Universal Sentence Encoder - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.11175 <comment><USER2> Interesting. There's a big need for better vector representations of things in-between words (for which Word2Vec/Glove/FastText work well) and documents (which to me seems impossible. Yes I know about Doc2Vec etc, but really.. it works ok for paragraphs).

Facebook's InferSent[1] has worked reasonably well for me for a variety of sentence level tasks, but I don't have anything I can point to to say that it is really substantially better than averaging word embeddings.

More options is good.

(Also, is Kurzweil part of Google Brain or separate. He doesn't really have nay background in NLP does he?)

[1] [https://github.com/facebookresearch/InferSent](https://github.com/facebookresearch/InferSent)

<comment><USER3> For the record, good old fashioned bag of words representations (tf-idf, LDA, LSA) still provide useful representations for documents. Obviously we hope to do better, but recently people act like there's no way of turning a document into a vector.

<comment><USER2> Bag of word representations work fine for some applications.

The reason people want better representations is for the applications where they don't. For example, Bag of words doesn't capture agreement or disagree well, whereas better representations can.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1\. This is more Technical Report worthy than paper worthy...

2\. "by Ray Kurzweil's Team", although accurate I find that fetishization of certain stars to pretty insulting to the other authors, we already have a convention and it's "Cer et al. (2018)"

<comment><USER5> At least Ray has the decency to be listed last on the author list!

Personally I think the idea of this paper is pretty good, but the evaluation is weak.

<comment><USER6> > At least Ray has the decency to be listed last on the author list!

Just do it like in mathematics: Authors in alphabetical order.

<comment><USER7> Usually the actual lead author is first, the assistant authors follow, and the advisor is listed last.

At least that's how it is in (psychology and other?) PhD programs.

So Ray may only be supervising or contributing a small portion and is likely listed on all papers his team publishes.

<comment><USER8> Same in Biology

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "We present models for encoding sentences into embedding vectors that specifically target transfer learning to other NLP tasks. The models are efficient and result in accurate performance on diverse transfer tasks. Two variants of the encoding models allow for trade-offs between accuracy and compute resources. For both variants, we investigate and report the relationship between model complexity, resource consumption, the availability of transfer task training data, and task performance. Comparisons are made with baselines that use word level transfer learning via pretrained word embeddings as well as baselines do not use any transfer learning. We find that transfer learning using sentence embeddings tends to outperform word level transfer. With transfer learning via sentence embeddings, we observe surprisingly good performance with minimal amounts of supervised training data for a transfer task. We obtain encouraging results on Word Embedding Association Tests (WEAT) targeted at detecting model bias. Our pre-trained sentence encoding models are made freely available for download and on TF Hub."

Awesome. Now what does all that mean in English?

<comment><USER10> They made a way to take any sentence, and output a small array of numbers that represent its essence. You can use their model to find the essence of your own sentences. And then use it either directly (e.g. compare the essence of two sentences to see if they're saying roughly the same thing) or use it as a starting point for the model you need (e.g. if you're building a system to convert English sentences into French, your neural network might generate the essence of the English sentence as part of its work. By using the pre-trained model, you have a better starting point for that part of the network than just random numbers, so your training time will be greatly reduced).

<comment><USER11> What do you mean by "its essence"? Is this a semantic essence?

<comment><USER12> The array of numbers represents some opaque statistical property of the sentence with respect to the others in the corpus the model was trained from. The hope is that this property will correlate with what we believe to be the sentence's meaning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> >Our pre-trained sentence encoding models are made freely available for download and on TF Hub.

what is tf hub? I assume it stands for tensor flow hub but what is that

<comment><USER14> It looks like an internal site, this is the link it is referring to: [https://tfhub.dev/google/universal-sentence- encoder/1](https://tfhub.dev/google/universal-sentence-encoder/1)

<comment><USER15> [https://www.tensorflow.org/hub/modules/google/universal- sent...](https://www.tensorflow.org/hub/modules/google/universal-sentence- encoder/1)

<comment><USER14> It looks like there is a link to a Colab notebook (Google's hosted JupyterHub environment, also called Datalab): [https://colab.research.google.com/github/tensorflow/hub/blob...](https://colab.research.google.com/github/tensorflow/hub/blob/r0.1/examples/colab/semantic_similarity_with_tf_hub_universal_encoder.ipynb)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As someone who has done a ML course, did a primitive Word2Vec but doesn't really follow the field all that close - how important is this and how does it compare to what came before?

</comment><comment><USER17> "..transfer learning to other NLP tasks" – NLP as in neuro-linguistic programming?

If so, can someone explain how this project is related to NLP? Thanks!

<comment><USER18> Natural language processing/parsing</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where do you see yourself in 5 years? - <AUTHOR> I'm wondering where do you see yourself in 5 years? What are your IT predictions for next 5 years? <comment> non-entity Realistically? Stuck in a cycle of dead end, highly corporate developer positions. Provably still working with .NET, but I imagine non-tech companies will be migrated to core finally

</comment><comment><USER2> 85% likely still using a keyboard to manipulate pixels on a screen

<comment><USER3> 85% likely still using a keyboard to manipulate bits

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Still in tech, but helping more people with products and content I create.

Prediction-wise: \- I agree with AI. I hope it will be advanced enough that we can have conversations with it, that it can anticipate things to help us with. \- I think banking as we know it will be different -- and the U.S. dollar is no longer the world currency. \- Hopefully, there is a cryptocurrency that is backed up with gold and silver. \- I really want Universal Basic Income to happen in the U.S. and also Medicare/healthcare coverage for all Americans.

</comment><comment><USER5> Ideally I will have decoupled my income from my time, made progress on personal savings, still be working remote, still have full control over my time, still working with great people, still paying the bills, and all that.

IT predictions, no thanks!

</comment><comment><USER6> If the stars align and all is well, I will have a 10 to 20 acre homestead. I grow my own food. Chickens. Maybe some sheep and cows. I subsist on writing. Woodworking takes up a large chunk of my days and it's been so long since the last time I've programmed, I would have completely lost the skill entirely. That's the dream... forgetting to code...

</comment><comment><USER7> Hopefully a Team Lead (or at least Senior Developer) in my current highly- corporate environment. Possibly work from home. Joined as an Associate per company policy, but already have 6 years under my belt. Taking some accredited coursework in ML and DL at night to open up professional options.

</comment><comment><USER8> 2 different questions I hope.

1\. Running a company doing 10+ Mil USD a year in revenue

2\. Crypto hype will be dead. AI hype will gain more steam. The FAANGs will keep getting bigger and richer.

<comment><USER9> Crypto hype dead but more boring real world use of cryptocurrencies and less ICO nonsense.

Price of btc goes up slow and steady like a vanguard index investment.

I agree with AI. I've seen some HN submissions that have changed my mind where I think yes I can see ordinary people using deep learning apps to assist their day to day life. And not just Siri type stuff.

<comment><USER10> Can you name a few (submissions)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not in the IT world, but I see two parallel worlds, the virtual world (like the next generation of Minecraft) and the real world

And people will spend more time in the virtual world to cooperate on different projects they love voluntarily.

About myself: A serial entrepreneur with 3-4 unicorns

</comment><comment><USER12> Honestly, I don't know. I only know I will still be a programmer. Who would have thought politics would be like this around the world in 2014? It makes me very uncomfortable and likely to move elsewhere (I am not American).

</comment><comment><USER13> I like to think I'll be a VPE or CTO

Still not sure how to get there, but in the last 2 years I've had the opportunity to be involved in the building and planning around a product and I know that's what I want to keep doing.

</comment><comment><USER14> Running a billon dollar company.

</comment><comment><USER15> Out of the rat race, with enough invested assets to be retired forever. A long shot :)

</comment><comment><USER16> who knows? thats the fun part</comment>


As Long as the King's Arm? - <AUTHOR> https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n05/james-vincent/as-long-as-the-king-s-arm <comment><USER2> [https://archive.md/nZQgN](https://archive.md/nZQgN)</comment>


Why Your Business Needs a Chinese Name - <AUTHOR> http://mygengo.com/about-us/blog/chinese-branding/

<comment><USER2> It's foolish to claim that bing has only claimed a small market share due to homophonic issues. Don't think for a second that the Bing brand wasn't overthought on every level. I can guarantee that they considered the Chinese localization before launch. Bing has enough problems gaining market share in markets where Bing has a vaguely positive sound to it.

For bona fides, I worked on many projects where we developed localized Chinese names for new and existing global brands. We charged through the nose for this. The numbers you are looking for end in six zeros. This was a couple years ago when China was even more of a black box than it is now and there was a sense of herd panic about getting in. License to print money. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Yes, you should worry about the transliteration, but if you are a western based company and want to move into the chinese market, you have much much much bigger concerns, namely getting shut out by any given joint venture partner that you shack up with, with onerous "technology sharing" terms which results in your company getting pillaged and left on the side of the (market) road. Or watch as your market is crowded out by a home grown tech-alike (supported by the chinese government).

And this stuff is way overthought most of the time. Coke isn't exactly a positive association on any level (drug, sounds like a bit like slang for other unmentionables, coal). I could go on all day spewing this but ultimately, as weird as some names are, as much as brand consultants like to BS clients with this rubbish, it is a much richer set of factors that determine brand & business success in the market.

<comment><USER3> _Bing has enough problems gaining market share in markets where Bing has a vaguely positive sound to it._

Heh, I'm curious what market that might be. The only associations I can come up with are bing cherries and Bing Crosby. Neutral at best :-)

<comment><USER4> I think of quiz-shows (like Wait Wait Don't Tell Me), where there's often a bell to indicate a correct answer. Also (and probably related), Bingo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > This search engine giant — known as 必应 (biying) — also found it difficult to > break into the Chinese market, partly due to its unfortunate choice of a > name that sounds similar to the Chinese word for sickness: 病 (bing). So far, > it's only managed to monopolize less than five percent of the market.

