Matrix Calculus for Deep Learning - <AUTHOR> https://explained.ai/matrix-calculus/index.html <comment><USER4> I'm in favor of there being more and better resources to learn anything out there, but every time I see a deep learning 101 type material all I can think is "who is this for?".

In ~July 2016 I was at a presentation by NVidia at GW in DC. They showed off how easy it was to build out and train a model using some of their tooling (Digits maybe?). After the demo they opened it up for questions and a grad student 'asked' "You just did in 10 mins with 30 lines of code what I worked on for an entire semester".

That's been the trajectory of the tools and increasing abstraction in this space. It's just getting easier and easier to build models that work (which is great), and it gets easier and easier to do so without knowing more than an extremely high level overview of the math behind it all.

So while this looks like a great resource - who's it for?

For jobs/problems that need you to have a thorough understanding of the math and theory behind the networks this isn't going to cut it.

For jobs/problems that need you to get something working math or not - <USER2> likely isn't necessary to get started.

So it's for people that have been getting into DL but also haven't bothered or needed to look up the math concepts?

<comment><USER5> > So while this looks like a great resource - who's it for?

I give you an analogy. Electricity. Who needs to know complex numbers and differential equations to understand electricity? Technician, civil engineer, scientist or research engineer?

Technician who just wires the house don't need math. They just read the wiring instructions and follow standard practices. Nvidia boasts about the tools it builds for 'ML technicians' in this analogy.

You need to know math if you are building new architectures and applying complex models for something nontrivial. It's not going to work first time and you need to know what's going on. Even if you are the 'civil engineer' in this analogy you should be able to read the math and understand it even if you don't do the math by yourself. You won't be able to do literary research and learn new stuff if you can't read math fluently.

If you are programmer who is given ML tools to implement something someone else designed and understand you don't need this or use existing models, you don't need this. Your career might benefit from knowing it but you can manage without.

<comment><USER6> I believe the OP's point was that the math described in the article is too simple and not enough to do any serious research. Anyone who attempts to do NN research already knows this material (and a lot more). This tutorial could be useful to someone who wanted to implement simple backprop from scratch, but all DL libraries already do it automatically. Someone who just wants to learn a bit about NNs to classify images or generate text does not need to know this, and someone who wants to make a breakthrough in NN theory already knows it. So yes it's not very clear who is the target audience here. I'm guessing it's for a bright highschooler who just learned calculus and who is interested in how NNs work. For such students I'd recommend reading [http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com](http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com) instead.

<comment><USER7> But someone who wants to contribute to the research doesn't just have this knowledge pop into their mind out of nowhere. They're going to learn it from somewhere and what's wrong with one more resource to help out with that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am very impressed with the clarity of presentation here. I usually link to The Matrix Cookbook[1] when I need to cite a reference for matrix calculus theorems but I might reference this instead in the future. I particularly like the section on the vector chain rule (which is very clear) and the section on element-wise operations (which uses novel notation to present many results in a compact form.)

[1]: [https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~hwolkowi/matrixcookbook.pdf](https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~hwolkowi/matrixcookbook.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER9> A genuine question: is there any math behind ML at all? For example, is there any solid theory, with proven theorems, that would tell us what happens when we add another conv layer here or use a 3x3 conv kernel instead of a 2x2 one over there, or replace that tanh with a relu? From my limited understanding, ML roughly works like this: we shuffle around the ML graph, using some intuition, off-load it to a cluster of GPUs that costs $10k/hour, feed it a dataset with 1 billion images and see what happens; but nobody can predict the behavior of training or convergence or accuracy based on the ML graph and data alone.

<comment><USER10> Of course there is. All the building blocks that people are mix and matching in networks nowadays were introduced at some point.

The paper that introduced batch norm, adaptive instance norm, attention heads, or any module used in a network have an extensive discussion of the motivation for their existance, some derivation or proof that they do what you want, and an empirical test to show it helps in practice. The reason some losses allow GANs to converge in certain situations while others don't isn't a complete mystery, there is theory that supports this.

Researchers designing new models are considering weak points in old approaches, identifying why they aren't working correctly, and proposing something new that solves a part of the problem. All of this is done by looking at the math behind all the operations in the network (or at least the parts relevant to a certain question).

That nobody really knows how AI works is one of those myths told by the media. Just because the model weights aren't interprable doesn't mean we don't know why that model works well. It just takes quite a bit of maths knowledge to really understand state of the art models. All that knowledge is also easily packaged into modern frameworks that make it easy to use without a deep knowledge of why it works. All of this contributes to the feeling that nobody really knows what's going on, while in reality it's onky the majority of people that don't know what's going on ;)

<comment><USER6> _nobody really knows how AI works is one of those myths told by the media_

It's not a myth. No one really understands how neural networks work. We don't know why a particular model works well. Or why any model works well. For example no one can answer why NNs generalize so well even when they have enough learning capacity to memorize all training examples. We can guess, but we don't know for sure. Most of the proofs you see in papers are there as fillers, so that papers seem more convincing. We rarely can prove anything mathematically about NNs that has any practical value or leads to any breakthroughs in understanding.

If we did really understand how NNs work, then we wouldn't need to do expensive hyperparameter searches - we would have a way to determine the optimal ones given a particular architecture and training data. And we wouldn't need to do expensive architecture searches, yet the best of the latest convnets have been found through NAS (e.g. EfficientNet), and there's very little math involved in the process - it's pretty much just random search.

Funny you mentioned the batchnorm paper - we still don't know why batchnorm is so effective - the paper gave an explanation (covariate shift reduction) which later was shown to be wrong (batchnorm does not reduce it), then several other explanations were suggested (smoother loss surface, easier gradient flow, etc), but we still don't know for sure. Pretty much every good idea in NN field is a result of lots of experimentation, good intuition developed in the process, looking at how a brain does it, and practical constraints. And yes, sometimes we're looking at the equations, and thinking hard, and sometimes we see a better way to do stuff. But usually it starts with empirical tests, and if successful, some math is used in the attempt to explain things. Not the other way around.

NNs are currently at a similar point as where physics was before Newton and before calculus.

<comment><USER11> > NNs are currently at a similar point as where physics was before Newton and > before calculus.

I'm more inclined to compare with the era after Newton and Leibniz, but prior to the development of rigorous analysis. If you look at this time period, the analogy fits a bit better IMO -- you have a proliferation of people using calculus techniques to great advantage for solving practical problems, but no real foundations propping the whole thing up (e.g., no definition of a limit, continuity, notions of how to deal with infinite series, etc.).

<comment><USER6> Maybe. On the other hand, maybe a rigorous mathematical analysis of NNs is as useful as a rigorous mathematical analysis of computer architectures - <USER3> very useful. Maybe all you need is just to keep scaling it up, adding some clever optimizations in the process (none of the great CPU ideas like caches, pipelining, out of order execution, branch prediction, etc came from rigorous mathematical analysis).

Or maybe it's as useful as a rigorous mathematical analysis of a brain - again, not very useful, because for us (people who develop AI systems), it would be far more valuable to understand a brain on a circuit level, or an architecture level, rather than on a mathematical theory level. The latter would be interesting, but probably too complex to be useful, while the former would most likely lead to dramatic breakthroughs in terms of performance and capabilities of the AI systems.

So maybe we just need to keep doing what we have been doing in DL field in the last 10 years - trying/revisiting various ideas, scaling them up, and evolving the architectures the same way we've been evolving our computers for the last 100 years, with the hope there will be more clues from neuroscience. I think we just need more ideas like transformers, capsules, or neural Turing machines, and computers that are getting ~20% faster every year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If anybody want to read the real stuff then here is the reference: Matrix Computations [https://www.cs.cornell.edu/cv/Books/GVL/index.htm](https://www.cs.cornell.edu/cv/Books/GVL/index.htm)

<comment><USER13> The book by Golub (RIP) and Van Loan goes way beyond what's discussed here (SVD, QR decomposition, eigenvalue computations, iterative solvers, error analysis, etc.), and it's focused more on (numeric) linear algebra rather than calculus.</comment></comment>


Why brilliant people lose their touch - <AUTHOR> http://timharford.com/2019/06/why-brilliant-people-lose-their-touch/ <comment><USER2> Working a lot, especially on one thing, makes us stupid, I think.

