Matchstick to refund everyone's money - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/matchstick/matchstick-the-streaming-stick-built-on-firefox-os/posts/1266549

<comment><USER2> The thing about Matchstick was this line from the original campaign:

"The product is fully functional today, with the hardware design final, tooling complete, and manufacturing ready to ramp up in the next 30-60 days"

followed six-months later by:

"We want to update the hardware" and "is being updated to support DRM" amd the ship date being moved back to now.

A lot of people backed Matchstick because it was going to be open - the plans were all available for download, it was all ready to go, and we were going to have kit in our hands really quickly. Instead we were going to get something that was slowed down by six months so that it could have closed DRM-support added. And then it's cancelled because they added support for something that wasn't even part of the original campaign!

It's not surprising that the backers are upset.

</comment><comment><USER3> The old reality, with companies like Google, was that if you aren't paying money, you aren't the customer, you're the product.

Then Kickstarter came along, and the premise was, "Gives us $X0,000 and we'll do our best to give you product Y as a so-called-reward. But this is not a store."

So now you're giving them money, but you still aren't a customer!

Because people are now using this as astro-turf marketing campaigns for products that are already funded by other investors, or as market research, or as a line item on their pitch deck to raise money from investors.

In this egregious case, the company seems to have had no intention of really entering into a "deal" with the backers of its kickstarter campaign, it was entering into a deal with its other investors, in accordance with a business plan its backers have never seen. Thus, they struggled to build DRM into the product, although DRM had nothing to do with the product they promised their backers, and everything to do with their other business dealings and plans. And now their backers are discarded like a one-night stand, but hey, here's your own money back.

Frankly, this stinks.

If you go on Kickstarter and say you're going to build product Y, that's what you should do. If your business plan requires raising Kickstarter backing and then going after investors, you should say so up front and not pretend you are off to start work as soon as the project is funded.

And as for the investors, shame on you. If you invest in a company that has entered into an agreement with backers to build product Y, you should actually make them do that, or not invest in the first place.

Whatever pivot the go on to do, everyone has been forewarned that simply giving them money and receiving promises in return means very little to them, their attitude seems to be, "well, if we change our minds, we just give you your money back and do whatever we like."

That is not a principled way to run a business. If they couldn't build this thing with the funds raised on Kickstarter, then they shouldn't have been on Kickstarter.

<comment><USER4> They _gave the money back._ Regardless of surrounding events or further stories, you do not get to call them unprincipled.

<comment><USER5> I disagree.

If they were principled, they would have followed through with the original product. Instead they used the money to start building something slightly different. It was a bait and switch.

Giving people's money back is saving face to avoid a huge backlash.

<comment><USER6> So Kickstarter companies aren't allowed to pivot?

Things change, other groups get involved. That's just real life, hell, look at Oculus.

<comment><USER7> Not without consulting their backers. 'Pivoting' means not delivering the item people backed. On the other hand, I think the refunds should be the end of complaints.

<comment><USER8> Refunds + appropriate interest rates for such a high-risk "investment" + penalty for not upholding their end of a promise + …. I don't see how they could afford to satisfy any morally (if not legally) reasonable demands.

<comment><USER7> It's definitely not an investment (as Kickstarter continually remind you), and there were no penalties agreed upfront. Seriously, do you want more restrictive consumer protection on KS projects than when you buy offered products at retail that have the order cancelled because it wasn't in stock?

I'm normally the last person to get libertarian about "you agreed to this contract", but this seems to be one case where it's appropriate. Or does it need more warning that you're not buying an extant product?

<comment><USER8> AndrewDucker's comment above, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10002117](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10002117) , does not look like "you're not buying an extant product" to me. In fact, it looks like the exact opposite of that, more like "we're finished and can start making these _now_ ".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Huh...

I've always thought that "this thing might totally fail" was something that people understood when backing a kickstarter project.

The idea that if they fail, they have to refund everybody's contribution kindof stinks, since I've always thought kickstarter was for people trying new things (which is obviously going to have a lot of stories about failure)

Maybe there is more to the story here.

<comment><USER10> There's been a lot of persistent misinformation floating around about Kickstarter, and I don't really understand why. It's not complicated.

Yes, Kickstarter projects are legally obligated to fulfill their promised rewards, or else provide refunds. It has always been this way. Really, the only difference between Kickstarter and a preorder is that the schedule is a lot looser.

<comment><USER11> That is no longer the case in the current ToS. Among the current verbiage: "they offer to return any _remaining_ [emphasis mine] funds to backers who have not received their reward (in proportion to the amounts pledged), or else explain how those funds will be used to complete the project in some alternate form."

As you say, the older ToS looked a lot like a pre-order which wasn't really the intention and didn't frankly make a lot of sense for a project that had some material probability of failing. After all, if the money is gone, it's not there any longer to issue refunds.

<comment><USER12> It made sense because it was the only thing holding Kickstarters accountable to the people funding them. With an investment, you're taking a risk but have some control over how the company's run. With a pre-order, you have no control but they have to deliver the product or refund you. Kickstarter now is the worst of both worlds: projects don't have to deliver anything and you can't even make sure they give it a decent try. Someone could promise the Earth, use the money to pay all their friends living costs for years while they tool around and fail to make a working product, then say "sorry, the money's all gone" and that's fine now according to Kickstarter.

<comment><USER11> Yes, but an ostensible requirement that the promised reward or a full refund had to be delivered _no matter what_ simply never made any sense. You can't get blood from a stone and all. Now, like then, you could pursue legal action but this isn't a realistic option in most cases, at least outside of clear fraud. The current ToS does it pretty clear that not delivering a project or a full refund is a bad thing and also outlines other obligations. But, by not imposing requirements that are typically just not realistic to meet with most failed projects, to me it establishes a more useful baseline for behavior.

<comment><USER12> We already have a way of dealing with these kinds of debts that can't be repaid: it's called bankruptcy, it has a whole bunch of safeguards to stop people abusing it, and it's what you'd have to do if you took on any other kind of debt to fund your business and couldn't repay it. There is absolutely no reason why Kickstarter needs to be any different.

<comment><USER11> So now the Kickstarter project which has increased its costs by incorporating (though that's probably a good idea in any case) spends its remaining funds on bankruptcy lawyers and there's now nothing to return to the backers. Nothing is certain and Kickstarter projects certainly aren't. Whatever the ToS, it's probably not something you should use if you're looking for "satisfaction or your money back" sort of guarantees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _Netflix is half of all Internet traffic (crazy), and all the content owners are hopping on board. We want to create an ecosystem built on open hardware and software so its easy for anybody to get to this great content, anytime, anywhere, without one of the "big guys" imposing their rules on who gets what, when, or where. _

This is plain crazy. Netflix can't offer their service without DRM, Intel can't even release a chip without supporting DRM. How on earth did anyone expect this to be succesful without DRM? In the kickstarter movie they even show clips of Game of Thrones and John Oliver, how did people envision the Matchstick to play that content without DRM support?

And then the craziest part, after working for 11 months with I imagine a team of at least 3 but probably more, they fail which is understandable but then they _refund_ the kickstarter campaign. That means they actually have 470k lying around. Probably from VC funding.

So they used the kickstarter money as leverage in VC negotiations, got funded. Then worked for 11 months on something the kickstarter backers didn't ask for which creates a backlash, then they decide to drop the kickstarter. I wonder what their investors think of it "Oh yeah, the initial 17000 people that believed on our project whom we woo-ed you with? Yeah they're not happy with the direction we're going in so we're dropping them". So now it's just going to be an HDMI TV stick which to my knowledge already exist right?

(BTW the proper way this should've gone is: After 11 months Matchstick admit they got nowhere because of supplier issues (i.e. they couldnt get DRM) have run out of money and give up. The backers sue for reimbursement. Matchstick LLC files for bankruptcy, court finds no wrongdoing, no one gets money. The end and everyone lives happily ever after. Faith in Kickstarter restored)

<comment><USER14> Yup, assuming they were on the up-and-up to begin with, they could have saved a bunch of time and effort by just asking anyone who had worked on video playing devices in the past 10 years if their idea was remotely feasible to bring to market while keeping both open source developers and content providers on-board.

The Sony Dash was the only locked-down "tivoized" (in the rms sense of the word) "chumby powered" device and also the only "chumby powered" device that had netflix support. These two facts are not unrelated.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Ok, on the one hand as a backer of the project I'm thinking "So DRM is hard, why not ship without it? Why not give people the choice?"

Another possibility is this : [http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20120243158](http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20120243158) although I don't see that it has been allowed yet so perhaps not a "real" patent?

I'm one of the people who would have settled for working hardware and just a basic Linux port with graphics support.

<comment><USER15> I agree; this would be useful even if it only played local content. I wouldn't expect a "Firefox OS" device to play Netflix or similar.