It's unfortunate when someone who knows nothing about a topic decides to start making assumptions. For example, bing has _many_ different meanings depending on the tone used:

bīng/bing1: 兵,冰,掤,栟,檳

bǐng/bing3: 丙,屏,怲,昺,柄,炳,秉,稟,苪,邴,鉼,鞞,餅

bìng/bing4: 並,併,寎,并,摒,病

The one that means sickness is only the last one.

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately the pronunciation of "Bing" in English is more often the same as the last one in Chinese, and frankly none of the characters you listed above, maybe except 冰 (means ice) and 饼 (means cake), has any good implications at all, let alone relevance to searching.

"Microsoft has Bing", translated to Chinese 微软有病 (literally "Microsoft has sickness", or "Microsoft is sick"), is a serious joke about Bing's launch in China. That's not to say it is a marketing mistake, though. At least it gets people's attention. It's wrong to attribute Bing's failure to capture significant market share to its Chinese name, as others suggested in the comments.

Google (谷歌) has similar problems in its Chinese branding. The name 谷歌 (valley song? WTF?) is an absolutely non-sense for a search engine.

Local brands are usually better in this regard. For example, Baidu's name (百度) comes from a famous Chinese poem by 辛弃疾 which depicts a scene where a guy is searching for his lover in a crowded festival night. Search engine? No problem!

Here's the complete poem if you can read Chinese:

《青玉案·元夕》 辛弃疾(宋)

东风夜放花千树,更吹落星如雨。宝马雕车香满路,凤箫声动,玉壶光转,一夜鱼龙舞。

蛾儿雪柳黄金缕,笑语盈盈暗香去。众里寻他千百度,蓦然回首,那人却在,灯火阑珊处。

PS. If you are careful enough you will find BMW's Chinese name 宝马 (means precious horse) also appeared in this poem, thought I'm pretty sure this is not the first use of the term. Ancient Chinese nobels rely heavily on horses for transportation, which matches BMW's high-end status perfectly.

<comment><USER7> I always thought 百度 literally means 100 degrees, as in Celsius, the boiling point of water. Maybe there's a secondary meaning saying "This search engine is hot".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My two favorites: Coke and BMW.

As sdz points out in his/her comment, whoever came up with Coke's name 'ke kou ke le' did an amazingly clever job while still retaining much of the sound of the original. [1]

Yet to be mentioned is BMW, one of my personal favorites. Their Chinese name, 宝马 (bao ma), literally means 'Treasured Horse' [2] but its more than that. 宝宝 (bao bao) is a common way to address a baby, something like 'little treasure' but not so pretentious in Chinese. And there are stories (I think from the 3 Kingdoms era) which refer to a character's reliable and sturdy horse as, "so- and-so's Bao Ma". Really a great name.

Coincidentally, as you might expect, its very hard for non-Chinese to understand the nuances of Chinese names. I have a modest command of Mandarin but some names that I think are quite interesting (Sprite - Xue Bi - ~Snow Jade) are not very well thought of by my Chinese relatives. Others like Subway (sai bai wei) which I thought was kinda wonky (100 Flavors?) are big hits as the article mentions.

1\. Coke - <http://goodcharacters.com/blog/blog.php?id=79>

2\. BMW Bao Ma - <http://goodcharacters.com/blog/blog.php?id=66>

[Update: added link to explanation of Coke's transliteration]

<comment><USER6> FYI, Subway (赛百味, Sai Bai Wei) would mean "better than other 100 flavors" in Chinese, which isn't true at all: for most Chinese, subways are not that tasty. But the name is great!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In India, bing is bing, subway is subway and coca cola is coca cola. Irrespective of that Google has around 89% market share. Considering other search engines, bing would have as much market share as in China. Coca Cola and its Indian counterpart(Thums-up) have around 20% market share. Subway is as popular and though I dont have the numbers based on a cursory search, I am sure the numbers are again comparable.

The argument in the article doesnt hold. These companies/products have succeeded/failed not because of their name but because they were good.

Speaking of names, IPad was probably not the best chosen name. It hasn't stopped it from being a success.

<comment><USER10> India speaks mostly Indo-European languages.

Chinese is a Sino-Tibetian language and much different. Most Chinese would have a hard time remembering Western names, let alone pronouncing them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> In reverse: I read a story once about a Japanese businesswoman who wanted to open a business in America. She was inspired by Bridgestone (the tire company), named after the founder Shojiro Ishibashi (ishi = stone, bashi = bridge).

Her name was Kawakami; translating this into English she decided to name her company Up River.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think it is deceiving to compare apples to oranges this way. Coca-cola is highly popular due to its branding across the board, not just the Chinese name they chose.

McDonalds is left out, but is just translated to 麦当劳 which sounds as close as possible to the syllables mac-don-alds (Màidāngláo). McDonalds is much more popular and prevalent in Asia than Subway, despite their 'worse' name that means nothing. The television commercials for McDonalds capitalize on the foreign nature of the company usually showing white people eating.

<comment><USER13> Seriously about usually showing white people in commercials? That's not what I see here, and I live in China right now. McDonald's and KFC, the two foreign fast food leaders, seem to have done a fairly good job localizing. Heck, I can't get any apple pies here, only pineapple and taro. And they serve chicken wings at McDonald's. Chicken wings! :) KFC goes one further, currently marketing a new Chinese BBQ pork set meal with rice and veggies.

<comment><USER14> Ha. Yep. And in Thailand they serve broccoli pies[1] and corn pies. Weird! :)

[1] [http://a5.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak- snc6/228089_101002...](http://a5.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak- snc6/228089_10100220946213845_3400786_51861994_3032657_n.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've always loved the Chinese naming for Coke. The article translates it as "delicious happiness," but it's actually more clever. The first two characters (ke kou) mean thirsty. The third character is the same as the first but means "can be" in the context. The fourth character (le) means happy. So all together, it literally means "[when you are] thirsty, [you] can be happy." As the other examples in the article show, it's quite easy to do the transliteration poorly, and a good one is far from inevitable. It's hard not to appreciate the amount of cleverness that went into "ke kou ke le".

<comment><USER16> <nitpick>

可口 (kě kǒu) does actually mean "delicious" -- you are thinking of 口渴 (kǒu kě) which means thirsty

</nitpick>

Admittedly, it is still a superior branding to Pepsi (百事可乐) which literally translates to "hundred events." Maybe this has something to do with how Pepsi has about 1/3 as much market share as Coca-Cola has in China [1].

[1] [http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/07/29/coke-sees-chinas- mark...](http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/07/29/coke-sees-chinas-market-as- the-real-thing-for-growth/)

<comment><USER8> <nitpick to your nitpick> 百事 could be translated as "hundred events" but could also just as easily be literally translated as "hundred things" which is much closer to its actual meaning: "everything" </nitpick>

Although by the number of promotional events that Pepsi puts on sponsoring concerts and such, I can very well see how "hundred events" may be closer to their actual marketing strategy. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My favorite part of this article is the comment from the guy who says "this sounds like it could be a business" and then links to a fully functional landing page he's already created to gauge interest in that type of business. He didn't waste any time.

EDIT: Here's his landing page. <http://www.chinesebusinessname.com/>

<comment><USER18> Haha yeah glad you liked it, but I wouldn't call it "fully functional" (although that image in the top left does say "chinese business name" in Chinese repeated over and over :)

I couldn't resist it and was pretty surprised the domain was available. Even a search for "chinese business name" in Google doesn't return many results so maybe I'll do something with it.

I submitted it to HN but I think it's sailed off the newest page and into oblivion.

I actually just had lunch at my local noodle joint and chatted with the guy there (who's native Chinese) and we played around with names for my CMS which is "Decal".

He doesn't have any special training other than being a native speaker but he was able to come up with a few ideas - he was pretty familiar with the concept.

Makes me think that actually my best strategy is just going to be to pretty up that landing page a bit (not too much though :) and just replace that "coming soon" form with a form that gets details about the business. My mate at the noodle place said he'd be happy to come up with some names. Start simple, iterate.

Then I could offer testing on each of the options via Mechanical Turk or something .... annnyhoo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Baidu is given special state endorsements, permission to skirt copyright laws, network priority (it's not mysteriously blacked out half the time, because it plays well with the Communist Party), and allows the Chinese people to use something distinctly Chinese.

We don't need the world's most attenuated homophone to explain why Baidu is beating the pants off of Bing.

</comment><comment><USER20> Just to add to the list, a few other good examples, all meeting the three criterion in the article:

Carrefour is translated as 家乐福(jia le fu), which means family, happiness and fortune. The supermarket chain's success was largely due to the name, 'cause many Chinese people actually think it is a Chinese company.

Pizza Hut as 必胜客(bi sheng ke), which means the winning one; although the name has not link to pizza or food, it helped to shape Pizza Hut as a premium brand.

BMW's brand identity(宝马, bao ma) is known as a prestigious horse; Mercedes- Benz's Chinese name 奔驰(ben chi) means gallop, running with speed, etc. So car manufacturers do have good tasted for their brand names.

Groupon' s newly picked name is 高朋(gao peng), which means classy friends. Also a clever choice.

\----

One key trend in the name-picking game in the recent years is that more and more companies are trying to make their brands actually MEAN something. Earlier entrants like McDonald's, KFC, Disney, Nike, Adidas, they simply chose a few characters whose combination replicates the sound but is nevertheless meaningless. Why? Because more than a decade ago, having such a name automatically indicates you are a foreign brand, and this is a good thing. People were naturally drawn to such names, they believed foreign products stand for quality and premium experience. Also, early entrants are usually the first in its category to attack the Chinese market, giving them a monopoly position (sort of). For instance, KFC is known as 肯德基, whose brand image is not KFC itself but _American Fast Food_ as a concept.