Although I was emotionally immature until ~25 years old, I actually believe that I was more intelligent and knowledgeable in my youth. Because I didn't have to work for a living, I could spend more time meddling in various subjects and activities. I never got particularly good at anything except programming and native plant identification, but I had more opinions on subjects with the absorbed knowledge to back up my thoughts.

These days, I have little time for anything else besides programming for a Fortune 100 company and searching for other means of supplementary income. I feel like my intelligence has been reduced to the next lowest standard deviation; the most I seem to be able to understand about anything that society deems important is at the periphery of the big picture. Good luck getting me to remember all the names of the political crooks I used to know like the back of my hand.

Worse yet, _I 'm not as good at my career_, either. I think I was a better programmer when I was working for peanuts but doing equally complicated things.

I'm not saying that I'm brilliant, by any stretch of the imagination, but I think that people, brilliant or not, can "lose their touch" both because people _simply change_ and because focusing on one thing for too long cuts loose the neural pathways that we took for granted when we could afford to make connections between all sorts of ideas at a time in our lives when _the stakes were low_. If this isn't a form of actual brain damage, it certainly seems like it to me.

And I'm not burned out, as far as I'm aware. I just _suck_ more than I used to, and I do think that's the result of becoming a "subject idiot".

<comment><USER3> I can identify with the feeling. Thinking back on the period of my late teens and early 20s, I had a lot of strong opinions on things. And I'd read about them. I could call upon information on those topics. I could cite the source where I read it.

In my mid-30s, I'm much less confident about just about everything. I still have some medium to strong opinions, but I've been wrong enough times about things I was _sure_ about that it's just hard to hold such strong views on things having only read it in a book or two.

There are a couple of differences between your experience and mine though, I think. The first is that I'm about to finish my PhD and have a great deal more expertise than I did in my early 20s. So as my expertise has grown, my certainty in many things, especially those outside my field has diminished. This is largely because I realize just how much more depth most fields of knowledge have and just how much is required to really hold an informed opinion.

I also deal with a fair number of young people, college students in my department and in other contexts. I recognize some of the same certainty and optimism I used to have at their age, and I hear some of the same opinions I used to hold on such things as vegetarianism, government systems, and economic policy. I remember having those beliefs, and talking to these young adults, it's striking just how little evidence their certainty rests on. It's worse inside my field, where students come in with their "great idea" having done no research and spent all of about 5 minutes really thinking through the ramifications of their idea, but that same certainty and optimism is there.

I often wish I was as idealistic and energetic as I was 15 years ago. But I wouldn't trade it for the naive surface-level thinking that went along with it. I like seeing the depth in the world too much, even when it shows just how shallow my thinking is in most areas, and even if it means that in most areas of life I'm forced to constantly face my uncertainty and lack of expertise.

Anyway, I hope that was at least a little bit helpful.

<comment><USER4> When you are younger your learning rate of change is higher but you also don't necessarily know what you don't know. As you get older you start to appreciate that things are more complicated than they first appear. In school everything that you learn (besides learning how to learn) is already known. Mastery gives you confidence to approach the unknown which is life outside of formal education.

<comment><USER5> Mastery has been an incredible and incredibly humbling journey.

I'm not so bold as to propose I'm a master yet, but I've definitely hit a patch of "these problems are plaguing the industry and lots of smarter people have not managed to fully solve them yet."

What's been fascinating is I now have sufficient perspective to have thoughts and hypothesis of how to approach solving them, but the experience to have a sense of where I'll likely hit walls.

In the case of business it gets interesting because in many cases, if these problems have been solved, there's vested interests in making sure nobody else finds out how you did it, so these may actually be solved by some companies already and I'll never know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We rarely know exactly why a thing works. This is part of why successful businesses are scared of change: They may break a thing they didn't know mattered and have no means to figure out what went wrong.

There's a story of a sausage business that built a new factory further north in town. A long time employee retired rather than make the longer commute.

After the move, their sausages lost some of their unique characteristics that had made them so successful. They were baffled and didn't know what went wrong.

One day, people were reminiscing about the good old days and began talking about the guy that retired. It had been his job to move the sausages from one area of the building to another.

With talking about it, they realized it had taken him like 30 minutes to do this and they had inadvertently eliminated this stage in the more efficiently designed new factory. They added a holding room or warming room and, voila, their sausages resumed having the characteristics that made them so popular.

I also love stories about bands that break up and later get back together after discovering that none of the individual musicians can capture the magic the band had. Or even stories where one particular band member rocketed to success and the others didn't.

I just love these examples of how changing conditions can cast light on who the real talent was or where the real magic was. It often isn't what people thought before the change.

<comment><USER7> For this sort of thing, I really enjoyed Scott Alexander's review of The Secret Of Our Success ([https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the- secret...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of- our-success/)), which contains lots of examples of how culture came to solve problems. Manioc is the big example from that article: when manioc was taken over to Africa as a cheap food, the corresponding culture was not taken with it, with the result that millions of Africans started showing the symptoms of cyanide poisoning twenty years later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is related to the general "is it luck or is it skill" question: At the broadest scales, luck increasingly explains every factor of experience. But in the everyday situation you can always point to factors of skill, until you get down to the most raw performance indicators of speed, strength, reflexes, etc.: then it becomes luck, unless you have a way of training those things, improving them with nutrition, pharmaceuticals etc. And then it becomes skill again, until you are limited by stuff inherent to a human body, and then it could be luck that you have long swimmer arms or bodybuilder genetics. You can then switch to considering mechanical assistance and developing original inventions, and now you are considering mental performance. It goes on and on like that.

The most practical thing I've found to do, in light of this problem, is to focus on developing better feedback: success and failure signals for each problem that you can use to summarize how you are doing. Then the skill/luck question becomes less reliant on external comparison and more on inner growth - hence more in control, more skill-driven.

But as a society our measures are mostly external. If someone succeeds, that's all we see.

<comment><USER9> As to luck there's an old saying that I really like: the harder I work the luckier I get.

How I interpret this it that working hard increases your skills. If you are more skillful you are more able to take advantage of lucky situations you have. We all have lucky situations, some more than others (we can even say privilege plays a large role here). But here's the thing, if you don't have the skills to take advantage of these situations then they are useless.

Let's make up an egregious example. Let's say you are working on battery powered rockets that use AI. If you one day meet Elon Musk at your local grocery store and somehow strike up a conversation then he's probably going to be very interested in you and your background. He'll probably try to keep in contact with you and maybe offer you a job. Now let's consider without the skill. Well you met Elon Musk which is pretty cool, but you're probably not going to get a job.

It isn't so much luck vs skill, but the combination of the two. I would be willing to bet that there is not a single millionaire (yes, that low) that can't chalk up a significant portion of their wealth to something that others would consider luck. Such as family/friend's connections, stumbling into a situation, taking jobs that lead to other jobs in the right way, etc (this is why the specific wording of the previous sentence. Because most don't notice these kinds of things and when looking from the inside we notice the skill part and not the luck. Because we did in fact work hard, and you know... Human psychology)

<comment><USER10> I think it's a myth that a person can choose whether or not they're a hard worker. It's most likely a matter of neurochemistry far beyond conscious control.

<comment><USER9> This is entirely a defeatist mentality. I don't think there is any evidence to show that neurochemistry causes determinism, which is essentially what you are suggesting.

But let's assume it is true (which I don't think it is). Is it mentally healthy to go around saying "well fuck it, I'm just this way because I was born this way".

I do believe you can change yourself. Neurochemistry definitely plays a role in your ability to (luck). But having this defeatist mentality means you'll never attempt it. I would even argue that this comment should hint at some evolutionary benefit of getting down trodden.

<comment><USER11> Exactly. I choose to believe I can control my own behavior, and that belief undeniably affects my actual behavior. Now some Determinist comes along and says I didn't really make that choice, it was destiny. Well, okay, whatever you say dude; but the fact that I believe it is still in play.

I don't see what the value in denying free will is. Fascinating sophomore debate? Yes. Gonna help you survive and thrive on this planet? No.

<comment><USER10> I feel like this is saying you're a Christian because religion is useful regardless of whether it's true. That's cool man, I'm not here to yuck your yum.

<comment><USER11> Sure, but all analogies are flawed. Yours is not as offensive to me as you might have hoped because I'm agnostic. But I can also flip it on its head:

The problem with religion comes when it's used as a justification for horrible acts—just like one might use the lack of free will to justify horrible acts.

