Controlling your own wealth as a basic human right - <AUTHOR> https://blog.coinbase.com/controlling-your-own-wealth-is-a-basic-human-right-9fbe78341a7f#.o51jvuhsw <comment><USER2> Kind of sad when people make such suggestions, not because it's alright if the government interferes with ones wealth, but because they thereby implicitly water down the concept of human rights.

Basic human rights are being treated as an equal to other human beings and with human dignity, being allowed to live, prohibition of slavery, being treated equal in front of the law and getting due process, and not being tortured. Everybody should be able to agree on them.

Yes, maybe controlling your own wealth should a right. But please don't put it on a par with _basic human rights_.

<comment><USER3> I have sympathy with your argument, but I'm not 100% convinced. If controlling your own capital means having access to the economy so that you can buy food and housing, then it becomes a prerequisite for basic human rights like actually living; doesn't that at a certain point put it on the same level?

It's sort of like countries that take steps to ensure everyone has access to the internet as a basic right: they acknowledge that participating in the modern economy, and the things that flow from that participation (security, dignity, basic sustenance) require internet access to do it meaningfully. How else are you going to apply for jobs, when companies no longer sort through CVs sent in by post?

(As an aside, this is one reason I rage at people -- and this has been a strain of thought popular in Britain recently -- that make negative comments about the homeless having "luxuries" like smartphones. How else are they supposed to find work, be contactable to do that work, etc.? Being able to make and receive phone calls, SMSes, and emails is essential in 2017, at least in Europe. Madness.)

Anyway, point is, it's not enough to say that "everyone has the right to life and not be tourtured" and other abstract concepts. Having a right, truly, means being able to exercise it meaningfully -- just having it under the law is not enough. Therefore, the prerequisites to exercising those rights need to also be in place, and form at the very least a part of those basic rights, even if you do not want to classify them as seperate, also basic rights. (But I think arguing about Linnean distinctions is a little pointless.)

<comment><USER4> Consider Proudhons famous "property is theft" for a moment.

His point is that enforcing property rights explicitly deprives others. If something is scarce, then the moment I wall it off, others become poorer for it.

Sometimes that may be worth it: the deprivation of others may be small, and the benefits to the individual of being able to wall something off might be high.

Even the vast majority of anarchists and communists would draw a sharp line between private property + the "means of production" vs. personal property. To put it rather pointedly: Pretty much everyone agrees that granting every random stranger the right to use your toothbrush deprives us of more rights than it provides us.

Where exactly the line goes on what should be shared and what should not is one of the major differentiating factors of political ideologies, but that there _is_ a line is recognised by every present-day government in the world.

The enforcement of exclusionary property rights might enhance everyones rights and freedoms when what is walled off is so common that there is no perceptable increase in freedom from protecting part of it or when the benefits of exclusionary access are large enough to overcome the downsides, and it might enhance some peoples rights all the time, but it may also cause a drastic, profound reduction in the rights of many once something is scarce enough that allowing some people exclusionary control of it has the potential to significantly deprive others.

To take an extreme example: If all the resources you could have used to obtain food belongs to someone else, you've just de facto lost the right to live and having a de jure right to life does not help you.

This also acts as its own counter-example: If you _don 't_ have right to control your own wealth, then the ability to eat depends on the willingness of socity to let you.

And therein lies the problem with looking at a right to controlling your own wealth: Depending on how the society you happen to live in today is structured in terms of your ability to _obtain_ wealth, and _who_ has ownership, you may have more de facto rights with a right to control your own wealth or more without it. And that structure can change, and suddenly reverse the effect.

In other words, a "right to control your own wealth" does not provide a universal good, but one that is conditional on circumstances. That is my biggest problem with considering it as suitable to be a human right.

<comment><AUTHOR> >His point is that enforcing property rights explicitly deprives others. If something is scarce, then the moment I wall it off, others become poorer for it.

That makes absolutely no sense. That's like saying preventing people from feasting on your flesh makes them all poorer. I'm using an extreme example to demonstrate the absurdity of the argument that enforcing exclusive control over abundant and practically free natural resources that you've appropriated and applied work to in order to turn it into something highly valuable (whether that be soil, water CO^2 and sunlight that you converted into food and then into bodily mass, or sand that you melted into silicon and turned into a microprocessor), deprives others of their rights.

<comment><USER5> > exclusive control over abundant and practically free natural resources that > you've appropriated and applied work to in order to turn it into something > highly valuable

Things like land, mineral resources, and water are definitely not "abundant and practically free", but in most places, scarce and highly contested. Furthermore, the people who control them to a large extent did not work for them, but inherited them. So to what extent you have access to some portion of these scarce resources doesn't depend on your own labor, but on whether you happened to get lucky in the birth lottery and get born to someone who, in the 19th century, signed a favorable water-rights contract in California, or a favorable ranching/mineral-rights contract in Texas. You'd have to have quite some metaphysical faith in the "labor mixing" theory to believe that because some pioneer in the 1850s got a good deal on land or water, it metamorphosized into "his land" in perpetuity, even though he didn't create it. Or, in many cases, even put any actual labor into it in the first place (many of these deals were "paper" deals where east-coast financiers acquired Western land holdings, and sent other people to work them).

<comment><AUTHOR> Natural resources that are scarce can be justifiably taxed, but the argument the parent comment paraphrased is not a Georgist one of taxing only land and other natural resources. It is claiming that no form of property rights are legitimate, and that all enforcement of property rights is a violation others' rights.

<comment><USER4> No, I did not claim that no form of property rights are legitimate at all. If you think that, then read again.

What I did claim is property rights over any scarce resource inherently reduces the liberty of others.

That does not mean it can not be legitimate - we reduce the liberty of others for various legitimate reasons all the time.

It does mean that whenever we enforce property rights we are making a tradeoff between the liberties of differents sets of people.

<comment><AUTHOR> You quoted Proudhon who considered none-natural-resource classes of property theft as well. But your argument is also absurd:

>What I did claim is property rights over any scarce resource inherently reduces the liberty of others.

All property is scarce, which is why it has market value. You're saying people have no right to the property they create, if it happens to be scarce (which it always is).

Maybe you have some vague arbitrary definition of "scarce" that allows you to claim that the property rights you exercise over your possessions are legitimate, while the property rights of those with much more than you are not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The misnomer in "own wealth" is in the word "own". The only reason that wealth exists is because of history and society. The only reason that its yours to control is because capitalism is a relatively efficient and natural way to allocate and control wealth.

Thought experiment: a world without history & society. 7 billion people, with the resources of the world fairly divided amongst those 7 billion, but these people come into the world as blank adults without any knowledge of the past.

They'd quickly starve. Even hunting and gathering requires a surprising amount of training to do successfully, and the world cannot support 7 billion people in a hunter and gatherer lifestyle.

Even if your Mom & Dad taught you the skills of subsistence farming you'd still starve; we don't have enough farmland to grow enough food for 7 billion without modern farming techniques.

But for the sake of this argument let's suppose your parents taught you how to farm and make your own tools, shelter, etc and you have enough land to live on. Subsistence farming is something you can do on a heavily populated world without the knowledge or cooperation or interference of any others. And it's pretty much the only thing.

Anything else requires history & society & cooperation forced or unforced.

We've the inheritance of Aristotle, Newton, Watt, Einstein, Borlaug, Caesar, Washington, Confucius and innumerable others. We control the wealth because they're all dead and we've inherited it. We're mice standing on the shoulders of giants.

Certainly we have all done something to be granted our wealth. Some of us may have inherited it, but most of us do our 9-5 or more. But what we do is such a small part compared to what came before. We spent 12-20 years in school being taught by society, protected by society, enabled by society and learning from history, given to you by your employer or your customers.

It's efficient and natural for you to control the wealth that comes into your hands; taxation and government implies a certain amount of waste. But society has just as much of a claim as you do. At least on any part more than that of a subsistence farmer.

<comment><USER7> _The only reason that wealth exists is because of history and society._

That is a bit extreme. You can hoard basic goods (wheat, lumber, livestock) or build infrastructure (house, barn, pipes) for your own use in the future, without involving state or society.

Society can more or less work without private property but a _free_ society can not. We tend to think of the State as an abstract law infrastructure, but it is not. Who does make, apply, execute the laws?

<comment><USER6> If you carefully save from your subsistence farm in the good years you might save a couple of tons of wheat to get you through the bad ones. Congratulations, you've just saved $300.

But you're right, our other freedoms do imply a certain amount of control over a certain amount property. The right to self-determination, freedom of movement, freedom of assembly, freedom of association et cetera would be hard to guarantee without a little bit of freedom of property.

As I mentioned, capitalism is a pretty good means to accomplish our goals. It's not an end in itself or a fundamental right, IMO.

<comment><USER7> Capitalism and private property are not the same thing. Capitalism is Karl Marx's definition of an economic system where _the means of production_ are private property.

Private property is a more broad concept that means of production. You can put some goods out of market by law (a dam, roads, airports) so society will work better, but that isn't the same as preventing individuals from having their own private wealth.

Private property is based on the concept of rule of law. If the State can arbitrarily disposses you of goods you earned through fair trade, you are not really free.

<comment><USER6> The list of fundamental rights that are widely agreed upon are:[1]

      - Right to self-determination
      - Right to liberty
      - Right to due process of law
      - Right to freedom of movement
      - Right to freedom of thought
      - Right to freedom of religion
      - Right to freedom of expression
      - Right to peaceful assembly
      - Right to freedom of association

If the state can arbitrarily dispossess you of _all_ of your goods you don't have some of the above rights. However, the vast majority of most citizens' property and wealth is not necessary to exercise the above rights.

