Media's Obsession with Trump Not Supported by Data - <AUTHOR> http://blog.parsely.com/post/3734/trump-does-not-drive-revenue/ <comment><USER2> The charts under the header "Trump Does Not Drive Revenue" seem to indicate 2.5x the number of articles can be written about him (vs Clinton) without dropping the number of page views significantly below other candidates.

So if the value of a page view is worth about the same for each candidate, Trump is driving more revenue, right?

<comment><USER3> I'm one of the authors of the article. Quick answer: The data shows that if you're a journalist about to write your next article, you're likely to get more views if you write it about Clinton rather than Trump. It's true that Trump got more pageviews overall, but that seems to be mostly because way more articles were written about him in the first place.

Long Answer: In the article we suggest that if publishers would have written more articles about Clinton, they would have received more page views, because in the data we observe posts on Clinton receive more page views on average. Similarly, we suggest writing more articles on Bernie Sanders would have caused an increase in referrals from social and search. As with all non- experimental approaches to causal inference, valid conclusions require strong assumptions. In the case of this analysis, we assume that the average number of page views that articles on a candidate receives is independent of the number of articles written on that candidate. If it were the case that writing more articles on Clinton, and fewer on Trump, would have caused Clinton articles to receive fewer views, and Trump articles to receive more, then our conclusions might be wrong.

<comment><USER4> I feel like you're working from a broken model.

Trump is the head, and the other candidates are the long tail.

You said: "It's true that Trump got more pageviews overall, but that seems to be mostly because way more articles were written about him in the first place."

And: "we suggest that if publishers would have written more articles about Clinton, they would have received more page views, because in the data we observe posts on Clinton receive more page views on average"

This seems to be the wrong conclusion because of diminishing returns. Writing more articles about Clinton should still push down the average page views. There is only so much interest, and only so much new to write about every day. None of the candidates can create fresh new controversies to feed the media the way Trump can. The question is how much would that push it down? I don't think it would be inaccurate to suggest, based on that these sites exist in a market, that it would push it down significantly below Trump.

I don't believe a base that strong exists per article, where any article is guaranteed to get some absolute number of page views. If diminishing returns aren't present or are extremely weak, then I'm wrong.

If anything, the data doesn't rule out that sites/reporters are correctly maximizing Trump coverage. Or they may not be maximizing enough since absolute demand is so high and Trump generates so much fresh content. If you can write about one easy topic, and maintain an average that high with only a small decrease in the average, you are doing more with less.

<comment><USER3> In the comment above, I try to clearly lay out that my conclusion rests on the assumption that for a given candidate, avg views per article and number of articles are independent.

I agree that if you reject this assumption, and instead assume that there are 'diminishing returns', then the conclusion I arrived at could be wrong.

There probably is some kind of diminishing return effect, but we don't know how strong it is. It could be weak compared the the effect that 'readers will consume whatever journalists write'. It's pretty interesting the all of the last four leading candidates (Trump, Cruz, Clinton, and Sanders) all had roughly comparable numbers for pageviews per post. That's evidence that readers just pretty much read whatever is published (with the exception of Kasich, a long shot).

It's also true that if you're a journalist right now, faced with the current distribution of articles, you're likely to get more page views by writing your next article on Clinton. This claim doesn't rest on any strong assumptions. That could change if many more articles on Clinton are written, but it's true for now.

If you look at the data in the dashboard, it's also interesting to see that Bernie Sanders gets way more social and search referrals compared to Clinton and Trump.

<comment><USER4> I think this assumption is dangerous to begin with. It should be proven with data that there are no diminishing returns, and that would be a powerful finding worthy of attention.

And saying that readers will consume whatever journalists write helps power the narrative that the media fueled Trump's campaign. They could write about a different candidate and get slightly improved pageviews, but they're choosing to flood with Trump articles. Your data would only conclude that pageviews aren't driving it.

I think expanding this to "readers will consume whatever journalists write" is a different argument and you would need to establish your "experiment" with a different methodology than the approach used here. The causation seems to be "reporters write news, it exists to be consumed on a site" therefore "readers read it" and that feels like it's missing something to me.

Also, it could be interesting they have comparable numbers per post, but it also backs up the idea that articles exist in response to the demand-supply feedback loop. If sites respond to pageviews, then candidates with lower average pageviews will simply not get as much media attention.

<comment><USER3> You bring up a good point. Journalists should explore to what extent there are diminishing returns to writing articles on other candidates. Statistics tells us that the most efficient way of exploring this hypothesis is with a multi- armed bandit algorithm. But before I go into that, I think it makes sense to break this problem down into two questions:

(1) Given equally interesting ideas for articles to write on each candidate, which candidate should a journalist write on?

(2) How much investment is required to write an interesting article on each candidate? It might require less work to write something interesting on Trump than on Clinton.

The right way of answering question (1) is with a dynamic multi-armed bandit algorithm. Such an algorithm dynamically explores the problem of diminishing returns. At this point, given the data we have, such an algorithm would suggest you should write on Clinton the vast majority of the time if you're interested in page views per article, and would suggest you write about Sanders if you're interested in bringing in external referrals from facebook and google. If journalists followed the advice of such an algorithm and wrote so many articles on Clinton that readers started to lose interest, then the algorithm would begin to suggest you write on someone else. If there's enough interest in this article, I might write up a follow-up where I fit a model that tells journalists what topic to write on, given that they it's just as easy to write an article on each topic. I could update this model every once in a while to make sure it detects those diminishing returns in time.

Question (2) is more difficult to answer and requires more domain knowledge. I would say it is possible at any moment to write hundreds of interesting articles on each candidate---the real question is how much work it takes. As I mention in the blog post, I am convinced that journalists find it easier to write interesting articles about Trump. So in some sense it's rational for them to do so: the 'return on investment' is higher because it's so cheap to churn out another article on Trump's latest soundbite. However, one could also argue that -- in the name of increased page views, or in the name of a functioning democracy -- they should make the extra effort to write an interesting article on the other candidates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From the article:

The fact is that in the midst of today's 24-7 news cycle, most journalists can devote only a small amount of time to their next article, and so they often find themselves choosing topics that are convenient to write about. Imagine you're a journalist in front of a blank screen, thinking about your next story, and faced with intense pressure to pump out content. There may be no clear breaking news on Clinton, Sanders, Cruz, or Kasich — so writing about these candidates may require you to conduct research or reach out to voters.

/endquote

I really think this is what it comes down to; this and the "access" issue, where reporters are scared of losing direct access to spokespeople and candidates who provide easy and ready-made stories and quotes. Without that, reporters are forced to, you know, report which they apparently don't have time for anymore.

</comment><comment><USER6> Trump gets more page views per article than anyone but Clinton. From the article's graphs it looks like Trump generated more page views than all other candidates combined. Trump's behavior writes news articles by itself. If it takes 50% of the reporting effort to get the same number of clicks then I think the media's obsession is supported.

<comment><USER3> That's not true. If you're looking at the interactive chart, you need to check the box that says "Show page views per article". Otherwise you're just seeing raw pageviews, and Trump has more of those because there were so many more articles written on him.

<comment><USER7> I think that's what @nimblegorilla was suggesting, and I think it actually fits with what the article was saying - the ROI on writing an article on Trump is much better than for other candidates because it's easy to write yet another article, and still get loads of pageviews for it.

In addition, Trump has significantly pushed up the total number of pageviews going to election cycle articles, even if the articles specifically about him are not as popular as the articles about Sanders, Clinton, Cruz, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article only continues to prove how little research is done before articles can be published.

The media is reporting on itself and its 'effects' without even taking the time to look at the data that is available through sites like Parse.ly and Google Analytics to see if their theories hold any water.

<comment><USER9> I was thinking the same thing. The sheer irony of this article proves what little thought goes into "news" these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> When I look at the coverage, it seems like the news outlets are obsessed because Trump doesn't fit their world view. He caters for a demographic that those outlets have left behind. The page views aren't overly high because what he says isn't as outrageous as they think.

<comment><USER11> He's a self interested huckster.

The media has payed plenty of attention to him in the past.

<comment><USER12> > He's a self interested huckster.

You are describing candidates for office in general. Sanders _may_ be an outlier, but the only one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If the media loves writing articles about Trump, they could at least put a modicum of thought into topics. There are so many easy topics.

Far from Trump taking over the GOP, the GOP has taken over Trump and now literally dictates his policy.

Bankers contributed money and bought Trump's support for financial deregulation.

Trump energy and coal policy are literally being written by GOP governors. The GOP now coordinates with Trump's speak writer to determine what is said.

Starting a trade war with China would have a direct negative impact on real estate prices in the US, which would affect Trump...and therefore will never happen.

