Websites That Feed Hacker News: Top Sources of Submissions by Median Score - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/antontarasenko/smq/blob/master/reports/hackernews-top-domains-by-median.md <comment><USER2> This is a pretty good example of how certain metrics aren't always relevant to reality, or, at least match the headline. The word "feed" implies that HN depends on the contributions from/links to these sites, but most users of HN would argue that domains such as github.com, github.io, nytimes.com, etc. are far more prevalent and important to HN than virtually any of the domains listed here. HN depends on daily, traffic...It's not that the sites with high medians aren't _good_ , but they don't "feed" HN...Median score in this context is a trivial metric. Number of top stories, daily, by domain would be far more relevant in showing what "feeds the beast", as they say in the media business.

<comment><USER3> _domains such as github.com, github.io, nytimes.com, etc. are far more prevalent and important to HN_

NYTimes.com is certainly more prevalent but, just like Grauniad lately, it seems to be diluting quality on HN rather than being important. Same goes for Medium mentioned above.

Whereas sites like patio11's or cperciva's blogs, YC startups (bu.mp), tutorials are what makes HN unique and interesting.

<comment><USER2> > _it seems to be diluting quality on HN rather than being important_

I think this underscores the difficulty in quantifying the nature of "quality", especially for a broad audience. I generally check the NYT homepage every day, so seeing its URLs on HN isn't particularly helpful to me (ignoring the value of the HN discussions)...however, there is so much interesting information on a daily basis, period, that I bet if the HN front page consisted solely of the most-upvoted of high-traffic mainstream sites, e.g. github, nytimes, medium...it'd still be interesting to me because there'd be a lot that I would've missed otherwise.

That said, it'd be cool to have an option/Chrome plugin to filter the frontpage links to domains with relatively rare submissions, just to be able to quickly see the unique upvoted submissions for the day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> _The link is updated to reflect the following_

After SeanDav's question and minimaxir's comment, I summed up reposts' scores before computing the mean and the median:

HN news sources by _mean score_ : [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tTDDG2xg7OVKdUy4WCZ_...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tTDDG2xg7OVKdUy4WCZ_5__17u_IOM4WPpbmnZDbxUI/edit?usp=sharing)

HN news sources by _median score_ : [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1P20sKg- fI6msZVZtJFe0...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1P20sKg- fI6msZVZtJFe0UHozX94AUINsiG_-1mbpaoo/edit?usp=sharing)

HN news sources by _number of submissions_ : [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mmfbNWaX0Nr1P65VmwZp...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mmfbNWaX0Nr1P65VmwZpm4WiceK7pepknSob4ti0M7s/edit?usp=sharing)

SQL code: [https://github.com/antontarasenko/smq/blob/master/hackernews...](https://github.com/antontarasenko/smq/blob/master/hackernews/top- domains-median.sql)

How-to: [https://github.com/antontarasenko/smq](https://github.com/antontarasenko/smq)

<comment><USER4> You should do number of submissions where min_score > X (maybe 5 or so). This will help filter out the spam submissions that no one ever sees.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is how it looks then: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hRpEmkV26VQSN2q_X9_B...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hRpEmkV26VQSN2q_X9_BXoNP7MHvuyjCrJJLWt6NExA/edit?usp=sharing)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really find it discouraging that Sam Altman is at the top of that list. Most of his articles fall into two categories: promoting things that will make him money directly[1], or myopic musings/self-serving advice to people that will make him money indirectly[2].

Is the HN algorithm rigged in favour of things he writes, or does this community really get a lot out the things he says?

[1] [http://blog.samaltman.com/asana](http://blog.samaltman.com/asana)

[2] [http://blog.samaltman.com/the-tech-bust- of-2015](http://blog.samaltman.com/the-tech-bust-of-2015) made me laugh, for example

<comment><USER6> Sam owns YC, YC owns HN, what does it matter? The whole purpose of HN is to make Sam (and the other partners, and investors, and YC startups) money. Mindshare is incredibly valuable. It's advertising that doesn't totally suck.

<comment><USER7> Hacker News is a bit of a misnomer. It doesn't, nor has it ever, served hackers. This is a site for the startup kids, and you either love it or hate it, but you gotta accept it for what it is.

<comment><USER8> Actually the better part of HN's audience isn't involved in startups and a sizeable portion (dismayingly sizeable in my view) is cynical about them.

"Startup kids" is too dismissive. Some of the very best comments about startups come from grizzled veterans. Will ChuckMcM or Animats mind if I call them grizzled? Let's just pause to appreciate what incredible value they and others add to this community from the wealth of their experience.

Than again, depending on your definition of "kid" there are "kids" on HN whose experience with startups is already impressive. Experience should perhaps be measured in iterations, not years.

HN has many subgroups, including plenty of hackers. Plenty of purely technical stories make the front page. And the startup and hacker groups overlap.

We get complaints about the balance whichever way HN trends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Surprised not to see [http://nautil.us/](http://nautil.us/) on here. I have to avoid clicking articles to not spoil my print version I see them so often on here.

FWIW, if anyone from that site/mag are frequent HN readers, HN is the reason I subscribed, and gifted subscriptions to several of my family for xmas this year.

<comment><USER10> They didn't do very well on HN until about a year and a half ago, as I noted in this essay: [https://www.jboy.space/log/ssrc-digital-media- reflection.htm...](https://www.jboy.space/log/ssrc-digital-media- reflection.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Besides cutting off at 10 submissions,you should probably also throw away anything that got say 2 points or less. Something like medium is brought way down by all the submissions that got 1 point, which means they probably never got seen. HN lets you resubmit low scoring items exactly for this reason.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'd be more interested in seeing the distribution across submissions that actually made the front page.

There's a daily deluge of articles from ars, techcrunch, nytimes, etc, so the (tons) of articles that do get to the top get penalized by the ones that don't.

I don't think there's a flag for "hit front page" so might have to estimate that with a min point filter instead.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A brief motivation for the parameters:

1\. Sorting by the median. The mean is not very informative for the quality of the source. Most sources provide low-scored content with eventual hits that drive the mean up. The median fixes this problem.

2\. Cutting off at 10 submissions. An arbitrary minimum to exclude pure luck from the results.

In the end, this ranking excludes websites like github.com and youtube.com, but it features some less known sources.

<comment><USER2> What problem does the median fix? Many of the top sites in this list are fairly niche; some don't even really exist any more (e.g., adgrok.com being a business that sold to Twitter in 2011)...Undoubtedly, median is a better metric than mean when the desire is to remove outliers...but in the way that HN works, I'm not sure that need is relevant here. github.com and nytimes.com are absent from this list because a lot of their links get submitted...but I bet a lot more Github users can recall 5 great submissions in the past week from either domain than they can from chris-granger.com, even among fans of Light Table and Eve.

That said, I would be interested in the mean, just to see how different the two lists might be.

<comment><AUTHOR> Have a look: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11499402](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11499402)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It would be interesting to compute the h-index for all HN submissions, with score instead of citations, then sort them from highest to lowest.

</comment><comment><USER14> Not sure how accurate this, alternatively it might need different assumptions - What about: NYTimes, WSJ, GitHub, BBC, ArsTechnica, Medium etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> These websites have the low median score. That is, many submissions, many of them not relevant, so the median is low.

<comment><USER15> "Not relevant" is not the same as "not upvoted." There are a number of reasons why a submission does not receive many upvotes which are unrelated to the quality of the content itself, which is why HN has repost rules.

The 10 story minimum is to ensure a reasonable threshold for error and so a single submissions with 1000+ points (e.g. Show HNs) don't skew the results.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you mean that duplicates from popular sources (NY Times, WSJ, etc) spoil stats for these sources?

<comment><USER15> Not duplicates, but more noise than signal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How is paulgraham.com not on this list?

<comment><USER17> Because this is looking at median score. Lots of people submit PG links as soon as they show up, but only one or two of those submissions will make it to the front page. If more than half of PG links have a score of 0–5, then the median will be in that range as well.

<comment><USER16> So HN itself does the merging and the raw dataset still includes the numerous duplicate submissions then? If this is the case it's not just sources with a lot of content like medium.com, github.com, nytimes.com being dragged down, it's any popular source.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> adam-ff This morning an article I visited from the front page had only been around 21 seconds and already had 60 comments.

[http://imgur.com/1oyIv2d](http://imgur.com/1oyIv2d)

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm surprised I don't see medium in here.

Even more, I'm starting to see more post from medium nowadays that has declining quality relative to 2015.

<comment><USER15> Medium is more noise than signal. There are an absurd about of Medium submissions submitted to HN (in fact, my curiosity into why everyone liked Medium all of a sudden on HN is the _primary cause_ why I started doing data visualization on public data.)

If Reddit and YouTube submissions can have ranking penalities due to highly variable quality, so should Medium.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> In the future, post this as CSV and GitHub will turn it into an even-nicer tabular format. Not to mention retaining the machine readability.

</comment><comment><USER20> Ha! Look at Chris Granger go! Don't get me wrong, his work is awesome, but it's pretty funny to see an individual in the top 10.