Yet companies who entered the market after 2000, all tried to attach some implied meaning to a name, or in some other words they all seek localization. The reasons things have changed are: firstly, more and more foreign brands entered the market, the monopoly benefits are no longer; in addition, a lot, I mean really a lot, of local Chinese brands try to mimic the strategy by crowning themselves a foreign title, which dilutes the whole foreign branding concept; finally, a growing number of English speaking population (especially the ones with considerable pocket size) demands difference, they are aware of Starbucks, but mostly remembers the brand as 星巴克, a clever enough translation.

</comment><comment><USER21> With limited resources, and a tough enough time running startups to begin with, putting the burden of naming it something that adheres to Chinese culture in the off chance you expand there seems like a huge waste of effort and resources.

I know that many people think that because China has so many people that it must be a market you are in, but I would argue that focusing on the US market (if you are US based) probably makes far more sense. If you really get big in the US, you can try to go to other markets and you could name the company a chinese name and market it in china as a separate division. Most likely more would need to be changed than the name.

Look at the way Netflix has grown for example. I believe they are a shining example of doing it right at home, then focusing on international markets.

<comment><USER22> I generally agree with this. I think it's just a suggestion that it's worth thinking about if you're at all considering Chinese market entry, instead of assuming your name will just "work".

<comment><USER21> Robert, Good point. It is an important thing to think about if you enter the Chinese market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Besides the business names, I am surprised to see all major operation systems don't have proper translations in chinese, including Microsoft windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It's hard to market these products to elder people.

<comment><USER6> Windows actually have great Chinese translations. They are not official, and some of them are really stupid (but funny!), e.g.:

Windows 3.2 -> Win32 -> 瘟32

Windows 95 -> Win95 -> 瘟95

Windows XP -> XP -> 叉屁

Windows 7 -> Win7 -> 瘟7

As long as Microsoft sticks with the pattern "Windows + something short", it's fine for most people to shorten it to just "win-something short".

Linux the term itself doesn't seem to have a translation, as most of Linux users seem to be able to pronounce the term in English (but they do fight over which way to pronounce the "i" sound). Various distros have official Chinese translations.

Mac OS X is the most stupid one to pronounce in Chinese, and many would pronounce the "X" as |eks|, not "ten". So many Mac users prefers to just say the "Apple operating system".

<comment><USER23> > Various distros have official Chinese translations.

      Debian -> 大便
      Ubuntu -> 俺不土
      Gentoo -> 真土

<comment><USER24> While I don't know about Chinese, in Japanese 大 means 'large' and 便 can be read as 'faeces'.

So perhaps the name for Debian in Chinese is actually "big poo".

<comment><USER23> Yep, just a joke people made to laugh at the pronunciation of Debian is the same as "big poo" in chinese, but we love Debian of course ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> More importantly, your business needs to be hard to copy.

</comment><comment><USER26> There is nothing wrong with not having any meaning. I lived in China for 10 years, and frankly if it's American, the Chinese will buy it.

Chinese names and English names are completely incompatible, go with sounds over meaning, but be sure that if there is a meaning behind the sounds that they don't mean something ridiculous.

David translates to Da Wei which also means Large Toilet if you get the tones wrong...

</comment><comment><USER27> Its tough finding a good name. I've done it twice with my own entities. Even if you don't need to worry so much about consumer branding, its hard to find something you like that is not taken...choices get rejected for being too similar with existing registrations.

</comment><comment><USER28> I understand a name can be important, but the article lacks how to go about finding a good name. Even if you hear a phrase means something good, it may mean something else to another culture. How would a person go to finding out if a brand name sucks?

In my opinion, mygengo should have offered this as a service as well as ask for suggestions for their own Chinese name.

Also, don't forget the slogans, even if they are in English: <http://www.i18nguy.com/translations.html>

</comment><comment><USER29> It's hard enough already to name product/company in English, considering trademark and hostname availability.

</comment><comment><USER30> Should mygengo name themselves "买跟给"?

<comment><USER26> I like it. Sounds like the English name and means 'buy a lot' But as mygengo is a revolutionary translation service not a retail store.

On the other hand...finding a Chinese name really is a pill for all companies. This may be the best name yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> They include the current version of 'Coca Cola' in Chinese: _the brand included a description of their product within its name, calling itself 可口可乐 (kekoukele) — "delicious happiness"._

They leave out the original version of Coca Cola translated into Chinese: _"bite the wax tadpole."_ (Sorry, couldn't find a phonetic version.)

[http://www.coca- colaconversations.com/my_weblog/2008/03/bite...](http://www.coca- colaconversations.com/my_weblog/2008/03/bite-the-wax-ta.html)

Seems a shame they left it out. I read it years ago and still remembered it well enough to google an example (though I was thinking "bite the toad"). It made quite the impression on me. It's an excellent example of how wrong this can go.

<comment><USER32> This seems like an anecdote that non-Chinese tell, but I've never heard about it in Chinese, nor have I seen the Chinese characters. Can anyone verify this?

<comment><USER33> Snopes.com calls it "partially true": <http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/tadpole.asp></comment></comment></comment>


Variational Inference with Toy Examples (2013) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.zabaras.com/Courses/BayesianComputing/Symposium/IgorLabutov/Presentation.pdf <comment><USER2> of all the things I'd notice are his use of conic sections and of calculus of variations. neither of which are the most relevant here.</comment>


Brainwashing your wife to want sex? Here is ad tech at its worst - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2018/07/23/brainwashing-your-wife-want-sex-here-adtech-its-worst <comment><USER2> This is satire, no?

more funny examples: [https://www.thespinner.net/packages](https://www.thespinner.net/packages)

e.g. "Message: Get your kid a dog! Target: Mom/Dad".

<comment><USER3> Do satirical Web sites typically accept payment?

<comment><USER2> I didn't dig so deep before.

It actually asked for and validated a CC number O_o

it might be real, oh my.

It uses [https://www.payplus.co.il/](https://www.payplus.co.il/)

<comment><AUTHOR> PayPlus is registered to a media group in Israel that is being sued by the US: [https://twitter.com/SWeinglass/status/1021428223136149508](https://twitter.com/SWeinglass/status/1021428223136149508)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If this isn't a joke thats messed up. If your not having the sex life you want with your SO figure out why generally there is something wrong in the relationship and fix it.

Is SO just tired and dead at the end of the day? Help them more, delegate out anything that you can to 3rd party services (not as expensive as you would think).

The obvious one, send the kids somewhere, go out on date.

That all being said. if this real i highly doubt it even works.

</comment><comment><USER5> I hope this is satire. If not, the fact that anyone could think this a) works, and b) is a good way to get more intimate time with their SO, makes me very sad.

This line from Heavens to Betsy never felt more relevant to me, if this story is true: "You wanna know how I feel? You could never just ask me"

<comment><USER6> > the fact that anyone could think this [...] is a good way to get more > intimate time with their SO, makes me very sad.

This doesn't surprise me at all. There are plenty of rednecks all over the world. There's no point in being sad for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This smells of satire maybe even something to spread awareness about tracking and targeted ads. I'm not even sure how this should work and how people would react to seeing so many suggestions I would be confused and annoyed mostly. "Funny" idea nonetheless even thought it wouldn't work for me and my wife (adblocker anyone?). Would be interesting for advertisers how well adds really work.

Anyway in the spirit of this article I will now order naptime [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF_nfazQaek](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF_nfazQaek)

<comment><USER8> Is it satire if they take your money too?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Fascinating. I don't know if this company's claims are real, the journalist was so offended she didn't do a full test of the service, but aquaintance manipulation by way of surveillance/targeted content will certainly find a market.

The tools of Infowar available for personal use. Newsfeed manipulation, psy ops, personalized propaganda, targeting your boss for a raise, targeting a competitor into a mistake, a teen targeting his parents so they be more lenient, parents targeting their kids to nudge them in a wanted direction, etc.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is a ridiculous example but the weaponization risks for adtech are interesting to contemplate. Do ad networks take any steps to verify who is placing ads?

<comment><USER11> I immediately though that this might be somehow more successful (and somewhat less creepy) if this was used to prank other people. "Send this link to your friend and they'll get ads for dragon dildos everywhere". IIRC there are online services to glitter bomb people, it would fit in that niche I suppose.

I'm utterly doubtful that sending your wife ads like "3 reasons to initiate sex with your husband" would have any effect at all (besides making it more likely to install ad ad blocker) but it is definitely one of the creepiest things I've read in a while. They're really preying on desperate people with that thing. Utterly immoral.

The only positive thing that can come out from this is making people even more aware of the risks of online tracking and how far it can go. After all if your creepy husband can use it to send you targeted ads in an attempt to change your habits, what can Google and friends do?

<comment><USER3> They can basically do the same thing -- if you ever have looked at a product on a Web site and then saw ads for that exact product for weeks you'd be familiar with it.

<comment><USER12> The really dumb one is when you've bought a product and then get ads (or recommendations) for the same thing for weeks. Thanks, Amazon, I really don't need another framing hammer, I've got one already.

<comment><USER3> I was more focusing on the way ads can already be highly targeted on the retailer's behalf; it seems to me that there is nothing technically implausible about what the wife seduction service advertises.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hahaha, this "journalist".

      What my investigation found

      Perhaps my cynical, journalistic spidey sense is awry

      As someone who is half-Israeli, lives in Tel Aviv, and speaks Hebrew, I take personal offense to this sketchy operation

Someone should tell him about satire.

</comment><comment><USER14> Brainwashing your wife to vote for a republican president? Old News!