A Trump presidency would basically be characterized by substantial benefits accruing to the wealthy while his middle class and lower class supporters will be further subjugated. In other words, just write about the effects of his policy suggestions...which does not take much effort.

And perhaps the biggest one, instead of writing articles that Trump will somehow magically take over every American institution, the reality much more mundane. US institutions are strong and his ability to get anything done will be mired in the same red tape that every President faces. Thus, campaign promises to build walls, undo numerous trade deals, ban Muslims, deport Hispanics etc. are empty promises that simply will not occur.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if Trump fans don't read things on the Internet as much.

</comment><comment><USER15> tl;dr fewer hits per Trump story, but more stories

A copywriting course taught me that many print and TV stories are based on prepared materials sent in by whoever wants coverage. [ _It 's not exactly "paid coverage", but "lower cost coverage"_ ] Since then, I've noticed many stories that (seem) obviously of this kind, because of the particular perspective and beneficiary.

Trump isn't preparing releases, but makes comments that are easy -- i.e. low cost -- to cover.

<comment><USER11> His hits per article are better described as similar to Clinton, Sanders and Cruz.

<comment><USER15> Article says fewer than Clinton, his main competitor, and is the gist of the article.

<comment><USER11> My point is that the difference between 9900 and 10200 is not particularly substantial. It's better summarized as "similar" than "fewer".

The differences with the other 2 are larger, but still not yuuge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Whether you agree with the premise one way or the other, it seems like the data does not say what they think it says with as much certainty as they think. (I also think that solely blaming the media is problematic.)

Pageviews per _article_ is not without flaws: if the media is writing more articles on Trump, then it will decrease. If a site has 10 articles on Trump, and 1 or 2 on the other candidates each day, and Trump's average view per article is similar then it's hard to conclude that there is a lack of interest.

Their graph shows Trump's average on par with the others, but he occupies 50% of the pie. That's huge. How is that categorized as "not driving traffic"?

It seems one assumption is sites could just write more articles about other candidates with the same engagement. If Hillary Clinton gets 6% more average clicks per article, it's hard to just pump out another article on Hillary if nothing new or novel has been said or done by her. Trump creates headlines and drums up controversy whenever he can in a way that most other candidates can't, because he's good at that. It's almost a symbiotic relationship with Trump and coverage of him.

Their idea of the definition of "driving revenue" is defined by the average clicks to read a Trump article. If your competitor has articles about Trump, and you don't, could you get away with that? Clearly people are reading articles about Trump here, so those views could disappear to other sites. (There is also the assumption that it's important that people click into the article, but many people will skim the headlines of a website.)

It also just compares coverage to other candidates, but the content driven revenue of a site is not just a basket of political candidates. It is relative to all other content as well. How much interest does Trump attract across the site?

Their chosen time period is November 2015 to May 2016. This ignores any jump start Trump might have received while his campaign was still nascent, relative to the many other contenders. The media coverage started way before November. You might say by November that Trump already was polling high enough that it was hard to ignore him. He announced his presidency in June 2015, and Trump has been consistently and heavily covered since. And Trump was already a celebrity and had been for years.

And this is why I was motivated to respond: "Many of the media companies we work with at Parse.ly encourage a data-driven culture that makes it easy for their employees to make informed content decisions. For example, anyone using Parse.ly can perform an analysis similar to the one we shared above."

I'm hoping "data-driven culture" in business doesn't become a synonymous with arbitrarily using data to make a point or disingenously undermine an argument. If there isn't discipline in application, then "data-driven" approaches will eventually gain a reputation as useless.

Not to be too cute, but I wonder how much traffic this post about Trump will drive to parsely.com relative to other blog posts.</comment>


A space ant fires its lasers - <AUTHOR> https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Herschel/A_space_ant_fires_its_lasers <comment><USER2> I'm happy to see this on the front page of hacker news! It was already shared to me via my family because Donald Menzel was my great grandfather.

<comment><USER3> Oh nice! Small world! Are you also pursuing a career in science?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Meta: I know people hate click-baity headlines, but it is the weekend and sometimes things are a bit more lax around here then.

I love clever headlines. Not the lying click-bait sort, but the kind that make puns or tell the summarize the story in a fun way.

It used to be that after you bought the newspaper, you were done making financial decisions. But editors would still stick these stories with cute heads deep inside. It gives a feeling for the tone of the people putting together the content.

For my money, for folks who like these things, "Giant Space Ant Fires Lasers At Earth" is just too much to pass up.

<comment><USER5> It may be clickbait, but it's not clickbait that's trying to sell you something or more generally make money - it's trying to get people interested in space, and it's relatively wholesome, so I agree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Titles aside, it did get my curiosity piqued, I didn't know lasers could be naturally formed.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sounds like a Salvador Dali's painting

</comment><comment><USER7> This title delivers.

There's an ant. It's in space. It shoots lasers.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is it aliens?</comment>


'Jeopardy' host Alex Trebek reveals he has stage 4 pancreatic cancer - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/longtime-jeopardy-host-alex-trebek-reveals-he-has-stage-4-n980266 <comment><USER2> Damn, that's sad. Alex Trebek is such a wholesome person, and has brought a ton of entertainment to millions of people with hosting Jeopardy. Stage 4 pancreatic cancer is incredibly hard to treat; it's inspiring Trebek very well may be using his final days to continue to be a positive influence on the world and bring joy to people watching him.

</comment><comment><USER3> How sad. Trebek has been one of the few TV personalities that have been part of my daily life for most of my adult life. Nothing is forever but somethings you wish would never end.

Pancreatic cancer is hard to beat but I wish him the best.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't think I would recognize Alex on the street anymore. My he's changed. Wow, 78 years old.

Also it feels weird to see him announce this in his game show host persona. Maybe that's how he copes or owns his own destiny.

<comment><USER5> Maybe it will help bring attention to the disease. We haven't made much progress. Next week will be 11 years since Randy Pausch testified in front of Congress.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaD1TsjGR0w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaD1TsjGR0w)

As Randy pointed out, there aren't many advocates because people die too fast.

His Last Lecture is definitely worth watching:

[https://www.cmu.edu/randyslecture/](https://www.cmu.edu/randyslecture/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment- arts-29727632](https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-29727632)</comment>


New Horizons: Probe sends detailed view of Pluto - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33524589

<comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9884165](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9884165).

</comment><comment><USER3> Current simultaneous discussion (bbc.co.uk): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9884165](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9884165) (50 points, 1 hour ago, 21 comments)

<comment><USER4> Most of which are political BS. Let's have a better conversation here!</comment></comment>


Fake social media ID duped security-aware IT guys - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/security/380874/fake-social-media-id-duped-security-aware-it-guys

<comment><USER2> There was a similar story a few years ago (2010). The fake "Robin Sage" profile hooked a number of military contractors in the Beltway area:

[http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9179507/Fake_i_femme_...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9179507/Fake_i_femme_fatale_i_shows_social_network_risks)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Sage](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Sage)

</comment><comment><USER3> "The experiment also shows that attractive women get special treatment in the male-dominated IT industry. The majority of individuals who went out of their way to help Emily Williams were men. The team actually tried a similar test in parallel with a fake male social media profile and got no useful connections."

But remember, tech is biased against women and women have to work twice as hard to get the same credit. _cough_</comment>


Show HN: A HN Api to provide random HN posts to read upon - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/avinoth/f2k

<comment><USER2>
      hn_url := "http://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/"
      page := rand.Intn(50)
      points := randomInt(200, 600)
      url := hn_url + "search?tags=story&numericFilters=points>" + strconv.Itoa(points) + "&page=" + strconv.Itoa(page)

That's an odd definition of random.

<comment><AUTHOR> The points is just a threshold to get a good article instead of just anything. And, Algolia returns maximum of 1000 hits for a query with 20 per page. So shuffling the page to pick up too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not bad, but instead of displaying title and just url, maybe put HN url too, because I refreshed the endpoint a few times and got a couple self posts that had blank urls, but titles looked interesting...

Maybe at least if it's a self post, show the HN url.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, sounds good. I'll add it today. I also am building another Ruby script which works on top of this to save the articles to pocket.</comment></comment>


The dominance of 'free' App Store games, as seen in one handy chart - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/224078/The_dominance_of_free_App_Store_games_as_seen_in_one_handy_chart.php <comment><USER2> What's even more shocking is the dominance of 'free' games in the 'highest grossing' list in the Google Play store. Last I checked, 98 of the top 100 grossing games were 'free'.</comment>


Ask HN: Why not edit all code in 'diff' view? - <AUTHOR> 70% of coding is maintenance.  Often you are replacing logic that might still be relevant, but requires a tweak.  Why not show a live diff as you work?  This keeps you in context without forcing you to comment out or write 'parallel' code. <comment><USER2> Xcode has this except it's called Comparison view. It's one of the things I love about working in Xcode.

