TipJoy Launches (YC winter 08) - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/10/tipjoy-a-better-tip-jar-for-content/

<comment><USER2> Fantastic, I look forward to seeing this service take off. However, I think you have a major (and seemingly hidden) issue: trust.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think you guys are out to swindle me or anything (quite the opposite), but honestly your website sets my 'dodgy brothers' sensor tingling. The main source of information, the FAQ, intermingles sales pitches with fragmented bites of detail about how the service actually works. Most of the FAQ is fluff, with the few facts hidden amongst it. I have several questions about how the service works. For example: When do you take your cut? What happens to uncollected funds? If I donate 10c to someone, am I going to be sent an email demanding payment 5 times a day? (I am not asking for a response on these questions here – I think this information should be on the website itself).

At the moment, if I use your service, I know what is going to happen in a general sense (and I had to read thoroughly to even get this far), but I don't know all the details. Because I don't know the details, I have to trust that you are going to do these right. But why should I trust you to do that? If you were trustworthy, wouldn't you be upfront in the first place? The more I have to trust you, the less willing I am going to be to trust you.

Also, be-careful of how you advertise yourselves. Quite a few statements in that FAQ are quite strange, like discussing passing on future savings to the tip receivers, and the whole money transfer service thing. Why are you asking for more of my trust, or my help? Me... help a company? You're supposed to be helping me! I don't want to trade with you because you're going to be help me in the future, I want to trade with you because you are going to help me right now. So you just need to sell your current rates and features convincingly. Don't get me wrong, slash your prices as soon as you can, but don't promise you will, just do it and let everyone know you've done it when you've done it. You can't tell me you're customer orientated; almost every company says it. Let your customers tell me (word of mouth style, not via your home-page :-) ).

I believe this trust to be an extremely important issue for you to deal with, because you aren't some website asking for my email address, you are a website dedicated to handling money transfers.

"If I were king of the zoo," I would drop the FAQ format and split the information out into two separate sections. The first would be your selling page, something that compels customers to try the service. The second would be simple, no fluff, factual explanation of what happens. Screenshots, diagrams, and examples can make all the difference.

Sorry, I don't mean to be so negative. You guys have the opportunity to make something great; its excites a man such as myself!

<comment><USER3> Don't be sorry for good feedback! Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very interesting, the most promising implementation of the micropayments concept I've seen yet. I love the ruthless simplicity of their approach, just looking at the url-entry box conjured up a half-dozen sites I had semi- subconsciously intended to tip as soon as the right solution comes along.

Though I hope they find a way around the possible problem of people spamming tips or just frivolously IOUing. Ideally once the thing gets some momentum, people will have a small pool of cash in their account so that the proportion of IOUs goes down, and the benefit of using the site become clear. But they'll have to get to that point quickly enough sustain interest.

</comment><comment><USER5> What a fantastic idea! You've created not just a start-up but a social experiment. I have no idea if it'll work, but I love the idea of separating the act of tipping and the act of paying.

Do users get a reputation based on the proportion of tips they eventually pay out? Can you force users to tip (e.g. you must tip before you get to read this article, regardless of whether you're going to pay eventually).

And please make it multi-lingual! I'd love to try out a tipping-based business model, but just English won't cut it for me.

Nice to see another great idea in the winter batch, btw!

<comment><USER3> Eventually we're going to open up an extremely configurable API. It will allow you to create your own micropayments engine, and determine the distribution model of your content. Internationalization is also on the roadmap. Maybe we'll tip users who help out :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Suggestion: rel=nofollow for ranked sites. The spammers are already tipping sites that they want to jack up the pagerank of.

<comment><USER7> Hi, Abby from Tipjoy here. One exciting aspect of tipjoy is that the ranking is determined by the amount of PAID tips something has received. Right now nothing's yet been paid (except for a little bit we've put in ourselves), so the top tip list has the spam you've mentioned. However, as people begin to pay for their tips (by hitting the 'pay' button in the upper right corner of tipjoy.com when signed in), the most popular tip list will start to evolve to reflect what's really worth money to people.

That being said, we're probably going to add a "safe for work" mode, which you can toggle to hide questionable content.

<comment><USER6> I'm glad you're aware of this. I don't know much about blackhat SEO, but if Tipjoy becomes an "authority site" such that getting a link from you would be the difference between page 2 and page 1 of a SERP, they'd gladly pay more than a few dollars for big-revenue keywords relating to gambling, porn, and finance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> TC commentors are a//holes. Well I think this is a decent product. This problem area has definitely been in need of a decent solution.

<comment><USER9> First of all, congrats to Ivan & Abigail! It's a great product and they did a great job.

As for criticism, I'm always reminded of this quote:

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat." ~ Theodore Roosevelt

<comment><USER10> "In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so." - Anton Ego

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is really cool, it feels much more personal than being stuck with an ad. Hilariously though, on TechCrunch this has become a moral discussion over the virtues of tipping at Starbucks.

</comment><comment><USER12> Hi TipJoy! Great concept! I was thinking about similar ideas, but didn't come up with two of your clever solutions: aggregation of micropayments to increase efficiency, and giftcards to avoid regulation. But I didn't want to give up on it, because I thought it would be good for the world. I'm glad to see you guys have already built it, and I'm very impressed with the execution!

I might make a suggestion though. While Amazon is great, I'd like to think, or home, at a few people getting tips would be basically able to live off them for a time, and that means they'd need to either get cash, or be able to use tips to pay for living expenses. It might be troublesome to get a deal, but I'd love to see grocery stores as a source of giftcards.

Many thanks, and a hearty congratulations, Kirigins!

<comment><USER3> Do you mean a gift card to a grocery store? Does this work for you? [http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/ref=gw_br_gro?%5Fencodi...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/ref=gw_br_gro?%5Fencoding=UTF8&node=16310101)

Just kidding!

I think the real solution is clearly to put in the legwork to become a licensed money transfer service. We fully intend to, but simply can't afford it till we close a Series A. So not to sound like a broken record, but use the service so we can impress VCs :-D

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I really want to see this allow sites to integrate TipJoy between their own users. If you offer a small, tiny cut to sites who do this, I think this will grow by leaps and bounds across the net. Imagine if you could leave a tip for some of the crazy cool comments people submit here on TC. I know I'd do it.

Encourage other companies to put TipJoy on their sites (by letting them have a percentage of peer-to-peer donations) and everyone wins, especially you.

<comment><USER14> Sounds like a call for an API.

<comment><USER3> Tipjoy is actually just the first user of a system I'm calling Millipaid. It will be a completely customizable micropayments solution. Before then, we'll release Tipjoy Platform. The site owners get a cut, and the content creators get a cut. It will be up to the platform to decide the distribution. Video sites could really benefit from it. So could sites like thesixetyone, twitter, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Best approach to micropayment yet. In fact, this one may well succeed. I can't think of a way to improve the mechanism - sure, it'd be nice if the tips were cash redeemable, but I realise it's not your fault, and you've made the situation pretty clear.

I know it's been mentioned by others, but I think your site layout needs a little work. In particular, your mechanism is pretty simple, yet you hide it in some text in your FAQ. Put up a "how does it work" page with a flowchart or something.

Oh, one more thing: what about mentioning the tip amount on the "Tip this" button? I know, it would make it marginally bigger, but I think it would help, psychologically. People are probably (well, I am) very wary to press a button that _implies_ payment (if they've not signed up) or actually "destructively" affects their balance with no check-back confirmation. (if they have) Putting the amount right there would definitely put peoples' mind at ease.

I've not read your client-side code, but I'm guessing you guys have made a decent effort to avoid cross-site scripting fraud where embedded buttons are auto-clicked by a malicious script or something. Right?

In any case, keep up the good work!

</comment><comment><USER16> I can't come up with any big objections to this, and I usually don't have trouble with that (except for the usual: It's purely speculative whether it will gain traction or not.)

It will be interesting to see if bloggers, _et al_ , start playing to the gallery if they get used to "tips".

One suggestion: Allow a way for website owners to 'redirect' a portion of a tip jar's tip to the creator of a particular piece of content.

<comment><USER3> Lots of blogs are really good at finding the best things on the internet, and delivering them to readers. The content creators clearly should get most of any tips, but the "finders fee" is also an important part.

We intend on building this. The challenge will be making it clear that the button goes in part to both people. We really don't want to make users think too much about tipping.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Awesome idea guys. Unfortunately, no matter how hard I try, I can't get it to work with my site (mobmov.org). Also, it screws up my layout with that inline iframe you inject, which limits my options as to where to put it. Can't wait for the next iteration though, keep up the good work!

<comment><USER7> It could be because we originally weren't allowing people to tip themselves, which was causing a slew of problems since (of course) people wanted to try out the button on their site. That was just a big UI oversight on my part; sorry. We've pushed a change out there now, so if you try to tip yourself the button says 'thanks' but instead of 'give more' it says 'you own this!' to the left. Hopefully this will solve your problem. Please email us if it doesn't. Regarding the layout, we'll work on improvements to that and will announce an update on our blog once it's ready.

