Uber's Credit Card Is Bankrupting Restaurants - <AUTHOR> https://blog.producthunt.com/ubers-credit-card-is-bankrupting-restaurants-and-it-s-all-your-fault-af76ea9ca46d <comment><USER2> Seems like a horrible submarine article. "Oh look! Uber did $Thing! Get in on it now or miss out like a loser!"

Like, honestly? This is it? Uber, the "behemoth" who failed to crush the taxi industry as promised, is now somehow going to "disrupt" not just the restaurant industry, but also the credit game? Let's not forget that they actually need to start making money. Are VCs going to subsidize peoples' credit purchases now, too? Why not have them subsidize my housing as well? Why stop at ride sharing and food?! Uber all the things, right? Shame that Uber forgets that it is not and never will be Amazon.

Gonna file this one under "total horseshit"

<comment><USER3> I don't know what planet you're living on where Uber is somehow out of the game and not completely destroying the demand for taxis.

<comment><USER2> I come from the planet where Uber is currently:

\- Hemorrhaging cash like a hemophiliac taking blood thinners

\- Embroiled in various legal battles

\- Losing labor market share to Lyft

\- Losing customer market share to Lyft

\- Failing to push legislation to eliminate taxi medallion systems

You know, the planet where they've lost their Keanu Reeves (TK) along with billions of dollars. The planet where I and many others do not use Uber in favor of a Lyft or taxi. The planet where Uber created a failing business model and tried to put lipstick on the pig by evading laws and throwing cash at the dumpster fire. The one where they subsidize every single ride with VC cash while they hold out hope for Level 5 autonomous vehicles to replace their substandard workforce on a more-than-optimistic time frame. The planet where Uber is a black hole of delusional "manifest destiny" style Silicon Valley kool-aid.

Taxis aren't dead. They'll be around well after these fools are parted with their money.

<comment><USER3> I don't really think I'm going to convince you that maybe Uber is doing what they've planned on doing all along and in the grand scheme of things seem like they're doing it pretty well. It sort of seems like you have some stake against Uber to be so vehemently against it. Just because Uber doesn't have a 100% market share doesn't mean they're doing poorly.

<comment><USER2> I have no stake for or against Uber in any manner. I just call spades what they are.

> I don't really think I'm going to convince you that maybe Uber is doing what > they've planned on doing all along

Conversely, I don't understand how you can argue I'm unconvinceable despite not providing anything to really be convinced by except vague allusions to some sort of secret plan that's working perfectly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Color me extremely skeptical of this. Uber can't seem to get taxis right and now they're going to dominate an entirely separate business with established competitors? And the evidence for this is that they launched a credit card when they could have just bought the transaction data from some data provider and tried to de-anonymize it instead like other tech companies do. Something isn't adding up.

</comment><comment><USER5> Content:

>Uber won't be able to single-handedly kill the restaurant industry

Title:

>Uber's Credit Card is Bankrupting restaurants and it's all your fault

I am confused.

<comment><USER6> Bankrupting some restaurants != killing the restaurant industry.

<comment><USER5> Creating "ghost restaurants" != Bankrupting some restaurants

This article is mostly fluff and contradictions (and credit card advertising). However, it does alert to the predatory information collecting / hoarding and value of that information to the restaurant industry, however speculatively those alerts are

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I own a food service business - this entire article is a bunch of conjecture and on-its-face nonsense . The only space that Uber is even going to be able to potentially dominate is that of delivery food, which is already a deeply entrenched industry with a ton of local and national and international competition, and unlike the taxi industry there's not much in the way of pricing that can be knocked down. Places that specialize in delivery already have minimal storefronts and not much in the way of wait-staff. So while these phantom kitchens with strict delivery may cause a few smaller joints with poor advertising and middling food quality to go under, those businesses were likely not going to last all that long anyway. Even with Uber's driver network and the power of Data™, I don't foresee Bill's Speedy Chippy going under due to Uber undercutting them anytime soon when it's got an established customer base.

On top of all of this, Uber still loses money with its ride-sharing, so what makes people think that they're ever going to make a lasting dent in delivery food? The only actual information they're able to garner from a card is how much people are spending, where, and at what time. That's got its use, but it's not exactly revolutionary never-before-seen information.

</comment><comment><USER8> There sure are lots of links to credit cards in this "article"...

<comment><USER9> This. Affiliate marketing payout for credit card signups is pretty significant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> So the whole article is about a future where Uber _might_ be able to do the bankrupting but the title is about how it _is_ doing it right now?

A classic clickbait.

</comment><comment><USER11> Middle of the article:

>Edit: Uber publicly denied that they would receive an individual's spending habits from the Uber card. However, that doesn't discount their previous attempts to acquire this data and don't prevent them from acquiring this data in the future from the card or other avenues.

Undermines the entire first part of the article...but don't let that discount it

</comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone think this credit card could just be an ad for UberEATS?

> "Dining, including UberEATS"

I bet that subconscious thought could increase spending enough to pay for any given rewards.

Most everything in this article seems like a huge reach. I'm sure Uber wants to keep options open given the rough waters right now, but I doubt any of this is a real plan at this point.

</comment><comment><USER13> How are they obtaining information about what dish you ate from a single row in a database that details the tax, tip and total? That, along with the restaurant name, is the ONLY information transmitted to the card company.

</comment><comment><USER14> _and it 's all your fault_

Thanks for the consumer bashing clickbait</comment>


We have to fix fashion if we want to survive the climate crisis - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90311509/we-have-to-fix-fashion-if-we-want-to-survive-the-next-century <comment><AUTHOR> Adopting minimalism or not buying from doesn't seem to be a solution that will make massive change. Is government regulation needed here?

<comment><USER3> Yes but no.

The article has a narrow view of why folks buy more clothing - <USER2> things like weight gain/loss, growing (children), differences in body chemistry (blood thinners make you feel chilly, hormones hot), money available, new job, cheap clothing falling apart quickly, ill fit after washing, and so on.

Government regulation can help with some of this. Making sure consumers can afford better items, regulations on unused inventory, quality (though I don't know how you'd figure this out). You could encourage sewing and try to change people's minds about the sorts of clothes necessary.

But a lot of these are difficult to solve without rationing things out.</comment></comment>


Show HN: an app for dedicating youtube songs to Facebook friends - <AUTHOR> http://young-forest-8019.herokuapp.com/dedicates

<comment><AUTHOR> Please give your feedback and suggestion.</comment>


Boston Globe's "Boston. Racism. Image. Reality" Series - <AUTHOR> http://apps.bostonglobe.com/spotlight/boston-racism-image-reality/series/image/ <comment><AUTHOR> The Boston Globe's famed Spotlight investigative team produced a multi-part series of articles on racism in Boston.

