How Star Trek Discovery is challenging my understanding of Trek, my own fandom - <AUTHOR> http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/how-star-trek-discovery-is-challenging-my-understanding-of-my-own-fandom <comment><USER2> I'm only a few episodes in, but I really like the ideological conflict they've set up. The Federation believes itself to be a unifying force for peace and coexistence. But the Klingons see the Federation as demanding conformity, destroying individuality, and threatening Klingon identity. Though the Federation is clearly meant to be the "good guys", both sides are sympathetic and there are parallels to modern politics (globalism vs. nationalism). Hopefully, the writers can resist the temptation to turn the Klingons into an irredeemable caricature (their statements aren't encouraging: [https://www.salon.com/2017/09/22/star-trek-discovery- creator...](https://www.salon.com/2017/09/22/star-trek-discovery-creators-our- klingons-are-secretly-trumpsters/)).

</comment><comment><USER3> TNG as Roddenberry's vision of the future.

I guess the writer missed the 'African Tribal War Lords In Space' and 'Space Irish' episodes of TNG. Or when Troi is gossiping with Beverly on how Beverly found her grandmother's sex diary erotic.

<comment><USER4> The semi-nude fit white people oiling each other up planet (TNG Justice) is rumoured to be a Roddenberry re-write. Roddenberry wasn't quite the person a lot of Trek fans think he was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Star Trek" as an abstract concept across franchises has always been a few things. It's always been about interesting, and generally likable, characters and a backdrop setting of extensive space exploration, a galaxy full of many civilizations and so forth. That's a comparatively small but still important part of Star Trek. Star Trek has always been a kind of anthology project similar to The Outer Limits or The Twilight Zone, except it has used a constant cast of characters and setting, which makes it easier to get to moments that have more significant impact on the viewer. You already know and are invested in the characters, and their different traits can be used to help tell the story. This is both the weakness and strength of Star Trek, leading to some of its worst but also some of its best stories, stories that show what literary SciFi is capable of achieving. TOS episodes like The City on the Edge of Forever, TNG episodes like The Inner Light or Chain of Command, DS9 episodes like Far Beyond the Stars, etc.

Additionally, Star Trek has always had a strong set of progressive values (peace, reconcilliation, cooperation, honesty, etc.) and has used its story telling to further those values. It put a black woman and a Russian man on the bridge of the Enterprise during the height of the civil rights fight and the height of the Cold War. It's pushed progressive causes for decades, even when it was risky to do so within the confines of the television studio system. There was an episode of TNG that tackled issues of homosexuality and gender identity in the '90s, for example, and of course there's that famous interracial kiss on the original series.

The new Trek seems to be substantially in the same vein here, though it's still a bit early to make a definitive call. The diversity of the cast is very nice to see, and the mixture of "episodic anthology show" and long-running plot is pretty well done and keeping with the tradition of Trek going back even to the original show. It'll take more episodes to see how good the show is ultimately, but so far it's doing pretty well.

</comment><comment><USER6> The thing that I like about Discovery (even though I'm preferring "The Orville, at the moment) is that it feels like a lead-in to the Trek that I know and love. Obviously, something had to happen to take people from where we are now to where TNG was. We didn't just instantly switch as a species from being war-hungry and emotional to being hand-in-hand with all these other species. It's refreshing to me to think that we discovered extra-terrestrial life (and maybe they discovered us) first and then became a unified species and I'm enjoying seeing this first hand.

That being said, I do not trust Scott Buck, the show runner, at all. He's taken these great concepts that had really strong beginnings and muddled them up and ruined them too many times for me to be happy with what we have. Case in point, the latest episode. It was absolutely great to me and felt Trek-y and funny and smart while feeling modern and _real_. They gave a good nod to a TOS character again while respecting him and making me prefer this iteration of him. There was some thoughtfulness to the writing, the acting was pretty great, and I could tell that they were trying to lead people to look at things from a different perspective which is very Trek to me. But then it all went sideways at the very end when the bad guy's comeuppance turns into nothing more than an annoyance and, for some reason, the Federation allows a criminal to (SPOILER ALERT) leave without any kind of repercussion or punishment for trying to hijack the Federation's premiere starship and, although the situation washes it away, kill several of its chief officers and crew members. It's backwards.

I'm still going to keep watching and enjoying but the inconsistency is really hard for me to get over. I don't mind if they're slightly inconsistent from series to series but we're only 7 episodes in and they're already being inconsistent with not only the universe they're playing in but also their own universe that they've set up.

</comment><comment><USER7> Discovery stacks up very well against their last attempt (Enterprise), and I like the way that they're willing to avoid fixing whatever problems show up using tachyon particles, or other magical plot devices.

It also compares very favorably to the first season of TNG, which had alot of issues even though it a some good episodes. I kind of worry about what happens when they get through the first season arc and have to come up with something interesting as that's when alot of shows tend to fall flat.

<comment><USER8> I mean time crystals are a weak plot device as well.. I enjoyed the episode but I don't like time travel in the Trek world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been ignoring something for way too long, so if you'll excuse the slight tangent I have a question: What do bloggers mean when they say "challenging"? Am I missing something, or is "challenging" just pretentious-blogger speak for things that make them want to turn their brains to "think about something for a bit" mode instead of living life on autopilot?

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd rather watch Enterprises opening theme song on repeat for an hour, than "Discovery". But if the movies couldn't drive this franchise into the ground I doubt this continuity breaking, sjw-ish circle jerk will.

In a few years, if we're lucky, they'll just reconn Discovery (and all its lens flare) into the Abrams timeline where it belongs.

<comment><USER11> Critique of continuity and "canon" aside, I'm curious about how this show can be seen as a "sjw-ish circle jerk" compared to the progressive, post-scarcity utopia of TNG.

Assuming that epithet refers to something obnoxiously progressive and preachy, I've not seen anything that so bluntly states its values the way TOS or TNG often had such obvious "morals of the story" about racism or intolerance.

This show has struck me as a lot more action and plot focused. I see how that is quite different from some of the older iterations and might annoy fans of the classic style with its focus on more flashy, modern, and explosion-filled TV action. But preachy campfire sing-along it ain't.</comment></comment>


Californium worth $72M seized in northern Turkey - <AUTHOR> https://www.dailysabah.com/investigations/2019/07/06/suspected-highly-radioactive-californium-worth-72-million-seized-in-northern-turkey <comment><USER2> A number of things about this story don't add up. Annual worldwide production of Californium is only about 0.5gm and it has a half life of about 2.5 years. It also costs $27M per gram. So where did smugglers obtain 18 grams of the stuff?

<comment><USER3> Similar story last year where user pointed out errors in math [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16618117](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16618117)</comment></comment>


Merge vs. Rebase – A deep dive into the mysteries of revision control - <AUTHOR> http://blog.experimentalworks.net/2009/03/merge-vs-rebase-a-deep-dive-into-the-mysteries-of-revision-control/

<comment><USER2> This is all nice and dandy (as usual with git tutorials, which I find to focus on what works great), but what about a long-lived feature branch where you need to get the changes from your master branch into your feature branch on a regular basis? Are you going to merge master into your branch? Are you going to rebase? Whatever choice you make, it's going to be kind of sucky experience, awful merges or a long series of resolving conflicts for each commit replayed on top of the HEAD of your main branch, with random git rebase --skip and "conflicted" files that you edit only to discover that the file actually doesn't contain any conflict.

What about the famous:

\+ EMPTY_LINE

\- EMPTY_LINE

That for some reason I still get every other day in git diff outputs?

What about deleting a branch? Tough shit son, the branch is not fully merged, BOOYA! Want to pull? BANG, merge bubble. Oh, you decided to be smart about it and to git pull --rebase instead? Nah sister, you've pushed that code before and you're now rewriting the history and screwing with it.

I don't know, it feels like there are no good choices in git, there's no "right way", there's no workflow that guarantees your peace of mind. It's always a fight. And the solutions to those problems are something that I never see in the git tutorials and examples. It feels like informercials, you really want to buy into it and go create branches, engage into interactive rebases and git bisect into nasty bugs but after a few shots at it, it becomes the software equivalent of that exercise bike collecting dust in the basement you pretend not to see on your way to the backup fridge. The one that reminds you how much you suck.

(Most of this tongue in cheek, I think git is great, it's just frustrating sometimes)

<comment><USER3> We (BitKeeper guys) have fought with this sort of problem a lot. In theory we should be better than git at this stuff and in some cases we actually are, but in some cases we are worse.

One class of problems that OP referred to is when you pull non-rebased csets into a cset that has been rebased. If the contents on both sides are identical I believe Git will handle that nicely (as will BK).

Where it gets hard is if you have changes on top of the history past the rebase and past the rebase point on the other branch. The version control system will think all of that crap is unique when only a little of it is.

Here's an example:

GCA:

A; B; C; D;

Left branch:

A; A2; B; C;

Right branch:

if (whatever) { A; B; C; D; }

Everybody currently makes this sort of thing hard to merge, it looks like a bigger change than it is.