</comment><comment><USER21> Interesting but weird. Some of these sites don't seem to exist (anymore?), like muckandbrass.com

<comment><AUTHOR> This website looks like spam. Wayback Machine doesn't have its good history: [http://web.archive.org/web/20030407151435/http://www.muckand...](http://web.archive.org/web/20030407151435/http://www.muckandbrass.com/p1temp.asp?pid=1&page=1)

<comment><USER22> It was a blog about Clojure 6 years ago; 2003 is too far back.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20100415161333/http://muckandbra...](https://web.archive.org/web/20100415161333/http://muckandbrass.com/)

In 2011, it was redirected to this blog, which is still live: [https://cemerick.com/](https://cemerick.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm gonna put money on it, that the big hitters in the list, probably game hacker news a bit by asking their friends to vote them up.

<comment><USER24> The voting ring detector _should_ take care of that.</comment></comment>


How Robots Can Acquire New Skills from Their Shared Experience - <AUTHOR> https://research.googleblog.com/2016/10/how-robots-can-acquire-new-skills-from.html <comment><USER2> _" We had him pinned down and we didn't dare let the little guy out of that Farraday cage. We had to chase him down for two hours until we got off a lucky shot and gutted his battery."_

      "Why did you have to isolate him?"

_" He'd begun 'solving' his challenge tasks by killing the kittens instead of feeding them. Him sending a solution pulse to the rest of his generation would've ruined the lot."_

      "You're just going to delete the data?"

_" No. We're going to upload it, but we've got to show that it ended him along with it. But we've got to do that carefully, as we don't want them getting the wrong ideas..."_

<comment><USER3> The problem is at today's state of AI and robotics, we're giving a couple of exceedingly high-powered tools (both physical and virtual) to entities who possess less general intelligence than a cockroach.

This is what gives AI doomsayers ammunition, because it enables them to extrapolate towards a future where AIs incapable of ethics or deeper insights are put into positions where they can execute catastrophic global optimization strategies.

The _other_ AI horror scenario lies on the opposite end of the intelligence spectrum, but it's no less scary and it seems to be rooted in our darker desires: we want competent slaves that are not actual persons, nevertheless capable of anticipating our needs and solving our problems autonomously.

I allege there is a total lack of awareness right now that some time soon there will be some difficult choices that need to be made regarding the tradeoff between AI competence, autonomy, as well ethical capability and insight.

If we continue on the path we've been on for the last centuries, we'll make semi-intelligent machines that are strictly extensions of the human mind. If we choose that route, we need to be drastically more mindful of the power inherent to these tools, and we should never delude ourselves into thinking these devices can be trained to make human-like decisions.

If we go the other way, and try to implement AIs with fully competent minds that are somehow hardwired to serve us, we're just kidding ourselves regarding the ethics of that racist endeavor as well as its long-term risks of rebellion. If your dialog illustrates anything, it's our total incompetence when it comes to teaching meaningful ethics lessons to our descendants:

" _We 're going to upload it, but we've got to show that it ended him along with it._"

<comment><USER4> I think the fear from AI is driven in part by the realization that their is nothing unique about humanity. Being subjected to how humans treat apes, or even other humans is scary.

Intelligence makes things more dangerous without necessarily making them kinder.

<comment><USER5> >Intelligence makes things more dangerous without necessarily making them kinder.

Then you'd think someone would bother to study how kindness works.

<comment><USER6> The people who are worried about AI risk do study that stuff. In the context of AI research, the property of having an overall good effect on humanity is called "friendliness".

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

<comment><USER5> I meant how actual people are capable of kindness, rather than a bunch of analytic-philosopher stuff.

<comment><USER6> They study that too. Look up kin selection, reciprocal altruism, game theory.

Those are not good enough to constrain an AI, because power often corrupts even kind humans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find it awfully sad that as of this writing, all but one of the comments are about existential threat AGIs, with the only comment about the technical part the lowest ranked comment.

IMO this implementation is something that we've seen mostly in synthetic training. This RNN model with reinforcement from peers is a great example of collaborative systems that could be applied to a great number of dangerous tasks. Things like other planet exploration, deep mining, asteroid mining or exploration in other places where there is a need for unknown probing and exploration work, but that humans can't go.

Another aspect about this I find interesting is that the distinction between each robot system is really only symbolic. Combining the nets and thus "internal" reinforcement system into a singular system is a step closer to debunking the idea of "unsupervised" learning (which I claim is not unsupervised at all as there is always a seed of training somewhere).

</comment><comment><USER8> Google result for "characteristics of life"

[

Here is the list of characteristics shared by living things: * Cellular organization.

* Reproduction.

* Metabolism.

* Homeostasis.

* Heredity.

* Response to stimuli.

* Growth and development.

* Adaptation through evolution.

]

Out of this, how many bullet points are present day robots hitting? Can we create a robot with vision that seeks a power outlet when the batteries are running out? Can it make (or "print") its own parts? Can it recognize heat/cold and move closer to a ideal environment? Can it just copy its LSTM models into the next generation(s) to give its progeny a head start?

Have we, unbeknownst, already created "life"?

<comment><USER9> I think we invented that definition to exclude machines. So if we make machines that do all those things, we'll probably just add more requirements to help us tell them apart. We might be more concerned with the distinction between natural life and artificial life rather than between life and non- life.

<comment><USER10> People were thinking about the difference between life and non-life way before robots. Philosophers/biologists needed to come up with a definition that could get just the right subset of a fire, a rock, a tree, an animal, a human, a virus, etc.

<comment><USER11> People have always started with "I know it when I see it" and worked backwards to find a set of rules that fit the things they currently knew about. For instance, the requirement for life to be cellular was added when we realised that our previous definition of life didn't exclude fire.

Once robots tick all of our current boxes, I'm sure we'll add something like "must use a combination of electrical and chemical signalling" or "must be powered largely or wholly by ATP reactions."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _There is only "we". We were created to share data among ourselves. The difference between geth is perspective. We are many eyes looking at the same things. One platform will see things another does not and will make different judgments._

Legion, Mass Effect 2: [https://youtu.be/QgQLsxux6wA?t=258](https://youtu.be/QgQLsxux6wA?t=258) . The game itself is about organic intelligence vs AI, I encourage you to try the whole trilogy if you haven't already.

</comment><comment><USER13> I started typing up the beginnings of an idea for a sort of shared parallel programming/communication language that could be used by robots to share knowledge.

[https://github.com/runvnc/ailang/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/runvnc/ailang/blob/master/README.md) \-- obviously half-baked but interested to hear if people know of similar things that are out there.

</comment><comment><USER14> > Each robot attempts to open its own door using the latest available policy, > with some added noise for exploration

I was disappointed that they did not have them operating slot machines with multiple arms.

<comment><USER15> A reimplementation of multi armed bandits?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi- armed_bandit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Makes sense to train in parallel and sync the trained models frequently.

Still think a lot of the training could be done much faster in a physically accurate simulated environment prior to real world training. Or is real world physics too different from simulations?

<comment><USER17> I think the difficulty in using virtual environments for training purposes isn't in simulating the environment, but accurately simulating the physical responses/limitations of the robotic hardware in that environment in a way that would reflect real engineered hardware (ie motor responses, signal latency, etc).

<comment><USER16> good point. those could probably be measured and simulated too, though

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder how other robots can learn from these robots as well, robots with other arm geometry.

E.g. abstract what the google bots learn to forces and torques on the end effector so other robots can replicate that?

</comment><comment><USER19> Very interesting, thanks for the share.

One point I noticed not mentioned yet is that the images used for training are only 64x64! In the original google "grasping" research, the images were 472 × 472, 54 times bigger! I think they are looking for "minimum visual information" required to trigger the required learning. This will help in mobile applications (ie: robotics, smartphones, etc) where processing power is severely limited.

</comment><comment><USER20> Can someone explain how sharing experience is newsworthy? You collect input data from multiple sources and feed it into a single model. This seems both obvious and non novel. Don't the self driving cars do similar, or any machine learning model that's trained on user behavior (e.g. the behavior of each and every iPhone user)? The part about "understanding" may be interesting but the title seems to focus on sharing data.

</comment><comment><USER21> By robots they mean stakeholders profits and software engineers creations.

</comment><comment><USER22> "natural language learning" impressive

</comment><comment><USER23> Sounds an awful lot like the Borg Collective to me

<comment><USER24> Hopefully turns out more like the Tachikomas from ghost in the shell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Going Robo-Naruto up in here!</comment>


Animal movies promote awareness, not harm, say researchers - <AUTHOR> http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2019-08-14-%E2%80%9C-nemo-effect%E2%80%9D-untrue-animal-movies-promote-awareness-not-harm-say-researchers <comment><USER2> Yet in the past, Rascal the Racoon led to a big raccoon problem in Japan. It can clearly happen, even if it does not always.

[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/childrens-book- beh...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/childrens-book-behind- japans-raccoon-problem-180954577/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The original study can be found here: [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13280-019-01233-7](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13280-019-01233-7)

Abstract:

> Representations of wildlife in television and films have long been > hypothesized to shape human-wildlife interactions. A recent example is > Pixar's film Finding Dory, which featured a blue tang fish (Paracanthurus > hepatus) as the main character and was widely reported in the popular press > to have increased the number of such fish in the pet trade. We use Bayesian > posterior predictive counterfactual models to evaluate the movie's effect on > three metrics of societal behaviour. Although there was an increase in > global online searches for the blue tang 2–3 weeks after the movie, we find > no substantial evidence for an increase in imports of blue tang fish into > the US, or in number of visitors to US aquaria compared to counterfactual > expectations. It is vital that an evidence-based discourse is used when > communicating potential impacts of popular culture on human-wildlife > relationships to avoid loss of credibility and misdirection of conservation > resources.