Among the attention grabbing highlights, "African-Americans in Greater Boston have a median net worth of just $8", and "black unemployment [was] more than double the rate of white workers in 2014."</comment>


Stegospam lets you hide your data in spam to avoid NSA/GCHQ spying. - <AUTHOR> http://charlieharvey.org.uk/page/stegospam_steganography_with_perl_and_spam

<comment><USER2> I would be highly surprised if mails (even spam) wouldn't be scanned for steganographically hidden messages (no insider knowledge though). Hell, I would even want this for my own antivirus functionality.

I would be surprised if your stegospam wouldn't have a red flag raised by any scanner which utilizes advanced heuristics. Especially since your stegospam utilizes a form of steganography which is already described into great detail by e.g. David Kahn in The Code Breakers (nice crypto history book).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I think you might be correct and I do note that my approach is not to be trusted prominently ;-)

I am interested to know what attacks would be possible.

My guess is that you'd look for known sentences -- which you can mitigate by using a custom corpus.

Or you do some sort of statistical analysis on the length of sentences, which is mitigated by distributing the sentence lengths along a standard distribution.

Or you do a statistical analysis for word lengths themselves. But if the data you are hiding is GPGed then this information is not obviously vulnerable to statistical analysis of this type because the character distribution ought to be even (ish).

I suppose you would mitigate against attacks on the length of the messages by splitting your message and sending from multiple accounts.

Are there other attacks that I've missed? I'd love to know.

And I'll check out Kahn's book, thanks for the suggestion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> After stegospam pass, have you not some html redundancy free room to utilize?

Are you aware of deogol, perl, stego?

Not much gained, but there is a scanner how much free space per html file size.

..........................

Deogol

an HTML steganography tool

What is Deogol?

Deogol is a commandline Perl program implementing basic steganography on HTML files

[http://hord.ca/projects/deogol/](http://hord.ca/projects/deogol/)

<comment><AUTHOR> No wasn't aware of it. I've just downloaded and having a play. Very interesting approach, using tags as the carrying medium.

<comment><AUTHOR> And for the sake of completeness, I've also found spammimic [http://spammimic.com/](http://spammimic.com/). There is a paper at: [http://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/crypt/old/mimic/mimic.text](http://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/crypt/old/mimic/mimic.text)</comment></comment></comment>


Drone CI announces native Kubernetes support - <AUTHOR> https://blog.drone.io/drone-goes-kubernetes-native/ <comment><USER2> Interesting although apparently still experimental. Does anyone know if Drone has good support for a monorepo? As in, on a PR only running tests for the projects which have code changes in that PR? With CircleCI the solution we use is really hacky.

<comment><USER3> We do not have native support for limiting Pipelines or Pipeline steps based on files changed, however, this can be achieved with plugins. I wrote a post about it here: [https://github.com/drone/drone/issues/1021#issuecomment-4178...](https://github.com/drone/drone/issues/1021#issuecomment-417819643)

There is a lot of interest in a plugin that supports limiting step execution, so I would love to work with teams that have mono-repository experience to come up with a solution. Perhaps eventually the plugin would become part of Drone core ...</comment></comment>


Leadwerks Game Engine Reaches 10k Paid Users - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/leadwerks-game-engine-reaches-10000-paid-users-2076080.htm <comment><USER2> The article was pretty unclear about what's going on here. I've pieced together the following, please correct mistakes if any.

10.000 sales at $100 each is 1m in revenue. Steam keeps 30%, so it's closer to 700.000. The product has been for sale for only 2 months, as far as I can tell. So 350k a month.

The company has been working on this product since 2006, and according to wikipedia they launched version 2.0 to the public in May 2008. Two years ago their kickstarter only raised 40k.

So they've been building a customer base for the last decade. They've got hype and people who love their game engine. Which means the sales of the last two months consist mostly of preorders. Once they've converted these core customers to the new version the sales will plummet. Therefore the revenue for Leadwerks Game Engine will be around $3M a year. That's a lot of money for regular folks, but not for a studio that has to make payroll every two weeks.

I've always loved games, but when I look at the numbers the market looks so unforgiving.

edit: looks like the company is tiny. Just a couple of people. So that means they're doing pretty well. Congratulations to the team.

<comment><USER3> Also it is an interesting business model. Get on steam with no 'greenlight'? I am going to check it out...

<comment><USER4> _> Get on steam with no 'greenlight'?_

Where does it say that? If that's true, it would bring the overall quality of Steam indie titles down even further, so why would they do that? Don't get me wrong, there is some great indie stuff on Steam right now, but there's also a long tail of exceedingly bad "games" that make you wonder how they even got on there.

<comment><USER5> From what I can tell, Leadwerks has a "Game Launcher" application on Steam, and you can upload your game as a workshop mod for the Game Launcher App.

[http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/tutorials/_/publishi...](http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/tutorials/_/publishing- games-r32)

So, its not like its actually a title on steam, but its available to be played through steam if that makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are insane competition in the gaming scene, so if you are very good at the technical side you are probably better off making engines then actual games. And it's probably easier to have developers as customers then to have (teenage) gamers as customers.

</comment><comment><USER7> Has anyone used it? How is it compared to Unity or UE?

</comment><comment><USER8> I remember when LeadWerks was just a GUI editor for Blitz Basic 3D. These guys have shown a lot of determination and persistence to take it this far, hats off to them!

</comment><comment><USER9> This looks like a press release.</comment>


Wikipedia Clickstream Data Release - <AUTHOR> http://ewulczyn.github.io/Wikipedia_Clickstream_Getting_Started/

<comment><AUTHOR> The Wikipedia Clickstream dataset shows how people get to a Wikipedia article and what articles they read next. It consists of counts for 22 million (referer, article) pairs derived from 3.2 billion requests to English Wikipedia collected during the month of February 2015. The Blog post describes how the data was generated and gives a step-by-step guide to get your explorations started!</comment>


The Banker Who Said No - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/03/banking-andy-beal-business-wall-street-beal.html <comment><USER2> He's also behind the Beal Conjecture which offers a $100,000 prize for either the proof or counterexample:

<http://www.math.unt.edu/~mauldin/beal.html>

 _BEAL'S CONJECTURE: If A^x +B^y = C^z , where A, B, C, x, y and z are positive integers and x, y and z are all greater than 2, then A, B and C must have a common prime factor._

</comment><comment><USER3> FTA:

> "This is the opportunity of my lifetime," says Beal. "We are going to be a > $30 billion bank without any help from the government." (A slight > overstatement: He is quick to say he relies on federal deposit insurance.)

And he pays for it, too (premiums, y'know). That's not "help" as we usually mean the word; that's a purchased service. Now, as for the bailouts -- which Beal is not getting -- that is "help".

