Why Copyblogger is killing it's Facebook page, and I agree - <AUTHOR> http://www.sudorank.com/why-copyblogger-is-killing-its-facebook-page-and-i-agree/

<comment><USER2> You're a SEO expert, yet your website design is very... basic... and your Evolvement site took literally 20 seconds to load.

If this link was an attempt at drumming up some business, I'd suggest taking a look at those items.

If you were trying to get inbound links, I guess that's a huge fail anyway since the links are nofollow'd here.</comment>


Sencha Labs releases open source framework for WebGL development - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/02/sencha-labs-releases-open-source-framework-for-webgl-development.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss <comment><USER2> Looks like a really cool framework; the demos are pretty spiffy, too, particularly the realtime video frame analysis of the Shreck trailer.

<comment><USER3> Sencha is doing really cool stuff lately. I love the ExtJS 4 preview as well, especially the built-in graphing.</comment></comment>


IPhone/mobile web app development: stand-alone or complementary? - <AUTHOR> http://www.webdragon.com.au/5390

<comment><AUTHOR> A trimmed-down mobile app usually means that the desktop app is unnecessarily bloated - the "get to the right information quickly" goal is just as appropriate on the desktop as on a mobile.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone else get a CR-48 today? - <AUTHOR>

I'm just curious if Google is still sending them out. I know a lot of people got them yesterday, but maybe a few people will get some today.<p>So anyone get one the day after? <comment><USER2> Glad somebody started this thread. Would love to know if Google is continuing to ship them.

<comment><USER3> Well I would hope so because the apply now thing still shows up on my new tab page.

<comment><USER2> I am most curious to know if Google is continuing to ship them regularly rather than in batches every few weeks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just found out mine came in today right after I left for work. My wife sent me a picture of it early this morning so the whole day has been dragging....

</comment><comment><USER5> Is there some way to find out if you're in the program or not, or do you just have to wait?

</comment><comment><USER6> My SO got his this morning.

<comment><USER7> Aren't you associated with the project? Your SO went through the regular channel?

BTW, quick question: Are the Chrome team using these for development? Like a self-hosting compiler :)</comment></comment>


4 Rules for Raising Money in a "Recession" - <AUTHOR> http://the42.com/news/2012/04/04/4-rules-for-raising-money-in-a-recession/

<comment><USER2> Those don't really seem like rules. They seem more like ways that you and your team got lucky.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you PK... :) and yes, we definitely got lucky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Good advice for any time</comment>


iCloud Terminal Notepad - <AUTHOR> http://www.slashie.org/articles/icloud-notepad/

<comment><USER3> I use todo.txt for this. Works well across my devices. Besides, it's done by Gina Trappani (of ex-lifehacker) so supporting her is good too.

<comment><USER4> Second that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Day One has similar functionality built in, "dayone", with an Alfred workflow. Day One supports Markdown and hash tags, for what it's worth.

The iA Writer method in this article feels a little fragile to me since it relies on that path. I guess it isn't likely to change in a hurry though.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have something very similar set up.

I have a terminal command called "log" which takes a string as an argument. It basically takes this string and writes it into my log file, prepended by the current date and time. This log file is in my dropbox folder. Typing "log" with no arguments will open up the log file in my editor.

I have this set up with an Alfred workflow which works exactly the same way. I find it very useful for keeping track of what I am working on, what problems I was meant to be tackling, quick calculations I would like to keep a record of, etc

EDIT: reading the article more thoroughly, my solution is basically identical.

<comment><USER7> I do the same using jrnl ([http://maebert.github.io/jrnl](http://maebert.github.io/jrnl)), which lets you do things like star, tag, and view entries from specific days - <USER2> still keeping everything in a plain text file.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a pretty neat hack! Unfortunately it won't work with my setup of NVAlt [0] (OS X) and Simplenote [1] (iOS). I've got NVAlt hotkey'd so I can bring it up anywhere and use it as a scratch pad all the time that I know will be synced to my phone immediately, the problem being it doesn't use iCloud but rather simplenote's syncing solution, I'd wager to bet that I could do something similar that edits NVAlt's local storage and see if it's auto-synced as well (I bet it is).

</comment><comment><USER8> Your link to Ajour at the end of the article is broken. Link should be to: [https://github.com/gopatrik/ajour](https://github.com/gopatrik/ajour) as your link to to your main github page and is missing the "[http://"](http://") and so it's getting appended on the end of your post URL.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, thank you for that! Should be fixed now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great idea. I use iA Writer & nvAlt in conjunction with Dropbox for syncing, but this will work in that scenario as well.

I also set up /usr/local/bin/notes, with the following: # !/bin/bash cat "path to your file"

That way, you can also quickly read all your notes from that file on the command line

<comment><AUTHOR> Brilliant, did the same!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is this also possible for the regular notes app on iOS/OS X? It does sync with iCloud but I am not able to check if it's available in iCloud Drive.

<comment><USER11> This works :

#!/usr/bin/env osascript -l JavaScript

function run(argv) { var note = Application('Notes').notes['Terminal Note']; note.body = note.body() + new Date() + ' : <pre>'+argv.join(' ')+'</pre>'; }

<comment><USER12> This is really great!

A couple notes for anyone trying it: 'Notes' has to be running & there has to be an existing note with the first line 'Terminal Note'. Both could be handled if anyone wanted to make it more robust.

This will be great for shooting specific tidbits of info from my work computer to my iPhone (which aren't connected via iCloud).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can someone make a Vim plugin command for this?

</comment><comment><USER14> "Voilà" is the correct spelling :)

</comment><comment><USER15> This is lame. The title should also mention that you need to buy the app.</comment>


The Agile Chocolate Factory - <AUTHOR> http://www.jimscollins.com/the-agile-chocolate-factory/ <comment><USER2> Article title is "AGILE MISUSE".

More accurate than either would be something like "Hypothetical Agile Misuse Model - Chocolate Factory Example (2015)"</comment>


Former BP geologist: peak oil is here and it will 'break economies' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/dec/23/british-petroleum-geologist-peak-oil-break-economy-recession <comment><USER2> Again?

1882: "only 95 Million barrels remaining/4 years of oil left"

1919: "only 20 years of oil left"

1950: "only 100 Billion barrels left"

1956: "peak oil" by 1970

1980: "only 648 Billion barrels left"

1993: "only 999 Billion barrels left"

2000: "only 1016 Billion barrels left"

2008: "only 1238 Billion barrels left"

The point is not the peak oil will never happen, it's that we have no clue when it will.

Past precedent says prices will rise slightly, technology will improve, and new oil that was once too expensive to obtain becomes obtainable. Here's my prediction: We will switch to some cheaper alternative long before oil ever runs out. There won't be some dramatic crisis where everything goes to shit. It will be a gradual change where oil prices steadily climb and consumption slowly diminishes. Just like has already happened with countless other resources and just like is happening now.

Source and video explanation [Are we running out of Resources?]: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcWkN4ngR2Y](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcWkN4ngR2Y)

<comment><USER3> > _Past precedent says prices will rise slightly, technology will improve, and > new oil that was once too expensive to obtain becomes obtainable._

And common logic says that a resource that is finish will, sooner or later, finish.

It also says that there's no natural law that "technology will improve" always, so that getting harder to get oil will only require the prices to rise "slightly". At some point a specific technology does not improve anymore, or you get diminishing returns.

Also, common sense says, that as time goes by, and measurements improve, it's far more likely for us to predict correctly how many barrels are left that it was in the past.

Common sense says that for a civilisation to run out of a resource and NOT find a proper, similarly cheap, replacement in due time, it's bloody probable. Nothing strange about it.

Now, some people like to think that stuff like "technology always improves in time to save us" is some kind of natural law. I guess they are more into science as religion, than in science as science.

<comment><USER4> _Now, some people like to think that stuff like "technology always improves in time to save us" is some kind of natural law. I guess they are more into science as religion, than in science as science._

(Shrug) On the one side, we have some people who have always said that. They have always been right.

On the other side, we have some people who have always forecast an imminent heat death of Malthusian malaise for us all. Those people have _never_ been right, so I'd say they bear the burden of proof that This Time It's Different.

<comment><USER5> Really ? Where were the technological improvements when oil shot up to $150 in 2008 ?

Sure technological improvements eventually got us to the energy level we were at in 2005 ... but only just barely and only for a week. Since then it's been going down, with predictable results.

And while shale (currently) provides a few years delay, it's only for a few years, and maybe even only America. That's the problem with these ass-saving technologies. The first few times they saved our ass for several centuries (coal + trains, which will keep working, later nuclear). The next revolution saved our collective energy-hogging asses for ~60 years. The next one, horizontal drilling, did for ~10-15 years. Now we have shale oil, which saves our asses for 5-6 years tops.

The situation is not as rosy as you indicate at all. We're effectively dependent on ALL technologies operating at totally maxed out capacity for economic prosperity, and a lot of these technologies are faltering all at the same time. It won't be pretty.

Frankly we have ~5 years to increase the efficiency of batteries (which have improved a factor 2 in ~100 years in mass/energy and volume/energy). Not by a factor of 2, but a factor of 10, to keep our society at the same technological level. Nobody has any even theoretical ideas to get a twofold improvement. We only have 5 years because of shale oil, and we knew perfectly well in 2000 that we'd need this super-battery before the decade was out, and humanity simply failed ...

I went to a robotic mechanics lecture 2 years ago. The opening line was this : you climbed 5 floors to get here, and you got seriously tired (the elevators were out). If you had been the best robot we have, with roughly half it's weight dedicated to battery you would have just used ~50% of the total energy contents of your battery. This is a problem that needs to be solved before we have any real hope of true independent robots.