<comment><USER17> that was it, thanks for the quick response and resolution. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Awesome concept and execution. This has alot of potential!

</comment><comment><USER19> It would be cool if there were a way to leave a tipjar in the comments/threads/diaries of social sites.

<comment><USER3> That is an excellent idea. We'll have to think about how to do this correctly. Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Cool stuff.

Quick gripe: On the main page, you show sites sans subdomain, but you seem to be tracking money based on subdomain, so for example techcrunch.com has two entries.

<comment><USER3> We changed the domain display to include subdomains. Just a different regex.

I need to change the check to see if a URL is already in the system. I cut off the protocol part, but forgot to cut off the www, i.e. <http://google.com> matches google.com, but not www.google.com or <http://www.google.com>.

This will be fixed very soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nice experiment. A couple bug reports: The Tip button doesn't work in IE. And, I found TechCrunch on the list of the sites twice!!! One with www. and one without it.

<comment><USER5> I also have a few bug reports: \- while signing in it said that my email- address was already taken, and did I left my pwd blank. Highly unlikely and no. \- in safari I can't move my cursor around in the email-address field because you jump to the end at each keypress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Congrats Ivan and Abbey. I'll be adding it to my blog immediately.

Everyone please be sure to give me lots of money so they'll have nice stats to show on Demo Day.

</comment><comment><USER23> Ay, financial regulations suck, which is why banks haven't changed a whole hell of a lot in the last 100 years.

</comment><comment><USER24> Finally! The need for a service like this has always been around. Your execution is excellent too.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks all! back to bug fixing...

</comment><comment><USER25> Many congratulations to you both.

</comment><comment><USER26> Congrats, Kirigins!

</comment><comment><USER27> congrats guys

</comment><comment><USER28> So, I get to have an ADDITIONAL amount cut from tips (beyond what PayPal does) -AND- I don't get cash...

<comment><USER3> People don't really tip online because PayPal is a pain. Amazon's micropayment system takes 20%. We take a few percentage points. As we get more efficient at the financial operations, we'll pass on savings to the content creators.</comment></comment>


What the Kapors Have Learned from Years of Working on Diversity in Tech - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/02/kapors-2/ <comment><USER2> > Or changing employee referral networks. When I ask if companies have > employee referral networks, most say yes. But if I ask whether they'd have a > structure for referrals of underrepresented groups, people often think > that's discriminatory and unfair.

Because it is. You can only remove bias by removing bias, not by introducing counter-bias. Removing names from resumes works, imposing quotas doesn't.

The problem with trying to counter bias with bias is that you can't make a shift on one axis without affecting five others. A bias in favor of e.g. racial minorities exacerbates the bias against everyone else of an underrepresented sex, economic status, religious minority, country of origin, disability, etc. But trying to enumerate all of the underrepresented groups is not only impossible because there are innumerably many of them, it leads to tokenism. Get yourself a couple of employees who each check multiple boxes and the numbers look good even when most of your employees are still white or asian male christian americans from middle class families.

By contrast, the bias in referral networks is the status quo. Hiring the people your existing employees know doesn't make a lack of diversity _worse_ in any direction, it only fails to improve it by making future employees look like current employees. In theory there is an argument that when the status quo is unbalanced, anything that continues the status quo is also unbalanced, but that doesn't actually point to any solution. The status quo is the continuation of the status quo. Figuring out what will make positive change takes more than objecting to things that make no change.

And one way or another you still have to get 'em while they're young.

<comment><USER3> I agree with your criticism of affirmative action. The last company I worked at had a strong Women in Tech program, but one of the women of color described it as "white feminism." The company favored one axis, which was enough for it to become self-congratulatory.

But I don't think this quote is about quotas. At least not quotas for employment. The program is merely for getting resumes of underrepresented groups. If the employee referral network only produces resumes from homogenous candidates then this is a positive change.

<comment><USER2> > But I don't think this quote is about quotas. At least not quotas for > employment.

Quotas for resumes don't in principle work any differently than quotas for hiring.

And I still don't see how that solves the pipeline problem. The problem in 1950 was that middle class jobs were unavailable to qualified women and minorities. The problem in tech in 2015 is that qualified women and minorities are unavailable to middle class jobs. You can't solve it in the same way because it isn't the same problem.

<comment><USER3> Your principles are different from mine. And if you believe the pipeline is the only problem then our principles are irreconcilably different.

Of course you are right that this doesn't solve the pipeline problem. No single thing can. At least it gets the company to interview someone they normally wouldn't.

I can't find the link now, but the EEOC gives an example. If a company only hires by referrals and all of the candidates are Mexican because all of the employees are Mexican then that is discriminatory.

<comment><USER2> > Your principles are different from mine.

Then state what they are so we can figure out why.

> And if you believe the pipeline is the only problem then our principles are > irreconcilably different.

There is a difference between a problem being the only problem and being the biggest problem. Amdahl's law. You can't fix more of the problem than the thing you're changing represents. The pipeline problem is not the entire problem but it's a _huge_ proportion of it. It's the sine qua non of fixing the overall problem. Without addressing it you're just rearranging the deck chairs.

> Of course you are right that this doesn't solve the pipeline problem. No > single thing can.

It isn't that it doesn't solve it, it's that it hardly even addresses it. By the time you're at the interviewing stage you're already at the end of the pipeline.

> At least it gets the company to interview someone they normally wouldn't.

Do the math on this. There are nine overrepresented candidates for every underrepresented candidate and you would normally interview five people. Now everybody decides to make the fifth candidate the underrepresented candidate. The underrepresented candidate would have to do ~twice as many interviews to allow all the employers to make their quota but can still only be employed by one of them.

The only way this even does anything other than waste everybody's time doing interviews at companies where the underrepresented candidate won't end up working anyway is if in the alternative the underrepresented candidate wouldn't have found employment in the industry. But the demand for programmers is such that if you're qualified you can almost always find work. It's a solution aimed at a very small corner of the problem that rarely occurs, but has significant costs because everyone ends up doing many fruitless interviews when they could be interviewing candidates more likely to actually work there.

> I can't find the link now, but the EEOC gives an example. If a company only > hires by referrals and all of the candidates are Mexican because all of the > employees are Mexican then that is discriminatory.

Now you're talking about a different scenario where the makeup of the existing employees differs from the makeup of the overall pool of qualified applicants, both the employees and the referred candidates are completely homogenous, and the company hires _only_ by referrals.

That scenario is a completely different kind of problem. It's an internal company problem vs. the industry-wide problem we have in tech. The internal company problem is easily solved by considering candidates from the broader pool of qualified applicants. The industry-wide problem is not helped by that at all because the skew is present in even the broadest pool of qualified applicants.

<comment><USER3> I see. Your point is a qualified minority is going to find a job anyway. That's a really interesting way to look at it. It's a really good point too. Thank you for sharing.

This is certainly true in SV and many other cities. However, top tier companies are criticized for not discovering and attracting qualified minority candidates. I want these candidates to have a shot at the best jobs. Going back to our original conversation about referrals. A referred candidate gets preferential treatment. If a company is entirely homogenous then few minority candidates will benefit.

On the other hand, I have noticed that underrepresented candidate are already treated better. Of course there might still be biases and other things against them but that's not what we set out to discuss. Yes, the pipeline is a large problem. Retention is too. I think there are many things our society should fix.

The EEOC example is an extra incentive for companies to try harder to expand their candidate pool. Some companies are entirely white which is a little odd because I expect to see at least a few Asian programmers.

In my experience most people who point at the pipeline problem are lazy. But you clearly are not and I want to thank you for this conversation.

<comment><USER2> > Some companies are entirely white which is a little odd because I expect to > see at least a few Asian programmers.

It's actually not that unexpected. If you take a majority-white population and distribute employees completely at random then you would expect to see several companies that are entirely or almost entirely white, because random is not the same thing as uniform. And then there are several benign things that tend to create clusters, like geography. (There is a lower proportion of Asians local to Boston than San Francisco etc.)

Diversity doesn't mean every company has every group in exactly the same proportion as the general population. That isn't diversity, it's uniformity. The only way you get that level of uniformity is authoritarian decree. Diversity is _so much messier than that_ because natural diversity is a derivative of Darwinian forces. It doesn't care about made up unscientific nonsense like race, so the distribution of "races" in a completely egalitarian society is not uniform, it's completely arbitrary.

> In my experience most people who point at the pipeline problem are lazy.

Probably most people who point at the pipeline problem can see it plainly but don't know how to fix it. If you sit down in a computer science class your classmates might be 16 white men, 10 Asian men and one Asian woman. After four plus years of that, try to be shocked to hear that the industry doesn't employ very many black women.