</comment><comment><USER3> > "We should all be thanking the Valley Bros that made The Spinner – it might > just be what it takes for folks to sit up and take note of (a) how this crap > works (b) what it is designed to do (c) how fucked up it all is," Aral > Balkan, a self-described cyborg rights activist, added. "The Spinner is > surveillance capitalism in its purest… The Spinner is surveillance > capitalism's Martin Shkreli moment."

Well, that's an interesting choice of example, because Shkreli went to jail and nothing much else has changed (in fact the Trump administration is talking about forcing prices up outside the US too).

</comment><comment><USER15> queue downvotes but isn't dating the same thing? brainwashing each other.

<comment><USER11> You'll have to explain to me how surreptitiously manipulating somebody's internet in order to influence them to have sex with you can be likened to dating.</comment></comment>


Reasons To Hate Your Code - <AUTHOR> http://coderoom.wordpress.com/2010/04/22/7-reasons-to-hate-your-code/

<comment><USER2> "If their answer isn't immediately and without any hesitation these two words: "My own," then you should end the interview."

I strongly disagree with this. I've written some pretty bad code in my time. But that doesn't mean it's the absolute _worst_ code I've seen recently.

At any rate, to make a long story short, I agree with reasons 1 and 7, but I'm not sure I agree with any of the reasons in the middle (especially #5). When you work for a software company, the code literally _is_ your product. There's absolutely no difference between writing good code and delivering a good product. Therefore, you do need to put time and thought into it. That's not to say you need to spend forever trying to make it perfect. It's just that the "code isn't important, products are" meme is a false dichotomy that gets old after a while.

<comment><USER3> There are plenty successful products out there that have _really_ dreadful code in them - they sort of look OK from the outside but the internals can be pretty damn awful.

So is having a good code base a big factor in the success of a product? Clearly not, from what I've seen.

<comment><USER2> There are probably a lot more unsuccessful products out there that have _really_ dreadful code. Is it possible to have a good product and have bad code? Of course. Is your product going to die a horrible death because it has a few bad lines of code in it? Absolutely not.

But you're kidding yourself if you don't think that the quality of your code doesn't have an impact on the quality of your product. Well-factored and modular code allows you to iterate much faster in the long term. Of course, if you need to iterate faster in the short term, then by all means use a few well-placed hacks. But you can't let them pile up otherwise you're hurting yourself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's hard for me to take something seriously when it openly uses the fallacies like appeal to authority.

And I found his defense of Atwood's comment to be inadequate.

</comment><comment><USER5> I upvoted this mainly because of reason 7. The joy of side projects particularly contrasted with feature lists in the day job really struck home, having just recently finally launched a side project (<http://lessonslearnedby.us/>) with a friend, one made possible by being written in a dynamic language no less.

The point about writing the minimum to make something useful is something I've only recently fully grokked and I think the humility of saying "mistakenly believes he's better" is good to keep in mind.

</comment><comment><USER6> So, Jeff Atwood comes before Jesus and Ghandi?

<comment><USER2> Ghandi and Jesus know _nothing_ about delivering a product. When they have their own successful startups, then their opinions can count. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't see a contradiction between beautiful code and a beautiful product. A great example of this is Apple's SDK. It's gorgeous on the inside and it leads to great products. Inner ugliness is hard to hide. Several examples come to mind.

</comment><comment><USER8> One of my favorite articles on HN thus far.

I have struggled with a few of these notions myself. It's nice to see another humble perspective.</comment>


A Binary Star Is About to Go Supernova and Could Produce a Gamma-Ray Burst - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencealert.com/this-jaw-dropping-binary-star-is-about-to-go-supernova-and-it-shouldn-t-even-be-here <comment><USER2> Time to uncomment that code Microsoft! [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18494690](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18494690)

<comment><USER3> came to the thread to say exactly that and you beat me to it. upvoted :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> >Of course, it's important to bear in mind that "just about to explode" means something different in cosmic terms versus human terms. It could happen at any time in the... next few hundred thousand years.

<comment><USER5> I don't know what sort of luminosity a GRB would have at 8k LY. But if it's strong enough to be an ELE, that's still a pretty short timeframe, in case the expected GRB jets will be pointed at us. We'd need to not only get off the planet, but to another star system entirely.

<comment><USER6> Out of curiosity, just what would happen to a person standing on Earth, staring up at the night sky right at the moment that a GRB jet hit the planet?

Also, how wide, in terms of arcseconds, is the jet? Is it a narrow laser beam that has no chance of actually hitting a planet, or is it wide enough that anything within 30 degrees of north is going to be sterilized?

<comment><USER7> Most likely (as in, _very_ most likely) not bad [1], though it's theorized that the second largest mass extinction event on Earth may have been due to a GRB [2].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma- ray_burst#Rate_of_occurr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma- ray_burst#Rate_of_occurrence_and_potential_effects_on_life) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordovician%E2%80%93Silurian_ex...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordovician%E2%80%93Silurian_extinction_events)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a better article (From bad astronomy) about the same thing: [https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/is-this-cosmic-sprinkler- surro...](https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/is-this-cosmic-sprinkler-surrounding- galaxys-next-gamma-ray-burst)

In particular, the sciencealert article mentions "very old" Wolf-Rayet stars, which is a little strange given that they only last a few million years, and certainly are not old on any scale used for stellar lifetimes.

<comment><USER9> I'm wondering what sort of physics research this opens up before the burst. I imagine it's still producing energy levels otherwise difficult to create.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> About to?

> It could happen at any time in the... next few hundred thousand years.

I understand this is imminent on a cosmological timescale, but the title is click-baity.

<comment><USER11> It's not click-baity. Any headline like this can only mean "about to on a cosmological scale", and I understood it as such immediately, and I also felt excited, and the excitement was warranted because the news really is exciting.

<comment><USER12> > Any headline like this can only mean "about to on a cosmological scale"

Sorry, I also read it as "any day now" and I'm pretty sure anybody who is a layman on this topic also did the same. The title is plenty click-baity.

<comment><USER13> -I had the unexpected pleasure of sitting next to a geologist on a domestic flight a few years ago; he explained about an unstable mountainous area he'd surveyed, stressing that it would come crashing down at some point.

I inquired as to /when/ we could expect this to happen, as it sounded imminent.

«Oh, any day now - definitely in the next 30-50,000 years!»

And here I am, with project deadlines measured in hours...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Maybe the explosion has already happened? But we still wouldn't be able to see it yet due to the distance and speed of light...

<comment><USER15> That is called "not happened yet" in our lightcone.

It's an easy concept to grasp, but many people resist considering an event to have not yet happened when it has not yet crossed our lightcone. If you are really interested, then I suggest Stephen Hawking's book A Brief History of Time.

<comment><USER16> Isn't there two events here: the actual supernova and our observation of the supernova. So the actual supernova event could have occurred but our observation is when it crosses our 'lightcone'?

<comment><USER17> The issue is that "now" is not well-defined since it depends on the reference frame. Therefore what we consider "already happened" another observer may consider "still in the future".

All observers will agree on the order of events if and only if the light from each event traveled to the next before the next happened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm not enough of an astrophysicist to do this math myself, but what would this kind of burst look like from Earth? Observable w a telescope? W the naked eye? Enter a bomb shelter and save yourself?

<comment><USER19> It could put on a nice show as one did for Kepler ([https://astrobob.areavoices.com/2013/03/24/hey-where-are- all...](https://astrobob.areavoices.com/2013/03/24/hey-where-are-all-the- milky-way-supernovas/)) but generally it wouldn't be much more than a curiosity for non-astronomers[1].

If it does generate a gamma ray burst, then that is a more interesting phenomena. Depending on whether or not it is pointed in our direction, we might see more or less energy from it directly. After travelling 8000 light years and passing through all the dust between us and the planet, it would be seriously attenuated and unlikely to cause any destruction or even noticeable effects on earth.

[1] Astrologers on the other hand, it could be the sign that the end of the world is nigh :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> If it is pointed directly at us, 8000 light years away is close enough to make the gamma ray burst a possible extinction event.

[https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/wr-104-nearby-gamma-ray- burst](https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/wr-104-nearby-gamma-ray-burst)

<comment><USER20> >If it is pointed directly at us

Is a gamma burst directional, or spherical in term of high-energy emission?

<comment><USER8> Directional, and this one is apparently pointed about 30 degrees away from us.

<comment><USER21> Can you point me to a source for that "about 30 degrees away from us"? I haven't seen it.

And, _how_ directional? All the energy is spread across half the sky? Only 10 degrees? Or only one degree? Is 30 degrees enough for it to completely miss us? Mostly miss us? Or are we still in the danger cone?

Finally, in a binary star system, is that 30 degrees going to change as the stars orbit each other? (Worse, IIRC, there's a third, more distant star. Can it change the orbit of the other two in a way that shifts that 30 degrees?)

<comment><USER8> It's mentioned in this article: [https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/is-this-cosmic- sprinkler-surro...](https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/is-this-cosmic-sprinkler- surrounding-galaxys-next-gamma-ray-burst) .

My impression is that a GRB beam is on the order of a few degrees, but I can't find that reference now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> From the article itself:

"Of course, it's important to bear in mind that 'just about to explode' means something different in cosmic terms versus human terms. It could happen at any time in the... next few hundred thousand years."

So a clickbait title.

<comment><USER23> Only to your relative position.

<comment><USER24> ,

<comment><USER25> False; it is not the same time everywhere. Two people travelling at different speeds will disagree about what order events happened in, and there is no privileged reference frame.

<comment><USER21> They will disagree about what order _some_ events happen in. But those events are causally unrelated to each other, so it doesn't matter what order they happened in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Don't think GRBs are all that worrisome, by comparison.

It has recently been calculated that there is a 50-percent chance that a GRB- induced mass extinction on Earth has occurred in the past 500 million years. This abstract: ( [https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.2506](https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.2506) ) links to a PDF of the entire paper.