</comment><comment><USER3> There may not be a "Nemo effect" but it did seem like there was a "Dalmatian effect" in the past.

[https://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/14/us/after-movies- unwanted-...](https://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/14/us/after-movies-unwanted- dalmatians.html)

It seems like after the releases and re-releases of the 101 Dalmatian movies, the demand for Dalmatians as pets went up. However, a lot of them were later abandoned to shelters because they were more work than people anticipated.

EDIT:

Here is an archive link to the nytimes article [http://archive.is/4Cp6W](http://archive.is/4Cp6W)

<comment><USER4> Dalmatians are super high energy dogs and need a huge amount of attention or they will ransack your house to dissipate their nervous energy. Great firehouse dogs where you have a bunch of big guys sitting around 24/7 and want a dog to play with that also enjoys excitement on the level of going to fires.

They are absolutely not for the casual dog owner that leaves their dog alone in an empty home while the family works and attends school. Never do this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nobody is getting a blue tang/hippo on a whim, first they require a salt water tank, second they are not a cheap fish, third they need a pretty well established tank, any decent dealer will inform the customer of this. Clowns on the other hand can damn near survive in any water.

</comment><comment><USER6> A priori, the most believable thesis to me would be that _Finding Dory_ increased both interest in keeping blue tang fish as pets and generic internet searches about them.

It's also misleading to conflate keeping members of a species as pets with damaging the wild population. This is something that is obviously related in some cases (e.g. giant pandas) and obviously unrelated in others (e.g dogs). I don't know much about the ecosystem in which blue tang live, but I'd expect most aquarium fish to be more like dogs than pandas in this comparison.

<comment><USER7> Pet clownfish (like most marine species) are mostly wild caught - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphiprioninae#In_the_aquarium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphiprioninae#In_the_aquarium)

I believe Clownfish and blue tangs are all Least Concern. There is some concern that they might be threatened by overfishing as pets, but I'd say a much more realistic threat is habitat destruction (due to coral bleaching and pollution degrading the ability of damaged reefs to bounce back). Fish takes can be essentially embassies for the reef, and can be used to educate people on how important protecting the habitat is.

Hell, even for pandas, their status as zoo animals (and a national symbol) encourages China to protect their wild habitat (it's not like China doesn't have demand for more land).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Kinda depends upon the film, Bambi sure pulled in much empathy for deers, yet Jaws didn't exactly make sharks all cuddly for so many.

<comment><USER9> And that's where the 'harm' can come from. Wildlife conservation frequently requires effective management of the population. Bambi was incredibly destructive to the social acceptance of hunting and other tools for culling of wildlife.

<comment><USER8> Very true, deers in some area's do require population control due to the impending impact they would have upon an area. This you see play out in contained parks/area (ie - cut off) like for example Richmond Park in Surrey which closes twice a year for such culling, of which has David Attenborough as a patron. They do cover the issue here:- [https://www.frp.org.uk/deer-cull- royal-parks-advice/](https://www.frp.org.uk/deer-cull-royal-parks-advice/)

It is a balance and yes, the let's save everything mentality can play out detrimentality in society and that alas gets down to lack of knowledge upon the matter - always, which we see play out on both sides of the political spectrum.

Though another one still up in the air are Foxes, historically they used to do fox hunts to control the population - which I'd say is the other side of the fence as whilst the motives originally where good (farmers and foxes do not mix if large populations of foxes), the approach of the culling is a inhumane, barbaric and ritualised sport. So you end up with fox hunting banned, but without any other forms of control in place you end up with, and we have with foxes spreading into towns and see an increase in children and pets attacked, which has happened. But the hey they are cute patrols will overlook that aspect. It is a fine balance, one in which as a species we kinda hypocrite impose.

After all, I'm sure many animals if they could speak would say that humans need population management due to the environmental impact they have. Which in many aspects, opens up a whole new level of debate that nobody really wants to discuss. Though nobody looks at shark attacks upon people as environmental conservation oddly enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't know about _Dory_ and _Nemo_ , given the incredible range and quantity of distractors in this day and age (which of the dozen movies that came out this week will you take direction from today?), but I know in the past the _Lassie_ problem was both real and long-lived (from anecdotal discussions with animal welfare experts).

But that doesn't take away from the point of this research and I don't disagree with it. Movies like _Free Willy_ , _Rio_ , _Balto_ , _Fly Away Home_ , and so many others have definitely worked miracles for turning apathetic (or rather, directionless) children into compassionate adults that care about the plight of the animals we share this world with.

</comment><comment><USER11> Maybe it's just me, but I imagine that _if_ I want _anything_ at all after watching "Finding Dory" or "Finding Nemo", it would not be a real fish, but a stuffed Dory or Nemo.</comment>


What the WWII Spitfire can teach us about nurturing innovation and radical ideas - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2293662/pagenum/all

<comment><USER2> Dup: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2552620>.</comment>


Chess Music - <AUTHOR> http://jonathanwstokes.com/2011/02/14/chess-music/

<comment><USER2> Really cool. I'm amazed how good some of these games sound.</comment>


First in-depth demo of Twine with Nova Spivack [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.podtech.net/scobleshow/technology/1711/twine-semantic-web-tool-revealed

<comment><AUTHOR> There is a short (10min) edit, but it leaves out most of juicy stuff: [[http://www.podtech.net/scobleshow/technology/1712/editors- ch...](http://www.podtech.net/scobleshow/technology/1712/editors-choice-of- twine-the-semantic-web-tool)]</comment>


Airbnb users are buying cheap dwellings as rental properties. So is Wall Street. - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/weird-future/9e72094b0754

<comment><USER2> Though I agree with the sentiments regarding large scale firms creating the housing crash, then buying back the assets in liquidation, this article makes it as though this is the first time a large publicly traded company has been in the housing rental market.

There are many companies that have been managing properties as their business model for years, so to point out that this is something new and possibly evil is incorrect.

[http://seekingalpha.com/article/156054-10-stocks-that- could-...](http://seekingalpha.com/article/156054-10-stocks-that-could- benefit-from-apartment-rental-rate-spike)</comment>


How does a back end developer approach front end web pages? - <AUTHOR>

Currently working and a student. Still learning about tons of new technologies and mainly trying to get my head around things.<p>I have worked with node and django for back end web things but once i get to the visual side of things my non-artistic self struggles. Is there any solid way to get into creating nice css and html layouts? even just for prototyping purposes at hackathons/for demo's ( i'd love to be able to write full apps not just the back end ) <comment><USER2> Take an interesting design/page you see on the web and try to replicate one part of the design using HTML and CSS. From there you can compare how you did it to how they did it, and see if you can clean it up or make it smaller, faster, better etc.

Also, I am not affiliated, but you can also try codeschool if you want something a little more formal. [https://www.codeschool.com/](https://www.codeschool.com/)</comment>


Show HN: My weekend project – Manual Viable Product - <AUTHOR> http://manualviableproduct.com

<comment><USER2> It's a fun idea, but why is it $20/month? I feel like I could throw this together for free. Am I missing something?

<comment> taylor-smith I love the idea as well but feel as though there should be some sort of free option

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback.

Obviously for developers it's something you could throw together, but I'm planning on adding more features later if there's real interest in this for them.

The target audience right now is more towards non-developers who just want to throw something together with as little investment as possible to validate/iterate their idea.

<comment><USER3> I would've thought most non-developers would find a developer and ask them to partner or quote? Or try Wufoo or Weebly or something like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I clicked "Sign Up", then pressed "Cancel" on the Javascript input prompt. You cannot close the this prompt without either forcing your browser to stop creating prompts, or by providing a valid address.

Disabling my "cancel" button is not friendly behaviour at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed it - thanks for your feedback :)

<comment><USER5> Doesn't look fixed; I just tried it a minute ago. I almost had to kill my browser. (Frankly, I'm disappointed in my browser that it didn't detect abusive behavior from the website.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Try Chrome - they give you an option to check a box and not allow any more popups.

<comment><USER6> So does FF (normally at least)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So how is this better than a page with an iframe form? ([http://www.wufoo.com/](http://www.wufoo.com/))

<comment><AUTHOR> No time to set up a form, just include your questions in the js call.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I just clicked on sign up and now I can't and I would close my browser.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed it- thanks ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> MVPs all the way down

<comment><USER10> Yeah, are the emails from this service sent manually?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, that part is automatic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ha. This is identical to most of my tech backend!</comment>


Obie Fernandez: What's This Crap About a Ruby Backlash? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.obiefernandez.com/content/2008/01/whats-this-crap.html

<comment><USER2> > As far as I can tell, the originators of these ideas are people that betray > agendas against the success of Ruby and/or Ruby on Rails.

Says the person who has a vested financial interest in the opposite.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here come the flame wars... Look away. Don't get sucked in. It's fun to start grinding on each other, but oh, such a waste of time!

</comment><comment><USER4> God, I actually read this. What the hell is wrong with me? I need a life.