Oh and let's feel inspired by nature. Wait. How does nature solve this ? Well, here's the basic formula for oil CnH2n+2. Here's the basic formula for human fat : CnH2nOOH. In both cases the energy is stored in the same chemical structure. The energy is pretty much stored in the exact same chemical bonds in the human body (or any animal) and in a gas tank. In other words : in 4 billion years evolution did not find a better way. Do you think humanity is likely to improve upon it ?

You best hope so. Or we'll see repeats of 2008, except without recovery.

<comment><USER6> Orbital solar. Methane Hydrate. More efficient engines of industry. These things are in development/getting done now. Economies might suffer but when they are needed they will happen pretty quickly.

<comment><USER7> Orbital solar is in development? I'd love to read more on that!

<comment><USER6> Well, since the DoE study in 81, the only active project is one between China and India announced in 2012. Solar cell costs have come down 100X since the 70's, so in that sense its getting some attention. But since power is still so cheap, its hard to pay back the lift costs of any space-based installation that's been designed.

<comment><USER8> I don't know how serious it is, but it appears that Japan has been looking into it too:

From Oct. 2013: [http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-10/02/japan- solar-e...](http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-10/02/japan-solar-energy)

From Apr. 2009: [http://phys.org/news172224356.html](http://phys.org/news172224356.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> barry-cotter Title exaggerates to my mind. Peak oil is here; it was reached in 2008 apparently but 'break economies' is doom mongering. It seems depressingly plausible that the decline in liquid petrocarbons will lead to a lower growth rate absent large technological changes.

I just hope nuclear or the unproven renewables come on line smoothly, otherwise coal might come back. There's 200 years supply for North America at current energy usage, in North America. But coal is awful. Just the radiation released into the air by burning it kills more people every year than Chernobyl and that's without considering "normal" air pollution.

<comment><USER9> I suspect it's not doom mongering for some of the goofier regimes propped up by oil money. Would not want to live in Saudi Arabia when the money runs out.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, it could turn into a corrupt feudal state ruled by religious police. What a nightmare.

<comment> barry-cotter It's not feudal, the religious police don't rule and as is the people there have enough water to drink, food to eat and mostly live in something resembling peace. After oil Saudi Arabia will look like Yemen does now, if they're lucky.

I'm sure the royal family/clan/tribe will be fine but the average Saudi will be in a much, much worse position than now.

<comment><USER5> They only have enough water and food because of constant imports of both. Without oil, Saudi Arabia couldn't realistically sustain 1% of it's population. Realistically, if the oil runs out, except for a few pockets and islands, Saudi Arabia will have to be abandoned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think that if we were facing such an imminent and catastrophic collapse world governments wouldn't be so complacent. There would be moves being made to secure each countries future. I mean the main job of the CIA etc is to predict and stay on top of such trends.

Also in such a scenario I would expect countries like Saudi Arabia to curtail their own exports and start preserving it for their own needs. The day you see that happen you can rest assured that we're in deep trouble.

The actions of the Chinese govt are also interesting to observe. They've been buying up oil around the world but haven't really being attempting to engineer a paradigm shift in their energy policy.

We have endless summits on climate change and such but not even a single global summit on such an important issue.

The govts of the world maybe incompetent but I would like to believe that they arent incompetent to this scale.

So the gist of my point is that we might be facing some difficult times ahead but not an outright collapse.

<comment><USER12> Why would Saudi Arabia curtail their own exports? They'll make a lot more money exporting it. The ruling class has no incentive to care how expensive oil is for their domestic economy.

<comment><USER13> They can make more money by exporting it later when it's scarser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's amazing how many people think that something like peak oil can't happen, not for anything else, but for their ardent zeal in scientific progress that makes them believe that things can only get better and there are no limits...

<comment><USER14> It depends what you call 'peak oil'. That there will be a point in time where we consume the maximum amount of oil ever is inevitable - we will run out, and the usage curve will have a maximum somewhere. But 'peak oil' is being used as some sort of scientific-sounding synonym for a precursor to a Mad Max style society. It's this part that is absurd and highly unlikely - much more unlikely than the alternative in which we more or less gradually transition into a society based on other energy sources and modes of energy transport.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I feel like the crazy decline in cost of solar will catch us in time, even if this is true.

[http://www.treehugger.com/slideshows/renewable- energy/import...](http://www.treehugger.com/slideshows/renewable- energy/important-graph-cost-solar-headed-parity-coal-and-gas/)

<comment><USER16> To what extent is the solar economy dependent on the petrol economy?

Solar is great for architectural uses, and with a decent electrical grid you can even out and match up the fluctuations in demand and generation. But if you need to ship quantities of energy dense easily usable power around; it's really hard to beat hydrocarbon fuels. And for manufacturing and installing all those solar facilities...?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > [...] showed that conventional oil had most likely peaked around 2008.

Oh, so it's "conventional peak oil" and not "peak oil".

<comment><USER18> Global oil production in 2013 increased by 2.2%. Natural gas production increased by 1.9%.

[http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/about-bp/energy- econom...](http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/about-bp/energy- economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy-2013/review-by-energy- type/oil/oil-production.html)

[http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/about-bp/energy- econom...](http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/about-bp/energy- economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy-2013/review-by-energy- type/natural-gas/natural-gas-production.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's most illustrative that this lecture was given to future actuaries. Branches of society that have to concern themselves with the future are already well advanced in making preparations for it.

For example, a friend who is a town planner has to make sure that all new infrastructure takes expected sea level rises into account - even as her political masters deny global warming exists.

Meanwhile, mass society still can't even come to terms with the fact that many well respected mavens predicted that the Iraq War would be a disaster, that there would be a housing crash and that banks were incentivized to be corrupt and loot the economy. What hope for anti-biotics misuse, over-dependence on synthetic fertilizers and civilization surviving the anthropocene?

</comment><comment><USER20> This is quite scary when you think about the fact that so most economies are ultimately tied to their oil prices (except Greenland). Because peak refers to production, as the world goes, we have some more time to prepare, but price will increase in the meantime. What's interesting is that I'm more hopeful that the oil companies will find a common ground solution than the governments of the world will, because at least the companies are motivated by their collective wallets.

<comment><USER17> > This is quite scary when you think about the fact that so most economies are > ultimately tied to their oil prices (except Greenland).

Oil can only get so expensive. We have lots of alternative sources of energy that put a lid on the oil price. Just to give some examples, at some point, making artificial oil out of coal will become viable on a large scale (just like Germany did during WWII), and there's always nuclear power.

And there's also lots of oil at sea that we have barely started to explore.

<comment><USER20> I don't understand your comment.

1\. How can oil "only" get so expensive? By oil, we are referring to the act of gathering existing oil. There is no limit to the cost of gathering. Going deeper and deeper, or from lower concentration will become more expensive as time goes on.

2\. We have a lot of alternative sources of energy that put a lid on oil price. Can you explain the mechanism for this? Are you referring to the true cost of oil, or just at the fillup station? Are you saying the major cost of gathering oil is the input energy, and because the input energy is alternative, the EROIE is infinite? Please elaborate.

3\. making artificial oil out of coal will become viable on a large scale. Making artificial oil has nothing to do with gathering oil. The reason they did that was that oil was a more valuable energy medium than coal, because it can be used for many products, not just trains/ships/electricity.

4\. There's always nuclear power. I am a big fan of nuclear power, but have no faith in governments making a sound scientific analysis. So unless nuclear power becomes cheap (infrastructure-wise), I think peak oil is still a big concern.

5\. Lot's of oil at sea we haven't explored. There's a reason we haven't explored it - it costs way, way, too much. But I'm sure we will as the EROIE goes down.

<comment><USER17> Let's ignore technical progress for a while. You can order every Joule of oil by how much effort the extraction is. There's basically no limit on the effort here. But, if you add all energy from other sources into your line-up, you will see that we won't touch the crazy difficult oil until we have exhausted the easier alternative sources.

So, if oil ever gets expensive enough, nobody will use it until we have used up eg more coal. While we use the coal and _not_ the oil, oil won't become scarcer, and thus won't increase in price.

Of course, it doesn't really make sense to go for oil that has less energy output than what its extraction costs. At any price. [0] Technologic progress will take care of some of that.

[0] Unless you use the oil as a kind of battery. Ie use 100J of solar power that's only available during the day, to extract 50J of oil usable anytime--- that might be worthwhile, but it would compete with battery technology not with energy sources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Forget production rates barrels left and the economic value of the oil. They are second order approximations .The way to measure peak oil is in joules. The energy from the oil - the energy to extract in the first place is what your economy is left with .We will never run out of oil but running out of energy efficient oil is probable

</comment><comment><USER22> The oil industry works like industries are supposted to from Econ 101: at $150 oil like there was in 2008, there is a lot more oil that becomes economically viable than the $100 oil now, or the $30 oil in the early 2000's (off-shore, oil sands, and fracking). The article seems to say that the recession was caused by a peak in oil supply - I would suggest it is instead made a peak in oil demand (or rather the downward slope on the other side of the peak).

They are probably correct that cheap oil is done - the oil sands in Alberta, Canada are viable only when oil is above about $70/barrel. Of course when the price goes up, demand drops, so the need for higher production goes down.

In my opinion peak oil isn't the question: what we should be asking is how do we want to change our industies and lifestyles to reflect that energy is more expensive than it has been.