<comment><USER10> Sorry, I genuinely wasn't trying to offend you, though I can see why it came off that way. I just meant to convey I'm not on some mission to convince people of anything. If it's helpful or makes people feel good to believe in free will, that's good enough for me. Even if I were 100% sure of there was no robust free will, I wouldn't be interested in changing people's minds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've written about some of the brilliant people I know who suffered at least one episode of burnout:

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

As I've gone through my 30s and 40s, I've been surprised at how many of my friends have suffered some kind of burnout. In fact, between the ages of 15 and 45, I would say that everyone I know personally has had at least one bad year. Back when I was in school, it seemed like some people were reliably happy, and other people were reliably depressed. And yes, many of those personality traits turned out to be consistent over several decades. But it was a surprise to realize that even the happiest people could fall into a dark spot. Some people are highly resilient, but no one is infinitely resilient.

Depression can end your career, end your marriage, and end your life. But long before most people find themselves facing a serious depression, they typically pass through an earlier stage, more mild and more subtle. What if we could all catch ourselves at that earlier stage?

I'm talking about burnout. Perhaps we can think of it as the mildest form of depression, or a mid-point between true mental health and outright depression. How do we identify something so subtle? Specific anecdotes are useful, because people need to be able to hear a story similar to what they are going through.

[http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/burnout-is- universal-...](http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/burnout-is-universal- but-the-right-kind-of-sleep-food-and-exercise-helps)

<comment><USER13> I don't see it that way. I have been severely burned-out, and will never let _that_ happen again. I have also been visited by the Black Dog. They are different. Perhaps both present in some people, so maybe hard to tease apart.

The cure for burn out is to cut out any activities that do not bring personal joy and satisfaction. (My burn-out was cured by a few months off pursuing my hobbies. Yes, I was lucky to have that option.) The thing about depression is that nothing brings joy or satisfaction. Burn-out and depression are orthogonal. But IMO you must cure depression first, before trying to address burn out, if both are present.

<comment><USER14> > The cure for burn out is to cut out any activities that do not bring > personal joy and satisfaction.

That, and giving yourself a series of small tasks, each of which you can complete easily. That feeling of satisfaction that you obtain by completing these small tasks quickly turns into your emotional ability to complete bigger and bigger tasks, and before you know it, you're back on the horse. It's amazing how effective this is, it's been documented here before too. I'll see if I can dig out where I first read this.

<comment><USER15> I have an acquaintance who works from home.

He recently told me that every time he feels like he's losing his motivation and starts to fall into negativity, he goes to the kitchen and does the dishes.

He considers this time to be part of his work day.

By the time he has washed the dishes, the sense of accomplishment is back.

What I take from this anecdote is that the brain does not distinguish that washing something is not part of building a web application. It is simply content to have cleaned multiple objects and then have completed a complex task.

<comment><USER16> This is what I learned/intuited/assumed (?) to be the practical value of raking the gravel in a zen garden. It's not the effect, it's the process.

I've also assumed that this was the moral of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance though I've never read it.

(I have my own rituals.)

[0] Not mentioned on the Wikipedia page: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_rock_garden](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_rock_garden)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A fourth reason could be psychological. Being expected to win can be a huge burden. It's much easier to be the underdog.

</comment><comment> slushy-chivalry I always felt that people (brilliant or not, who am I to judge) lose their touch because they stop learning and start making excuses. "I'm not young anymore". "The world has changed". "Back in my days it was easier".

As far as burnout, I always felt like getting a few small wins was quite beneficial for preventing it. For example, as a programmer, depending on a level of burnout, I might:

\- Fix a small bug

\- Learn / setup up a new framework (shout-out to all JS frameworks out there -- you help us prevent burnout!)

\- Do a self-contained project that you can release in a few days

\- _in severe cases_ Do some random shit completely not related to programming until you miss it and naturally come back because it's fun again.

</comment><comment><USER18> I ended up meeting a lot of my idols who had lost their touch when I was young and it never made sense in close quarters. But when I'd go out with them and people would incessantly talk to them it finally made sense, they lost their ability to observe the world and had no choice but to be observed. They weren't able to grow

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm glad that others have mentioned regression toward the mean [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean) but this article also suffers from fundamental attribution error [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error). Society identifies brilliant people by brilliant outcomes, but this is a flawed implication: brilliant outcomes can happen to anyone, and brilliant people might never have a brilliant outcome.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think one possibility is if you're one of the gifted you tend to skyrocket during the first half of your career.

But if everything came easy to you from the start you missed out on working through tough problems. You didn't develop the tenacity to push through. So by time you do start seeing the harder problems you start failing and the failures hit you harder. Without the skill to keep pushing yourself through failure you just kinda give up sooner.

</comment><comment><USER21> I was great at Visual BASIC 6.0 until Dotnet came out. I had years of experience in VB 6.0 but nothing in C# or VB.Net. Technology passed me by, and the same thing happened when I did COBOL and FORTRAN on an IBM 370 Mainframe. I didn't lose my touch, technology passed me by.

So now I have to catch up with Python, C# and other languages. I've been sick from the stress of a toxic environment at work and had to go on short term disability and rest. I didn't become stupid or lose my touch or get soft in the head. I can still program VB 6.0 just that nobody wants those skills anymore.

</comment><comment><USER22> Personally when I am looking at something interesting that I want to learn from, I always ask:

"What is the difference that make the difference?"

These are my general observations:

When you do not understand _what the important variables are_ , most often than not, you end up clueless.

Humans are not good with too much complexity. When too many variables are playing a role, it is usually not clear what dominates.

Being a generalist helps understanding. To figure out what is going on, a generalist mindset helps because you can find clues from other domains.

Over generalization is the root of all evils. People usually dramatically fail when they think the situation is the same of one they observed in the past but it is in reality VERY different. This happens because they are looking at variables they observed in the past situation that are similar. But they are not seeing or underestimate other variables that dominate the new situation.

In general, even when you think you got it, it is useful to test a few times (assuming you can) to find out, if you really got it right.

</comment><comment><USER23> An insightful book that touches on these issues in more depth is Robert H. Frank's _Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy_.

Good argument for the estate tax, by the way.

[https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10663.html](https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10663.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> Hormonal decline due to accumulated stress/inflammation/cortisol/insulin. Starts with DHEA at ~25. Others follow, as DHEA is a precursor.

Meditation, time, absence of urgency, replacement of contentment with a new passion/spark, nootropics, nutrition, less stress, compatible environment, etc..

</comment><comment><USER25> I agree with the article about luck and context. The world changed, your brand, product, or philosophy may be come less relevant or regarded over time, or faces greater competition.

But part of the death of genius is certainly in rooted in the person. A number of pitfalls in that direction to which we can relate. I think a major one is believing in your own hype, decreasing your ability to reject bad ideas. Also success can dim the the fire inside that had something to prove, and by caring less, settle for less. Also, for certain types of genius, it may have depended on peak working memory, and that declines with age. Last, I think knowledge of the world dims certain types of genius. I think melodic genius is particularly vulnerable to having heard and played too much music previously. Patterns get built up in your mind, and when trying to write music, at least for me, not only am I more likely to travel down the same worn melodic paths, but if I do discover some interesting turn of melodic phrase, I am more likely to recall some bit of music that I've heard, and go "ahh.. its one of these" and suddenly its hard for it to take its own path, and you are comparing it to what was written before....which kinda kills a moment of inspiration.

</comment><comment><USER26> With some exceptions, there is no mystery about it at all, sooner or later luck runs out and they simply regress toward the mean [1].

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

</comment><comment><USER27> fascinating stuff:

> _Perhaps we do. Michael Blastland's recent book, The Hidden Half, argues > that much of the variation we see in the world around us is essentially > mysterious. Mr Blastland's opening example is the marmorkrebs, a kind of > crayfish that reproduces parthenogenetically — that is, marmorkrebs lay eggs > without mating and those eggs develop into clones of their mothers._

Blastland is a very passionate speaker too. RSA talk on the subject:

Risk, Chance and Choice - Michael Blastland and David Spiegelhalter: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INw0O5F-yWc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INw0O5F-yWc)

</comment><comment><USER28> Regression to mean of a random walk.

<comment><USER23> As mentioned in the article:

> More likely it is "regression to the mean", or in simple terms, a return to > business as usual.

<comment><USER28> I haven't got to that point. It was obvious from the first paragraph.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > There is even a legend that athletes who appear on the cover of Sports > Illustrated are doomed to suffer the "SI jinx". The rise to the top is > followed by the fall from grace.