So the probability in a human lifetime is magnitudes less than a supervolcano event or _big_ asteroid impact.

According to ( [https://phys.org337426962/pdf.pdf](https://phys.org337426962/pdf.pdf) ): "The researchers don't believe a GRB striking the Earth could penetrate the atmosphere, but do believe one could destroy the ozone layer".

We started to do that to ourselves more than once, not long ago. We are by far the highest-probability danger to Earth life. Chlorofluorocarbons: check. Nuclear weapons: check.

Back to less-likely (inhuman) radiation sources: In the late 8th century, tree rings in the northern hemisphere 'recorded' a one-year atmospheric increase of 1% in carbon-14 ... 20 times normal. Cause: 'an extremely intense burst of high-energy radiation'.

Cause unknown, but could have been ... a coronal mass ejection (the Sun).

( [https://www.nature.com/news/mysterious-radiation-burst- recor...](https://www.nature.com/news/mysterious-radiation-burst-recorded-in- tree-rings-1.10768) )

</comment><comment><USER27> With this close proximity, isn't there a good chance we may be hit directly with the gamma ray burst ? Shouldn't we be alarmed about another possible mass extinction event ?

<comment><USER28> What could we do about it if we did find we were going to get hit directly with it?

<comment><USER29> The GRB starts, from my understanding, when the core collapses - and that only takes seconds. And then travels at light speed. The shockwave making its way through the rest of the star can take hours, and you might see the explosion take months. But the GRB would hit us before we would see the shockwave, or explosion.

Without the ability to accurately determine when a supernova will occur, we will effectively have no real warning we're about to be hit.

Protecting ourselves from it is also well beyond our current technology. We'd either need to build enough physical shielding to block it from hitting earth, or we'd need to leave our solar system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I always get excited when I read these things that I might be lucky enough to see a supernova in the sky in my lifetime (provided the gamma ray burst misses us!).

<comment><USER31> I feel like being interested in space is an exercise in being simultaneously enthralled and disappointed. This sounds awesome! But, like with basically everything space-related, the scale is too immense for a human lifetime:

 _> Of course, it's important to bear in mind that "just about to explode" means something different in cosmic terms versus human terms. It could happen at any time in the... next few hundred thousand years._

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> About to go in cosmic terms would mostly mean not earlier than a millennium.

</comment><comment><USER33> about?

</comment><comment><USER34> I would like to see Neil Degrasse Tyson do a season 2 of Cosmos with all these new discoveries. We're only going to keep discovering more.</comment>


A restaurant owner who asked for 1-star Yelp reviews - <AUTHOR> https://thehustle.co/botto-bistro-1-star-yelp/ <comment><USER2> What a guy though:

>Under the alias "Babghanoush I," Cerretini posted 13 fake positive reviews for Botto Bistro, as well as fake critical reviews of neighboring restaurants — sometimes going so far as to disparage fellow owners.

......

>In the spring of 2014, after turning down another Yelp salesperson, Cerretini claims that four 5-star reviews were filtered from his page, and three 1-star reviews were suddenly catapulted to the top of the page. For the chef, this was the final straw.

>"Those 1-star reviews were from people who never even set foot in my restaurant," says Cerretini. "One complained about our waiters… we didn't even have waiters!"

Yeah, I wonder why you got fake negative reviews.

<comment><USER3> Notably that information came from Yelp...

"Documented records shared with The Hustle by a Yelp spokesperson tell a fuller story of Cerretini's actions."

<comment><USER2> Yes, but he himself admitted to writing good reviews and I have no reason not to believe Yelp in that case.

<comment><USER3> Two businesses each claim the other is full of shit. More at 11.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I used to go a lot to a particular restaurant which I really liked which I remember had a bad review about a rude waiter. The review described that waiter in detail, and despite going there all the time I never saw him there. The review said that waiter was really rude, but I've never seen anyone be rude there. The staff was always quiet, professional, and polite. I couldn't imagine any of them being rude to anyone. Maybe that waiter had once worked there, but got fired or quit and was no longer there, but the review remained.

After some years the restaurant closed for renovation, and when it reopened there were completely different people working there, and the food was way worse. It was probably sold or went under new management, though they kept the name. So all the reviews this place had gotten over the years were really no longer relevant, as it was effectively a new restaurant. Yet all the Yelp reviews remained.

<comment><USER5> A similar problem happens on Glassdoor. If you look at the salaries for pretty much any position at a big legacy company the bulk of the data comes from reviews submitted up to a decade ago...during the depths of the financial crisis.

At many smaller companies with only a few submitted salaries, the problem is much worse. I've received offers for 2.5X the quoted salary for the same position glassdoor supposedly had 10 submitted salaries for (bay area).

None of these review aggregators are incentivized to dump old reviews and make it look like they have less data than their competitors. Inevitably, consumers will start trusting reviews less and less...similar to what has happened on Amazon.

<comment><USER6> comp.fyi and Blind are much much better for that sort of thing.

<comment><USER7> I've seem the first but what's Blind's url?

<comment><USER8> teamblind.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am a former Yelp engineer who worked on the review filter and had full access to Production. There is nothing in the code or infrastructure that allows sales to filter reviews. End of story. Any other position is for your own entertainment.

Users can and will be creative on the site. Making fake accounts in order to mislead others is not a creative practice that aligns well with typical users of Yelp.

<comment><USER10> Does it really matter? All that matters is what we perceive: from the perspective of both consumers and small business owners, Yelp looks like the bad guy--and that's probably only going to get worse. Nobody is ever going to be satisfied with their decisions.

Imagine if they allowed total anarchy and didn't police any of the reviews. Small business owners and consumers would be upset about all the fake reviews. Yelp claims they attempt to filter out these reviews; opponents claim they either go too far or filter as a form of extortion.

Who am I, as a consumer, to trust here? My only solution is to avoid using Yelp: then I don't have to worry about either of these problems. If I'm traveling, I ask the locals where they like to eat.

I'd argue that Yelp's whole business model is flawed; it doesn't scale for this very reason. No matter which path they take, it's going to be a PR nightmare. Unless they're able to both avoid filtering and disincentive fake reviews, somebody's going to be unhappy (and vocal).

<comment><USER9> >Does it really matter? All that matters is what we perceive: from the perspective of both consumers and small business owners, Yelp looks like the bad guy

nope! you don't need to believe the truth. a lot of people don't. but the hacker news community tends to like to surface technical truths even when they defy popular sentiment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This reminds me of someone I used to play with on Starcraft Broodwar. When victory when inevitable, he would always quit the game to give himself a loss. He considered it better to have mostly losses on his record so other players cannot gauge his skill level.

<comment><USER12> Or so he could constantly play below his skill level as the matching system would think he was worse than he is.

If he was doing that on ladder, that's generally considered to be bad form.

<comment><USER13> If I remember correctly, there was no matching system in BW.

<comment><USER14> Brood War had (has) a ladder system and then there were external leagues such as ICCUP that has ranking as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > ...a clear violation of the platform's Terms of Service.

What can Yelp do to you if you invite their worst punishment as a badge of honor?

This is brilliant.

<comment><USER16> I know, right?

What? Will Yelp _remove_ me from Yelp's listings and search results?

Oh, darn!

<comment><USER17> This was Yelp's business plan - get so big, aggregate so much demand, that you _had_ to play by their rules to get business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> So many business people I know have their own Yelp horror story. How is this company even still in business?

<comment><USER18> Yelp's practice of intentionally biasing their reviews (and search results) was protected in court a few years ago[1], so unfortunately businesses have no legal recourse.

If we want to kill Yelp, we have to switch. My cousin works for Likewise[2] and recommends it. It solves the fake/biased reviews problem by letting you as a user select who influences your recommendations (including friends and family). I've never tried it, so I can't vouch for it myself.

1\. [https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Yelp-can-give-paying- cli...](https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Yelp-can-give-paying-clients- better-ratings-5731200.php)

2\. [https://likewise.com/what-is-likewise](https://likewise.com/what-is- likewise)

<comment><USER19> There's plenty of review action on Google Maps. My impression is that it's surpassed Yelp already, at least in the markets I'm active in (Denver).

Oddly I see lots of hipster businesses with signs mocking yelp, but none of them seem to register that GM is similar.

<comment><USER20> Google maps reviews are of way lower quality compared to both Yelp and TripAdvisor. Lots of 3-word reviews or barely English reviews. I'm sure there are more of them but I don't value them at all.

I think there's a weird culture around yelp reviews especially of people who openly label themselves as yelpers. I haven't met them but it's an easy group to mock. I'd bet a lot of those restaurants don't realize how many visitors end up at their business because they saw something they liked about it on yelp despite not being some kind of power users of the site.

Frankly I like the platform more for discovery than reviewing, but generally most restaurants at 4 stars or above are pretty consistently good, while those between 1 and 3 are pretty consistently trash. It's also nice being able to search reviews for menu items and things like "happy hour" or "patio".

Lately I use Eater a lot more than any user-driven service though.

<comment><USER21> A few year ago my wife and I decided to look up all the restaurants we regularly go to, and we were surprised to find that pretty much all of them rated 3.5 stars on yelp. Perhaps that rating helps ensure we won't have to wait for tables. Works for us.

But more to your point, I've noticed that when friends/family refer to "5 star restaurants" these days, they're almost always referring to 5 stars on yelp. To them, it goes without saying that they're using yelp as the measuring tool.

<comment><USER19> My experience is that the places that rate 4.5 or five stars on yelp deserve it. Every once in a while, I do discover one that I would consider excellent that has 3 1/2 or four.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Seemingly unpopular take on my experience with various review sites:

1) In the US, Yelp's reviews of restaurants have a significantly higher correlation with reality than any other review site. Google reviews are okay.