<comment><USER16> Also: DRM-reading capabilities is a software feature, right? Couldn't they deliver it through a software update and just send me a frigging Matchstick not reading DRMs like I wanted it!?

<comment><USER17> Not always. Many DRM mechanisms require trusted hardware components to work. That is hard.

<comment><USER16> I guess that wouldn't be the case: since they are using Firefox OS, the DRM would work like they do on the Firefox desktop. But there might be something I am not paying attention to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> More useful tech destroyed by DRM. How long are we as an industry going to keep this up?

The only DRM that's even remotely defensible is like what KDE's PDF viewer has: a checkbox that says "Enforce DRM restrictions". For that, we don't need anything more than a couple of flags and some copyright metadata.

<comment><USER19> > we as an industry

Step 0: There is no "we". There are millions of individuals in thousands of companies across dozens of industries with wildly divergent goals, priorities and philosophies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm a plex user (Local media server) and I've found after trying Chromecast, AppleTV+PlexConnect, and FireTV Box I've found that using a Raspberry Pi 2 running RasPlex (total of around $85 w/ media center remote, I don't use it but it got the USB->IR so I could use my universal) provides the best experience of all (by which I mean sub $100 sticks/boxes). Similar results can probably be experienced with XBMC.

<comment><USER21> I'm a heavy Chromecast + Plex user. What do you prefer about the Raspberry Pi setup?

<comment><USER20> Direct play for everything. Way less stressful on the server and you can skip around in the video without hardly any delay (this is something I've never experienced with any other clients). I also quite enjoy being able to browse my collection on the TV instead of just on my phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Really bummed that the team came to this conclusion. I am a backer and found them at CES 2015 since they said they would be there with a demo. They had screencasting working and controlled it with an app on their phone. It was a little buggy and froze once, but totally worth the amount I backed them for. Around this time they decided to redesign the sticks with more processing power. I figured respinning the boards would take a while, but the software looked so good in January that I never thought it would be what brought the project to a halt.

Personally I'd be fine with transcoding videos on the fly from another machine to remove the DRM, but I suppose that defeats the purpose of a small hdmi stick if you have a full powered desktop running in the next room over. But really most of the stuff on my local netowrk doesn't have DRM and I don't do a whole lot of online streaming beyond Amazon Prime and I have an app on my TV for that. I suppose all I really wanted was screencasting without having to pay $100 for a WiDi adapter. Oh well.

But at least I'm getting a refund, so I don't suppose I have any ill will for the team. I have backed projects before that did a magic trick with my money - one shoe KS took $130 for a pair of boots and kept up a sham for almost a year, even claiming that production had started and we would see our boots in a few weeks (it was always just a few weeks away), and then abruptly vanished. So I hope whatever project the Matchstick team works on next pans out better for them.

<comment> TD-Linux >Personally I'd be fine with transcoding videos on the fly from another machine to remove the DRM

That would probably be either illegal or against the ToS of the streaming service they were trying to add.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Doesn't this go against what Kickstarter is about? Will other projects feel pressure to refund if they don't pan out?

<comment><USER24> > Will other projects feel pressure to refund if they don't pan out?

They should as it's one of the remedies Kickstarter requires projects to pursue should they be unable to complete the project and fulfill the rewards:[1]

> If a creator is unable to complete their project and fulfill rewards, > they've failed to live up to the basic obligations of this agreement. To > right this, they must make every reasonable effort to find another way of > bringing the project to the best possible conclusion for backers. A creator > in this position has only remedied the situation and met their obligations > to backers if:

> [other required remedies]

> * they offer to return any remaining funds to backers who have not received > their reward (in proportion to the amounts pledged), or else explain how > those funds will be used to complete the project in some alternate form.

[1]: [https://www.kickstarter.com/terms-of-use#backer- creator](https://www.kickstarter.com/terms-of-use#backer-creator)

<comment><USER25> Well, obviously, if you still have the money, it's _nice_ to refund the money. I think the parent meant more "will this create an expectation in Kickstarter backers that they'll always get either the product or their money back, thus creating some sort of reputational debt-slavery for the project creators who genuinely just use up the money and fail? And doesn't that defeat the purpose of Kickstarter?"

<comment><USER24> > will this create an expectation in Kickstarter backers that they'll always > get either the product or their money back, thus creating some sort of > reputational debt-slavery for the project creators who genuinely just use up > the money and fail?

Hyperbolic imagery aside, the expectation is _already there_. They can't just walk away from the project with a shrug should it fail: they have a contractual obligation to demonstrate that they did not squander their funds and to provide the best possible outcome to their backers. If they fail to do that, the terms of the agreement allow backers to seek legal action:

> The creator is solely responsible for fulfilling the promises made in their > project. If they're unable to satisfy the terms of this agreement, they may > be subject to legal action by backers.

In this case, Matchstick's project creators have assessed that they have enough money to pay everyone back, so they're doing exactly what the terms of the Kickstarter agreement between backers and project owners have obligated them to do: provide the best possible resolution to backers by, in part, returning the money.

Another project may determine that they can't pay everyone back: in that case, they're subject to the requirement that they "demonstrate that they've used funds appropriately and made every reasonable effort to complete the project as promised". If they can't do that to the satisfaction of every backer, they're still on the hook. That's why a lot of times, project failures will have a note about providing a refund to anyone who requests one instead of Matchstick's strategy of proactively refunding everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Rumor is that they're being bought out by the Chinese company they've been developing the unit with. So the refund is so that no can have claim the designs (like a bunch of people who bought a product because its all open source.)"

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/matchstick/matchstick-t...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/matchstick/matchstick- the-streaming-stick-built-on-firefox- os/posts/1266549?cursor=10773496#comment-10773495)

</comment><comment><USER26> I pity the people who have to run 17K refunds by hand.

</comment><comment><USER27> Where are they getting the money for the refunds?

<comment><USER28> One of the executives' pages on LinkedIn says he manages 30 employees at the company. If true, it must have gotten some kind of venture funding, since the $500k they raised on Kickstarter is nowhere near enough to run a company that size for over a year.

<comment><USER29> If I were a VC and my money were being used to repay kickstarter backers instead of me, I would be pretty pissed.

I wonder if there is more to the story. Maybe the company is pivoting.

<comment><USER30> I imagine a pivot is likely, given the tone of their message. Everything they wrote talked about how hard their goals, like the DRM portion, were under Firefox OS, and there was no talk about winding down the company. Leads me to believe that there will be /a/ product from them, just not one based on Firefox OS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Look, if you want this it could undoubtedly be done much more cheaply by not building new hardware and taking one of the Chinese Android sticks and getting it to run Firefox OS. A hassle, and not an inconsiderable project, but much less so than building the thing from scratch.

</comment><comment><USER31> I don't know why they are actually shutting down, but this explanation doesn't ring true. They're blaming DRM complications - a part of the project that no one cares about - as the lynchpin that has taken down the whole thing.

To be honest, I would be quite surprised if anyone receives any money back. The "everyone should have their money back by the end of September" thing seems quite long. Having seen some other, very similar scenarios play out, to me it sounds like they did something else with the money and are trying to stave off the consequences of it or are trying to buy time hoping for a miracle that will allow them to replace it.

<comment><USER17> They need DRM to support most Chromecast apps (that people care about)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Good lesson in keeping product simple. They could have delivered their original product. And the backers would have figured out what they'd do with it. Why wouldn't Netflix help them succeed I wonder instead of just scrapping it.

</comment><comment><USER33> I wonder if this could, in any way, be covered under bait and switch laws. Yes, I know people are getting their money back. I'm just thinking to help prevent other people on kickstarter from trying to switch up their product midway.

</comment><comment><USER34> As a backer now apparently getting a refund, I'm extremely disappointed with the way this project was managed.

The DRM that apparently blew up the project wasn't in scope when I backed it. This was supposed to be an open source, No-DRM stick. After they had everyone's money, they decided to build a Chromecast clone instead. Classic bait-n-switch.

<comment><USER35> The old "Take their money then give it back to them 11 months later" con. Great theory ya got there.

<comment><USER29> I'm pretty sure I could make money if I had $470K to hold on to for 11 months. Of course, I could just get a job, that would be easier.

<comment><USER36> Yeah, for sure. I remember once I bought tickets for a large stadium gig. The gig was postponed at a late stage, for a year, and the options were:

1) get a refund, lose the ticket you'd been lucky to get at face value back into the pool, probably never to be seen again for the same price. 2) hold onto your ticket, wait a year, go see the gig

It therefore resulted in $millions being held by the organisers for over a year - there are extremely low risk ways to gain a meaningful profit from a large amount of capital. Intentionally or not, and whether or not it was invested by them during that year, this situation turned out to be a great way to get a huge, zero-interest loan of said capital.

I'm not sure if there are laws that prevent this kind of thing from happening, but it's certainly easy money in theory.