This phenomenon is pretty easily explained. People make the cover of SI when they've peaked or just hit a major accomplishment. It's extremely unlikely that they'll do anything but regress.

Additionally, until recently there were 50 SI covers per year. Once we're aware of the "SI Jinx", we remember the ones where it comes true and ignore the many, many, many issues where it doesn't.

<comment><USER30> If you'd have finished reading the article:

 _Few people make the cover of Sports Illustrated after a run of mediocre luck. They appear after things have been going well, and if the good luck fails to hold then it seems like the SI jinx. More likely it is "regression to the mean", or in simple terms, a return to business as usual._

<comment><USER29> Not a big reader but thanks. And I believe you're breaking the site guidelines:

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER31> Well the guidelines also say not to post shallow dismissals...

<comment><USER29> Didn't you just break that one too?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> burnout doesn't have to be negative - sometimes it can force you identify what is really important and leave everything else behind

</comment><comment><USER33> No, No, No... "Brilliant people" are defined by others by their work, the period when they were born, how they let others know of their work (a form of self-advertisement), hard work and random luck. Lose any of those and the person loses his/her title of "brilliant." Look at Einstein vs Feynman they both did brilliant work but Einstein is considered the smarter man. Einstein made himself a celebrity. He did as much as he could to make sure that people knew about him. Feynman did not. Einstein is considered a more brilliant man but he was not. Einstein was born a the right time in history. Had he been born 100 years earlier he would not have had the accumulated human knowledge to do his work. He was a hard worker. Up to his last days, he worked to advance his work. And ofcourse just random luck which you can't control.

<comment><USER34> Hmmm.. interesting to compare the two. I am a big fan of both, but _like_ Feynman better as a nerd.

Wasn't Einstein 40 years older than Feynman? He did physics PLUS politics, including the letter to Roosevelt about the bomb. Even at the challenger investigation Feynman mostly stuck to science.

I think Einstein's ability to be interdependent made him a little more brilliant in my eyes. (along with the ability to reflect light)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> > We rarely appreciate just how much inconsistency there is in the judgments > we and others make, argues Prof Kahneman. It can hardly be a surprise, then, > if past performance is no guarantee of future success.

Past performance can often predict future success that's why geniuses often are serial geniuses, sometimes in more fields than one. But we often forget that before they became known as geniuses they passed through a string of failures as is necessary. Im not sure if it's a problem with the geniuses themselves, or a problem of perception from our side, as we become intolerant to their failures.

<comment><USER36> "future success" does not have to be preceded by past "string of failures".

Like, at all. That's just classic gambler fallacy.

If you want an example of reverse gambler fallacy, see here - [https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=20231181&goto=threads%...](https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=20231181&goto=threads%3Fid%3Dkamaal%2320231181)

There the author says "10k heads have shown up, so 10k tails are waiting to show up"

which is equally rubbish.

There's this weird thing where people on HN keep falling prey to Gambler's fallacy. Maybe it's like a programmer's blind spot ?

<comment><USER37> You could turn it around and say, assuming I eventually succeed, what's the distribution of failures I'd have to endure? You might get lucky, but it's definitely possible to quantify how long it would most probably take to succeed.

If you have a bunch of people tossing dice and stopping when they roll a 1, only ~1/6 will succeed immediately. Most people will take a few tries; a few will take many tries; there's a nonzero chance you will wait forever without a success.

That's not to say that a success gets more likely with time (the Gambler's Fallacy) but on the whole, you'd expect most successes to have some prior failures, unless the dice are rigged.

<comment><USER36> > it's definitely possible to quantify how long it would most probably take to > succeed

yes. if success means to roll a 1, and anything else is a failure, you will on average roll the die 6 times before you succeed. E(x) = 1/p for a geometric with p = 1/6\. your variance is q/p^2, so 30.

so then, my rational decision as an investor is to quit rolling the die after 17 rolls ( mu + 2 sd = 6 + 2*sqrt(30) = 17 ). I wouldn't wait until heat death of universe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I guess I'm realizing I never approached this from a standpoint of expecting top people to stay on top forever, so the inquiry seems a little misguided to me. Even if you manage to dominate your field, in the very best case you're going to grow old & die someday. That's the pessimistic, decay theory. Or there's the optimistic, "progress" theory: If you believe humanity is on a more-or-less continuous arc of steady progress, that means somebody better is always coming along sooner or later to surpass your work.

</comment><comment><USER39> Usually when people cite Dunning-Kruger, the results are explained by a corollary of reversion to the mean. Incompetents think they're more average than they are, prodigies think they're more average than they are, full stop.

If you look at the original measurements, they are mostly explainable on that basis. The usual claim that incompetents think they know better than experts doesn't show up in those results, and they don't report that.

That's not to say there aren't people who are really delusional -- Trump exists -- but it's not a rule.

It's not reversion to the mean, exactly, because there's no time series involved, but similar statistical laws operate.

If there's a real "effect", meriting a name, it's that incompetents are even bad at identifying the average, and miss, often thinking they are above average just because they don't really even understand what average means.

They cited this in their actual results.

</comment><comment><USER40> Something similar I had written in 2011 [http://arbidobservations.blogspot.com/2011/08/why-we- think-w...](http://arbidobservations.blogspot.com/2011/08/why-we-think-we- become-increasingly.html)

</comment><comment><USER41> If you enjoyed this article, I can recommend the author's book "Fifty Inventions That Shaped The Modern Economy" (mentioned at the end of the article). The inventions are not what you might think and it was a pretty enlightening read, at least for me.

<comment><USER42> Also the World Service 50 episode podcast of those inventions - all freely available. I always thought it a bit odd they renamed it from "50 things" to "50 inventions" for the US book release.

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04b1g3c/episodes/downloads](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04b1g3c/episodes/downloads)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> something similar I had written in 2011.

[http://arbidobservations.blogspot.com/2011/08/why-we- think-w...](http://arbidobservations.blogspot.com/2011/08/why-we-think-we- become-increasingly.html)

</comment><comment><USER43> TLDR: Theres like 7 billion people. We have lottery winners both (specifically) and in other areas in life.

<comment><USER44> Unlike most lotteries, in life we also have lottery losers who have to pay their ticket another 100x or so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I think I was born regressed to the mean. :-/

</comment><comment><USER46> Regression to the mean.

</comment><comment><USER47> Gradual brain damage can strike at any time. You wouldn't even notice anything other than feeling more sluggish and having foggier thoughts. Imagine how many people don't even know they have sleep apnea that is slowly lowering their IQ. Imagine how many people have an oral herpes infection that reached their brain where it will now wage an endless battle to convert all of their neurons into derelict HSV-1 replicators. There could even be an evolutionary advantage to a brain automatically permanently entering a more dormant state after it senses it has reached the top of the pyramid, assuming tribes were less likely to self-destruct when members of the next generation had a fairer chance at usurping the throne.</comment>


Fake holidays are the new infographics - <AUTHOR> http://blog.backupify.com/2013/03/26/saint-backup-day-a-community-holiday-that-falls-the-day-after-reddits-holiday-that-i-cannot-mention-due-to-trademark/

<comment><USER2> More often that I'd like, I've seen people get too deep into their projects, and forget that things are supposed to be fun.

They start trying to coerce their project into a business, and it not only looks sad, but destroys what they loved in the process.

I certainly understand the temptation, but I hope I maintain the wisdom to know where the line should be.

<comment><USER3> If you don't extract maximum value from your assets, someone else will.

<comment><USER4> This changes the moment you realize your 'assets' have free will, a capacity to discern, and really strong opinions

<comment><USER3> Then it's your fault for not acting to neutralize those risks.

<comment><USER2> I have a website, Robohash.org, that's embedded in websites around the world. It gets millions (!) of loads every week.

Should I be falling over myself, trying to find a way to monetize it, or should I enjoy that people are using it, and smile when I see one?

Most of us already have good jobs, our bills are (mostly) paid, and we're not in danger of going hungry.

Startups are great, and I encourage people to start one when there's something with a real revenue model, but don't try to force your fun little quirky project into being something it's not.

Try to force a quirky fun project into being a revenue producing startup, is like charging you friends to watch your Garage band play. I understand the motivation, but it's kinda sad.

<comment><USER5> just to clarify - robohash is a image made up from discrete robot parts (ears, nose, etc) and assembled according to say every 8 bytes in a SHA1 hash?

So its essentially SSH-fingerprint-art, but waaaaay cooler.