We're fixing it but it's a huge pile of heuristics that make me vomit.</comment></comment>


BW's Businessperson of the Year - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/dec2007/db20071227_684654.htm?campaign_id=rss_tech <comment><AUTHOR> Lesson: laser focus is important for all businesses, especially startups</comment>


Why does everyone love polymorphism over switch case - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/63732704/polymorphism-versus-switch-case-tradeoffs <comment><USER2> Personally, I agree with the author. Since code executes linearly (in a single-threaded app), it makes sense to write it that way, too. We recently wrote a large a complex parser, interpreter, and backing database for a new text processing language we're developing and it was done entirely without classes or OOPS-type constructs. As the author suggests, it's mostly a lot of switch/case (or in our case, lisp cond expressions) that test for and handle the various cases that the parser might encounter, much as a human would. We've found this design much easier to reason about and debug than a bunch of classes that depend on each other.</comment>


GDPR laws are causing panic in Europe - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/gdpr-europe-laws-advertising-demand-complaints-90343bc6-47cc-4832-bff3-24d2e19c7175.html <comment><USER2> This title is just false. There is no panic at all and GDPR is good for everyone. Well maybe everyone except Zuckerberg...</comment>


Supreme Court Loses Chief Geek as Judge Stephens Retires - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/06/the-supreme-court-loses-its-cryptographer.ars

<comment><USER2> The justice's name is Stevens, not Stephens.</comment>


Brutalist UX - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcodesign.com/90127559/what-facebook-google-and-tinder-would-look-like-with-a-brutalist-makeover <comment><USER2> UI/digital product designers would do themselves a favour to actually read up on what these terms actually mean that they keep co-opting.</comment>


Ask HN: Should I stay? First employee equity/pay question - <AUTHOR> I was the first employee at a startup 1 year ago. I'm thinking about leaving now because I don't feel like I have enough equity to care.
When I started, I was making a competitive salary with other tech companies in Los Angeles (150k), but was awarded what felt like a very small equity stake. As the first full-time employee, I was awarded 0.5% option grant.
The company started with a 3M seed round out of an accelerator. We just raised a 8M Series A round.
Since starting, I've always felt the equity stake was too low and considered leaving many times. I was offered a job at Facebook, which I decided not to take. I also came across a number of other Series A stage companies that I strongly considered, but decided not to pursue.
Is there any way now to request more equity, without taking a pay cut? Or is it too late?
I definitely can't imagine staying at the company, knowing that there are other employees starting now with a similar equity stake and also feeling like the founders are coming away with 30x more equity, when we all started around the same time.
What should I do? Leave or stay? <comment><USER2> 0.5% for employee #1 is very low. Sounds like the company is doing well, and also that you're in-demand in the industry, so if I were you I'd use these facts to try and negotiate a higher salary (I wouldn't value equity too highly).

If they don't go for it then I'd be ready to take another job — you can definitely get a better package elsewhere (FB etc), and it sounds like you're not super satisfied where you are right now.

Compared to founders, early employees get a bit of a shitty deal in general, but your equity is definitely below market rate for a first employee.

All the best!

</comment><comment><USER3> "Your mouth is saying you value me but my equity share says you don't." I might not say it out loud to the founder, but I'd be thinking it.

</comment><comment><USER4> 0.5% is low. I got more than that as employee #6.</comment>


George R.R. Martin Writes Everything In WordStar 4.0 On A DOS Machine - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/14/george-r-r-martin-writes-everything-in-wordstar-4-0-on-a-dos-machine

<comment><USER2> I was amazed when I saw this Years ago. Now that I think about it, seems like a good choice since it allows him to focus, that machine has no multitasking = no distractions, internet...</comment>


The Cities Americans Want to Flee, and Where They Want to Go - <AUTHOR> https://www.citylab.com/life/2020/01/where-to-move-most-affordable-cities-apartment-list-rentals/605371/ <comment><USER2> [https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/2020-q1-renter- mig...](https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/2020-q1-renter-migration- report/)

> Methodology

> Results are based on searches of Apartment List users occurring between June > 1, 2019 and December 31, 2019. We include data from both registered and > unregistered users. While registered users are uniquely identified, > unregistered users who perform multiple searches may be counted multiple > times. For users who search in multiple locations, we consider the initial > search location to be the primary one. Each user's current place of > residence is defined by the IP address from which the user is searching. All > results are aggregated at the metro level, using Census definitions of > metropolitan statistical areas.

I forget what its called, but this is the sample population problem where all of the sample is based on people who voluntarily come to a website. This can substantially skew the results, IIRC.

For example, I can't determine if the study demonstrates the impact of Paradise, California being completely evacuated. It's a bombed out ghost-town and probably 20,000 people have moved some place else, even if to nearby Chico, Red Bluff, Redding, and Sacramento areas.

I also wonder about other factors. California has a looming tax-base problem in that new company formation outside of tech and biotech is slowing, new small businesses creation is slowing, the number of public employee pensioners is rapidly growing and the pension fund is backed up by tax dollars, should the fund lose money in a downturn. Most of the people leaving the state are taxpayers and not government employees and the rate of business exodus continues to grow, even for capital-intensive manufacturers but including large publicly-traded companies such as McKesson.

Gaining a better understanding of _who_ is leaving will provide a far more valuable insight into how this activity is going to affect the state than just broad stats on where people are leaving and where they are going to.</comment>


HN front page, 16000 visitors in a day, how many actually read the article? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quantisan.com/post-gone-viral-16000-visitors-in-a-day-how-many-actually-read-the-article/ <comment><USER2> I rarely read even the articles with interesting titles that make it to HN's front page.

This is because when I did read more of them, they usually turned out to be a lot less interesting than the ensuing discussion on HN.

So now I use the HN discussion as a proxy for article quality. In the HN discussion I can often find a good summary of the article and get a sense of whether the article is likely to be worth reading or not.

Only maybe 1 out of 10 articles or less that I look interesting to me on HN wind up ones that I actually bother to click through. And of the ones I click through, only 1 out of 10 wind up deserving of being read rather than skimmed.

Some years back, there were a couple of "HN Full Feed" type RSS feeds, that would send the contents of the entire linked article, so I could read them without even bothering to go on to the web site.

I valued these services not only because they were more convenient in that it made clicking through and waiting for the aritcle to load no longer necessary, but also because there'd be less tracking of my interests this way.

I also have javascript disabled for 99% of the sites I visit, and am considering starting to use TOR for more of my browsing. It's really nobody's business what I'm reading, and it's a real pity the Internet wasn't built with more inherent privacy and anonymity features.

<comment><USER3> Yet that discussion is littered with uninformed pot-shots at the topic. We can hope that more than 6% of the HN comments come from folks who read/understand the topic I guess.

Btw how did you accumulate your '1 in 10' stats? Off the cuff? Can you think of a way to measure this? Because I don't think 1 in 10 articles 'deserve to be read'. Somebody DID read them, took the time to post them here. So for some audience at least they were meaningful.

<comment><USER2> _"Btw how did you accumulate your '1 in 10' stats? Off the cuff?"_

Yep. Just a rough estimate based on my sense of how many articles I actually bother clicking through to. Having a more accurate estimate of my own click- through rate would not be valuable to me, so I never bothered to try to find out.

 _"Can you think of a way to measure this?"_

If I was interested in gathering such stats for myself, I suppose I could use a browser add-on to measure my HN use.

Alternatively, HN could start using indirect links. But I'm not sure if I'd stay with HN if they started doing that. I hate being spied upon, which is one major reason I stopped using Google, and would probably drop HN as well if they started going down that road. Not that HN really needs to do that, since they already know which HN discussion pages I open and what I write (which are reasons for me to start making myself a bit more anonymous in my HN use).

 _"Because I don't think 1 in 10 articles 'deserve to be read'. Somebody DID read them, took the time to post them here. So for some audience at least they were meaningful."_

It all depends on who the audience is, doesn't it? If you aim for the lowest common denominator, you'll probably get a bigger audience. This is a major reason for much of the mainstream media content being such utter garbage (from my perspective).

Also, just because someone clicked through on an HN link doesn't mean that they liked what they found when they got there. The same goes for tracking of people clicking on "Like" buttons or even sending links to their friends.

People could have all sorts of reasons for clicking "Like" buttons that have nothing to do with them enjoying or even reading the content. And I can't count the number of times I've forwarded unread articles to friends because I thought it might be something they might be interested in, but that I had no interest in myself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> These data are not being interpreted correctly. Analytics calculates time-on- page based on the time between loads of the google JS embedded in your pages. Any visitor who 'bounces' - that is, only visits a single page - only loads the JS once, so their time-on-page is recorded as 0 seconds, regardless of how long they actually spent on the page.

<comment><USER5> what if i told you they use the onUnload event?

<comment><USER6> Do they?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There seems to be a lot of confusion about how GA tracks user engagement, which is understandable as even the Support article linked in another comment doesn't accurately explain what happens with single page visits.