<comment><USER29> If you're looking for something extremely low risk, you're only going to make a few percent. (I'd be thrilled to learn that I'm wrong on this.) So, may not be worth it if you have other costs or people you have to share the profit with. 3 percent of a million is only 30K.

<comment><USER36> Depends on your definition of meaningful but, I was thinking more along the lines of 10 million -> 200-300k, almost guaranteed.

Obviously if the starting capital is less, you could potentially notch up the risk of the investment etc, but that's a very meaningful profit for most companies I should think. At the least it's a very valuable individual's salary for a year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Their fault for dealing with Firefox OS.</comment>


Show HN: Translate the entire app to 103 languages: A DIY tutorial - <AUTHOR> http://about.saltar.co/blog/translate-entire-app-with-spreadsheet-diy-tutorial <comment><USER2> That's a great idea! Thanks for sharing!

<comment><AUTHOR> You're welcome!</comment></comment>


Data Structures Cheat Sheet - <AUTHOR> https://algodaily.com/lessons/an-executable-data-structures-cheat-sheet?view=article <comment><AUTHOR> Wow, the response to this was great! Thanks all for upvoting. Small plug-- [https://algodaily.com](https://algodaily.com) uses illustrations and visuals to teach technical interview concepts. We're coming out with a book soon! If you liked this cheat sheet, you may be interested in signing up for our 100 days of free interview problems newsletter at [https://algodaily.com/challenges/daily](https://algodaily.com/challenges/daily)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hope this helps some people :-) I've always wanted a cheat sheet that I could print out or save as a reference. A quick scan before interview day will be sure to help you feel more confident.

<comment><USER2> This is well-written, and a good survey of basic data structures. It would be more useful if you included more advanced data structures, as well. Do you have any plans to add more? For instance, the first thing I looked for was self balancing binary search trees.

Side note: I've never heard it expressed as FILO before. Or at least I've never noticed it. It's always been LIFO. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! There's definitely plans to include more. For now, a lot of additional material can be found at [https://algodaily.com/curriculum](https://algodaily.com/curriculum) :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I really like this, thanks for sharing</comment>


Cached and Confused: Web Cache Deception in the Wild [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://sajjadium.github.io/files/usenixsec2020wcd_paper.pdf <comment><USER2> "Please don't submit so many links at once that the new page is dominated by your submissions." ([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html))

15 submissions in 10 minutes is too much. You risk getting all flagged.

<comment><AUTHOR> New to this so I just wanted to post all the current/previous research. Sorry for the inconvenience :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Degree in Computer Science vs Business? - <AUTHOR>

Which is more useful, higher paying, and better to have in general? <comment><USER2> CS by far. Business degrees don't actually teach you business, nor do they qualify you for business management jobs.

It would probably behoove you to learn about business as well if you get a CS degree; it opens up some doors and will prevent you from getting taken advantage of so much. But the way to do that is to go out and actually try to sell something (whether it's your labor, a webapp, lemonade, whatever) and make money off it. Business degrees usually function at too high a level of abstraction to be useful for any one particular business.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a CS degree and an MBA and overall I feel that the CS degree provides more value. The MBA is helpful for some positions but only combined with my CS background. An MBA or business degree on it's own is not that helpful because the only set of skills you have is business, and nothing really tangible.</comment>


The Impact of Medical School Oaths and Other Professional Codes of Ethics (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/486982 <comment><USER2> "Our data suggest that if oaths and codes are to play an important role in medical education in the future, leaders in professionalism may need to draw connections between standards of professionalism and the personal, philosophical, and theological traditions from which physicians actually draw their moral guidance."

Have any other folks here taken oaths? I recall my own as "I, (your name), do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic; ..."</comment>


Facebook Folds In Face Of Massive Litigation, Bans Project Playlist - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/23/facbook-folds-in-face-of-massive-litigation-to-disable-playlist/ <comment><USER2> Facebook is shutting down because of a lawsuit!? Oh wait. It's just a linkbait headline from TechCrunch.</comment>


Why Preschool Shouldn't Be Like School - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=2288402

<comment><USER2> Shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has kids themselves, I've seen this effect over and over with mine.

Interestingly, to some extent I also see the same effect with grown-ups. When I was building machine tools and inspection equipment I was sometimes required to write comprehensive documentation and give training, other times the tool was thrown over the wall and the technicians and operators made it work as best they could. I've had cases where I've come back and found that the processes they developed on their own were more creative and better than what I would have asked them to do, also they often found new uses and approaches I hadn't thought of.</comment>


Creating a 2D game with Unity - <AUTHOR> http://pixelnest.io/tutorials/2d-game-unity/

<comment><USER2> This was interesting- I was surprised at how hard it was- I died most times before I got more than ten seconds into the game- but as a demo it's not bad!

One thing that perturbed me a little bit was the length of time I had to wait from going from windowed to fullscreen mode. However- my only experience I can compare it to is with a desktop application and Java so that's probably not fair.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

I must admit we probably made a too hardcore (unbalanced) demo but we may fix this in an update.

Yeah Unity performance are not always great, specially the web plugin. But the fact that you can deploy everywhere, including console and mobile, with the same "code", is really great. Now that you say it, it reminds what Java tried to do for applications.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Independent Math Study - <AUTHOR>

I never thought I'd be asking this.  Math was never my "strong suit",  but over the last year I've really grown to enjoy it as I learn more.  I've taken Calc. I in a fairly demanding college environment, and am planning on continuing with Calc. II and Linear Algebra.
My question to HN is: How does one go about doing self-study in Math?  It seems, of all the sciences, to be especially  difficult to tackle without the built-in support of the classroom.  I assume that like most things, it just takes a lot of hard work and study, but I'm curious if anyone out there has a rough plan for tackling a reasonably rich understanding of mathematics on their own.  Sites, materials, etc. are appreciated.
Thanks! <comment> mark-t To be honest, calculus isn't that important for mathematicians, but if you want to study mathematics seriously, I'd suggest picking up a rigorous text like Rudin's or Apostol's. It will be difficult. You'll have to read most of it several times. That's perfectly fine; the point is that it will help you learn to think like a mathematician does.

Now, on the other hand, linear algebra is almost universally important and is probably easier for a programmer to grasp. I would also suggest picking up a Number Theory or Combinatorics text; they're practically useless, but they're fun and interesting, they'll give you a better idea of what mathematicians do, and you don't need much education to get into them.

My usual advice for building skills is to work on contest problems. See if you can find some AMC12 problems. If those are too easy, you can work your way up. AIME and Putnam would be good next steps (those can be found here: [http://web.archive.org/web/20080205091131/http://www.kalva.d...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080205091131/http://www.kalva.demon.co.uk/index.html) ).

<comment><USER2> Saying the Putnam is a next step from AMC12 problems is like saying the NBA is a next step from pickup basketball with friends in middle school! There are people who can do Putnam problems for fun, but those people generally know who they are already.

<comment><USER3> Solving problems 1-4 on each day of the Putnam with an "unlimited" amount of time is not a ridiculous expectation. Putnam's difficulty is partly due to its time format.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's been ages since my last university math class (I was a I math major), so I can't point you to any reference material, but I can say the following.

If you really want to improve your problem solving skills, I would highly recommend studying real analysis. What you get out of this will go a long way to making you a better problem solver. The reason why I say this is when you have to so something like prove why 1 is greater than 0, you'll learn to look at things differently.

In studying real analysis, you are almost learning how to walk again. Everything that you have taken for granted as being obvious in the past will now have to be proven. And by going through these exercises, you'll learn the importance of truly understanding what you are doing.

<comment><USER5> What's a good real analysis text these days? Is Spivak's calculus book still a common favorite?

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't know as it has been over 10 years since I looked at a math textbook. The thing about math is it doesn't change. Well at least the basics so it's safe to say any text that you find in the library would be a good source.

Where different text books may deviate from one another is how they prove a theorem. Like programming, you can usually get the same results by going down different paths. Some paths are more efficient than others, but that is predicated by what you know.

If you are just learning, the best thing to do is find textbooks with answer keys to assignments. Also with the advent of google and such, I would have to imagine you can probably find answers to a lot of the questions that would be posed in these text books so answer keys may not be all that important now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've learned a lot of math that's beyond the scope of what I had in college. I usually find that it works best when it's on the way to something that I'm trying to do or understand. I never really tried to learn math for the sake of math -- I wanted to understand quantum computing algorithms, recommender systems and graph clustering -- and had to fill in the gaps so that the papers in the fields made sense.

</comment><comment> cool-RR I self-studied math for 2 years. I just attended lectures without officially enrolling to the university. I also did about half of the homework problems given in these courses (My math-student friend was envious of me: I could choose the interesting questions out of the homework paper, and ditch the boring ones!)

Some of my studies I also did with books, video lectures, and articles I found on the internet.