The "problem" with the pipeline problem is that it doesn't have a center. There is no single thing that causes it and no organization responsible for it. So it's easy to point to it, _because it 's real_, but how do you fix it? Pass a law prohibiting high school girls from ostracizing their peers who spend time learning about computers? It's a big problem but not an easy problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Excellent point from Freada: "My first piece of advice is to stop thinking about yourself as a meritocracy. Because if you believe you're a meritocracy and you have numbers like everybody who has released their data, the implicit message is that Caucasian men are better than everyone else. Because that's who is overrepresented."

<comment><USER5> White men are over represented at large tech companies? White people make up around 80% of the U.S. population [0]. They make up less than 60% of tech workers at Google[1] and less than 55% of tech workers at Facebook[2]. That's underrepresented.

Asian Americans make up less than 5% of the U.S. population[0], but almost 35% of tech workers at Google[1] and 36% of tech employees at Facebook[2]. That's over representation by a factor of about 7 times.

Yet, the media will continue to harp on the over representation of white people at tech companies. Why? Because "diversity" really only means "not white".

BTW: I bring this up not because I want fewer Asian Americans in tech or more white people in tech, but to point out the hypocrisy of the reporting on diversity in tech.

[0] [https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world- factbook/...](https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world- factbook/geos/us.html)

[1] [http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/06/google-diversity- sta...](http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/06/google-diversity-statistics- barely-impoved)

[2] [http://recode.net/2015/06/25/facebook-employee- demographics-...](http://recode.net/2015/06/25/facebook-employee-demographics- a-little-less-white-a-little-less-male/)

<comment><USER6> Your argument is using some old data and substantially flawed reasoning and I'll let other people talk about it. But there is one thing I want to point out:

 _It is possible to be both marginalized in one aspect and privileged in another._ It is definitely the case for Asian Americans in tech. Very few will say they're not (in aggregate, individual experiences vary of course!) better off than other people of color in this field, even as they also suffer racism. The numbers, as you suggest, do not lie. It's a similar phenomenon to the treatment of homosexual people in tech on the west coast. Just because someone is a gay man doesn't make them suddenly not white, for example.

This is a really important and often overlooked feature of intersectional feminism: nearly everyone has privilege even if they're also marginalized. That's why it's such a worthy cause, nearly everyone has something substantial to gain.

<comment><USER5> >Your argument is using some old data and substantially flawed reasoning and I'll let other people talk about it

If I'm not mistaken, all of those sources are from 2015.

You seem to be interpreting my statement of the facts regarding demographics in the tech industry as as a statement that I believe Asian Americans are privileged. I'm not saying that. I think tech is the closest industry to an honest meritocracy that exists, and if there are more Asian Americans in tech than white people, then it's probably because of differences in ambition and the extent to which education is valued.

But, I brought up those stats not to make that point, just to prove the point that the way the media, and popular perception views diversity in tech is wrong.

<comment><USER7> The CIA data is from 2007 and counts all hispanic/latino people as white. Wikipedia places the white population at 63.7% based on the 2000 census.

So while it changes nothing about your comments about Asian people being over- represented, it does show that white people are not really underrepresented significantly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Question:

What was the percentage of blacks and/or women at Lotus notes when Mitch sold?

How many low-income/minority households is Mitch within walking distance of from his Berkeley compound?

Diversity for thee, but not for me.

Also, while we're discussing Things You Should Not Notice: what are the numbers as far as litigiousness of "protected" groups? If I'm looking to hire someone, non-protected status (whether it's race, unionization, etc.) means I'm more likely to hire them (all else being equal). Like the blowback from affirmative action, I don't see an objective discussion about litigation risk (whether or not it's substantiated). It's human nature to asymmetrically attribute failure to others and success to oneself. Add racial/gender rent- seeking to the equation and you get an especially potent, counterproductive miasma. Just look at Buddy and Pao - they've made entire careers out of entrepreneurial race/gender grievance litigation.

Why can't all this under-utilized talent create a tech company dominated by blacks and women? Why not create a Meyerhoff like program to prove your hypothesis rather than ask me to subscribe to the latest social engineering fad?

<comment><USER6> > What was the percentage of blacks and/or women at Lotus notes when Mitch > sold?

> How many low-income/minority households is Mitch within walking distance of > from his Berkeley compound?

> Diversity for thee, but not for me.

Can I ask you a quick question here? _What does any of this matter?_ Diversity isn't about protecting yourself from character assassination. It's about promoting fairness, equality, and opportunity for everyone in society.

If you look in the past of anyone, you will find things they regret and things that may draw censure from the pro-diversity and intersectional feminist mindset. That's _natural_. That's _to be expected_. Society is, by any reasonable and several reproducible metrics, extremely biased in favor of white men. We all grew up influenced by that society. It is therefore almost inevitable that anyone with these sorts of experiences has and will continue to have both privilege and mistakes in their past.

What matters is going forward, how we all take these things we've been fortunate enough to be handed (along with the misfortunes and difficulties we've endured) and use those to promote a fairer, more just world for those who come after us.

We can sit here and argue if this messenger is the ideal messenger. Which is odd, because in many other fields we view past mistakes as a teaching opportunity. Ultimately, the people in power should cede and share some of that good fortune and cultural windfall to create a more equal world rather than waiting for history to repeat itself with violent uprisings. History suggests that such uprisings are not kind to even bystanders.

> Why can't all this under-utilized talent create a tech company dominated by > blacks and women? Why not create a Meyerhoff like program to prove your > hypothesis ...

Because creating an environment that mimics the societal advantages white men get in the US and most of the western world is infeasibly expensive.

I mean, seriously. How would you even? You'd have to raise kids from birth in a theme park with meticulous care to shield them from the deleterious effects of racism and sexism.

> rather than ask me to subscribe to the latest social engineering fad?

Progressivism isn't a fad. It's the consistent direction of society since the dark ages.

<comment><USER9> Something something just-world fallacy.

[http://www.spring.org.uk/2012/06/the-belief-in-a-just- world-...](http://www.spring.org.uk/2012/06/the-belief-in-a-just-world-a- fundamental-delusion.php)

> _expensive_

With the millions of dollars from diversity initiatives, I'm sure someone could pull it off.

Also, I think you're missing the entire "classism" thing. I'm Polish, and just because I'm white doesn't mean I have the world handed to me. Kind of the opposite actually, everything that I've ever gotten in life was thanks to fighting the system (whether it was my work or my parents' work).

I could say I deserve something, but honestly I don't really think I do. The world is not a fair place.

<comment><USER6> The world IS fundamentally unfair. That doesn't mean that society should foster fundamentally unfair policies. I don't know why you would think that this would be wise, or after even a casual perusal of history you'd think it was novel or sustainable.

> Also, I think you're missing the entire "classism" thing. I'm Polish, and > just because I'm white doesn't mean I have the world handed to me. Kind of > the opposite actually, everything that I've ever gotten in life was thanks > to fighting the system (whether it was my work or my parents' work).

It simply wasn't the subject of this conversation. "White privilege" is a specific set of special treatments you get in the US. It is not, "Magically you have a perfect life." It's undeniable that with white privilege you're less likely to be summarily executed by law enforcement, as an example.

But economic and other social divides still exist. Polish and Irish people are excellent examples of other axis of discrimination and racism that still exist in the world today.

> I could say I deserve something, but honestly I don't really think I do.

We're all raised to accept racism as normal. It's not surprising that you feel this way. But remember, you're not the one who's history is getting them shot in the street in the US right now, so you're probably going to feel slightly less personal pain and be asked to express slightly more empathy at this exact moment.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Mathematician's Lament [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

<comment><USER2> The author does not make any reference to the learning psychology when he talks about learning and teaching. He does not know and does not care how students learn. Most of what he said is nonsense, kind of postmodernism staff.

For anybody who really cares:

How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom (2005)

[http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10126](http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10126)

PDF is free for download</comment>


Looking for co-founder/co-worker to build a hybrid of ebay and craigslist - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> How does ebay fit into it? I see the CL part on OLX

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This request is closed. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER3> so something like olx.com?

<comment><AUTHOR> :) yes something like that

<comment><USER4> so what's new?

<comment><AUTHOR> nothing as usually. you can post 10 announcements a day here. nobody wants to join :) it is as I said, cofounder is needle in haystack.

<comment><USER5> Picking a co-founder is almost like getting married; go with the wrong person, and your life will be miserable.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The plan to move the Swedish town of Kiruna - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/dec/02/kiruna-swedish-arctic-town-had-to-move-reindeer-herders-in-the-way <comment><USER2> There have been a bunch of articles about this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15755529](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15755529) (13 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14416840](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14416840)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12551206](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12551206)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11747452](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11747452) (4 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11738133](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11738133)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9727414](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9727414)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8731296](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8731296) (50 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8497057](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8497057)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7354364](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7354364)

</comment><comment><USER3> As dang mentioned, they've been going on with this for several years now. It's really worth a visit out there, the town truly captures the northern Swedish feel.

Also of note worth visiting if you go during the winter is the ice hotel nearby that is rebuilt every winter: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icehotel_(Jukkasjärvi)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icehotel_\(Jukkasjärvi\))

</comment><comment><USER4> I've been there and visited the mines, I can recommend it if you are in the area, I visited with my dad in my teens and I can still remember the visit. I am sure they were already talking about this back then (~15 years ago).