<comment><USER3> With some google search I got this screenshots for the Comparison view in Xcode.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6013458/how-to-set-up- fil...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6013458/how-to-set-up-file-compare- diff-in-xcode-4)

It has even some git integration.

[http://www.appcoda.com/git-source-control-in- xcode/](http://www.appcoda.com/git-source-control-in-xcode/)

[https://aimatters.wordpress.com/2016/05/25/using-xcode- with-...](https://aimatters.wordpress.com/2016/05/25/using-xcode-with-github/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In addition to the other tools people have mentioned, Vim supports this with tpope's vim-fugitive (:Gdiff)

To answer your question, "... why not?":

* oftentimes when I'm writing code I'd rather split the screen with another relevant file

* sometimes the diff is irrelevant (I started from scratch, or primarily added code instead of modifying or removing it)

* other times, it's enough to know only that a line has changed. I've configured Vim (with vim-git-gutter) to show symbols next to added and removed lines

</comment><comment><USER5> If you tdd, you will write the test for the new code while the old code is still available, and you will use the test as a guide rather than the old code.

Even if you don't tdd, I would say that typically if you understand the code well enough to make a change, you should be able to write a replacement without referring to the old code. The diff should fit in your mind, so to speak. There are some exceptions, like when you're modifying a regex or some dense, opaque shell command, but in the course of modifying typical code I can't see a live diff being that useful to me

</comment><comment><USER6> I constantly reference the Tower ([https://www.git- tower.com/mac/](https://www.git-tower.com/mac/)) current diff view while coding a new feature or hotfix. It would be awesome to have that level of integration in Sublime. GitGutter is a great add-on package but way more limited in scope.

</comment><comment><USER7> All IDEs provide that...

<comment><USER8> my thoughts exactly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks like a nice idea. I'd like an option to toggle between normal view and diff view. Perhaps you can write a plugin for your favorite text editor.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's easy enough to diff and un-diff and I'd rather have the full window while editing, especially on a laptop.

</comment><comment><USER10> Anyone know of version of this for emacs?</comment>


MapD: Massive Throughput Database Queries with LLVM on GPUs - <AUTHOR> http://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/mapd-massive-throughput-database-queries-llvm-gpus/

<comment><USER2> Are problems that fit in memory on a single machine (96GB in this article) considered "big data" now? This buzzword is becoming absolutely meaningless. But yeah, "Hyper-interactive visualytics at scale.", go nvidia PR.

Also, while it's absolutely amazing that they are able to scan 240B rows/sec, I wonder what one would use this capability for if they can only keep a few hundred million records around at a time? The difference between taking 10 or 100ms to scan the dataset should hardly matter to a user that is running "interactive analytics queries".

<comment><USER3> You can rent a 128gb machine at Hetzner for $130 a month.

I think we can all agree to draw a line in the sand and say if a kid doing a paper run could afford your servers, you don't get to call it big data.

(not to take away from the linked project, which looks technically awesome)

<comment><USER4> I disagree with the "big data" line in the sand being whether "a kid doing a paper run could afford your servers". Using spot instances on AWS, you can have a 100 machine cluster with 1.5TB RAM for only $3 per hour.

Working at Common Crawl, some of the coolest projects I've seen have been side projects or weekend projects by interested volunteers. WikiReverse[1] cost only $64USD to parse the metadata of all 3.6 billion pages (even cheaper if you avoided EMR fees) whilst Yelp extracted 748 million US phone numbers from 2 billion pages for $10.60USD.

These days, big data (regardless of how you define the term) is within the reach of the kid with a paper route.

[1]: [https://wikireverse.org/](https://wikireverse.org/)

[2]: [http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2015/03/analyzing-the-web- fo...](http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2015/03/analyzing-the-web-for-the- price-of-a-sandwich.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Spark SQL, with their new Catalyst optimization, is real time compiling their queries into code (assembling Scala quasiquoted fragments into an AST, compiling that). No ridiculously awesome GPU backend here, but some of the same general kinds of tech- compiled queries. [https://databricks.com/blog/2015/04/13/deep-dive-into- spark-...](https://databricks.com/blog/2015/04/13/deep-dive-into-spark-sqls- catalyst-optimizer.html) [http://people.csail.mit.edu/matei/papers/2015/sigmod_spark_s...](http://people.csail.mit.edu/matei/papers/2015/sigmod_spark_sql.pdf)

<comment><USER6> I use SparkSQL every single day and it is not anywhere close to this.

You could combine SparkSQL with Tachyon but it is still pretty far from what MapD seems to be accomplishing.

Would love to see parts of Spark skip the JVM and call out to Rust or LLVM for some aspects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder how much effort the CPU implementation saw. I'd expect 1 socket, 4 memory channel Haswell CPU to be able to filter 40+-10 GB/s of rows per second, if row data can be in column major order. SIMD is pretty often memory bandwidth limited, whether we're talking about CPUs or GPUs.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I agree this is surprising. If all the data in their CPU implementation were stored in a well-packed columnar format, I'd expect something close to theoretical memory throughput on the query they describe (intermediate counts table fits easily into L1/L2 cache and results are commutative and associative). Cache-coherence issues in the aggregation code are a possible cause.

If I were building a speed-freak analytics database I'd be focusing on making my CPU implementations as fast as possible, since that's what 99% of potential customers are already running. Assuming you get to 40GB/s on this type of query, that's only a factor of 5 slower than the GPU implementation. I'd imagine that for most workloads, a factor of 5 speedup that requires new hardware and lots of energy is kind of a non-starter.

<comment><USER9> Hi, one of the original authors here.

You're confusing rows per second with bytes per second. We're measuring here in rows per second, with random data that takes four bytes per record. So the group-by is showing around 24 GB/sec for CPU and roughly 1 TB/sec for the GPUs. Admittedly we are a small startup and there are some optimizations still to be made on CPU (we're working on being NUMA-aware, for example), but the CPU performance is not bad and still much higher for group by than you see in other databases.

You have to remember that we're building a full database and visualization system and not just optimizing for a single benchmark. In addition we're trying to make the point that you can hit this 1-2TB/sec (depending on the query) on a single server with GPUs, which means assuming the compressed data fits in 192GB of GPU RAM you can get much higher performance that you would see out of a whole rack of beefy CPU servers, particularly when you take into account the network overhead that distributed databases suffer. Furthermore, the bandwidth of Nvidia's Pascal architecture (to be released next year) should have at least 2X the bandwidth by using High Bandwidth Memory and likely significantly higher memory sizes, so our speedups will only increase.

<comment><USER10> have you considered the cost of your system? the aws g2.8xlarge comes with 16gb vram and will cost almost $1,900 per month. the 192gb of vram you are talking about will cost $22,000 per month!! A system with 192gb of normal ram will cost almost an order of magnitude lower than that. How does it make sense to run MapD in that case considering the enormous cost.

<comment><USER11> It doesn't make sense to run it on AWS, and not just because of cost. Which is why it is run on bare metal, which costs approximately the same as two months of AWS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> similar : PG-Strom (past=CUDA ; now=OpenCL)

"GPGPU Accelerates PostgreSQL"

slide: [http://www.slideshare.net/kaigai/gpgpu-accelerates- postgresq...](http://www.slideshare.net/kaigai/gpgpu-accelerates-postgresql) ( Dec 20, 2014 )

HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8787414](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8787414)

and Open Source! [https://github.com/pg-strom/devel](https://github.com/pg- strom/devel)

</comment><comment><USER12> more info ( from : 2013 )

[http://data-informed.com/fast-database-emerges-from-mit-clas...](http://data- informed.com/fast-database-emerges-from-mit-class-gpus-and-students- invention/)

now:

Demo: [http://tweetmap.mapd.com/desktop/](http://tweetmap.mapd.com/desktop/) Blog [http://www.mapd.com/blog/2015/06/04/mapd/](http://www.mapd.com/blog/2015/06/04/mapd/)

</comment><comment><USER13> > that maps OpenGL primitives onto SQL result sets

Here is a set of vertices, now draw me a 2d image that represents the 3d scene those vertices represent from a certain viewpoint.

It boggles my mind that this logic can be twisted into running arbitrary SQL logic. Does it actually do something as magic as overlying SQL set logic onto a graphics scene...where the results of the SQL query are equivalent to the set of vertices that are calculated to not be visible when rendering the scene? Amazing stuff.

