the game is quite different. I simply see a plausible parallel with your observation regarding the game of Go and the scenario of superintelligence take over, if we develop them wrong.

<comment><USER20> I think this interpretation just stems from our insecurity as human beings when it comes to our own brain capacity.

What I think is really going on (and what will actually happen if a "robot takeover" happens) is the computer just does its thing, but because it's so powerful, it's out of reach of any human being's understanding, and people think they are pulling some trick.

Machines can win without using tricks just based on their computing power.

Yesterday I heard one of the commentators say something like "what i liked about alphago today was how effortless it's playing. It's almost like it's just playing happily and not even trying hard, giving away losses happily when it comes to it."

Alphago has no emotion, but just like how human beings look at something that walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and conclude it's a duck, humans interpret everything based on their point of view, thinking "I can actually feel what alphago is feeling, just based on its moves".

Another thing they said was something like "there's a high level player premium", meaning when people play against other people, they can't ignore all the subtle little queues, such as how much time they're taking to come up with a move, whereas Ke Jie has no such thing against alphago because alphago doesn't care. (Whereas Ke Jie does care)

I think if anything, that kind of emotional vulnerability is what will bring human down against machines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I hope the next focus for Deepmind will be on opening up the black box and trying to put some explainability aspects in place, as has been done before for other deep learning architectures (or at least, people are starting to play around with). So many questions of the form "I wish we could ask AlphaGo what is was thinking here" \-- so this would be great to have.

<comment><USER22> Probably something like "I've been trained on many similar past situations, these are possible moves that worked out well, let's simulate a few of them internally, OK, here's my move."

Full disclosure, I really don't know much about the internals of DeepMind, but if it's just a DL system on steroids with sampling, there isn't really any 'thinking' happening, it's just tapping probability distros over possible moves conditioned on tons of training data.

<comment><USER21> I didn't downvote you, but there's more going on here than just inferencing over a database of prior knowledge. The game is too complex for that. Compare this approach for instance to Monte Carlo based approaches which aren't doing so well.

Speaking of Monte Carlo, the Lee Sedol version of AlphaGo did combine a series of deep networks with Monte Carlo sampling, but rumor is that was replaced in this version altogether (it's also running on TPU's now). Would like to see some more technical details as well.

<comment><USER23> Their state of the art approach hybridizes MCTS with deep neural networks. I'd be interesting indeed if they manage to get better performance without MCTS all together, although they did achieve very impressive performance without MCTS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> For those that find the Google livestream jittery, I found the direct YouTube link[1] much smoother.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-HL5nppBnM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-HL5nppBnM)

<comment><USER25> A nice unofficial commentary here as well:

[https://www.twitch.tv/usgoweb](https://www.twitch.tv/usgoweb) or [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFNgHXjIJo4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFNgHXjIJo4)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Does anyone know whether they isolate generations of AlphaGo and then recombine them after a while? Simulating something like, having Go being played in geographically distinct countries for years and then having the (perhaps many) traditions clash?

<comment><USER27> This is one of the common extentions to Genetic Algorithms. It does not sound as though they are not going to such extremes here, but it is a reasonable concept.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> i love the commentary. for somebody who knows the rules but is not a frequent player it's just the right amount of detail i need. same guy who did the alphago commentary too, i believe.

<comment><USER29> Michael Redmond, the only western-born pro to ever attain a 9-dan professional rank. (He sometimes does commentary for all-human pro tournaments for Japanese TV, in Japanese.)

He's talking with Stephanie (Ming Ming) Yin, a 1-dan Chinese pro who currently teaches in New York.

<comment><USER28> don't know who to respond to, but i really enjoy the way he thinks. he tends to take over the commentary a little bit, and i'd love to hear her opinion, but the commentary is very respectable. kudos to them,happy to hear he's well respected.

<comment><USER30> He was voted best Go commentator on NHK(I believe) a few years ago (and Japan has a decent amount of professional go games on tv).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I have a feeling that Lee Sedol's single win will be remembered as the first and the last instance of a human victory versus a strong AI in game of go.