</comment><comment><USER5> Before WW2, German authorities considered moving the town of Beuthen in Upper Silesia (now Bytom in Poland), having then 100,000 citizens, that sits atop rich coal deposits.

See the end of this article: [https://www.nytimes.com/1982/08/08/world/tremors-plaguing- po...](https://www.nytimes.com/1982/08/08/world/tremors-plaguing-polish-coal- town.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_(Most_District)#Destructi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_\(Most_District\)#Destruction_&_redevelopment)

"Most, the Town that Moved: Coal, Communists and the 'Gypsy Question' in Post- War Czechoslovakia"

[https://www.jstor.org/stable/20723640?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...](https://www.jstor.org/stable/20723640?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents)</comment>


Lively Linear Lisp – 'Look Ma, No Garbage' (1991) - <AUTHOR> http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/LinearLisp.html <comment><USER2> A shout out for LinearML

[https://github.com/pikatchu/LinearML](https://github.com/pikatchu/LinearML)

Development kinda stopped after the author joined FB. Hoping for a revival.

</comment><comment><USER3> Are there any languages that have dynamic typing but linear/affine memory management or C-style manual malloc+free? I reckon there would be some real productivity benefits in such a language if you wanted fast code with good C interop (Rust shows that affine types combined with destructors allows fantastic C interop) with faster development speed.

<comment><USER4> I'm a bit curious about combining RAII or similar with dynamic types myself. It's been discussed at mild length here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9356925](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9356925)

If we assume some sort of object orientation, or first class functions are available, affine types become (I think) impossible; If a value T with lifetime 'a is handed to a completely unknown method on an unknown object, or to an arbitrary lambda, we can't prove that the method will not destroy T in the middle of lifetime 'a. In otherwords, if typechecking is ruled out, we cannot do borrowchecking either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder how similar this linear logic is to other linear types language such as Rust, or the GHC paper recently shown here too.

<comment><USER6> Hmm, I thought Rust uses something like affine types [0] (which is similar to linear types).

[0] [https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/4mdgux/rust_and_affin...](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/4mdgux/rust_and_affine_types_did_i_get_it_right/)

<comment><USER5> Right, that's the kind of subtleties I wanted to understand.

<comment><USER7> Linear types = "you must use this value exactly one time" Affine (uniqueness) types = "you can use this value either zero or one times, but you can't use it more than once"

As an example, compare two languages: one with linear types and one with affine types. Let's say that you had a "File" type, a function "open()" that creates a file (either linear or affine as appropriate), and a function "close()" that consumes the file. Then this code would be legal in both languages with linear types and languages with affine types:

        let f: File = open()
        close(f)

Note that "f" is used once and only once, at which point the value is consumed. In a language with affine types, this is also kosher:

        let f: File = open()
        // Do nothing

This fails to compile in the language with linear types because "f" is never used. Finally, this code is never legal in either language:

        let f: File = open()
        close(f)
        close(f)

... because "f" is used twice here, and neither linear types nor affine types allow that.

So affine types give you a little more leeway.

<comment><USER8> Given the importance of zero in mathematics to simplify a lot of things (see Roman numerals), my intuition is that affine types are much more flexible without losing the nice properties of linear types?

<comment><USER7> What kind of guarantees do you want from your type system? Strictly speaking the only guarantee that linear types give you is that _every single_ linear value will be consumed at some point, which generally means that no resources ever get "leaked". If the idea of accidentally leaking a resource is unacceptable to you then you might find that affine types are _too_ flexible, as languages that implement affine types generally give you _some_ way to leak a value.

In practice I don't know if anyone is overly concerned about this. While Rust doesn't have linear types, I find you have to bend over backwards to introduce a situation where you might accidentally leak a resource.

Tarean makes a good point with respect to fusion, but "guaranteeing" fusion requires additional assistance from the compiler in addition to the basic implementation of linear types.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Human Terrain – 3D map of population - c-slice https://pudding.cool/2018/10/city_3d/ <comment> c-slice It's easy to spot prisons on this map.</comment>


How to scrape an ImageBam gallery for images with 30 lines of Python - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tankorsmash.com/?p=463 <comment><USER2> Actually title should be "How to scrape an ImageBam gallery for images with 56 lines of Python". This implementation obviously not the best since there is no off-site control and making requests sequentially. I can recommend scrapy for serious web crawling. <http://www.scrapy.org>

<comment><USER3> Well.. there are 30 insignificant lines in the source, so it's really 26 lines of Python.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice for experimentation. Not so nice for production.

</comment><comment><USER5> Plus requests and BeautifulSoup lines of code.

<comment><USER6> Don't forget Python and <language of python implementation> lines of code!

<comment><USER7> And don't forget all the hardware pushing the bits around!

<comment><USER8> "How to scrape an ImageBam gallery for images with 50,000,000 lines of Assembly" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

<comment><USER5> Actually, that would have been a better!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What database solution would you choose for this type of workload? - <AUTHOR> We have a telemetry gathering system. We get about 250rps to our backend systems, which dump this data on a database. We get ~25million records per day, occupying a disk space of ~12.5GB per day (inclusive of elastic index). We use elastic as the backend.
We chose elastic because we did not what fields we may get. There are ~40 fields (per record). Some fields may be missing in some records. Coming to the reads, the data thus saved would be queried in a timeseries way. We will access data for last 1 hour, 1 week, 1 month mostly.
The data will be queried with a lot of complex aggregations and joins too. For ex: What is the avg response time (which is a field) of all the requests that talked from node (another field) appServer1 to node appServer2, last month.
With elastic we are quite happy with the data until there are ~10 million records, beyond which response times just lag. It takes 10+ seconds for each query after 10 million records. We thought it could be due to reader starvation (because of incoming writes) and created a read-only replica and did our queries in that replica. But even there the slowness is felt.
In terms of memory, We have given about 1GB for esmaster, 2GB for esdata and another 1GB for esclient. All persistent disks are normal HDDs and not SSDs. We do not have much worries about diskspace and can add more diskspace (but not SSDs). But we will not be able to provision more RAM.
Also, we want our system to add columns/fields without any stop-the-world migrations. This is what makes me nervous about choosing databases that want a schema ahead.
The writes can take (update multiple indexes on each write) but the reads have to be fast. We are also fine with choosing a hybrid approach where one system receives the writes and another system can do the analytics. The system has to work in kubernetes across clouds. So single-cloud solutions (like dynamodb) are ruledout.
Given the load and the above constraints, what kind of a database solution would you choose ? <comment><USER2> You say you can't add RAM or SSDs but that sounds like exactly what you need. If your data doesn't fit in RAM (and, with 25MM records/day, it doesn't), then you're gonna be hitting those slow HDDs when you run queries.

I'd add RAM first and SSDs second but you say you can't do either of those? Well, good luck, I guess -- any "database solution" you choose is going to perform like crap given these resource constraints.

</comment><comment><USER3> Have you tried column based databases such as Cassandra, HPE vertica, or Clickhouse?

Have you tried a "big data" approach like Apache Spark on parquet files?

Did you consider saving less data? Do you really need to save that much data? Can't you sample the data and save a lot less while keeping the same information overall ?

<comment><AUTHOR> We are yet to try any other technology and this post is primarily for seeking those candidates.

We could not get away with saving less data, for reasons beyond the scope of this post (non-technical reasons).

<comment><USER3> I would try first with these columns based databases but I think you should consider saving less data. Doing what you want is definitely possible but it may be expensive, and if it's only because one non technical co-worker would love to query so much data for his reports, perhaps you should try to show him the cost once you tried a few technologies.

Querying less data but saving everything is also an alternative. With Clickhouse you can specify a sampling rate for example.

<comment><AUTHOR> This turned out to be a good advice. I am evaluating if it is possible to somehow intelligently sample the data when it comes to ELK. Something like an average of 1min data via a logstash filter. We could do this from our backend programs too, but for now, I am trying to do this in ELK during the writes.

Also we do not use Clickhouse, but I will see if I can somehow do a sampling rate in the reads, during my read queries. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> When you say you have 25 million records per day, taking 25 GB of disk space, can you clarify what you mean by that?

Does each day of 25 million records take 25GB of disk space? Or are you saying that it cumulatively takes 25 GB up until now?

1 million records per GB would indicate a really, really large record.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry I was wrong. It takes about 12.5GB diskspace for 25million records. I took two days disk size. Updated the post now. Thanks for spotting it. Also, the diskspace is what is occupied by elastic and so it might contain any extra index sizes too. Not the size of the actual data alone.</comment></comment>


So you seriously are crazy about star wars? - <AUTHOR> I didn't grow up watching star wars but know about it from Big Bang Theory and all the hype in news / media. I wonder what percentage is hype and what percentage of people seriously are crazy about Star wars as they show in news?
TO be frank, I think its a decent movie but not something to go crazy about.
This is right place to ask I suppose as they portray as if all geeks, tech people love Star Wars. <comment><USER2> I grew up with Star Wars. The first three movies were pretty good. I've never been able to finish any of the other three. The new one doesn't interest me, so I won't be going to see it in the theater.