<comment><USER4> It is a good read and he obviously is a "good" banker for not overextending his bank. But to say he doesn't rely on government help makes it sound like he runs a normal corporation. Banks are not normal corporations. Mine can't loan out money at 26 times my deposits. Can yours? Of course not, your not a bank. This is the rub with banks. They want to behave like private entities, but they leverage government backed currency which normal corps cannot do.

I think we need a new class of corporation for banks and possibly insurance companies. A class that recognized they are hybrid entities, and not the same as a typical private company. It turns out we sort of do have this class (there are lots of hoops to jump through to become a bank). But this class is built on top of the normal rights and privileges of the standard corporate entity.

<comment><USER5> Lot of upmods for an extremely confused post.

 _Mine can't loan out money at 26 times my deposits. Can yours? Of course not, your not a bank._

...oh kay.

 _A class that recognized they are hybrid entities, and not the same as a typical private company_

Umm. You seem to be getting at GSEs, a standard corporate form.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government-owned_corporation>

Generally, this doesn't seem to work out too well with financial companies, see Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac (which weren't GSEs, but close enough...) The truth is, the vast bulk of banks were perfectly healthy and responsible. Almost all the trouble came from a few gigantic ones, and the reasons for their behavior were many.

<comment><USER6> Is it really responsible for a bank to back 30-year loans with demand deposits, at 25-to-1 leverage? I really can't imagine that happening without government intervention, and if it only happens when the government makes it happen, there's a good reason to expect that it's irrational.

Banks are hybrid companies in the sense that FDIC insurance means they are basically conduits for lending to the government. If I deposit $100 with my local bank, I don't care whether the banker keeps it in cash, invests it in penny stocks, or spends it on whores -- no matter what, the government backs my deposit.

This is for other promises from companies. E.g. if I pay someone $100 now for $100 worth of lawn care over the next five years, I make damn sure I can trust that person. If I pay the bank $100 for a CD maturing in five years, I don't.

This gives all banks an incentive to take undue risk, balanced by government regulation, which gives them a secondary incentive to find clever ways to take big risks (which they do by hiring clever people who would otherwise do more socially useful stuff).

<comment><USER7> >E.g. if I pay someone $100 now for $100 worth of lawn care over the next five years, I make damn sure I can trust that person. If I pay the bank $100 for a CD maturing in five years, I don't.

> This gives all banks an incentive to take undue risk

Actually, you've just demonstrated that FDIC insurance gives you an incentive to take undue risk. You'll deposit your money at any bank without regard for whether said bank is trustworthy.

BTW - It's curious that you seem to believe that better rules will help since you also seem to believe that "clever people" can always get around the rules.

As to whether a govt-run bank would do any better, feel free to point to the fraction of govt enterprises which are run as well as you'd require of govt run banks. Which states' DMV is "good enough"? How about the post office?

<comment><USER8> Bank of North Dakota. A government run one..

<comment><USER7> > Bank of North Dakota. A government run one..

Majority-Scandanavian states seem capable of lots of things that other states can't manage. Since the majority of US states are not majority-Scandanavian, we can't use the majority-Scandanavian ones as a model.

<comment><USER8> Well, ND is a German majority state. I understand that it is tempting to say that it has something to deal with scandinavian personality, but look up a bit up north you'll see Canada, with very non-scandinavian in it's population makeup, however I'd think it is a lot like Northern Europe in its political and economical structure

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> To prepare bids he locked himself in his office to write a computer program with 50 variables (now 250), ranging from home price changes by neighborhood to interest rates to origination dates.

Yep, he's a hacker.

<comment><USER10> This sounds like a multi-variable linear regression he did in Microsoft Excel?

<comment><USER11> Other than excel having some floating-point arithmetic problems, what difference does it make what tool he uses?

Most things are linear to a first approximation anyway.

<comment><USER12> Only because most first approximations are linear.

<comment><USER11> I can't prove it, but I will assert without much fear of a counterexample, that, for most if not all systems, linear models describe most of the variance with the fewest number of free parameters. This may be as much as 90% in some cases, but almost certainly more than 50%.

In other words you get the most bang for your buck. This is not to say that a linear approximation might not be very inaccurate on important parts of the problem domain, but the variance that a higher order model would describe would be less, perhaps much less, than the portion the linear part describes.

<comment><USER13> First you say, "linear models describe most of the variance with the fewest number of free parameters," and then later you say, "In other words ... the variance that a higher order model would describe would be less, perhaps much less, than the portion the linear part describes."

In my limited statistical experience, the problem with higher-order models is not that you get less bang, but that you need more buck: that is, there are too many free parameters. But in your second quote, you seem to be talking about higher-order models that have as few parameters as a linear model, i.e. one parameter, plus one per independent variable. What kind of higher-order models are you thinking of?

<comment><USER11> Sorry, I mistyped.

I meant that the _additional_ amount of variance described by a more complex model _beyond_ that described by a linear model is much less than that described by the linear model in the first place. Obviously the total amount will be more, or else your model is both complex and _wrong_. :-)

Consider:

      Model A - 1 degree of freedom - 60% of variance
      Model B - 2 degrees of freedom - 75% of variance

That extra DOF has gotten you 15% better description of the variance, but at the cost of complexity. Perhaps that is worth it, perhaps not. As has been noted above, that complexity has a real cost that can manifest itself as overfitting, instability, and lack of generalization. The curse of dimensionality is very real.

All that I meant was the linear model will probably capture the most variance per unit complexity. Which gets back to my original point that most (all?) problems are linear to a first approximation. It's not just that people are lazy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think it's pretty telling that this guy was investigated for _not_ consuming the fraudulent crap coming out of Wall Street.

Wouldn't that be like a 1999 startup being investigated because they didn't have exponential growth projections in the IPO prospectus?

<comment><USER15> Well, if someone does something completely out of the ordinary for [what the investigator thinks are] no apparent reason, then that should raise red flags to investigate.

I'm not surprised he was investigated; Massively different investments, raising money without buying anything apparent, and not trying to cash in whenever possible do point to an anomaly -- possibly even a fraud -- happening.

So long as he's not wrongfully convicted, I don't have a problem with investigations.

<comment><USER16> _Well, if someone does something completely out of the ordinary for [what the investigator thinks are] no apparent reason, then that should raise red flags to investigate._

Yeah, that's the point...that it was extraordinary to behave sanely (as opposed to "consuming the fraudulent crap coming out of Wall Street").

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Beal shrank his bank's assets because he thought the loans were going to > blow up. He cut his staff in half and killed time playing backgammon or > racing cars.

I have always respected a man who drives his cars hard and plays a mean game of backgammon -- and actually makes money while doing it. Upvoted.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is a great article.