</comment><comment><USER7> Always use more than 1 text, always do the problems, & always keep up a steady pace. I haven't found anything else to be really important.

<comment><USER8> This is really good advice. Also, remember that it means nothing beyond what it says, all you really have to work from are the definitions and the theorems. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you wish to move beyond the level of learning methods to solve a very specific class of problems (like Calculus I/II/III teaches, no offence/looking down one's nose is intended), you'll need to eventually learn to write proofs. A good book to get you over the initial hurdles is Daniel Velleman's _How to Prove It_.

<comment><USER10> And in addition -- it greatly enhances ones ability of abstract thinking. At least in my case it was true :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Checkout this thread, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=108723>

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't have a complete answer for you, but I linked to this book a few days ago. It's pretty good. <http://www.math.wisc.edu/~keisler/calc.html>

_Elementary Calculus: An Infinitesimal Approach_ for a mathematically rigorous course in infinitesimal calculus. I think it is much more intuitive than typical limit calculus.

<comment><USER13> There are vast sections of mathematics which cannot be understood without first understanding limits. There are very few areas of mathematics which require understanding infinitesimals.

<comment><USER12> Sure. I just think the infinitesimal is an interesting approach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Book recommendation: Princeton Companion to Mathematics

It's a good way to skim a lot of different mathematical topics for further exploration.

[http://www.amazon.com/Princeton-Companion-Mathematics- Timoth...](http://www.amazon.com/Princeton-Companion-Mathematics-Timothy- Gowers/dp/0691118809/)

</comment><comment><USER15> First make sure you have a solid operational foundation on the basics. Advanced topics will feel so much easier.

For that I can recommend Discrete Mathematics and its Applications by Kenneth H. Rosen.

Optionally supplemented by Student's Solutions Guide for more elaborate answers to exercises.

Do as many exercises as possible.

<comment><USER9> I second Discrete Mathematics and its Applications. This book was the book I used in the first class that required a substantial amount of proof writing. A majority of it was easily tackled within a six week course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> You could do a purely applied approach, look at some Data Mining books, like Witten/Franke and the Weka java framwork (there's quite a few good books, check amazon reviews, ) and the assortment of methods that are applied from basic logit/probits, through clustering, SVM, neural, evolutionary programming, .

</comment><comment><USER17> You should take a look at a book called The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose. While it's geared more towards physics, this book has proven to me to be the most enlightening mathematics text I've ever read. Admittedly I'm only about 10 chapters in - it's a very dense book, and you'd do well to go through it slowly. But, if you're interested in math, this book will blow your mind.

[http://www.amazon.com/Road-Reality-Complete-Guide- Universe/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Road-Reality-Complete-Guide- Universe/dp/0679776311/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1247988835&sr=8-1)

</comment><comment><USER18> I really recommend <http://www.mathxl.com> . I've used it for calc 3 and linear algebra in place of physically being in those classes. It will walk you through examples and keeps track of your weakness to review later. It seems to be powered by Mathematica, from what I can tell.

</comment><comment><USER19> My advice to you is to find a really good book and go with the book program. I passed many college classes just by studying hard with a good book.

</comment><comment><USER20> You could try MIT's free courses!</comment>


Real-Time Stock Indices Futures - <AUTHOR> http://www.investing.com/indices/indices-futures <comment><USER2> Worth remembering that the FTSE (UK stock index) crashed briefly after Brexit, and is now up.

The markets priced in a Clinton win, and now that isn't happening. What we're seeing is uncertainty and volatility getting priced into the market, not any referendum on Trump. We'll see what happens in a week.

<comment><USER3> It's also worth remembering that no one has any idea what the long-term consequences are either. Brexit might never happen, it might happen and be a disaster, or it might happen and not really affect much.

Similarly with Trump we have no idea what might happen if he does win. He could end up starting WW3, or call for the end of US Democracy and install himself as dictator (and now we know 50% of the country is stupid enough to go along with that).... or he might just end up a do-nothing president bounced out after 4 years. For that matter maybe he's crazy like a fox and fed the Rs bullshit so they'd get behind him, then turn around and push for a hugely progressive agenda. You never know what Trump might do.

So yes, I predict a short-term crash, a recovery, but after that all bets are off. We're also due for a recession at some point. In fact Trump could be a blessing in disguise as he presides over a recession, bungles the response, and gets him and the rest of the Rs tossed out in 2018 or 2020.

I'm torn about the whole thing because I will personally benefit from Republican control. I've finally made it into the tax bracket where their constant tax breaks for the rich personally benefit me. Long-term their rich- get-richer strategy will lead to anemic growth.

Whoever said "may you live in interesting times" as a curse was right.

<comment><USER4> > and now we know 50% of the country is stupid enough to go along with that

this kind of superiority isolationism leads to the problem. it lead to brexit and to the election of many right-wing politicians in european countries.

when a large mass of people is isolated and unrepresented, they will strike.

<comment><USER5> There's no other explanation I can accept at this point. You can break down how he appealed to voter sentiment better than liberals because he obviously did, but you'll never convince me his policies won't go in the completely wrong direction for everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this is an emotional reaction, I have 60k of liquid cash ready to invest tomorrow, where would be the best place to put it? My first thought is a leveraged ETF... which I think for a short term trade is okay, but the leveraged nature might magnify my losses more than I can tolerate if I'm wrong. What are you guys looking at?

<comment><USER7> Go back in time and buy call options? Now... you're trying to time the market. Good luck.

<comment><USER8> Ah, ye olde time inverted option

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've posted this elsewhere but about a year ago I was invited to a private wealth management (PWM) round table luncheon with a bunch of the principals from UBS PWM.

I asked them what they thought would happen if Trump was elected and they said that because of his unpredictability, the markets would likely take a huge hit. They went further, and said that when they spoke with leaders in politics and business in other countries around the world, those leaders indicated their biggest fears were if Trump won and they would have to reevaluate their strategies with the US.

Interesting times.

<comment><USER10> I'm not buying the dip tomorrow. This isn't a temporary issue. It's going to cause a global power realignment in the ME, eastern Europe, and all countries on the South China Sea. It's a huge victory for Russia on the heels of the Brexit, and by extension China. If China close ended funds take a hit, buy them. Hard to think of a floor on US equities that makes sense, but I don't see why a 25% fall over the next year isn't possible.

<comment><USER11> Under Trump there is little chance that the US wouldn't enter a trade war with China since Trump has already publically declared that he will leave China as a currency manipulator. China is already struggling with massive over capacity in about every industry and needs the export market to export the resulting deflation. It is unlikely that China is going to see another market as large or as willing to absorb imports as the US market has been.

China is struggling with massive amounts of bad debt and a sharp downturn in trade could set China down the path of a deflationary depression. The end result may be beneficial if China is able to rebalance its economy but _no_ economy that has grown debt as fast as China has recently has ever been able to do it without massive deflationary disruption (including the US).

Generally the world seems to move toward greater integration and trade and then step back in a two steps forward one step back pattern. Trade is generally collapsing globally and this may be another shot across the bow.

This has the definite possibility of trying to catch a falling knife.

<comment><USER12> As of September, China held $1.22 trillion of US Treasury bonds. Something to keep in mind before launching a trade war.

<comment><USER11> So what?

The world is literally starving for high quality assets with yield right now. Ten year bonds in Japan have _zero_ yield and a lot of bonds are trading with _negative_ yield. If China were to convert all those bonds into cash in a fire sale there would be investors literally lining up to purchase them.

Then all that China has done is traded one form of USD debt (bonds) for another form (cash). To get out of the USD it would need to exchange that for something else of value. What? Bonds denominated in Euro? Ten?

How do you think the ECB or JCB would react if their currencies started to soar relative to the USD as a result? Do you think Germany would sit idly by as their manufacturing was decimated due to the strong currency? Would Japan?

So what if instead they went on a shopping spree and bought US produced goods. Would the US be aghast as demand soared and factories were expanded and wages rise and imports from China sank?

There are certainly people that would get hurt in that scenario. Retirees would be crushed; retail would be crushed; real estate would be crushed; US government spending would be crushed; Wall Street banks would be crushed; US advertising would be crushed.

But at the same time farmers would soar; manufacturing would soar; oil producers would soar; miners would soar;

Look at the US electoral map and see if how many Trump states would be on the wrong side of that outcome.

<comment><USER13> > Retirees would be crushed; retail would be crushed; real estate would be > crushed; US government spending would be crushed; Wall Street banks would be > crushed; US advertising would be crushed.

> But at the same time farmers would soar; manufacturing would soar; oil > producers would soar; miners would soar;

Interestingly, the industries you are suggesting would crash employ most of the people in _all_ states and the ones you suggest would soar are not large employers (with the exception of oil/mining that might come back online).