<comment><USER32> There are other strong AIs out there now, Zen and Fine Art. Both are active on internet Go servers. They're still losing sometimes.

But if you mean the last victory against the very strongest, you're probably right.

<comment><USER33> Yes, I got that inpression in the moment watching game 4 last year: "We will never see this again." It remains to be proven empirically but that's why we're here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Some key differences between this match and the Lee Sedol one are:

1) Ke Jie has an estimation of Alpha Go's skill. Lee Sedol did not know how strong Alpha Go was. Lee Sedol was very skeptical that a bot could have reached such high level.

2) Ke Jie has been able to study a game where Alpha Go was beaten.

3) Ke Jie has been able to play Alpha Go before, with faster game settings.

<comment><USER35> 4) Ke Jie has been able to study 60 AlphaGo games (albeit with faster time settings)

5) No one expects Ke Jie to win.

6) AlphaGo has had more time to train. Between the Lee Sedol games and the 60 game series, there seems to have been noticeable changes.

<comment><USER28> 7) Ke Jie claimed he would beat AlphaGo [1]

1: [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/1219091...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/12190917/Google- AlphaGo-cant-beat-me-says-China-Go-grandmaster.html)

<comment><USER25> >Ke Jie claimed he would beat AlphaGo [1]

He changed his mind after watching just one more match:

[http://english.donga.com/List/3/all/26/527586/1](http://english.donga.com/List/3/all/26/527586/1)

>But after watching three matches, he said, "AlphaGo was perfect and made no mistake. If the conditions are the same, it is highly likely that I can lose."

>"As AlphaGo learns endlessly, all human beings could be defeated in the near future," Ke said on AlphaGo's capabilities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Match is live here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-HL5nppBnM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-HL5nppBnM)

</comment><comment><USER37> Can anyone shed light on the significance? AlphaGo already beat a top human quite decisively a few month ago. How is this different?

<comment><USER38> This is different because while AlphaGo did beat Lee Sedol a while ago. Lee was ranked 2nd in the world for Go. Ke Jie, AlphaGo's current opponent, is ranked 1st in the world.

<comment><USER39> He's also had more time and data to try develop anti-AI tactics and prepare against AlphaGo's strategy. While Sedol mostly went in blind.

<comment><USER33> At the time there wasn't much expectation in the Go community that an AI could really compete at the top level, either. Everything is different now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Seeing how little time AlphaGo used compared to Ke Jie, I wonder how much computation power AlphaGo is allowed to use this time?

<comment><USER41> I suspect it's also likely that AlphaGo continues thinking during the human's turn, and is more able than a human to effectively use its opponent's time to frontload certain computations.

<comment><USER42> Both contestants use their opponent's time to think, naturally.

I'm not sure what "frontload certain computations" means, but this arrangement sounds only fair. It's not like Ke Jie's brain switches off once he puts down a stone.

<comment><USER43> AlphaGo calculates the most likely human moves when they play their turn, and focuses it's next play on the most likely outcomes. So as long as a human plays like a human, it's done a mountain of calculations on what it should do next based on what the human player is likely to do.

That's kind of what happened with the huge move by Lee Sedol last year. AlphaGo calculated a 1/10000 chance for a human to make the move he did, so (A) it did little to prepare for it (B) it played its move prior to that BASED on the idea that Lee Sedol simply wasn't going to do what he did.

<comment><USER42> There's no difference between humans and AI in that regard.

Everybody tries to read and analyze the most likely sequences (duh).

Or I'm not sure what you're trying to say?

<comment><USER43> There is an ENORMOUS difference. A computer can read hundreds, if not millions of moves ahead. A human is incapable of reading more than maybe 1 or 2 moves ahead in Go and even _that_ assumes AlphaGo is going to do what humans do, which it has proven it does not.

I mean sure, if you broaden the term to the point that they both "do stuff", then yes, they do the same thing. But saying they try to "read an analyze" sequences is pointless. Of course both do that. But _how_ they do it differs vastly, because AlphaGo can do things no human can. It's not just the depth in which it can do it.

<comment><USER42> Did anyone suggest AlphaGo and the human brain work identically? That sounds preposterous.