First off, the metric by definition will always be skewed lower than reality. For multi-page visits, GA takes the time of the first hit and time of the second hit to calculate time on page (and will chain these together to get time on site). Since the page the user leaves on doesn't have a "second hit", that time is never included.[1]

For single page visits, as blog posts tend to be, the calculation is slightly different.[1]

       Time on Page = (time of last "engagement hit" on page) – (time of first hit from page)

If you set up Event Tracking to trigger as a user scrolls to predetermined lengths of your article, it'll trigger these 'engagement hits' and give you a better approximation of time on site. If you just throw in a standard tracking code that fires off a _trackPageview() event on page load, then GA will never see a second engagement and will not be able to calculate any approximation of time on page/site, so it'll default into the "less than 10 seconds" bucket. Depending on what blogging platform you're using, there are some add-ins that provide such functionality.[2]

[1] [http://cutroni.com/blog/2012/02/29/understanding-google- anal...](http://cutroni.com/blog/2012/02/29/understanding-google-analytics- time-calculations/)

[2][http://www.analytics-ninja.com/blog/2012/06/google- analytics...](http://www.analytics-ninja.com/blog/2012/06/google-analytics- bounce-rate-demystified.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> Analytics calculates the time on page by the time difference _between_ page hits. One hit: 0 seconds on site. Because of this, it isn't an accurate metric to measure engagement for a single blog post.

<comment><AUTHOR> I assumed they have some fancy javascript thing to take care of that? what would you suggest to use to estimate actually readership?

<comment><USER8> I would stick with GA and just trigger an event via javascript once the body of text is scrolled through.

If I didn't know how to do that, I would probably use a scrollmap tool like CrazyEgg.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Most of long articles are just a waste of time, the actual information can be condensed into a single paragraph or less and the rest is just redundancy or useless information.

</comment><comment><USER10> As other commenters have mentioned, 0 seconds doesn't mean anything. Meanwhile, those 18 visitors who spent more than 1800+ seconds on your page? Probably they just opened the page in a new tab and only got around to reading it a few hours (or days) later. So data at both extremes are useless.

If we ignore the 0-second anomaly, it looks like we've got a nice bell curve peaking between 180-600 seconds, probably closer to 180 than to 600. That sounds about right for a 670-word article.

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting, that ties in with my observations of around 700 visitors per hour on the front page - [http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/11/whats-the-front-page-of- hack...](http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/11/whats-the-front-page-of-hackernews- worth/)

While I didn't track engagement time, I looked at number of comments (both here and on my posts, and shares on Twitter and Facebook) to try and figure out how much of it was "real" traffic.

</comment><comment><USER12> Here are my stats for two of my blog posts that made the front page:

[http://syskall.com/how-to-roll-out-your-own-javascript- api-w...](http://syskall.com/how-to-roll-out-your-own-javascript-api- with/index.html/)

        3051 visits
        00:00:16 average visit duration
        98.9% less than 10 seconds

[http://syskall.com/yc-w12-startups-hosting- decisions/index.h...](http://syskall.com/yc-w12-startups-hosting- decisions/index.html/)

        3920 visits
        00:00:14 average visit duration
        99.1% less than 10 seconds

Somewhat depressing...

(edit: according to lenazegher's comment the average visit duration stats might not be as bad as they look since my bounce rate was pretty high, ~95% on both posts)

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting. I posted a link to my shithole of a site in a comment a hundred deep in a post that had reached the top of the frontpage and had fallen to pretty much the bottom when I posted in the thread.

I got a extra 300 visitors that day and about 50 the next. The average visitors per day is around 25 so this is a big and noticeable spike.

I guess I am kinda shocked a random link in the middle of a dying thread generated that much traffic while something hitting the frontpage only generated about 53 times more traffic.

<comment><USER14> You should put your site in your profile so you can see how many people come after you post an offhand reference to the fact that you may have once written something interesting elsewhere.

<comment><USER13> Well I thought it was interesting that my shitty comment that linked to something I wrote got so many hits while getting on the frontpage got so little in comparison.

I could get your angst if I had linked to it again or actually linked to it in my profile. But I did neither. So now I just think you are a dick.

<comment><USER15> I had a Show HN that made no headway on the frontpage (like 3 karma then it disappeared into the depths), but I posted that same link, relevantly, as a comment somewhere in the middle of the thread and it absolutely blew up. It's now my highest starred repo on Github and I started the phone interview process with Hulu because of it. Don't underestimate the comments here. A TON of people browse these posts too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This discussion highlights exactly why I don't consider GA a very useful tool - there is no real transparency as to what and how data is collected/measured/filtered [That I've been able to find, anyway].

So in the end, the only useful information you get from GA data, is the rate of change (which is useful for many things) -- but not, for instance, the actual number of visits to your pages -- because you have no idea what is counted and what isn't -- and what is considered a visit.

</comment><comment><USER17> If the article is long, I usually add it to instapaper or pocket to read later. The time spent on the actual site is low but I still engage with the content.

<comment><AUTHOR> good point, I'll keep an eye on returning visitor metric over the next few days

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I was just discussing this with a friend today. We both had front page stories on HN recently. He reported 6k of 6.8k[1] leaving within 10 seconds and I saw that 11k of 13.5k[2] left within 10 seconds.

If these numbers aren't accurate due to Google Analytics, I'd be interested to know a way to get the accurate numbers.

The other annoying thing was that, HTTPS never sends referrers. Hence, not a single one of my visits said it was from Hacker News.

I know, you don't want to leak the referrer in most circumstances when it's HTTPS, but it just seems so vital. The Internet was made and understood by referrals and links, lacking an ability to see referrers seems quite unfortunate, especially if all the Internet ends up HTTPS.

Google and Facebook are the only ones who would be able to stitch together significant portions of referral traffic due to Google Analytics or Facebook Like / Connect. Everyone else is just left stumbling around blind.

[1]: <https://twitter.com/taybenlor/status/326622962377695232>

[2]: <https://twitter.com/Smerity/status/333534743670951936>

<comment><USER19> _I was just discussing this with a friend today. We both had front page stories on HN recently. He reported 6k of 6.8k[1] leaving within 10 seconds and I saw that 11k of 13.5k[2] left within 10 seconds._

This is probably minority behavior, but I will often use Instapaper to bookmark articles for later, and then read a batch together. For most in-depth articles, I probably spend less than ten seconds decide whether I should click "Read Later" and then leaving, even though I do in fact read later.

<comment><USER18> I did consider the possibility of Instapaper, Readability or other similar apps, but as you say I couldn't imagine they'd be the majority, even on the relatively tech savvy Hacker News.

As an example of alternate HN clients, hckrnews.com had 124 referrals, ihackernews.com had 85, HackerWeb had 77 and PulseWeb had 48. That's a grand total of around 300 out of 13.5k.

I'd imagine Readability and Instapaper to be big but probably only some small multiple of that at best.

<comment><USER20> > As an example of alternate HN clients, hckrnews.com had 124 referrals, > ihackernews.com had 85, HackerWeb had 77 and PulseWeb had 48. That's a grand > total of around 300 out of 13.5k.

I see similar proportions for submissions of my pages as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I suspect that if you only make one page view, Google will assume your visit was 0 seconds. Most HN visitors will read the article and close the tab.

</comment><comment><USER20> Here's a bit of data: last week my page <http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns> was submitted to Hacker News and hit the front page for a while, racking up thousands of visitors. As it happens, I was running an A/B test on fonts, where a JavaScript timer sleeps 40 seconds and then fires, telling Google Analytics that a reader has 'converted'. (This hopefully avoids the bouncing distortion of the 'time on page' metric.) So, what percentage of readers stayed on the page long enough for the timer to fire after 40 seconds? (The Markdown source is somewhere around 12k words, so it's not the quickest read in the world.)

~18%

(See [http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/85192141/Analytics%20www....](http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/85192141/Analytics%20www.gwern.net%20Referral%20Traffic%2020130503-20130512.pdf) )

<comment><USER22> What happens if a user is running noscript?

<comment><USER20> Then they won't be counted either in the page load (Analytics was never run) or conversion figures (both Analytics and the conversion trigger will never run).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> at this rate, I'm now hoping that I can do an analysis of the analysis of a viral post that also have gone viral. how awesome would that be? :)

</comment><comment><USER23> If I read your page on my desktop, JavaScript was off - unless I had forgotten to revoke temporary permissions after whitelidting Google analytics on another page.

Which illustrates that Google analytics reports something, but what it reports is what it reports. To put it another way, Google Analytics records information useful to Google. What it reports back to the datapoint is designed to _appear_ useful to the datapoint. The purpose of the information provided is solely to encourage the datapoint to keep using Google Analytics so that Google can keep using the datapoint's website to track people on the internet.

</comment><comment><USER24> A post that estimated how many HN visitors block Google Analytics would be useful.

<comment><USER25> It may surprise you, but HN visitors are pretty low on the scale of privacy- concerned. /. and /g/ are far more active in using privacy tools.

<comment><USER26> That's not too surprising as a decent percentage of HN visitors are currently making tools that destroy privacy.

<comment><USER25> s/destroy/monetize/

<comment> qu4z-2 Pretty sure more of them monetize the lack of privacy, and destroy privacy to do it. Just sayin'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> For me (echoing some of what gnosis has stated), the real value that HN brings is the discussion. Frequently, I find the comments, insights, opinions, and tangents elicited by HN submissions to be more interesting and thought- provoking than the submissions themselves. I typically browse through the discussion a good bit before ever clicking through to the article/site which initially drove the discussion. There are plenty of "show-and-tell" mechanisms on the Web. What sets HN apart, in my mind, is the round-table that develops in response to a lot of those submissions.