Oil and mining actually might get wrecked as well if the US/China relationship gets worse as Chinese demand is so important to those industries globally. Its hard to tell what the equilibrium point in those markets would look like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Look at the VIX - up 42% at the moment... A sign of major volatility expected ahead.

</comment><comment><USER15> Does the stock market traditionally drop around election time? Uncertainty is usually bad for the market, yeah?

<comment><USER16> No, it doesn't traditionally drop -- it only drops when the "wrong" candidate wins (as determined by who the markets would prefer). It dropped because Trump's stated economic, trade, and diplomatic policies are anti-globalization and would be bad for business. The markets were riding lower for weeks on fears of Trump winning, then recovered yesterday when Hillary had that final uptick. Now they've lost all that and then some.

<comment><USER17> I'll be very interested to see whether this interpretation comes to bear. The more likely explanation, I think, is that something unexpected is happening, and markets don't like uncertainty. A little reductionist? Maybe. But maybe not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does this imply that the well educated wall street folk might be out of touch with 'America'?

</comment><comment><USER19> I have $8k waiting to dump into my kids ESA; been waiting for market to drop.

</comment><comment><USER20> Time to buy then?

(Half kidding, I know they say to never time the market and such).

</comment><comment><USER21> It seems that the biggest beneficiary at this point is Turkey. Make Turkey great again???

</comment><comment><USER22> A 300 point drop in the Dow is an "almost normal" day.

700 point is nothing to worry about.

<comment><USER12> There have only been 2 drops greater than 700 points. The third largest fall was 684 points.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hey did anyone mention it's because TRUMP HAS WON?

<comment><USER24> I believe this is implicit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> 4% isn't much. Good site though, so thx.

<comment><AUTHOR> The percent the S&P 500 futures can fall before they stop trading is 5%[1]. So this is a big drop.

[1]: [http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/equity-index/faq- sp-500-pric...](http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/equity-index/faq-sp-500-price- limits.html)

<comment><USER25> How's the market doing? Did you dump it all at the bottom?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: what's the best way to run a tight meeting? - <AUTHOR>

None of like to sit through long meetings, and we definitely don't like to waste other peoples time. Unfortunately, both can happen.<p>What are you recommendations for staying on task and on target? <comment><USER2> Email the presentation to everyone in attendance beforehand, well enough in advance for people to pour over, spend some time on and approach you BEFORE you go to the conference room. Then, as you're giving your presentation you've got target points to reiterate on instead of burning cycles in a shotgun Q&A session. The added benefit is that increases information bandwidth, the presentation is constantly with the members for later review.

</comment><comment><USER3> Use a timer. Everyone has 5 or 10min to discuss their viewpoint; 6 people = 1hour; If someone finishes before their allotted time, tack it on at the end for a group discussion. You have to enforce the time constraints, otherwise you'll just waste everyone's time. It also helps everyone get in the habit of 'getting to point' of what they have to say and it makes for an efficient and productive meeting. Good luck.</comment>


Bill Nye warns: Creation views threaten US science - <AUTHOR> http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Bill-Nye-warns-Creation-views-threaten-US-science-3888451.php <comment><USER3> I've never understood why out of all the things broken in the US and in education specifically people get so worked up over this one issue. Evolution is one of the easiest concepts to understand in all of science. Literally all it takes is a ten minute YouTube video to explain it to a fourth grader.

As such, while clearly evolution should be taught in schools, I fail to see how students are significantly harmed if it isn't. The fact that these kids come communities where most of the parents are really dumb has to be hundreds of times more damaging than not getting a day or two worth of lecture.

(And as an aside, I would bet money that the percentage of religious folks who have a good understanding of the main arguments in favor of evolution is about 10x as high as the percentage of 'science-oriented' folks who have a good understanding of all the philosophical concepts referenced in the wiki article on intelligent design.)

<comment><USER4> Not understanding Evolution effectively locks students out from large swaths of science. The issue you see isn't merely that they don't understand evolution, but that the people preventing them from being _exposed_ to it are _also_ teaching them to be _opposed_ to it.

The style of "creationism" in America that is seen as the opposition of evolution _(versions of creationism that appear compatible with evolution exist. See: the RCC)_ is not defined merely by the absence of evolution but also by it's warped and twisted "versions" of it (strawmen) and often some healthy dose of conspiracy theory (evil scientist conspiracies).

This basically 'immunizes' children against what would normally be a trivial education in evolution. I say this from personal experience. In retrospect evolution is _embarrassingly_ simple and obvious, but it took _years_ for it to truly sink in for me. A quick 10 minute youtube video can explain it _great_ , but once a certain degree of damage has been done it can suddenly take a _lot_ more.

<comment><USER5> > Not understanding Evolution effectively locks students out from large swaths > of science.

Large in what way?

How much of physics depends on evolution? How about chemistry? How about materials science? I can go on and on.

In fact, much of biology doesn't depend on evolution. (Who do you think did all the work on selective breeding pre-darwin?)

I don't know Knuth's views on evolution, but he is Christian. Can you tell me if he believes in evolution?

As someone else pointed out in this thread, evolution is being used as a tribal signal.

And no, believers in evolution are NOT more rational.

<comment><USER6> Evolution as a conceptual framework for understanding how complexity can emerge from simple feedback is relevant to many branches of science, including computer science.

Maybe I am really stretching, but if evolution wasn't real, then many machine learning algorithms wouldn't work.

<comment><USER5> > Maybe I am really stretching, but if evolution wasn't real, then many > machine learning algorithms wouldn't work.

You're really stretching. No one denies selective breeding. The evolution claim is much stronger, and isn't necessary for machine learning.

Why would you make such an absurd claim?

<comment><USER6> Evolutionary processes present themselves everywhere from political systems, social organization, genetic algorithms in computer science.

If evolution doesn't exist, then why do we constantly see processes evolve based on a feedback cycle of constant experimentation, survival, failure, etc. Isn't that word evolution? Is there another word I am supposed to use?

So I stand by what I said, if evolution isn't real (i.e. evolution doesn't happen) that all things are complex by-design, and never by uncontrolled processes of iteration and survival, if that is true, then evolutionary algorithms wouldn't work.

Is that really absurd? What am I not getting?

<comment><USER5> > If evolution doesn't exist, then why do we constantly see processes evolve > based on a feedback cycle of constant experimentation, survival, failure, > etc.

> Isn't that word evolution?

No. As I wrote, evolution is a stronger claim.

Evolution involves feedback but not all feedback is evolution.

Many stable amplifier designs use feedback. Would you claim that the signal being amplified is evolving?

As to man-made entities, yes, their designs are affected by feedback. However, they're also created.

As I said, creationists believe in selective breeding. Their argument wrt evolution is wrt something else, so if you don't understand that....

> So I stand by what I said, if evolution isn't real (i.e. evolution doesn't > happen) that all things are complex by-design, and never by uncontrolled > processes of iteration and survival, if that is true, then evolutionary > algorithms wouldn't work.

You do know that you didn't say that above, right?

However, I'll play along.

Your new claim is wrong because algorithms with feedback can work even if evolution doesn't occur in the wild.

As to your suggestion that evolution is involved in every complex system, I'll ask how stars evolved. They're very complex systems.

There are lots of complex systems. Evolution only applies to the biological ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I had the pleasure of meeting Bill Nye about three years ago, where I told him that as a kid, he was my scientific inspiration. I never imagined at that point, that he'd still be fighting my battles, even now.

</comment><comment><USER8> The Creation Museum's response is laughable.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-AyDtD6sPA>

</comment><comment><USER9> What I would prefer is to have creationism taught in a religion class. I do not care if my kid knows about it.

I just do not want him to think that any real scientist even comes close to believing in it. And I know some people do not believe in carbon dating and that is fine too. But the facts as we know it point to us not being plopped down on the earth instantly as the bible suggests.

Teach the facts, let the other stuff be taught in a class on religions or mythology.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've always been curious about how we date things so far back. It's one of those things which I wish I could understand better. Does anyone have a good resource on carbon dating or other modern techniques that are used today?

Also, has anyone ever scientifically argued that perhaps our dating techniques are incorrect? Could there be natural ways for the system to be thrown off?

<comment><USER11> In the case of carbon dating, plants take in carbon-14 from the atmosphere. Carbon-14 is radioactive and decays at a known rate. Once a plant dies, the carbon-14 begins to decay. By finding the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 and carbon-13 in a sample, we can estimate how long it has been since the sample died. Since animals consume plants directly or indirectly, they also take in carbon-14 and can thus have their ages estimated in a similar fashion.

<comment><USER12> Just so you know, in practice it's considerably more complicated than that.

The main limitation is that carbon dating only works to about 60,000 years (so older figures are never from carbon dating). This is well known.

Less well known is that it only works if the sample has never been soaked in water. This is because the CO2 in water will dissolve into the sample completely overwhelming the original carbon ratios. This probably causes a huge number of errors in the field, unfortunately. Because how many samples have been completely shielded from water for that long?