<comment><USER2> I believe these guys are actually going straight from SQL to "GPU instruction code" (so AIUI the SQL query execution is not some hack that is layered on top of the programmable shader pipeline [which is what's responsible for the "here is a list of vertices now draw me a 3d scene part" you mentioned] or something like that but runs directly on the more or less general purpose processor in the graphics card)

I understand the part where they "map the result set to opengl primitives" as that they write the output/result set of the sql query into some datastructure that allows them [after executing the query] to easily use it from opengl to render pretty stuff. This part shouldn't be much different from other texture/vertex data that you'd bring in e.g. from files on disk or a MySQL database into opengl specific buffers so that you can subsequently use it for drawing in your program.</comment></comment>


California secession, calexit - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/california-secession-calexit-2016-11 <comment><USER2> Honestly this is not as far-fetched as it seems: a west coast + east coast union would be one of the largest economies of the world.

[http://www.yescalifornia.org/](http://www.yescalifornia.org/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I will vote for this, if it makes it to the ballots.

California can and should be it's own country, we can even take in Oregon and Washington. The only thing that CA doesn't have enough is water, but guess what it is right beside ocean!

20 to 30 Desalination sites can provide water for the whole LA, and they only cost $1B each. compare to the subsidies Californians pay to Fed, it is peanut.</comment>


Getting A Better View - <AUTHOR> http://ticketstumbler.com/new-stuff/2009/03/29/getting-a-better-view/

<comment><USER2> What I really find remarkable was that all 25,000 images were collected by three guys with day jobs, in one season.

<http://seatdata.com/html/home/faq.htm>

<http://seatdata.com/html/home/adventures.htm>

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. Their $10 membership is truly a bargain.

<comment><USER3> I hope they have a licensing deal with TicketStumbler.</comment></comment></comment>


How JavaScript is Slowing Down the Web (And What To Do About It) - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_javascript_is_slowing_down_the_web.php

<comment><USER2> The title is misleading. A somewhat more precise title would be

"How & why [lots of] (poorly written) widgets slow down blogs".

As Paul Graham once said: "...the closer you get to the truth, the messier your sentence gets."

</comment><comment><USER3> Good things to keep in mind as I write out my front end. I never knew about defering.

</comment><comment><USER4> HA, I know the author. He taught Software Engineering at NYU. Very smart guy.</comment>


Uber tests self-driving car in Pittsburgh - <AUTHOR> https://newsroom.uber.com/us-pennsylvania/new-wheels/ <comment><USER2> The ultimate solution of the Employee vs. Contractor dilemma.</comment>


Ask HN: How long did it take you to launch? - <AUTHOR> How long did it take to launch a product resulting in revenue. How did you do it? Full-time, nights/wkends? Team size? Advice? <comment><USER2> I just launched my project officially and it's generating some revenue for quite some time now (small amount though). I first started working on it 2.5 - 3 years ago, but it wasn't full time, it was always a side project.

It's only me on the project, the whole time.

I don't really have an advice, just work on it and don't give up, as long as you don't give up, you haven't failed.

I wish you a good luck and a lot of persistence!</comment>


Thoughts on Foam and GitJournal for Zettelkasten/note taking? - <AUTHOR> https://foambubble.github.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> I have been using [Foam]([https://foambubble.github.io/](https://foambubble.github.io/)) along with [GitJournal]([https://gitjournal.io/](https://gitjournal.io/)) for all my note taking. I believe this is the ideal setup for all my writing needs as 1\. this offers support for Zettelkasten-like tags(although GitJournal needs Graph view implemented) 2\. No vendor lock-in 3\. Completely open-source

What is your current note taking setup? What are your thoughts on this particular setup?

<comment><USER2> I'm actively working on a Graph View, I have a prototype already ready :)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's great! Would love to try it out.</comment></comment></comment>


EDIT: please look at the other poll about lobbying the EU - <AUTHOR>

EDIT I just discovered how to create a real poll, you can find it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3303323
In the latest poll [1] we saw that there are a lot of Europeans on HN, and I guess many of them from the EU. I also noticed a comment [2] from davedx from the Netherlands that said "not being based in the US comes with lots of disadvantages, such as terrible payment gateways, unfriendly tax and small business legislation, and smaller networks of entrepreneurs", and started wondering if in the EU we could, and should, start lobbying the EU Parliament and Commission to get a better environment for (especially web, but not only) startups: eg for payment gateways, only a more harmonized system could make them easier to create. To do so, we would also (need to) build bigger networks of entrepreneurs.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3298905 [2] http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3300204
So, the question is: Should we start lobbying the EU Parliament and Commission to create a better business environment for startups? <comment><USER2> Tax legislation is the domain of national parliaments, not the EU (except for aspects of VAT, anything else?). Tax harmonisation requires a treaty change and agreement from all 27 member states.

On unfriendly legislation --- is this national legislation or EU-wide legislation?

On terrible payment gateways --- why do you think that is? Imperfect implementation of the common market (e.g. unharmonised regulations)? Insufficient competition generally? Something else?

<comment><AUTHOR> EDIT: please repost your question here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3303323> I'll do the same with my answer :)

Terrible payment gateways: AFAIK, based on many comments by the newest providers in the US, the biggest problem is exactly that of different regulations for different EU countries. Creating better options requires different solutions for each country, so it is very expensive. With a harmonized system, you would be able to create a solution for 500 million potential users - it would be worth the effort.

Unfriendly legislation: The EU parliament can force national legislations to become friendlier, and especially to make it easier for a startup to operate in the whole EU.

Tax legislation: I'm not thinking about revenues taxation, but registration fees and mechanism and controls and the likes. There could be interventions from the EU Parliament to harmonize them, I think, and if that's impossible now - we could at least start to lobby to make it possible.</comment></comment>


Alternatives to Deep Neural Networks(DNN) - <AUTHOR> https://alpes.ai/2020/03/02/alternatives-to-deep-neural-networks/ <comment><USER2> Please use the URL and title field on [https://news.ycombinator.com/submit](https://news.ycombinator.com/submit) "Our thoughts here" adds little to no extra information.</comment>


Ask HN: What are your startup ideas that you aren't pursuing? - <AUTHOR> (I'm going to keep posting this topic on HN - partially because I think the answers will be interesting, but also partially as an experiment to see how much randomness goes into a HN post becoming successful). <comment><AUTHOR> Heres mine: My proposed business is a centralized website similar to Kickstarter that does the financing for new music albums. With the spread of streaming services, many artists are now making an insufficient amount of money through record sales. Bands would list the albums they could potentially release (ie their next album, a live album, b sides etc) on a website where once the band has reached their asking price, they will start working on/or release that album. The price listed is not how much the album costs the band to make, but the amount of money that it would take the band to feel sufficiently incentivized to make/release the album. Once the album reaches this point, the band would release the album for free online. This creates two new streams of revenue - fans who really love an artist (or have lots of money) can contribute proportionally. Additionally, cheap fans that otherwise wouldn't pay for the album would be incentivized to with the hope that the album comes out sooner, or out of fear that it won't be released at all. You can read more details here: [http://danfrank.ca/startup- ideas/](http://danfrank.ca/startup-ideas/)</comment>


Do you have domains you would rent-to-own? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Doesn't previous use of a domain name by an unscrupulous actor lower the value of a domain name? If so, I would be weary of renting out a domain name without understanding how it would be used.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been building a domain marketplace at [https://xn-- i-7iq.ws/marketplace](https://xn--i-7iq.ws/marketplace) and from my research, at least on the higher end, financing and leasing plans are somewhat common for the bigger transactions.

<comment><USER4> Cool site. No offense but I would never associate with godaddy unless it was life or death. I saw it was powered by godaddy aftermarket.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Basically no.

When I'm looking for a domain I often see people squatting on a domain I would like. I would consider buying the domain at a premium, but renting, no way. If my product or service is successful they will always have a hold over me.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I have a lot of domains I think are pretty cool. I've just never got very far on the project. I'd don't want to let them go but I don't have time for the projects either. Is anyone else on this situation?

<comment><USER6> I am in the same situation, I have more domains/ideas than time. Now even more as I'm focusing on a single project to try to deliver something _bigger_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I do have some domains I would rent-to-own such as img.chat but most of the domains I have I acquired because I have plans to build projects that they would be used for.

</comment><comment><USER8> This a pretty brilliant business idea.

Let me know if that is what you are doing, I would be willing to try it out when it launches.</comment>


Show HN: Paperkast - <AUTHOR> http://paperkast.com
Hello everybody,
I just wanted to share a link aggregator website: paperkast.com. It's a article sharing and discussion hub.
It's opened recently. I think it was a need for the academia. I don't think there is an online community for paper discussion. Twitter is good for publication sharing but there is no central discussion around a paper. It's all over the place. Seperately, we know that the link aggregation style has a good reputation. It's a good stimulation for discussion.
What do you think of it? <comment><USER2> I was thinking of a similar thing for discussion about books as well.