</comment><comment><USER28> Like has been mentioned by many, this is incorrect interpretation... and quite common to see on blogs or single page sites. Although technically it's not dependent pageviews, but interactions (so pageviews or events).

So, one common way to handle this on blogs is to use setTimeout in conjunction with an event. Basically you fire an event after 15 or so sections which will then count as an interaction.

</comment><comment><USER29> As another data point, I recently had a 60% read rate on a post that was on HN's front page for a while.

It was a post on medium.com about Pac-Man. Medium tracks number of views and number of reads per day. I think they use a metric that's not just time-on- page to differentiate between views and reads. My post had about 26k views and about 15k reads the day it was on the front page.

</comment><comment><USER30> Paul, you may want to compare raw web server logs to the numbers you get from GA. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a big discrepancy, especially when there's HN in the mix. Moreover, those who are nerdy enough to surf with tracking scripts blocked might be the ones who actually read the article ;)

</comment><comment><USER31> Can anyone count those who read translations without link to the original article or to the HN discussion?...

Do this stats make any sense at all?

Rephrase: can anyone count positive effect of the articles mentioned on HN and further discussions to them?

</comment><comment><USER32> I tend to quickly go through the front page and bookmark the articles that I'm interested in. Then, when I have the time and I'm on my tablet - I read them.

It may be that I'm not the only person that does this kinda thing.

</comment><comment><USER33> Here's another way to measure engagement for longer content, scroll depth: <http://robflaherty.github.io/jquery-scrolldepth/>

</comment><comment><USER34> A tool to record which portion of the screen was visible for how long would be interesting.

Using something like this for example: <http://larsjung.de/fracs/>

</comment><comment><USER35> The most traffic a domain controlled by me ever received from HN was about 3000 uniques: 2000 the first day, 1000 the next.

</comment><comment><USER36> I add a lot of these articles to my Pocket and read them later. I wonder how GA reflects that.

</comment><comment><USER37> Anything to do with preloading by Chrome?

</comment><comment><USER38> 16K is not the real number

</comment><comment><USER39> tl;dr</comment>


Arthur Whitney's short list comparison of J to Lisp/Scheme/Clojure - <AUTHOR> Arthur Whitney recently published a short list of the commonalities between Lisp/Scheme/Clojure and the J programming language on his site [1]. Concise, but a nice comparison. I've always favored J and Lisp, and thought they were leagues apart, but this brings some perspective to bear on this for me. Lambda (λ) calculus vs. Lambda-mu (λμ)? I need to read up on it more. Arthur Whitney created the K programming language, and founded Kx systems, heavily used in finance, which is known for its ability to query very large datasets with very low latency. He also wrote the initial prototype for J, along with the collaboration of Ken Iverson and Roger Hui, which was a continuation of APL, originally created by Iverson. The initial stab at J was very terse C code with lots of macros [2] that has been on HN before [3].

  [1] http://kx.com/q/lisp.txt
  [2] http://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Incunabulum
  [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8533843
 <comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing this. I've been a kdb+/q user for ~5 years. Yesterday, after coming across this, I went through the J Primer. It has some really powerful ideas in it (I didn't know Arthur was behind J as well!), and kdb+/q now feels like a distilled version of J.

I've already started prototyping a small simulator using J. Thank you so much.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am an amateur J-er, but I can't stop jumping back to it and implementing something quick or re-implementing something I've done in another language. I am always surprised by how quick it is to prototype. I want to learn more how to use Qt to add GUIs to my projects, since unfortunately, only old-timers like myself like command lines. It doesn't get any buzz unless it has a nicely-designed GUI. Have you checked out JD? You can get an evaluation, non- commercial key to play with it. It should complement your kdb+/q background.

<comment><USER2> JD looks very promising too for timeseries! I'm going to try it out one of these days.</comment></comment></comment>


Browser benchmark battle January 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2020/01/15/browser-benchmark-battle-january-2020-chrome-firefox-edge-brave/ <comment><USER2> Browser benchmark battle January 2020: Chrome vs. Firefox vs. Chromium vs. Chromium

<comment><USER3> Lmao. I was thinking exactly this! ;@)

It's too bad they didn't benchmark on multiple platforms because there's no Edge (stable) on Mac or Linux and the performance on other platforms likely isn't identical.

<comment><USER4> Edgium for Mac was released as stable the same day as it was for Windows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Off topic, but wow, this website has a bizzarre combination of 2 annoying "features":

1\. splitting the article into a ton of tiny pages, and forcing you to click to go to the next page

2\. infinite scrolling of different articles

This combination means that if you just read what is shown, you will read 1/10th of a ton of different articles, rather than anything coherent.

<comment><USER6> "View all": [https://venturebeat.com/2020/01/15/browser-benchmark- battle-...](https://venturebeat.com/2020/01/15/browser-benchmark-battle- january-2020-chrome-firefox-edge-brave/view-all/)

I recommend to HN mods that the URL be changed to this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd be interested browsers benchmarked by privacy, security, compatibility to standards and UI/UX features.

<comment><USER4> Security is hard to quantify in a useful way. Compatibility to standards can be quantified [https://html5test.com/results/desktop.html](https://html5test.com/results/desktop.html) but you'll find much debate in what counts as a "standard" vs what Google released publicly as well as debate about things like proprietary video codecs or DRM. Privacy gets debated much the same way and it's harder to quantify to boot. UI/UX features can't really be benchmarked as much as a list of unique features made for each and the question "do any of these seem useful to you?" at the end.

These things would be interesting but I don't think a benchmark gives enough of a picture as general text reviews would. Not that the way these performance benchmarks were presented was very helpful in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> TL;DR:

Chrome wins the benchmarks developed by Google. FireFox wins the benchmarks developed by Mozilla. Edge wins most of the other benchmarks. Edge, Brave and Chrome, being all based on Chromium, show almost exactly the same performance (differences are so small as to probably be explained by noise).

</comment><comment><USER4> Not that the benchmark is particularly useful but I find it interesting I get such different results on the SunSpider benchmark compared to the article. The article got FF ~725ms and Edgium ~344. My PC got FF ~133ms Edgium ~186ms. That makes my relative FF performance on that test 3x higher overall, I wonder where that variance comes from.

</comment><comment><USER9> Safari?

<comment><USER10> Nope, they benchmark only on Windows.

> We used Windows 10 in order to maintain a common platform, and because > that's what the majority of desktop users browse on.

<comment><USER11> Glad I'm in the minority of millions who doesn't

<comment><USER12> Or the few people from china who are migrating off windows... or the few people using android devices.

<comment><USER13> Or the billions using iOS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> mobile ?</comment>


Terraform Elasticsearch AWS Module Released - <AUTHOR> http://www.admintome.com/blog/terraform-elasticsearch-module/ <comment><USER2> How long does it take? My current set of shell scripts takes minutes (10 for a 3/3 cluster)

<comment><AUTHOR> about two mins. Its only a single node cluster with this iteration though.</comment></comment>


Open Rights Group demands government act to secure 'track and trace' data - <AUTHOR> https://www.openrightsgroup.org/press-releases/org-demands-government-act-to-secure-track-and-trace-data/ <comment><AUTHOR> The health benefits of track and trace vs. privacy infringement...</comment>


On Making the Front Page of Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://tanayj.com/on-making-the-front-page-of-hacker-news/

<comment><USER2> Sorry, quick note about your design: your links aren't distinguishable at all from the rest of the text for those of us that are mildly colorblind. I have a page at <http://robsheldon.com/colorblind> with some examples, if that helps.</comment>


How Gay Marriage Is Like Lisp - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2013/03/26/how-gay-marriage-is-like-lisp/

<comment><USER2> I think you could replace "gay marriage" with "socialism" in that article and still get a thought provoking article.

<comment><USER3> Really? You think people in Cuba come to the United States and marvel at what a backward society we have?

<comment><USER4> Scandinavians might think different?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> TLTR: Everyone driving faster than you is an idiot and everyone driving slower than you is a moron.</comment>


Open Source .NET three years later - <AUTHOR> http://www.mattwarren.org/2017/12/19/Open-Source-.Net-3-years-later <comment><USER2> What's holding .Net back is a lack of the vision thing. That's a shame, since in many ways it is a better designed framework, with a superior flagship language (C#) compared to the Java platform. Their framework and language designers are truly world-class, probably the best in the world.

The problem with .Net's vision has been painfully obvious to anyone following .Net over the years - it is still Windows First. While in Enterprises and Startups [1], Linux is what matters on the Server.

As an example, just last week I was looking for some http2 libraries in C#. Go and Java have mature libraries already in production, while .Net only supports http2 services on Windows. That in turn affects other ecosystems as well, such as gRPC Services. This to me is a red flag. Given how important something like http2 was going to be, how come Microsoft is so late to the party? What exactly is .Net's niche, given front-end wars are over?

Another example, the very promising CoreRT project ([https://github.com/dotnet/corert](https://github.com/dotnet/corert)) page says this about Linux: "Same as Windows, the libraries are less complete."

As a late comer, .Net faced an uphill climb. High-end web tooling is almost exclusively JVM based (Kafka, Cassandra, Elastic Search, Kibana etc). The upcoming competitor is Go, not .Net. If Microsoft doesn't pour a billion dollars into getting .Net ready for Linux in 2018, .Net is over.