If anyone is interested in learning more about Andy Beal's million-dollar poker games with the best players in the world in 2001, you should check out this book: "The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time", by Michael Craig. It's got a pretty complete profile of Beal, and tells all about the games.

</comment><comment><USER19> Does anyone know if it's possible for an individual to buy a CDO?

Supposedly everyone wants to get rid of these things and is desperate for cash, which makes it seem like a decent opportunity for buyers. If I had $10,000 I could afford to lose (and was willing to take a long shot with) is there some market where I can buy those sort of assets?

<comment><USER20> To start with, you have to be what is commonly called an "accredited investor." This is a requirement because almost none of the "investments" sold as CDOs are registered with the SEC. The accredited investor loop-hole is the one you'll need to invest in hedge funds and the like: it means something like _you're a big boy now, and you don't need the feds protecting you from crooks_. Alternatively, your organization will need to be qualified as an institutional investor.

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

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

Ask your broker if they've got any they want to unload.

<comment><USER19> I'm a bit short of the wealth requirements to be called an accredited investor ... (1M net worth + 200K/year income).

That just seems blatantly unfair to me. It's the government setting up a different set of rules for the rich.

<comment><USER21> > That just seems blatantly unfair to me. It's the government setting up a > different set of rules for the rich.

There was one VC here that mentioned how someone emailed him about also investing in 3 of the companies that he had invested in, and how he couldn't let the person do it because the person didn't fit the requirements to be an "accredited investor" then he mentioned what three companies they were. They were all money pits with no path to profitability. I believe the "accredited investor" bit helps people from having there life's savings thrown away on a unregulated bad investment. The ultra rich either inherited money or built a real business from the ground up and sold it. I would suggest one of those paths instead :)

<comment><USER22> But doesn't the current crash highlight the superfluousness of the 'accredited investor' limits? Even investments poor people are allowed to make -- like common stock of giant financial institutions, even those with government sponsorship (Fannie/Freddie) -- can essentially go to zero.

The general markets are down 45% from their peaks. Why should submillionaires be denied the chance to put 55% of their portfolio in T-Bills, and 45% in highly-risky unregistered private securities? That wouldn't have done any worse than the public stock market... and might do a lot better, if you understand the private companies involved.

And if submillionaires are such easy marks, why not any limits on how much they can gamble in casinos or even state lotteries?

The 'accredited investor' limits are silly; a phony security blanket at best, an unfair impediment to broad-based entrepreneurship and investing at worst.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "To prepare bids he locked himself in his office to write a computer program with 50 variables (now 250), ranging from home price changes by neighborhood to interest rates to origination dates." - Forbes.com 2009

"Beware of geeks bearing formulas" - Warren Buffet 2008

<comment><USER24> Didn't Berkshire Hathaway loose a lot of money because of the current mess?

<comment><USER25> They went down as the market went down and did have some losses, but they also had an enormous pile of cash and not very much debt. Buffett has been waiting for the market to go down like it has so he could make his move with that cash. As a result, I think he's going to make out extraordinarily well in the coming years.

Sorry for the Buffett fanboyism, but he's the man.

<comment><USER24> As I understand it he made some serious missteps in the recession. WP:

> Berkshire Hathaway acquired 10% perpetual preferred stock of Goldman Sachs > at $123[40] only for it to fall to below $60. Furthermore some of Buffett's > Index put options (European exercise at expiry only) that he wrote (sold) > are currently running around $6.73 billion mark-to-market losses.

Warren Buffett tarnished as Main Street oracle <http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/604619>

Buffett suffers big losses at Berkshire Hathaway [http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2009/02/28/buffet-suffers- big-...](http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2009/02/28/buffet-suffers-big-losses- at-berkshire-hathaway/)

(d Berkshire's net worth dropped a whopping $10.9 billion in the final three months of 2008.

Berkshire's shares have fallen 44% since the end of February 2008. )

etc...

<comment><USER25> Actually, the preferred stock in Goldman is an option. He has the option to buy the stock at $123 indefinitely, meaning if it ever goes above that amount he can then choose to buy it and sell it for a profit.

And like I said, the stock went down with the market. Yes, at one point his stock was down 44%, but so was everything else. And if you look at the fundamentals, they have a small leverage ratio, close to zero actually if I remember correctly, lots of cash, and are one of a handful of companies still rated AAA.

The guy in the article keeps saying if only he had access to more cash he would be making piles more money. Well Buffett has the cash, and he's going to rake it in when the market rebounds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Beal Bank? I am more interested in the story of how he started the bank. How can an individual with the government's blessing can start a bank like that. Don't they need huge funds and deposits and a million financial and security hurdles? Where did he get it all?

<comment><USER26> Furhtermore, I wouldn't trust my money to a bank where the owner spends millions playing poker and brags about it. WTF?

<comment><USER27> Poker inculcates many of the skills needed for finance, and if you're good it can simply be a profitable investment.

<comment><USER28> Exactly! When interviewing for hedge funds for a quantitative analyst / trader position one should expect to be asked about poker / blackjack / backgammon.

A classical interview question / challenge would be to invent a new card game and ask the interviewees to devise an optimal strategy for that game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Buy low, sell high. This is not rocket science.

<comment><USER30> However, he does know that too.</comment></comment>


Emailing 25k Marilyn Manson fans a video of their house - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@leemartin/wkwyfl-43879e3348ac <comment><USER2> In June 2004 Reason magazine did something similar: Every subscriber to the magazine received an individualized copy with an aerial photo of the subscriber's house on the cover, and the title "[Subscriber name], they know where you are!"

[http://reason.com/archives/2004/06/01/database- nation](http://reason.com/archives/2004/06/01/database-nation)

<comment><AUTHOR> YES. Wow. This is what I referenced when pitching the project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> People are very sensitive about other people seeing images of thier homes. I'm in the military and once had to deal with a complaint about our aircraft "buzzing" a house. As the address was in nearby farmland I called the person to confirm the exact location. Maybe the house was on an approach to our airport or maybe our pilots were using it as a landmark for an exercise.

"I'm with one of our pilots now. We're looking at what we think is your house based on the address you gave us. Is it the one with the gravel driveway and L-shaped pool?"

"What? Are you taking pictures of my house?"

"No ma'am. I've got a satellite view of your address on my screen."

"You have spy satellites over my house!!@!$#!#"

"Google maps!, just google maps!"

#Click#

</comment><comment><USER4> This reminds me of the interactive video to Arcade Fire's The Wilderness Downtown: [http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/](http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> You nailed it Paul. That campaign really inspired me early on as a developer (and I think a lot of devs in music would say the same) and I've used similar tricks of geo-nostalgia in other projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Really clever campaign.