I remain puzzled by your comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Games are the first step. There will be a point in time where the only things humans are best at is being human.

<comment><USER44> Eventually, we might not be the best at that either. Imagine AI companions that can not only perfectly emulate human behaviour, but can produce simulations of empathy, compassion, humour, etc. perfectly tailored to an individual's psyche.

When we imagine intelligent AIs keeping humans as pets, we tend to do so in analogous terms to how we treat animals: E.g. in sparse, constrained environments, like cages and zoos. But those environments are designed with animal level intelligence and instincts in mind. AIs will probably design habitats intended to placate human instincts. And a big part of that will be keeping us psychologically happy, which will involve providing simulated companionship.

<comment><USER6> This brings up an interesting philosophical question - by emulating a thing, are you more of that thing than the thing itself? Not an easy answer.

<comment><USER8> If I was confident in a GAI's ability and willingness to emulate me, then I might be willing to grant it my identity, after I die. My work would carry on, and accelerate, while I would still get to have the final experience of death, for better or worse. The people who depend on me would not be abandoned, and the people who like me, might like the new me even better.

We might become a species that undergoes metamorphosis from a carbon based body to a silicon based body. How much of a caterpillar remains in a butterfly, when it emerges/ascends?

<comment><USER45> > How much of a caterpillar remains in a butterfly, when it emerges/ascends?

Butterflies retain memories learned when they were caterpillars: [https://www.wired.com/2008/03/butterflies- rem/](https://www.wired.com/2008/03/butterflies-rem/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> For those joining the stream now, can anyone indicate the current state of the match? Is AlphaGo already dominating? I keep waiting for the commentators to give their opinion but they haven't so far.

<comment><USER34> It's hard to say since Alpha Go's style is not about maximizing a score difference but about maximizing a probability of winning.

<comment><USER47> This is a really, really important point to consider. AlphaGo _does not care_ if it wins by a half point or twenty points. Increasing your margin of victory past your margin of error is one way of achieving victory, but simply reducing your margin of error below your current margin of victory can be just as effective an approach in many situations.

If AlphaGo is highly confident in its ability to reach an effective draw in other areas of the board, it will happily enter a line in the current area of play that only nets it a stone or two, rather than going for more material at the cost of uncertainty in the remaining areas in play.

<comment><USER48> How do you know that? A NN often maximizes its performance against a goal

<comment><USER49> From the explanations of how AlphaGo was architectured and trained: The goal being maximized isn't stone difference, rather probability of winning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> i would love to see a match between alpha go vs a group of humans. I think it's a better match since as computer can use multi cores so humans can use multi-minds.

<comment><USER35> Thursday :)

<comment><USER50> that would be worth watching for sure. the only drawback is that humans are not usually "trained" to work together at this game like a computer who can multi-task.

<comment><USER51> Yes. I'm not sure if game-playing by "democratic" means is going to be such a success.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I wish they would not keep panning the camera away from the explanation though. Google hired some pretty piss poor horrible camera operators. It really really sucks.

<comment><USER52> They should have an AI do the camera work.

And by they I of course mean an autonomous corporation that arranges the match, pays everyone and makes sure the humans show up on time by having backups for everyone around them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> From the start Ke Jie had chosen the path of narrow but certain defeat, without himself knowing. Alphago knew it all the time and therefore let Ke Jie to take the course of euthanasia. The end result is a close defeat but it was a total defeat all the way.

</comment><comment><USER54> alpha go wins by 1/4

<comment><USER33> Which, it bears repeating, is no different to AlphaGo than if it had won by 14 points—it is programmed only to win, not to give any preference to larger margins of win. And being so expert at reading the board, it will often sacrifice that margin of victory for even the smallest increase in overall win percentage, leading to many "close" games like this.

That said, I totally appreciate Ke Jie actually taking one of these live matches to the bitter end so we could see the counting process play out.

<comment><USER55> I understand that margin of wining and chance of winning are two different goals for optimization, but I would expect them to positively correlated, i.e. if you are winning more, then you have higher chance of winning.