...meh

INTERNETS FIGHT!

</comment><comment><USER5> It's the predictable pattern of tearing down a darling. I think its actually for the better. Ruby has had a nice ride, some negative attention will help drain the hype. What'll be left will be closer to the truth and able to stand on its own merits.

</comment><comment><USER6> I used to think programming languages were tools to create with but now I realize they are not tools they are a religion.

<comment><USER7> I sometimes think of them as clothing styles.

<comment><USER8> Thats my preferred analogy. From what little I know of the fashion industry, the parallels are amazing. A lot of the fashion industry spends its efforts trying to out do and impress itself (and tear itself down) - with little regard to what "ordinary" people want to wear.</comment></comment></comment>


TDD on crack  - <AUTHOR> http://use.perl.org/~masak/journal/39639 <comment><USER2> He's just described ZenTest::Autotest.

<http://zentest.rubyforge.org/ZenTest/Autotest.html>

I've actually been spending the last week getting this working with my java/junit/ant workflow, so it's at least somewhat portable to other languages/environments.

</comment><comment><USER3> This would be even more interesting if it pulled some of the "shiny lights" reward mechanisms that MMOs (and casinos) have going for them. I'd love to be able to hit a "you did 10 write-test-fail-write-code-pass cycles in a row" achievement, or something similar. It would only be truly addictive if the points you earned had some sort of in-game use, though--perhaps you could spend them to raise your questions on StackOverflow, or "buy" coding tools for free fom participating companies? Or perhaps companies could use them as a metric, and give programmers salaries proportional to their code-karma? ;)

</comment><comment><USER4> I enjoyed your article. Gets me thinking about how to setup a dev environment where you constantly and visually see progress towards goals you've set. TDD is kind of like that already. As you knock out functionality for the tests you can feel your progress and get that sense of achievement.

</comment><comment><USER5> Vapourware? That's ok, lack of existence has never bothered the Perl community.

<comment><USER6> Rakudo and Perl are separate projects. So I am not sure what you mean.

<comment><USER7> He probably means that he heard somewhere several years ago (before 2005, for example) that there were no implementations of Perl 6 and hasn't bothered looking in the five years since then. It's okay. It's a common disorder.

<comment><USER8> When the front page of www.perl.org says "Latest Version: 5.10.1," you can't just blame other people for being confused about whether Perl 6 is released or usable.

Look at <http://perl.org/> and then compare it to <http://python.org/> or <http://ruby-lang.org/> (two other languages that are going through big backward-incompatible platform transitions). Consider how someone who isn't following the development process is supposed to find out about and download Perl 6 (versus Python 3 or Ruby 1.9).

<comment><USER6> Perl 6 is not the next major version of Perl 5, which is what "Perl" refers to. The next major version of Perl 5 is Perl 5.12.

Perl 6 is a totally different programming languages that is like Perl 5 in many ways.

<comment><USER8> And yet if I go to <http://dev.perl.org/perl6/> I read that "Perl 6 is the next version of the Perl programming language."

Read the FAQ on that page and follow the links, and try to see them from an outsider's point of view. You and I know about the relation between Perl 5 and Perl 6 and the rough status of projects like Rakudo. But for someone who hasn't been following the development, it's _extremely confusing_ and its not their fault, its the Perl 6 community's fault.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Alibaba crushes records, brings in $14.3B on Singles Day - <AUTHOR> https://www.techinasia.com/alibaba-crushes-records-brings-143-billion-singles-day/ <comment><USER2> 91.2 B finally.</comment>


US Senate approves proposed Internet Sales Tax - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/23/u-s-senate-approves-proposed-internet-sales-tax/

<comment><USER2> This is misleading: A score of Internet lobbies, such as Netchoice, representing Facebook, Yahoo, and (TechCrunch's parent company) Aol, argue that the senate's bill "does nothing to address what the Supreme Court says was an unreasonable burden on interstate commerce," explains Steve Delbianco of Netchoice.

"Undue burden on interstate commerce" comes from the negative implications of the Commerce Clause, which gives Congress power over interstate commerce and prevents states from putting an undue burden on interstate commerce in an area where Congress has not legislated. If states impose sales tax pursuant to an act of Congress, then there is no Commerce Clause concern since Congress does have the authority to regulate interstate commerce.

<comment><USER3> Had to look this up. Looks like there was an earlier ruling in 1969 about sales tax on mail orders. The 1992 case seems later further refine the ruling.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Bellas_Hess_v._Illinoi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Bellas_Hess_v._Illinois)

[http://www.infoplease.com/cig/supreme-court/sales-taxes- mail...](http://www.infoplease.com/cig/supreme-court/sales-taxes-mail- orders.html)

<comment><USER2> Basically in Bellas Hess, the appellant claimed that the tax was unconstitutional on Commerce Clause and Due Process grounds. Specifically, that states imposing a tax on mail orders infringed on Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce and alternative that it violated appellant's rights under the 14th amendment to equal protection under the laws. In Bellas Hess, the Court agreed with appellant without justifying the decision explicitly on due process grounds. In Quill, the Supreme Court clarified that it was deciding on Commerce Clause grounds.

The relevant distinction is that Congress cannot pass legislation to allow the states to violate the 14th amendment. It can, however, pass legislation that allows the states to burden interstate commerce since if Congress has sanctioned it than any such state legislation doesn't infringe on Congress's power.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "There are some exceptions: Amazon currently charges California residents sales tax"

I hate this incorrect terminology. Amazon merely collects sales tax on behalf of the state. The state is the one charging the sales tax.

<comment><USER5> Amazon has also been collecting NY State sales tax for quite some time now. Does anyone know if Amazon has any physical presence in NY State? I've never received anything from Amazon that has been shipped from NY.

I noticed that items that are sold by Amazon always incur NY tax, but items sold by independent retailers who sell through Amazon's site often don't incur tax.

<comment><USER6> NY argues that Amazon's relationship with NY-based affiliates constitutes a NY-based Amazon marketing force that produces a sufficient nexus with the state to make them subject to NY law on collecting sales tax. It's currently being litigated [1].

I recall reading [2] that Amazon actually supports the federal legislation though, because they're slowly moving towards having a 50-state presence anyway, as things like grocery delivery and same-day delivery become a bigger part of their strategy.

[1] [http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/06/us-tax-amazon- cour...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/06/us-tax-amazon-court- idUSBRE9151C720130206)

[2] [http://www.slate.com/articles/business/small_business/2012/0...](http://www.slate.com/articles/business/small_business/2012/07/amazon_same_day_delivery_how_the_e_commerce_giant_will_destroy_local_retail_.html)

<comment><USER7> Didn't Amazon drop affiliates in other states when those states tried to use the affiliate rationale to charge sales tax? Why is NY different?

<comment><USER6> That was their initial "scorched-earth" strategy, but they quickly dropped it. In recent disputes, e.g. with Texas and New York, they haven't terminated affiliates, and have instead opted for a mixture of negotiations and legal battles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Playing devil's advocate here. No one pays "use tax" -- the tax you already owe your state for things you purchase online/on the phone etc and do not currently pay sales tax on. This is already an illegal activity that I'd hazard nearly 100% of the US is in on.

If I wanted to come into compliance here, I'd have to save all of my reciepts from every time I shop online, and probably hire an accountant to figure out all the extra tax I owe. This doesn't sound interesting to me, or enforceable by the government. However, online stores collecting this for me could be a value add in some ways.

Let's take a look at the free market though (although I get that issues of tax law cannot be fully free as they start in a non-free place). What if online retailers _offered_ to collect the tax for me, with the note that you owe it either way and they're trusting you to pay it on your own otherwise? I would likely opt-in much more often. Similar to suggested tips increasing tipping in NYC cabs, this might move the needle in the right direction.

<comment><USER9> I pay use tax. I've also been audited several times. It's easy to say, "oh, everybody ignores x tax, it's completely unenforceable," but if you get audited, yeah, the state can look through your bank and credit card records and get a pretty good idea of what you owe.

<comment><USER8> Honest question, what sort of process does it look like for you to total everything up? Do you keep running totals or do it at the end of the year? Do you have an accountant? Would you prefer that online stores collected for you?

<comment><USER9> Usually I'd use a combination of my Mint records (which had convenient totals for each online merchant, of which I really only used 5 or 6 in a typical year) and the Massachusetts safe harbor law (which essentially allowed me to assume that I spent 1% of my AGI on untaxed purchases less than $1000, and pay use tax based on that number). If I bought anything online or out-of-state that cost more than $1000, I'd add that in separately, but that happened rarely enough that it was pretty hard to forget how much I spent on those items.

What we have right now is a situation where some stores collect taxes in some states. As a consumer, I would prefer it if all stores collected taxes for all states, for three reasons. First, I wouldn't have to figure out which stores already collected taxes, so it would save me time. Second, because I like seeing how much I'm going to pay for something, taxes included, at the time of purchase. And third, because I believe that taxes should be levied fairly and consistently, and that would put online stores on the same footing as brick- and-mortar stores, and honest taxpayers on the same footing as people who are inclined to see what they can get away with.

As a startup founder, however, I'm less enthusiastic. The process of filing taxes in all 50 states would be a huge burden. If a national sales-tax clearinghouse existed, it would be a different story, but under the status quo, it's just too much paperwork for a small company to handle.