Architecture wise I would have rendered the video server side and just send a link to the MP4 to the user skipping the 6MB attachment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cheers man. I would usually do something like this server side but didn't have much time to test the pros and cons of rendering via something like FFMPEG vs. After Effects. I was pretty excited to try out the DataClay plugin as well.

We really wanted to mail the attachment because most folks would receive this via mobile and you can't download a link (easily, to my knowledge) to your mobile file system or photo library. By putting the attachment in their inbox, it's a one-click process which gets them one step closer to sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> you leaked the videos url in your medium post :( Now everyone can check the location of MM fans. [https://s3.amazonaws.com/wkwyfl/WYWYFL_1.mp4](https://s3.amazonaws.com/wkwyfl/WYWYFL_1.mp4) [https://s3.amazonaws.com/wkwyfl/WYWYFL_22357.mp4](https://s3.amazonaws.com/wkwyfl/WYWYFL_22357.mp4)

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha. That's like saying Google Maps can leak the locations of people. There's nothing to tie the users to the videos but I've gone ahead and turned off that S3 because you gave me a small heart attack.

<comment><USER6> better safe then sorry! ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. Thanks for the nudge

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is awesome. How did you end up working on projects like this one? This kind of interactive one-off experiences are something I've been interested in for a long time.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1) Got lucky: [http://leemart.in/origin](http://leemart.in/origin) 2) Worked really hard and stayed as curious as possible 3) Add 15 years

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sounds like an wesome campaign. Congrats! Are there any sample videos available?

<comment><AUTHOR> Cheers man, check this out:

[https://twitter.com/leemartin/status/907308086184087552](https://twitter.com/leemartin/status/907308086184087552)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is pretty awesome. Updates on the AC bill would be appreciated ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well it's probably not going to be as bad as my S3 bill but I'm not looking forward to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Smart idea, and you got lucky there with the addresses :)

<comment><AUTHOR> If we're counting luck, this campaign was a god damn fluke.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I assume the competition had finished. Why hadn't this personal data been deleted?

Did competition entrants have to opt in to allow you to use their personal data for marketing? Or was that opt in assumed?

<comment><AUTHOR> Competition is still ongoing. It's tied into a larger campaign.

The videos were sent directly to users as part of an email confirmation of their contest entry. We did not use the videos for marketing. It was up to the user to actually share the video.

<comment><USER12> I think parents question is about if you have consent from your competition users to use their location data as part of marketing campaings as part of the ToS. While from a technical PoV this campaign is awesome, in Europe you might easily get sued for this kind of use of the data, especially since you make it quite obvious how you used the data (v.s. "hidden" data mining, which most companies can get away with).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeh, I hear you. Users consented to sharing their location as one of the variables required to enter the contest. It was a ticket giveaway so knowing their location allowed us to figure out which show they might go to. Again, the videos themselves were emailed directly to users and while sharing them publicly was encouraged, it was not something we did ourselves.

It's like... you gave me an email address so naturally I'm going to email you. You gave me a location so (unnaturally) I'm going to make a video for you.

<comment><AUTHOR> I should also note that the location consent was (in most cases) initiated by the HTML5 Geolocation prompt. Now a lot of companies use this technology to reposition something like a Google Map on their website. We did the same thing but positioned a static map and made it part of a video composition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Contestants were required to give their email address and share their > location in order to earn a chance to win tickets to see Manson live at a > show near them.

ah ok

<comment><AUTHOR> In addition, we contacted a few online store customers since we knew their mailing address. I believe the Manson camp also mailed some of those folks post cards with a similar theme.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> no video example?

<comment><USER6> [https://s3.amazonaws.com/wkwyfl/WYWYFL_X.mp4](https://s3.amazonaws.com/wkwyfl/WYWYFL_X.mp4)

where X is 1-22357

<comment><USER15>
      #!/bin/bash
      for ((i=1; i<=22357; i++)); do
         ffmpeg -ss 00:00 -t 00:01 -i

[https://s3.amazonaws.com/wkwyfl/WYWYFL_$i.mp4](https://s3.amazonaws.com/wkwyfl/WYWYFL_$i.mp4) -vframes 1 -f image2 mmfanloc-%05d.jpg done

whoops..

<comment><AUTHOR> Out of curiosity (since we are on Hacker News) - what would have been your next logical step on trying to connect those videos to their actual fans?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Quora responds to influx of new users with tech & process changes - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Charlie-Cheever/Quora-product/Scaling-Up <comment><USER2> It's a real challenge for Quora. Introducing some kind of automated ranking system seems like a natural way forward, but Unless Quora's really careful, on most of these systems, longer-term users generally are "higher quality": they have more posts, more upvotes, more followers, more experience knowing how to do well on the quality metrics, etc. So Quora's current techie male base starts with a huge advantage, which will make it hard for them to expand into other areas. On the other hand if you don't give the current base an advantage, they'll be justifiably bummed. A tricky situation.</comment>


Ask HN: Does anyone know what's happening with Magicleap? - <AUTHOR> It largely feels dead to me. With Apple coming out with ARKit, the augmented reality's time is now. Magicleap started in 2014 and still hasn't shown anything. It doesn't hog any media attention either. Anyone has details? <comment><USER2> They raised [1] $793.5M 16 months ago so they still probably have a decent amount of cash that they can ride out.

[1]: [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/magic- leap/funding-r...](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/magic-leap/funding- rounds)

</comment><comment><USER3> They took the wrong tack, GPUs rapidly increasing processing power means that portable devices can drive AR. You don't need super heavy, super expensive custom hardware. You just need great software.

<comment><USER4> It's unfair to make any assumptions right now because as far as I know general public did not see what they are working on, did they?

<comment><USER3> Yea, my comment is entirely based onrumoiurs, including a story that claimed their first hardware was refrigerator sized. And if those stories are right, startups can change direction, so they might already be trying to adapt their software to existing consumer hardware.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the most important NP-complete problem? - <AUTHOR>

If it were possible to efficiently solve a large NP-complete problem, the solution to which real-world problem would have the largest positive impact?<p>I'm interested in actual, concrete problems where  a solution would have a real, obvious, and positive impact. I'm not interested in (except in-so-far-as the real-world problem can be re-formulated as) the theoretical "toy" problems (travelling salesman, subgraph isomorphism, subset sum, etc.). <comment><USER2> The so called toy problems are "generalization" of many real-world problems. Which means if you could solve these problems efficiently then that (single) algorithm can be used to solve problem in different areas of engineering, physics, biology, chemistry, shipping etc. Ask any of the professional in these areas and the "real world" problem that they would describe are basically NP-complete problem i.e the solution space is huge and the only way they are trying to solve them as of now is using brute force i.e try each possible solution and check if it works or not, which is obviously not an efficient way. Most of the time the problems are kind of optimization problems - "How to use the resources I have to make most of it" OR finding the right combination - "What sort of composition of all the chemicals would produce the desired effect?"