[1] I've been a consultant to several Small and Medium sized businesses (especially in Medical) which predominantly use Windows and .Net, and that's still a huge market. But even they are looking to move off Windows.

<comment><USER3> The only thing that is holding .NET back is the significantly slower compilation speed when compared to Eclipse's incremental java compiler.

<comment><USER4> the resharper plugin to visual Studio or the rider ide will both do this. Only builds the projects required and doesn't need to build dependent projects unless a signature changed.

<comment><USER3> It's not comparable whatsoever to how much faster Java is. In Eclipse it basically compiles in the background right after saving a file so you never feel the impact of compilation.

<comment><USER5> you can do that in .net with the watch command [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/aspnet/core/tutorials/dotne...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/aspnet/core/tutorials/dotnet-watch)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Always confused that people talk about .Net as if it's failed on here, any time I look for employment in the UK there is a seemingly unlimited amount of high paying C# jobs available and it doesn't take long to get hired. Even my university taught in C# for the first year.

Net core is a slow moving project for sure, and it's not at a stage to use in production yet, but it'll get there and I look forward to further improvements made in 2018.

<comment><USER7> In the UK C# occupies the main enterprise language slot that Java does in America, that's why. Java just didn't get as far here. I remember in mid-2000s not being sure whether to learn Java or VB6/.Net, but a few years later I rarely saw Java jobs.

At least that's my impression from being on HN for the last decade, and working mainly in MS back-end languages in the UK.

The other one I never see mentioned in the UK is Oracle, I've only had Oracle mentioned to me IRL once, and that's because the local council is inexplicably moving from MS SQL to Oracle for reporting, but they're super incompetent.

<comment><USER8> Aahhh, thank you for stating this. I'm reading HN for only 1 year and half and couldn't figure out why Java seemed so present in conversation as I thought it was not spread that much.

I'm french and I only know one person who've been on the Java path, and he's not even working in France. I of course know companies working on Java, but not that much (not at all, if you except those working for Android) and suddenly it becomes crystal clear.

Thanks again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd like to switch away from Java in future applications, and C# seems like the top contender, but there are questions I'd really like answered before I make the switch.

I see a lot of people talking about Microsoft open-sourcing .NET Core. But as someone who's never used it, what _is_ .NET Core? And if .NET Core was open- sourced, what about the rest of it? Am I likely to run into major parts of the ecosystem that are still proprietary?

Also, can I develop and use C# applications on Linux without feeling like a second-class citizen? The ability to easily develop on Linux using free software and then run on my clients' Windows computers is one major reason I use Java at all, and I definitely won't switch to a language that doesn't support Linux properly.

And finally, how likely is Microsoft to fuck free software developers over with proprietary extensions in the future? This _is_ Microsoft we're talking about, after all.

<comment><USER10> > And finally, how likely is Microsoft to fuck free software developers over > with proprietary extensions in the future? This is Microsoft we're talking > about, after all.

There's a radical change in public behavior of Microsoft since Satya Nadella became CEO. While at first I was skeptical, it's now been three years we have had to observe whether Microsoft's actions match their promises.

So far, I'm impressed. I think their new vision and approach to doing business is much improved from that of their previous two CEOs - it's better for consumers and developers, and frankly it was necessary for the long term survival of MS.

I don't expect to see nasty behavior from them like we have seen in the past.

<comment><USER11> What about when the CEO changes?

<comment><USER12> Well, they could commit suicide and get a Ballmer clone.

They lost control of the client (it's web + Android/iOS now), steering away from the current course and back to the old one is a sure way to irrelevance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My 2c: I never had any interest in writing C# on the .NET platform until it was open-sourced and added first party-supported cross-platform support with the introduction of .NET Core.

Nowadays it's my favourite language I write in - it has _excellent_ tooling, especially JetBrains Rider IDE. The open-source library ecosystem might not be as broad as NodeJS or Ruby, but it's high quality and growing all the time.

<comment><USER14> Let me say something about the prejudice (mostly my own).

For most the late 80s-early 2000s, I was not a huge fan of Microsoft mostly because of their predatory practices and the shoddy quality of their software. But they had a few products that I thought were legitimately good, and Visual Studio (and the C# language) was one of them. Part of my admiration of it was partly because of Anders Heijlsberg, its architect.

I started my programming life with Borland tools (Turbo Pascal), and then later Delphi. Anders architected all of these tools. They are long in the tooth now but at the time, these tools were fairly well regarded because they reflected flair and good taste. When Anders created C#, I managed to look at it without being clouded by my Microsoft prejudice, because I knew who was behind it.

I started writing C# code a couple of years ago when I started working for a large enterprise. Even as a Linux/UNIX guy, I am able to say that C# is a truly elegant language that is fun to work with, and I would pick it over Java or Scala any day. I don't like its Windows centricity (Windows is still not my favorite platform), but outside of that, it is truly a well-architected language.

Silicon Valley types would do well to put aside their prejudices of the C# language and evaluate it based on its own merits.

<comment><USER15> C# is a great language and I love using it (especially compared to Java), but right now the Microsoft stack is prohibitively expensive compared to the common stacks for java, ruby, and python. .NET Core is a great step in the right direction, but it is going to be a long time before parity with other ecosystems is reached and unfortunately enjoying writing the code is way less important than having the libraries I need to interact with modern web technology.

<comment><USER16> What are you paying for with C#? Tooling including IDE is free, servers are typically free (unless you run IIS on windows) and databases are obviously the same as in any other stack. In an apples to apples comparison I can't see .NET coming in more expensive than java. The only thing that might be more expensive on Linux is if you need a better IDE than vs code - you'll have to pay for JetBrains Rider.

But good java IDEs aren't free either.

<comment><USER17> I'm pretty sure he meant windows, IIS and possibly the upgrade from headless to something with a gpu for windows ops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have given up on .NET for the most part. Wake me up when we are in Fedora's repos because until then, there are pieces that Microsoft hasn't (won't?) release that we need to get out of COPR.

The people of Dot Net Special Interest Group at Fedora are too nice to say this but I am not. Microsoft is dragging its feet and it is ridiculous.

<comment><USER19> .NET core seems to install and work fine on Fedora 27 using:

[https://www.microsoft.com/net/learn/get- started/linuxfedora](https://www.microsoft.com/net/learn/get- started/linuxfedora)

There were issues with Fedora 25 which is what I was previously running, but that resolved itself after I dnf upgraded to 27.

Or am I missing something here?

<comment><USER18> Fedora has strict guidelines that you have to meet to be included in the default repos. These packages don't meet them.

This indicates the project isn't free enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> .NET Framework is still closed source AFAIK. .NET Core is open source, but that's two different things. Moving existing applications from .NET Framework to .NET Core and running them on Linux is still troublesome (for example lack of proper ODBC support on .NET Core). Serialization between the two is often not possible or not easy (differences in byte layout). While I think .NET Core is better than nothing, it all has a long way to go, including MS-provided API dlls (like ADOMD, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER21> It's funny when Java devs mention that C# and .NET is a copy cat. The irony is the other way around , even though Java predates .NET , the same creator was then one that created Delphi which Java pretty much copy pasted not as elegantly. It's great to see Delphi being around and it's legacy continue through C# and .NET. The fact that Microsoft open sourced it brought a smile in my face. My Delphi days are over, nowadays I Code in Python, but .NET still feels like home.

<comment><USER22> It actually goes further back than that. Anders Hejlsberg created Turbo Pasacal, then Delphi.

However, the development of c# did follow the development of Java. C# is not really related to Delphi or Pascal other than they have the same author.

<comment><USER21> Not really, .NET is heavily tied to its IDE and winforms are very similar to VCL. Not to exclude the fact that Microsoft was already heavily copying Delphi way before .NET. Java is simply another programming language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I learned C# a while ago when started a project in the now defunct XNA. I loved how I felt like home when moving from Java bit with some really nice differences.

I thought that after open sourcing .Net the C# adoption outside the MS ecosystem would be wider by now, but I feel it's not the case. Or am I missing a trend I'm not aware of? (which is very likely too)

<comment><USER12> There is still wide resentment towards Microsoft, just go to /r/programming and check out threads about .Net, there's at least a few threads at the bottom going "EEE".

Plus dotnet core wasn't API stable until recently. I think we're still 1-2 years from mass adoption.

Also check @librexpr's comment above, there's a lot of confusion around.

<comment><USER7> It's still not really any where near finished is it?

I think they finally managed to get image manipulation in to replace the missing System.Drawing, but EF Core is still woefully half-finished.

The literally seem to have no clue about how people actually use their system and keep focusing on all the wrong things. Actually, it's more like some idealist programmers have become the core team instead of getting-it-done programmers, so it's all the latest fads instead of getting finished. The obsession with async isn't helping either, it makes the code so bad for no real-world performance gains.

My impression is they are moving super slowly and from the POV of an existing customer, the whole process has been a complete disaster. It might end up ok, but at the moment it's just a bad version of existing .Net.