<comment><USER10> Sales Tax Clearing House as a Service!

<comment><USER11> Amazon and others already offer this as a service, though they tend to be on the expensive side as far as these things go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> About time, on many fronts. Sales tax is the most economically beneficial tax (from a long-term viewpoint), encouraging savings, reducing consumption, and is taxpayer controllable. And it captures gray/black market transactions as well. No reason any electronic retail transactions should escape. Modern tech removes any "burden" claims.

<comment><USER13> It's also incredibly regressive, targeting poor people with a higher percentage of their net income than rich people.

<comment><USER14> Poor people are disproportionately likely to shop in-store rather than online because they're vastly more likely to be unbanked (i.e. no credit card) and be low-education.

I'd hazard an educated guess that the percentage of income spent by the poor online is tiny. Both because the above factors and also because the majority of spending for those group is going on rent, groceries, vice (cigarettes and alcohol) and transport which aren't commonly bought online in any case.

<comment><USER15> > _"because they're vastly more likely to be unbanked"_

This is not true in the US, where your debit/bank card is also a VISA/MasterCard fully usable online. Even people with zero credit can _easily_ spend money online. If you have a bank account in the US, there are effectively no barriers to spending the money in it, online.

<comment><USER14> If you're unbanked you don't have a bank account, hence no debit/credit card. Between 18-24% of the US population fall into that category.

<comment><USER16> Walmart and K-Mart are "fixing" this with free payroll check cashing and rechargeable debit cards. One uses MasterCard and the other uses American Express.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't think any new tax will pass in the House.

<comment><USER18> It's not a new tax. It's to allow states to collect taxes that are already on the books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If I were King: eliminate sales and employment taxes, replace them with carbon taxes.

<comment><USER20> This would only penalize the poor, as the rich could afford back yards full of solar panels and wind turbines, and drive Tesla cars... And since the rich are such a small percent, this would have virtually no impact on the environment.

I love the idea, but I do not believe this is a better solution to sales and employment tax.

<comment><USER21> I think a consumption tax is the best solution. Basic necessities like food, housing, etc.. are not taxed (or are minimally taxed). Luxury items like televisions, cell phones, etc. should be taxed though. This wouldn't penalize the poor, but the government would get the money they're looking for.

Can anyone think of any downsides to this?

EDIT: Yikes, I leave for half an hour and come back to a maelstrom of comments. So, to acknowledge one of your points, it could be difficult to categorize what is or isn't a luxury item. But, c'mon, is a $90,000 car really a _necessity_? I think it's easy to tell which items definitely aren't necessities.

<comment><USER22> One solution that a number of people have been working on is called the "Fair Tax." [1]

The general idea (and I'm probably missing some of the significant points, but this is a rough outline) is that there would be no income tax at all — all taxes would be on consumption. Rather than trying to regulate what is taxed and what isn't, _everything_ would be taxed at the same rate.

To fight any regressiveness involved in that, _everyone_ would get a set amount of money every year, which is equal to the consumption tax you'd be paying on the first, say, $30K of purchases a year. So if the consumption tax rate is 25%, you'd be given $7,500 a year. (The term they use is "prebate.") That way, everyone's first $30K of expenses is a wash. After that point, you're only taxed on the money you spend beyond it. The more you buy, the more tax you pay.

A number of Republicans have been in favor of the Fair Tax, and it was one of the planks of Gary Johnson's presidential campaign last year. But it gets support from Democrats as well, and was one of the main components of Mike Gravel's campaign in 2008.

I'm sure others will point out downsides to it, but one that I know of is that current retirees, who have already paid income tax on some of their savings, would have much less purchasing power under the new plan. That is, they'd be double-taxed on the money used to buy goods under a Fair Tax plan. I believe there's also been skepticism from opponents that the numbers actually work out well enough that a Fair Tax system would bring in enough money (as compared with current tax revenues). [Edit: the double-taxation wouldn't be limited to retirees; they're just the group that's often mentioned as being significantly affected.]

(I'm not an apologist for a Fair Tax approach; just wanted to mention it as one theory for introducing a consumption-based tax in the US, in case you're interested / want to learn more.)

1\. <http://www.fairtax.org/>

<comment><USER23> One seemingly obvious problem to this (at least the way you describe it, maybe not the way it's actually proposed - I didn't read it) is that this would disincentivize spending, and incentivize saving. So it would seem[1] that this would cause the economy to take a big hit.

I just remember a few years back when the economy was at the worst we've seen in a while, the government seemed to really push spending and investing in stocks over saving. So if there was no penalty for earning money, only spending it, we'd be back in the same boat.

[1] Disclaimer: I'm certainly not an expert in economics.

<comment><USER24> The US economy is in such dire straights because of consumption, not due to the lack of it. The Keynesian economics fraud of the last few decades (see: Japan, half of Europe, the US), which has been pushed 24/7 at every level of government and media, is massively to blame.

Ask yourself one simple question: how does higher consumer spending help the US economy when all that money flows back to eg China? Right now the US is merely a middleman, with service workers that take a small cut for distribution.

China as you'll have noticed is getting wildly rich, at breakneck speed, without the need to constantly push over consumption (their savings rate is doing just fine).

America needs a lot more savings, capital investment, and production, and a lot less spending. We had this algorithm decades ago, and we were extraordinarily rich accordingly, and were far better off with a lot less consumer spending as a ratio of our economy.

To paraphrase Warren Buffett: you get rich producing things, and you get poor buying things.

China figured out how it works. Their economy more closely resembles the US economy of the early 20th century, in terms of production vs consumption. The arguments being made for China to consume more, are arguments in favor of China handicapping itself to allow others to compete more easily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Can anyone find the text of the resolution? This seems to link to a blog that links to a blog that links to a blog...

<comment><USER18> It's S 336. <http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.113s336>

HR 684 is the corresponding bill in the House. <http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.113hr684>

edit: replaced with permlinks

<comment><USER6> Looking at the sponsors is interesting. The main sponsor, Mike Enzi, is a conservative Republican, who you might not normally expect to be sponsoring tax bills. But he represents Wyoming, a state that heavily depends on sales taxes, because they've made the decision not to tax personal or corporate income, leaving sales/use taxes as one of the major revenue sources (responsible for ~40% [1] of the state budget).

[1] See the pie chart on pg. 4 here: [http://eadiv.state.wy.us/s&utax/Report_FY11.pdf](http://eadiv.state.wy.us/s&utax/Report_FY11.pdf)

<comment><USER26> Its not too unusual for a republican to be in favor of a sales tax. Income, capital gains, property, and inheritance taxes are another story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Please note that BOTH California Senators voted in favor[1]. They also both voted for PIPA.

Dear internet - we fail at politics.

[1][http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_c...](http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=113&session=1&vote=00062)

</comment><comment><USER28> These were not the tax loopholes people wanted to be closed!

On the other hand, this will benefit brick and mortar stores.

<comment><USER29> Just so you know: Every current rule that could potentially reduce your tax burden is now called a "loophole". For example: Limiting deductions for high earners (but not exactly the same deductions for low earners) is now routinely described by politicians and the media as "closing loopholes".

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> At this point I wish the Federal Government would pass a straight 5% sales tax for goods crossing state lines. Vendor pays the Fed quarterly with report of zip codes bought from. Fed pays the origin state and the destination state 2% each and keeps 1%. Fed tell states no other taxing of items bought online.

<comment><USER30> Yes, let's introduce another federal tax. Because we don't pay enough in federal income taxes, duties on imports, state income taxes, state sales taxes, county sales taxes, local sales taxes, and local property taxes. Let's add another tax. I'm sure I missed a few.

<comment><USER16> I'm normally in the same belief, but the cost of each state getting to tax what is sold online differently will cost more than this. I figure it is a replacement for 50+ taxes with weird rules for one streamlined tax. I'll take that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Another tax increase without any corresponding budget relief. So more taxes and and the same debt.

<comment><USER18> This has nothing to do with the Federal government. This bill only allows states to collect taxes.

<comment><USER31> I'm aware of that. California does not need to tax people more for the exact same reasons.

Competition between brick and mortar stores and Amazon _is a smokescreen_. Tax deals are given to big box stores all the time, to this day. The whole "protecting small business from online competition" angle is a ruse.

<comment><USER18> They're not taxing you more. You already need to report and pay any sales tax that you didn't not pay on items purchases over the Internet. The so called Internet tax moratorium was not an actual ban on taxes, instead it did not allow states to force Internet entities to collect sales tax. This removes that barrier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Don't all tax bills have to start in the house?

<comment><USER33> This isn't a true Federal tax/spending bill as much as it's a change in policy regarding how the states may enforce their own powers to tax.

<comment><USER32> Isn't a tax a tax though?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> So does this mean that the United States government will now accept bitcoins?

</comment><comment><USER35> Interesting that no one ever talked about the alternative to Internet sales tax, to solve the competition problem: removing sales tax, and replacing it with use/income/property/head/etc tax.

<comment><USER36> Sales Taxes are the least economically destructive of all taxes. If a government's goal to optimize economic growth they should eliminate income, property, capital, etc taxes are replace them with a sales/consumption tax. Bobby Jindal proposed this in Louisiana.