<comment><USER23> You just sloppily restated the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> RIP [http://www.theoildrum.com/](http://www.theoildrum.com/)

everyone should go read at least one article from that site. doesn't matter which one.

</comment><comment><USER25> ah, the yearly peak oil outcry</comment>


Why war is coming, in our lifetime - <AUTHOR> http://sudoscript.com/war-is-coming/ <comment><USER2> War is coming, but military power is also more asymmetric than ever. The US fared relatively poorly in the skirmish-like proxy wars of the last 50 years, but that's a different type of warfare than another world war would be. The goals aren't to win and hold territory, the goals are to create a stable environment. All the opponent has to do is create chaos with guerrilla warfare and the US loses.

When you're talking about a total war scenario, the US is effectively unbeatable for a lot of reasons. Ignoring the amount we spend (much of which is wasted on graft and ineffective procurement), we hold the distinct advantage of geography. We're fully capable of building a war machine all by ourselves -- we have the raw materials, the industry, and most important of all: a several-thousand mile long buffer zone between the US and any potential enemy looking to disrupt production.

China is the only real rising threat, and even then, they have two or three decades of catching up to do. And ultimately, I'm not convinced there are any resources that China and the US both covet so much as to go to war with each other: both are large, geographically diverse countries with a wide range of natural resources. The Chinese also have very little to gain by a shooting war: they will naturally eclipse the US in a global economy in the next 100 years anyway, so why bother fighting a dangerous enemy on the battlefield when you have better economic weapons?

<comment><USER3> You're thinking about the old kind of war. If China wanted the US to suffer, they'd just create versions of ISIS for each minority group—persuasive ideologies that present violence as the only option—and watch as the country tears itself apart.

<comment><USER4> > If China wanted the US to suffer, they'd just create versions of ISIS for > each minority group—persuasive ideologies that present violence as the only > option—and watch as the country tears itself apart.

The USSR tried to pursue a softer version of this strategy, often highlighting racial tensions in the U.S. and poor civil rights for Black People in the U.S. However, it really wasn't all that successful. It turns out despite poor conditions for many racial groups, a shared national identity wins out.

<comment><USER5> > _It turns out despite poor conditions for many racial groups, a shared > national identity wins out._

And it's not clear how much of that is present in China.

> _If China wanted the US to suffer, they 'd just create versions of ISIS for > each minority group—persuasive ideologies that present violence as the only > option—and watch as the country tears itself apart._

Two can play at that game. (Although the long-term consequences might be unpleasant, as the U.S. has learned about its support of Afghanistan's mujahideen after the U.S.S.R. invaded in 1979.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> James Allworth wrote something similar that made the case better:

[https://medium.com/@jamesallworth/brexit-trump-and-the- ultim...](https://medium.com/@jamesallworth/brexit-trump-and-the-ultimatum- game-2237e17de71c#.p8h2i1psh)

</comment><comment><USER7> Not sure I understand, war never stopped: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflict...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflicts)

</comment><comment><USER8> So this anonymous person (seriously: do a whois on the domain) posts a list of vague conspiracies and ... we're supposed to do what? Tremble? Change?

How is this on Hacker News?

<comment><USER9> _> How is this on Hacker News?_

It's not very different from dossiers that (intelligence, financial, political) analysts write about different scenarios all the time. While the text does contain more emotional imagery and blog-style tag lines, you'll basically find the same content in many organizations' databases.

Personally I think there is at least some merit to the reasoning behind this specific scenario: the population of the West is beginning to reject the globalisation effects that have brought global peace but left many disadvantaged, while religious and ideological radicalism is sharply on the rise world-wide. As the intellectual level of discourse is declining, the influence of populist ideas is becoming ever greater. From a bird's eye perspective, it seems humanity overall is in the process of rejecting peace, science, and secularism in favor of short-sighted economic considerations and dubious promises.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The end has been nigh nigh on forever.

<comment><USER11> Yup. I'm honestly sick of it. Everyone I talk to seems to think "the country has gone to shit" or another world war is just around the corner.

Maybe I just don't see how bad things are from my little bubble, but the people I hear it from seem to be doing fine.

My guess is it's caused by consuming too much media, watching CNN or Fox News for too long seems to put fear into people.

<comment><USER12> >My guess is it's caused by consuming too much media, watching CNN or Fox News for too long seems to put fear into people

bingo!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As long as the world is looked this way: Socialism is still an enemy which talks about income equality (Fair share of goods and services) Capitalism is still a friend which brings the income inequality (Winner takes it all)

We are not human anymore. We are the crazies who put end to a planet much faster than any other animal can do. may be thats what human really means.

Find the planet faster which is immune from crazies Build those rockets quicker which can fly my kid to a safer place.

</comment><comment><USER14> Let's take one of the 'signs', taken to be 'Brexit in the UK'. For most people the issue came down to asking that vital political question that has to be considered in any country: who has the power and how can it be removed if the demos so decides?

Brexit concluded (among other issues) that letting 28 un-elected commissioners decide EU law and preventing elected members of the European parliament (MEPs) from initiating new legislation or repealing existing law was not acceptable. As to removal of the governing body, unless I'm mistaken that's not possible. You can only vote for MEPs. Thus, UK citizens opted by a majority for control returned to Britain.

Was nationalistic xenophobia on display? Short answer, no! New research from ICM for British Future finds that 84% of the British public supports letting EU migrants stay – including three-quarters (77%) of Leave voters. Among Conservatives, support for protecting the status of EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens in Europe is even higher at 85%, with 78% of UKIP supporters in agreement.

Aggrieved peoples within a trans-national entity may not contribute towards a recipe for a peaceable environment.

</comment><comment><USER15> Well, of course the war is coming. The reasons are purely economical. When there are too many hands and too few jobs, war is inevitable. There are no unemployed at war, and after the war too, when those survived gather to rebuild their homelands.

Political implementations may vary, but the world is driven by economy.

</comment><comment><USER16> "Technology and globalization radically expanded the pie, but they also shrank the number of people who got the big pieces."

All this talk of US income and wealth inequality... First of all, global inequality is falling. This is indisputable! Secondarily, the pie should be measured in actual consumption, not in income or wealth. Look at what Mark Zuckerberg consumes, not what he earns!

<comment><USER17> You and I know that in absolute terms people are better off now than they were 30 years ago. But, that's simply not how regular people view the world. Their evaluations are relative. They will always be relative.

<comment><USER18> And as the essay mentions - "But human psychology doesn't work in absolute terms. It works in relative ones." \- this is how psychology works.

As much as all the "logical" and "rational thinking" folks in the world want to ignore and dismiss emotions and politics in decisions and actions, the truly rational thinking and logical decisions and actions understand, accept, and take into account emotions and politics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This analysis doesn't seem to take into account the existence of nuclear weapons. Military escalation has a very definite endpoint. Use of nuclear weapons is not unthinkable if a nation feels genuinely threatened. Wars will remain limited and proxy until there is an effective counter to nuclear weapons.

<comment><USER20> You underestimate the power of the dark side. While most people think nuclear war is loose-loose, some may think differently, especially when anger is overflowing. From the logical point of view Hitler should have never started the war, yet he did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> As a nationalist, I can certify that the author gets their understanding of our motivations completely wrong. Indeed, every time Trump or Le Pen are dismissed as "crazies", our resolve only gets stronger.

The abject refusal of the Left to even so much as _attempt_ to understand this incipient uprising is shocking.

<comment><USER9> > _Indeed, every time Trump or Le Pen are dismissed as "crazies", our resolve > only gets stronger._

Of course, that's entirely expected. I doubt this is a criticism meant to weaken your resolve. Like most political posturing, it's not directed at the enemy, but at the home base. If it _also_ strengthens the enemy's resolve that's just an added bonus.

> _The abject refusal of the Left to even so much as attempt to understand > this incipient uprising is shocking._

The article takes a decent stab at trying to understand your motivations. I would summarize them like this:

You feel your way of life is under attack, the very foundations of society are threatened by the erosion of religious morals. You feel that your nation, once destined for true and unique greatness, might become nothing but a weak and unrecognizable shadow in a larger political landscape. You feel that traditional roles of gender, class, and race, are becoming irrelevant, degrading society into a chaotic free-for-all where only the weak and perverted thrive, and poor people are getting a free ride. You feel that forces beyond your control are taking away your liberties while at the same time giving too many liberties to classes of people you don't like. You feel that education and science are unnaturally superseding righteous decisions made by people who simply know in their guts what's right and what's wrong. You feel you live in the unbroken tradition of like-minded and wise people who have endured through thousands of years, and now it's your generation's turn to keep this tradition alive, which is at this moment facing the greatest threat it has ever known.

Of course, this is a huge list of grievances, and you very likely don't share every single one of them. But your concerns are in there, right? If not, I'd be very eager to hear them!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> War has always been here. Some just choose to not look at it.

</comment><comment><USER3> While the nationalism wave is terrifying, telling people that war is coming only speeds up the wave.

</comment><comment><USER23> Says nothing about Clintons being immune to prosecution though.

</comment><comment><USER12> i wish i could live in as simple a universe as this person. maybe our anger stems from boiling down the "other" to "crazy" and "stupid" and "ignorant" rather than giving them the benefit of the doubt and making an honest attempt to understand them.</comment>


Physiognomy's New Clothes (on the Limits of AI) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@blaisea/physiognomys-new-clothes-f2d4b59fdd6a <comment><USER2> It sounds like there are some valid methodological criticisms that can be made of this criminal prediction paper. But I don't like the rush to condemn the paper as "pseudo science" just because it has implications that the OP is uncomfortable with. The OP's main point, which could have been made far more succinctly, is that "criminality" is a human judgment that encodes bias, and therefore the paper authors' machine learning methods were merely trained to learn these biases. I don't think anyone will claim that there's a perfect criminal justice system anywhere. But to dismiss these results off hand on the basis that criminal justice systems are imperfect is extremely hasty. The OP is too close minded by politically correct ideology to even consider that one might actually be able to accurately predict criminality with such a methodology.