Once in a while a breakthrough happen in these areas and some problems are now become simple but that doesn't meant they solved a NP problem, that means they have discovered that the problem was not NP complete problem. So if you really want to solve the real world problems you would basically find some insight in that specific problem which would make it efficient to solve that particular problem but it wont mean that you solved a NP problem, it would just mean that you proved that the problem is not NP problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> I get that they are generalizations; that is why I'm asking for specific instances.

Say you were trying to develop a general algorithm to solve NP-complete problems in P-time. You want this algorithm so that you can solve actual, real-world problems. Now imagine that you only have enough computing power to solve 1 problem per week; you'd likely want to prioritize the problems you solve based on the 'value' derived from solving them. I'm asking, what is the problem with the highest value?

Where could you have the most impact? Optimizing global shipping routes? Power-generation scheduling in Arizona? Encryption breaking?

<comment><USER2> The problem with the highest value will be very subjective as everyone from different fields will say that their problem is of highest value. I would suggest that you can pick a problem from a domain that you are most familiar with to understand the problem and it's impact. Wait... Are you asking about a start-up idea ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point. I'm looking for highest value by the metric of something like 'weighted sum of subjective value of all problems'.

Not really about a start-up idea. I've been talking to a person who claims to have such an algorithm, but is looking for an actual instance of a real-world problem.

So far, no one I've asked has been able to describe such a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It once cropped up for seemingly simple everyday problem that I will describe here:

When I was still a graduate student (1980's), I was helping out some local businesses. There was a need to print a lot of receipts, and these receipts would be of some size, measured in number of lines. Say 10, 35, 20, 5, 12 etc. The paper size would be about 60 lines.

And then, we thought we should reduce the number of papers actually consumed for printing, by fitting as many receipts in single paper (We had cheap manpower to cut the pages manually.) Ordering of receipts was immaterial.

So given a simple list of (receipt no, #lines), how do you re-order them and create groupings so that each of that group size is less than 66 (in this case), and yet, the wasted size from all groups is minimized?

It is famous Knapsack problem.

<comment><USER4> The knapsack Problem (the classic 0-1 version) is solvable through Dynamic Programming in O(n^2) time

The problem you described is the Multiple Knapsack Problem, which is indeed NP-complete.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't know which reduction you'd use exactly, but efficiently solving Weather Modeling would be positive for most everybody. I wouldn't reduce it to vertex cover, for example, but 3SAT solver might be a more useful tool.

</comment><comment><USER6> Isn't school roster scheduling NP-complete?

<comment><AUTHOR> I found some papers that claim it is. Do you know of a real-world dataset?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Dealing with spam from competition. - <AUTHOR>

I help a friend manage a gaming forum.
Recently we have been spammed (private messages to users and forums themselves). All calling to switch to another forum.  How does one deal with these, besides putting caps on messages per minute or catchpas?
My friend wants to do retaliation - to spam the other forum.  He feels double-wronged since that other forum already is bigger.
So far I have cleaned up our forum, and told him not to message anyone.
However, what is the proper etiquette for this? How does one handle this cleanly?
As far as I see, this all could have been instigated by a third party.   On the other hand, I do not know admins of the other forum, and they could be playing dirty.  I have no way of knowing.
So what is best way to deal with this?
Thank you
Adam Piotr Żochowski <comment><USER2> You definitely do not want to succumb and retaliate. There is no end game there, except that users leave both forums as they are spammy and unusable. There, all you've succeeded in doing is killing off two forums.

First, contact the admins and establish communication. Explain what happened, and ask if they would mind changing their ToS or put a notice on their board, asking their members to stop. From this round you can figure out if the admins did it, or if their users did it.

If it was the users, then you should probably look to technological solutions like CAPTCHA, user bans, IP bans, etc. Maybe require that someone be a member for X months, or have N minimum karma before they can PM someone else. Start filtering for certain content (URLs, names of other forums, etc.)

If it was the admins, you should plan on doing the same stuff, but you're probably going to be up against some more savvy folks. Start watching your logs seriously, and step up the tech filters. You can do things like flag suspect accounts, and filter messages to / from those accounts (if you do it silently, the other site admin won't realize his spammy techniques are ineffective).

Step 1: open lines of communication Step 3: profit!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.

I will tell my friend to try communication with the other admins.

Kind regards

Adam Żochowski</comment></comment>


JRuby 1.6.3 Released - <AUTHOR> http://www.jruby.org/2011/07/07/jruby-1-6-3 <comment><USER2> ...three weeks ago!

<comment><USER3> Nor a particularly significant release ;-) (as awesome as JRuby is generally, of course!)

<comment><USER4> I disagree:

\- Ruby object construction performance boost \- Require performance improvements

<comment><USER3> Sure. It depends on your definition of "significant." I don't consider a secondary point release with some performance improvements to be "significant" but others are certainly welcome to :-) Now 1.7..</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Please check out my new user interface and tell me if it sucks - <AUTHOR> http://blog.foldertrack.com/?p=231

<comment><USER2> I think it is a little bit old. I mean, I think your UI could look more modern, and 2000 way. Maybe you should inspire yourself in the files of a OS X style. It is very beautiful and User friendly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I will try to make a more modern looking one.Sidenote the UI is just a paint drawing of what I was thinking. It is not the real UI</comment></comment>


Are humans still evolving by natural selection? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12535647

<comment><USER2> I don't recall where I heard it, but there was an interesting statement that was made, I think in some movie, about all of us (currently living humans) being the off-spring of the victors of violence/battles past.

That only those who are living and the spawn of Humanities particularly violent nature and history.

One of the thoughts I had on this concept was that we still see humans seeking to dominate each other, and while there is certainly the overt, obvious manifestation of this through continued violence and war in the world -- there is also a more subtle version. Politics. The systems of laws, rules, and conditioning that our systems of control and governance impose on all of us.

That while we have this docile, domesticated peaceful persona - we are really in a struggle against ourselves (as a species) with respect to who has control.

Now we have other forms of exerting our wills on one another, financial violence, if you will. To control through availability of, and access to, required resources.

If financial liquidity that one has access to is akin to the ability to move, then we can "physically" force mass groups to behave in certain ways through controlling their ability to move (make/spend money).

I believe that our physical bodies are highly evolved, in that they are perfect biological machines for what they are designed to do, and we are evolving a great deal now on the mental plane -- the spiritual plane is currently on hold....</comment>


CS229 Materials (Autumn 2017) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/econti/cs229 <comment><USER2> If anyone's wondering, CS229 is the ML course at Stanford ([https://see.stanford.edu/Course/CS229](https://see.stanford.edu/Course/CS229))

<comment><USER3> Is this link for the latest offering? It has links to the video lectures as well, which OP's link doesn't.