Especially since the official site of a book is usuallly not suitable for that (no forum or separate login per publisher etc.)

Or in the case of Pragmatic Programmers not accessible, if you click on discussion forum at [https://pragprog.com/book/swdddf/domain-modeling-made- functi...](https://pragprog.com/book/swdddf/domain-modeling-made-functional) you get redirected to: [https://forums.pragprog.com/fosta- sesta](https://forums.pragprog.com/fosta-sesta)

Anyone else who is missing something like this?

<comment><USER3> I often wish I could connect with people who are reading or have read the same books as me. I think that's what GoodReads is for, but I haven't really looked into it.

Edit: looks like it's just for reviews.

<comment><USER4> Eh, no. GoodReads is more about connecting to your _existing_ friends and sharing books between each other, not really designed for you to meet new people based off of your shared interest in books.

But as for the comment above yours, that is Goodreads. It doesn't sell the books, but is a central place to discuss books. Unlike Amazon.com comments, you don't need to verify anything to be able to comment on a book.

And lastly, it's kind of difficult to say that it's an independent source of reviews, considering that Amazon purchased GoodReads back in 2013, GoodReads offers Amazon-only discounts, and Amazon is always the preferred seller (while the rest of the sellers are hidden behind a dropdown).

<comment><USER5> I think you have groups on Goodreads that are intended for discussing a specific topic, book, or author's books. But I agree in that it's not really designed for meeting new people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One piece of feedback I have is to be careful with tagging. What is physics to a biologist [1] is probably not physics to a physicist. If you want communities to build around this hub, then you need to be careful about flooding a small community with unrelated topics because a larger community is more active on the internet.

This looks neat otherwise and I joined.

[1] [https://paperkast.com/s/mbiq74/maximum_entropy_model_for_pre...](https://paperkast.com/s/mbiq74/maximum_entropy_model_for_predicting)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. I would say that as the community grows, there will be more and more tags and therefore specialization. Do you think it's better to stick with broad tags like Physics or Genetics, rather than Synthetic Biology or Quantum Mechanics? I would say the latter would be much better.

<comment><USER6> Specific tags are good to carve out communities as they really are in academia.

I work in materials science, which there is a tag for, but I work in a super narrow slice of materials (it's a broad field) and I imagine many others are the same. Even on a list of about 10 journals I keep RSS feeds for, I have a hit rate (of a paper I will read) if no better than 10%. And these are journals that I have already selected as "my flavor" of materials.

Specific tags are bad in that they could harm discoverability. It would be neat if the tags could be hierarchical. E.g. a tag for quantum mechanics shows up in materials science and physics so that the discoverability is there from the general tags, but the narrow slices are available as a filter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Really great - I signed up.

One useful feature might be for the index to show one-sentence blurbs about each paper (in addition to the title of the paper itself). Unless I'm reading papers very specific to my subfield, I need some context to know what I'm looking at & why it's important. Otherwise I fear that only articles with the most accessible titles (or disciplines whose titles tend to be most accessible) will be clicked, read & upvoted.

I would hope that the nature of the type of people who read scientific papers is to avoid sensationalizing too much (like popular science journalism does).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for the feedback. Do you think it has to be in the front page -under each link, perhaps?

<comment><USER7> That's what I was thinking - maybe something under the link. Could be optional as well.

I'd been remembering how Marginal Revolution, which despite having a fairly educated/technical audience, still often writes its own link text when linking to papers: e.g. item #1 here [https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/08/sa...](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/08/saturday- assorted-links-172.html)

But obviously that would have a big impact on UX for submitters and readers which I haven't thought through in detail!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Signed up right away, love the idea!

One note, generally I think academic papers are heavier than articles on HN. Maybe the person sharing a link should be encouraged to add a note/summary/reason-for-sharing/personal-take-away

<comment><USER9> /r/TrueReddit has a submission statement rule, it's interesting even for the poster to think about why they found given article interesting enough to share

That being said, I'd be afraid it would discourage people from posting. And when it comes to papers, shouldn't the abstract serve this purpose?

<comment><USER10> Maybe the abstract should automatically be fetched when posting and shown with whatever the poster wants to add?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is also [https://paperhive.org/](https://paperhive.org/) which works really well with comments directly within the document.

</comment><comment><USER12> Awesome site, love the brutalist design!

Edit: post to [https://roastmy.site](https://roastmy.site) to get some design feedback if you like!

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely. But in general, the design of news aggregator sites is pretty minimalist which is so important as you don't want any disruptions.

<comment><USER12> True, but you never know what your users think could be improved until you ask ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting! My first thought went to fermats library, as that's doing something very (and quite well I think) but they don't have a voting system

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, Fermat's library is amazing. But I wanted have a community exactly like lobsters and HN. It's super easy to read and post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> TypeError in Home#index

Showing /opt/lobsters/app/views/layouts/application.html.erb where line #85 raised:

no implicit conversion of Symbol into Integer

<comment><AUTHOR> Should be OK now.

<comment><USER15> I am still having similar issues: [https://paperkast.com/feed](https://paperkast.com/feed)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is a great idea. It could really turn into a study group for new papers.

You might want to edit your post / title. I don't think I would have known that it was for academic papers if I hadn't have opened the link.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was thinking that, for example, if there is a neat discussion going on about really detailed stuff in the paper (like one sharp peak in one of the figures or one value in a table), it can be really good resource for the reader of the paper as well. They can look around in the comments. Seperately, if they couldn't find it, they can just ask.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Getting a controller exception.

        Showing /opt/lobsters/app/views/layouts/application.html.erb where line #85 raised:

        no implicit conversion of Symbol into Integer

<comment><AUTHOR> Should be OK now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wondeful! We need something like this. I hope it takes root.

</comment><comment><USER19> Can't access your app. Looks like it has crashed.

Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2)

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks good now

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is nice.

But what I don't understand is why e.g. Google Scholar doesn't provide a service like this.

</comment><comment><USER21> Excellent! May I suggest a tag for imaging research? And/or radiology?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. Any user can suggest a tag by creating a post with 'meta' tag. And according to the comments from other members, it can be added.

<comment><USER21> Ah gotcha. Ok I'll do that then. Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Any particular reason for the 100 character title limit?

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed to 150 characters. Thank you man!

<comment><USER21> Thank you! I really hope this takes off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> is this opensource?

<comment><USER23> not sure how many modifications were made but the About page states:

> Paperkast.com built on lobste.rs open source news aggregator system.

<comment><USER24> Funny, years ago a friend and I were trying to make something exactly along lines of lobste.rs but for scientific papers. [https://github.com/seltzered/journaltalk](https://github.com/seltzered/journaltalk) was as far as I got.

Didn't get very far due lack of motivation and other parallel projects, but it's been neat to see things like this (and fermat's library, and peerpub, etc.) spring up over the years.

<comment><USER25> I know how you feel- It's always rewarding when you worked on something but never finished it- you knew it was a good idea when doing it-- then years later someone else does something very similar. No anger from it, not like they stole your idea- it just validates that your original idea was so good that it was just a matter of time until someone else did it. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

<comment><USER26> I have this happen all the time, but often I have the opposite experience and feel like I failed, lacked focus, missed an opportunity.

Basically like getting punched in the gut.

Not sure if that is good because it keeps me motivated to ship, or if your perspective / wiring is better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Throwing an error!

</comment><comment><USER27> Try resubmitting this as Show HN: Paperkast

It might get more attention

<comment><USER28> We've added that bit above. Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks guys!</comment></comment></comment>


Why are some of the Web's ugliest sites also the most popular? (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/dd/2017/06/29/why-are-some-of-the-ugliest-sites-on-the-web-also-the-most-popular/ <comment><USER2> Who says they look terrible? HN is one of the most beautifully simple sites around. So is Wikipedia. They both have high usability, no garbage ads, clean and simple navigation. Reddit is a mess, but tolerable with ad blocking. I won't even load the 4chan home page to look at it on the off chance it somehow supports them. Craigslist is too clunky for me to list it as "beautifully simple", but some minor UX tweaks would put it in that category. Drudge is hilarious bad, but still far more readable than CNN.</comment>


Work Smarter and Harder - <AUTHOR> http://www.callmejeffrey.com/entry/2009/01/15/Work_smarter_and_harder <comment><USER3> I agree, I would rather enjoy my work than get paid a lot of money to do something that was uninteresting and not challenging.