<comment><USER56> Not necessarily. If you are ahead in points you have a higher chance of winning by playing defensive moves and strengthening your position. When behind you need to play riskier moves which could win you a lot of points, but could also risk spreading yourself too thinly resulting in your complete decimation.

<comment><USER57> So, that means Ke Jie either didn't know he was losing, or didn't play to win at the end, or played brilliantly at the end, picking the optimal move every time?

<comment><USER56> From what I have heard Alpha Go was roughly 10 points ahead by the end game, but didn't then bother maintaining the lead. In other words, it was aiming for a 0.5 point lead. Ke Jie would have known he was losing, it is a credit to him that he pushed through to the end so we could all marvel at the spectacle.

<comment><USER54> > but didn't then bother maintaining the lead

How did you know that?

<comment><USER58> Because it lost points by playing sub-optimally.

<comment><USER59> exactly. In fact, I was really surprised when I saw B9. It could have played at B11 which was a 15 point move. But it decided to play safe because B11 even though big in point, would give back strong safe in the center. (it also lost 2 point ish in end game which is typical of Master)

<comment><USER60> maybe it's willing to loose points to erase uncertainty. Lee said AG took a smaller position on the top, eating the two stones, in order to simplify.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Why Ke Jie doesn't connect stones in left-center groups?

<comment><USER35> Which connection are you looking at? The only questionable connection I see in that group is the stick at the top (the four stones on the 7'th column); but the cut doesn't quite work out for white because after the cut, black can extend his two dead stones at the 3-2 point. By cutting, white shorted himself a liberty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> The new world order

</comment><comment><USER63> This is good!

</comment><comment><USER64> 0.5 is not really decisive enough. Let's wait for the next games. Je Kie is really good, much better than in the training games online.

<comment><USER65> AlphaGo does not distinguish between 0.5 points and 30 points. Its only objective is to win, and to absolutely secure the win. It doesn't care by how much it wins.

<comment><USER64> No point in repeating the well-known. 0.5 is almost nothing, go is not just binary win or loose.

<comment><USER58> It had a 10-15 point advantage in the middle game. It chose to whittle it away in the endgame in exchange for more safety. In my opinion that makes it even more impressive.

<comment><USER64> I'm aware of that. I'm also aware of the troubles in counting and evaluation of it's strange/bad moves. It's not impressive at all to go away with only 0.5 after such a large lead. Think about your confirmation bias a bit.

Ke Jie knows that he will probably loose, but this will give him confidence. And confidence is what they need at most, much more than in chess. Otherwise Ke Jie will probably have to end his lucrative career. It not over yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> LOL, apparently Chinese media has been ordered to censor all coverage of the loss.

<comment><USER67> Can you read Chinese? Every news site in China reported his loss. Try harder.

I'll give you one of the biggest media sites. [http://www.163.com/](http://www.163.com/) It's on headline. "人机大战首局柯洁苦战落败 AlphaGo胜1/4子暂1-0"

<comment><USER66> Oops, looks like I shouldn't rely on reddit for my news.

<comment><USER68> don't believe anything you hear about China, especially if it falls into the "Chinese Government is an evil overlord" bucket, or you'll end up looking like an idiot.

<comment><USER69> They were ordered to censor the video livestream (only allowing text) just ~1d before the event though.[0] Rumor has that the censorship order explicitly called for avoiding mentioning Google in the text streams. A YouTube mirror video livestream on Bilibili has been taken down for unknown reasons.

[0] [http://archive.is/tTgsx](http://archive.is/tTgsx) (original page already gone)

It might not be the gov't intending to act evil in this case -- it can be some random "old red army" hearing about Google's involvement in this thing and protesting. But no matter what the underlying reason is, they are defly trying to hide something they are not supposed to in order to make stuff look good. (They ain't no White Lotus.[1]) You don't need an evil overlord to do this; a narcissist will suffice.

[1] [https://baike.baidu.com/item/白莲花/17505528](https://baike.baidu.com/item/白莲花/17505528)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> If AlphaGo wins the series then Google should be unblocked in China. Is the People's Government willing to take Google up on my proposed wager?