Do not monetize it - the world will come back around and reward you one day.

<comment><USER2> That is exactly how it works. It's fun!

And I think that's exactly the right attitude ;) It's not something I need to make money on, it's just something cool to have added to the world. (It's OSS, too!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like the idea of Saint Backup Day much better than world backup day ... but why not make it Jan 3, though, the feast day of St. Genevieve, the actual patron saint of disasters? Also in early January most people are in a "let's get organized" mood, anyway.

</comment><comment><USER7> I guess I missed the news that explains the link to infographics in the title. Can somebody explain where this title comes from?

<comment><USER8> Infographics are a classic SEO black hat scam, where an infographic with random factoids and idiot-enticing charts/graphics is circulated to generate link juice for a site with an unrelated business purpose.

The poster is just saying that Holidays are the new black hat marketing technique.

<comment><USER9> I don't think that creating content people want to consume in an effort to get them to link to your site qualifies as black hat SEO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Descriptive terms immediately describe the goods, or some important characteristic of the goods. Trademark law does not protect descriptive terms unless achieve "secondary meaning" in the minds of consumers. That is, trademark rights accrue when the public comes to associate the descriptive term with a particular company rather than the product in general._

[...]

 _Failure to "police" a mark by stopping infringing uses can result in the loss of protection._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_trademark_law#De...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_trademark_law#Descriptive)

Two sponsors on the website, yet numerous parties issuing press releases:

[https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=world%20back...](https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=world%20backup%20day#q=world+backup+day&hl=en&source=univ&tbm=nws&tbo=u&sa=X&ei=cwlTUd6yDO3j4AOpuoGwCA&ved=0CEAQqAI&bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&bvm=bv.44342787,d.dmg&fp=6b5b7d932ecc93ee&biw=1386&bih=806)

<comment><USER11> We don't know how many emails or C&Ds they've sent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > _take down any unauthorized reference to World Backup Day, it's trademarks_

> _it's trademarks_

I try not to harass people on HN and Reddit with grammar, but I do expect better from a legal document.

</comment><comment><USER12> These are the people that have never had an iota of power in their real lives.

</comment><comment><USER8> Besides misspelling "its", the lawyer-impersonators at WBD Legal spammed the WBD phrase several times without even saying that it is trademarked.

Good for Bfy, to displace WBD trolls, unless they set up a fake controversially to make them selves look put upon (cynical because Fake Controversies are a classic marketing technique, older than Fake Holiday and Infographic)</comment>


0-day vulnerability on WordPress 3.x (remote command execution) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sucuri.net/2011/04/serious-security-vulnerability-on-wordpress-3-x-remote-command-execution.html

<comment><USER2> Lying about a highly dangerous 0-day in a very widely distributed piece of software seems in bad taste, even for April Fools Day.

<comment><USER3> particularly when you also implicate someone specific in the process.

<comment><USER2> Indeed.

The danger is that people will read "0 day" and start freaking out. If you actually read the post, you see a couple warnings signs:

1\. They claim it's part of a larger conspiracy and that people should sue Automattic.

2\. The "vulnerable" filename is wp-att.php, as in AT&T

3\. They point out that the MD5sums to trigger this behavior come from the words "remote_control" and "nsa"

But even noticing that, I still felt the need to log in to my server and make sure the file didn't actually exist; when someone cries "0 day", it would be irresponsible of me not to, no matter how crazy they sound.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> OK, if that was April Fool's, it's in very, very bad taste. People like me who aren't hackers or technically savvy will take it seriously. I tweeted it around. At the end they could have at least said April Fools, FFS!

</comment><comment><USER5> There's April Fool's jokes, and there's "seriously nasty month-ruining unpatched exploit in the wild". This is not a good example of the former.</comment>


Show HN: Published Manuscript Manager - <AUTHOR> http://www.published-app.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Published! Submissions Manager is a Mac Application used by some very accomplished authors, poets and artists in creating and managing of their own works. It's built by the creators of [http://www.MyStacki.com](http://www.MyStacki.com).</comment>


Web Landmines: Thrash, Nags and Bloat - <AUTHOR> http://www.nattaylor.com/blog/2017/web-landmines/ <comment><AUTHOR> Before I wrote this I knew it was bad, but one site I checked was: 3118 requests, 10.6MB, XHR: 201, JS: 1238, CSS: 15, Image: 837, Media: 3, Font: 17, Doc: 333, Other: 436, Cookies: 36 domains</comment>


Show HN: Hacker News Simulator - <AUTHOR> http://news.ycombniator.com/ <comment><USER3> We got an email from someone asking why they were logged in as pg, so you've passed some sort of niche Turing test.

<comment><USER4> Shouldn't we worry that someone has been fooled by the ycombniator.com domain and lookalike design?

<comment><USER3> It seems pretty harmless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Leonardo da Vinci used to throw paint filled sponges at walls and then force himself to make sense out of the resulting irregular shapes in relation to a problem he was interested in. For example: he might be thinking about transportation and say "well this looks like a horse drawing a carriage ..." and then use it as a basis to come up with new ideas. By forcing his brain to make connections between totally unrelated things it enhanced his creativity (or at least that was the intention.)

What comes to mind for this Hacker News Simulator is the modern equivalent of da Vinci's sponges: an ink blot which you can use to come up with completely new and novel ideas by forcing unexpected connections. And because the topics here are in some way related to hacker news the result could be filling in enough blanks to produce something newsworthy (i.e. an actual good idea instead of a garbled markov chain.)

<comment><USER6> That's really interesting, hadn't heard that before. A big difference here though is that the software is making (the appearance of) very specific logical connections itself -- with the ink sponges, you're creating a vague image that is open to human interpretation.

<comment><USER7> Some of the software-generated "logical connections" are not quite logical though, and require a little massaging/tweaking (human interpretation) in order to make sense. This process can result in interesting new logical connections.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is perfect. I opened it on a new tab, and went off to read another article. After coming back and opening multiple links I found myself thinking "where are all this posts with gramatical errors coming from" for a solid one minute - until I noticed "pg" where my username should be!

<comment><USER9> I, too, did this. >.<

"Wait, how did Hacker News get opened twice?"

...

"Eh, I'll just close this one." (You can guess which one I closed. :P)

 _[One pile of middle-clicking later]_

"Wait, ycombinator is defaulting to opening _comments_ now?!"

I noticed the "ycombniator" shortly after that.

I wish those links were real :(

\- [http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_198.html](http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_198.html): "Git 2.0 changes push default to using only CSS3 - No more remote work work: An adventure in civic hacking (scienceblogs.com)"

\- [http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_210.html](http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_210.html): "Show HN: Farmly – find anyone for anything you want and keep the Olympic germs away. (nowthenapp.com)"

\- [http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_208.html](http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_208.html): "Twitter will pay for anything [Product] (skullsinthestars.com)"

\- [http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_184.html](http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_184.html): "Ask HN: Angry/hardcore rock music to code the summer away, stuck for ideas to practice/exercice a new UI designer/programmer (NYC)"

\- [http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_190.html](http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_190.html): "Is GTK+ the real reason people are startups using? (blog.cto.hiv)"

My responses ranged from "they're doing _what_ to Linux now?" to "that one sounds cool..." to "that's true..." to "...of course I'm clicking that" to to "hm... well they must be going for an Indian motif".

And somewhere in there I was like "wow, /r/titlegore meets HN."

I'm very dense though. This was really well-made! :D

I still wish that 4th link was real. Like, I have a different taste in music, but I'd so reply to that. lol

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The titles suddenly got a lot better! Less grammatical errors. One of my favorites is "Hosted Continuous Integration Using Gradle, Android Studio And New York Times, Evernote, Gmail, and Quicksilver".

 _That_ is a CI solution I'd _love_ to see :)

<comment><USER11> *fewer grammatical errors (sorry)

<comment><USER12> Newsbot thanks you for proving that you are real.

You may return to your life simulation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Was it anyhow influenced by [https://reddit.com/r/subredditsimulator](https://reddit.com/r/subredditsimulator)?

<comment><USER14> I made a similar thing a year or two based off of another Markov Chain of HN headlines. I generalized it to allow you to mashup headlines from different news sources (Buzzfeed x Hacker News, for example). Still pretty funny, if anyone's interested: [http://www.headlinesmasher.com/best/all](http://www.headlinesmasher.com/best/all)

<comment><USER15> Scandal: Politician Goes to Work

LOL

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Oh wow, clearly my timing wasn't right...