2) In Europe, Yelp reviews are mostly by American tourists and are sparser and higher variance quality-wise. Google reviews seem to be generally the best in Europe. (Canada might be a toss-up between Yelp and Google.)

3) In both continents TripAdvisor reviews are pretty much meaningless. I've been to multiple restaurants on TripAdvisor with ~4.5 that have absolutely sucked in terms of both food, service, and atmosphere.

I don't have much experience with reviews for local businesses that aren't restaurants or outside of the US/Canada/Europe. But in the US, for all of Yelp's supposed manipulation, their reviews are noticeably better than other sites'.

</comment><comment><USER23> >claiming he was exchanging reviews for "incentives" (a discount on pizza) — a clear violation of the platform's Terms of Service

That doesn't seem all that different than what yelp itself does.

<comment><USER24> How does Yelp's Terms of Service matter? Does the restaurant owner even have a Yelp account?

<comment><USER25> Exactly. Terms of service don't mean a thing unless you explicitly agree to them. And checking a box upon sign up is not necessarily enough to constitute agreement either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Here's his Yelp page: [https://yelp.to/qTKq/2I1Y0WkNnX](https://yelp.to/qTKq/2I1Y0WkNnX)

All the _wink wink_ 1-star reviews are gone - many 1-star reviews left, but only those that seem somewhat believable. There are also only a few hundred reviews, not the thousands mentioned by the article. I'd guess that Yelp watches his page pretty closely and deletes any reviews that are obviously fake.

That said, I'd bet that the majority of the 1-star reviews, even the ones that appear believable, are still fictional.

</comment><comment><USER27> I've noticed that any organization or process that serves as a "gatekeeper" inevitably has a lot of resentment directed at it. Business owners resent Yelp. Software developers resent the interview process. Aspiring entrepreneurs resent VCs. College applicants and their parents resent Ivy League admissions.

In all of these cases, people love to complain about the injustices and imperfect heuristics being used by the gatekeepers. A lot of these complaints are very valid, but a lot of them also seem to miss the bigger picture entirely. These gatekeepers and their heuristics serve a very valid purpose in society, which is why they wield so much power to begin with. The only productive complaints are those that suggest viable alternatives or improvements - suggestions that don't simply trade-off one set of bad outcomes for an even worse set of bad outcomes. It's hard to take Grotto's "burn Yelp to the ground" ethos seriously, because I've lived through the pre-Yelp era of Yellow Pages and tourist traps, and I'd never want to return to that world again.

<comment><USER28> We've heard again and again that Yelp harasses small businesses for ad buys. In itself, not a problem. But we've also heard that their mystery secret sauce "algorithm" then by sheer coincidence puts down 5 star reviews in favor of negative ones when they say no.

If Yelp was really interested in clearing the air, they'd show how their algorithms are making the decisions they're making. It's not like they'd give away their entire platform or market space by doing so, there's such immense network effect at play with Yelp that they'd likely never be unseated.

But they won't, and I suspect it's because they do manipulate it, even if slightly, because they have _have every single solitary financial and business reason to do so._

<comment><USER27> You could make the same accusation against any gatekeeper. The linked article quotes a unbiased professor and his peer reviewed study which found no evidence of review tampering by Yelp as a means of extortion. Any accusations at this point are pure speculation.

<comment><USER28> Except there's no way to review Yelp's process without intimate involvement of Yelp itself, which, if you assume for a moment that they do have levers and strings into their algorithm, means they would be pre-prepared to change how data is presented to those conducting the study, with minimal impact to their ongoing business.

Or, even if they don't manipulate them directly but simply have baked that behavior into the algorithm, it wouldn't even look that different. It's not as if Yelp wouldn't assume this behavior would attract complaints and regulatory attention, so they'd be motivated to make sure it's as subtle and undetectable as possible, which when you have total and complete control of a closed-source codebase, is easy.

Do we have proof? No, and that's why Yelp won in court, they couldn't be implicated beyond a shadow of a doubt of manipulation. But considering how much of their system is nothing but shadows and doubts, I don't find that all that exonerating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Dan Neves, a waiter at a fine dining establishment in Austin, Texas, created > YELP BULLIES EXPOSED, a private Facebook group that tracks down rude Yelpers > and sends them a one-pound bag of animal feces procured from > poopsenders.com. In a little over a month, the group has attracted 278 > members.

With this kind of publicity poopsenders might soon go public

<comment><USER30> This will backfire though - poopsender will get negative yelp reviews and people will no longer go there to eat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> If only Yelp behaved a little like the late Jonathan Gold, who'd only give _favorable_ reviews to restaurants he really enjoyed, skipping negative/mediocre reviews for those that could improve.

<comment><USER32> The problem is then Yelp filters your reviews to be lower on the main page- their algorithm features reviewers who leave "balanced" reviews so more even % of 5-1 star reviews. People who have only positive or only negative reviews get pushed onto the non-featured reviews/reviews we don't recommend page. One thing that helps your reviews stay on the front page is having a lot of friends on yelp, as well as being on of the first to review for places.

I always feel bad leaving a mediocre review for small businesses, so I generally will only do that for places that it doesn't really matter (random gas stations).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've started ignoring yelp reviews. The quality as a whole is about the same as Amazon reviews, which I find close to useless.

That said, I still use the app. I use it for pictures, especially recent pictures of menus and food. I also use it for basic business info like hours, address, phone number, and (sometimes) map.

If I were to own a business that would be a natural yelp candidate, I would definitely incentivize one-star reviews.

First, I think that good yelp reviews attract some (perhaps many) pathological customers, many of whom are not from your natural customer base. These folks will put an effective service tax on the business, and they will make the place not what your regulars want it to be. Think a minor version of the Michelin Star hug of death.

Second, I think that there are much better / more effective outreach methods than yelp and similar apps to target the audience you want.

What I would do is keep an up-to-date collection of images of the menu and food on the site, and the business information would be accurate. I would be tempted to muck with the business information if yelp tried to go to war, but I imagine taking the high road would be the correct choice even if yelp didn't.

I would not create accounts to post to about any restaurant, including my own. I also would not advertise on the platform.

I fully believe that a lot of these "social" sites seeking growth with questionable ethics practices will end up biting themselves in the ass. The tech isn't _that_ complex. I (naively?) believe that companies that make an effort to delight both sides of the marketplace (purveyors and potential customers) without trying to make VC-level returns will eventually marginalize predatory sites and apps. I hope this comes sooner rather than later.

<comment><USER33> I wish we could boil restaurant reviews down to "did you like it?"

I usually use some combination of TripAdvisor, Google Maps, Yelp, and OpenTable to get an idea of what's going on. TripAdvisor tends to have less millennials which is nice.

Actually, what would be ideal, is filtering out the prolific reviewers in any of these platforms.

Other things to get good data would be more general questions, like "what are some places you like to eat in your neighborhood" or "what places stood out to you on your recent trip to _____"

... and then some incentive to respond or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> A lot of startups focus solely on exponential growth. It's probably only a matter of time before they resort to extortionist tactics like this and somehow justify it as a l perfectly valid strategy.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is why Consumer Reports doesn't take ads. In any ad-funded review platform, corruption is inevitable. And we could solve it with a simple (but difficult) law: that review platforms may not receive any income from whoever they're reviewing.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is genius tactic, and should become a coordinated movement.

<comment> yoz-y Why? If all rating systems are driven to ground then what did we earn in exchange?

<comment><USER37> We don't need such ratings systems for restaurants.

We need a rough idea of what's there, some photos of the place and food tell a lot of the story. And prices.

Maybe some 'editors choice' for the one's that stand out.

A 'guide book' made by a small, decent team is as legit as any public review system, probably more so.

<comment> yoz-y Well, for example Paris has a few thousand restaurants. If you know the locals then it's of course best to ask them. But if you come for a day or two it's pretty nice to be able to check that you are not falling into some sort of tourist trap.

<comment><USER37> Yes, a small team of professional reviewers could handle Paris.

20 reviewers x4 restos a day (most are little brasseries, don't need tons of time) is 80 / day, 800 in 10 days only.

It would only take maybe 4-5 people to do it ongoing, once most were established.

<comment> yoz-y I don't know. Like with all reviews, one would first need to find a reviewer with similar taste. For movies, for example, I don't trust journalist reviews at all because they all have to go see all the movies, whereas the public pre- selects and more or less only goes to see movies they might enjoy watching.

If some reviewer smashes a restaurant because the food is too spicy it makes it of no value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> On his blackboard the fourth line seems to say, "We have no god". Am I misreading? Seems a little incongruous for a restaurant to have a public position on such a historically controversial topic...

<comment><USER39> It's the last of 4 lines of various "we have no <whatever>".

I'd read it like:

 _" Yes, we are godless heathens for not having lemon, ice, ranch, butter, etc. Get over it."_

<comment> the-rc Plus he's from near Pisa. Historically, modern Tuscany had the reputation of a communist/leftist stronghold where people might go to Sunday Mass, but still swear a lot and not follow the church blindly (when they weren't outright atheists).

</comment></comment></comment><comment> nathan-io Yelp has always been a thinly veiled extortion platform, overrun by spam, yet surprisingly quick to filter legitimate five-star reviews.

I tried their paid advertising for a client in 2017, and have avoided it like the plague ever since.

Not only did the trial yield no leads, but Yelp billed substantially more than the defined monthly campaign spend.

It took repeated complaints and escalation to a sales manager to even get part of the overage credited.

My experience was:

* Near zero detail or transparency in campaign reports

* Deceptive and confusing budget rules

* Absurd cost per click (even compared to Google Ads)

* Sudden filtering of _all_ the legitimate 5-star reviews on one listing, after we declined further sales efforts

</comment><comment><USER40> Bad Yelp reviews can safely be ignored most of the times. Some of the best tasting restaurants I went to have 2 to 3 stars, and they are hugely popular. It seems they don't care about the rating and relying on providing the best food and best service.