<comment><USER71> They already blocked the live for this match.

<comment><USER21> Did they? I was wondering about they'd unblock YouTube for a while for the Chinese livestream. So apparently this was not the case.

There has been talk from Google recently that they're planning to enter China again, at least for the Android space (Play store and services, for example).</comment></comment></comment>


Colin Powell Says Israel Has 200 Nukes in Leaked Email - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/colin-powell-says-israel-has-200-nukes-leaked-email-499192 <comment><USER2> While I think the subject of Powell's email getting hacked is very interesting -- he's admitted to the hack but have we learned any technical details regarding how his GMail account was breached? -- this doesn't appear to be a very newsworthy insight.

First of all, he's not writing as a Secretary of State, so the number "200" could be conjecture, he certainly doesn't seem to be making an appeal to authority, i.e. "When _I_ was at State, Israel told us etc etc etc". Who are the "boys in Tehran" who know that Israel has 200? CIA spies? The negotiators? Diplomats?

Meanwhile, President Carter has been giving _speeches_ and interviews about this for years: [http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/isr...](http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/israel- nuclear-weapons-secret-united-states/380237/)

> _Former CIA Director Robert Gates said so during his 2006 Senate > confirmation hearings for secretary of defense, when he noted—while serving > as a university president—that Iran is surrounded by "powers with nuclear > weapons," including "the Israelis to the west." Former President Jimmy > Carter said so in 2008 and again this year, in interviews and speeches in > which he pegged the number of Israel's nuclear warheads at 150 to around > 300._

<comment><USER3> They don't need spies to count the actual bombs. One can estimate the number through a combination of knowing which warhead tech Israel has acquired and an estimate of their production capacity. Whether it is Israel or North Korea, the math is the same.

Or, assuming that Israel has had time to make far more bombs that it needs, one can estimate the stockpile through a measurement of potential delivery systems. 150 missiles + 50 aircraft = at most 200 warheads.

<comment><USER4> So the number of actual warheads could be far greater, but it is effectively only as many as the number of delivery vehicles. Especially in the event of a full nuclear war, since they won't exactly be able to go back and rearm with those spare warheads.

<comment><USER3> These things aren't cheap to build or maintain. And trying to keep 300 things secret is harder than 100. So no nation has a pile of extras lying around. Even the US/UK actually have far fewer warheads than delivery systems. Not every warhead on every missile in every sub is always armed. So counting the delivery mechanisms gives you an upper limit. I think this is the source of the 200 number. Of course Israel is a little odd. They are the one nuclear power obsessed with invasion of a very small territory. They may have some static plans, large warheads meant to be detonated at fixed positions rather than be 'delivered' by missile or bomber. That is a complication.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think what's far more interesting is his dismissive attitude toward Iran possessing a nuclear weapon. How would they test it? What would they do, polish it? It puts the Iranian nuclear deal in an interesting context.

As for Israel possessing 200 nukes, I'm sure that surprises no one. Yeah they don't publicly address it but anyone remotely familiar with their foreign policy would have known this for some time.

<comment><USER6> The idea that Iranian theocracy is crazy and determined to destroy Israel even at the cost of the destruction of Iran and collapse of their state is convenient fiction. I think most IR scholars think that Iran wants to be regional power next to Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

It's easy to use threatening soundbites in both sides. Axis of evil and Death to the America are just slogans. Theocratic leaders of Iran are first and foremost cynical and calculating politicians.

<comment><USER7> Maybe too much credit? They are first, theologians. Explains much of what they do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Israel prosecuted one its citizens for disclosing this type of information in the 1980s. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordechai_Vanunu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordechai_Vanunu)

<comment><USER9> They didn't just prosecute him - they illegally abducted him from Australia, dragged him back to Israel, locked him in prison and threw away the key.

<comment><USER10> Italy, not Australia. Released in 2004 (according to Wikipedia, did not dig further).

<comment><USER9> He was abducted via honeytrap from Sydney, but physically overpowered and drugged once in Rome.