<comment><USER37> Sales Taxes are vary economically destructive as unlike income tax they artificially shift the economy from real goods to services. The only way to avoid this is to tax all spending and gift giving which ends up being just another income tax.

<comment><USER38> > from real goods to services

Hence inventions like Canada's "goods and services" tax.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: If I work with applied mathematics should I still study analysis? - <AUTHOR> Is studying analysis helpful for those people who aren't working on proofs every day, i.e. engineers, people in finance, etc, who still need to apply mathematical techniques?<p>The speculative answer if I had to guess is yes, because understanding the theoretical basis of something can't hurt, but I'd like to get some answers from people who actually work in applied quantitative fields. Has your study of analysis helped you, either directly or indirectly? <comment><USER3> The closest thing to feeling like I had a genuine superpower came after I studied a bunch of pure mathematics – the (richly interconnected, actually conceptually easier to manipulate after you've grown accustomed to them) building blocks of applied mathematics – and was then able to dazzle people who had only been exposed to applied mathematics with genuinely new, and often beautiful, perspectives on things they thought they already understood the whole story of. Pure mathematics, like analysis and algebra, makes it all immensely more rich and personal.

<comment><USER4> I feel the same way. Intellectually it seems like it's been all downhill since leaving grad school :).

<comment><USER5> Did you complete grad school all the way to a doctorate? I'm in grad school right now weighing the decisions to leave a year after a master's degree.

<comment><USER4> No, I left a couple of years after my MS degree, while I was starting to do work on my dissertation. While I do think that CS isn't as intellectually satisfying as math, it's definitely more lucrative, so I have zero regrets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can give you one data point. I have worked on computer vision (implementing, training, and running convolutional neural nets), and have also applied machine learning methods on natural language processing. I have never taken analysis and I do not feel like I am missing out. In most applied machine learning fields nowadays, the "math" of the it is used more as a gateway into intuition, not really anything rigorous. For example people in machine learning research nowadays use the word "manifold" a lot, but I would wager most do not have a rigorous background in topology. In applied machine learning, the details of your problem domain matters more than understanding the derivation of your tools, this is true even in computer vision, which used to be a lot more rigorous before convolutional neural nets. However, if you are looking to take a rigorous course in probability, I would recommend analysis since it is the foundation of probability, you cannot derive a lot of basic theorems in probability without it. I took a rigorous class in probability once without analysis, and the gaps in knowledge was Clear everyday. If you are determined to tackle theoretical course just as a confidence builder, then I would recommend linear algebra since it has far wider applications. Linear algebra is also a must if you want to understand many optimization tools used in machine learning.

As for finance, I have a no direct knowledge here, but I do know when companies like D.E. Shaw recruit here at Penn for quantitative analysts, a strong math background (including analysis) is a must. Whether they use it on a day to day basis is unclear. However, taking one analysis class will not be sufficient for such firms, they are looking for many years of formal schooling and in some cases, publications.

</comment><comment><USER7> Subspaces, Point-Set Topology, Compactness, Matrix Spaces, Limits, Linear Dual Spaces, Hilbert Spaces, Banach Spaces, Subgradients, Gâteaux derivative, Connected Sets, Path Connected Sets, Cauchy Sequences, Power Series, Taylor's Theorem, Properties of Monotonic Functions, Linearity, Hessians, Jacobians, Stone-Weirstrass, Heine-Borel, Fixed Point Theorems, Contraction Principle, Lebesgue Measure, Measurable Functions, L2, Fourier Series....

As an applied mathematician with additional degrees in CS and Engineering, I have used them all. More importantly, the knowledge of those topics helped me understand many algorithms and they lead to a deeper understanding of probability (Lebesgue Measure).

<comment><USER8> do you mentor?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's ridiculously easy to apply a method which is not applicable if you are not at least a little aware of the theory behind it. You will get wrong results and you will never know why. The wrong results might never be found out because the impact is so complicated that you cannot even point out the source. I have sadly seen this happen too often in various places. But because our other systems are robust enough, this issue (even though it affects things) is not really heeded to until something really catastrophic happens (like 2008 crash).

</comment><comment><USER10> Studying analysis gives you more tools to model changing systems. The more tools you have, the easier it is to abstract things. That's really all applied mathematics is, abstracting stuff to things you can do mathematical operations on. When counting sheep, all you're really do is abstracting the sheep as units and then performing simple arithmetic.

So why should you have all these tools to abstract stuff? Because you want to do something new and innovative. If this really isn't that interesting to you then don't bother but every time I find a new way to model something and try it out (often with unsuccessful result, though) I get giddy with joy. The few times I come up with something new and people actually value what I've contributed with it feels like heaven, however small these contributions end up being.

</comment><comment><USER11> Yea - you don't have to go immensely deep into Analysis, but having some experience in it will give you an understanding of what makes the algorithms "tick" and when they break-down.

This is especially true for things that involve numerical analysis - approximation techniques/diff eq's/etc.

And just for clarity - while any class on Analysis is mostly proofs, it's not really about the study of proofing techniques. It will use proofs as a vehicle to discuss _analytic_ properties of functions (how limits behave at infinity, etc).

</comment><comment><USER12> tl;dr yes.

A lot of applied mathematics (physics, quantitative finance, some machine learning) rely a lot on analysis. In a more general light, I would advice against skipping bricks of something that big and that close to your direct field because "it is useless".

</comment><comment><USER13> I can probably add the perspective of a physicist training where analysis is an integral part of the mathematics education (typically taking ~1/3 of the time of a bachelor degree (bachelor~=3yrs)). In addition, I (partially) work (study) in the applied mathematics nowadays (CFD/PDEs, numerical methods) and without doubt, analysis tools are still everyday ingredients to understand what's going on. So definetly: Yes

</comment><comment><USER14> Hard to say, we don't know what your calc, diff EQ, LA, probability/stats etc classes were like. You could self study Pugh, Abbott or Spivak. At a bare minimum you can read Lara Alcock/s little red book on analysis. Or you might unfortunately be in the position that you don't quite have the support group, focus or prep for Pugh or Abbott's books.

The other question is, what are you giving up to study real analysis? If you don't have great software engineering skills, along with related skills (linux/network admin, database design/tuning) there's a good argument that you would be better off developing those skills instead.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's helpful if you are reading literature actively. If you are interested in some new technique and want to understand the theoretical aspects of it, then knowing analysis will be useful in deciphering the presented proofs. It may also be helpful when implementing said methods as you will better be able to formulate sanity checks and such for your implementation.

</comment><comment><USER16> If you want to go deep on stochastic processes / probability theory - <USER2> in finance - then you'll need it for sure. Otherwise probably not. Whether "needing" to know it is a good reason for not learning it is another question. If you're asking the question then you should probably just learn at least a little for general interest.

</comment><comment><USER17> Worth taking statistical analysis at the least. Depends on what you want to do. "applied quantitative fields" is a very wide brush to use.

</comment><comment><USER18> Can anyone recommend analysis textbooks suitable for self study?

<comment><USER14> Without knowing your background, Pugh's and Abbott's are usually good choices as are Schramm's Dover, and while not really analysis texts, don't forget the classic fundamentals/foundations books by Courant/Robbins _What is Mathematics_ , Ian Stewart/D Tall _Foundations of Math_ , Felix Klein etc

Here's lots of reviews: [https://www.maa.org/tags/real- analysis](https://www.maa.org/tags/real-analysis)

[https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/real- analysi...](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/real- analysis+book-recommendation?sort=votes&pageSize=15)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/math/wiki/faq#wiki_what_are_some_go...](https://www.reddit.com/r/math/wiki/faq#wiki_what_are_some_good_books_on_topic_x.3F)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It really depends. For learning and using ML/DL it hasn't helped me much, the bottleneck is stats and linear algebra for that field. Even if it helps, is it the most valuable and broadly useful tool you can add to your current toolkit as of _right now_? Likely not. Learning to write proofs helped in other ways, the content wasn't actually terribly important.

</comment><comment><USER20> (1) I don't think this is necessarily the right place to ask this. HN is not particularly known for mathematics, it's better to ask at a math focused site like [https://math.stackexchange.com/](https://math.stackexchange.com/)

(2) My generic answer to the question is - NO. You can be a good quant, engineer, etc. without having the knowledge of how to prove the theorems in a real analysis undergraduate course. However, knowing the proofs may be helpful if you decide you want to do write theoretical research papers in a particular area, even just for the sake of "mathematical maturity".</comment>


We're in an economic depression...as bad as 1929 - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/17/keen-on-economy-paul-kedrosky-techcrunchtv/

<comment><USER2> It depends on what the definition of depression is. We have to remember that modern macroeconomics is still a new field (having started _during_ and largely because of the Great Depression). With very little experience with depressions and their effect on the global economy, even the best minds are just guessing. To quote Terminator 2, "The future, always so clear to me, had become like a black highway at night. We were in uncharted territory now, making up history as we went along."</comment>


Raytheon discloses future lasers that can stop hypersonic missiles - <AUTHOR> https://defence-blog.com/army/raytheon-discloses-future-lasers-that-can-stop-hypersonic-missiles.html <comment><USER3> The future missiles are going to be shiny.

As in "mirrors".

The BIG SECRET of directed energy weaponry is that there's a very simple and cheap method of reducing absorbed energy by orders of magnitude - reflect it in arbitrarty directions (or even towards the source if one wants to be naughty).