There are other datings though, but they are less accurate. Usually they are only able to date the rocks near the sample, but not the sample itself. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiometric_dating>

Most commonly things are actually dated based on fossil and geological evidence, not any type of direct dating. But there is a bit of circular logic in those types of datings. First the rock is dated, and the sample is assumed to be of the same age. Next when other samples of the same type are found they are assumed to be of the same age as the first. The rock formations are then recorded and the appropriate layer is given an estimated age. Which is then used to date other things. Basically, things older than 60,000 years are dated based on what fits the theory best.

<comment><USER3> Kind of like how we know the universe is 13 billion years old because of the speed of light. And we know the speed of light is constant because it hasn't changed in 100 years. Hmmm.

<comment><USER12> Let's not overreact here. We know the speed of light is constant because it's impossible for it not to be - too much is tied into it.

If you change the speed of light the energy content of matter changes, and where would that energy come from (or go to)?

If you tried to balance out the change by changing other constants you would end up changing even more things in an impossible cascade.

As for the age of the universe, it's not calculated from the speed of light, but from other things which I do not understand well enough to explain to others.

<comment><USER3> For what it's worth I was kind of joking, I agree that it would be basically impossible for the speed of light to change over time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _"...according to a June Gallup poll that found 46 percent of Americans believe God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago."_

The rest of the world, even developing countries, look on with astonishment while the US undermines itself after more than 500 years since the Enlightenment!

</comment><comment><USER14> This is a good critique of the _form_ of Bill Nye's anti-creationist screed: [http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2012/08/bill-nye-demonstrates- how-...](http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2012/08/bill-nye-demonstrates-how-not-to- persuade-a-creationist/)

The form of his argument only encourages the conflict. He clearly feels contempt towards creationists, and even towards those who sympathize with them. As soon as you've shown contempt you've given up on convincing anyone of anything, and are just cheering on your side.

A serious attempt at promoting evolution would emphasize how you can resolve the tension between the theory of evolution and a strong belief in Christianity and The Bible. (There's no reason to pretend this is a general issue, it's a Christian issue: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_support_for_evolution#...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_support_for_evolution#Support_for_evolution_by_religious_bodies))

I'm not a Christian, so I can't write something more authentic than what Bill Nye might (though I damn well could write something less offensive). But I can imagine what the intellectual tensions are. I made an attempt ([https://plus.google.com/104537541227697934010/posts/TnMt9Wgf...](https://plus.google.com/104537541227697934010/posts/TnMt9WgfJq6)), something like:

To convince someone of evolution, as a Christian, I'd want to emphasize a reverence for the world as God created it, that He teaches us through the world around us, and that learning from and of that world could never be in contradiction with His word, in the Bible or as shown to us through our faith. The world is full of contradictory messages and lessons, we can't always expect to decide that one is right and another is wrong.

I'd want to probe how the person has chosen to resolve the tension between Bible-as-fact and Bible-as-historical-document. For example, the Bible in many places talks freely and without condemnation about slavery, and clearly this does not fit with a modern understanding of Christian morality. I would hope that the person has seriously considered this problem and come to a resolution. I would hope to find a way to fit evolution, and ongoing scientific discovery in general, into that intellectual template.

Some Creationists might claim, for instance, that something as complicated as the eye could not be made through the incremental changes of evolution – it had to be designed. But this is a terribly limited notion of God. Could not God create a mechanism that would lead to the design of His choosing? Is there a mechanism so complicated that He could not conceive of it and create it?

There is a story of creation in the Bible. It is not a recipe of how to create a world. It is a message given to us to explain the world, a world that we cannot ever fully know. We've found tensions in that story. Consider for instance dinosaur fossils. Some people have considered this and read Genesis, and decided that dinosaurs must have lived in the Garden Of Eden, or been wiped out by the Great Flood. Does the Bible say this? No. There is more in the world than is in the Bible. Does the Bible talk of electricity, or about germs? No. Would we try to create a Biblical basis for this phenomena? No. The Bible covers the entirety of the creation of the Earth in one chapter, would we expect it to be comprehensive? It is _our_ burden to resolve the world we see with the Bible as written. Some decide to ignore the world. This is a lazy approach, God did not give us the world in all its fullness just for us to ignore it.

<comment><USER15> Your comment about contempt is right on. As soon as someone decides there can be no dialogue, only monologue [0], you've given up on convincing anyone and are now "preaching to the choir".

There's actually a much simpler Christian solution to the intellectual tensions between the creation account and science:

Recognize that the Genesis creation account (traditionally said to be written by Moses, to an audience that lived in Egypt) strongly parallels the Egyptian creation account. It's not a recipe to create a world, nor is it primarily a story about the world. It's a story about how this One God is different from those gods [1].

Some modern Christians have a problem with this response because they view it as a modern watering down of the Bible. Yet some highly respected early Christians, like Origen [2] and Augustine [3], expressed these views. The literalist/creationist view has only been in favor for the last century or so. Prior to that, it was common understanding among many Christians (as well as many Jews) that the creation account was about God's position as sovereign creator of the physical universe, not about the details of the universe itself. It's not literal history; it's a poetic description meant to highlight specific details.

[0] "sophisticated argument requires as an essential condition that you have the good manners to understand before you criticize" - <USER2> [http://www.uky.edu/OtherOrgs/GainesCenter/Letter%20To%20Jerr...](http://www.uky.edu/OtherOrgs/GainesCenter/Letter%20To%20Jerry%20Coyne.pdf) (the "only monologue" line comes from the debate he is responding to.)

[1] I wrote a short introduction to this concept at [http://transformedthoughts.blogspot.com/2009/08/genesis-1-in...](http://transformedthoughts.blogspot.com/2009/08/genesis-1-introduction- to-theology.html)

[2] <http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf04.vi.v.v.i.html>

[3] <http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf102.iv.XI.6.html>

<comment><USER4> >Recognize that the Genesis creation account (traditionally said to be written by Moses, to an audience that lived in Egypt) strongly parallels the Egyptian creation account.

Some pretty strong emphasis needs to be placed on the _"traditionally"_ there. There is absolutely no archaeological evidence for the Exodus. It, and necessarily Moses as he is known as well, are fictions.

The truth is far more interesting though. In fact the evolution of the religion that would come to be what we know today as Judaism is a fascinating topic in general.

<comment><USER15> > _"the evolution of the religion that would come to be what we know today as > Judaism is a fascinating topic"_

Agreed -- but it's difficult to find legitimately evidence-based, scholarly works amidst the sea of speculation (secular and religious). Do you have any decent resources?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> To play devil's advocate, can anyone provide a clear, concrete example of how it hurts science if the man in the street believes in creationism?

This doesn't seem like an issue that it makes rational sense to get up in arms about. It seems emotion-driven to me, ironically.

<comment><USER7> It hurts science because it's wrong. I'm not trying to be a jackass here, but believing in creationism is the same as saying "I believe acceleration at the Earth's surface is exactly 10 km/s^2 because it says so in the Bible." (it doesn't... I hope)

It discourages scientific criticism of ideas. When you are taught a scientific fact or theory, you are always welcomed to, and often encouraged to question it. "Why is acceleration 9.81m/s^2? How do I know that it is true as of right now? If I carry out my own experiment, will I see this?" When you listen to the "word of god", this is no longer the case. You know it's _right_ because someone, thousands of years ago, apparently said it is.

Yes, it can waste tax dollars - but we can always make more dollars. An innovative generation that can carry on mankind's survival? That's a little more important.

<comment><USER16> How many discoveries in the past (and even in the present) were made by people who believed in Creationism?

Why didn't that belief stop them from advancing science?

Why would it now do so?

<comment><USER17> This is a list of famous thinkers/scientists who were also christians. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_thinkers_in_s...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_thinkers_in_science)

<comment><USER3> Science has practically been a branch of Christianity for the last 1,000 years. It's only since Reagan that science has essentially been hijacked by new atheism and private industry.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


IT repairman seeks home for Apple collection, possibly world's largest - <AUTHOR> https://ca.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idCAKCN1MR2AD-OCATC <comment><USER2> Strange that this guy's business was bankrupted by the anti-competitive practices of the company he loves so much yet he doesn't seem to be that upset about it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sadly this happens frequently in the world of vintage computing. Hoarders collect stuff for years, get deep in the red, and then must get rid of everything RIGHT NOW or else everything's destroyed.

The mentality of hoarding doesn't allow for slowly parting out collections and maximizing preservation, which is what we should be trying to achieve.

</comment><comment><USER4> Paul Allen's Living Computer Museum + Lab in Seattle may want them. Anyone have a contact there to put them in touch?

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd watch a Youtube series talking about Apple hardware releases. Talking about the changes since the last version, maybe some stories if they're well known, as well as demonstrating actual machines in use.