</comment><comment><USER41> When it started, crowd-sourced ratings seemed like such a great idea. But I now think it has either failed or is doomed to fail. I have noticed, for example, that some movies rated on IMDB split into 9 or 10 star and 1 or 2 star. These are generally movies that, in my opinion, are bad: poor writing, wooden acting and so on. I get the impression that the 9/10 are all paid for. Well written, but somehow wrong. The 1/2 always ring truer to me.

At least in the golden days of paid movie critics (or even restaurant reviewers) I could decide whether or not my tastes (in movies or restaurants) were similar to the critic. Crowd reviews make that impossible.

Call me old-fashioned, .... please.

<comment><USER42> IMDb definitely seems to be on the take when it comes to new movie reviews. Almost any summer blockbuster will be in the top 10 for a number of weeks before eventually being edged out of the top 250.

Friends and I have a tradition of picking movies from the top 250 list and we always skip these as a result.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> "We won't tell you how our filter works but we pinky promise we're not extorting you!"

Not sketchy at all

</comment><comment><USER44> "I came from Italy, and know exactly what mafia extortion looks like," he says. "Yelp was manipulating reviews and hoping I would pay a protection fee. I didn't come to America and work for 25 years to be extorted by some idiot in Silicon Valley."

I love this paragraph so much!

</comment><comment><USER45> For some pretty good satire on Yelp reviews, check out Yelping with Cormac - Yelp reviews in the style of Cormac McCarthy...

[https://yelpingwithcormac.tumblr.com/](https://yelpingwithcormac.tumblr.com/)

Bitingly funny.

</comment><comment><USER46> Isn't it a ridiculous joke that yelp is threatening "a clear violation of the platform's Terms of Service", when it seems he is no longer a user of the service?

By his own admission, he is no longer paying yelp for any service so there is no contractual agreement between the two entities right? A punishment where they delist the business from their site is giving him and other businesses exactly what they want? So.....?

From a conceptual level, an unrelated entity lists the details of you/your business on their own accord and then threatens you with "terms of service violation" when you do something or share information it doesn't like? Seems insane.

</comment><comment><USER47> Intentionally targeting someone like this (or yourself) with a flood of abuse in order to discredit/drown out real abuse is a plot point in the new Neal Stephenson book!

</comment><comment><USER48> This story an be copied on to the onion. And no one would know.

</comment><comment><USER49> "We don't have ranch"

Good Lord people, it's an actual Italian restaurant. You wanted the real deal? You got it.

</comment><comment><USER37> The truth is people don't want reviews!

They just want a rough idea of what to expect.

Frankly - you should be able to tell by the _pictures_ of the place, and photos of the actual plates (if they're legit).

That's 90% of right there.

The odd bit of bad service or extra great service I don't think is a huge deal. I've never thought poorly or great of a place because of the service, I always just assumed that was the individual server.

All we ever need is for 2 or 3 people with decent taste to walk in the place, have a taste, take a few photos and 'tell us what it is' \- maybe point out what's good, what's bad a little bit.

And then maybe some 'editors choice' for the one's that naturally stand out.

That's it.

<comment><USER50> "People don't want [this thing millions of people use, around which entire industries exist. And which is the only effective way of assessing a restaurant you've never been to personally.]"

If I could reach through the internet right now I would.

<comment><USER37> Your comment defeats itself.

"is the only effective way of assessing a restaurant you've never been to personally"

That's why they use it, not because it 'has reviews', but because it's a comprehensive directory, it has the address, phone number, photos, and the 'reviews' give a rought idea of what's up.

If the reviews were replaced with a simple star rating, then people wouldn't care.

There is also Google Search, which shows images, price.

I haven't used Yelp in a few years, it's simply unecessary.</comment></comment></comment>


Good E-Reader 13.3 inch Android e-reader - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/13-3-inch-android-e-reader#/ <comment><USER2> A comparable e-reader is also available from Onyx: [http://ereader- store.de/de/75-onyx-boox-max.html](http://ereader-store.de/de/75-onyx-boox- max.html) . The site owner (ereader-store.de) is very active in the mobileread forums and provides on-going support for Onyx products including firmware updates. For example, he has made available Android 4.2.x for Onyx Boox T68, even for versions that he didn't sell.

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks awesome & fills a gap in the market. As a doctoral student I've wanted one of these for years for reading papers. I only wish it were roughly half as expensive. At $700 it's tempting to just buy an iPad Pro or some other large tablet (I know this is e-ink, different use case etc, but still).

Does anyone know if there's a 10" version available anywhere?</comment>


Starbucks' refugee hiring program to counter Trump is hurting brand and sale - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/08/starbucks-refugee-hiring-program-to-counter-trump-is-hurting-brand.html?__source=Facebook <comment><USER2> The first line of the article says it " _could_ negatively impact sales in the near term, according to analysts at Credit Suisse". This is speculation, not a fact as the title implies.</comment>


Dell's 43-inch, 4K monitor supports four clients on one screen - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2016/05/23/dell-43-inch-quad-monitor/ <comment><USER3> So can the Philips BDM4065UC which has been around for ages and is a pretty nice monitor (although only supports 60Hz 4K on the displayport input).

A much nicer price as well, even if lacking 3 inches ;)

<comment><USER4> Neither have pivot (portrait orientation) though. Except maybe by mounting it to monitor arm or something.

I want an ability to control monitors programmatically. I want to be able to script brightness, contrast, active input, etc. Using buttons to do that is just so horrible, especially with multi-monitor setups.

Monitors should also signal orientation and ambient light level back (many monitors have sensors for these anyways!). I want my OS to automatically adjust to portrait when I rotate the damn monitor.

All this must happen in a standard way, that's always available regardless of currently active video input. Bluetooth could work for this. No I2C pins anymore, please.

USB ports should be powered and connected all the time. Not just when the monitor is on, this makes the feature nearly useless.

<comment><USER3> There's absolutely massive room for improvement in the monitor market - <USER2> agree that all of the things you mention should be standard by now.

Even TVs still have atrocious menu systems considering how cheap technology is now - A raspberry pi zero is likely far more capable than most TV/monitor UI controllers.</comment></comment></comment>


You Don't Have to Be Smart to Be Rich - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2007/05/01/you-dont-have-to-be-smart-to-be-rich/

<comment><USER2> I went to the Intelligence journal's website and could not find the study. My two cents: I think we should look at the methodology of the study before trusting its conclusions.

To me, the conclusions don't meet the sniff test. Drawing causal inferences from social science data is tricky, and I think it's more likely the study is flawed in one of the many ways observational data analyses are often flawed.

Regardless, IMHO we as a society should praise hard work and effort rather than lauding those who "win" the "intelligence" lottery.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well it's available but you have to purchase the study: [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289607...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289607000219)

Here's anther another similar study I found that cites the intelligence journal study and can be read without a paywall: [http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/cprc/conferences/2008/cfrg...](http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/cprc/conferences/2008/cfrg- october/cole-shastry-rich.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "One of the most surprising discoveries for me in researching my book Richistan was that many of today's rich didn't do that well in school. In fact, many of them didn't go to college — or if they did, they quickly dropped out."

Does he go beyond Bill Gates, Mike Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs et al.? I think it's widely known that a lot of tech founders left college or grad school so I suspect it wouldn't have come as a surprise to most people.

<comment><USER4> What does doing well in school have to do with intelligence?

<comment><USER5> You need a certain measure of intelligence to be able to pass the tests, or to game the system so as to appear to pass the tests.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe you don't need to be smart to _be_ rich, but I'd be interested to know if you need to be smart (in the IQ/book smart sense) to _get_ rich. You'd have to measure the IQ of people like successful small business owners, etc. who built their own wealth rather than being born to or inheriting it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is the part in the article that I can relate to the most when people try to correlate richness with intelligence:

"Intelligence is not a factor for explaining wealth," he said. "Those with low intelligence should not believe they are handicapped, and those with high intelligence should not believe they have an advantage."

</comment><comment><USER7> Inheritance generally has jack to do with IQ points.</comment>


UK bulk surveillance review is 'fiction', claims former NSA technical director - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerweekly.com/news/450400247/Bulk-surveillance-review-is-fiction-claims-former-NSA-technical-director <comment><USER2> I think a lot of people expect that bulk gathering and storage is the current game, with analysis waiting on better ways to filter noise and increase signal. As long as everything is stored for later, more advanced analysis, we have a problem.

That assumes of course that you could believe a single word out of the mouth of anyone involved in national security at this point.

</comment><comment><USER3> The emperor has no clothes. So this is what freedom looks like? Naked despotism couched in legalese and wanton abuse of the english language with propaganda.

I don't see what case can be made against stasi or surveillance regimes when leading lights of the free world are more than neck deep in it. This crass duplicity makes Russia, China, Putin and all the favoured demons look tame.

The western world have fed off these crimes against humanity to create a halo around ourselves. We can't deny this has benefitted us. Now we undeniably look like the biggest bunch of hypocrities who have only tainted human rights, liberty and freedom forever with our greed.

At least Russia, China and other regimes own up to their their actions. This is important as it gives people an opportunity to clearly identify and rally against repression. Running a sly dupliticious propaganda filled operation on the other hand will catch people by surprise when its too late.

To all apologists who think they can ride this out in feigned denial, diminish the implications of surveillance or argue legalese simply having a 'reason' does not justify anything. It only makes you look like an opportunist with values of convenience. Murdering millions of people in the middle east, funding despotic regimes, decimating entire countries, funding extremism and then building surveillance states at home in response.