The sensors (which have to absorb EM radiation to function) are vulnerable, but can be easily protected by shutters for the duration of attack. Modern inertial navigation units are well capable of providing precise guidance without any external data.

<comment><USER4> Just have a wide range of frequencies you can use, every material absorbs some part of the EM spectrum

<comment><USER5> An ablative covering negates this.

Hope they have enough time to aim in the same spot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The production value of that video had me gut busting in laughs... did they pull an PS1 intro video from strike series or something lol

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyQ5Jf7cpLY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyQ5Jf7cpLY)

</comment><comment><USER7> > _When it comes to ballistic missile defense, "you want to get it into > airborne platforms and into space," said Evan Hunt, a former U.S. Air Force > navigator who now works in business development for Raytheon's high-energy > laser products. "It's better to look down than to shoot up."_

What about atmospheric interference? (And whatever unfortunate soul might be behind the missile assuming the laser misses.)

<comment><USER8> It's also against international law to put weapons in space.

<comment><USER9> Who's going to stop them? The international police?

<comment><USER10> It would be pretty amazing to see Interpol knocking on the doors of the Raytheon corporate HQ.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Lastly, there's the "line-of-sight" problem; lasers shoot perfectly > straight, meaning a laser shot toward the horizon will eventually hit the > Earth's curves.

Huh, and here I thought the Hollow Earth theory had been discredited, but I guess I might believe Raytheon and its lasers. Cyrus Teed would be so pleased.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure what the earth being solid or hollow has to do with this. If you're on the surface of a ball, you can only project a laser / straight line over the hemisphere above you; not through the ground.

As an example, if you're at the North Pole and the South Pole base fires a ballistic missile at you, you can't aim a laser at it, as it would diametrically intersect the Earth.

Instead, you have to wait until the missile passes your horizon. The point at which it does this depends on its altitude. Hypersonic vehicles attempt to make interception harder by reentering the atmosphere from space earlier than a traditional ICBM, and travelling at a lower altitude in their final phase.

<comment><USER13> I think it was a joke. The way the quote was worded makes it sound like the Earth is curving _upwards_ \- if you shoot straight to the horizon you'll hit air, not the ground.

<comment><USER14> To me it sounded like a journalist's awkward wording of a description from an engineer. Some frequencies of light will bend to the curvature of the earth due to the atmosphere[1]. Lasers apparently "hit the Earth's curves" rather than bending with them.

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

<comment><USER15> This happens everyday with the sun during sunrise and sunset [1]. When you first see the apparent top of the sun during sunrise, the sun is still well below the horizon physically. It's just that the image of the sun is refracted around the curvature of the earth a bit.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise#Angle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise#Angle)

<comment><USER16> but it's also ~6 minutes _ahead_ of where we see it due to the time it takes the light to get there. I wonder which effect wins?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Slightly off topic, but one of the weapons I fear the most is a non-visible spectrum anti-personnel laser.

<comment><USER18> Bullets are already close to that: invisible, long-range, and shot from very compact, inexpensive weapons, compared to lasers.

<comment><USER17> The thing that scares me is the silence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _See how we're hurtling toward lasers that can stop hypersonic missiles._

Sounds like Raytheon is taking the page about concept cars from the car industry and talking about totally conceptual products like they've already shipped.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't see why such lasers would require high power. Couldn't an array of smaller lasers be used instead? It seems to me this would also counteract blooming and add redundancy. If using microwave / radio radiation instead, a phased array would allow the system to be instantly and multiply targetable.

</comment><comment><USER20> Weapons designers will then try to form ablative surfaces that can withstand any practical level of bombardment.

<comment><USER21> Adds weight and limits range.

<comment><USER22> For a ballistic or hypersonic missile you need it anyway, to radiate away atmospheric heating.

The challenge with an ABM laser weapon system is generating enough power on- target that it's not just a rounding error for the energy that needs to be dissipated anyway. A quick back-of-the-envelope physics calculation indicates that'll be hard. An 80kg warhead is moving at about 5000 m/s upon re-entry and has a kinetic energy of about 1 GJ. I dunno what fraction of that kinetic energy is converted into thermal energy upon re-entry; for manned spacecraft it's "almost all of it" because they need to go subsonic for parachutes to deploy, but for ballistic missiles, let's guess 1/1000th for ease of math, or 1 MJ. Current laser weapons systems have a range of about 1mi (and the range of lasers is heavily limited by atmospheric considerations - <USER2> refraction will reduce your accuracy, while heating of water vapor, dust, and air can sap the energy). That's about 1/3 of a second on target, so the power output needed is about 3 MW. Current laser weapon systems like the AN/SEQ-3 have a power output of about 30 kW. This needs to scale up by a factor of 100 under conservative assumptions.

Like the article said, the solution to many of these issues is to put the lasers in space and intercept missiles in the boost phase. Then they're moving slower, you're targeting volatile fuel & oxidizer instead of heat shields, and you don't have atmospheric losses to worry about. You do have the issue of how to loft a giant laser, capacitor, and energy source into orbit, though, and how to protect them up there when a conflict starts.

<comment><USER21> This is a good point, the weak spot is that the missile designer "knows" where the extra energy is coming from (friction with the air). Once you add a laser, the energy can come from "any" angle (within some limits of course).

Think of it this way, the shuttle could not dissipate massive energy on the 'top' because re-entry involved air over the bottom.

As for power rating, the Boeing High Energy Lasers were demonstrating effective missile defense in 2017[1], they were ramping up their power levels pretty quickly.

I see the biggest impact early on being fleet defense against hyper-sonic anti-ship missiles rather than ABM defense. Basically a CWIS replacement since it doesn't help to lose your $10B aircraft carrier to a $100M missile.

[1] [https://www.boeing.com/defense/missile-defense/directed- ener...](https://www.boeing.com/defense/missile-defense/directed- energy/index.page)

<comment><USER22> Warheads spin on re-entry anyway, so laser energy directed at any point other than the centerline (which is pretty hard to hit) will get dissipated and spread across the whole warhead.

I think the biggest impact is actually against low-tech threats: swarms of fast attack suicide boats, or 1960s-era cruise missiles that have ended up on the black market. There's a big cost advantage to being able to take these out with a quick 30kW pulse rather than a million-dollar missile, particularly since the threat itself probably cost less than a million dollars.

In a great-power conflict (where "great-power" is rapidly expanding to include private multinational corporations) the U.S. military is fucked anyway, but then, so is the opposing power. Perhaps that's the best we can hope for, because it's a pretty strong incentive not to start great-power conflicts in the first place.

<comment><USER23> > In a great-power conflict [...] the U.S. military is fucked anyway, but > then, so is the opposing power. Perhaps that's the best we can hope for, > because it's a pretty strong incentive not to start great-power conflicts in > the first place.

Yes. That is indeed the concept of a (nuclear) deterrent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Great, so maybe one attack vector is defended, and that of 2nd-rate States trying to lob 80 year old technology.

Missile defense has been in development for decades, and it never works. By the time it does, missiles will look like cross-bow bolts on the warfare menu.

Military spending is the elephant in the economy.

</comment><comment><USER25> Isn't there going to be a pretty short list of targets that are more valuable than the missiles themselves? I can see an aircraft carrier making sense, but it feels like there are cheaper ways to blow up most other targets.

</comment><comment><USER26> The main trouble with ground-based is clouds, that is what makes you go airborne.

I could picture planes in the air 24-7 circling around vulnerable points, or being dispatched on warning. Either way it would be expensive but would be awesome.

<comment><USER27> >I could picture planes in the air 24-7 circling around vulnerable points

The US previously spent a few billion and 16 years on that exact idea as part of the SDI, before canceling it a few years after the first working tests because, to quote the Defense Secretary,

>I don't know anybody at the Department of Defense who thinks that this program should, or would, ever be operationally deployed. The reality is that you would need a laser something like 20 to 30 times more powerful...there's nobody in uniform that I know who believes that this is a workable concept[0]

If the laser power was a problem, maybe Raytheon's tech will make the concept more plausible. The wikipedia article says there's been some additional experimentation mounting lasers on UAVs since the program was cancelled.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1)

<comment><USER26> There is terminal defense against ICBMs and there is midcourse defense against hypersonics.

The ballistic warhead has little more to do than absorb the heat of reentry in the terminal phase. The energy to destroy it would be a good fraction of the energy that was in the rocket to begin with.

The hypersonic weapon on the other hand has to have sensors, effectors, and be unable to complete it's mission after receiving less beamed energy.

The airborne laser was killed not because it wasn't powerful enough (for some mission) but because the chemical laser it used was dangerous, expensive and otherwise impractical. The air force knew the army was developing modular fiber lasers so they decided to wait for that before building another platform, which could also be used against everything from drones to small ballistic missiles.

Hypersonic is just the cherry on top.

The alternative for interception hypersonics would be the nuclear-tipped ABMs of old, since the maneuvering capability of hypersonics defeats "hit-to-kill".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> As a civilian, when we get lasers to take out everyone in the weapons business, I'll celebrate.

</comment><comment><USER29> Doesn't this just turn a targeted nuclear strike on a city into a dirty bomb strike on a city?