I have been thinking about this for the past few days after seeing a job advertisement that's billed as the best job in the world. Basically, Australia is offering to pay someone 100k to go to an island for 6 months, do a a little yardwork, do some interviews, and play for 6 months. While it would be nice to take a vacation, I am enjoying going to school and studying engineering. So it really wouldn't be worth it for me to get behind a year just for a six month vacation. Sure, I would enjoy it for a month or two, but after that I would want to get back into some actual work. And once that happens, the only thing that would keep me interested in staying would be the money that I was getting.

<comment><USER4> _"... Basically, Australia is offering to pay someone 100k to go to an island for 6 months, do a a little yardwork, do some interviews, and play for 6 months ..."_

Also diving and the sharks are pretty active this time of year. The other way of looking at it is by taking a 6month setback for the opportunity of certain payment allowing for free time later on to work on your product - <USER2> gratification.

<comment><USER3> That's a good point, but I'm just in a time in my life where my major goals revolve around school, and since engineering is pretty regimented at my school, it might set me back nearly a year. Although sharks and scuba diving both sound really tempting... Oh well, I would probably have better odds winning some lotteries than getting this job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _(1) if you love what you're doing, why would you want to do it less?_

Because you don't want to get sick of it? Because there are other things you want to do?

 _(2) If you don't love what you're doing, why not do something else?_

Because it lets you do what you love? In the real world there are no single objective problems.

</comment><comment><USER6> Had never heard of this blog before, but great read. Thanks for submitting BRM.

What always gets me are the people obsessed with "secrets to success". But over and over again, it's been shown that the only "secret" is putting in the time & effort. And even then you still need quite a bit of luck and exceptional timing.

</comment><comment><USER7> I fall for The 4-Hour Workweek not because I want to work less, but because I want work less at what I don't like.

Markus Frind represents a lost opportunity to me; in that position, I would have spent half my time expanding business around Plenty Of Fish and half my time around risky new ventures (for a million dollars a year, you can afford a good programmer or two).

</comment><comment><USER8> _"If you love what you're doing, why would you want to do it less?"_

Gee, I don't know...I love chocolate cake, but I don't want to eat it for every meal.</comment>


Ask HN: FB banned our page without any reason - <AUTHOR>

I'm writing this in despair (as it usually happens when you are dealing with FB). We just found out that Facebook banned our webpage, so users can't post or like links from our webpage. Facebook login also stopped working. We haven't received any message from FB explaining the situation.
All existing content that pointed to our webpage was removed (from our fanpage http://www.facebook.com/mojvideo and from user's profiles).
So ... does anyone here know what to do now? How to get our domain un-banned? I've already written to developers-help (a t) facebook.com so far I only received some useless automated response. I've also sent this report: http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=block_appeal I've sent this reports a couple of hours ago.
But I'm suspecting that this will take forever to resolve (if it will get resolved). Anyone from FB here that can help? At the very least we would like to know why we ware banned.
Anyone from FB here that could help or shed some light on this? <comment><USER2> Businesses and websites really need to quit putting their faith in FB. When their accounts get closed like Mojvideo's, it affects their brand viability in a negative way.

Getting banned by FB is the new getting banned by PayPal.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. Most of our traffic comes from search engines and loyal users. But off course we used FB to promote our page too, we would be stupid not to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You need to get in touch with an account manager. They're actually really easy to deal with if you know the right combination of words, as with most things.

We managed to get a clients FB page vanity URL switched from an old page to a new page within about half an hour of sending an email - something we thought was a long shot.

Hit me up if you need a hand, my email is in my profile.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've sent you a email, cheers!

<comment><USER3> and replied. Good luck Jan!

<comment><USER4> I'll send you an email, I paid for an ad on Facebook then my account was blocked for making fraudulent activity, not sure what I did wrong because I used my Paypal account to pay for the ad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Ha, FB un-banned us. No response from them, the bann was just magically lifted.

If somebody here had something to do with it then I really can't express my gratitude!! I just hope this does not happen again.

</comment><comment><USER5> Good luck. You might as well try negotiating an unblock with China.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's what we are afraid off. Something is very rotten at FB :\

<comment><USER5> I don't know if it's possible, but perhaps you could do an IP switch.. maybe you can trick FB into allowing your site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Since we have some other pages on the same IP but on different domains, and those other pages ware not banned, I don't think this will solve our problem :\

But even if it did FB could just bann us again, I'm trying to find out why we ware banned so we can fix any possible problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> FB's practices are well known and should've served as a warning. You shouldn't rely on this being resolved _now_. I ain't saying it won't be resolved in a good way, but just don't rely on it.

Even if your page is restored, think about alternative marketing channels. Don't make yourself depend on the services of one attractive but unereckonable company.

<comment><AUTHOR> Luckily FB is not our primary source of traffic, but we'll still take a hit if this doesn't get resolved. Unfortunately this is the state of the web right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Similar story from Ars Technica when their page was recently banned, with some similar steps you might be able to take:

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/04/facebook- tak...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/04/facebook-takedown- followup-what-happened-and-what-facebook-needs-to-fix.ars)

</comment><comment><USER8> Do you have any guesses why you were banned?

Maybe Facebook has the impression that all the Pokemon videos available on your site are copyright violations or something? I'm not sure whether that kind of stuff is illegal to host where you are but it's the kind of thing that companies seem to care about these days.

<comment><AUTHOR> If I had to guess I would wager that this is a result of someone sharing a video that had some naked ladies in it, and some other users then flagged that as spam/abuse. So it was completely automated probably.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How long has it been since your appeal?

<comment><AUTHOR> Couple of hours. I know, I know. But we all know how things are with this things. My boss recently got his account locked, and then he got un-locked 14 days later without any explanation (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2493877>). So I'm just trying to speed things up.

<comment><USER9> Well, it is (was) the weekend after all.

Nothing wrong about soliciting for feedback on HN, but some context like thisnis useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> <http://xkcd.com/743/>

<comment><USER11> As much as I hate random xkcd links turning up in discussions, he has a point. Stop building your infrastructure on other people's proprietary platforms (that are known to be notoriously fickle) and acting surprised when you get burned.

<comment><AUTHOR> We only have "like" buttons on our content, and on Friday we implemented FB login. We can survive without this (we ware around long before FB became relevant in our region), but would rather not be locked out of FB.

And yes I get it, FB is _insert whatever here_, but the sad truth is that they are a big player on the market and ignoring them is, simply put, stupid.

And the point is that we are a paying customer of FB and this behavior is unacceptable. Pointing the way FB operates is one of the points of my original post. They need to change, and if no one is pointing fingers that won't happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Facebook likewise took my page down. It was going viral. I "appealed" it but never heard anything. I wish I could get it back.

</comment><comment><USER13> Try asking on Quora. It's a longshot, but there are a couple of people on Facebook who check it regularly.

</comment><comment><USER14> Do you expect a response at 3AM on Monday morning in Facebook's main time zone?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, off course not. But we all know how FB is with responding. It's usually nothing or they get back to you after a year or so. I'm just trying to speed things up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Keep in mind the coverage a few weeks ago that indicated there are some automated/judgement-less processes at Facebook, based on number of complaints/flags, that can take Pages down. See for example:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2494231>

So don't assume Facebook has already judged you; as soon as someone there looks at it, it may get fixed. (Sucks in the meantime, but like Google and Craigslist, outsourcing lots of the moderation to the semi-anonymous masses can generate collateral damage even if it usually is a win.)

</comment><comment><USER16> This may sound a little harsh but:

That's the risk with putting all your eggs into someone else's basket. Especially if that someone is a faceless corporation with famous bureaucracy.

FB closed my account earlier this year too, because I have an uncommon/strange middle name. It led to 7 iOS apps not having any FB support for several days. No, the FB acc wasn't reopened - I just uploaded new versions to the app store with FB support removed. But I was sort of prepared for that and never gave the FB integration a prominent place in my apps - so users weren't that upset when it went away. (I got burnt the first time around 2002 when Google decided to close my Adsense account because our color scheme was "mis leading" users. Adsense was at that time my only (but good paying) income and suddenly losing all of your income was a hard lesson to learn.)

I don't know your site/app but maybe you should (after you get the stuff sorted out) over think your investment in FB for your future projects. (I'm sure you aren't desperate for no reason.)

Btw. FB answered my request 3 weeks later with a form letter asking me for a copy of my ID. I didn't react to that but I have the feeling that it would have taken another weeks and form letters to sort the situation out.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with you completely. And like I've said a couple of times in this thread, we didn't put all our eggs in FB's basket.