From what I've observed, the new movie is being very heavily marketed. Facebook now has the option to stick a light saber on your profile picture. The merchandise is all over the larger stores. In my opinion, it's mostly hype due to its prevalence from marketing.

</comment><comment><USER3> I believe you are confusing _Star Wars_ with _Star Trek_. BBT has numerous referrals to _Start Trek_. The obsession and indirect similarity of Sheldon with Spock (L. Nimoy) is a recurring theme of the TV series as far as I recall. Haven't seen the last season though.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's all hype. I don't know if Disney is guerrilla marketing geniuses or if they are just bribing Reddit, but the site is currently nothing but Star Wars- related links. And TBBT sucks. It wouldn't surprise me if the producers had some kind of deal in which they are paid by DC comics so that all the main characters like their superhero comics.

<comment><USER5> They probably are paying Reddit. Isn't that what half the fucking noise from that website been about this year? Them wanting to make (more) money and needing to gimp their userbase to do it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wasn't such a fan but a friend of mine was and explained to me what I needed to know before watching the movie. I went into the movie with expectations at 0.

The movie was epic. I loved it. Damn. Just set your expectations at 0 and may the Force be with you.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's a nice contrast to the back ground noise of marketing. As if you turned all the ambient music in all the offices and grocery stores and department stores into the same 3 second clip and turned up the volume to 11. Soon enough it will go back to normal. But I hope some people will be a little more cognizant of the presence of marketing in public life.

I wonder what it would be like if all of advertising space were instead filled with affirmations about the human condition, about empathy, about statistical intuition, and about finding cognitive distortions. You know, the opposite of what advertising needs to function. So, totally not possible. But I think it'd be a good idea.

</comment><comment><USER8> I didn't grow up on Star Wars, even though I was the right age to have at least seen ads for the third one. I don't remember it being an unusually big deal where I grew up -- no more so than E.T., for instance, which we never hear about anymore. Or Close Encounters, which I think was big when it first came out but was a little before my time.

Anyway, since I didn't grow up on it, there's no nostalgic connection for me and I'm not into it at all.

(Whereas I'm at least somewhat aware of the Star Trek goings-on because I was exposed to TNG by television.)

</comment><comment><USER9> Markering, social engineering. Hot or not, learn from it!

Everyone in the marketing business should learn how it's done from such premieres (other examples are Bond, Hobbit, Harry Potter).

I think those strategies would not work with a completely new title. Here you have a series that spans over 2-3 generations and through marketing you can create this illusion that this is an incredible cultural phenomenon, and that everyone is waiting, and that it's a part of the saga, and that without watching it you cannot call yourself a member of the polite society, or a middle class.

Look closely at what kind of arguments are used in the marketing messages. "This episode fits to the style of the other films". Now do reverse engineering on that statement - they took focus groups, sociologists, cultural anthropologists, ask people questions: "what are you most afraid of with the new episode", they say: "that it will spoil the style and mood of the previous movies". Now take 2-3 most repetitive statements and construct the smart message that will cover these problems. This is how it's done.

Another element is that the screenplay is written in such a way, that this episode has to be both - relating to the previous episodes and satisfy the fans, but also has to have a self containing story, that will be understood by those unfamiliar to the series. From the marketing point of view the Star Wars fans are not really the target group, they will go to see it no matter what. The real challenge is to broaden the fan base, attract those uninterested. Make the girlfriends go together with the boyfriends, and parents together with the children. Big bucks rule.

I particularly like the way they insert the information into the news reels. Of course the TV stations are being paid for it and the message is well tailored, but goes seamlessly well with other pieces of news. Very few movies are honored like that.

On a technical level - I think Episode I in 1999 was the last one shot on 35mm film. But actors spent most of the time in the blue box, so the editing deserves applause. Episodes II and III were shot on video making the composition with the CGI much much easier. But this time they went back to shooting on film, natural scenery and models. Interesting development. It's also interesting how they are able to release it on all different formats, 2d, 3d, IMAX etc. all at once (like games on different consoles).

I'm slightly critical from the point of view cinematographic art, but I'm admiring it as a global social engineering masterpiece and a business enterprise.

</comment><comment><USER10> There's a big advertisement campaign going on worldwide. In my city they have decorated a large Spire structure ("The Spire") as a lightsaber.

It's funny how all the real fans agree that 3/6 movies were terrible. The first 3 released didn't age well in my opinion but were probably great when released.

<comment><USER11> > It's funny how all the real fans agree that 3/6 movies were terrible.

I don't think this is a unique phenomenon. Although the _real_ fans hate it, I'm sure that some Star Trek viewers enjoyed Spock's Brain, or Threshold (well, I take that back; no one liked Threshold).

It's also "cool" to dislike Special Edition versions, and the Clone Wars show, but that doesn't mean they're bad, or even that fans actually dislike them.

Additionally you have people who watched the originals so many times that they were just disappointed with the prequels (it's hard to make a prequel right, and even if it was nearly perfect, it wouldn't be what the True Fans hoped for). Star Wars was never made for the real fans, because that is too small a niche to really target; in the same way as Star Trek 2009 made True Fans feel betrayed, I think the prequel trilogy disappointed them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's the first movie in a long time that I care enough to see in theaters. The originals are masterpieces. After the shitty remakes though it's hard to get too excited about the new movie.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've never seen any of the films and don't plan on it anytime soon. I've certainly heard about the new film though, but I wouldn't want to spend all that time in a movie theater.

</comment><comment><USER14> Agree --> To be frank, I think its a decent movie but not something to go crazy about.

</comment><comment><USER15> this was a great movie just like there are other great movies. All i can say is that I really enjoyed it and it was worth going to the movies to see the movie. :)</comment>


Intel Reveals Neuromorphic Chip Design - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/view/428235/intel-reveals-neuromorphic-chip-design <comment><USER2> If I understand this correctly, the technology replaces transistor-like technologies, where the state of one input determines if a pathway conducts or blocks, with something called memristors/spin-valves, where the input directs current rather than ever blocking it.

I recall a talk at MIT back in the 90s where the speaker emphasised that heat generated in semiconductors is generated by the frequency with which heat is generated and then sunk, and that it would be possible to design much lower energy, lower heat electronics if ideas from linear logic were applied to gate construction, minimising the need for generate-sink. The paper's technology seems to support this thesis.

For more about linear logic, see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_logic> \- I'm afraid I don't have any references to applications of linear logic to low-power device design.

<comment><USER3> Something like that. The 2008 symposium about memristors talked a bit about "material implication" as a basis for more efficient logic systems. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFdDPzcZwbs>

The HP guys published some papers about it too, but they might be all paywalled?

<comment><USER4> I don't understand why Leon Chua keeps popping up first when memristors are discussed. Williams at HP is the person that made it a reality. Chua postulated the existence of the memristor but as far as I know made no progress on a working example.

That's a bit like giving da Vinci credit for the invention of the helicopter.

The Williams talk on youtube is really good. He discusses the element itself, its use in memory (as vast amounts of on-CPU memory) as well as the possibility of new CPU architectures based on it:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY>

<comment><USER5> A helicopter is an invention but not really a discovery. The memristor is as much a discovery as it is an invention.

<comment><USER6> So, you claim that unlike helicopters, memristors are part of the nature?

<comment><USER7> Indeed they are.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor>

It has been known for decades that laws of nature imply a fourth fundamental electronic element (besides resistor, capacitor and inductor).

>>> The Memristor is believed to be the missing 4th circuit element. Memristor is basically a charge-dependent resistor. The reason that the memristor is radically different from the other fundamental circuit elements is that, unlike them, it carries a memory of its past. When you turn off the voltage to the circuit, the memristor still remembers how much was applied before and for how long. That's an effect that can't be duplicated by any circuit combination of resistors, capacitors, and inductors, which is why the memristor qualifies as a fundamental circuit element. Memristors can be combined into devices called crossbar latches, which could replace transistors in future computers, taking up a much smaller area. They can also be fashioned into non-volatile solid-state memory, which would allow data density of about 100GB/1sqcm. This can be implemented for designing circuits with lesser components, lesser expenses and lesser power consumption. Also coupling the crossbar latch with FPGA (Field Processing Gate Array) technology, we can potentially make processors so dynamic that they would never get obsolete. Giving a practical solution to reduce the millions of tonnes of computer waste generated each year...[1]

[1]: <http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1742116>

<comment><USER8> Blaise Mouttet has written numerous papers and online comments which challenge the claims put forward by memristor proponents[1][2]. Debate surrounds whether the device created by HP is a memristor or simply a varistor[3][etc]. The heated debate has been widely publicised in the scientific community[4][etc] and is still ongoing. According to [3], Blaise has an interest in preventing a patent land-grab over these technologies on the basis that the patent claims may use unjustified science.