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

<comment><AUTHOR> It was once widely agreed upon that slaves had no rights. Just because something is widely agreed upon doesn't make it right. I would argue that the proceeds of the private trades you engage in are fully yours by right, and that no reasonable case can be made to the contrary.

To suggest that it is not a right is to imply that it is okay for a government to demand that two private parties divulge information about a private trade they engaged in, and throw the two parties in prison if they refuse to divulge this information, or if they refuse to hand over a share of the value they received in this private trade.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> From the article:

> I list [the lack of wealth redistribution] as a con because I think most > people view it as one, but it's not clear that it is one.

It is _widely_ clear that its a con, especially in the advent of the current forces in the world. Global warming has made some places on the planet impossible to live on without wealth redistribution and technology gains largely go to the extremely talented or the extremely wealthy.

Furthermore "controlling your own wealth" is basically translatable to "doing whatever you want with stuff" which is so clearly a bad idea. Can I "control my wealth" towards bribing a politician? Can I "control my wealth" by burning a bunch of methane on a boat in the middle of the atlantic?

Property / wealth is an important institution for many reasons, and crypto- currencies should be tolerated for now, but if the world starts to show signs of regular kidnappings for BTC ransoms then we should use political action to put an end to the anonymity or lack of state control that they provide.

</comment><comment><USER9> > but it also wiped out a large percentage of the wealth of the poorest > people.

This is a blatantly incorrect statement (that shows the bias of the author). Old currency could be turned into bank accounts, and then out to new currency.

The inconvenience was around the logistics of getting new notes into circulation (which was indeed managed badly in many parts), but no way can this be conflated with 'wiped out a large percentage of wealth'. The author's bias is making that leap.

<comment><USER10> You're right but the author isn't totally incorrect.[0]

> _But with the note shortage in India, cash is precious and the queue-jumping > jugaad has a dark side. As banks quickly run out of cash, many have to go > hungry if they cannot make it to the front of the line. Others have to take > days off work to wait in line. One man, standing in the queue at the bank, > who does odd jobs for a launderette, says he will phone his boss when he > reaches the front, so that he can come and make a cash deposit. "Every man, > whether he's rich or poor, has a mouth to feed. But somehow, only ordinary > folks like us end up standing in line," he says._

[0] - [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/28/india-bank- lin...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/28/india-bank-lines- controversy-cash-for-queuing)

<comment><USER11> However counterproductive India's change might have been, I don't think you can call statements like "it also wiped out a large percentage of the wealth of the poorest people" and "One could argue that the Indian government recalling bank notes had a positive impact on citizens (more tax revenue for education, roads, etc). Yet it also harmed millions by eroding their wealth" anything other than a misrepresentation of what the Indian government actually did.

I don't think it serves the Bitcoin ecosystem well when CEOs of some of its most trustworthy platforms make such flatly wrong statements on basic finanical issues. More generally, it's a counterproductive line of rhetoric to take when the average person in the developed world is several orders of magnitude more likely to suffer significant wealth loss through BTC volatility, platform malfeasance or government crackdown on domestic bitcoin use than hyperinflation or generalised currency seizures by Western goverments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I disagree with the notion that property ownership should be provided as a right, for free, and that any regulation or control over the property the State protects is an atrocity on par with slavery.

Don't get me wrong, in general I very much like the concept of private citizens managing capital rather than the State (though I wish workers had a bigger say in how capital is managed, but I digress), but there are times when States have to exercise some control over the property they protect in order to protect itself and the property it guards. Keep in mind, the Draft is a thing the State can do, the trick is to use such controls as lightly as possible.

Private control and ownership of property, while important, must necessarily be secondary to the stability and protection of the society it inhabits.

Also read bryanlarsen's comment, they go into good detail on how the State enhances private citizen's ability to create and accumulate capital.

<comment><USER13> [http://imgur.com/sjO5Hi3](http://imgur.com/sjO5Hi3)

<comment><USER14> We should all stop paying for third party enforcement of criminal and civil disputes. Any seizure of my property by the government is a curtailment of my property rights.

What benefits of the state are you willing to live without? All of them? If the answer is no you just want the line drawn further back or forward than others. My guess is like most of us you draw the line around services and benefits from the state that benefit you and people you know and not around services and benefits the state provides you deem unimportant to you and the people you know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As usual, I find Paul Graham's comments on economic theory incredibly frustrating.

This piece just uses the pull quote "a great deal has been written about the causes of the Industrial Revolution. But surely a necessary, if not sufficient, condition was that people who made fortunes be able to enjoy them in peace." Graham's article about that goes on to theorize that this might be _sufficient_ , and if so that only guild monopolies prevented earlier industrialization.

This is, in a word, stupid. Stability is a necessary component of industrialization - though stability to invest is even more directly required than stability to profit. This is not a breakthrough idea, I learned it in high school. Graham just hasn't read enough of the "great deal" he references to discover that. Stability is thoroughly insufficient - there's a laundry list of other requirements, with agricultural advances driving most of the other keys (especially, concentration of capital for investment and displacement of workers from food production). All of this is well-studied, heavily-analyzed content. It's not new to this article, or Graham, they're just reworking theory from scratch.

It's not especially egregious here, and I'm not attacking the conclusions of the article by pointing this out. But it's a problem that crops up a lot (ever read pg's thoughts on the Edict of Diocletian?) and it's exhausting to read ground-up recreations of basic theory.

</comment><comment><USER16> Talking about pragmatic human rights: Fiat money exists as legal tender in many countries in one form or another. No shop keeper can turn you down for wanting to pay with Dollars. With Bitcoin that's a different story.

While I wholeheartedly agree with all the benefits a currency like Bitcoin can offer, I think we're a long way from being able to use Bitcoin as an embodiment of basic human right.

<comment><USER17> _No shop keeper can turn you down for wanting to pay with Dollars._

I do appreciate your point, although 'legal tender' is generally only a relative term with regard to payment of debts. A seller is not otherwise obliged to accept dollars.

<comment><USER18> That's not true, my local german bakery simply doesnt accept big euro bills with the premise it could be fake money, which is nonsense as the smaller bills get faked more often, shit like this can't happen with bitcoin.

They also dont accept debit cards so u can be screwed if u have only a 100 eur bill with you..

<comment><USER19> I think you responded to the wrong comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Not that the points are invalid, but this is posted on a site hosted by a company that profits when people switch to digital currencies. Good marketing uses truth, and you may agree and use their product.... which is what makes it good marketing. But it is still marketing, and it is good to be aware of that.

</comment><comment><USER21> > everyman has a property in his person; this nobody has a right to but > himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hand, we may say, are > properly his \- John Locke

Locke wrote this envisioning people producing a measured but fair output from their labor - growing food, making durable goods, etc - and the modest property and wealth that could be obtained from this effort. In modern times, the true value of goods and services is skewed drastically in favor of those that own means of production, increasing exploitation of those that don't. Locke saw the potential but then less fully realized problem of unlimited accumulation and concentration of property and wealth and he wrote the government should moderate this and more equally distribute wealth.

Allowing one to _fully_ control their wealth may increase innovation, but there are downsides to this without some controls in place to control dangerous unchecked accumulation of wealth. I disagree with the premise that "smartphones and steam engines" are a justification for this because they improve the human condition. They improve it for some, at a huge cost to others.

</comment><comment><USER22> I am not sure how is that supposed to work. If someone steals or cheats and then launders the money into Bitcoin or whatever, should he have the right to keep it? Presumably, no. That would mean that right itself would depend on the legality of the process with which the wealth was obtained, and that's kinda circular.

I could however imagine supporting right to control your wealth up to the point of the average wealth of a human being on the planet. That would be within the spirit of human equality and universality of human rights.

And in practice, I wish I had at least a right to count my money in public, and publish my salary (without annoying my employer).

</comment><comment> d--b "my product as a basic human right"... sigh...

Putting all one's money in a bitcoin account doesn't sound like the best solution to hyperinflation and cash confiscation in poor countries. Why not buy US dollars or gold?

<comment><USER23> Because US dollars are controlled by the evil US government and not the not- at-all-self-interested Chinese bitcoin miners and speculators \s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> "51% of more of the participants on a network must agree to a change."

"Governments exist to serve their citizens."

In a democracy you also need 51% or more of the votes and everybody is equal.

We all know the real world works very very differently.

</comment><comment><USER25> The prohibition of other people controlling your wealth as a negative right (as is simply represents inaction of others interfering), therefore I must consider it a basic human right.

"Rights considered negative rights may include civil and political rights such as freedom of speech, life, private property, freedom from violent crime, freedom of religion, habeas corpus, a fair trial, freedom from slavery."

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

</comment><comment><USER26> Since the article is about Bitcoin and human rights I think it's worth mentioning that Monero is the only crypto currency that protects your financial privacy. Privacy is an important part of controlling your own wealth not least because it makes money fungible and doesn't allow discrimination against where coins have been spent previously.

</comment><comment><USER27> Most human beings don't have any wealth - or it's negative!

<comment><USER28> Global median net wealth is about $2200. Most human beings have positive, not negative, wealth, even if not an awful lot of it.

For global wealth info, go to [https://www.credit-suisse.com/us/en/about- us/research/resear...](https://www.credit-suisse.com/us/en/about- us/research/research-institute/global-wealth-report.html) where you'll find a nicely presented Report and a Databook with more numbers in it.