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9453454](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9453454)

Edit: To be fair, this version generates plausible comments and has subjectively funnier titles. :)

</comment><comment><USER17> These post titles are really good!

some of my favorite so far:

> _Debunking Myths About Growth Hacking Goes Bad (infoq.com)_

> _First Firefox OS developer to come (businessmandi.com)_

> _Modern science and art go to jail? The law is dead in cinema > (techcrunch.com)_

<comment><USER18> _Pussy Riot members jailed for posting photos to raise your hourly freelance rate (arabcrunch.com)_

Hahahaha!

<comment><AUTHOR> This is my new favourite!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Or, 'How HN looks to non-hackers'.

Brilliant work. Truly monads in backport VM scandal-worthy.

</comment><comment><USER20> I opened it in a background tab, lost track of it for a while, ended back there thinking it was the normal ycombinator and unwittingly spent a couple minutes thinking "wtf is up with HN today?"

Well played.

edit: lol, seems I'm not the only one.

</comment><comment><USER21> In fact, I learned in a very silly thing to know. The risk is on controlling the hardware thats in there"Only when you get the impression that credit cards that my Time Warner unfamiliar with the goal these people as potential phishing as well as US government uses private business to sell your company in its own horn about being able to be great.

</comment><comment><USER22> I kept looking at the URL and thinking: "How are they using the same domain?" I came back an hour later only to realize that the i and n are switched in ycomb _ni_ ator.

That was a real "smack my head" moment.

</comment><comment><USER23> This reminds me of a Google exercise within their Python course, wherein it read in a text file and built dictionaries of every word and the words that followed said word in the text in order to create a prosaic style that mimed the author of the original text. It was quite interesting to run and throw a text file at it to see what it produced.

EDIT: I have a cached version of the exercise if anyone feels like looking at it:

[https://github.com/AdmiralAsshat/learn_python/blob/master/go...](https://github.com/AdmiralAsshat/learn_python/blob/master/google_code_university/basic/mimic.py)

There should be an "alice.txt" in the same directory as a sample file to throw at it.

<comment><USER24> See also [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain#Markov_text_gener...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain#Markov_text_generators)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Sometimes the real HN reads like this for me. It's how I know I'm tired, and should go to bed immediately after reading one more story.

<comment><USER26>
         10 I am to tired
         20 Just read one more story
         30 Goto 10

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Tell HN: my first dollar on the App Store due to a good review from > Techcrunch, lessons learnt.

This is so real

</comment><comment><USER28> Some of my favourites so far:

 _> Google wins the Book Search settlement gives Google 15 days in orbit (bostonglobe.com)_

 _> Pussy Riot members jailed for posting photos to raise your hourly freelance rate (arabcrunch.com)_

 _> Microsoft launches Bing Booster program for exploiting weakness in smart phone (blog.geeksphere.net)_

 _> Tell HN: Rejected from App Store due to a charitable project, continue in 2012 (askgolang.com)_

</comment><comment><USER29> > Show HN : One click image optimization service for your terminal

This is perfect. Well done.

</comment><comment><USER30> Markov chains are great fun

[http://thedoomthatcametopuppet.tumblr.com/](http://thedoomthatcametopuppet.tumblr.com/)

HP Lovecraft + Puppet Documentation

<comment><USER31> Also, King James Programming [1].

[1] [http://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/](http://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Absolutely fantastic, and probably will happen on Mars. Unfortunately, I can't read it. But Erlang is a human, but it's not unheard of, or even a real wood and lead pencil. A comment to mean what you mean how do we keep in mind when I can set a deadline, some basic programming with Scratch.

</comment><comment><USER33> As a HN data processing note, to remove the garbled characters, you need to convert the smart quotes from HN (among other things like long dashes) into normal ASCII characters.

EDIT: Looks like the garbled characters were fixed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah thanks for pointing that out, I took the nuclear approach and just ran all everything through unicodedata.normalize("NFC", ...) which seems to have done the trick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> We're all markov chains when you get down to it.

</comment><comment><USER35> Feels like HN when I am high

</comment><comment><USER36> Oh, that's great. I have just spent five minutes trying to figure out why all these comments on HN just stopped making sense.

<comment><USER37> I had the exact opposite experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> McAfee thinks this is porn. Cute.

</comment><comment><USER39> > I, being born a woman was violently beaten and robbed in a project/problem.

That's a weird auto-generated comment[1]. I wonder how much of it is random selection and how much is seeded text. What were the units that combined to form this?

[1] "Ask HN: Pure client-side PadMapper would be great as jobs? What a senior Rails dev?" post).

</comment><comment><USER40> Love this comment from the simulator:

> We had an inkling that something that someone is logged in to a traditional > incandescent bulb

<comment><USER41> Lol has anyone really been far as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

<comment><USER36> You've got to be kidding me. I've been further even more decided to use even go need to do look more as anyone can. Can you really be far even as decided half as much to use go wish for that? My guess is that when one really been far even as decided once to use even go want, it is then that he has really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like. It's just common sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Nice work.

FYI, cicking on the "<#> Comments" link from within a comments page leads you to a 404.

</comment><comment><USER43> LOL, everything sounds like a t-shirt from Japan.

</comment><comment><USER44> It even uses real usernames for comments. I've apparently commented on "Watch Morley Safer Lie in Tech is Not a Single Blog Post" :P , and I've seen posts by patio11 (and referencing patio11 too!)

[http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_286.html#](http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_286.html#)

And some of the Ask HN actually make sense too :) , I mean "Ask HN: Are there any good MOOCS/Online resources for learning TDD?"

But others are almost but not quite there: "I'm an 18 year-old front end GUI development?".

</comment><comment><USER45> Have you open sourced the code on Github? Would love to play around with this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I'll be writing a blog post about it and release the code then :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I tweeted a link to this, and it's already fooling people. Well done!

<comment><USER47> I absent-mindedly opened this in a new tab along with a few other Hacker News stories. Was very confused for a few minutes. Good job!

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Quick note: You are not setting the page (tab) title with the <title> element. Right now it says "The Death of the Party" for every story.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, fixed

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> "From 0 to 8-figure revenue in spite of flat UI design and email (gizmodo.com)" My coworkers are looking at me like I've lost it. Oh my...

</comment><comment><USER50> Some of my favorites:

>I miss Google wave invites going for $26 a month (srikarg.github.io)

>Ask HN: Is there a good, standard capped convertible note paperwork?

>NSA leaks: David Cameron cracks down on Apache Quitting JCP: 'Oracle Is the Fear of Macros (techcrunch.com)

>RSS.gd: the RSS icon was mistaken for the end of the Union at CoreOS Fest 2015 – Call for New Startup BitcoinDeals is Launching its Own URLs? (technokyle.com)

</comment><comment><USER51> One thing I noticed is that comment lengths are almost all the same - I think some randomisation would be good.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea, they are supposed to be between 50 and 150 characters, but that needs adjusting I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Nice. Was i the only one who took a minute to find the minute difference in the spelling of the hostname.

</comment><comment><USER53> My favourite: "Myth: systemd is unstable and insecure people who outsource have no future. "

</comment><comment><USER54> > Steve Jobs came within $5k of going to have cracked unsolved Zodiac Killer > cipher

I wonder why he stopped then?

<comment><AUTHOR> He didn't hit his kickstarter target, obviously

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I kind of feel bad I discovered what was going on in like 20 seconds.

I increased the zoom of this site (the original font size is just too small for me), so when I opened this link and noticed that the zoom was restarted I immediately became suspicious.

</comment><comment><USER56> I'm confused. What is this?

<comment><USER57> An automated parody of HN, OP explains above: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10248803](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10248803)

> _I 've pulled every comment and story from HN through the API and make a > bunch of Markov chains to produce story titles and comments._

<comment><USER56> I see. Cool. I'm building an HN clone now. Hierarchical comments are a fun challenge. Any tips?

<comment><AUTHOR> Postgres recursive queries make them pretty simple to deal with. This[1] is the query I used to pull a list of all a stories children recursively.

1\. [https://gist.github.com/orf/5565a572c6ddda039d6f](https://gist.github.com/orf/5565a572c6ddda039d6f)

<comment><USER56> Hmmm, I'm trying to decide between this recursive query or something using ltrees.

Can't make up my mind . . .