I also note that the 2008 symposium talk by Leon Chua made mention of Memory Capacitors and Memory Inductors[5]. Stanley Williams started the next talk by thanking Leon for the challenge posted to systems implementers to find and use memory capacitors and memory inductors. If the missing circuit component is the memory resistor (confused with the varistor?), where do memory capacitors and memory inductors fit in?

[1] <http://vixra.org/author/blaise_mouttet>

[2] [http://arxiv.org/find/all/1/all:+AND+Blaise+Mouttet/0/1/0/al...](http://arxiv.org/find/all/1/all:+AND+Blaise+Mouttet/0/1/0/all/0/1)

[3] [http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328535.200-online- sp...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328535.200-online-spat-over- who-joins-memristor-club.html)

[4] [http://www.eetimes.com/electronics- blogs/other/4236273/Memri...](http://www.eetimes.com/electronics- blogs/other/4236273/Memristor-brouhaha-redux)

[5] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFdDPzcZwbs>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "One reason the brain is so power efficient is that neural spikes charge only a small fraction of a neuron as they travel. By contrast, conventional chips keep each and every transmission line at a certain voltage all the time."

On thr contrary, the brain maintains a constant voltage on neurons, and spends a lot of power to maintain that voltage in the face of leakage current. It is just a much lower voltage. (50 mV rather than 1000 mV.)

</comment><comment><USER10> TRN article, flagged.

<comment><USER11> Huh? Why? Did I miss something? Have TRN astroturfnauts been spamming HN or something?

<comment><USER10> Like Singularityhub or phys.org or sciencedaily, TRN's SOP is to credulously repeat the claims of dubious papers, and give them massively misleading titles.

Bullshit TRN articles:

      http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4057225
      http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4047622
      http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4021790
      http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4007047
      http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3993640

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sheesh, last thing I want is my computer to become horrible at math. Although maybe it'll be better at floating point...

<comment><USER13> The most promising approaches I've seen combine analog pattern-matching-based compression of calculation with traditional digital computation. We see this right now, where human+computer regularly outperforms either alone: the goal is to move both types of reasoning into hardware.</comment></comment>


GreenStone: messaging beacon to spread P2P connections, no Internet required - <AUTHOR> http://opengarden.com/greenstone-1/ <comment><USER2> How the heck is a closed-source, EULA'd platform pretending to be censorship resistant?

<comment><USER2> [https://firechat.opengarden.com/tos](https://firechat.opengarden.com/tos)

<comment><USER3> "You agree that Company may collect and use technical and usage data and related information, including but not limited to technical information about your device, date and time of Application access, system and application software, and peripherals"

This is more facilitation of censorship than censorship resistant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Oh god, Open Garden, not to be confused with anything that's actually in any way open.</comment>


Instagram Stories and WhatsApp Status hit 300M users, nearly 2X Snapchat - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/01/instagram-whatsapp-vs-snapchat/ <comment><USER2> My personal experience with a couple of these apps:

* Snapchat Stories is used by real people to, well, share stories with friends.

* Instagram Stories is flooded with "influencers" peddling diet teas and other shady products.

Is this the case for anyone else?

<comment><USER3> IG stories is a cesspool just like the meme and gif spam that ruined facebooks newss feed

<comment><USER4> thats the best thing about stories and was the best thing about Snapchat: you weren't forced to look and this was counterweighted with the limited lifespan of the content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Could someone explain why people keep directly comparing Snapchat with Instagram and Whatsapp Status?

To me, Snapchat is a fancy way to tell a small subsection of my friends about something i'm doing / seeing right now which they might enjoy. Everything I see on Snapchat is highly relevant, personal, and real. The whole Snapchat Story thing is not even remotely relevant for a lot of users.

Instagram and Whatsapp Status do the complete opposite thing. Their services are simply another copy of traditional social networks, namely posting perfect pictures of the ideal personality that you wish to be to all of your "friends" \- or rather all of the people you ever cared enough about to add to your network. Instagram especially seems to have devolved into a cesspool of poorly hidden advertisements.

It's more or less the digital difference between sending a friend a postcard while on holiday, or submitting an opinion piece to a major newspaper. They seem so different to me that any direct comparison is completely meaningless. Why is this valid?

</comment><comment><USER6> Is anybody else confused by the spate of articles on Snap's decline as a direct result of 'stories' through Insta the last 6 months yet Snapchat still seems to invariably sit on/near the top of the Play Store/App store charts?</comment>


New software company in the field of Artificial Intelligence  - <AUTHOR> http://www.tri-soft.net

<comment><AUTHOR> TRI soft is a company, dedicated to solving real-world problems. We employ the field of Artificial Intelligence, empirical research and innovative technology. Some of our recent work includes visual tracker, scientific visualization of a tornado dynamics and multi-touch web-applications.

<comment><USER2> Hey guys, I wish you all the best with your company, but I really think you could use a native English speaker to craft your PR messages.

Just for starters, any native English speaker will tell you that saying you're a "modern company" is non-informative and ever so slightly ridiculous (sorry to be harsh!). Also, if it's you speaking about your own company, use "we" instead of "they".

With that said, it sounds like you're doing really cool stuff!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the comment. We will take care for crafting our PR messages.</comment></comment></comment>


The McRib Arbitrage (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/11/the-mcrib-arbitrage.html <comment><USER2> "And though the sandwich is made of pork shoulder and/or reconstituted pork offal slurry, ...."

"and we can't seem to agree on what the McRib is made of — some sources say pork shoulder, others say a slurry of offal ...."

While I realize in some cultures there is nothing wrong with consuming offal from my upbringing eating that is a hard no. Makes me wonder what other "offal" products MickeyDs offers.

On second thought, I have eaten a number of McRibs over the years so perhaps I like the taste of offal.</comment>


This week we received our last shipment of Nexus One phones - <AUTHOR> http://googlenexusoneboard.blogspot.com/2010/07/update-nexus-one-changes-in.html

<comment><USER2> That phone rocks and it sucks that their experiment failed. What a shame.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does this mean that you can no longer buy an unlocked (or locked) Nexus One in the US?</comment>


Windows 10 needs Windows Firewall enabled to install fonts - <AUTHOR> http://superuser.com/questions/957907/unable-to-install-fonts-on-windows-10? <comment><USER2> Maybe it has to call home to microsoft to find out if the font is whitelisted? That would of course imply that in Windows 10, "disabled firewall" doesn't mean "all traffic allowed", which I find bizarre...</comment>


Why Didn't the Dream of a Laptop Upgrade Slot Take Off? (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/78w8jy/pcmcia-once-defined-portable-computing-now-its-a-cable-industry-oddity <comment><USER2> Hypothesis: there's a certain minimum amount of time users want to be able to use a laptop for. Say 3-5 years.

Back when every 18 months new hardware would be out that was twice as powerful as what you had just bought for $2k, anything that could upgrade and extend the useful life of your computer would be a selling point and help beat the competition.

These days, for the vast majority of users, a $500 laptop will serve their every need for 5-8 years without upgrades. Even for most power users and developers, a $1500-2000 laptop will last 3-5 years.

So longevity is no longer a major selling point, and thus neither is extensibility. In fact, if they want to get you to buy another new machine within the next decade, it's _against_ the manufacturer's interest to sell you something upgradable.

</comment><comment><USER3> thunderbolt 3 is everything a laptop upgrade slot should be.</comment>


Which video host would you choose? - <AUTHOR> http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/Poll/Embed/WEB22DDFFAMD8E#facebook

<comment><AUTHOR> Basically prior to development I am curious as to the video hosting the majority of users would prefer, videos will be between 30 - 60 mins in length and quality will be reasonable. Any feedback would be much appreciated.</comment>


Bug? Or can you downvote stories on Hacker News? - <AUTHOR> http://s3.amazonaws.com/jaanix/images/16395/Screenshot-1.png <comment><USER2> Ok, I just tracked down the bug and fixed it.

(It was in some new domain-banning code. The problem was that I was checking the domain even on url-less submissions, which caused an error between the point when the story was created and when it was upvoted by its submitter.)

</comment><comment><USER3> The bug is that when you submit a story it doesn't automatically get voted up. Still no downvoting.

<comment><USER2> Yes, looks like that's what happened. For some reason the submitter's initial upvote is not included in the votes of this story. I'm not sure how this happened.

You sound like you've seen this before. Have you?

<comment><USER4> I saw it earlier today... I added my upvote to sort it out. The only similarities were that both stories had no external urls... they were both questions to the community.

Ah, here it is: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=256760>

<comment><USER2> Hmm, sure enough, the submitter is not listed in the voters for that one either. If anyone knows of any other examples, please let me know.

<comment><USER5> For a day or two my votes didn't count. Maybe they were on moderation when they submitted?

<comment><USER2> You triggered some automatic protection against some form of abuse. I forget what.