And my desperation didn't come from the fact that now we are screwed (which we aren't), but from the fact that I know what hell I'll have to go trough to get the matter sorted out.</comment></comment>


VimAwesome: VIM Plugins ranked by usage in users dotfiles on GitHub - <AUTHOR> http://vimawesome.com/

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7951020](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7951020)</comment>


How Yammer Should Have Responded to the TechCrunch Ad Hominem - <AUTHOR> http://www.seekomega.com/2012/01/how-yammer-should-have-responded-to-the-techcrunch-ad-hominem/

<comment><AUTHOR> Also on BusinessInsider: [http://www.businessinsider.com/how-yammer-should- have-respon...](http://www.businessinsider.com/how-yammer-should-have- responded-to-the-techcrunch-ad-hominem-2012-1)</comment>


The Fable Of Market Meritocracy - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/2010/02/09/markets-finance-sarkozy-economics-opinions-columnists-shikha-dalmia_print.html <comment><AUTHOR> I liked the insights presented in this essay, although sadly I think the whole thing was mangled to make it seem relevant to recent events: the banking bailouts and the outcry over bankers' compensations should probably have been left out of it completely; banking is regulated in so many ways that you can hardly apply market-principles anymore.

</comment><comment><USER2> I wrote a blog post that talks about similar issues: <http://bit.ly/coeLqg></comment>


Travelling with 24" Monitors - <AUTHOR> https://blog.luap.info/travelling-with-24-monitors.html <comment><USER2> Whilst fascinating, I can't help but think he's better off just buying second hand monitors in the destination!</comment>


CNET email response regarding the bundled installer - <AUTHOR> http://nl.com.com/view_online_newsletter.jsp?list_id=e482&send_date=12/07/2011

<comment><USER2> Already posted it in the current discussion thread from the morning:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3322957></comment>


China's Warning to Global CEOs: Toe the Party Line on Hong Kong - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-21/china-s-warning-to-global-ceos-toe-the-party-line-on-hong-kong <comment><USER2> *Tow

<comment><USER3> *Kowtow</comment></comment>


Ballmer agrees to buy Clippers for record $2 billion - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/29/us/nba-clippers-sterling/

<comment><USER2> If Steve Ballmer doesn't buy the Clippers while saying "I have no plans to move them out of LA" and then move them to Seattle immediately after sending an email to Adam Silver, cc David Stern and Clay Bennett that just says "fuck you" I'm gonna be really mad.</comment>


My advice to young entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://jonbischke.com/2009/03/12/my-advice-to-young-entrepreneurs/

<comment><USER2> The text is okay, but it feels a little odd he keeps saying "you guys". Too much of that.

There's also one thing I could argue. Personally, I feel like I'm half entrepreneur half hacker and I wouldn't trade one half for another. So, being hacker usually means a lot of work and decreased socialization. This really makes it hard to connect with others as much as the author suggests. But still, we all know examples when this works. Maybe, those are weird exceptions and we should still try to be more socialized and sacrifice our work hours for that, I don't know. Probably I'd love to do that, but for now it feels like it's more important to come up with a good idea and build a product than to talk about. That could be a mistake, but it doesn't feel like a mistake right now.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is great "motivational" advice. So for anyone that needs motivation, here it is!

Practically speaking though, the post encourages a lot of learning, reading, researching, networking, talking, etc ...

...at the end of the day ...

Get

Work

Done.

</comment><comment><USER4> Definitely too much reading, not enough doing.

</comment><comment><USER5> seems more like commencement speech motivation, then how to survive and thrive in a down market. for a young startup founder with limited resources and runway, all the time spent reading and researching would be better allocated to talking with early customers and improving the product.

<comment><USER5> going to add that the first bit regarding getting to cash flow profitability and making some short terms adjustments to reach that stage is solid, not new but def good advice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Figure out a way to get on TheFunded.com and read every single thing everyone there has written (and realize that a lot of it is crap of course! :))._

Why should anyone waste time on reading crap? he suggests to read as much as possible, but will that not be at the expense of the time spent working on the start up. If much of it is crap, general opinions and subjective stuff, then why not just focus on the start up and find the lessons for yourself rather than waste time reading crap.

<comment><USER7> Maybe he emphasized a wee bit too much on the reading part. However, there are some good reading material he did point out in the article.

I've always said "Its good to learn from your mistakes, it's better to learn from others'". The only way to gain knowledge of other people's mistakes is to read, network and communicate.</comment></comment>


AI Software Learns to Make AI Software - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603381/ai-software-learns-to-make-ai-software/ <comment><USER2> ah, back from 2017

Also here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13436195](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13436195)</comment>


Sex Problems at Google+ - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.forbes.com/quentinhardy/2011/06/30/sex-problems-at-google/

<comment><USER2> "A lot more men than women on Google+" is a more accurate title, but I think Forbes wants to link bait

<comment><USER3> Shame it's not possible to make titles on Hacker News more truthful than their linkbait versions irrelevant of the original source's title...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Almost all my friends on G+ who got invites are in some sort of techie scene, the ratio is pretty normal in this area.

This talk is not useful until it is open for everyone.</comment>


Up close with Apple's HomePod - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/26/up-close-with-apples-homepod/ <comment><USER2> Over at iMore Serenity Caldwell has impressions from a head to head test Apple set up for the HomePod, Sonos One, Google Home Max, and Amazon Echo.

Unsurprisingly blew away the Echo. But she also said it sounded much better than the Google Home Max (which is $50).

[https://www.imore.com/homepod-vs-amazon-echo-vs-google- home-...](https://www.imore.com/homepod-vs-amazon-echo-vs-google-home-max-vs- sonos-one-speaker-showdown)

<comment><USER3> Typo: Google Home Max is $399.

<comment><USER2> I meant to type "$50 more".

Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It will be interesting to see how widely the homepod will be adopted and used in six months or a year because it looks like it is really only useful for people who are fully in the apple system. One report says you can't even set it up unless you have an ios device [https://www.imore.com/should-you-buy- homepod](https://www.imore.com/should-you-buy-homepod)

<comment><USER5> Ugh, the seemingly intentional lack of support for Spotify and other streaming services makes me see red. It also strikes me as a pretty dumb business move. Someday soon, a company will release a $350 cylinder that sounds just as good as Apple's while supporting every standard service and interface — and at that point, why on earth would anyone get a Homepod?

<comment><USER6> Probably it's harder than you think to make a cylinder sound that good, plus Siri will do more over time. We'll see if it's a "dumb business move" to control the whole stack. It's worked out kind of ok for them so far.

<comment><USER5> For their main devices, sure, but what about Apple TV? I know far more people with Amazon and Google boxes than Apple ones. And stats seem to agree: [http://variety.com/2017/digital/news/roku-apple-tv- chromecas...](http://variety.com/2017/digital/news/roku-apple-tv-chromecast- amazon-fire-tv-market-share-2017-1202506850/)

In the "connected appliance" market, I believe openness is key.

<comment><USER6> There's more Android devices out there than iPhones too. Same story. Apple's success has been about selling the best and most profitable products, not the most.

You will definitely know more people who own echoes than HomePods, at least for awhile. Echoes are cheap. Doesn't mean it's a "dumb business move" for Apple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm curious to know whether it will be possible to use a pair of these with a TV. I stream video from a computer to my TV and would love to use HomePods as the audio via AirPlay. I know HomePod pairs aren't supported at launch, but I wonder if there will be audio/video sync issues when this eventually is an option.

<comment><USER2> I believe that is something you're supposed to be able to do with the Apple TV, once AirPlay 2 becomes enabled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's a matter of preference. If you value sound over smarts, and if you have mostly Apple devices, then this is perfect. If you value smart over speaker, or if you don't have mostly Apple devices, then an Echo or Google Home is better.</comment>


Ask HN: How does your future fantasy look like? - <AUTHOR> For me, I would like to upload my consciousness and be able to slip in and out of various skin suits.
I have a choice to retain memories of other avatars. Or not.
I want multiple lives and many different experiences I can control and recall.
Like reincarnation but where time isn't linear. Time can also be paused and resumed at will. And I have control over all of my lifetimes. <comment><USER2> I just want to live in an egalitarian society with good public transit. No poverty, no hunger, I want larger community groups outside of just the nuclear family. A society where people can afford to work their dream job, even if it doesn't pay top dollar.

I want to contribute towards a society that cares for all people.

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem with egalitarian societies is that there will be no progress. Progress necessarily insists upon societal hierarchy. Faustian bargain. What would you choose?

<comment><USER2> You've presented a false dichotomy, and I'd love a citation on your first point. Anyways, I'd argue that hierarchy is incredibly inefficient.

For example, does every child who aspires to be a scientist get to go to college and pursue that passion? Obviously the US doesn't have free education for every person, it's highly gated by wealth.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok. Example: Food gatherers in Melenesia. They have no ruling authority and are considered egalitarian according to given anthropological definition.

In the animal kingdom, elephants and lionesses(not lions) are egalitarian. Egalitarianism can only exist if the society is already at the top of the food chain. Size matters.(the females also have smaller litters)

Resources must be easily available and they don't have fight over it. Lionesses have lions maintaining the hierarchy.