The Databook has a table (Table 2-4) giving estimated median wealth per adult for all the world's countries (or something like all; I haven't checked). Many of the figures are small, but _not one_ is negative. I'm fairly sure these figures are net of debt, but it's not 100% clear. So, just in case, compare those figures with the ones in the previous column, listing debt per adult; the only countries where the debt figure exceeds the wealth figures are (unless I missed some) Brazil, Cyprus, Denmark, Germany (!), Malaysia, Maldives, Sweden, the US.

(I believe from other sources that US median net wealth is comfortably positive, which is one reason why I am pretty sure the figures in the "median wealth" column of Table 2-4 are net of debt.)

<comment><USER21> Half of all adults own < USD $2,200. The bottom 20% (something like 1 billion adults today) own < USD $248. Inequality is increasing - the top 1% own almost 51% of global assets.

These statistics show that most humans have very little accumulated wealth to control, and very few humans have a lot of the total global wealth.

<comment><USER28> I agree with all of that. But _nikolay_ claimed that most people have zero or negative wealth, and that isn't correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Bitcoin or any "cryptocurrency" has nothing to do with "human rights". You can keep it, but you also can choose not to. Human right is something you cannot easily revoke. For example, slavery was historically recently prohibited in the UK. Since then, you cannot sell yourself as a slave even if you are willing to.

<comment><USER30> > you cannot sell yourself as a slave even if you are willing to.

That's because human rights are inalienable, meaning they can neither be taken nor given away.

<comment><USER29> "Human rights" were introduced historically very recently, including concept of their inalienability. Concept of "justice" is much older. Thank you for clarification, I really like the word "inalienable".

<comment><USER30> Human rights have always been there, it's just that recently they were discovered (not invented).

<comment><USER29> Cant find any human right on me, or with microscope. Guess this is pure speculation, used for human resources management.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Interesting that the article talks about wealth but not income. After all, today's income is tomorrow's wealth. If control over your wealth is a "basic human right", then shouldn't control over your income and cash flow also be a"basic human right" for all the exact same reasons given? And if control over your income is a basic human right, and nations like US and Canada have tax rates approaching 40% on high earners, does that mean they are violating basic human rights? At what tax rates do we go from economic-policy to human-rights- violations?

I agree with the other comments here. The whole point of human rights is to enshrine the things that we absolutely need for our physical and psychological needs. Water, air, housing, safety, education. To claim that taxation, inflation and demonetization are a violation of human rights, devalues the term itself.

<comment><USER32> If something is being done against someone's will ==> Basic Human Right is being violated.

Thus Taxation by the definition, is a human right violation _for many_.

<comment><USER31> So your opinion is that every major nation in the world, by having mandatory taxes, is violating basic human rights.

It's exactly statements like this which dilute and devalue the power of terms like "human rights."

If you are a hardcore libertarian, and want to claim that every major nation violates libertarian principles, more power to you. But don't appropriate the term _" basic human rights"_ towards a political ideology that it was never meant to represent.

<comment><USER32> "Dont do somthing that you dont want to be done to yourself." is probably the reason that give birth to every basic human right.

So yes its absolutely appropriate. You dont have to be even a libertarian to realize that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Money is an integral part of a social system and stability. You can't 'disrupt' money without disrupting governance, rule of law, accountability and systems.

We are far safer with governments and central banks that are accountable to us to varying degrees than self appointed shadowy crypto currency cliques with zero transparency and accountability. The monetary system certainly cannot be in private hands.

The 'solution' peddled in a frenzy by early adopters is tainted by self interest and infinitely worse than any problem with central banks and current monetary systems.

<comment><USER34> > We are far safer with governments and central banks that are accountable to > us to varying degrees

Ah, but there's the rub. How accountable are they, really? In the software industry, you find out that if "everyone" is responsible for something, then all too often, no one is. And even if they are accountable to people in general, what happens when they fail individuals? Like this guy who had £440,000 of lawsuit-settlement money seized by Barclays on money-laundering suspicions:

[https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/jan/22/barclays- took-...](https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/jan/22/barclays-took- my-440000-customers-caught-up-banks-de-risking-money-laundering-laws)</comment></comment>


Jack Dorsey says Mark Zuckerberg served him a goat he apparently killed himself - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-jack-dorsey-cold-goat-dinner-2019-1 <comment><USER2> If he's serving meat that just came out of an oven cold, I think the Zuck needs to learn how to cook before trying to learn slaughter techniques.</comment>


Javocalypse - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cr0.org/2010/04/javacalypse.html

<comment><USER2> I love all these 'embarrassingly trivially exploitable issues' that require me to set up my machine in just the right way to make them work. And for all that effort, you can't even own the machine using the exploit.

What has it been? 15 years? and this is the best they can come up with for java security holes?

You know, I don't like java, but the more stuff like this I read, the more I have to admit that it is smart for enterprises to use it so heavily.

An interesting comparison might be to look at the number of java security holes vs activex vs windowsxp vs apache vs iis vs php vs ruby vs (you get the picture). Maybe group by client side and server side. That would give a real 'data based' look at software security quality.

Though I suspect that the jvm would be at the top of the 'security quality' heap in both groupings. (ie-least number of holes). I think it would be interesting to see nonetheless.</comment>


A demo that Magic Leap was going to show at TED - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3044047/tech-forecast/this-is-the-demo-that-magic-leap-was-going-to-show-at-ted-before-it-backed-out <comment><USER2> This is unbelievable. As in, I literally can't believe it. There's no way they've come up with a full-resolution, head-mounted, transparent, additive _and_ multiplicative display attached to a computer vision system capable of identifying light sources and nearby geometry that _also_ has 100% perfect hand tracking with haptic feedback. I also don't believe anyone would make such bizarre, quasi-pornographic grunting noises while wearing such a device and "playing" at the office.

<comment><USER3> It's a _concept video_ done by a special effects company well known for The Lord of the Rings and Avatar. The YT description "This is a game we're playing around the office right now" is a bit provocative and without a real demonstration it's just PR.

Video on YT: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPMHcanq0xM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPMHcanq0xM)

Company: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weta_Workshop](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weta_Workshop) , [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weta_Digital](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weta_Digital)

It's called _augmented reality_ and more basic implementations are already possible for some time: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality)

@Downvoter: what's wrong?

<comment><USER4> I didn't downvote you, but I suspect it's because this whole comment thread is about trying to determine whether or not the video is real footage of Magic Leap's tech. Asserting that it is or it isn't, without something to back up that assertion, isn't all that helpful. Nowhere in the video description does it say that it's just a concept.

<comment><USER3> > without something to back up that assertion, isn't all that helpful

The video credits list _Weta_ prominently - that's alone is a significant signal. The guns are props from Weta too: [https://www.wetanz.com/rayguns/](https://www.wetanz.com/rayguns/)

CEO Rony Abovitz, who was supposed to go onstage at the TED conference in Vancouver on Wednesday, has canceled his talk. Why would a CEO cancel such a high profile talk and release that video afterwards? More info: [http://recode.net/2015/03/16/magic-leap-googles-high- profile...](http://recode.net/2015/03/16/magic-leap-googles-high- profile-3-d-tech-bet-just-cancelled-its-high-profile-appearances-why/) , [http://recode.net/2015/03/19/the-first-video-of-magic- leaps-...](http://recode.net/2015/03/19/the-first-video-of-magic-leaps- technology-looks-fake/) .

I tested two state of the art augmented reality glasses (university research prototypes) last year. The glass was connected (via cable) to a workstation PC with several high end NVidia graphic cards. One also used Xbox Kinect to track the environment and the arms. Everything shown in the video is already possible, but not with that perfect visual quality and without any latency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wait, I'm confused. Is that video the actual game and how everything actually looks, or is it a concept video with visual effects and props and whatnot by Weta? Because up until now, I was under the impression that it was the latter.

<comment><USER6> Magic Leap PR has not yet confirmed if the video is an authentic demo of the product ( [http://recode.net/2015/03/19/the-first-video-of-magic- leaps-...](http://recode.net/2015/03/19/the-first-video-of-magic-leaps- technology-looks-fake/) ).

One hypothesis is that PR commissioned the video and planned to show it at TED and other venues. IMO the video definitely looks produced and it was prudent to cancel the talks rather than spin the video as a plausible demo of their product.

Re/code's comparison to Google's hype of Glass is a little harsh, but nevertheless if the video is indeed "fake" this would be yet another example of Marketing being completely reckless with consumer expectations. I'm sure the Magic Leap product has some impressive strengths. Better to let the product speak than to let Marketing try to "lift" something different that doesn't exist.

<comment><USER7> Re-watching the glass video, compared what was actually launched, their criticism seems fair in retrospect.

It is also a great comparison on another level. This product may be amazing, but whatever it takes to make it happen is so unwieldy that no one would want to use it. Glass didn't fail only on the product experience, but on the social stigma aspects as well. Odd gruntings aside, until we actually see the product it is hard to say it will sell.