<comment><USER5> I think that was when I downvoted all the congratulations in your wedding thread. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been wondering about the point system too... Lots of comments have negative points, but I don't see how to downvote. Does downvoting require a certain amount of karma?

<comment><USER7> Yes, I think it's like 25 before you can downvote comments.

<comment><USER8> I am on 25 and I cannot down vote comments. Is karma rating the only mechanism for restricting this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Kinda off-topic, but I noticed that you can't (or at least _I_ can't) downvote direct replies to my own comments. I like this feature, but is it new or have I just never noticed it before?

<comment><USER10> You never noticed before.

<comment><USER9> Thanks. I guess I'm not as observant as I thought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Go to the new page and see the entry in question: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=257108>

<comment><USER11> I'm battling the temptation of upvoting it :)

<comment><USER12> No, it definitely earned that zero.

<comment><AUTHOR> Somebody couldn't resist, now it has 1 :(

<comment><USER11> That wasn't me though.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Should colleges be putting smart speakers in dorms? - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614937/colleges-smart-speakers-in-dorms-privacy/ <comment><USER2> >Should colleges be putting smart speakers in dorms?

No.

From the top of the article:

>Administrators say installing listening devices like Alexa in student bedrooms and hallways could help lower dropout rates.

No. Stop. Just stop.

In fact, I think installing these devices in the offices and conference rooms of administrators is a much better idea albeit just as <s>minimally</s> equally thought-out.</comment>


Apple's Face ID wipes the floor with Android's facial recognition - <AUTHOR> https://bgr.com/2018/12/17/iphone-vs-android-facial-recognition-test-face-id/ <comment><USER2> This seems like it should be labeled paid content? Especially after the huge issue with the X unlocking for almost anyone.

There is the chance Apple put that much money into R&D to fix it, but there is a greater chance they just paid a small percentage of what that would cost to an ad agency to fix public perception instead.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why would anyone use face id to auth to your phone? Not a very good idea.

[https://www.cnet.com/news/fbi-unlocked-an-iphone-x-by- forcin...](https://www.cnet.com/news/fbi-unlocked-an-iphone-x-by-forcing-the- suspect-to-use-face-id/)</comment>


First Psystar Mac Clones Ship - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/384526/exclusive-video-psystar-in-the-wild <comment><USER2> So now we know they're for real.

I'm pretty sure what's happening is a home business started making these and now is getting overrun by the press they are getting. It will be neat to see how they cope with it, but I don't think the outlook is good for them.

Time will tell.

</comment><comment><USER3> hahahahahahahaha, those guys are making bank off of the publicity they're getting. The lawsuit probably won't even cost them near what they're getting. Its nothing more than a bundled up hackintosh. Their product is pure hype from the digg/slashdot/blogosphere. Any mention of a lawsuit is only helping them make more money.

I kept an open mind when everybody said (and even on here), _OMG they won't last till the next day, apple is going to sue them hard!!!_ You'd be surprised how crazy stuff works out in the real world.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think the most interesting thing to watch with this company will be how the licensing and support issues play out.</comment>


Show HN: Google calendar event short urls - a fun weekend project - <AUTHOR> http://calwith.me

<comment><USER2> Cool idea. Note though that the bookmarklet is broken. Also, it appears that an hour is being added to the start time of the event.

e.g. [http://g.calwith.me/meet-tom-tomorrow-at-12pm- for-2-hours-1N](http://g.calwith.me/meet-tom-tomorrow-at-12pm-for-2-hours-1N)

Should start at 12pm, but starts at 1pm instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I think something's going on with time zones. I'll dig into it.</comment></comment>


Searching for the killer app of unikernels - <AUTHOR> http://unikernel.org/blog/2017/the-search-for-the-killer-app-of-unikernels <comment><USER2> Unikernels don't need a killer app, they need millisecond boot and teardown time from the major cloud vendors, along with suitable pricing.

Unikernels are a great technology and very much ready for prime time, but unless cloud vendors provide the millisecond boot/teardown/pricing, Unikernels will remain nothing more than a niche special interest technology.

All the technology is in place for Unikernels to take off once the cloud vendors get behind them.

I wrote Bootrino specifically for the purpose of booting Unikernels (and a whole host of other exotic tiny operating systems) on the major clouds and it works fine - you can see a demo here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJhxmVlR46c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJhxmVlR46c) (Bootrino not released to public as yet).

However, the real draw for Unikernels is short lifetime function as a service type applications.

<comment><USER3> To add to this, I think attention needs to shift from "booting" unikernels to sorta... "instantiating" them. Booting involves enumeration, initialization, and teardown of devices. If unikernels could be resumed from a compact memory image without having to enumerate or initialize any (virtual) devices then I figure things would get a lot easier.

For what it's worth, though, there's a lot of value in long-running unikernels. There are good reasons not to pay even the cost of a memcpy of the unikernel image, especially when it comes to making good use of system resources. I'm mostly interested in unikernels on bare metal (or something close, like device-specific PCIe passthrough). There's a lot of potential in an application having full and exclusive access to a hardware platform; it means that your application can make creative use of isolation primitives, be aware of its true resource limits, and choose scheduling and work sharing primitives which make sense for the application.

In many ways, good unikernel environments are similar to DOS, I'm amused to see the resurgence.

<comment><USER2> Check out Solo5. There's nothing much more in there than a virtual network driver and a virtual disk driver.

Solo5 acts as the host for MirageOS and maybe other Unikernels, or even just for raw C++ code.

<comment><USER4> Do they or would they support libc? And how to go around compiling other important libs which would be required to get python/node/go working?

<comment><USER5> There are plenty of standalone libcs that can be compiled like any other code, they don't need special support from the host. Likewise you could effectively statically link any libraries you wanted into your unikernel image - though if you just build the normal interpreter then you're not getting a lot of advantage out of having a unikernel, part of the point is to build your program in a more direct form without so many extra layers of translation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > This VM would not have an IP stack but a small, secure, and well defined > interface. It can basically do two or three things to communicate with the > host: [...] All of these mechanisms can be transported out of the VM through > hypercall (like VMCALL).

So how is this better than using existing IPC mechanisms and using the "user" abstraction to separate privileges?

And how is this more secure then IPC to a process running under another user given

> The browser takes a careful look at the pointer and the data it is pointing > at. This code will need to be properly vetted as a buffer overflow here > could potentially allow the unikernel to execute code outside its hardware > prison.

(The long list of CVEs tells us how good programmers are at "properly vetting" buffers).

<comment><USER5> > So how is this better than using existing IPC mechanisms and using the > "user" abstraction to separate privileges?

It's a smaller, cleaner, interface that's been designed from day 1 to be secure, rather than having security awkwardly partially retrofitted.

> (The long list of CVEs tells us how good programmers are at "properly > vetting" buffers).

Right, which is exactly why it's vital to keep those interfaces as small as possible, rather than having dozens of different IPC mechanisms for vulnerabilities to hide in.

<comment><USER6> > It's a smaller, cleaner, interface that's been designed from day 1 to be > secure,

Care to argue how something based on sharing memory could ever be more secure than sending messages over pipes or sockets (between different processes)?

<comment><USER7> Pipes and sockets on a local system are usually implemented using shared memory. While there are challenges to implementing secure* shared memory interfaces, it has been done (see eg. SEL4, QNX and many others).

* For example, DoS-safe

<comment><USER6> > Pipes and sockets on a local system are usually implemented using shared > memory.

... where the sharing is mediated by the kernel. You can't access the pipe/socket buffers directly from a user-space program.

EDIT: IIRC, POSIX message queues, at least on Solaris, are implemented SHM and clever queue bookkeeping. But MQs are not sockets or pipes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's never been clear to why very simple unikernels are better than running essentially the same code as a normal user program.

<comment><USER9> A user process running on an OS running on a hypervisor has certain overhead, so you can either remove the hypervisor (native containers) or you can remove the OS (unikernels). Arguably the hypervisor has a smaller attack surface than an OS.

Also, there's a small set of programs that don't get along with the abstractions provided by OSes and run better on a virtual hardware abstraction instead.

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately containers aren't considered secure enough for malicious users while VMs are.

<comment><USER11> Neither are most unikernels. Especially the weak points are file system and network handling. Generally the security of VMs is enforced by hardware and improved by limited attack surface - few drivers to audit, limited communication APIs. You can do the same with general purpose OS by cutting options.

<comment><USER10> I'm not talking about unikernels. I'm talking about the VMs that isolate them from each other. The VM isolation mechanism is considered secure enough to isolate malicious users, while the container isolation mechanism isn't (at least Linux-based containers).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A question that constantly reoccurs for me is this: who does the scheduling of threads and/or processes in a unikernel?

I know unikernels are single process, but are they also intended to be single core? If not, without the kernel scheduler, what is providing that function to the unikernel? Is it just an optional module, say in the case of rumprun?

<comment><USER13> Consider that any complex language runtime (e.g. Erlang's BEAM, the JVM, etc.) has its own scheduler. If you convert such a runtime into a unikernel (such as in Erlang on Xen), the runtime scheduler is "the" scheduler.