<comment><USER4> the SEE materials are from 2007.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The Autumn 2017 materials have a lot of breadth - notes now cover deep learning, reinforcement learning, and gaussian processes.

</comment><comment><USER5> Sadly, no solution is available for the psets. Personally, I don't see any value of assignments on the web without solutions as you cannot be sure of your answers.

<comment><USER4> i know what you mean.

on the other hand, many of the problems in CS 229 are proofs and derivations that are very similar to those in the lecture notes (forcing you to understand the lecture notes in detail). as such, they can't just "tweak the problems every year" like you'd do in a lower-division math course - they're more like the exercises in an upper division math text (some problems are in fact referenced in the notes).

so, it is perhaps understandable why they might not want solutions floating around the internet forever.

(yes, i know that the stanford honor code is supposed to deal with this.)</comment></comment>


How Sony inadvertently helped a competitor and lost position in the videogame market - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123069467545545011.html

<comment><USER3> I know media loves to cover all contests as a horserace, whether it be presidential politics or business rivalry, but this is less a story of What Sony Did Wrong than What The Competitor Did Stunningly, Amazingly, Breathtakingly Right. Same with Sony's entry into the portable MP3 player market -- don't know the name off the top of my head but they've had one for a decade, right? -- which is now The iPod Market because Apple has designed and marketed one of the most iconic products of my generation.

Its not that the Sony entrant -- whatever it was -- was flawed. Its just that Apple just totally ran away with the game.

[And when my mother, who is 56 and had a stroke three years ago such that until recently she could barely move without assistance, mentions that the Wii is her favorite Christmas gift ever, you KNOW Nintendo did something right.]

</comment><comment><USER4> I love outsourcing disaster stories. Business strategy 101: never outsource the functions that give you competitive advantage. <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html>

<comment><USER5> But you can outsource in a strategic way, right? Like McDonalds, and KFC, with their seasonings - no one vendor knows all the ingredients or their quantities. Didn't Apple take a similar path with the iPod and then the iPhone? They rolled one critical aspect of the product themselves - <USER2> software - but the competitive advantage of the hardware was strategically outsourced.

<comment><USER6> the competitive advantage of the apple hardware lies in the design, not the actual manufacturing of it.

<comment><USER5> Sure, but if it was as simple as ordering parts from vendors couldn't anyone reconstruct either product on the hardware side?

<comment><USER7> They can and do, for the most part. iPhone knockoffs are a dime a dozen, for the most part, although Apple has design patents to keep them from looking too close to they original.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One line summary/spoiler: "Technical supremacy divorced from sound strategic vision is no virtue, it can even end up in disaster."

<comment><USER9> Wii innovated and became better in an area that happened to matter more: player interaction with the console. I don't think it was obvious in foresight that this was so important.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. That last line was the most glaring with the whole article because it was the Nintendo GUI that gave them their current standing. Their "vision" emerged from their greatest weakness - the inability to compete with the biggest boys in playing the same game. So instead they changed the rules by innovating. They must have known they were aiming for a different slice of the market but without appreciating how big it could be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone have any concrete info on what similarities the Cell and Xbox 360 CPU share, besides the fact that they're both by IBM?

I was under the impression that the 360 CPU is based on the old PowerPC designs that IBM already had in-house, and is a far more traditional CPU (albeit with 3 cores) than the Cell.

<comment><AUTHOR> The Wii/GameCube one definitely is based on the PowerPC designs - I hadn't heard that about the 360 chip. Lo and behold, you're right: [http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa- fpfxbox/?...](http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa- fpfxbox/?ca=dgr-lnxw961XBoxDesign)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great read, but amongst all the drama they both lost!

Now off to play some FUN Mario Kart!</comment>


Can we move toward electronic roads on the cheap? - <AUTHOR>

What if traffic lights used wi-fi or radio to broadcast their decisions?  Could cars use that data to arrive at lights just in time to catch the green?  Could they talk back and actually vote on when the light changes?
Could cars use GPS, suspension sensors and wi-fi to report where the potholes are?
There's work being done on enabling cars to travel closer together and reduce the amount of drag that most cars have to overcome, but isn't there lower risk, low hanging fruit to pick?
Can you think of any creative ways to deploy the great technologies we have now to make concrete more efficient? <comment><USER2> People adjust very quickly and easily. Much of the inefficiency the commenters on this thread observe are either the result of intent or indifference. We've had the technology for years to make for "better" traffic flow. Studies have been done which demonstrate local maxima which aren't adopted by municipalities. The main barriers are archaic ideas based on felt truths and the profit motive.

Many city planners believe that stopping traffic frequently makes the city safer. This isn't true, of course. But, it seems true and it's easy to believe. If a city timed major traffic ways properly, it's been shown that accidents are reduced. But, facts are so inconvenient. Rather, lights are timed poorly which causes greater pollution and tension. The drivers, seeking a more optimal path, start taking side roads and neighbors complain. So, the city, rather than improving the efficiency of their roads, make the neighborhood streets less attractive by adding stop signs and speed bumps.

The other factor is the profit motive. Frustrated drivers who have limited options for side streets become increasingly likely to slip through changing lights or speed between signals. The result is, of course, greater revenue for the city. You'll note, this is also a completely unsafe situation. Ideally, our municipalities are there to make things better, easier, safer. Here, they're not -- yet, no one seems to complain.

What you can do, rather than introducing yet another optimization agent (humans do this pretty well), is organize a social movement to make your streets safer through applying demonstratively better solutions with existing technology. For instance, why do demand lights initiate an immediate change rather than simply queuing the change durning the next light cycle? Negligence and miserliness.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not a big fan of the traffic light wifi idea. For starters, I think people trying to time the lights just right trying to hit a changing light at 35mph are crazy and are just asking to be hit by someone trying to beat a red.

Moreover, in places where the lights are influenced by the cars around, I think it's usually pretty easy to tell if a light is going to change soon.

But, I do think we will start seeing a lot more tech in the automotive future. I think it's the newest prius that has an auto-sensing cruise control, to adjust the speed to the car in front of you. I've been wanting that for years. Also, I think it's the first step in integrating autonomous drivers on the road.

I've also heard about work on a "train" like vehicle that other cars could attach to and be dragged along. Idea is that it'd be more efficient, plus the drivers would get to relax on their commute.

Like you mentioned about communicating where potholes are, I think all cars should be alerted to emergency personnel on the side of the road well before they reach them. I think maybe some radar detectors do something like this, maybe as a side effect. Something built into GPS would be awesome though.