There are many behaviors we can predict about a person with a high degree of confidence just by looking at an image of him. Why is predicting criminality not one of these behaviors? If the premise is nonsense then it won't stand up to further scrutiny. OP should do a larger study that addresses the methodological deficiencies in the original paper. Definitively shoot down this paper with hardcore research and gain widespread critical acclaim.

<comment><USER3> The article's point is broader than that: the entire idea of physiognomy, "the practice of using people's outer appearance to infer inner character", is not scientifically defensible. There's no mechanism that would cause someone's inner character to be reflected in their appearance in any consistent way. This remains true even if it's a computer algorithm, not a person, making judgements based on people's appearances.

<comment><USER4> "There's no mechanism that would cause someone's inner character to be reflected in their appearance in any consistent way." That's a pretty big leap. Down Syndrome has consistent physical characteristics that correlate with a particular set of cognitive/behavioral characteristics. While it is important to carefully critique scientific findings that may be motivated by political biases, it is also important to give science as a process the chance to find truths even if we might not like their political implications.

<comment><USER3> Sure, that's true, and I bet a Down-Syndrome-recognizing neural net could be made quite accurate. I guess what I mean to say is that there's no _general_ mechanism that would cause someone's inner character to be reflected in their appearance in any consistent way. If you want to predict behavior from appearance, you have to actually do the science and prove that there's an underlying mechanism before you can trust that your neural net is recognizing something meaningful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > To put into perspective just how extraordinary a 90% accuracy claim is, > consider that a well-controlled 2015 paper by computer vision researchers > Gil Levi and Tal Hassner find that a convolutional neural net with the same > architecture (AlexNet) is only able to guess the gender [5] of a face in a > snapshot with 86.8% accuracy. [6]

This seems like a rather misleading comparison. I would be really surprised if CNNs, which can hit <5% on ImageNet out of 1000 classes, and whose GANs can generate nearly-photorealistic clearly gendered faces, can't even distinguish gender at least that well. And guess what happens when you click through to factcheck this claim that CNNs do worse on a binary gender prediction problem than guessing hundreds of categories? You see that the facial images used by Gil & Hassner are not remotely similar to a clean uniform government ID facial photograph dataset, as they are often extremely low quality, blurry, at many angles or lighting conditions, and I can't even confidently guess the gender on several of the samples at the beginning and end, because as they say:

> These show that many of the mistakes made by our system are due to extremely > challenging viewing conditions of some of the Adience benchmark images. Most > notable are mistakes caused by blur or low resolution and occlusions > (particularly from heavy makeup). Gender estimation mistakes also frequently > occur for images of babies or very young children where obvious gender > attributes are not yet visible.

It wouldn't surprise me, going off the samples, if human-level performance was closer to 86% than 100%, simply due to the noise in the dataset.

(It's also bizarre to make this claim shortly after presenting ChronoNet! So which is it: are CNNs so powerful learning algorithms that they can detect the subtlest biases and details in images to the extent of easily classifying photographs of random scenes to within years of their manufacture and so none of their results are ever trustworthy, or are they so weak and dumb that they cannot even distinguish male vs female faces and so none of their results are ever trustworthy? You can't have it both ways.)

<comment><USER3> _> It wouldn't surprise me, going off the samples, if human-level performance was closer to 86% than 100%, simply due to the noise in the dataset._

I think that's kind of the point! The idea that any agent -- human or machine -- can know someone's gender, criminal convictions, or anything else about their background just from a photograph is fundamentally flawed.

<comment><USER5> > I think that's kind of the point!

No, my point is that you can't use a hard dataset to say what is possible on an easy dataset. 'Here is a dataset of images processed into static: a CNN gets 50% on gender; QED, detecting criminality, personality, gender, or anything else is impossible'. This is obviously fallacious, yet it is what OP is doing.

> The idea that any agent -- human or machine -- can know someone's gender, > criminal convictions, or anything else about their background just from a > photograph is fundamentally flawed.

This is quite absurd. You think you can't know something about someone's gender from a photograph? Wow.

Personally, I find it entirely possible that criminality could be predicted at above-chance levels based on photographs. Humans are not Cartesian machines, we are biological beings. Violent and antisocial behavior is heritable, detectable in GWAS, and has been linked to many biological traits such as gender, age, and testosterone - hey, you know what _else_ testosterone affects? A lot of things, including facial appearance. Hm...

Of course, maybe it can't be. But it's going to take more than some canned history about phrenology, and misleadingly cited ML research, to convince me that it can't and the original paper was wrong.

<comment><USER3> _> This is quite absurd. You think you can't know something about someone's gender from a photograph? Wow._

No, I'm saying that neither humans nor machines can determine gender solely by looking at a picture, no matter how well they're trained. There will always be examples they get wrong. The problem is not that the machines aren't as good as humans. The problem is that they're both trying to do something that's impossible.

And predicting at "above-chance levels" isn't enough. The article goes into great detail about how this kind of inaccurate prediction can cause real human suffering.

<comment><USER5> > No, I'm saying that neither humans nor machines can determine gender solely > by looking at a picture, no matter how well they're trained. There will > always be examples they get wrong.

This is irrelevant and dishonest. Don't go around making factual claims like something can't be done when it manifestly can usually be done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I remember a story a professor once told me about something similar to this. He once knew of a research team that was trying to develop an algorithm to tell the difference between pictures of American and Russian tanks. They were able to achieve a very high success rate very quickly. Excited but skeptical, they decided to keep testing the algorithm on lower and lower resolution photos. Shockingly, they were still getting close to 100% identification on images of sizes around 10 by 10.

Turns out, all the pictures of Russian tanks were taken in the winter, while all the american ones were taken in the summer. All they had done was trained a model to classify how bright the picture was.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, this urban legend always gets trotted out to criticize neural networks, but after years of looking, I've never been able to confirm it, and even when Minsky tells it, he can't name any names or concrete details about when or where - for example, in Minsky's version, it was how the photographs were _developed_ , but in yours, it's winter/summer, and in other versions, it's night vs day, or it was forest vs grass: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/td/magical_categories/4v4a](http://lesswrong.com/lw/td/magical_categories/4v4a) [http://lesswrong.com/lw/lvh/examples_of_ais_behaving_badly/c...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/lvh/examples_of_ais_behaving_badly/ckmm)

<comment><USER4> And last week I heard that story but the difference was that the images of the NATO tanks were in perfect focus while the Soviet tanks were out of focus in the training images. Clearly this story is all over the place. I wonder if even the likely source is correct. [https://www.webofstories.com/play/marvin.minsky/122](https://www.webofstories.com/play/marvin.minsky/122)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Tl;dr Two researchers claim they can use convolutional neural networks to pick criminals from pictures.

For the criminals they use pictures from government id cards. For non- criminals they searched the internet for random pictures.

These bozos just trained CNN to pick government id photos.

This is scary stuff because police are not very technically savvy and use biased scoring systems already[0].

[0] [https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk- assessm...](https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments- in-criminal-sentencing)

<comment><USER8> All of the photos in the paper, both "criminals" and "non-criminals" are from government ids. Though as the article mentions, in the pictured example all the "non-criminals" are wearing collared shirts.

This reeks real hard of overfitting. 2000 images for training a CNN feels so tiny. The paper should have included a learning curve.

The paper shouldn't have been written at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In-depth and interesting article, with thoughtful exposition. It's a longer read, and I enjoyed it. (I almost said "but", which makes me a bit ashamed, because the two characteristics are not at all contradictory, we've just been trained to seek quick reads.)

</comment><comment><USER10> tldr: Really long article about history of stupid theories people have had linking superficial traits like your face to criminal behavior and intelligence. I'm not sure why those old theories needed such debunking.

<comment><USER11> > _I 'm not sure why those old theories needed such debunking._

Well, in case you actually "dr", it's because those old theories not only are still held by many, but are also re-surfacing in the form of superficial deep learning applications -- as the article mentions.

<comment><USER12> To add to that, I guess the intent of the writers is explained by the following:

> We expect that more research will appear in the coming years that has > similar biases, oversights, and false claims to scientific objectivity in > order to "launder" human prejudice and discrimination.

Historical theories are brought up (1) to show that they are resurfacing and (2) because sciences (and I'm inclined to say DL in particular) are susceptible for making similar mistakes. The hard part is that these biases are often not clear at all, as they are based on general preconceptions/stereotypes and the theories thus confirm something we think we know (confirmation bias).

For example, I have been examining emotion recognition software [1] with which, just as with physiognomy, the face is taken as a proxy for a person's mental state. Just as OP examines the terms "criminal" and "justice" one could inquiry into the concepts underlying the digitization of emotions, such as "anger" and "joy". Terms that seem very clear on a brief encounter, but when further examining them turn out to be heavily influenced by eg. culture. Though not as obviously poignant as incriminating an innocent person, one should still wonder then what it means to feel 34% angry.

Now, this is a single example, but I guess OP's use of historical theories allows for a critical look at more DL applications out there. And maybe helps convince laymen (policy makers that buy and employ such technology) that DL is not an easy answer to complex social/political problems, such as OP's example of Faception's classifiers for terrorists, paedophiles and white-collar offenders.