Besides languages, though, plenty of complex applications have their own schedulers. Databases, for example. Postgres-as-a-unikernel would make a lot of sense, because it's already doing its own equivalent to everything that OSes do.

If your program is complex enough, it likely will already have an "optimized" form of internally-managed shared memory/message-passing multithreading (with core affinities et al) to allow it to allocate tasks to cores better than the OS can without the "insider knowledge" of what it's trying to accomplish. At that point, your program will end up with a scheduler "inside" whether you set out to build one or not.

On the other hand, if your program _isn 't_ that complex, then it's very likely you'll get better performance out of your code by just making each process into a single-core unikernel and then packing instances onto however many vCPUs the hypervisor host offers.

<comment><USER12> I don't know much about the other Runtimes that you mention, but correct me where I'm wrong:

In the case of the JVM, green threads were dropped a long time ago, and under the current paradigm, native threads are used (on all platforms?). So doesn't this need to be written into the JVM? Not impossible of course (or provided by the unikernel wrapper as it is in OSv).

Similarly with Databases, Oracle and Postgres both use a process per connection client/server model. So a unikernel for these would be impractical without rearchitecting those to run in that kind of environment.

I was initially very excited for Unikernels, but because of this question (and others), I've really started becoming less enamored by them. I'm sure there are many places where they can be put to use, but for most of the software that I'm familiar with, there are still a bunch of kernel services that are quite handy.

At what point of building these services into your unikernel/userspace application do you cross-over to basically building a new kernel. It really feels like the micro-kernel architecture would be a better fit in many of these cases. And yes, I understand that we can think of unikernels as VMs based micro-kernel services, but they have more isolation than traditional variations specifically allowing them to be used in AWS, etc. But still...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if functional programming might be something to implement with a "flock" of unikernels? I'm not even sure what I mean, but it seems like decomposing into unikernels might allow entirely new architectures. (Perhaps analogous to a VM allowing better use of hardware resources, unikernels might allow complete abstraction away from, and across, hardware??)

<comment><USER15> You mean like some kind of "lambda" maybe in the Amazon cloud.... [https://aws.amazon.com/lambda](https://aws.amazon.com/lambda)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A malicious DRM operating system running in my browser sounds pretty bad.

</comment><comment><USER17> Just call this "cloud serverless architecture" and you're done...

(yes, I know this already exists and it's container-based, but similar enough)

</comment><comment><USER18> Would IoT be the killer app for unikernel? Since most IoT apps are simple single purpose app and require fast boot time.

<comment><USER19> Aren't most of these developed using realtime kernels on platforms such as VxWorks ? (last time i looked into hardware dev was 10 years ago, so my knowledge might be outdated)

<comment><USER18> I really have no clue since I haven't done embedded dev for a long time (VxWorks proprietary?). Just throw ideas out and see what stick. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> MirageOS hello world app is pretty ugly. Everything remains to be done before being understood by a wider public.

<comment><USER21> I think few of us like OCaml for its syntactical beauty. People are drawn to MirageOS for its semantics. Type safety, etc.

However, there are other Unikernels. IncludeOS uses modern C++ so the Hello World looks like this:

#include <os> int main() { printf("Hello World!"); }

<comment><USER22> For reference, the ugly OCaml equivalent unikernel is:

let () = print_endline "Hello, world!"

(from [http://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2014/07/28/my-first- unikernel/](http://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2014/07/28/my-first-unikernel/))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The usecase of executable code in the browser (including DRM) sounds quite similar to what SGX is trying to do.

<comment><USER21> There is no opposition here. You can, unless I'm missing something, run a unikernel within a SGX enclave. They are complementary.

Since a unikernel provides a self-contained system it could provide very clear and reasonably secure interfaces to the enclave.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This culture of optimization and mutation is pretty out of control.

</comment><comment><USER25> deterministic low-latency audio?

</comment><comment><USER26> I think unikernels are a use case where something like Rust could really, really shine without any feelings of NIH or reinventing the wheel.

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't know, it's pretty unlikely at this point that anything will replace Linux as The Kernel. It's like replacing Google as the search engine.

On top of that users are currenlty moved away one additional abstraction layer from the kernel, to work with apps inside of containers (see Android, Kubernetes). The OS underneath becomes a static one-version-one-set-of- packages layer. That reduces the amount of people who can even decide to exchange a kernel for another, and these are mostly people who are rewarded for stability instead of experiments. Who would still like to write Android apps, if Android would start to crash more often or change its API drastically?

This is a battle that can't be won. Let's move on to one that is still undecided, e.g. which container engine will finally win. Although Docker seems to be the most likely favorite already at this point, I'd still like to see if nspawn will do a systemd move and just replace the alternatives.

<comment><USER28> > _I don 't know, it's pretty unlikely at this point that anything will > replace Linux as The Kernel_

Depending on the domain (embedded, IoT, industrial, medical, etc), tons of other kernels are used (and prevail). We're not necessarily talking web services here.

> _This is a battle that can 't be won. Let's move on to one that is still > undecided, e.g. which container engine will finally win._

That's a totally different concern.

<comment><USER27> Yes there are always special cases that use special tools. But add all computers in data centers + all smart phones and you may have a factor bigger than 1000:1. For the broad mass of people it's totally irrelevant that there is an edge case that makes power use of special kernels.

And no the container war is not a totally different concern. That's the current main concern which influences most people and how software will be administrated (and therefore developed) in the next 20 years.

<comment><USER28> > _And no the container war is not a totally different concern. That 's the > current main concern which influences most people and how software will be > administrated (and therefore developed) in the next 20 years._

I'm not really sure. I think containers (if we're talking of the Docker type) is a hype.

But in any case, totally different concern doesn't preclude it being important. Just irrelevant to unikernels.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Riemann hypothesis, the fine structure constant, and the Todd function - <AUTHOR> https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2018/09/24/riemann-hypothesis-the-fine-structure-constant-and-the-todd-function/ <comment><USER2> I'm a mathematician, but I work on things that are not even remotely related to the Riemann hypothesis. I could not possibly weigh in on the validity of the proof. My colleagues who know this area better are extremely skeptical, in part due to their opinions of Atiyah's work over the last decade. Mathematically, the point of skepticism seems to be the existence of the Todd function with the properties that Atiyah requires in his proof. See [1] for an informed opinion.

Atiyah is one of the most influential living mathematicians. His prior contributions give him a prominent platform from which to announce this result, which has quickly generated a media firestorm. To me, the worst part is that the work doesn't stand alone---a proof is a proof when it is understood by a community of experts. Until it has been carefully evaluated, no one should be criticizing him due to his age or past failures, nor should they be celebrating his achievement.

1\. [https://motls.blogspot.com/2018/09/nice-try-but-i-am- now-99-...](https://motls.blogspot.com/2018/09/nice-try-but-i-am- now-99-confident-that.html#more)

</comment><comment><USER3> > As far as I know, none of the critics have a Fields Medal or Abel Prize in > their closet.

Few years ago when Atiyah was publishing his 12 page proof of Feit-Thompson theorem Serre (both Fields Medal and Abel price) said this:

"I hope Atiyah's "proof" will not be published; I have seen it : it is hopelessly wrong." [https://plus.google.com/+TimothyGowers0/posts/Troy62f3AS6](https://plus.google.com/+TimothyGowers0/posts/Troy62f3AS6)

Those who have the level of understanding needed to understand and critique his work don't seem to think that he just makes normal mistakes anymore. The word proof was in quotes. Let them be the critics and let's not make news about this.

<comment><USER4> Rumor has it that his most recent proof also received private criticism and he rejected it. But the experts are being discreet. They're not jumping on twitter. Instead you had unqualified people who hadn't seen the papers or the talk saying that it had to be wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> that seems very strange that the limit of a purely mathematical function would yield the fine structure constant based on anything other than a coincidence, especially considering we can only measure the fine structure constant to only so many significant figures based on the accuracy of our experiments

however if it indeed is the case that the value of ratios of speed of light, planks constant, electron charge and electric permittivity of the vacuum are related to prime numbers would be indescribable

edit - this appears to be closer to the paper [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WPsVhtBQmdgQl25_evlGQ1mmTQE...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WPsVhtBQmdgQl25_evlGQ1mmTQE0Ww4a/view)

</comment><comment><USER6> So my reading of the article is that Atiyah has claimed that he has a proof of the Riemann hypothesis as a corollary to another theorem that is not yet published?

</comment><comment><USER7> This is the clearest, most balanced thing I've yet read on the subject.

We wait to see what the manuscript on the Todd function says.

</comment><comment><USER8> _Michael Atiyah is taking a big risk. I've seen lots of criticism of Atiyah online. As far as I know, none of the critics have a Fields Medal or Abel Prize in their closet._

I don't see how it's a big risk. the worst that can happen is it's wrong. I'm pretty sure he put a lot of thought to it.</comment>