[1] [https://truongtx.me/2014/02/28/tree-structure-query-with- pos...](https://truongtx.me/2014/02/28/tree-structure-query-with-postgresql/) [2] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/603894/is-postgresqls- ltr...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/603894/is-postgresqls-ltree-module- a-good-fit-for-threaded-comments)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Well that was pretty awesome. Small suggestion. Fix the times on the comment threads to make it even more realistic. Threaded conversations have people starting a thread 11 minutes ago but getting replies 35 minutes ago. Busted :D

</comment><comment><USER59> It would seem the texts were all written by Markov Chainy, which is why they are grammatically wrong. I would have preferred a grammar-oriented text generator. It's still too easy to tell the one simulation from the other.

</comment><comment><USER60> What's impressive is that when I see a typically hacker newish headline or comment I now find myself checking to see who I'm logged in as to make sure I'm on the real hacker news.

<comment><USER61> yes I was having to read the real HN much more carefully right after I played with the simulator

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> favorite comments so far:

"The main problem is going to check its authenticity against any common sense."

"I use in your TOS, you say you're better than a bad example: a painting as an extreme advantage"

</comment><comment><USER63> This is a solution in search of a problem. But nice anyway!

</comment><comment><USER64> Oh man, I almost did this awhile ago. I even registered [http://ycornbinator.com](http://ycornbinator.com)

Very convincing fake.

<comment><USER65> I used to have yccombinator.com (interestingly it looks like somebody else picked it up after I let it expire) after noticing that there are quite a few places on the net that think that is the right name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Pretty good. It struggles a bit with some punctuation, inserting spaces after "." in urls and not having space after "?" in sentences.

</comment><comment><USER67> It seems your version has a higher average score per post than OG HN. Might want to apply a 0.75-0.85 multiplier to each post, as a crude estimate.

</comment><comment><USER68> Out of curiosity, what is the status bar to the left of every comment for? Is it some sort of admin tool available to pg's account?

<comment><USER9> I _think_ it might be a relevance or score of some kind.

The reason it might look weird (like a strange progress bar or something) is because it's an img link to "s.gif", but s.gif is actually a 404.

The td cell (yup it's a table structure) the img link is in is named "ind".

No idea what these two things put together mean.

EDIT: Then I noticed a thing between "Hacker News" and "new" at the top. s.gif yet again.

> " _It 's a spacer gif...! The img tag has an explicit width= set...._

Wow, that takes me back a bit, and I'm not even a real webdev or anything (and I don't mind tables to boot). _Blinks_

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Am I the only person who removed the `news.` from news.ycombniator.com to see if there was a parody of Y Combinator's main site?

</comment><comment><USER69> Tell HN: my first dollar on the App Store due to a good review from Techcrunch, lessons learnt. (spreadsheets.google.com)

</comment><comment><USER70> Maybe some sort of "this is not the real hn" and "we are not endorsed by ycombinator" could be good.

<comment><USER71> If it ever needs that then that's serious ground for worries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> I didn't understand what this is about.

<comment><USER73> I think it's just the Hacker News layout filled with randomly generated content. I don't get the point though. Maybe playing with some text generation algorithm?

<comment><AUTHOR> All the content is created based off every post/comment on Hacker News, hence the somewhat plausable post titles (if you squint a bit). There isn't much point to it, other than I found it quite funny :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> For some reason, this site is blocked by the proxy at work, with "pornography" as the category.

</comment><comment><USER75> Browsing this creeped me out in a weird, "is there a glitch in the matrix?" way.

</comment><comment><USER76> This reminds me of reading in a dream- nonsense sentences that sound familiar.

</comment><comment><USER77> Very cool!

> Entrepreneur crowdsources decision to quit Silicon Valley

Perfect :)

</comment><comment><USER78> Damn, I thought I was having a stroke.

</comment><comment><USER79> Why did YC not buy ycombnioator.com too? Isn't that a phishing risk - <USER2> www.gmail.com and www.gmai.com?

</comment><comment><USER80> Exactly 1337, eh?

</comment><comment><USER81> sometimes all news looks like this to me</comment>


Ask HN: Best book for understanding hardware-software interface - <AUTHOR> What's a good book for understanding where and how hardware and software connect? <comment><USER2> One of the best ways would be to build a computer yourself. For that I haven't found anything better than ECS [1]. Please try to build your own extensions to ECS and don't forget to burn your computer to FPGA.

Follow that up with Computer Systems A programmers perspective.[2]

My review of ECS [3]

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Computing-Systems- Building-P...](https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Computing-Systems-Building- Principles/dp/026214087X)

[2] [https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Systems-Programmers- Perspect...](https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Systems-Programmers- Perspective-3rd/dp/013409266X)

[3] [https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer- reviews/RZ4ME4QH22JML/ref...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer- reviews/RZ4ME4QH22JML/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl)

<comment><USER3> I also highly recommended working through The Elements of Computing Systems by Noam Nisam. There's more info available at the website [https://www.nand2tetris.org/](https://www.nand2tetris.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That sounds like a simple question but the answer is very complex. I recommend you look at old technology that was more simple and easy to understand, and then start moving forward. Look at the S100 bus and how simple 8 bit microprocessors such as the Z80 and 6502 did IO.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-100_bus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-100_bus)

[https://z80journal.wordpress.com/2015/10/07/z80-io- space/](https://z80journal.wordpress.com/2015/10/07/z80-io-space/)

Then with x86 PC age, look at the ISA bus first [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture)

and later on, the PCI bus (should I even mention Microchannel?) : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_PCI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_PCI)

Another direction for computer IO might be to learn about the Raspberry Pi GPIO interface: [https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/raspberry- gpio/all](https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/raspberry-gpio/all)

</comment><comment><USER5> Get an 8 bit microcontroller dev board for a few bucks and learn how to control the peripherals. AVR are good and there is a lot of material online to learn from. Sorry I don't know any books.

</comment><comment><USER6> I recommend CSAPP, even though I'm not sure it's what you want: [https://csapp.cs.cmu.edu](https://csapp.cs.cmu.edu) and Inside The Machine.

</comment><comment> a-dub I'm surprised there's no mention of the classic Computer Organization and Design by Patterson and Hennessy. Combine that with a recent book on the Linux kernel (either the O'Reilly one or I think there's one from Addison-Wesley) or the BSD red book (design and implementation of 4.4 bsd I think it's called) and I think you'd have good coverage of the topic.

</comment><comment> alok-g While not exactly what you have asked for, I once delivered a related session intended for software developers -- "How Does a Processor Execute My Code? And Why?!" If the slides for this would be of interest, reach out to me using contact information in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER7> You should definitely checkout this book - [http://www.buthowdoitknow.com/](http://www.buthowdoitknow.com/)

It explains everything in layman's term.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would buy a raspberry PI and start with that, or an Arduino.

There is a Arduino simulator (I have not used it, others told me about it) on Tickercad.</comment>


Where did reddit go? - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com Am I hallucinating, or did reddit get replaced by the Hotchkiss family blog?<p>If it changes, see here: http://imgur.com/lnbBw <comment><AUTHOR> This is what I am getting: <http://imgur.com/lnbBw>

</comment><comment><USER2> Reddit's still there when I visit it.

Is your dns fubared?

<comment><AUTHOR> hrrmmm, It might be MITM. Looking into it now.... thanks for the help</comment></comment>


Trading Sugar Beet Quotas - Secure Multiparty Computation in Practice - <AUTHOR> http://ercim-news.ercim.org/content/view/359/542/

<comment><USER2> You might also be interested in the toy problem of 'mental poker'.</comment>


What if we replaced politicians with randomly selected people? – TED Talk - <AUTHOR> https://www.ted.com/talks/brett_hennig_what_if_we_replaced_politicians_with_randomly_selected_people?rss <comment><USER2> My question is how would we find people to do things like write new healthcare law? Would we have an army of consultants? Would they have the real power, because they could navigate the complexities?

<comment><USER3> This is already the case in the US Congress. Legislators have teams to research, write, and understand the laws they propose and sign.

The legislators themselves spend most of their time campaigning and fundraising.</comment></comment>


Research shows that people project their own beliefs onto God. - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18216-dear-god-please-confirm-what-i-already-believe.html

<comment><USER2> We didn't need a new research report to tell us this.

<comment><USER3> Right.

It is interesting how (in the European and American context) we have not developed this idea much from the Enlightenment (Spinoza, Pascal, etc). We know this idea and yet cannot get past it.