[1]: [http://networkcultures.org/longform/2017/01/25/choose-how- yo...](http://networkcultures.org/longform/2017/01/25/choose-how-you-feel-you- have-seven-options/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Rapid developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning have > enabled scientific racism to enter a new era, in which machine-learned > models embed biases present in the human behavior used for model > development. Whether intentional or not, this "laundering" of human > prejudice through computer algorithms can make those biases appear to be > justified objectively.

Let's be honest here. Realistically, could those biases _ever_ be justified objectively to the satisfaction of the author? Probably not, because any evidence in their favor will likely be swiftly dismissed as itself racist, and thus, somehow automatically invalid.

On the issue of race, the modern leftist increasingly resembles a Sixteenth Century geocentrist desperately adding epicycle after epicycle in a futile struggle to preserve their cherished ideal. I suggest listening to Sam Harris's recent interview with Charles Murray. It's a rare, refreshing example of a prominent leftist at long last conceding the existence of a reality that they for so long denied:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1lEPQYQk8s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1lEPQYQk8s)</comment>


Goldman executives cheered housing market's decline, newly released e-mails show - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/24/AR2010042401049.html?wprss=rss_politics

<comment><USER2> Facts:

1) The stock-market itself is theoretically a zero sum game. So regardless of the instrument being trade someone is always betting against a trade. ex. over and above a long/short combo, even if person X is going long and person Y is booking profits. Person Y is theoretically betting against X.

2) GS is a clearing house among other things. Hence there is a high probability that on any given day they have hundreds of transactions that are long/short withing the same client pool.

3) Most transactions take place on a level 2 platform, i.e. the maximum someone can see if which company cleared the transaction, not which client etc.

4) Even if it is the same advisor, it would be illegal to disclose the transaction details of a client to another client.

5) I have never come across a retail investor that invests in CDOs and other exotic instruments.

6) There is a difference between hedging and naked/un-hedged trade. If someone is smart enough to be willing to trade an exotic instrument in the later category they better have the ball s to take ownership of the losses.

7) I wonder if people would have whined at all if GS did not make money on the hedge, since that happens in the majority of cases. Even in the case of GS. Like a number of other activities/sports a 30% win rate can be awesome.

8) This article is baseless is theory and practicality...

Because(Opinions):

a) Either they are trying to say, hedging should not be allowed. If it should be allowed the ones hedging should not make a profit(??). If they do make a profit they should feel sad about it.

b) If making a profit is a bad thing then, I guess they are trying to promote a way to eliminate losses. If thats the case I wonder what they would like to do. More bailouts or close the stock markets completely.. what would be the use if no one should make a profit??

c) I guess to make the article/issue clearer the next thing they could say is underwriting of any kind is also an illegal practice, since the institution assuming the risk is only entitled to risk and losses, go forbid if they make a profit, well we can see GS getting bashed for now :)

d) Anyone who lost money, even if they were GS's clients ought to have done their own due diligence too, if the people investing do not understand the inherent risks involved with doing business they are better of staying away from the markets as much as possible.

e) lastly, IMO the intent of this article is not to do anything but upset people who lost money or know someone close to them who lost money (includes all most everyone)to help gracefully without opposition let others implement speculative unhedged measures to curb speculation, hedging, profit making, angel funding etc..

Cheers!!

<comment><USER3> Fact:

1) Your argument is baseless...

Because (Fact)

a) We (the taxpayers) were compelled to bail GS out to the tune of 12 billion dollars to prevent a catastrophic worldwide economic collapse.

b) GS has access to huge amounts of credit at zero percent interest from the Fed.

Conclusion

1) We the people don't require evidence of a "crime" to take further action to protect our interests going forward.

<comment><USER2> LMFAO! Where did you get this from: "GS has access to huge amounts of credit at zero percent interest from the Fed"?? whereas in fact: They had "10 billion" shoved down their throats in Oct-Nov 2008, in exchange of preferred stock, with the condition that they had to take the money, and had to keep it for six months.

Which they repaid in full in April-May 2009 along with 23% interest. 23%!!! thats more per annum than a sub prime individual with no security would pay!

Your interests in what exactly? You don't even know the facts of your own investments.. if at all you would like to call it that. i guess you meant interest as in the 23%!

Go dig up the archives for 14 Sep 2008 - 30 Nov 2008, since I dont remember the exact date for the statements "We dont want or need any funds from the TARP".

Why not, because in Sep 2008 they had already raised 10 Billion from buffet. Not to cover their asses etc. but to use the money to make more money.

Of course this also brings up the question whether the motive of force funding GS was to save them or just get a slice of an awesomely lucarative delicious pie! something you the taxpayer profited from!

But of course you could have easily missed that, due to a beautiful blame shifting concept called "dissonant discomfort/cognitive dissonance". google it.

Question: 1\. Which we the people are you referring to, the ones who understand issues, or just carry a vote without any knowledge? 2\. If everyone understands the issue, I am sure you realize that "don't require evidence of a 'crime'", is an unlawful non-democratic statement in every way. ..... and hence you could definitely not mean "we the people"? 3) Again, what interests exactly?

in conclusion: are you really under the illusion that you are going forward ? LMAO!

<comment><USER4> Goldman was one of the 9 banks at that infamous meeting where Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (not to be confused with the selling short hedge fund counter party of this deal) said "Take this money or else".

Here's Judicial Watch's page on this meeting: [http://www.judicialwatch.org/news/2009/may/judicial-watch- fo...](http://www.judicialwatch.org/news/2009/may/judicial-watch-forces- release-bank-bailout-documents)

The talking points that were coughed up 3/4ths of a year later for Judaical Watch's FOIA request match the leaked substance of the meeting including these details:

" _We don't believe it is tenable to opt out because doing so would leave you vulnerable and exposed.

"If a capital infusion is not appealing, you should be aware that your regulator will require it in any circumstance._"

The leaks said that they were told they weren't leaving the room until they'd signed on the dotted line. This is the sort of thing you expect from the Mafia or in a Third World country, not the USA! Not to mention that the 23% interest they were charged was Mafia like.

Too many envy the successful, and in this case technical excellence was part of the story. Goldman developed their own computer language "Slang", and while it's not too hot today, their overall system for using it gives them a _fantastic_ advantage. When their leadership wants to play "what if", or the world changes, they can use their system to query all their units and get an answer in something like a few hours at the most.

Other firms keep this embedded in a zillion different (and by definition often broken) spreadsheets and the like. Finding out which end is up is a largely manual and error prone process taking days (or so I read; whatever the time amounts, Goldman's system is going to be a lot faster and more accurate).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why is this bad? Are investors supposed to be cheer leaders?

Any time a stock transaction takes place, one party believed it was a good idea to sell and the other party believed it was a good idee to buy.

How is the housing market any different? Should we all be made to believe it's always a strong buy?

<comment><USER6> Its my understanding that GS is being accused of playing both sides: telling clients to continue to invest while GS was internally hedging for a fall. This article possibly points out some evidence of this.

<comment><USER7> > telling clients to continue to invest while GS was internally hedging for a > fall.

I think it's slightly more subtle than that. They didn't actively tell clients to invest - rather, they had clients who wanted to go long housing, and facilitated the trade without telling the buyers that GS thought it was a bad idea. At least, that's my understanding, based on talking to some people who spent decades at GS and left between six months and three years ago.

<comment><USER8> Ah the age-old corporate cop-out: commission vs omission.

<comment><USER9> It's not Coca Cola's duty to keep you thin. It's not your bank's obligation to keep you solvent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Personally I cheered the housing market's decline as well. It's interesting how we're always told it's a disaster when there's a market correction but never when an asset class is getting overvalued.

<comment><USER11> Yes, and then the government 'has' to do something to 'correct' the market's own correction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> These articles have sensational headlines that don't point to the real issue. The possible fraud committed relates to GS recommending securities that they were betting against.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm cheering for its decline too: I don't own a house, so lower prices are good for me.

</comment><comment><USER3> I liked Bill Black's comments on the Bill Moyer's Journal last week. He said (my paraphrase) that if corporations are to have the privileges of personhood, most notably free speech and rights to political contributions, then they also should have the same consequences: As in losing civil rights for felony convictions, and the "three strike" rule, meaning I guess they should be permanently dissolved upon the third felony conviction.

<comment><USER14> Somehow it's controversial to argue that corporations should have responsibilities other than to their shareholders. You don't have to take many steps back from our present-day paradigm to see that as awfully weird. Personally, I'd have thought the controversial view would be that corporations _shouldn't_ need to balance shareholders' interests against, say, employees' and public's. _That_ seems like the ideological dogma to me: this idea that if you place one set of interests above all others, magic will happen.

<comment><USER4> Logical error: "place one set of interests above all others" is not the same as does not have "responsibilities other than to their shareholders".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Would you like your surgeon who is charging you money to save your life to also take out a life insurance policy on each operation?

<comment><USER4> Well, he _does_ take out an insurance policy on his making a mistake, or at least being accused of one.