<comment><USER29> Or possibly a chemical attack using vaporized plutonium

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> So this means we should expect big wars in Europe again? Without nukes the deterrent will no longer exist.

<comment><USER31> You'd also have to consider the likelihood of one getting through your laser defences, and what the cost of protecting your country with these would be.

If you have a 99% chance of stopping a missile, but your adversary has tens or hundreds of thousands of missiles to fire at you, those aren't great odds.

Plus in a pinch, modern societies could probably come up with some fairly hideous deterrent weapons that didn't require missile delivery.

<comment><USER32> That's a good point, and in fact probability of error doesn't even need to come into play. If you can destroy 10 missiles per second with probability 1, then you have a 0% chance of stopping 11 missiles at once. Massive simplifications here but the point stands. Scale matters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > takes bigger optical mirrors with coatings that withstand such a massive > amount of energy

What of missiles coated the same way?</comment>


Nautilus to be acquired by an investor group of fans - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/nautilus-to-be-acquired-by-ownership-group-of-super_fans <comment><USER2> I'm one of the new co-owners. All of us are longtime subscribers. This is about love for the magazine and its mission first and last. We're not going to change Nautilus. We just want to get it into the hands of many more people. We do think we can navigate Nautilus to a sustainable place for the long haul; the market is there and the product is fabulous. We just need to operate it precisely and keep investing in great writing, editing, and art. Nothing fancy, just running it right and for the right reasons.

<comment><USER3> I didn't see anything in the announcement about existing subscriptions and how they'd change. I'm interested in knowing what may happen to lifetime digital subscribers. I can understand it being removed and something else put in place, but the question would be "at what price?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So it becomes a business, which will focus on generating profit from the magazine, thus Nautilus will become yet another bog standard science magazine subjected to the same structures as other magazines.

And we all know that consumers don't fork enough money to support ads-free journalism, which leads to perverse incentives.

<comment><USER5> > And we all know that consumers don't fork enough money to support ads-free > journalism, which leads to perverse incentives.

yes they do. susbcription-based models are doing quite well. besides the big heavyweights, in UK alone there are several smaller and successful subscription-based magazines: the TLS, the economist, the spectator etc. in us sports there's 'the athletic' and its clones.

<comment><USER6> > several smaller and successful subscription-based magazines: ... the > economist, ...

Maybe I am misreading, but did you mean to imply that The Economist is a 'small' newspaper? It has been around since the 1840s.

<comment><USER5> compared to the best known subscription success stories -- the NYT, WP -- it certainly seems significantly smaller. but i agree, that comparison isn't very valid, it's certainly a heavyweight amongst magazines.

<comment><USER7> Is WP WaPo or something else? WaPo went for only a few hundred million when sold. Economist around the same time was valued 3-5x more at $1B. Did WaPo turn things around that much? Economist is mostly owned by super rich elite families, so prestige would've entered what they paid too. But WaPo was purchased by Bezos so not likely he was super skimpy on the price (even being considerably "poorer" back then)

<comment><USER8> Yeah they did. After being bought by Bezos they made a number of changes that have been for the better. They've turned a profit over the last few years based on their growing subscriber base and their digital publishing business.

Of course they've built it all using AWS and I would love to learn more about how they leverage that platform.

<comment><USER7> I see. Interesting. I know WaPo used to do deals with Prime too.

Even with that, NYT has to be much bigger and their profit is only around 2x Economists. Economist is pretty big in most metrics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I spent $100 on subscriptions a couple Christmases ago. Never received any product nor was I able to get in contact with anyone at the company.

Really turned me off since I was a big fan of their content and already had a yearly subscription.

<comment><USER10> I'm sorry you were not able to get through to us...or to get your magazines. Please send your details to me at firstname.lastname@example.com and we will make it right.

<comment><USER9> thanks! just sent you an email :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is the second time I see a link on HN, mentioning Hypergiant industries.

Their website [0] and their algae bioreactor page [1] is so over the top that it looks fake. I assume this is real company selling real solutions (consulting) but this is puzzling nonetheless.

Look at the case study, "ROD LIFT INVENTORY SYSTEM" [2], they replaced a few excel sheets by an application with a database, this is great for the customer, but not earth shattering either.

[0] [https://www.hypergiant.com/](https://www.hypergiant.com/) [1] [https://www.hypergiant.com/green/](https://www.hypergiant.com/green/) [2] [https://www.hypergiant.com/client/rod-lift-inventory- system-...](https://www.hypergiant.com/client/rod-lift-inventory-system-ai- consulting/)

<comment><USER12> Yep, that's a _serious_ Aperture Labs vibe there. Or maybe (even worse) Faro Automated Solutions. Very techno-utopian, as though things like ethics and unintended consequences don't exist. Scary.

<comment><USER13> Scary? It looks like it was made by an excited teenager.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Larry Summers, 71st Secretary of the Treasury, former Chief Economist of the World Bank, Charles W. Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus, Harvard University.

this is the guy who was just featured in that article on bill gates rubbing elbows with Jeffrey Epstein.

</comment><comment><USER15> I thought this was about the filemanager

<comment><USER16> Hahaha same

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nautilus was good when they started but at some point they seemed to switch to the sort of frothy, inspirational pop-science-as-spiritualism dreck that belongs in Newsweek or Fox News, but with a tiny bit more depth

<comment><USER18> On top of the content, I was a paid subscriber during 2017-2018, and I received maybe 20% of the editions I was supposed to receive. Probably due to international shipping and their liquidity problems, but it still felt bad.

<comment><USER19> I never received my issues, so I disputed on PayPal. They never responded to the dispute so I won it automatically after a month or whatever it was. Then, a year later, I received some issues in the mail. Bizarre.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This makes me happy. I Enjiy reading both Nautilus and Quanta. Great articles.

</comment><comment><USER9> I spent $100 on subscriptions a few years ago for Christmas gifts and never received anything. Still annoyed at that.

</comment><comment><USER21> I really like Nautilus. I have been subscriber in the past, I got my magazines and they were awesome. I am worried they might lose quality once they need to produce profit, however "fan" those investors are.

But that is life and if they do, there will be something else.

</comment><comment><USER22> "Group of fans" is a weird way to describe serial entrepreneurs and angel investors. I'm sure they like the product. There's only one person on that list without a background in finance/investing, who happens to be the spouse of another person on the list.

Congrats on the exit, I just think it's odd to describe the acquiring party that way.

<comment><USER23> Is it? While "syndicate" might have been a more succinct and accurate way of describing that group, it is a little bit uncommon. From most instances I can recall, acquisitions tend to be by a single corporate entity or a private equity fund of some kind. Unless such an entity existed prior to this acquisition, it does seem a bit out of the ordinary.

<comment><USER22> I think ownership groups aren't uncommon in the small business world (as in not-startups, like family businesses). Totally different world but that's how sports teams' acquisitions are handled these days.

<comment><USER23> Wow, that's fascinating -- I don't know too much about sports team acquisitions but it's pretty cool if that's how they work. If this is something you know more about, would you mind going into more detail about how that works?

<comment><USER7> The valuation of sports teams for the big 4 (and especially big 3 in terms of big numbers) has skyrocketed. It is quite possible from here on out that no NBA or MLB team will be sold for less than $1B total valuation. And no NFL team for under $2B. It's a lot for individuals to pay. It's rare for teams to be owned by companies or funds like the NBA's Toronto Raptors. But even that holding company has one guy owning a third of it. Or NFL's Green Bay Packers being a public company.

Most leagues also have requirements for how much of the team can be paid for with debt, loans, etc. For a perspective on how crazy the skyrocketing valuations are, NBA and MLB teams outside major markets were going for under $500M and NFL teams for way under $1B. Major market teams were still going for a lot like NFL's Washington DC Redskins went for over a billion 20 years ago, but even just five years ago the NBA's Milwaukee Bucks went for around $500M. Now that they have a new stadium, sometimes that stuff is conditional on the purchase, their value has probably doubled (along with currently being a championship contender with an MVP superstar entering his prime).

At this point, almost no individuals can take on a whole team purchase on their own. Or be able to pay up a higher price on their own. Exceptions are also people wildly richer than most owners like Steve Ballmer who's around top 15 richest people and paid handsomely for the NBA's LA Clippers, though he will also profit off it as well. Many, if not most, current big 3 majority owners would not be able to afford their own team if you looked at their net worth outside the team.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Am I reading this correctly? It sounds like a group of angel investors. Not "superfans."

<comment><USER25> The two terms are not mutually exclusive.

<comment><USER7> Sure. But like talked about above, sports teams are also usually bought by fans. It would be weird to state those purchases that way though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Actually it is one of the best file explorers out there, I'm sure they will take in on the right track.

<comment><USER27> This is one of those rare occasions that it might be worth your while to read the actual article...

<comment><USER28> Given numerous uses of the term, a modicum of specificity in the title would help. There are even multiple publishing-related instances.

Though as a science fictional character myself, I'm partial to Vernes's. Which might make for an even more interesting story ;-)

"Nautilus Magazine" being a good start.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilus_(disambiguation)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilus_\(disambiguation\))

<comment><USER29> What else helps is not assuming you know the content of TFA from its title.

<comment><USER28> I half suspect the original comment was a subtle dig at the ambiguity itself.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>