<comment><USER24> Your paragraph about they "literally don't know how people use their system" seems obvious to me that you must be a 10x mega developer with insider knowledge. Idealist programmers, you're right! Async await offers NO benefits and was implemented in es6 as a mistake... probably corporate bullying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Link to the recording (slides and audio): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=garlskQb8BU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=garlskQb8BU)

<comment><USER26> Thanks, this is exactly what I've been looking for.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you don't want to watch through the whole thing I wrote a post the gives an outline, see [http://mattwarren.org/2017/11/14/Microsoft-and-Open- Source-a...](http://mattwarren.org/2017/11/14/Microsoft-and-Open-Source-a- Brave-New-World-CORESTART/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Being open source is good but outside of Windows it's still perceived as a Windows solution with bonus Linux support. I have yet to hear someone migrate from Java, Go, Node, Ruby ... to .NET in meetups I attend. Is open source .NET penetration on Linux any better than Mono?

</comment><comment><USER28>
       What exactly is .Net's niche, given front-end wars are over?

.NET works as an awesome back-end for Angular 2+

<comment><USER29> But so do most other programming languages and frameworks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Can we have a link to the actual talk please?

</comment><comment><USER30> Maybe because it hasn't been the most popular tech among open source developers .net is now a very effective tool for almost any kind of work. The choice of libraries and frameworks is smaller than in Java but quality is better and purpose more clear. You can pick a few core libraries and build on that instead of sifting through millions of half-done or incompatible frameworks. And if you don't demand that Windows is like Linux then it's quite decent OS. The only thing missing is good desktop UI framework, but nobody has a better solution now

</comment><comment><USER31> I am extremely impressed by Microsoft. I think Microsoft has proven the world that nothing is impossible. Once a hip tech company at the beginning of the computer era, then transitioned into an old, boring and outdated corp has now turned into one of the healthiest, most innovative, brave and genuinely nicest tech giants of our time again. What Microsoft has done and achieved in recent years is astonishing.

They played many years catch up and I think at the point when they realise they cannot do everything themselves and started to embrace the open source world they quickly moved from catching up to being the innovator who pushes new limits again (Azure, Surface devices, Window 10, .NET Core, etc.)

It's already a bit old, but I wrote a blog post not too long ago where I tried to sum up some of the amazing things that happened at Microsoft over the course of the last few years:

[https://dusted.codes/thank-you-microsoft-for-being- awesome](https://dusted.codes/thank-you-microsoft-for-being-awesome)

<comment><USER32> Literally none of these characterizations of Microsoft, past or present, resonate with me at all. Maybe the company has truly turned a new page, but I still mostly see them copying others' ideas and playing second string as a result. I'm glad they finally have some real OSS offerings but I don't yet see any as truly collaborative efforts which keeps them on the sidelines.

But, you know, hail corporate!</comment></comment>


Computing Pi using a needle and a sheet of paper - <AUTHOR> https://kayali.io/blog/computing-pi/ <comment><AUTHOR> Author here, feel free to let me know if anything can be improved about the simulation or the explanation.</comment>


Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2014/01/26/exclusive-google-to-buy-artificial-intelligence-startup-deepmind-for-400m/ <comment><USER3> I remember that they had an impressive demo at the NIPS Deep Learning Workshop in December (probably a highlight for me and a few people I talked to afterwards) of a reinforcement learning agent playing Atari 2600 Games where the input consisted of an image that was fed through a Convolutional Neural Network. There is a paper on Arxiv that describes the approach ("Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning"[0]) but unfortunately I don't think they made the videos available.

Deep Mind has a whole bunch of talented and serious people so this is an exciting acquisition.

[0] [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.5602v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.5602v1.pdf)

<comment><USER4> I actually read this paper a couple weeks ago as part of a deep learning reading group that I co-run. While several of these authors are household names in the RL community, this paper was not actually that impressive to me.

The only real "deep" learning here is that they used a GPU library and stochastic gradient descent to perform Q-learning updates on a network with 3 large hidden layers. It was an interesting application paper, but I suspect that the Google acquisition is for something more novel than this work.

<comment><USER5> This deep learning group you mentioned. May anyone join in?

<comment><USER4> Sorry, it's for UT Austin PhD students only.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, Google's list so far:

\- Some top ML talent: Geoffrey Hinton, Sebastian Thrun, Peter Norvig, Jeff Dean, Andrew Ng.

\- One of D-Wave's quantum computers to establish their 'Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab'.

\- Creepy robot maker Boston Dynamics.

\- A stack of other robotics companies: Schaft.inc, Industrial Perception, Redwood Robotics, Meka Robotics, Molomni, Bot & Dolly, Autofuss.

\- DeepMind, obviously.

Am I missing any?

<comment><USER7> Ray Kurzweil

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ohhh, did Google buy them? Or did the AI figure that the best place to launch world domination from was inside Google so it forged a letter from Larry and Sergey offering to acquire the company? :-)

<comment><USER9> Larry Page has been replaced by an android clone since the so called "throat operation". Don't you think it's a little weird that they've started buying all sorts of robot and AI companies lately to create the ultimate machine?

<comment><USER10> AI vs Aliens from Space vs Zombies!! The future is exciting!!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here's a talk the founder gave in 2010 for Singularity U about combining neuroscience and machine learning.

[http://vimeo.com/17513841](http://vimeo.com/17513841)

<comment><USER12> It seems that Google has now gone full Singularist. They jumped the shark when they hired Kurzweil.

<comment><USER13> I don't really understand the objective of those like Kurzweil. What do they see as the benefit of the singularity? Wouldn't a drastically more advanced intelligence just dwarf and dissolve any lesser intelligence that tried to meld with it? It would be complete ego death.

<comment><USER14> At best, a copy of you living in VR gets to live until the sun explodes. Which at least is better defined than "heaven".

<comment><USER15> Well, when you scratch the surface, it's not really any better defined than heaven. You're gonna have to spec out 'copy', 'you' and 'living'.

<comment><USER16> We have some ideas on how to make "copy" work, and what "you" and "living" is. We also know that we can in principle achieve it by our own strength as a civilization. We can see the path from "here" to "there". Which seems much better defined than heaven.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> $400M for a company I've never heard before is quite surprising. Could someone who participates in the machine learning community share any insights or facts they have on the company? Other than the founders' histories, the article doesn't do much justice to the pricetag.

<comment><USER18> As far as I can tell, quite a few ML people can vouch for someone at the company (I know someone there second-hand myself), but the details of what precisely they're doing have been kept fairly well under wraps. The broad parameters are "something to do with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)", which is a field that tries to straddle the fine line between contemporary AI and sci-fi AI, without erring too far in the direction of either too incrementalist to too pie-in-the-sky. More specifically on the "methods" side, they have people who are known in both statistical ML, and in the recent resurgence of neural-networks known as "deep learning".

You can discern some more about their general direction by looking at courses they've been involved with, talks they've given or sponsored, etc., but as far as I know (and I tried to probe a few months ago through a friend who knew someone there) their actual product / business / etc. hasn't really been leaked, or at least not leaked widely enough that I could find out about it.

<comment><USER17> This has seriously piqued my curiosity. Do you think Google bought the product or the team? $400M is a big chunk of change for ~3 people.

Edit: peaked --> piqued, thanks to spiderPig!

<comment><USER19> If the article is correct, they bought the team.

<comment><USER20> 400 millions for a 3 person startup that don't even have a proper web-site and is not in wikipedia seems crazy. But then again Google knows a little more about future value than me.

<comment><USER21> I think you're mixing up two types of acquisitions here.

There is a difference between Snapchat being worth $3 billion and Nest being worth $3 billion. The former gets the valuation based on users, the latter on talent and intellectual property.

Ditto here: $400 million is not buying you users, it's buying you raw talent and IP. Users can go off to another service in a blink of an eye - IP can't (talent _can_ , but you can often structure the deal so that it won't for some time).

This could still be a terrible deal (I'm sure there are some people at Google still a little sore over Motorola, where the IP was valued far more than it ended up being worth), but for very different reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> >The DeepMind-Google ethics board, which DeepMind pushed for..

Damn, if DeepMind had to 'push' for an ethics board then that is a fairly bad sign. I am getting more worried.

[0][https://www.theinformation.com/Google-beat-Facebook-For- Deep...](https://www.theinformation.com/Google-beat-Facebook-For-DeepMind- Creates-Ethics-Board)

<comment><USER23> At least _someone_ pushed for it. It's reassuring to hear that the thought was on the radar at all.

<comment><USER24> This is my thought as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> FYI, Shane Legg's theses was "Machine Super Intelligence". [http://www.vetta.org/publications/](http://www.vetta.org/publications/)

<comment><USER26> I'm really wondering where you have to go to grad-school for someone to approve a thesis that blatantly speculative.

<comment><USER27> I skimmed it and didn't think it was that bad - it's kind of interesting to see a thesis that allows reasonably informed speculation. I don't know enough about ML to say whether the core results are actually of any value.

The title is a bit much but it does say "The title of this thesis is deliberately provocative".

<comment><USER26> I didn't say "speculative" as a _bad_ thing. I meant it more with overtones of "brave" or "ballsy" or, let's just sum up, "heroic".

<comment><USER27> Ah yes - I did wonder if I had misinterpreted your comment after I posted mine... :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I know Shane Legg from his work with AIXI, the mathematical model of infinite general intelligence. That's some heavy hitters.

<comment><USER29> I worked with Shane at Ben Goertzel's company Webmind about 12 years ago - <USER2> good guy.