<comment><USER15> A general policy to keep from being sued. Far different than profiting from your death.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> To me this seems like unethical behavior of a very profound nature when you consider the human consequences.</comment>


Cloudflare is DOWN – Sites are returning: 502 bad gateway - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/search <comment><USER2> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20334945](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20334945)</comment>


To restore American leadership in semiconductor manufacturing - <AUTHOR> https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/7178?s=1&r=1 <comment><USER2> American Institute of Physics Summary:

[https://www.aip.org/fyi/federal-science-bill- tracker/116th/c...](https://www.aip.org/fyi/federal-science-bill- tracker/116th/creating-helpful-incentives-produce-semiconductors-chips)

\- Authorizes funding for semiconductor R&D, including $3 billion for the National Science Foundation, $2 billion for the Department of Energy, and $2 billion for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Electronics Resurgence Initiative

\- Creates a multi-agency National Semiconductor Technology Center that would conduct research and prototyping of advanced semiconductors in partnership with the private sector, with a recommended budget of $3 billion over ten years

\- Establishes an Advanced Packaging National Manufacturing Institute under the Department of Commerce with a recommended budget of $5 billion over five years and creates a semiconductor program at National Institute of Standards and Technology that would support a new Manufacturing USA institute

\- Creates a $10 billion trust fund to match state and local incentives for investments in semiconductor manufacturing facilities

\- Provides tax credits for qualified semiconductor equipment or manufacturing facility expenditures through 2027

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the summary. I was not able to see any additional text in the house bill so I was confused what to glean.

300M/year is not going to dig us out of this hole. Intel's R&D budget is 10 times that per quarter [1], and that apparently doesn't even get you #1 in process leadership. In my opinion, the real problem is that semiconductors is no longer an attractive field for the best and brightest Americans. They realized they can go into software engineering and, as a new grad, make more as a BS than a semiconductor PhD. Unfortunately, national security doesn't dictate market wages, so I expect the U.S. to fall further behind unless they find a way to lower software wages, which perhaps ironically they're doing the opposite of with the H1B freeze.

[1] [https://www.intc.com/investor-relations/investor- education-a...](https://www.intc.com/investor-relations/investor-education- and-news/investor-news/press-release-details/2020/Intel-Reports-Fourth- Quarter-2019-Financial-Results/default.aspx)

<comment><USER4> From Wikipedia: Fabs require many expensive devices to function. Estimates put the cost of building a new fab over one billion U.S. dollars with values as high as $3–4 billion not being uncommon. TSMC invested $9.3 billion in its Fab15 300 mm wafer manufacturing facility in Taiwan.[1] The same company estimations suggest that their future fab might cost $20 billion.[2]

So the _total_ amount of this bill would be enough to build a new fab (in theory, _not_ in practice). Still, I think you're right that, short of nationalizing US fabs and building a new one outright, this isn't going to bring the US back on par with other countries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It'll be interesting to watch as congress balances vertical integration concerns with increased need for high-tech (like semiconductor) manufacturing.

Companies like AAPL and AMZN have shown multiple times, they are willing to invest past the barriers to entry to improve vertical integration, reduce their bottom line, but also give back some of those wins to their customers. Both of these companies are leaders in custom silicon, and it is only a matter of time before they prioritize the move into silicon fabrication as well.

Best case would be if, once mature, these companies would spin out subsidiaries which design generalized chips and fab chips for the entire industry. But if there is a push for regulation to have less vertical integration because of the enormous competitive advantages, its not clear where that line should be drawn for creating subsidiaries. It'll be interesting to know if their decisions to invest into things like semiconductor manufacturing will be impacted by regulation and which is the less bad choice accounting for the economy and national defense.

</comment><comment><USER6> We have intel and amd here already. It's not clear that R&D is the issue, it's cost of manufacturing. This seems to be better solved with some kind of critical industry tax incentives.

<comment><USER7> Does AMD manufacture here?

<comment><USER8> TSMC makes AMD chips. TSMC recently announced plans to open a plant in Arizona, although I don't believe they've announced what chips will be made there.

<comment><USER9> doesnt GlobalFoundries as well (the spinoff of AMDs fab along with some acquisitions.)

[https://www.anandtech.com/show/13915/amd-amends-agreement- wi...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/13915/amd-amends-agreement-with- globalfoudries-set-to-buy-wafers-till-2021)

<comment><USER8> You're right, I was thinking of 7nm. They still have agreements with GF for 12nm+.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Besides Intel (who doesnt need a subsidy IMHO) who even makes chips on advanced nodes in the US any more?

<comment><USER11> Samsung Austin, Intel (NM, OR, AZ), GF, Micron and then it depends.in what is added. Cree, arguably.

The better question: who is building a next Fab. Samsung will expand Intel could TSMC will

Someone, somewhere, will restart Sematech as a research facility. I would bet on either Austin or Ann Arbor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Meh. This is treating a symptom. Semiconductor manufacturing moves very slowly and it just took it a while to live the US like everyone else did.

</comment><comment><USER13> In my country this would never happen

</comment><comment><USER14> Well, aren't you glad we just made it untenable for a large number of experts on the subject to work here?

<comment><USER15> > Well, aren't you glad we just made it untenable for a large number of > experts on the subject to work here?

Even if they lift the ban, its not like these experts will immediately abandon their families and jobs to jump into the uncertain administrative environment of the US.

Why would they come if their lives can be upended by the stroke of a pen?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> When was the last time a political decree lead to change in who gets to be leader in what ?

The modern Chinese supply chain can only be replicated in few other places in the world.

I don't see what the problem is to let China do what it does, and focus everybody else's goal on other more important things - like reducing global C02 emissions.

You could generate millions of jobs just by doing that.

<comment><USER17> _> When was the last time a political decree lead to change in who gets to be leader in what ?_

The creation of the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and Advanced Research Project Agencies undoubtedly had a profound impact on the direction of both the US economy and the rate of scientific progress during the mid-late 20th century.

 _> I don't see what the problem is to let China do what it does, and focus everybody else's goal on other more important things - like reducing global C02 emissions... You could generate millions of jobs just by doing that._

What makes these mutually exclusive?

<comment><USER18> Also, the entirety of what China has accomplished is based on political decree...

<comment><USER19> exactly this. China did all / everything by political decree...

You like their High Speed Rail network? Oh that was a political decree when nobody in its population could even afford to ride a high speed train.

You like their science? That's a political decree as well.

<comment><USER20> You've gotta admit, their high speed rail network is very impressive. And it all runs on electricity.

Granted, most of the current electrical production comes from coal I think. At least until they can phase that out for natural gas, solar, and nuclear.

And 10 years ago, the western media was a laughing at China, and declaring that their high speed rail network was a commercial failure, because most Chinese people couldn't afford the expensive train tickets.

But then, fast forward to today, and their high speed trains are running at maximum capacity. At least before the virus. They cannot run anymore trains, because of clearance requirements, so they are building newer dedicated tracks.

The median Chinese person's income had increased in the past few years, that more of them can afford the travel and vacations, and can pay for a high speed rail ticket.

And the interesting thing, is that the newer dedicated tracks will run on the even faster maglev technology, that they indigenously developed, which can run almost as fast as an airplane.

This new maglev technology was not stolen from Japan or Germany, or gasp, the United States. Unless they have a time machine too, and stole it from future American technology. LOL.

The other interesting development is that they built a low speed maglev intracity rail to move people around. But this doesn't get as much attention as the faster trains.

Pretty interesting developments.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


LinkedIn: What the "data export" contains - <AUTHOR>

after LinkedIn had extended the period for retrieving/exporting one's own data (see link below) I became curious and requested my own dump.<p>Since it has just arrived and I downloaded my zip, curious what they had on me, here's what it contained. It would have interested me so I thought I'd post it and see what you think.<p>- profile picture<p>- email addresses (every single one, also old/deactivated ones)<p>- received endorsenents (when/who/what)<p>- languages & levels<p>- login attempts (timestamped, with IP and full user agent string, reaching back until 2013 for me)<p>- search queries (timestamp & search string, back until 2013)<p>- timestamp of opening/closing/reopening the account<p>- connections (first/last name, email, current position & company)<p>- positions held (with dates)<p>- skills listed on the profile<p>- ad targeting, with the following fields
  "Age Group"|"Country"|"Company Sizes"|"Companies"|"Followed Companies"|"Functions"|"Gender"|"Industries"|"Followed Industries"|"Partner Opt Out Advertising"|"Seniorities"|"State"	"Zip Code"|"Schools"|"Graduation Year"|"Groups"|"Interface Language"|"Degree Classes"|"Skills"<p>- education (start/end, degree, notes) <comment><AUTHOR> looks like I have an underpopulated profile. There are many more fields contained, I have uploaded their "README" that came along with the zip file.

[http://pastebin.com/aFigdAiV](http://pastebin.com/aFigdAiV)</comment>


Show HN: Ultra-fast style transfer in the browser - <AUTHOR> https://instacasso.club/?ref=hackernews2 <comment><USER2> It is fast but the output pictures are not particularly "great".</comment>


Google Tips - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/get/googletips/ <comment><USER2> Wow. As a long-time user of almost (read: not G+) everything Google has made, I was just admiring the UI, thinking "How nice of them to make this for people who don't even know how to check their email..." and then I spot this:

[https://www.google.com/get/googletips/card/ask-google-to- fet...](https://www.google.com/get/googletips/card/ask-google-to-fetch-your- stuff/detail/)

Which I had no idea about.

This is a brilliant content and feature discovery tool. Any other company would've just created a long list of products with short descriptions for each.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting. This appears to be an attempt to do some market research by Google--to find out which messages are resonating with their audience.

I wonder if it'll work.

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://www.google.com/insidesearch/tipstricks/all.html](https://www.google.com/insidesearch/tipstricks/all.html)

<comment><USER5> I actually didn't know about the range searching, that's really nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This could go either way really. Either you think that Google is such a monstrosity with all these parts that don't really fit together which makes for bad UX or you think that Google's services are something we should be thankful for and that this display of free stuff is the kind of really nice UX only Google can deliver.