A good example of this is Apple. Presentation is equally important as the actual tech (hence these unrealistic marketing videos.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's odd that Engadget trumped this. I'll re-hash my comment from the article:

Those weapons are physical props from the Weta workshop collection (starting at the low low price of ~$500, up to about $7000 @ [https://www.wetanz.com/rayguns/](https://www.wetanz.com/rayguns/)). They also used SFX from Team Fortress 2 when they put down the turret. For the video they either:

a) Created a magical bio-feedback system to artificially create gun recoil for the person holding the weapon as well as tactile feedback for "in the air" functions.

or most likely:

b) Created a Post-processed CGI demo meant to impress execs that have no concept of what's currently possible - Might as well hire CorridorDigital and make something like this instead: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhCQeFX9GSg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhCQeFX9GSg)

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't even understand the purpose of a video like this. The only thing it tells me is what Magic Leap hopes their tech will some day achieve.

Blatantly conceptual and given that it's being released in lieu of in-person presentations, one can only assume that they didn't want to have to publicly explain it.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm not sure this is the actual thing. If you check out the video at near 0:10 you have emails which are fictitious, like an email from brands.edu (no whois record).

For the company to say they're playing this at the moment in office it is a bit misleading.

I hope the real thing will be just as cool if not cooler.

<comment><USER4> I'm skeptical about the technology, but the email domains have nothing to do with it. They could easily create a demo with real AR hardware and fake data, or with fake visual effects and real data.

The software is pretty clearly a mockup, but nobody cares because the 3D interface design isn't all that interesting. It's the hardware that's claimed to be revolutionary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The fact that the guns have recoil seem to suggest it's a concept video.

</comment><comment><USER12> can't believe anyone thinks this is real. It might resemble where they want to go with the product but this video is composited, that's blatantly obvious. I hope they can deliver on this vision. _cough_ google glass _cough_

<comment><USER13> Yes.

Let's not forget this is the same company whose patent draft diagrams were found to be basically wholly ripped-off copies of other public works. [1]

I'm impressed with the thoroughness of HNers screenshotting and looking at motion blur, but nothing I've seen says we should give this company the benefit of doubt. This reeks of "concept video" all around.

[1] [http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/30/7954611/magic-leap- augment...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/30/7954611/magic-leap-augmented- reality-patent-art-copied-designers)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Of all the skepticism, the two most reasonable ones are \- quality of the headmounted transparent display. This doesn't even seem to be Magic Leap's core competency and the tech required for a HMD to reach this level of quality is far beyond anything we've seen before. \- real-time computation power on a battery powered wearable. It would run incredibly hot and drain so much power unless the guy was wearing a giant battery/CPU backpack covered in exhaust fans.

For the other things, 1\. The room geometry could have been prescanned and coded in 2\. hand-tracking could have used an additional wearable sensor on the hand 3\. the AR systems could have been optimized for recognizing the gun (I have worked with systems capable of that) for highly accurate and fast real-time tracking of a non-malleable object 4\. and the interactive 3D graphics given knowledge of the room (surface geometry and lighting) is not a big deal at all.

The acting (such as recoil on the gun) is a bit overdone and obviously has nothing to do with the technology itself, and I find it weird that the AR actually seems to _assume_ you'd recoil that much and animates the shots as such.

<comment><USER15> > The room geometry could have been prescanned and coded

There's an Oculus Rift forum post that has a link to hand tracking with the Structure Sensor.

The depth sensing portable Structure Sensor is 95 grams and $380 (Kickstarter).

There's noticeable latency in the hand tracking, but a post talks about possible low latency for static objects by using a previous map.

Assuming you stay within a certain space, would premapping with something like the Structure Sensor or Project Tango contribute the most to the stability of virtual objects that Hololens testers experienced? (objects stick to their intended position as you move):

>Daily Tech News Show DTNS 2414 - Jan. 23, 2015

that objects stayed stable when you move your head 17:43

well hold on a sec it is excellent 17:47

at keeping orientation for sure I looked around and something with an absurd and 17:51

Spa 17:52

I looked around the same thing was there again I if they're mob rock on the 17:55

surface of mars 17:56

or a table covered with you know i i 17:59

toy castle at minecraft made all these tiny little minecraft building blocks 18:03

it would always be exactly where I thought it would be but I had to turn my 18:07

head all over the place cuz the field if the US 18:10

tiny it's like this little I somebody's described it as a sixteen by nine TP 18:15

floating maybe seven to eight feet and Franny 18:18

you're looking through this little narrow slice ever went out about this 18:22

big around in my view 18:24

trying to see mars this much at a time 18:27

and wherever you look is like oh that's exactly where I thought it would be 18:30

but its tunnel vision it's like you're looking through a pair of binoculars or

watch?v=uGYksMRmUwA

\---

>Through it all, the 3D effect was thoroughly convincing.

>The system felt very low latency; as I moved my head and walked around, the objects retained their positioning in the real world, with the castle, for example, never becoming detached from or wobbling around on the table.

arstechnica

\---

Or is good real-time tracking necessary for the virtual objects to stay attached to their positions.

(> If you can figure out these numbers for your system, the addition of 38 ms from the Structure Sensor will give you and idea of the total latency in your system. kickstarter

> 20 ms minimum latency (AKA lag, compared to 102 ms minimum latency for > Kinect 1 and 50 ms minimum latency for joypads in 60 fps games.) 123kinect)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reality Check: Comparing HoloLens and Magic Leap: [http://www.technologyreview.com/news/535806/reality-check- co...](http://www.technologyreview.com/news/535806/reality-check-comparing- hololens-and-magic-leap/)

</comment><comment><USER17> They need some UI & UX designers badly.

</comment><comment><USER18> Although I used to enjoy quake2 when I was young, I don't feel the appeal of shooting games anymore, or videogames in general. That is to say, I have been on both sides of the fence and I still vividly remember the sweaty excitement of a deathmatch.

Now, my first impression to this and to other AR (and VR) demos is, "Isn't this literally a new Columbine waiting to happen?".

(NOTE: I do not mean the incident, those seem to happen regardless, I mean the public outcry and witch-hunting).

Has public perception of interactive violence shifted to a point where "it's not different from an action movie after all", even at this new point of immersive realism?

<comment><USER19> I think anyone who has issues distinguishing between virtual reality and the real world will have issues regardless of whether or not they play these types of games. I don't think there is any study out there showing that violent video games make people any more violent.

<comment><USER18> And I agree with you! Edit to make the point clearer.</comment></comment></comment>


Relearning Matrices as Linear Functions - <AUTHOR> https://www.dhruvonmath.com/2018/12/31/matrices/ <comment><USER2> Linear Algebra, at least at my school, is taught pretty poorly. Instead of teaching the beauty of transformations, the course is boggled down in numerical nonsense and tedious calculations (who wants to find the inverse of a 3x3 matrix? Bueller? Bueller?). Only after learning Algebra and homomorphisms, isomorphisms and automorphisms did I appreciate the importance of linear transformations. Stuff like Singular Value Decomposition gets a lot more interesting once you know some basic Algebra. I suppose Linear can't get too abstract because non math majors have to take it, but starting from generalized ideas of transformations is a far better way to teach it imo.

<comment><USER3> That was exactly my experience. Struggled with matrices theory at uni doing some bullshit exercises but started to grasp the topic only when I needed to apply some linear transformation in a game

<comment><USER4> I think the situation has improved somewhat as visualization tools have become easier to use. We made this simple visual [1] to help people understand what they might get out of linear algebra, and it was easy enough for some statisticians to accomplish.

[1][https://datasciencetexts.com/subjects/linear_algebra.html](https://datasciencetexts.com/subjects/linear_algebra.html)

<comment><USER5> Nice site, but it's worth giving some info about yourself on the site and why I should trust your advice, given that these books are expensive.

In elementary machine learning, you give two options. You should really include introduction to statistical learning by the same folks who wrote ESL. It's a great book that covers the same ground as ESL but with less math.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the feedback! ISL is indeed a good option, especially for the more application-oriented; it's on the todo list!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It took until I started learning differential geometry in the form of General Relativity to arrive at this insight, even though I feel like the notion of a matrix as a linear map was drilled in pretty thoroughly. The notion of matrix multiplication as function composition was presented almost as an interesting side effect of matrix multiplication -- that is, multiplication by these rules came first, and, hey, look, they compose!

Personally I found the prospect of tensor algebra to be much more intuitive than either of these; with matrices thrown in mostly as a computational device. Even a vector (through the dot product) is just a linear function on other vectors, and the notion of function composition carries through to that and to higher-order tensors.

Covariance and contravariance are a little more complicated to completely grok, but for most applications in Euclidean space (where the metric is the identity function) the distinction is of more theoretical interest anyway.

<comment><USER7> The metric?

<comment><USER8> A _metric_ is a distance function. Defining a metric on a space is one of ways you create a topology.

I'm not sure what the parent means by the metric being the identity function, however. The Euclidean metric is basically the hypotenuse of a triangle parameterized by two vectors. The adjacent and opposite sides of the triangle are measured to be the Euclidean norm of each vector (their length), and the hypotenuse is the shortest distance between them.

The Euclidean metric is not the _only_ metric - you can define distance however you'd like as long as it's consistent. But I'm not sure how the identity function works as a metric, because that would map a vector to another vector, not a scalar.

<comment><USER6> In differential geometry the metric [1] is a tensor that defines the relationship of vectors in the space to vectors in the tangent space. The identity function as a metric means that you are in a locally flat space where geodesics (the path taken by traveling in a given direction) are straight lines.

A metric in a traditional metric space is a global distance function; you can use the metric tensor in a Riemannian manifold to allow integration to find the distance between two points.

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

<comment><USER8> Ah, so that's the setting we're talking about. Thanks for explaining that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In my high school matrices were first taught in geometry class, starting with using matrices as affine transformations in 2-d and then 3-d, and using that to teach concepts like what eigenvectors/values are, the equivalence of matrix and function composition, etc.