A little off topic, but I suspect that one reason to sell themselves to Google is Google's infrastructure, both in ability to easily run very large jobs and their very nice development environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The DeepMind website [1] links to cofounder Demis Hassabis' biography on Wikipedia [2]. Read it. This guy is a world-class hacker!

[1] [http://deepmind.com](http://deepmind.com)

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

<comment><USER31> He did the AI for Black & White? My respect for him has just increased by an order of magnitude. Black & White's creature AI was nothing short of amazing.

<comment><USER32> My second-hand impression is that Richard Evans is responsible for most of what actually shipped in the game's creature AI. As the Wikipedia article says, Demis only briefly held the title of Lead AI Programmer on the project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Apparently Facebook also tried to acquire DeepMind. [https://www.theinformation.com/Google-beat-Facebook-For- Deep...](https://www.theinformation.com/Google-beat-Facebook-For-DeepMind- Creates-Ethics-Board)

<comment><USER33> Also interesting that Google agreed to DeepMind's proposal to create an AI ethics board. Wonder how Facebook responded to that stipulation during negotiations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is Google drunk? Thats $4B in basically two weeks on unproven companies.

<comment><USER35> They have an assload of cash on hand and the singularity is coming at us like a freight train. I'd think they were drunk if they weren't snatching up everything relevant in sight.

<comment><USER36> _> They have an assload of cash on hand..._

I wonder if they managed to pay for DeepMind out of funds that are "stuck" offshore (i.e. earnings from outside the US that can't be repatriated without incurring a big tax bill).

<comment><USER7> Probably. Deepmind is a UK company based in London.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> There were a lot of pros a DeepMind. For example: Volodymyr Mnih, Andriy Mnih, Alex Graves, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Karol Gregor, Guillaume Desjardins, David Silver, and a bunch more I am forgetting.

</comment><comment><USER38> I recently watched the interview with Eric Schmidt on CNBC. In it they asked about the singularity (as good as any main stream finance oriented television show can). The key quote I took away from it (and sorry this is from memory) was "We've had the algorithms for AI for years, but the big difference between now, and in the past is we finally have the computer power for it".

My own speculation. One of the key concepts to come out of the experience of translation is "A billion is more than a million". When they thought they processed enough data, it still wasn't enough. They may be scaling that concept even larger. At the same time, quantum computers SHOULD be getting to the point where they pass classical computers, and its generally known that Google has had access to them.

If Roses law is true, I'd speculate that Google is ramping up to take advantage.

<comment><USER39> > At the same time, quantum computers SHOULD be getting to the point where > they pass classical computers, ...

Where exactly would they pass classical computer? Legitimate question.

Because I've read this ([http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1643](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1643)) today, which shows quantum computers probably will not be that much better at NP problems than classical ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I don't know anyone on the team, but Om Malik was not impressed and he's usually reliable:

[https://twitter.com/om/status/427653907766972416](https://twitter.com/om/status/427653907766972416)

> A $400 million talent acquisition with little talent. That's how Google > rolls now!

There's also word that it was more than $400m, perhaps as high as $500m. That's a lot for talent any way you slice it.

<comment><USER41> How is he qualified to judge ML talent? DeepMind wasn't just a 3 man team, Yann Lecun posted on G+ that 3 of his PhD students were on the team and I've heard that they were recruiting more people.

<comment><USER42> Exactly. Interesting, Yann LeCun in his G+ post ([https://plus.google.com/u/0/+YannLeCunPhD/posts/LnKBPi9cCWm](https://plus.google.com/u/0/+YannLeCunPhD/posts/LnKBPi9cCWm)) explicitly mentioned that the acquired ML scientists have been focused in reinforcement learning. Also, they have published ArXiv paper on the subject: [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.5602v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.5602v1.pdf).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I can't believe that they would pay $400M for a company without getting something more than just talent. They must have created something very impressive that will be able to plug into the Borg.

<comment><USER44> look how much facebook paid for instagram.

<comment><USER45> If instagram decided to create a couple of features more.. that would be a real threat to facebook as the #1 social network..

With a lot of money to spend.. this was a good move.

Acquisitions can also serve to kill the competition

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Did anybody else read this as "Goodbye Articial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M"?

      Google to Buy
       Google Buy
         GooBuy ~ Goodbye

<comment><USER47> Upvoted but disagree on behalf of Youtube, Android, Keyhole, etc.

Some exist independently, others are absorbed.

<comment><USER48> To be fair, Youtube could have been so much more. For example they recently removed the video response feature while claiming the click-through rate was abysmal - it probably was because the focus of Youtube is more like "Newtube". TV now means on demand and broadcast via internet/web, simple and boring as that.

<comment><USER47> Youtube would have died by itself.

Or imagine what Yahoo would have done to it post acquisition.

I know Apple would have called at iTube & put a price tag of $0.99 on all decent ones :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I've met one of the founders a while ago. pretty smart people, but it seems to me that the whole purpose of silicon valley is advertising. not a world I want to live in. google establishing an ethics committee for proper AI? give me a break, we know how well that works.

</comment><comment><USER50> A search on arxiv for DeepMind[1] finds that in the last months they have been publishing some first-class stuff.

[1] [http://search.arxiv.org:8081/?query=DeepMind&in=](http://search.arxiv.org:8081/?query=DeepMind&in=)

</comment><comment><USER51> Google ∩ Nest ∩ Boston Dynamics ∩ Ray Kurzweil ∩ Andrew Ng ∩ DeepMind = Domestic Robot?

<comment><USER39> = attempt of implementation of sci-fi sounding idea that will be rewarded even if it fails.

It's is good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Dang. $400million sounds like a lot for landing page. Only kidding. Best of luck to those guys. They sound very talented.

<comment><USER53> Extracting millions out of acquirees should be done with the least possible investment. Seriously, if you can rook 'em in some way that can't blow back, go for it.

<comment><USER52> I don't know what this means. I understand the individual words....but not the meaning of your post

<comment><USER54> They're saying that they think Google was conned - or at least manipulated into a higher price than the company is worth.

This is the Internet, so I'm sure this random opinion is both well-informed and valid.

<comment><USER52> Ahh I see. Thanks. I trust him. Nobody knows best like an anonymous stranger on the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Programmers might be one of the unfortunate firsts that can be replaced by AI! No programming at all everything self programs itself!

<comment><USER55> Visual programming ala Yahoo Pipes, with the computer creating the code itself in the background. Would be pretty cool...

<comment><USER10> And then, programmers will be like john carmack, building spaceships and rockets, while the computer does its job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> The missing piece for Google to become Skynet?

<comment><USER57> Robotics companies and now AI companies, Google seems to have much higher ambitions than the internet. May be they watching too many sci-fi movies in their 20% time. :)

<comment><USER58> When you have the capability to achieve dreams as immense as Google can, it's best to reach for the most powerful dreams possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I am jealous: working on AI _and_ getting rich.

</comment><comment><USER60> Well, Vicarious is still independent... [http://vicarious.com/](http://vicarious.com/)

</comment><comment><USER61> Agh! Crap! I almost got a job with them!

<comment><USER62> I feel sorry for you :(. Are you a developer or a scientist?

<comment><USER61> I am a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. I generally bill myself as the "&" in R&D, bridging the gap between academic researchers & mathematicians and mainstream software engineering. I.e. I can do a bit of classifier design, but most of my focus tends to be on build systems, automated test systems, parameter tuning, data quality monitoring and all the nuts-and-bolts stuff that most researchers don't want to be bothered with. I am way too OCD to spend my day producing "research quality" code, and too wary of BS for my output to be just research reports and academic papers. I prefer shipping product, if you know what I mean?

I lost interest in DeepMind when I could not figure out what their business was after a couple of interviews. (The startup that I was previously working for had just run out of money). More fool me. Heh.

<comment><USER63> What impression did they give you during the interviews? In retrospect, do you think that was their whole goal, to get acquihired by Google?

<comment><USER61> Yes, in retrospect, I think that was the goal. They were interested in me for work on their machine vision product (my area of expertise), but the spiel was very much around how they had built up one of the world's best machine learning research groups. Over the years I have seen many great academics fail to produce much commercially, so perhaps I was less impressed with that than I should have been. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> So Deepmind $400M but Snapchat $4Billion? So Google thinks Snapchat is more important?

<comment><USER6> Not more important, more profitable. DeepMind is an investment, SnapChat is a revenue raiser. And a big ball of users to foist G+ on.

<comment><USER65> consider also that it's not only Google's opinion that affects the price tag.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> The price seems quite low, goes to show how bad most technologists are at bargaining.

</comment><comment><USER66> Can someone shed some light on the reasoning behind paying 3.2 billion for Nest (thermostats) and only 400 million for DeepMind (artificial intelligence). Is it really that Nest was a consumer, revenue positive company?

<comment><USER67> Well, if you keep in mind that Google's game is data collection, it makes sense that a product that will give them an even more detailed look into the life of people will help them monetize that somehow at somepoint. (I have been doing lots of macro level SEO research lately and have come to the conclusion that Google is getting ready to make some big moves in the near future.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> DeepMind seems awfully close to DeepThought - maybe its $400m for the answer to life, the universe and everything? Would seem to be a good deal on those terms..