<comment><USER7> I think the implication that Google's UX is a monstrosity isn't really warranted based on the content of this page.

Most of these fall into a few categories:

1\. Hey, this service exists (Google Contacts, Google Keep, Google News) 2\. Look at this intermediate-level thing you can do with this service (Install apps from the web interface of the Play store, make playlists on YouTube, natural language semantic Google search) 3\. Bad UX (hey, you can share map search results!)

Google has a lot of services (leading to #1); a lot of users are very cautious about using computers in general and won't try to explore to find intermediate or advanced usages (even though they're very useful and HN would probably bitterly complain about their being taken out); the UX is sometimes bad but having user education doesn't automatically imply that.

Have we really gotten so addicted to onboarding that any feature that can't be explained in a 30-second "welcome to Google" tour should just be shafted? I really like being able to install Android apps from my laptop, but even if I was told that in the Android "welcome to Android" screen that I first saw years ago and haven't seen since, I'd have forgotten it.

Using any tool as an expert requires some amount of education. Is it really desirable to build tools that cannot be used as an expert? What would the world be like if the only tools that existed were only usable at the beginner level?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The fact that someone thought this was necessary emphasizes the amount of problems Google has with user experience design.

<comment><USER9> By "this", do you mean an intuitive natural-language one-stop-shop to get information from across all of Google's properties? Seems like pretty terrific UX design to me.

Or by "this" did you mean Tips -- i.e. is your argument that you shouldn't ask your users for discoverability advice? If so, I can see how doing so requires a bit of indifference to embarrassment, and a lack of care as to what snobs might think, but hey, discoverability is hard.

How would you design a way to teach users they can do queries like this?

<comment><USER10> I don't know if you have multiple google accounts (I have personal gmail, personal analytics and some work related accounts).

Try this: Go to Google.com as a logged in user and try to "switch" to your new account. What was originally one click to logout and one click to bring up a un/pw now takes a ton of additional user interaction.

I'm no Jony Ive but whoever thought this was a good workflow needs to reconsider.

<comment><USER11> I have two accounts: my personal account and a work account. Until a few minutes ago, I had never signed in to my work account from my home computer.

I tried to "switch" to my new account, as you described. It took about 10 seconds, which was the time it took to load a new page and type out my credentials. Furthermore, as soon as I did that, I could instantly switch between accounts with two clicks and without having to log out of either account. What's the problem?

<comment><USER10> My point is that the solution before was more elegant, since it was just a pop-up flow with single clicks to log out and log in. The whole rigmarole now is just the way all the Google apps feel to me now. Extra hoops to jump through, I guess I'd describe it as?

<comment><USER11> Fair enough; I can see your point. I think the other side of the coin is that, once you've logged into all your accounts, it's much easier to switch back and forth between accounts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't find the logic on this site

<comment><USER13> Google has so many features that users don't know about that they created a site that (1) gives users a random listing of their products and features to sort through, and (2) lets Google see which features/services get the most interest from the uninitiated users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Chrome on Windows 7 and the text on the cards is difficult to read normally, and impossible on mouseover.

<comment><USER15> Fine for me. Get the latest version of Chrome (it includes some anti-aliasing differences). Maybe just restart your browser if update is already downloaded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "See what videos your friends are posting (and adjust friendships accordingly)"

</comment><comment><USER17> Since Google can't get one of their flagship services, "Google Now", to actually work[0], even after a year or so of user complaints, and this is on one of these cards, I'm not really motivated to try any of this other stuff out.

[0][http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/calendar/SJZxi...](http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/calendar/SJZxi4xGrkQ%5B101-125-false%5D) [0]</comment>


ShowHN: An objective-c method call tracer - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nviennot/objc-tracer

<comment><AUTHOR> It's an early version of it, but support iOS (arm), and MacOS (x86_x64, no i368).

I'd be happy to hear your comments :)

Nico.</comment>


Why I don't feel like presenting at conferences any more - <AUTHOR> http://peterevjan.com/posts/why-i-dont-feel-like-presenting-at-conferences-any-more/

<comment><USER2> Interesting… I've never really thought that the _point_ of speaking is to get a message out to the maximum number of people — which seems to be the definition of effectiveness the OP is using (and on that scale I wonder why books are at the bottom too…)

Some of the reasons I speak at conferences:

* Before I started speaking at conferences I got a lot out of attending. Both in learning and networking. As corny as it sounds I like to give a little back to the communities that helped me when I was younger and less experienced.

* Not everybody learns the same way. I know that I've attended workshops and talks that have made clear topics that I've found opaque after reading books, blog posts, etc. People have told me that they've got more from one of my workshops than they have from hours of reading and unstructured practice. So while I might not be reaching the maximum number of potential listeners, I may well be reaching people that I would have otherwise missed.

* I reach people through different channels. The people attending a conference are not necessarily the same people who read blog posts, mailing lists, etc. If you're following a blog on X, then you're interested in X. Conference talks are an opportunity to reach people who maybe didn't even know X existed.

* I find presenting in front of groups a little daunting and difficult. Practice has made it less daunting and easier. Communicating to groups of people is a useful life skill — from business meetings through to pitching to investors. Presenting makes me practice and improve it.

* I value the time I invest into making a good presentation. It forces me to put my thoughts in order and really think about the most effective way of communicating a topic.

* Unlike the OP I have got work through speaking. Both directly, from people who've seen my speak, and indirectly from folk googling around a subject area and finding my name pop up repeatedly around particular topics at conferences.

* I generally don't present at a conference unless I get at least travel / accommodation / ticket. So this reduces the cost of an event to opportunity cost at _worst_. This means I can go to more events. I enjoy and get value from conferences so this is a good thing in-of-itself for me.

* Speakers usually hang out together at some point. This means I've had the opportunity to meet and occasionally make friends with some wicked smart people. Occasionally folk in the "Squeee! I'm a fanboy" area ;-)

* I generally get more feedback from a presentation than I get from a blog post. Both directly from talk Q&A, folk approaching me with specific questions, etc. And indirectly from watching the reactions of the audience during the session.

* You often have the opportunity to present something multiple times at different events. This allows you to experiment with different ways of putting the message across with fresh audiences. Something much harder to do with blog posts, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've had a bit different luck. A few have paid for flights and hotel, some included a honorarium of some sort but most were paid on my own dime outside the free pass.

Two of my recent good friends are fellow speakers I met at conferences abroad. I met them abroad first but they live about 40 miles from me in the States. A couple days abroad felt like we were condensing months of friendship.

</comment><comment><USER4> Just an alternative point of view, IMHO: if talking at conferences is tough, you should try writing papers to get published in IEEE/ACM conferences. After going through revisions and getting them approved by your academic adviser. ;)

I'm so glad I left academia behind and work in industry now. I've presented at a few conferences and enjoy it every time. Its actually fun compared to publishing papers at research conferences. But that's just my personal point of view.</comment>


Debugging Ruby (My notes) - <AUTHOR> http://napkin.highgroove.com/articles/2010/11/09/debugging-ruby-tools My notes on the fantastic Engine Yard Debugging Ruby webinar given by Aman Gupta <comment><USER2> <pedant> Heh...some of these things are "intro to IP networks and UNIX". </pedant>

<comment><AUTHOR> Very true. In my experience, many ruby and rails developers aren't familiar with these tools and these intro tools are the groundwork for using some of the more ruby specific ones.

<comment><USER3> Nice unintentional compliment to the platform</comment></comment></comment>


When You're Hot, You're Hot: Career Successes Come in Clusters - barry-cotter https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/career-hot-streaks <comment><AUTHOR> I'm a bit skeptical.

They looked at scientists (citations), artists (painting prices), and film directors (imdb ratings). The question is whether the works that they're looking at are actually independent.

For scientists, it's rather unlikely that, having discovered a rich vein of research, a scientist would put out a single perfect paper and then never revisit the topic. Instead, I'd expect several papers exploring aspects of the research, which would get cited where those aspects are applicable; that pattern would produce several highly cited papers which look like a 'hot streak' but are actually just one piece of work.

For film directors, the Peter Jackson example the article gives is similar: the three Lord of the Rings movies are a 'hot streak' consisting of the director repeatedly putting together the same actors playing the same characters in the same story.

For artists, they're using the art market, in which prices are determined by the opinions of critics, gallerists, and other experts herding towards a consensus about importance and quality, as a proxy for quality. A conclusion that "the stuff artist X was doing during this period was important" would naturally produce a cluster of works escalating in price.

My expectation would be that after such effects are accounted for Einstein's _anno mirablis_ that produced four transformative and unrelated papers would once again appear to be extremely atypical.

<comment><USER2> Whatever may be the contribution of actors in addition doesn't invalidate the results though. Whatever environment forms around the scientist may lead to a streak of great works. The streak remains.

<comment><USER3> But if we're looking at things like a trilogy, or a series of papers in the same small area, it only appears to be a streak due to a (somewhat artificial) decision about divvying up the results. These sorts of "streaks" could be interpreted instead as single events, and the whole premise of the article goes out the window.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wanted to dismiss this finding as some kind of reputation adder, whereby after a hit a professional's work would receive extra positive attention that might not have been warranted. However, but the authors appear to extend their result to artists such as Van Gogh, who was not, to my understanding, famous during his lifetime. According to the authors, he managed to produce his best works in a clustered manner while the feedback from these works presumably remained about constant.