That was taught right after a unit on complex numbers and trigonometry so that we could see the parallels between composing polynomial functions on complex numbers and composing affine transformations.

To this day I think that was one of the most beautiful and eye opening lessons I've had in mathematics.

In hindsight, I think I got lucky that the teachers who wrote the curriculum this way were math, physics, and comp sci masters/phd's who looked at their own educations and decided that geometry class was a great Trojan horse for linear algebra.

<comment><USER10> You certainly were lucky to be taught Linear Algebra in such a manner! I came to understand the importance of such an approach only after a lot of head- scratching and self-study. IMO, a beautiful and important branch of "Practical" Maths has been needlessly obscured by the pedantic formalism espoused by the teaching community. Linear Algebra SHOULD always be taught alongside Coordinate/Analytic Geometry and Trigonometry for proper intuition.

I found the book "Practical Linear Algebra: A Geometry Toolbox" very helpful in my study.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> FWIW, I was told that matrices are linear maps pretty early on in my education. Are there any college level linear algebra / matrix calculations courses that _don 't_ tell students about that?

<comment><USER12> Sadly, there are. Or at least were.

When I went through university the standard set of courses was a Calculus course that was mostly about derivatives, a second one that was mostly about integrals, a third Calculus course that was about multi-variable Calculus. That third course necessarily had to teach matrices, and taught it as rote calculations. There was a follow-up differential equations course which refreshed people's memories of matrices..as a rote calculation.

It was done this way because the multi-variable Calculus course was a prerequisite for a lot of physics+engineering courses. So a lot of students wanted to take that sequence. Differential equations were a prerequisite for some other advanced courses. Linear algebra was pretty much just for math majors.

<comment><USER13> For me also. It is still that way in many programs, that I can tell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey OP here!

When I first was introduced to matrices (high school) it was in the context of systems of equations. Matrices were a shorthand for writing out the equations and happened to have interesting rules for addition etc. It took me a while to think about them as functions on their own right and not just tables. This post is my attempt to relearn them as functions which has helped me develop a much stronger intuition for linear algebra. That's my motivation for this post and why I decided to work on it. Feedback is more than welcome.

<comment><USER14> What got me for a while was the concept of a tensor:

For example: What is a tensor?

Wrong way to answer it: Well, the number 5 is a tensor. So's a row vector. So's a column vector. So's the dot product and the cross product. So's a two- dimensional matrix. So's a four-dimensional matrix, just... don't ask me to write one on the board, eh? So's this Greek letter with smaller Greek letters arranged on its top right and bottom right. Literally anything you can think of is a tensor, now... try to find some conceptual unity.

Then coordinate-free fanaticism kicked in, robbing the purported explanations of any explanatory power in terms of practical applications of tensors. The only thing they could _do_ was shift indices around.

What finally made it stick is decomposing every mathematical concept into three parts:

1\. Intuition, or why we have the concept to begin with.

2\. Definitions, or the axioms which "are" the concept in some formal sense.

3\. Implementations, or how we write specific instances of the concept down, including things like the source code of software which implements the concept.

<comment><USER15> As a layman, the word "tensor" always intimidated me. As a programmer, I was surprised then when I found out that a tensor is just a multi-dimensional array (where the number of dimensions can be as small as 0). That was a concept I was already quite comfortable with.

<comment><USER16> That's a bit like saying a vector is 'a row of numbers'. Not incorrect, but missing the point. What matters is what vectors _do_. It's the properties like pointwise addition, scalar multiplication, and existence of an inverse that make vectors vectors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is great and a nice mathematical approach to the ideas of matrices. Another great resource is 3blue1brown's essence of linear algebra:

[https://www.3blue1brown.com/essence-of-linear-algebra- page](https://www.3blue1brown.com/essence-of-linear-algebra-page)

Math is Fun also has a nice writeup that explain matrix multiplication from a real world example of a bakery making pies and tracking costs:

[https://www.mathsisfun.com/algebra/matrix- multiplying.html](https://www.mathsisfun.com/algebra/matrix-multiplying.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> One of the things that always irked me about the term "linear transformation" is it doesn't include affline transformations, which is funny because back in elementary school, you learn that a "linear equation" looks like Mx + b. Of course, the article states the term "linearity" when talking vector spaces (or modules) means linearity in arguments, while the term linear for a child in school means "something like a line on graph paper", and this is yet another example of terminology in the way mathematics is taught, possibly for historical reasons, that leads to even more confusion.

PS. incase you didn't know, affline transformations are not linear:

      f(x) = mx + b =>
      f(x+y) = m(x+y) + b /= mx+b + my+b = f(x) + f(y),
      f(cx) = c m x + b /= c(mx + b) = c f(x)

</comment><comment><USER19> Their most recent post about kernels is even better than this:

[https://www.dhruvonmath.com/2019/04/04/kernels/](https://www.dhruvonmath.com/2019/04/04/kernels/)

The matrix/function stuff is elementary enough that I understand it intuitively (I suck at math), although it's neat to be reminded that given a enough independent points you can reconstruct the function (this breaks a variety of bad ciphers, sometimes including ciphers that otherwise look strong).

The kernel post actually does some neat stuff with the kernel, which I found more intuitively accessible than (say) what Strang does with nullspaces.

</comment><comment><USER20> If you're interested in this approach to linear algebra you should read Linear Algebra Done Right by Sheldon Axler.

<comment><USER21> Or pretty much any other Linear Algebra book.

<comment><USER22> Axler's book has the advantage of skipping determinants in order to provide a more intuitive approach to linear algebra.

<comment><USER8> I strongly disagree skipping determinants provides a more intuitive approach to linear algebra. I don't know your background, but I'd venture a guess you feel it does because the Laplace expansion formula for computing the determinant[1] feels uninspired and out of place.

The reason determinants are hard to teach (in my opinion) is because a rigorous derivation of their formula isn't possible without first teaching multilinear algebra and constructing the exterior algebra. Once you do those things, the natural geometric interpretation of the determinant basically falls onto your lap. But it's still very useful for e.g. computing eigenvalues and using the characteristic polynomial, so it's taught before that context can be formalized.

Professors shouldn't teach determinants in the context of matrices, at least not at first. That's heavily computation-focused, and the symbol pushing looks really unmotivated and strange to students. Instead they should teach the basis-free definition of determinants (i.e. focus on the linear map, not the matrix transformation representing the linear map for some basis). Then the determinant is "only" the volume of the image of the unit hypercube under the linear transformation, which is where the parallelepiped comes in. If the linear transformation is invertible, the unit hypercube is transformed from an _n_ -dimensional cube into an _n_ -dimensional parallelogram, from which you can geometrically see the way the linear map transforms the entire vector space it's defined over.

3Blue1Brown has a very good video on the geometry underlying the determinant[2]. For a more rigorous presentation which constructs the exterior algebra and derives the determinant formula using the wedge product, Noam Elkies has notes[3][4] for when he teaches Math 55A at Harvard. Incidentally Noam Elkies uses Axler's book, and while he obviously approves of it he's pretty upfront in asserting that the determinant should be taught anyway[5].

________________________

1\. [http://mathb.in/33068](http://mathb.in/33068)

2\. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip3X9LOh2dk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip3X9LOh2dk)

3\. [http://www.math.harvard.edu/~elkies/M55a.10/p8.pdf](http://www.math.harvard.edu/~elkies/M55a.10/p8.pdf)

4\. [http://www.math.harvard.edu/~elkies/M55a.10/p9.pdf](http://www.math.harvard.edu/~elkies/M55a.10/p9.pdf)

5\. [http://www.math.harvard.edu/~elkies/M55a.10/index.html](http://www.math.harvard.edu/~elkies/M55a.10/index.html)

<comment><USER23> I agree, the way I still see determinant is as the 'volume scaling factor' of a linear transformation.

This means it makes sense that det(A) = 0 means A is non-invertible. It also makes a lot of sense when the jacobian pops up in the multi-dimensional chain rule.

Given the above, and the Cayley–Hamilton theorem, I never really had to know why the determinant was calculated the way it is. The above give enough of an interface to work with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It recently occurred to me that if you use that matrices represent linear functions, you don't have to do tedious math to prove that matrix multiplication is associative (that is, (A * B) * C = A * (B * C), which allows us to write A * B * C without brackets, since it doesn't matter how we place the brackets anyway).

For a matrix M, denote f_M(x) = M * x. Then f_{A * B} = f_A(f_B(x)) so that f_{(A * B) * C} = f_{A * B}(f_C(x)) = f_A(f_B(f_C(x))) and also f_{A * (B * C)} = f_A(f_{B * C}(x)) = f_A(f_B(f_C(x))).

So f_{(A * B) * C} = f_{A * (B * C)} = f_A(f_B(f_C(x)))

</comment><comment><USER25> Conjugate transpose and other adjoints are kinda nuts, they are the other part of the story

[http://www.reproducibility.org/RSF/book/bei/conj/paper_html/...](http://www.reproducibility.org/RSF/book/bei/conj/paper_html/index.html)

Esp the ray tracing/topology relationship is nuts.

</comment><comment><USER26> Nice! The illustrations + color coding for the vectors are very useful.