This is a macabre and sickening degradation of humanity. If this does not compel a revolt from the people what will? Periodic elections with rulers consistently acting against the people's interests does not make a democracy, only perpetuates the illusion of one.

<comment><USER4> _> > At least Russia, China and other regimes own up to their their actions. This is important as it gives people an opportunity to clearly identify and rally against repression. Running a sly dupliticious propaganda filled operation on the other hand will catch people by surprise when its too late._

Are you serious? Russia's go to response to things that they've blatantly done (think Crimea) is to just say they didn't do anything. It's laughable how much evidence there is to things they often deny...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> ->"So this bill and study are to review and then authorise something that they have been doing for 15 years and, yes, we are joining the Russians and Chinese in monitoring our populations."

15 years is only 2001. Bulk surveillance started in 1998.

The only reason they stick to "bulk meta data" is everything else is to much data to store. As soon as they pick up something interesting (illegal or not) it definitely doesn't stop there.

On the plus side. At least the development community can now start taking communications security seriously. Rather than sticking their head in the sand and pretending https: is the be all and end all to that particular problem. Or just not caring at all.</comment>


100 NLP Papers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mhagiwara/100-nlp-papers <comment><USER2> Unless you are a researcher (in academia or a corporate research lab), you should think twice before spending your time with these papers.

I have seen repeated examples of information technology industry professionals who go off on a wild goose chase of trying to parse the papers and reproduce them. If you are a machine learning practitioner or a data scientist in the industry, it is highly likely that you are going to waste your time with these papers. Here's a concrete example from the list: "John Lafferty, Andrew McCallum, Fernando C.N. Pereira: Conditional Random Fields: Probabilistic Models for Segmenting and Labeling Sequence Data, ICML 2001." This used to be the defining paper in early 2000s. Today it is important only as a road marker in the NLP research history which turned out to lead down an unproductive route.

Those who have not spent meaningful time in academia working on publishing their own research papers tend to fetishize them. The reality is that even the best papers in the field are a mess of ideas designed to please fickle reviewers and academic superiors. Most papers explore nooks and crannies of ideas that are irrelevant to an industry practitioner and are filled with assumptions that turn out to be impractical.

Unfortunately reading research papers has become a self-reinforcing status symbol for practitioners to name-drop and generally show off their in-crowd status rather than to rely on the ideas in the papers for a source of useful and practical information.

<comment><USER3> Uh, I disagree? Some of the best scientific discoveries of the 2000s came from insights found in old papers (50s, 60s, 70s). For example, optogenetics.

And now with Transformers, Hopfield learning and continuous Hebbian dynamics are making a small comeback. I mean, sure, don't implement the paper verbatim, but it's depressing to discard decades worth of work and insights only to rebuild it all again. Our disregard for past 'unsexy' work is one of the largest inefficiencies in science, hands down.

<comment><USER4> The comment starts with "Unless you are a researcher...".

If you are a practitioner you are just trying to use the result of some research that someone else has done before, mostly to not have to do that research again.

Sure this result is possible thanks to revisiting old ideas, but using it does not mean you are discarding anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone have a similar list of NLP papers, but focused on recent best practices for commercial applications, rather than foundational academic research?

<comment><USER6> Yea, this would be a great resource if it exists. I constantly have to point out to project managers that neural NLP models by and large have very different goals than they do. If you're not trying to do something that amounts to computing a feature of a language (produce similar output, sentiment of a sentence or passage, parse into SVO, etc.) they're not all that helpful. Laymen pretty much all assume you can get them to reason about text, which we're very far away from.

<comment><USER7> I wonder if there is room for a reddit clone that only links to papers. Each subreddit is a community of interest, and there are time series analytics available for any of the votes/references/etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It would be helpful if research papers included the publication date prominently displayed in the header/abstract of the paper -- but none of them do. You can get a idea by looking what the paper itself references in the endnotes, but that varies.

It would be a useful search-engine feature or plugin to derive the pub-date information (and possibly the source journal(s), if appropriate) from meta- data elsewhere and/or by cross-referencing the papers that cite each other and include dates.

It's also very annoying that one can _usually_ find a free version of most papers, but I need to wade through gobs of hits first where they want me to pay for it -- and it's not always obvious w/o following each link.

</comment><comment><USER9> Agree with previous posts re: reading papers being potential rabbit hole for NLP practitioners. One paper that could be pretty useful for practical applications is this one [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.12848.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.12848.pdf)

It outlines strategies for data augmentation in NLP, as well as other ML task. Finding task-specific labeled data is often one of the most pertinent issues for applying ML outside of academia.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been going down the academic NLP rabbit hole lately, and at least in my domain (unsupervised key phrase extraction), the problem isn't the papers, it's the code (surprise!).

Let's start with the fact that in applied NLP, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face by any number of pre-processing issues. And let's set aside the fact that in the end it's all going to regress to supervision, without which you can't optimize. Let's also set aside the fact that performance against a "gold standard" SemEval dataset doesn't mean shit in a lot of real world applications.

So you try out the standard issue "top of the line" algo, like YAKE, which is so fucking slow in pure Python that it'll choke a Bayesian optimizer. You sit around for a while debating whether or not to port it to Cython, having little idea if the effort will pay off because you aren't sure how well YAKE is going to work to begin with and it might get bested by another algo anyway.

So you go looking through the literature and you're delighted to find that within just the last few months, there have been some really cool and promising algos coming out with solid benchmarks, and there's code available to boot. Yay!

So you download the "weakly supervised" statistical one and it turns out to be a fucked up polyglot of Bash, C++, and a stale version of OpenJDK, some of which you have to compile yourself with g++, and then you have to dump your corpus into text files even though you've already got it in memory, run it through a tokenizer you neither want nor need, and then read the results back out of other text files. Sure, there's a docker version. It's full of bloat and solves some of the more negligible problems at hand.

Then you download a graph-based algo and it's such an undocumented mess of spaghetti it might as well have been written by an Italian restaurant. So you spend a really unreasonable amount of time just trying to figure out which function even takes your text as an input, and you read through a bunch of other functions trying to figure out if it needs to be pre-tokenized or not and if it wants the input as sentences or not or whatever. It also wants your input as a text file.

Then you download a language model-based algo and you think you're going to run the BERT variant you have at hand, but you double check the paper and it happens to perform way better with ELMO and then if you're lucky you don't spend a whole day trying to get AllenNLP running because you're using WSL on a laptop without a GPU and the non-gpu Tensorflow dependency is shitting itself all over the stack trace. You finally get the environment going in all its bloated glory even though you just wanted the pre-trained ELMO model, which you finally get deployed to Cortex or whatever and breathe a sigh of relief. And then it turns out your corpus is so domain specific that your matrix is sparser than swiss cheese because it's chock full of unks.

What have you learned after all this? That building an ensemble model which plays nicely with spaCy or SparkNLP is going to be an order of magnitude harder. Have fun!

<comment><USER11> I wrote a summarizer which (when using the right settings) performs unsupervised key phrase extraction using language models. It is available here: [https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/CX_DB8](https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/CX_DB8) It seems that it would be very useful to you.

Like most data science code, it's non-trivial to install (it used to be when it was still updated)mostly because some dependencies are out of date and I will not risk a lawsuit from my current employer due to the similarity between this work and my day-to-day work. There is a jupyter notebook available which will allow you to use it without an install</comment></comment>


The Startup Kids trailer, a documentary about web entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/07/lets-back-the-startup-kids-a-documentary-that-needs-to-be-seen/

<comment><USER2> This looks really good - just interesting people talking about the interesting things they're doing. I also like how they seem to have chosen quite a few entrepreneurs outside of the SV hype cycle in addition to the usual suspects like Harj Taggar, Drew Houston etc.

I also think that this project is a pretty awesome way for the two filmmakers to market their startup <http://www.kinwins.com>!

</comment><comment><USER3> The lead quote from Mans Adler is interesting. I'm still trying to grok it ->

"You don't start a rock band today, you start a company."

Is he trying to say that it is fashionable or trendy to be in a startup these days?

<comment><USER4> Yes. Kids (I know, because I'm a kid) don't hang out in coffee shops writing songs or working on their screenplay anymore, they sit around writing code.

Everybody wants to be Mark Zuckerberg, at least everybody that I know does.

Honestly, I don't think that the dreams are that dissimilar. When I was in highschool, the person who is now my co-founder and I worked together on music. We spent out nights in my parents' basement trying to build a recording studio out of scavenged tape-recorders and microphones from goodwill because we wanted to make something really _cool_ that we could show our friends.

We're doing the same thing now, albeit with less taperecords. Every project that we've ever worked together on has had the end goal of being something cool that we can show our friends. Honestly (and I'm going way off topic here, sorry), this is a bit of stumbling block for me. I'm currently in a position where I could doing _business-y_ things that might make me a lot of money, but nobody would know about them, and they aren't any fun.

I'm mostly turning those opportunities down because I'd rather make no money, and do stuff that I can show off to my friends.

I guess the parallel would be that when we were in highschool, we certainly had the talent to make radio jingles, but if anybody had ever offered us the chance to, we would have turned it down because it isn't any fun.

We wanted to be in a rock band, and we still do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For some reason the link to this one bombed on HN recently but because it's relevant..

<http://startingupinamerica.com/>

Another documentary but about foreign entrepreneurs and the problems involved in starting up in Silicon Valley.</comment>


Crystal 0.27.1 released - <AUTHOR> https://crystal-lang.org/2019/01/30/crystal-0.27.1-released.html <comment><AUTHOR> Crystal is a Ruby inspired compiled language, allowing it to run blazingly fast with a very low memory footprint. It uses LLVM for emitting native code, thus making use of all the optimisations built into the toolchain.

Website: [https://crystal-lang.org/](https://crystal-lang.org/)

Github: [https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal](https://github.com/crystal- lang/crystal)</comment>