</comment><comment><USER69> So does anyone know what they actually do in more detail?

<comment><USER53> [https://angel.co/deepmind-technologies-limited](https://angel.co/deepmind- technologies-limited)

Looks like PayPal (tm) mafia extended family.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> How do you know if you are talented enough to pursue an intricate field like Artificial Intelligence? Or is it merely a lot of hard work?

<comment><USER62> Pick a camp: symbolic or sub-symbolic. If latter then do a neuroscience degree along with a computer science degree. Get an insight while experimenting with biological brain. Make a start-up that capitalizes on your new idea.

<comment><USER70> Getting 2 degrees sounds like way too much work. How about reading a plenty of books and research papers?

What do you mean by symbolic or sub-symbolic?

<comment><USER62> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence#Symboli...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence#Symbolic)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence#Sub- sym...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence#Sub-symbolic)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Video Games with Emergent AI, and Machine learning will be next mainstream AI thing. Academic AI and Game AI might somewhat merge...

</comment><comment><USER71> How do we know it was 400M?

</comment><comment><USER72> Machine learning and big data startups will strike it rich in 2014!

<comment><USER62> You mean those start-ups that were founded long enough to be one of the first to capitalize on these ideas? Like DeepMind that was founded in 2011?

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> AI and robotics... I for one am excited.

</comment><comment><USER39> The question is, what is Google going to do with all these robotics and AI companies? And please no singularity/skynet/robot uprising BS, I'm expecting more from HN than youtube level comments.

<comment><USER16> Singularity is not BS, and I'm pretty sure they want to make it happen. It would be a shame if Google wanted all this AI talent to improve ad revenue or just for self-driving cars. I for one hope they are not that short-sighted. I think, hope, that with "all these robotics and AI companies", they literally want to build the future of mankind.

<comment><USER39> Singularity is BS because there's no such thing as "machine surpassing human intelligence". Human intelligence is not a one dimensional measurement that can be "surpassed". There's not much challenge to write AI that surpasses all humans in IQ tests. You can't even say if one human surpassed other human in intelligence, how are you gonna measure machine? In the same way every one of us are intelligent in some specific areas, AIs are and will be intelligent in their own. We, humans, only have many things in common, because we all have the same body, that makes us to have the same physical needs and what results in relatable experiences that we call "common sense". If we, you an I, didn't have same types of bodies, even if we both could speak english, we could barely understand each other. That's why there will never be a point where AI will become "unpredictable". It's just pop culture meme for people that don't want to think it through the details, sitting in the same page with UFO, spirits and other _I want to believe_ crap.

<comment><USER74> > You can't even say if one human surpassed other human in intelligence, how > are you gonna measure machine?

It's not because something is difficult to measure that it does not exist(1). Even if you don't believe in IQ tests, you gotta admit that those people Google just hired are more intelligent than the average Joe. They sure are more intelligent than me anyway. Probably more intelligent than you as well.

In the same way, the idea that one day a machine could be more intelligent than any human being would be very real the day a machine will write scientific papers, program its own code, design high-tech devices, win a Nobel price and stuff like that.

This machine would be more intelligent than Demis Hassabis (the founder of DeepMind) for exactly the same reasons that I can say that Demis Hassabis is more intelligent than me: he does more intelligent things.

1: for example, the famous conundrum "how long is the coast of Britain?" does not suggest that Britain has no coast.

<comment><USER39> > It's not because something is difficult to measure that it does not > exist(1).

No, I don't say that it doesn't exists. What I say is that intelligence is not something to be expressed in one number, it doesn't work that way. Intelligence is more like NxN matrix of numbers, where each number in a matrix represent individual skill in some specific task. As for your example of Google employee and average Joe, what you mean by more intelligent is that the sum of all of that NxN matrix number for that employee is larger than of the average Joe. However if you take some particular numbers, Joe might still have them higher. For the simplest example the average Joe will know his house better than the Google employee who hasn't even been at Joe's house. And the same is for AI, just the number of that supposed intelligence matrix will be completely different than that of human. AI without human body, human body needs and without hormones to control his behavior will never be anything like human to be compared to them.

So in the end what you say I also think is true, especially about machines writing scientific papers and generally doing science already out of grasp for human mind. My problem I guess is the measurement problem.

If someone would say "singularity will be when machines will manipulate mathematical concepts and invent/discover and prove theorems that no human mathematician alive can understand" I would agree. But if they say "machine is more intelligent than any human" I can't agree. That statement makes as much sense as statement "singularity will be when apples will be more fruit than any banana".

<comment><USER16> > _What I say is that intelligence is not something to be expressed in one > number, it doesn 't work that way._

But nobody in the singularity field says that intelligence is one-dimensional quality! It's a strawman.

It reminds me of a common accusation that "computer people" have subpar worldview because they "reason in 0s and 1s, and the world is not binary", to which I say that actually "computer people"'s view is superior because they figured that out long ago and developed proper methods to quantify and deal with uncertainty.

> _Intelligence is more like NxN matrix of numbers, where each number in a > matrix represent individual skill in some specific task._

This is also not a good model, because what we usually mean by intelligence are reasoning capabilities, not e.g. motor skills. You don't say about a surgeon that he is smart, because he can manipulate a blade with great precision; we say he's exceptionally skilled.

> _For the simplest example the average Joe will know his house better than > the Google employee who hasn 't even been at Joe's house._

Put Average Joe and Google Employee a house they have never seen before and see which one will learn how to navigate faster - that's a way to measure intelligence. Not the knowledge, but the ability to process and use it.

> _If someone would say "singularity will be when machines will manipulate > mathematical concepts and invent/discover and prove theorems that no human > mathematician alive can understand" I would agree. But if they say "machine > is more intelligent than any human" I can't agree._

Saying "machine more intelligent than human" is just a shortcut for saying "machine that is able to reason about the world faster, better, with less biases than human; which will manipulate mental concepts and prove theorems out of reach for humans, as well as invent better technology, tackle human social problems better than humans do, etc. etd.".

<comment><USER39> > This is also not a good model, because what we usually mean by intelligence > are reasoning capabilities, not e.g. motor skills.

Yes, the model is not good, I agree. But your understanding of intelligence incorrectly. You think that intelligence is a rate of learning. Or in neuroscience terms, brain plasticity. So, first, plasticity is largest at birth and gradually decreases as brain matures. This means that newborn would be "more intelligent" than 50yo man. Secondly, a fast rate of learning is not necessarily a good thing. If you ever worked with neural networks, you'd know that when training it, you can adjust at what rate the weights in artificial neurons would change. If you make fast rate, for one, network quickly overlearns, meaning he becomes too specialized and adjusted to exact cases he experienced, and secondly, it can quickly "forget" what he has learned. Slow learning rate makes it longer to learn, but also is more "stubborn" and doesn't give of on old beliefs so easily either.

On the other hand, as you said, knowledge also does not mean intelligence. If it cannot learn from it's mistakes, it is surely not intelligent. So I'd say intelligence is a combination of experience and plasticity.

> Saying "machine more intelligent than human" is just a shortcut for saying > "machine that is able to reason about the world faster, better, with less > biases than human; which will manipulate mental concepts and prove theorems > out of reach for humans, as well as invent better technology, tackle human > social problems better than humans do, etc. etd.".

So in the other words machine becoming more proficient in some very specific skill or multiple skills. Yes, that is common sense.

It's not that I disagree with the core idea of singularity, I just find it pointless and unnecessary. Some might say "it brings attention to the field", but I'm not really sure it helps AI research, since it attracts the wrong kind of people that would make actual research.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> I watched a fascinating documentary about DeepMind's most popular product:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QRvTv_tpw0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QRvTv_tpw0)</comment>


Ask HN: Google Play Music is going away. What will you replace it with? - <AUTHOR> I need to upload my own music files to a cloud so that I can access them from a mobile phone o Sonos. What is a good free replacement of Google Play Music? <comment><USER2> Ever since Rdio got acquired I haven't bothered to get a paid streaming service. I just listen to music on YouTube and the algorithm curates a 'My Mix' list.

</comment><comment><USER3> Also interested to hear the options.</comment>


Why is C++ code faster than handwritten assembly for testing Collatz conjecture? - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.com/q/40354978/563941 <comment><USER2> I remember hand-optimizing my code many years ago trying to re-use the same variable for many things, because it would be more efficient. I always think about that when I see people avoiding std::vector or other C++ standard library things. Thankfully, as soon as people really understand how things are implemented they start using the standard libraries and suddenly become way more productive.</comment>


OpenCompany by Steve Coast is hilarious capitalist cosplay (scroll down) - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/237731198/16841593?token=1f0d5da4 <comment><AUTHOR> Here's his blog post about it: [http://stevecoast.com/2015/09/15/open- company/](http://stevecoast.com/2015/09/15/open-company/)</comment>


LinkedIn is looking for a Senior Punch Card Programmer - <AUTHOR> http://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/13095313 <comment><USER2> An amusing April Fool's joke from LinkedIn. We all know they don't use anything that up-to-date there.</comment>


Facebook Facelift - <AUTHOR> http://deface.xyz/

<comment><USER2> This is pretty well done, just tried this out and being a minimalist myself, I think the author has done a great job with this. Going to keep this installed.</comment>