Here is a video tutorial that goes through some of the same topics (build up matrix product from the general principle of a linear function with vector inputs): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfrwVMTgrfc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfrwVMTgrfc)

Associated Jupyter notebook here: [https://github.com/minireference/noBSLAnotebooks/blob/master...](https://github.com/minireference/noBSLAnotebooks/blob/master/chapter02_linearity_intuition.ipynb)

</comment><comment><USER27> Good, intuitive introduction to matrices. Next steps could be showing that there are infinitely many different matrix representations of a linear map (different from the polynomials) and they can be used for function spaces, too.

One question that usually pops up that I was confused about till recently: are rank two tensor equivalent to matrices? Answer is no, e.g. see here: [https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/20437/are- matric...](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/20437/are-matrices-and- second-rank-tensors-the-same-thing)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey!

Thanks for the feedback. I go into this in the next post on eigenvectors here: [https://www.dhruvonmath.com/2019/02/25/eigenvectors/](https://www.dhruvonmath.com/2019/02/25/eigenvectors/). I start by discussing basis vectors which I believe is what you're looking for in your comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I just skimmed the article quickly. Are there other ways to learn about matrices? If you don't treat them as linear applications, they are just boring grids of numbers and the matrices multiplication doesn't make any sense.

<comment><USER29> Which is precisely how they were presented to me at college.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The basic equivalency is fine but what about all other things you can do with matrices but can't do with functions? For example, what is the equivalent of transpose in functions? How about Eigen values or Gaussian elimination?

</comment><comment><USER31> Nice article. That's how I learned matrices in high school in Germany. Maybe it's different here in the US, I'll have to take a look at my daughters' textbooks.

<comment><USER32> They were in the textbook in my high school, but we always skipped that chapter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Having not taken a linear algebra course in college, does anyone have a recommendation for a book/course to follow?

<comment><USER23> That would heavily depend on whether you are coming at it from a theoretical math p.o.v. or a more applied p.o.v.

Not that the applied approach should leave out the theory, because theoretical stuff like this article give a great and intuitive understanding of linear algebra. However, the more theoretical treatments should set up things like rings, modules, and even category theory that are much less useful from an applied perspective.

For the theoretical approach I've heard good things about 'linear algebra done right'. I imagine it is less appealing for the applied approach. All I can say is be wary of the 'shut up and calculate' mindset in linear algebra. Getting the ideas behind the concepts is essentially a shortcut to understanding linear algebra without any downsides.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Gilbert Strang uses similar approach on his Linear Algebra lectures. Much more intuitive

</comment><comment><USER35> The next relearning step is to construct the category where arrows are matrices...

<comment><USER36> > The next relearning step is to construct the category where arrows are > matrices...

Why not the category of vector spaces (morphisms are linear maps)?

<comment><USER35> So yes, this is equivalent to FinVect of the field of which entries in the matrices consist.

The difference is that here you construct the category from a simpler premise. To construct FinVect you need to include all set objects with structure satisfying some axioms.

The category of matrices is simply positive integers with as morphisms n x m matrices between the two integers. Composition is matrix multiplication.

Here [1] is a nice overview. If you can follow what is going on there, it is worth while looking at II, III and IV.

[1] [https://unapologetic.wordpress.com/2008/06/02/the- category-o...](https://unapologetic.wordpress.com/2008/06/02/the-category-of- matrices-i/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> this was an important result in the linear algebra class for first year math/cs/eng students at my university.

</comment><comment><USER38> What could possibly be a more basic understanding of a matrix in mathematics? There's a reason the first teach you Linear Algebra before anything else.

</comment><comment><USER39> Who is "we" in this context?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey! I wrote this article - "we" is referring to people who had a similar educational experience to me. I was introduced to matrices as a tool for solutions to systems of equations. I always wish I was taught the functional perspective from the beginning.</comment></comment>


Show HN: iHindustan – India's Own Business Search Engine [Newly Launched] - <AUTHOR> https://ihindustan.com <comment><AUTHOR> Looking for valuable feedback and critiques to further improve the platform.</comment>


Dark net 'used by tens of thousands of paedophiles' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27885502

<comment><USER2> Every time people talk about the "deep web" or "dark net" or whatever I roll my eyes so hard that I worry they will fall out of my head.</comment>


Ask HN: Request some suggestions for startup Video - <AUTHOR>

Anyone know or can recommend some firms doing videos for startups <comment><USER2> I assume you mean a demo video and are looking for something affordable: <http://demogirl.com/></comment>


Vermont cafe finds a ban on laptops and tablets earns better business - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/06/vermont-wifi-wireless-ban-starbucks-good-business <comment><USER2> This makes perfect sense. When computers were a novelty, allowing them would make an establishment seem to be on the vanguard of fashion. Now that computers and tablets are ubiquitous, it's the other way around -- people probably appreciate a break from the devices that are everywhere _else_.</comment>


iPhone App Prototyping Made Easy - <AUTHOR> http://popapp.in/

<comment><USER2> Mmm creating user accounts to up-vote you and comment just to get in the front page is an old trick...

The product seems nice, tho.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kmshiori> <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=changmason> <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=milesthegreat> <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=BruceLee345>

<comment><USER3> Hi, this is Wraecca from the POP team, I saw our new product "POP" on HackerNews so I invite my friends to vote, I guess they don't have HN account so they create new. I feel sorry about that!

However, feel free to give any advice about POP :)

<comment><AUTHOR> You guys still made it to the top on another post(weirdly) regardless. Congratulations! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is the right way, how intuitive!

</comment><comment><USER5> The best tool for paper prototyping.

</comment><comment><USER6> great app

</comment><comment><USER7> Looks nice

</comment><comment><USER8> Awesome, simple is not simple.</comment>


NSA director finally greets Defcon hackers - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57481689-83/nsa-director-finally-greets-defcon-hackers/ <comment><USER2> IMO, when the director of the NSA goes on-stage at DEFCON and the result is anything other than tomatoes being thrown and him being booed off the stage, something is wrong.

While it is true that hackers are not a single minded collective, and some hackers may have sympathy for the NSA, I'd hope that most hackers would see the NSA as what it is: just one more head of the Medusa that is the US government, in all it's civil liberty infringing, experimenting on it's own citizens program, illegal wiretapping, constitution ignoring glory. The NSA are _not_ \- so far as I'm concerned - the "good guys." Some individuals in the NSA may be "good guys" but the agency is just a tool of a government that is out of control.

"We don't keep files on every American citizen" Yeah, right... this guy would have had more credibility if he'd just said

"Yeah, of course we do. You know it, we know it, so why beat around the bush."

<comment><USER3> _I'd hope that most hackers would see the NSA as what it is: just one more head of the Medusa that is the US government, in all it's civil liberty infringing, experimenting on it's own citizens program, illegal wiretapping, constitution ignoring glory._

The NSA does some questionable stuff, but it also does some awesome stuff. The first thing that comes to mind is SELinux.

On a tangent, don't forget that we _need_ an organization like the NSA (or at least like what the NSA should be). The more ubiquitous computing becomes, the more important that role will become. So, don't advocate chopping off a head of the Medusa; advocate fixing what you see as wrong.

<comment><USER4> > don't forget that we need an organization like the NSA

For those of us who have already forgotten or have never known the reason for its necessity, could you explain why? Internationally and historically, similar levels of state communications monitoring are correlated with the need for self-preservation by authoritarian regimes. There are also many modern day states which do not possess an agency directly analogous to the NSA.

<comment><USER3> I believe that cyber-warfare, while fanciful-sounding in name, is going to be a part of the future whether we like it or not. In which case, the NSA seems the best positioned to conduct the USA's end of it.

<comment><USER4> If this is a justified belief rather than a faith-based belief, you'll need to offer a refutation of Thomas Rid's "Cyber War Will Not Take Place", which holds that cyber-war is contradictory because acts of cyber-war do not fulfill the definition of acts of war: [http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01402390.2011.608...](http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01402390.2011.608939)

<comment><USER3> Ok, so cyber-warfare is a shitty word. I know that, but people understand what it refers to, which is why I used it.

Would you be happier if I said I expect cyber-sabotage, cyber-espionage, and cyber-subversion to be important parts of future conflicts?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I saw the talk. Much of the talk made the assumption that the hacker community has the same goals and values of the NSA. This NEEDS to be justified.

This is a hacker community and while not a single minded collective I believe there are many popular views that are diametrically opposed to some of the goals of the NSA. He mentioned that he wished the internet would be perfectly secure and then went on to mention how this would protect American IP laws. His definition of secure internet does not include values such as censorship resistance or freedom of expression/information.

He also tried to tell everything how great it would be if we all had IDS's that reported back to the NSA in realtime.

We were not allowed to ask questions. They brought up a paper with questions that must have been determined BEFORE the talk happened which isn't fair to the attendees.

I wish there was a DEFCON panel to discuss this. Everyone just clapped and seemed cool with him from my perspective. I'm not against the director talking at DEFCON, but I don't think we shouldn't be accepting his ideas without more public criticism and discourse.

<comment><USER6> The questions weren't scripted, at least some of them weren't. DT was checking his twitter and I saw at least dave aitel's one about Cyber Command growth/size on there.

<comment><USER7> Even if they weren't scripted, they were mostly softballs, and the talk was more an introduction than a detailed roadmap.

The most interesting question was about whether the NSA would prefer a perfectly secure internet or a usefully insecure one (roughly paraphrased).

That's not far from what I wanted to ask: given the offensive value of 0-day exploits (as seen with Stuxnet, regardless of who actually did it), can agencies in "Cyber Command" really be trusted to give theirs up via responsible disclosure?