The opposite of egalitarianism in animal society is that of hyenas. They have a caste system like hierarchy. They are scavengers. Their litters are larger than say..big cats or pachyderms. Resource denied and have to scheme rather than cooperate(another egalitarian necessity)

Egalitarianism is only possible when there is no competition for resources or scarcity of resources, no threats and a small elite population.

If I were to hazard a guess: They can also be found in matriarchal societies with a warrior male populace. War like societies/tribes/groups face higher mortality and cooperation amongst females is crucial to propagate their species/race/gene pool.

<comment><USER2> This is a hilariously reductive viewpoint. I would strongly urge you to pick up a sociology / anthropology text book. We aren't animals anymore.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am disappointed that in HN, posters don't debate or discuss points anymore, but rather pass judgements and opinions on posters. This is bringing down the quality of discussion and frankly of HN itself.

So you have nothing to say. Ok. Got it. Fine. Have a nice day. I will read what I want when I want in my own sweet time.

<comment><USER2> You engaged my point, provided meaningless allegory with the "animal kingdom", and then complain when I asked for more information or explanation. "Debating" or "discussing" usually requires a _bit_ more effort on your behalf.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. You have made your point. Thank you. Please drive through.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What's Wrong with Deep Learning? - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxKBnD5y2M8NVHRiVXBnOVpiYUk/edit <comment><USER2> If someone were to ask me what's wrong with DL (and not that anyone would, since I'm an unknown), I'd say the lack of theory. Most DL results look very hacky to me. Someone says Max Pooling works; someone again comes along and says it's not necessary. Someone says sigmoid or tanh are the best activation functions; someone else says ReLUs are better. And so on. Why? Why is one better than the other?

I'm no biologist, but I don't think our brains are going around trying to do a grid search for the best hyperparameters. Most DL results today are the result of throwing 1000s of Titans on the problem and then sitting back for a week for the beast to cough up a solution.

Tangential nitpick: one (very minor) nit I have with Prof LeCun's presentations is that I don't see him give more credit to Hinton and Schmidhuber. Hinton is mentioned a couple of times (3), but Schmidhuber is totally ignored; for example, when he mentions LSTM, it's cited as [Hochreiter 1997], even though it was a join publication with Schmidhuber. It should be cited as [Hochreiter et 1997], as he does in the very next line.

<comment><USER3> Max pooling tests if a feature occurs anywhere in a certain area, rather than being sensitive to the exact location.

ReLUs fit combinations of piece-wise linear functions. Whereas sigmoids are more nonlinear and can be harder to optimize. They were originally continuous approximations of binary threshold functions.

All these things can approximate each other. Neurons can approximate the max function, and ReLUs can approximate sigmoids. So there really isn't much to fret over.

It's like asking for a theory of which programming language is better. In practice they will have different advantages in different domains, but they are all Turing complete.

<comment><USER4> _It 's like asking for a theory of which programming language is better._

There's nothing wrong with just ignoring programming-language theory and just deciding on one, seat of the pants style. But this is because programming as it exists now is a static "art form" with only marginal progress expected.

However, assuming deep learning currently works unexplainably well and one aims to scientifically explain that good working, one would want an explanation which guides one's approach to extending the process.

I've done a bit of applied math, where knowing which kind of function to pull out of one's toolbox for which situation was the really-smart-people's purview, a fairly well guarded folk-knowledge, actually. I'm used to the "little bit of this, little bit of that" kind of explanation for which functions to use when and why. If one weighs them long enough, I assume one can intuitively figure out what to do.

But if we're aiming to advance fundamentally beyond the state-of-the-art, we would aim to _quantify_ these advantages and disadvantages, to automate one more layer. So here we really should know and have a "real" theory here.

<comment><USER5> Do you think no one is trying? Should researchers just ignore all results until the underlying theory is found? What if we don't find it for another 50 years? I find it incredibly hard to be critical in this situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is always impressive to me how both Professor LeCun, Bengio & Hinton stuck to their guns and worked on these problems while others were not so interested. I'm very glad Hinton's group at DNN Research was able to blow away the competition in the Imagenet challenge. Now many more people are working on these ideas and some really amazing things have been accomplished in a very short time. I can't wait to see where we are in five years, and I love that LeCun's points out the areas where we should focus and what we are not good at yet.

<comment><USER7> Do you have any information about what were the hot topics just before this new resurgence of NNs (meaning around late 90's, and early 2000's).

I know symbolic AI was big in 60s, and 80s, but not sure about recent past.

<comment><USER8> Probabilistic models. Recent research often focuses on Bayesian models.

Probabilistic models have never really gone away. This presentation by LeCun actually suggests embedding neural networks inside of various types of probabilistic models: factor graphs and conditional random fields. This is, for example, how speech recognition works: the output of a neural network is fed into a probabilistic model (a hidden Markov model).

<comment><USER6> Actually, state of the art speech recognition has switched over to having a Recursive Neural Network directly run over the audio input. Take a look at the paper at [http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.5567](http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.5567) and [http://usa.baidu.com/deep-speech-lessons-from-deep- learning/](http://usa.baidu.com/deep-speech-lessons-from-deep-learning/)

However combining learning features with other systems is a very powerful approach and combining SVM's on top of the learned features of a Neural Network I would say is common. I personally am more interested in approaches like Deep Fried Convnets ([http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.7149](http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.7149)) that combine kernel methods as part of the Neural Networks themselves.

<comment><USER9> Not to nitpick. I just want people to realize there are actually recursive nets that rely on a parser to be built (this is the recursive net that relies on backpropagation through structure). Then there is the recurrent net (LSTMs,multimodal) that rely on backpropagation through time.

Talking to some of the users of Recursive nets, they will be renaming them to tree rnns which should help clear up confusion a bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is that document available in some standard format? The player that's playing it from Google Docs is buggy, and about 20% of the slides display an error message.

"10:01:47.662 Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at [https://drive.google.com/viewerng/img?id=ACFrOgBySwSrGvI- XLL...](https://drive.google.com/viewerng/img?id=ACFrOgBySwSrGvI- XLLt8yzMipqv7ffA6jN_fFpTRl88JGL9KzU39f4S0oroqq45kVAZ7staj8oYE6yPEsqdHD6S8r09_m- ZRpYjNTUwNlILDrA2-H463PBLY9LZSb8=&w=2000&page=46). (Reason: CORS header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' missing).1 <unknown> "

<comment><USER11> Look to the nav bar at the top of the page. The source file is (purportedly) a PDF and there's a download button.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The final 20 or so slides about building general AI using deep learning strike me as really interesting. Seymour Papet said that if you can fit concepts into your cognitive architecture then they are learned. I think that this part of the presentation speaks to a need to demonstrate this as "learning" proper. It's strange, because I believe that this needs to happen, but the idea that you would do it with an "all nn all the way down" architecture, rather than breaking out into a symbolic layer a-la SOAR just seems odd.

</comment><comment><USER13> Wow what in incredible amount of knowledge in those slides. Is there a video of the keynote?

<comment><USER14> CVPR usually makes all talks available when the conference has concluded. Watch this page [http://www.pamitc.org/cvpr15/](http://www.pamitc.org/cvpr15/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would like to see or hear more regarding the theory slides - in particular on the objective being a piecewise polynomial, and the distribution of weights using random matrix theory. Anyone know where I could find more?

<comment><USER16> [http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.0233](http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.0233) (and the references within he cites by Gerard Ben Arous)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> For some reason, most of these slides say, "¡Vaya! Hubo un problema para cargar la página." Is there a better URL, maybe with the PDF itself? ([https://doc-04-4c-docs.googleusercontent.com/docs/securesc/h...](https://doc-04-4c-docs.googleusercontent.com/docs/securesc/ha0ro937gcuc7l7deffksulhg5h7mbp1/0ptf7tt7v8qkg9j40pi37h2cvhm14jn8/1434326400000/06392201561352539427/*/0BxKBnD5y2M8NVHRiVXBnOVpiYUk?e=download) doesn't look like it's going to work reliably for other people.)

<comment><USER18> I downloaded the pdf; will mail you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> See slides 134-135. It's amazing that works. They get induction without any understanding at all. It still gets the right answer.

Intelligence may be dumber than we thought it was.

</comment><comment><USER19> I have attempted to put together the math stack for deep learning at

[http://rlucente.blogspot.com/2014/08/deep-learning- mathemati...](http://rlucente.blogspot.com/2014/08/deep-learning-mathematical- stack.html)

</comment><comment><USER20> Is there a volume summary of research papers or recommended book(s) for DNN?</comment>