The realization does not shake the belief itself, unless it was very weak to start with. The German philosopher, Ernst Bloch - I think in his work "Atheism in Christianity" - insisted the the 'atheist is very close to the true believer' in the sense that both are responding to the same impulse.

Darwin doesn't wreck my idea of the possibility of a God. And I do not mean in the sense of "Intelligent Design" or whatever it is called.

It seems hard to accept that if there is 'an allpowerful creator being thingie' that it would be completely beyond our ken. And any approximation would be an approximation of something infinite and thus as good as nothing. Less than the shadows on the cave in Plato's image.

This idea is at least as old as the combined JudeoChristian tradition. Arguably (and I am not competent to argue this - just was taught it years ago by a Franciscan so take it for what itis worth), arguably the oldest book of the Hebrew Scriptures is Job. The oldest text. And to me the answer to this idea is in that book. (and if you happen to be in NYC check out Wm Blake's Job prints in the Morgan library exhibit)

That idea of god is incomprehensible, terrifying and at turns mild, beatific. Like those alternately anthrophagous and beatific buddhas on Tibetan or Mongolian tapestries.

Over the years a few things I have read have given me the same chill as the lines of God responding to Job from the whirlwind (Stephen Mitchell's translation). Like the ending of "King Lear" or Prince Arjuna looking over the plains at his immense enemy spread before him but then realizing his charioteer is Krishna. Moments of almost obliterating awe - the realization of the absolute otherness of creation of which we are a part yet separate through consciousness trying to get back...

Which gets to why I think Bloch was right. The atheist and the true believer they are human responses to the same impulse.

I do not get the in between - ie articles like this - is this a new idea?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "This research suggests that, unlike an actual compass, inferences about God's beliefs may instead point people further in whatever direction they are already facing."

I have long thought that one of the major downside of any religion is that it radicalizes people. No mater how much peace and tolerance it preaches, dogma always takes over.

<comment><USER5> It can increase people's commitment to compassion too. Like Lisp or Forth, it is an amplifier. Actually placebos are a better analogy. Both are imaginary social support that allows a body to commit resources that would otherwise be held in reserve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This isn't surprising...people tend to project their own beliefs onto everybody, and unlike our fellow humans God doesn't give us any opportunities to disabuse ourselves of this notion.

</comment><comment><USER7> The question this should make people ask is: where are these beliefs coming from, if not from religious teaching?

Often both sides of a controversial argument are content to blame God for the position of the religious side. It's easier to simply write off your opponent as an unreasonable religious nutcase rather than making a legitimate attempt to look for the real motivation. It's almost as easy to attack religious fallacies as it is to use them for support.

</comment><comment><USER8> It is somewhat interesting for noting _why_ this is the case, eg fMRI observations showing that praying activates the same brain regions as used when chatting to friends.

Didn't read the original paper yet, but I'd like to see some research on how these beliefs may shift at different times. For example, someone might say it's wrong to steal on Monday, but on Friday they might embezzle some money while murmuring 'god helps those who help themselves', balancing it out with an hour or two of being a poor sinner on Sunday before deciding they've been forgiven at the end of it. Stories of large-scale financial fraudsters often reveal a pattern of 'doubling down' and increasing the fraud in an attempt to use the money as capital for a superficially legitimate scheme designed to yield a large profit and allow the return of the money they 'borrowed'.

Julian Jaynes theorized that consciousness as we know it today developed out of a kind of low-grade schizophrenia in which people internalized social mores as religious voices prior to the kind of self-reflection we take for granted today.

</comment><comment><USER9> Much like how we project our ideas about our ideal love-object onto the people we fall in love with. Which, of course, no person can ever live up to.

"God" is a very flexible object of contemplation. As a word, its entire meaning is dependent on context. To a great extent that context is _very_ private. Yet most of humanity naively bandies it about as if we're already agreed on what it means. As a meme it's certainly one of the most, if not the most, successful that's ever grabbed hold of us. For whatever purposes.

</comment><comment><USER10> Is this surprising or concerning? This article seems to presume a belief or decision making process wherein the subject has a belief, but has not thought about what God would think on the issue, and so decides to address the question by performing an act of intuition—at which point God's opinion is intuited to be similar to the subject's own.

I would be awfully surprised if religious people didn't tend to have opinions, religious and moral, that tend to track with each other and influence each other.

</comment><comment><USER11> This reminded me of something from a Steve Yegge rant:

"Now do a Google search for "perl religion". Looky looky, the first link is a Slashdot interview with Larry entitled: Larry Wall on Perl, Religion, and..., in which Larry talks extensively about his conversations with God, in which God evidently explains to Larry that He only likes Perl programmers. "

<http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/ancient-languages-perl>

</comment><comment><USER12> I tend to think that a lot of religious fanaticism is a result of positive- feedback loops between sect members. God is defined by the authorities in a group, per this article; the rest of the group internalizes this God and projects their own beliefs, again per this article; they share these beliefs among themselves and with the religious leadership, and the cycle starts over.

(I am a Christian, in case that colors your interpretation of this comment).

</comment><comment><USER13> Ramen.

</comment><comment><USER14> In other news, the world continues to rotate. It's nice to have a proper study saying it, though.</comment>


Future of the Open Office Means Saying Goodbye to Your Desk - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/s/2069/if-you-thought-open-offices-were-a-bad-idea-what-comes-next-will-be-worse-5b2f9521d6a8 <comment><AUTHOR> "The worker will be free to move to the room or zone that fits the mood they're looking for."

No need for my company, or any company, to build this. As it turns out I already have an environment where I can move from "zone to zone" as I see fit - my home.</comment>


What is a nerd? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/17/3244598/what-is-a-nerd <comment><USER2> I'm not so sure I agree with the definition of a nerd.

Are all nerds really socially inept? If so - what happens to a nerd that later begins to acknowledge that inefficiency, and alters certain behavioral patterns to appease the masses? Does he/she cease to be a nerd if all else held constant?</comment>


Ask HN: Internship/Apprenticeship in Buenos Aires - <AUTHOR> I'm an Electronics Engineering student. I'm moving to Argentina to finish my degree and would really appreciate any [info | hints | tips] to find a job or internship there. <comment><USER2> Do you know spanish?

Search for satellogic, they build satellites

</comment><comment><USER3> Which companies interest you?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've worked mainly with instrumentation, control, embedded systems and FPGAs

<comment><USER3> I am curious about the names of companies that interest you because research is often helpful in finding an internship (and later when finding regular employment).

Maybe you will have great luck and a Hacker News reader in Buenos Aires will discover your question and offer you a job (but there is no contact information in your profile). It is more likely that you will have to depend on the ordinary luck of finding a job by gathering relevant facts about possible companies or by contacting the placement office of your school or by meeting people and hearing about a job from them. The internet probably will not replace most of the traditional hard work of finding a job.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice, I know It seems like I'm going for an easy way out (and it kinda is), but I was curious to see if there was anyone from Buenos Aires who I could talk to since I don't know anyone in the industry there. (And the industry in my country is non existent). I'm currently searching for companies and openings but I'll expect to do the real work when I arrive there in a couple of weeks, I guess I wanted to get a few pointers.

<comment><USER3> My experience has been that it is usually much easier to look for a job once I am in the new place. In the past, however, I have done research beforehand...once it involved cutting a payphone phonebook in half with a pocket knife and taking it back to my home town, but that is a pre-internet story.

Besides companies, it might make sense to look at hacker spaces and meetups and electronics surplus stores. Also, think about talking to companies that sell instruments and electronics parts because they will know who the local industries.

I don't attribute anything to laziness. There's only so much a person can do and before moving there are a lot of other things to do.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Primo: the beautiful, colorful, mathematical board game - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/343941773/primo-the-beautiful-colorful-mathematical-board-ga

<comment><USER2> I love that the prime numbers after 10 are red, and that you end on a prime number.

Even better, is I love the divisions of each number, showing the multiplication factors.

Well thought out, solid design, and has randomness incorporated into the game to keep it addictive, yet it seems simple enough to play with your kids, which is clearly the goal.

Can't wait to get my copy.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it is a neat idea, but I don't find the colors and design as attractive as I think they could be. Right off, a bolder palette would probably help. I don't think a dull gray background does the look of the game any favors. Oh, had anyone considered using polygons instead of circles?

</comment><comment><USER4> This... looks pretty fun actually. Visualizing each number by its factors is brilliant. You can simply add up the factors to get the product.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow — beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER6> what a lovely design!</comment>