<comment><USER8> Your definition of "responsible" is not the same as everyone else. Try asking an actual question, not a question disguised to inject a moral judgment and re-ignite the disclosure debate that everyone was sick of 20 years ago.

<comment><USER7> Late to the party, but... you really couldn't find a question in there? Let me try again.

My definition of "responsible" doesn't matter. I was suggesting that the government could adopt a policy _it_ considers responsible, rather than just sitting on the exploits and using them for strategic advantage.

Unless there's a definition of "disclosure" that involves failing to disclose things to those in a position to fix the problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "We don't keep files on every American citizen": depends how you define 'files' and perhaps there is 1 American citizen they don't keep files on, so not 'every'. But we have on sworn testimony that the NSA keeps all of your emails [1] & a large chunk of your electronic communications & spies on American citizens[2][3].

[1] [https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/att/section1006summary101...](https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/att/section1006summary101608.pdf) See in particular ex-NSA officer William Binney's testimony.

[2] <https://www.eff.org/node/55051>

[3] [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/03/nsa-chief-denies- abili...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/03/nsa-chief-denies-ability- warrantlessly-wiretap-despite-evidence)

<comment><USER10> There's also the aspect about law, allowing warrantless wiretapping of anyone, or, everyone[1].

[1] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us- int...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-intelligence- collection-initiative-violated-rights-at-least-once-government- says/2012/07/20/gJQAtJjFzW_story.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Fabio Pietrosanti pointed out on twitter <https://twitter.com/fpietrosanti/status/229113274698981376> "My view from Italy (without ever crossing US border): DEFCON: NSA is a friendly agency to work for HOPE: NSA is a unfriendly agency to fight". There was a NSA whistleblower at HOPE Number Nine barely 2 weeks ago, William Binney. He detailed some of the abuses there. <http://www.hopenumbernine.net/speakers/#binney> You can listen to his talk here <http://www.hopenumbernine.net/schedule/#binney>

</comment><comment><USER12> I can't believe the director of the NSA (also an Army General) showed up in bluejeans and a t-shirt. I'm sure it was a PR move, but I still can't believe it.

<comment><USER13> probably a recruitment drive for the interception center they are building. That 260 million people statement is pretty stupid, considering facebook is in and around 4 times that. How stupid does he think people are? <http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/>

<comment><USER14> Not just for the interception center, but they are recruiting the best pen testers and vulnerability writers since they run the main offensive arm for the US Government.

Stuxnet was written at the NSA, the other worms were almost certainly were partially written there. The MD5 signature collision attack was almost certainly developed there. You could imagine that they now have dozens, if not hundreds of developers working on finding 0day and integrating new exploits into their attack arsenal of worms.

I suddenly have a handful of friends form the old underground who went from working openly in the security industry on papers, audits etc. to no longer talking about who they work for.

I can only put two and two together and conclude that the NSA has been on a hiring binge the past few years and are hiring all the best security guys (exploit developers, more specifically).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It was the most condescending speech I've ever witnessed given to adults. It certainly didn't raise my opinion of the NSA. Once you see the video, you will agree.

<comment><USER7> It did seem half-aimed at children. Especially after the corny opening to introduce one of the Defcon Kids ("help grandpa find his arrow keys", or whatever he was going for).

Right. Defcon Kids. An actual con within DEFCON sponsored by the NSA and AT&T, among others. That alone is the creepiest thing I've seen all week, enough so that the first time I saw the posters I was absolutely sure they were some kind of vicious parody.

<comment><USER16> I think Defcon Kids is awesome - hacking is a very fun skill which, like programming in general, interested kids should be encouraged to learn.

That said, don't be dishonest. The media should not be calling someone who discovered they could make time-based events in games happen by changing the time a "hacking prodigy"[1], and the website of a hacking con, whose others should know better, should not be saying it "allow[s] for exploit code to run on servers"[2]. It devalues the real thing :)

[1] [http://www.darkreading.com/blog/231300589/tween-hacker-s- tim...](http://www.darkreading.com/blog/231300589/tween-hacker-s-time-travel- trick.html) [2] <http://www.defconkids.org/?page_id=505>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There's a lot of angry comments, but this is a step in the right direction for the NSA. Hayden would've never showed. He had a disdain for hacker types and so-called privacy advocates.

<comment><USER18> It's pragmatic to bring one's propaganda to every available avenue and to try to coopt movements with anti-authoritarian roots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's more said here: [http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-07-28/hackers-asked- to-help-...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-07-28/hackers-asked-to-help-us- secure-internet/4160966)

"He held firm that the internet defences could be ramped up without sacrificing privacy or civil liberties."

However, he seems to be a staunch pro-IP advocate with this statement: "Look at all the intellectual property we've lost over the past decade,"

He should be asked how does one prevent an idea from being easily copied. Because, that's the fundamental problem behind criminalising altruistic IP infringements.

Personally; my hunch is that congress has no idea how to tackle widespread piracy, even NSA doesn't. There's also many 'cyber' companies that are complaining about security issues (Decentralised/Centralised attackers such as Anon/Wikileaks). So, NSA is requested to get into those. One step is a careful PR spokesperson to recruit (Notably, the clothes and charm). Also, to instil uncertainty and doubt among hackers.

<comment><USER19> If you watch some of his earlier speeches it is pretty clear that "intellectual property loss" is code for "chinese industrial espionage". This guy doesn't care about your game of thrones torrents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Only, what has this 10 year old to do with it?</comment>


Accounting Standards Wilt Under Pressure - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/26/AR2008122601715.html?hpid=topnews <comment><USER2> Accounting standards could, theoretically and technically, be as transparent and open as OSS. As far as the IASB and FASB's manufactured reporting standards to the public go, they might not even need to exist: transparent accounting could really solve most of these issues. Deception can only occur when some aspect of the formula is mired or obscured. I truly think transparency in accounting is going to be the wave of the future.

My Bachelor's is in Accounting, and one of the reasons I chose to not go into financial (or tax) accounting was this very reason: the legalities. It's just too easy to find a loophole and to adjust financial statements to be appealing to whatever audience an accountant wishes, inside stock owners or outside stakeholders. What portrait I am forced to paint is directly correlated to whomever is paying me. Yeah, technically it might be "legal" but it's not always an accurate or truthful portrait of a company's financial position. Ethics are a giant issue in accounting.

There's a reason the big five accounting firms were reduced to the big 4: SOX always gets a bad rap, but its intentions were really decent. It's just that the degree of complexity has risen beyond an efficient means to capture that complexity.

Openness and transparency, then, are actually the best and most efficient ways.

<comment><USER3> > There's a reason the big five accounting firms were reduced to the big 4:

Judicial error and/or prosecutorial misconduct appears to be the reason. From the Arthur Anderson Wikipedia page. "[In the ruling vacating the conviction] The [Supreme] court found that the instructions were worded in such a way that Andersen could have been convicted without any proof that the firm knew it had broken the law or that there had been a link to any official proceeding that prohibited the destruction of documents."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So many organizations, so many acronyms, so much talk, but nothing is getting done. This:

 _The results were dramatic. Deutsche Bank shifted $32 billion of troubled assets, turning a $970 million quarterly pretax loss into $120 million profit. And the securities markets were fooled, bidding Deutsche Bank's shares up nearly 19 percent on Oct. 30, the day it made the startling announcement that it had turned an unexpected profit._

is exactly what these organizations were supposed to stop. Instead they _knowingly_ allowed it.</comment>


How to use UTM parameters to grow your audience - <AUTHOR> https://smashnotes.com/updates/how-to-use-utm-parameters-to-grow-your-audience <comment><USER2> "Grow your audience" is a stretch here. Better to say "...to see where traffic comes from."

If you want to go a step further and see which traffic sources lead to form completions (like newsletter or app signups), I made a utility that captures UTM parameters and then inserts them into any form submitted during that session: [https://github.com/gkogan/sup-save-url- parameters](https://github.com/gkogan/sup-save-url-parameters)

<comment><USER3> That's really useful! It's actually surprising that something like this doesn't come as a default with Mailchimp forms. Just forked it and will give it a try. Thank you!

<comment><USER4> You can also check out [https://github.com/medius/utm_form](https://github.com/medius/utm_form) which can handle a lot of use cases.

(Disclosure: I created this to help my customers at [https://www.terminusapp.com](https://www.terminusapp.com))

<comment><USER2> Nice product. I came across it recently when researching other accessible methods for capturing UTM parameters. Yours was the only other one I found.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I occasionally change them to something random, like "potato_world_weekly_back_cover". Figure it might provide a little entertainment to bored marketeers.

<comment><USER6> Bored marketeer here. It's much appreciated :-D.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I run a newsletter company with almost 500k subscribers. When I started out 10 years ago, I was a fan of Google Analytics so added these parameters to all links in my newsletters. This was uncommon at the time and it turned out to have a huge impact on our growth as lots of webmasters were glued to their analytics at the time, wondered who we were, and Googled the name of our newsletters! I got emails or tweets every week saying as much and thanking us for linking to them, etc.

In the last five years it hasn't come up at all as everyone is doing it and people seem to dig through their analytics less than ever before, but if it helps you track links to _your own_ content, as being shown in the article, it's certainly worth a go.

Another amusing point is that HN didn't used to strip these parameters, so sometimes I could see when people had reposted things from our newsletters on to HN (and kept the utm params in) which was always a buzz :-)

<comment><USER8> Just to add to Peter's comment, the one issue with links via email/newsletters is that they show up as 'direct' traffic with no referral, so they are about impossible to link back to anything w/o the utm params.