Your comment implies he is free. He spent 18 years in prison, including more than 11 in solitary confinement, and while 'released' is apparently surveilled, subject to a lot of restrictions and forced to stay in Israel.

        he shall not be able to have contacts with foreigners

        his telephone and Internet use shall be monitored

        he shall not enter Internet chat rooms

        he shall not own cellular phones

        he shall not approach or enter embassies and consulates

        he shall not come within 500 meters of any international border crossing

        he shall not visit any port of entry into Israel

        he shall not leave Israel

<comment><USER10> My comment does not imply that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm pretty sure everybody assumes they've got nukes already. It's an open secret. Whether it's 100 or 200 at home doesn't really change much either.

<comment><USER12> What worries me a bit is Isreal is a bit trigger sensitive and prone to throw stuff defensively. I hope they never reach nuclear level anxiety.

<comment><USER13> More worrying is the fact that Israel considers its secret nuclear arsenal to be a primary motivating force when dealing with its relations with _Western nations_. The 'Goliath' program has a very, very sinister purpose: to hold the world ransom with nuclear deterrents, such that Israel gets its way no matter what.

<comment><USER12> That's the only field use for Nukes anyway right ? Every country wants it as big muscle to show up to other neighbors in negotiations. I'm curious if the 200 count is growing or if it's only remains of the post WW2 nuclear spread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm tolerant of Edward Snowden-related politics on HN, but this just appears to be straight up politics with little/nothing related to tech.

<comment><USER15> You are right,

 _Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they 're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off- topic._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER16> Read a little further.

> Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate > for the site. If you think a story is spam or off-topic, flag it by clicking > on its 'flag' link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Colin Powell has to be one of the few people who has had their privacy invaded and has come out looking better because of it.

It's a very strange cultural thing going on with this hack. I've read three articles about the hack, and depending on the political views of the author, Colin agrees with him. If the author doesn't like Trump? Colin said some bad things about him. If the author doesn't like Clinton? Same thing.

Of course, I'm sure the reality is that he was frank and biting about all of them, but the reporting on this leak is like an exercise in propaganda -- find something true that demoralizes the other guys, then publish it.

I feel sorry the guy got robbed, and I hope they catch whoever did it, but I'm not holding my breath.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is not news, here's a report from 2007 covering the topic in detail: [https://fas.org/nuke/guide/israel/nuke/](https://fas.org/nuke/guide/israel/nuke/)

("Updated 2007" is in the footer of the page.)

</comment><comment><USER19> An interesting engineering question that needs to be raised is, given no known nuclear test conducted by Israel, how do they know about the reliability of their design ? Assuming they built the warheads by themselves. Did they use foreign blueprints ? Or did foreign countries tested their weapons under their [the foreign country's] official program ? Or do they have access to advanced computation models [which is less probable given they had these weapons since the 70s]

<comment><USER20> They are believed ti have tested at least once, in the South Atlantic in 1979.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is there any speculation as to where Israel got it's nukes? Did they develop them independently? If so where did they test them anyway?

For what it's worth, I think Colin Powell is right: Iran doesn't want to develop nukes as an offensive weapon. What they really want is a seat at the grown-up table and to prevent regime change being imposed on them.

</comment><comment><USER22> I wonder if this was "hacked" (as in, leaked) as some kind of warning to Iran, perhaps following one of those diplomatic incidents that never make it to the popular press.

Not that it's very productive to wonder this sort of thing, since I don't have any way to know what's up, but I can't help to wonder anyway.

</comment><comment><USER23> I am more worried about Saudi Arabia. It paid a lot of money to Pakistan.</comment>


Advantages of a refurbished computer against Used Computer - <AUTHOR> I am looking for a used computer. Actually I have some shortage of money for purchasing new one.
Many websites are showing used computers . Some of them tell it is refurbished.
Is there any advantages of buying a refurbished computer  than used computer? <comment><USER2> New computers are expensive. That is the reason people looking for used or refurbished computers. The term "USED" and "REFURBISHED" both stands for Used Computers. The first is Used..It is available as is..Means if it is working ..It is working

Refurbished is also a used computer but the difference is that it has been restored to its original condition. Means Proper testing has been done, remove or replace any faulty components, and testing done to ensure it is working fine properly and it will be more reliable.