<comment><AUTHOR> The research is using prices to determine the "best" paintings for an artist, but that means that their data for art is basically determined by the not- exactly-quality-based forces involved in pricing art. "Van Gogh painted this one at the same time as X that sold for $$$$Y" is an effective selling point to certain segments of that market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> In general I think the clustering of success comes from recognition of successful bits during/after repeated practice or iterative production. Once you recognize that you are onto something you can pursue that until you either become bored with it or the market does.

I have had two successes that kicked off hot-streaks and they each came after several years of thrashing around, learning the space and material with which to work. I am in the middle (hopefully) of a new thrashing phase, lots of core competency being built up, (waxonwaxoff) some minor successes, and a whole lot of dissatisfaction.

<comment><USER6> I have noticed this as well. Insights don't come out of nowhere (although they often appear to). In my experience, they are the result of focus and effort over a period of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a very under-appreciated article.

The more I look around the more I feel every one has at least the following phases in their career- Fall, Struggle, Rise, Plateau. The thing is the order is not guaranteed. But the phases come in parcels of decades.

The best is the order I mentioned. Sometimes the order is brutal. You go like Rise, Plateau, Struggle, Fall. The best years happen in early life- Like 20's. You go through it assuming this is how its going to be all life, don't invest or save up. And then reach 40's and realize you have another 40 to go and regardless of how hard you work, You have to suffer through the remainder.

In some people's case the big success comes in the last decade of their working career.

Either way the most important to note is, that luck goes around. No one remains lucky forever. One must be worried if start tossing a coin, and head comes up straight 100 times.

<comment><USER8> _The more I look around the more I feel every one has at least the following phases in their career- Fall, Struggle, Rise, Plateau. The thing is the order is not guaranteed. But the phases come in parcels of decades._

That describes my career perfectly.

(this started in the mid 90s)

Fail - first pass of my first major development project out of college. I was the only developer at my company. I knew how to program - I done complicated side projects in assembly and C for years before and during college.

Rise - Asked a former professor for help, came out with version 2.0 of the project. Between two raises, a basically guaranteed 20^ bonus, and changing jobs, I was making $40K more in 4 years.

Plateau - next 8 years, took my eye off the ball, stayed at the one job too long and between bonuses being cut, and 3% raises, only made $7K more in year 9 than I made in year 2.

Plateau #2 - I changed jobs, learned a lot and muddled my way through the recession for 3 years.

Rise - over the next 5 years, changed jobs 4 times and made $55K more at the end.

For context, because of the mistake made by staying at a job too long up until 2008 and focuses on always getting jobs where I'm barely qualified to learn and build my resume, I've been under the median salary for my market for my years of experience since then. So I'm definitely not trying to brag. I'm also not in Silicon Valley. I am in a major metropolitan city.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can confirm.

Got 4000 stars on GitHub and suddendly a publisher offered me a book deal.

Had some interviews and people told me, they already knew me from the news, where I got to via the 4k GitHub stars.

<comment> 52-6F-62 Please do elaborate if you can.

<comment><USER9> I wrote a React tutorial in 2015.

A React core dev starred it on GitHub.

I got about 4k stars for this and some news coverage (front-end/JS/React news)

Some publisher asked me if I want to turn it into a book, so he can sell it for/with me.

Later I had a few interviews where I was asked to show my GitHub account. When the interviewers saw the 4k repo they told me they read about it a few days ago in the news and now they were impressed because they talking to the creator of it in person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder how much of it is having one breakout hit drives more attention towards their later ones and helps them have better resources (budget, staff, equipment, etc).

Works that might have ignored or simply missed earlier now get more attention.

And works that might have failed due to lack of resources now have a better shot.

</comment><comment><USER11> i don't think it's so much that people become "hot" as people tend to work on the same thing for a while. So of course your biggest hits will be in close proximity to your next biggest hits — they are variations on the same theme! Hot topics, not hot people.

I would be quite surprised if patterns like Einstein's annus mirabelus are actually the norm, with four largely unrelated breakthroughs in the same year.

</comment><comment><USER12> It would be interesting to know how these "hot streaks" coincide with personal events occurring in people's lives.

</comment><comment><USER13> [http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~mozer/Teaching/syllabi/7782/read...](http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~mozer/Teaching/syllabi/7782/readings/gilovich%20vallone%20tversky.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> … is the first paper cited in the abstract of the paper in the article: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0315-8](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0315-8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Link to the actual paper [https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01804](https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01804)

</comment><comment><USER15> Exciting research for someone who did their best work recently. But maybe scary for someone who think their best work happened few years back.

</comment><comment><USER16> What about Jeff Dean?

<comment><USER17> Between 2000-2004: GFS, GroupVarInts, Snappy, Protocol Buffers, Google's cluster-management system, MapReduce, AdSense, BigTable, & a critical part of the Search serving stack that doesn't appear to be public.

Between 2011-2015: LevelDB, Google Brain, another important internal project that I don't think is public, and TensorFlow.

Between 2004-2011: Spanner, some work on Google Translate, and consultation for the replacements for GFS, Proto1, and MapReduce.

Certainly seems like clusters to me.

<comment><USER18> Isn't that just one big cluster from 2000-2015? Or, was that your point?

<comment><USER17> It's two clusters, one centered around big data from 2000-2004, and another on large-scale machine-learning from 2011-2015. The middle period from 2004-2011 mostly just featured Spanner and helping other people pick up the torch for his accomplishments of 2000-2004. While Spanner is great and last I heard had one big client inside Google, it's hardly as impactful as GFS, Protobufs, MapReduce, Google's serving system, and BigTable were, nor as Brain, TensorFlow, and that other internal project are now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think it may have to do more with one idea triggering another. For instance, Einsteins papers were all pretty much the "logical" conclusion of a single idea - mearly separated by publication date.

In my own life, I can witness similar events in collegues and myself. It may also be that others take a "hot streak" train of thought, style, premise, and once it becomes common place, that hot streak or cluster ceases to be relevant.

<comment><USER20> Einstein's annus mirabilis ("miracle year") in 1905 involved publishing 4 excellent papers, covering some very different ideas: the photoelectric effect, brownian motion, mass-energy equivalence, and special relativity. It's true that he later focused on relativity, but the photoelectric effect and brownian motion are still quite different.

<comment><USER21> Agreed. The photoelectric effect paper revolutionized quantum physics, the brownian-motion paper revolutionized statistical mechanics, and relativity changed everything.

They are _really_ different papers, each of which most physicists would be extremely blessed to have just one in their lifetimes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Damn. Could it mean if you can reflect and pinpoint your glory years being a while in the past then you are screwed?

<comment><USER23> I mean, is your career finished? Reading this, I wondered if there were any other clusters that would have been the glory years, but later on the person's accomplishments were so much better it completely eclipses their past glory.

It seems the researchers concentrated on creative careers. Wonder if it is applicable to more corporate standardized careers and how would they would measure it. The title implies careers in general, but I don't find what the article says to support the careers in general.

Would also warn against using this as self fulling prophecy.

<comment><USER24> If you were to study this for corporate standardized careers, how would you go about getting data?

I can't think of a reliable, detailed, readily available source of info like that. Maybe LinkedIn for profiles that explicitly state education years (HS and B.S. to estimate age) and then somehow filter through and classify job titles?

Several issues not including users who state themselves "Founder", "CEO", for MLM schemes. Maybe you could cut the population down to users who have had software titles.

<comment><USER25> I expect it would be effectively impossible. The meaning of titles vary markedly between companies, a lot of companies don't even have well- standardized titles, and people often don't list a succession of titles within a given company. And I'm not sure how any of that maps to success anyway. Even if you had salary info, which you don't, that's only one metric and, for many, not even the most relevant one.

<comment><USER24> Perhaps data from large HR departments would be useful. Although that would limit it to people who stay at the same company.

Brings another question, is it possible to find out which two companies in the world have the most overlap between employees? To clarify, two companies which a majority of knowledge workers jump between.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Can't wait for my first cluster!</comment>


Sundance asks for credit card info without SSL, says it has SSL anyways - <AUTHOR>

http://www.sundance.org/festival/tickets/registration/
Just bothers me that companies can get away with this given the recent history with Sony etc getting hacked.
http://www.box.com/shared/vdqv03hfgxri5ocreohz <comment><USER2> Not quite true...

If you noted your order is processed inside an  element which is secured with https to [https://webtix1.sundance.org/WebTixsNet/OrderFormPage.aspx?d...](https://webtix1.sundance.org/WebTixsNet/OrderFormPage.aspx?dtticks=634878250741441833)

<comment><AUTHOR> replied above

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> actually "false, I checked that already. the iframe src is <http://webtix1.sundance.org/webtixsnet/?key=RegPublic-PITW> the form's action is "OrderFormPage.aspx?dtticks=634878773966587077" which means that the form submits to [http://webtix1.sundance.org/webtixsnet/OrderFormPage.aspx?dt...](http://webtix1.sundance.org/webtixsnet/OrderFormPage.aspx?dtticks=634878773966587077)

so the iframe isn't ssl, and the form doesn't submit to an SSL page either.

furthermore! even if the iframe were over ssl (which it isn't), that still wouldn't be secure. since the outer page isn't over ssl, an attacker could replace the iframe with one that has the same content but points to a non-ssl page. this is why SSL is useless unless the user checks the browser SSL indicator (the green lock in the URL bar)."</comment>


Uber is the new Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3029457/technovore/uber-is-the-new-google

<comment><USER2> When should Google acquire Uber? It seems inevitable (Uber + Google's self- driving cars) but the longer Google waits the higher Ubers valuation will be.</comment>