<comment><USER9> You can make a dummy page for each email link that simply redirects to the correct page with the proper tracking information.

<comment><USER8> I think that is exactly what Peter ended up doing for his newsletters.

<comment><USER7> We have a redirect so we can measure traffic in aggregate (we don't track who clicks what) to refine our content over time. But.. I don't believe we get set as the referrer the way we do it (30x redirects). I believe this is why Twitter's t.co redirector DOES use a true "dummy page" as then they get the referral. It's something that might be worth trying though..

<comment><USER8> Ah, okay... that makes sense and is a great setup. Did you run into any issues with spam filters when you made that switch?

<comment><USER7> Nope, it's what Mailchimp, etc., do. All the outgoing links just fly through their server on the same hostname. We do the same with our hostname.

I have evidence that Google follows these links though, because if you link to a "bad" site even through a redirector, Google notices and will throw you into spam or say you're phishing, etc :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/utm- tracking-...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/utm-tracking- token-stripper/)

I have never observed a "utm" query param actually improve the quality of the response.

We all know why this obviously positive functionality isn't built into the browser: because browser vendors rely on hostile business practices to survive. Still no technology to transact with the site you're visiting for their content....

<comment><USER11> > I have never observed a "utm" query param actually improve the quality of > the response.

You have it backwards. It's more tracking for the webmaster/marketer to know what was popular and what wasn't.

<comment><USER12> Reminds me of a time at my previous job where I was asked to add a utm_source to API client calls for one specific type of client. Less for marketing, more for just the product management side.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I came across another article[1] on this and they state to "Never use UTM parameters on internal links (e.g., homepage sliders, internal banners, or internal links on blog posts). Clicking on those internal links will cause the current session to end and a new session to start—attributing the new session to the source/medium used on the internal link."

[1] [https://cxl.com/blog/utm-parameters/](https://cxl.com/blog/utm- parameters/)

<comment><USER14> That's definitely a really common issue. And correcting internal links when that happens is always a painful process - the artificially inflated site traffic figures it creates have likely been celebrated and publicized internally, and correcting the analytics (and the subsequent drop in traffic stats) gets treated as if you actually killed real traffic to the site in the process.

<comment><USER3> Can you use your own domain as the `utm_source` and therefore, even if the session is being reset by an update in source, you will know that the sources is your own domain?

Might even be good, as a way to calculate how well your internal links are working in keeping the users within the property.

For example, put a link at the end of the blog post, and then track how many users clicked it, vs. how many exited on that page.

<comment><USER14> The two issues you run into are:

\- The primary attribution model in Google Analytics is last non-direct visit prior to <conversion/goal/significant event>. Leveraging the source tracking parameters (utm_*) on internal links obliterates the usefulness of much of the built in attribution-related reporting. Relatively recent enhancements do provide visibility into multi-channel funnel flows, but the capability is compartmentalized into a few purpose-built views and don't filter back to most of the core reporting.

\- It also drastically skews engagement-related reporting, overall and at a source level. A new session in GA constitutes a completely new visit. So metrics like visits per user, new vs existing users, average visit duration, pages per visit, etc all get whacked in the process. And understanding user behavior and conversion paths from any given channel becomes somewhere between torturous and impossible, as the actions performed in the "new" session aren't visible when looking at the user flow of the original session.

What you're describing is possible and commonly done, you just can't do it with the utm parameters intended for source tracking without having disastrous side effects. Custom dimensions/metrics[1] or event hits[2] are the intended ways of doing that. For developers, Google's autotrack[3] library is useful for implementing that with fairly minimal dev overhead (mainly, seeding your markup with relevant data- attributes so event hits can be auto-populated and sent). There are also a lot of third party libraries for framework-specific integrations. And for non-developers, Google Tag Manager (or any other tag manager) makes event tracking pretty straightforward to implement without dev coordination.

[1] [https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2709828?hl=en](https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2709828?hl=en)

[2] [https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033068?hl=en](https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033068?hl=en)

[3] [https://github.com/googleanalytics/autotrack/#overview](https://github.com/googleanalytics/autotrack/#overview)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Neat URL is a Chrome extension that automatically removes all that cruft from URLs. Not affiliated with the author, just sick of people like this author littering in my address bar.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/neat- url/jchobbjgi...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/neat- url/jchobbjgibcahbheicfocecmhocglkco?hl=en)

<comment><USER16> I was looking for that. Now and then I manually add "Your_Mum" as a campaign and other profanities as utm_source

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't understand why we have to store the entire dataset in the URL, when something like ?utm_id=1 (mapped to the others in some database) would do. It's stuff like this that prevents average users from "getting" URLs; they don't know what UTM is and assume it is important to get to the information.

This garbage breaks the UX of the internet.

<comment><USER14> You don't have to; GA actually _does_ support precisely the scenario you're proposing - you can use a random campaign key/identifier in a utm_id field, and upload a custom dataset mapping to GA that contains the details to map to the other utm fields. This[1] support article walks through the process.

You just rarely ever see it because marketing execution is already an operational nightmare at most places (even more so at scale), and the centralized coordination required to leverage the campaign key method introduces a lot of friction, overhead, and potential bottlenecks into processes with little perceived gain. The decentralized model (i.e. entire dataset in the url) is far easier to enforce compliance with between all parties, as you can providing tooling (i.e. a link builder spreadsheet) that allows each party to integrate the usage into their workflows with minimal overhead or ongoing coordination required.

[1] [https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6066741?hl=en](https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6066741?hl=en)

<comment><USER17> Thanks for the explanation. This really does makes sense.

<comment><USER14> One other thing to note is that there are a few alternatives which tend to be a bit more feasible to implement (and sustain). Namely, using a single campaign key but leverage an encoding scheme for the key/id rather than a randomly generated one. That way it can be parsed at collection time and every permutation doesn't have to be predefined in a dataset ahead of time. Then end users can still self-service link creation with a template provided to them (they input the usual utm parameters they're used to, but it spits out a link with a single encoded key).

Then on the receiving end, you use lookup tables or functions to decode the various aspects of the key, and explicitly define the relevant utm parameters in the call to Google Analytics (which it natively supports as an alternative to implicitly sniffing them from the URL string). Or if your encoding scheme is simple enough, you can send the key directly to GA and use Advanced custom filters[1] to decode the utm parameters there.

[1] [https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033162?hl=en](https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033162?hl=en)

<comment><USER18> I've implemented this approach for my teams before. It's always a giant PITA without lots of effort around tooling to enforce conventions. It's useful though if you're trying to marry analytics tools without reinventing the wheel though because you can take out of the box UTMs and just transform them into some intelligible encoded format that first into some other tool's sole field for user-defined data.

<comment><USER14> Web analytics as a whole is a giant PITA without lots of effort around tooling. The default approach just has a silent failure state that is harder to detect, and becomes more of a hassle for the analyst that has to cope with the resulting data.

At least with this approach, the PITA becomes more explicit and easier to justify the tooling needs, allowing for it to be addressed and tackled at the outset by the upstream implementation team, rather than cascading to downstream consumers.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Get the Google Wallet APK for you LTE Galaxy Nexus – No Root Required - <AUTHOR> http://www.talkandroid.com/79447-get-the-google-wallet-apk-for-you-lte-galaxy-nexus-no-root-required-courtesy-xda/#.Tu2PzhdjEqF

<comment><AUTHOR> Just installed this on my Verizon Galaxy Nexus. Worked like a charm. Up and running with my free $10 credit from google. Just need to try to find a place to try it out tomorrow.

Edit: Google has an app for that. <https://market.android.com/details?id=com.mastercard.paypass> will tell you where you can use Google Wallet.</comment>


Ask HN: How does one go about mastering your area of expertise? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I read one definition that an expert is someone's who's made every possible mistake in a particular very narrow field. There's something to that. If you love your field, it's hard not to get started doing that!

Also, _mastery_ is relative, isn't it - like _beauty_ or _understanding_ \- mastery to one person might seem like elementary blundering to another. I guess learning is never-ending. The more you know, the more you realize you don't know.

Beauty is as relative as light & dark. Thus, there exists no beautiful woman, none at all, because you are never certain that a still far more beautiful woman will not appear & completely shame the supposed beauty of the first. - Paul Klee, diary, 1910

El sabio siempre quiere aprender; el ignorante siempre quiere enseñar. – Spanish proverb (The wise person always wants to learn; the ignorant person always wants to teach.)

What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing. – Aristotle

Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself, must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know. – Emerson

EDUCATION, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding. – Ambrose Bierce, _Devil's Dictionary_

Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. – Oscar Wilde, _Maxims for the Use of the Overeducated_

It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot, irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it. – J. Bronowski, _The Ascent of Man_

</comment><comment><USER3> I have met very few masters, yet they're all extremely humble and open to learn from anything/anyone.

</comment><comment><USER4> Step 1: The fundamentals or core skills - this is the bare minimum you need to be functional. Step 2: The history or how your area evolved into it's current state. Step 3: Bleeding edge, the most current developments in your area.</comment>


Waiting for AOO - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/729460/a34654e7697903dc/ <comment><USER2> By this point, AOO is just a liability. I do not understand how they can continue boasting about their hundreds of thousands of downloads a day, while being unable to release even minor security patches for months. They should just do the reasonable thing and redirect to LibreOffice.</comment>