Something along the lines of what 8-bit guy does.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why the hell are the options always "someone support me" or "shred/bulldoze it?" Does he not realize he could probably pay the rent and retire by parting his collection out?

<comment><USER7> I sold my Apple IIGS around the year 2000 for $600 on eBay. Buyer spent an additional $600 for shipping from Canada to California. The buyer was getting it as a gift for a friend who was retiring from Apple and worked on the Apple IIGS.

A quick scan of eBay today is showing $1,200 to $1,800 for an complete functioning Apple IIGS. If he has 1,100 computers, I can see him getting to $23,000-35,000 pretty easily.

<comment><USER8> Very interesting. I have three complete ][gs "Woz" editions sitting in storage somewhere, that I rescued from a school computer lab where they were being thrown out in ~2004. I also snagged the Macintosh that was used as the server for the network, and all the backup media that I could find. There's a copy of Oregon Trail in there somewhere, that I played in school :)

Maybe I should find them...</comment></comment></comment>


Fasting to Enhance Cancer Treatment - <AUTHOR> https://jbiomedsci.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12929-020-00651-0 <comment><USER2> Awesome to see fasting going more and more into the mainstream.

My dad always fasts when he has any kind of sickness; he says the body then can focus only on beating the disease.

Fasting is hard and most Westerners never do it; the religions of the world proof the opposite: Fasting is natural and "Lindy" (passed the test of time).</comment>


Engadget - We're turning comments off for a bit - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/02/were-turning-comments-off-for-a-bit/ <comment><USER2> Bold. This makes me really happy. Comments sections are the cesspools of the Internet, so it's great to see someone say "This is going away until you think about what you did wrong."

P.S. Yes, I'm aware of the irony in that I'm commenting on a comment-centric site about how much I hate comments. Let's just say HN is the least cesspoolish place I've found so far.

<comment><USER3> Comments really are a hard problem. 90% of the thought I expend on HN is devoted to saving the site from bad comments. Spammers and overt trolls are easy. The really hard problems are fluff comments and subtle trolls (people who are fundamentally nasty, but who are sophisticated enough to stop short of name calling).

<comment><USER4> If you ever write an essay on making online community scale, I'll certainly be an enthusiastic reader! Quite a bit has been written on the subject, but I've found surprisingly little that seems really good, despite the importance of the topic.

Two useful links on the subject are <http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006036.html> and <http://www.meatballwiki.org/wiki/>

<comment><USER3> One reason I don't is that it would attract attention to HN, and one of my strategies for staving off disaster has been to keep a low profile, so that most new users are people who hear about the site from friends.

<comment><USER5> You can't "write an essay on making online community scale" because _community doesn't scale_

<comment><USER6> I wrote a long article on the subject of online community and the problems of scale: <http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For an example of blogs with very high quality comments, see, e.g. [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7266/full/461879a...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7266/full/461879a.html). It's an essay describing the use of blogs and blog comments to solve a difficult open mathematical problem. The average quality of the comments made in that project - more than 800 comments in all - was extraordinarily high. Several strongly research-oriented blogs in mathematics and physics routinely have very high quality comments, e.g., the blogs of Richard Lipton, Terence Tao, Tim Gowers, and the n-category cafe.

(I should perhaps disclose that I'm one of the authors of the linked article.)

<comment><USER7> Well, the content of that particular blog has something to do with that. You need a certain level of sophistication to come up with something coherent to post, and most of the trolls out there know they'd be instantaneously obvious to everyone else on a topic like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Engadget has written _54_ articles about the iPad in the last 12 days. I'm honestly surprised that _they_ are surprised their audience are idiots.

<comment><USER9> The funny bit is that Engadget's commenting community seems to be vehemently anti-Apple, but the fact that Engadget keeps writing huge numbers of Apple articles implies that these generate traffic still (gut feeling: most of the non-commenting visitors).

This seems like complaining about a movie theater while sitting in the first row munching furiously on popcorn.

<comment><USER10> Apple gets so much press precisely because few people have the capacity for indifference toward them. Write a story about a new Microsoft product, and half the audience will yawn. Write a story about an Apple product, and the other half will be pounding their keyboards in fury.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> After reading Siver's post (<http://sivers.org/punish>), this development seemed like a perfect data point (though I am unaware of the extent of threats etc which drove them to take the decision)

</comment><comment><USER12> We haven't enabled comments on our blog precisely for this reason.

Are there any success stories or best practices for quality comments and discussions on blogs? What makes Hacker News commentary successful? User accounts required and therefore no anonymity? Guidelines?

<comment><USER13> I wonder about using something like Facebook Connect for commenter accounts, and using the person's full name that Facebook provides. People might be less likely to post useless or trolling comments if their real name (indexable by search engines) and even a link to their Facebook profile were attached to their comment.

<comment><USER14> They might be less likely to post lots of other stuff too, though. Do you really want any potential future casual acquaintance, boss, or what have you, to have instant, easy access to a transcript of every conversation you've had?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> They're almost universally total garbage on engadget anyway (and not just recently). I don't see any loss of value in leaving them off permanently.

To be clear, I like engadget just fine, but the comments never seem to provide any insight/value.

</comment><comment><USER16> I noticed a while ago Jeff Atwood did this on codinghorror.com too (I believe citing a technical reason, although they have not yet come back). Also, Seth Godin does not have comments on his blog either.

Is this a trend going forward? I'm not against it...

<comment><USER17> Kottke's blog is without comments also. More should follow their lead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think this should go a bit further. The next time Google or Apple announces something major-ish, the entire Internet should just be turned off for two days.

Okay, so maybe not the entire Internet, but there really must be a better answer than to clutter my daily sites with everybody incessantly thinking they have a useful (or worse, humorous) opinion when they don't realize they are regurgitating other regurgitations of talking points introduced by hacks in the first place.

<comment><USER19> Agreed. There are too many trolls out there. Newspaper websites in particular are bad; I avoid visiting the San Francisco Chronicle website both because it's a dreadful website for an increasingly irrelevant newspaper, and because the 'comment crew' there are _so_ obnoxious.

I'm biased in favor of the ability of people to comment, not least due to >20 years of internet use...but increasingly, I think that the best way to host public discussion is in forums rather than comments, which are vastly more likely to result in heckling and trolling as there is no obvious structure to the discussion, and thus no (social) penalty for saying something glaringly stupid.

<comment><USER20> Ditto for both Boston newspapers. It can literally ruin your day reading some of the comments below even mundane articles.

The NYT has a good approach: Approve only those comments which present reasoned arguments in a semi-intelligent way. There's a lag, but the comment threads are excellent reading.

Another approach: Force everyone to use real names when leaving a comment. I am not sure how that would work, but the trolling would drop away if real identities were tied to people's words.

Unfortunately, it might also inhibit people from commenting, too. Anonymity is a great way to say what you actually think.

<comment><USER21> I just had to register on HN to say how much I completely agree with this statement:

"Ditto for both Boston newspapers. It can literally ruin your day reading some of the comments below even mundane articles."

<comment><USER22> Welcome to HN! Please take some time to go through the guidelines: <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>. And hit upvote when you agree with somebody's comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It seems every new open web community tries desperately to stave off its own Endless September. I think a scalable answer will probably look more like multiple layers of authentication. Only some actions can be completely public; you have to be respected before you are allowed progressively more reign. That is what our society does with kids and things like drivers licenses, college degrees, etc.

<comment><USER24> For anyone else who doesn't get the Endless September reference: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September>

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Wow nice. Reading sites like Engadget without comments is almost better than reading them without ads.

When I want to comment on something, I will come to a site designed for that. There, I have a single place to track replies, so I can actually _discuss_ things, rather than which blog I commented on today.

I know for my own blog redesign, I will not allow comments. I just don't see the point.

</comment><comment><USER26> Spam and flame wars are not at all a new phenomenon. The decline of intelligent conversation amidst the noise does seem pretty new.

I think this may be more related to the nature of these sites and the communities that form around them, rather than merely to the scale of the community.

Sites that go for a very broad appeal rather than targeting a specific, well- defined audience tend to have much lower-quality comments. Engadget is a great example - it is a consumer-oriented tech blog, and it's structured more like a traditional publication than an online community. The comments there are almost always not worth reading.

On the other hand, I visit sites like HN, Slashdot, and Ars Technica primarily for the discussions.

</comment><comment><USER27> News Flash: You can't turn off people. If you really can't learn to deal with the inane comments of morons, your life is going to be nothing but stress. Plugging your ears just attracts more attention and will make people want to kick and scream more than before.

This is going to happen with big announcements. Just suck it up and deal.

</comment><comment><USER28> People need to chill-out their self-righteous and frequently hypocritical disgustometer. If you're gonna have a worldwide open discussion you're gonna have some trolls. How about thinking about how amazing it is? How about not having your emotions triggered by the trolls. There are things to learn on all sides.