</comment><comment><USER4> Related: Why are we not installing an over-head electric rail at freeways that tall trucks and buses could use? I understand that at high speeds the kind of system used by Trolley-buses the poles would constantly fall off or the wire themselves would wear and tear.

But what if one had sturdy beams instead of wires that could guide the trolley-poles, and indirectly the driver to stay in-lane. More like a third- rail, that is 4-5m above the road.

These trucks and buses could then have a weaker combustion engine to use off electricity, but perform the majority of the trip, on the freeway, on electricity.

I understand that not all countries have a near mix of 50% hydro and 50% nuclear electric power to make this decrease pollution.

<comment><AUTHOR> or how about one that work using magnetism that doesn't require constant contact? Or perhaps buses could have a robotic system to find the wire and a battery for when they cant't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You don't need to send the data to cars for wi-fi equipped traffic lights to be useful.

I can imagine hooking up a traffic light with both a wi-fi device and cameras to measure traffic flow. Traffic light A could communicate with traffic light B to let each one know how much traffic was on the way to the other light, so that it could adjust its programming. If you did this on a large scale, I would expect it to reduce traffic by a lot.

Of course, I don't know if the reduction in traffic would be greater than the cost of equipping all traffic lights with wi-fi devices and cameras.

<comment><AUTHOR> It would be useful for lights to communicate with each other.

But if you can measure traffic flow passing through one intersection, can't you measure traffic approaching another?

It seems that the way to start implementing would be to improve nodes first. Connecting them seems a bigger, more political job.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Suggestions for simple service for sending audio messages? - <AUTHOR>

We're building a simple service for sending audio messages, with an eye toward devices that won't have keyboards. Just curious if people are interested in seeing this on their desktops or mobile phones. If yes, what features would you like? Would you like the option for audio messages to be played at 2x? <comment><USER2> is this a simplified way of sending a voice not through sms?

<comment><AUTHOR> correct. is this something you're interested in?

<comment><USER2> not sure. its pretty easy to send voice notes on windows phone. maybe if it was something fun?</comment></comment></comment>


The ins and outs of research grant funding committees - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/the-ins-and-outs-of-research-grant-funding-committees-49900 <comment><USER3> In the spirit of "betting is a tax on bullshit", this seems like an interesting opportunity to try it out.

Why not find some way to make panelist rankings public (or some function of panelist rankings)? If you serve as a panelist and you rank grant proposals highly that ultimately don't meet success criteria down the road (spawning high-profile publications, generating citations, coming in under-budget, whatever...) that should reflect badly upon you as a panelist, in a public way. And over time, your "score" as a panelist would modulate the extent to which your rankings are weighted in a panel discussion. Similar to how each major European football league gets a coefficient from UEFA, and based on the coefficients, the number of direct and playoff slots into the Champion's League tournament is decided.

Imagine if academics who want to serve on a panel must agree to also have such a 'coefficient' published about them. Now, their ranking is something they must openly bet their reputation upon, and over time those who place correct bets will be given more weight when panels select grants.

Obviously this isn't perfect. The coefficient scheme could be manipulated in the same way that network connections lead to manipulation of the rankings as it is now. If we don't trust the central body measuring and adjusting the coefficients, that would be a problem (cough... FIFA).

But still, wouldn't some version of this idea -- making academics pay a public reputation price in order to vote for their preferred funding recipients -- be better than letting people rank and vote without reputation effects? In theory, it should also mean that only those with a real stake in the decision will risk the reputation price to vote -- and you could imagine even beginning to open up grant funding decisions to much wider voting bodies. Instead of a small panel, just drop all of the proposals onto a site like arXiv, and allow absolutely anyone at all to vote -- so long as the weight of their vote corresponds to their public score, and that their future score will be affected by the success/failure of whatever they vote for. No more small / closed-off committees, just open speculative voting like a prediction market.

<comment><USER4> >"success criteria down the road (spawning high-profile publications, generating citations, coming in under-budget, whatever...)"

I wouldn't handwave this aspect. Creating incentives to optimize the wrong thing can be worse than using an arbitrary filter. Your first two sound like they encourage hype, popularity contests, and quantity over quality.

How about something combining reproducibility of analysis, availability/sharing of the data, precision of theoretical prediction, and consistency of quantitative estimates from independent replications?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It sounds about as hopeless as many things in science. There are too many researchers and no good objective measurements of success. Even the author essentially said "I prefer to fund people according to whether they have recently published in a luxury closed access journal".

I had the same thought as danieltillet while reading it - if they're all equally good, then choose randomly instead of being consistently biased towards an arbitrary criterion that's going to skew the system.

</comment><comment><USER6> Disclaimer: I have never been on a grant committee myself.

I see two problems with grant committees. 1\. Some of us are more theorists, others - engineers. Some of us want to solve mysteries, others - <USER2> problems.

Which means that if the panel is composed primarily out of theorists then applications possibly yielding highly cited papers (solving general problems vs specific) are more likely to get funded. This also creates incentive to split the work up into as many papers as possible.

Likewise, panel composed primarily out of engineers is likely to undervalue deep problem research without physical deliverables. I have absolutely zero idea how to adjust for both these cases, though.

2\. Another problem is relevance/urgency. Some problems/proposals are always actual and can be polished and reapplied every year. Others can quickly get practically irrelevant or competing technology become _de facto_ standard. E.g. analogue television (terrestrial), Magnetic Cassette (solve practical problems why those got phased out). Do we rank ones over the others or keep them in the same pool? I have no idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have actually been on grant committees before and the basic problem is you only have enough funding for 10% to 15% of the proposals. Almost all of the applications are really good and from good people. The reason for this is it is so much work (at least 6 to 8 weeks full time) to write a grant application that only the really good people put them in. On top of this the universities will "pre-review" all the grant applications internally before they go in to make sure that all the weak proposal are weeded out and all the obvious flaws removed.

The end of this process is that almost every grant is really, really strong making it impossible to rank them consistently. The committee ends up ranking on trivia, or in the worse case on "old-boy" connections. We are asking these committees to do something that we know is impossible.

If we can't rank grant applications by quality then lets stop pretending we can. Just decide if they are strong and then put all the strong ones into a lottery and fund as many as we can.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Interesting to see this resurface after it died yesterday. Dang working his magic again.

What I find most frustrating about this story is that the panelist recognises that whole process is not able to determine which grants should be funded (basically they are all good), yet he still continues to try and do so. If you can't tell which of the good grants is better than the other just put all the good grants into a lottery and fund as many as you can - every other option is worse.

Edit. I should add that my experience of being on committees like this is that excluding yourself when you have a conflict is a highly effective way of getting your grant funded. The people left in the room can hardly decide to not fund you to your face when you come back into the room. This is why the competition to get onto these committees is so great despite them being very laborious.</comment>