You can find used computers in India with the following seller [http://www.netgencomputers.in/used-desktop- computers](http://www.netgencomputers.in/used-desktop-computers)

Found this information from advantages-of-buying-refurbished-computers/

<comment><USER3> Very useful information.. Really helpful

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It depends on a seller. Some refurbished comes with warranty (Apple is doing that) so this is definitely and advantage. Technically refurbished computer, by definition, should be in a state as close to "new" as it was possible. This of course varies from seller to seller so the best would be to buy it from official vendor. Many big brands like Apple, HP, Dell and Lenovo are having refurbished sales and I can highly recommend those. With 3rd party vendors it can be tricky and it entirely depends on the seller so be careful.

</comment><comment><USER5> A refubrished computer can be of two types:

It was used as an exposition device in a store, so it's "new" but with some wear of being turned on all day, etc. When is removed from display it is checked and if everything works fine it is put on sale.

Or it's a returned device that had some faulty component that has been replaced.

The advantages compared with an used device is that refubrished are more or less "new" and have warranty.

</comment><comment><USER6> I had an older amd pc that was getting slower over the years, didn't have a lot for upgrades so I just compared the speeds to a random find on ebay, it was a hp z210, didn't want to mess with building one, I don't game a lot so I got a 1050ti mini which I knew worked with this box, it's solid and was only $150 shipped, a huge upgrade from what I had. It's the e3-1270 xeon version.

</comment><comment><USER7> The companies that make the computers often have outlet sites where they sell overstock and refurbished. Often this is last year's model, so extra cheap.

If you buy these you have much better warranty, and much better guarantee it works. But you'll pay more than random 3rd party used.</comment>


Start school day at 11am to let students sleep in, says expert - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/sep/08/start-school-later-11am-students-sleep <comment><USER2> Completely agree with this. I spent most of my youth in an extremely tired state. Up at 7 to be in school for 9. I doubt I ever really learned anything useful until after 11am. By 4pm I was shattered, then had to go home and do sports / homework until 8-9pm. At the weekend atleast at one of the days was spent sleeping in, purely because I was so unnecessarily wrecked by the stupid school hours.

Fast forward and these days, since setting up my own company, I rarely start properly working until 11am. By that time I'm not exhausted getting up and am ready to be immediately productive.

So what about adjusting to societies (stupid) rules at such an early age - most people are not morning people anyway. School is supposed to be about learning and productivity, so why are we making it part of the "hours just for the sake of it / that's how it's always been done" problem?

School hours are basically currently set as it's a form of childcare but parents are working all kinds of hours these days - why should schools be different?

</comment><comment><USER3> Part of school is to orient our youth to society. You start school early in the day and later in life the young adults will be able to show up for the start of work easier.

While 11am seems extreme I think having the start like 9 or so might be better, but, then again we have the coordination of getting kids to school and you to work in the same time frame then.

<comment><USER4> It doesn't work that way. Circadian rhythms are regulated by the PER3 gene. No amount of practice will convert someone from a late-riser into an early-riser.

The only benefit you might see from forcing those young adults to get up before they are ready to wake up during their school years is that you might condition them to see their hours of morning grogginess as normal and reduce the psychological distress they might otherwise feel when considering the prospect of going through that experience every work day for year after year with no prospect of relief.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Certainly the adolescents should start later. The problem I saw in Montgomery County, Maryland, is that the first bus pick-up times are in the dark for much of the year. The county reasonably thinks it better to have a crowd of 15 to 18-year-olds on the corner in the dark than a bunch of 5 to 10-year-olds.

<comment><USER6> Same deal for Howard County, MD. We had to get up at 6 to be on the bus by 6:30, and it was pitch black outside in the winter months. Luckily I had an forty-minute bus ride, which provided the opportunity for some extra rest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Completely disagree. Morning people exist. Growing up I couldn't stay awake past 10:30 and I got my best work done from 5-9 AM.

</comment><comment><USER8> They'll just stay up later, though.

</comment><comment><USER9> Also mitigates road congestion</comment>