<comment><USER29> How is it self-righteous to turn off a feature on your site that you feel is currently causing more harm than doing good? Are they in some way obligated to give the trolls a place to troll?

<comment><USER28> I'm responding more to the outburst of (self-)righteousness happening right here on HN right now.

<comment><USER29> Sorry, I misunderstood that then, my bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm not sure what was being said in the comments, but I always think its a bad choice to cut off the medium that your users voice their opinions on.

</comment><comment><USER31> I love this. Absolutely love it. I've always kind of dismissed comments as mostly empty white noise on the internet, and have never figured out why so many CMS systems/Blogging software/Web apps/etc are so eager to add comments to EVERYTHING.

Give me the content, I can form my own thoughts on it, and if I actually feel like my thoughts are worthwhile for reading I can publish them myself.

<comment><USER32> You just added a comment to a story.

How is your comment on HN not _exactly_ what you're dismissive of?

<comment><USER31> YES I REALIZE THE IRONY HERE

I will admit HN is one of those rare sites with a pretty good signal to noise ratio in comments.

<comment><USER33> There is no irony here. This is a discussion forum. If I check out a book from the library, I don't want to see comments scribbled in the margins, but I'm more than happy to join a lively discussion about it on HN or reddit.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


If you were accepted where are you coming from? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> I was wondering where people are coming from to go to the startup meeting, because I've been having trouble getting decent tickets so I wanted to know where are people looking for tickets/accommodations.

</comment><comment><USER2> Chapel Hill, NC. Fares shot up 100 bucks in last two days. Sucks. Where are you guys planning to stay in CA?

</comment><comment><USER3> We are coming from Austin, TX. Rates are cheapest through Continental for us, around $380 per person.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure where I'm going to be staying but coming from Boston really sucks. It's $600+/person.

<comment><USER4> I'm also flying out from Boston. Where were you able to find nonstops for $600+? Is that the best you could do? All I can find are nonstop fares starting at $800 for my travel dates.</comment></comment>


Voc: a physical model of the vocal tract, written in ANSI C - <AUTHOR> http://pbat.ch/proj/voc/ <comment><USER2> Hey! I'm the author of this thing. Let me know if you have any questions about it.

FYI, the generated C code is now part of the dev branch of Soundpipe here: [http://pbat.ch/proj/soundpipe.html](http://pbat.ch/proj/soundpipe.html), my music DSP library, and it has also made it's way into the develop branch of AudioKit: [http://audiokit.io](http://audiokit.io).

Also, check out the original implementation Pink Trombone: [https://dood.al/pinktrombone/](https://dood.al/pinktrombone/). It's the perfect interface for this kind of model.

<comment><USER3> Funnily enough, I also made a C90 port of the same code, and also named it "voc". Here is an oldish version:

[http://ultra-premium.com/scratch/voc.zip](http://ultra- premium.com/scratch/voc.zip)

I would completely expect yours to be better in all ways (mine was basically a line for line transcription of all the audio and stripping out the UI stuff, where as you actually went to the effort of understanding the thing being ported).

<comment><USER2> I found your code last night, and it really freaked me out that there would be another person in the world who would want to make a C port of pink trombone and call it Voc as well.

Voc is pretty much a line-for-line port of PT as well, but I removed some bits like the simplex noise. I also wrote some small utilities to go with Voc, like small plotting programs and some plugins for my audio language for both the whole source-filter model and just the filter.

Still sinking my teeth into the literature. Voice synthesis has a very rich history!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting use of Knuth's literate programming concept. I remember reading about it and the source code of TeX in PDF format a long time ago, but now that I have a chance to read another piece of code written in it, I'm finding it _less_ readable because of the proportional fonts than if it were equally- commented but in a more conventional monospace programming font.

Also, some samples of making it talk would be good, like: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voder)

<comment><USER2> > I'm finding it less readable because of the proportional fonts than if it > were equally-commented but in a more conventional monospace programming > font.

My initial motivations for using literate programming with Voc was to take advantage of TeX's math mode to express what was happening numerically in code, as well as to have the ability to use BibTex inside the code.

> Also, some samples of making it talk would be good, like: > [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voder)

At the bottom of the page, there are music examples on Vimeo, with plots of the 44 vocal tract diameters being manipulated in realtime:

[https://vimeo.com/220091107](https://vimeo.com/220091107)

[https://vimeo.com/220091290](https://vimeo.com/220091290)

[https://vimeo.com/220091487](https://vimeo.com/220091487)

My goal was really to build vocalizations, and not necessarily to produce speech. This engine is a bit more low level than that. It could be possible to build a speech engine on top of Voc though... next steps perhaps?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great! Also inspired by Pink Trombone, we ported the same model to our maker platform and then to a modular synth:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo5ZEgBEapk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo5ZEgBEapk)

[https://twitter.com/BelaPlatform/status/856110345332674561](https://twitter.com/BelaPlatform/status/856110345332674561)

[https://github.com/giuliomoro/pink- trombone](https://github.com/giuliomoro/pink-trombone)

<comment><USER2> Hey yeah! I actually came across that when I first set out to make my project.

I was going to actually fork off your project, but decided it would be cleaner/faster to do it off the original code since I wanted to write it in ANSI C.

<comment><USER6> Slightly off-topic sorry, but why ANSI C and not C99 (or C11)? Is it common to come across systems where C99 isn't supported, or are there reasons why you prefer C89 to C99?

<comment><USER2> There aren't any real reasons I have for choosing C89 over C99. Both tend to be very portable, which is very nice if you aren't sure what operating system you are running on (if any, in many situations). I still write many programs using the "-std=c99" flag, but I never find myself in dire need of the extensions, basically honorary ANSI C. For projects like this that just do numerical processing, C89 C really isn't that much more of a hassle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Would this be a good target for deep learning? It's low level in some sense, but still nicely parametric. It strikes me that this could be a good synth for some neural nets to learn how to play.

<comment><USER8> Yes, speech recognition and speech generation would be easier to implement if you used neural networks that were trained on these vocal cord inputs rather than audio samples. In either case, you'd need to solve the inverse problem to generate vocal cord parameters given an audio sample. This seems difficult but I'd imagine some commercial software packages do it to some extent.

<comment><USER9> I would imagine a neural network that fed parameter values to Voc would be far faster (real-time?) than something like WaveNet which needs to sample the output thousands of times a second.

<comment><USER2> Correct. WaveNet is a very brute force approach to speech synthesis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is quite cool!

On a sidenote, can this be used to train or obtain voice parameters of oneself for using it in software programs like Espeak?

<comment><USER2> Not directly, no. IIRC, programs like Espeak and Festival use formant synthesis, which would require explicit formant values. Voc models the tract itself... the main parameters are diameters in the vocal tract (which implicitly produce vowel sounds).

It may be possible to go the other way around and analytically derive parameters for Voc that match target formant frequencies. Not sure though...

<comment><USER11> There are other ways though e.g. if features like formants produced by the model can be differentiated with respect to vocal tract parameters, the latter could be estimated based on real data maybe

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's an example of it in action [https://vimeo.com/221310975](https://vimeo.com/221310975)

<comment><USER12> That was... very strange. I'm not sure how else you'd demonstrate a physical vocal tract model though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is super cool. I seem to remember a JS version of this floating around earlier this year. Does anyone have it?

<comment><USER14> It's the first link on the page

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is there something that does the opposite? Feed vocals, get jaw movements? I've got a weird little project, think "talking skeleton".

<comment><USER16> There are numerous programs that translate spoken words to mouth/jaw movements -- usually for animation (to match the 3D /2D model with the right movements for what it's supposed to say).

IIRC, Adobe Animator does that too.

<comment><USER15> Thank. Unfortunately, I need something suitable for embedded hardware.

<comment><USER16> Check this maybe:

[https://github.com/DanielSWolf/rhubarb-lip- sync](https://github.com/DanielSWolf/rhubarb-lip-sync)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wouldn't you also need to model tongue and mouth chamber (with teeth) and all of their movements?

<comment><USER2> Yes and no. Perceptually, you don't really need to model everything to get convincing speech sounds. Most of the realism actually comes from performance, and not the mathematical model.

In a way, lips and mouth are accounted for here, but in a more abstract away. The KL model approximates the vocal tract as a series of cylindrical tubes with varying diameters. Segments of the tubes actually correspond to things like the tongue and mouth somewhat. In this model there is a really neat tongue control that manipulates these segments. It's quite expressive!

This model is a 1d waveguide, so it doesn't account for things like the curvature of the tract. More modern vocal modelling techniques include implementing a 2-dimensional waveguide, which _does_ allow for this control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Title says "Vox". Page says "Voc".

<comment><AUTHOR> fixed</comment></comment>