Ask HN: What is the most impressive career switch you've ever witnessed? - <AUTHOR> Curious to hear about the un-thinkable. <comment><USER2> I don't know if "impressive" is the word I'd use, I also don't know if this is the sort of story you're interested in, but...

I graduated Construction Engineering Technology, worked manual labour and moved into an estimating/quantity surveying role at a small construction firm. I was still site foreman at the time, and did just as much physical labour after graduating as I did before.

I decided physical labour was not the life for me. Got hired on at a small oil and gas engineering firm which engineers specialty products for large diameter pipeline construction. What was I doing? Reception. Answering phones. Doing dishes. Booking flights. All the administrative things which were (I thought) far and below me, the educated man.

Fast forward 6 months, I've had two promotions, two raises, and am having my IIBA membership and classes paid for. I still do some reception duties, but rarely.

I think there's a lesson to be had here. I was pretty upset moving into a role at the bottom of the pole, after being fairly "high up" in my old role (well, lots of responsibility even if the pay didn't quite reflect that). But, now I'm making more money than I was, with as much schooling as I (reasonably) want paid for. I showed up with a good attitude every day, and no matter how remedial I felt the work was, I put in 100% effort. It paid off. It's continuing to pay off.

tldr - Started as a receptionist, now am much more

</comment><comment><USER3> I know irony is dangerous on HN, but there was this millionaire who became politician and presided over a nation.

I think that it qualifies as both unthinkable and impressive (albeit mostly in terms of collateral damage).

<comment><USER4> That was impressive, and surprising!

<comment><USER3> Well, it was easier to spot from the outside.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> le-mark I once knew a guy who was enlisted in the Air Force (US) and assigned to a ROTC unit at some school near Harvard. He some how got into Harvard Business school and got the Air Force to pay for it. When I knew him, he was in my reserve unit, and had finagled a COO role at a prominent local business with the mandate to turn it around. Apparently this was based solely on his MBA from Harvard. Which he did. He finished out his reserve contract and last I heard had moved on to CEO some other company.

TL DR: Air Force enlisted to CEO.

Edit; Now that I think about it, I also worked for another company who's CEO had started of enlisted in the military (army national guard iirc). So two enlisted to CEO stories.

</comment><comment><USER5> Jeff Baxter, one of the great guitar players who played with Steely Dan and Doobie Brothers, is now a defense consultant and chairs a Congressional Advisory Board on _missile defense_.

Talk about a _radical_ switch.

</comment><comment><USER6> Any career switch that involves dozens of months of training is very impressive. I've seen several career switches. One of them was an architect that took part-time CS studies to become a programmer. Another was a HR guy that was an electrical engineer before; he was around 40 years old when he took the same part-time CS studies as the mentioned architect. Yet another started as a paramedic, then switched to civil engineering, and he still has enough energy to learn programming (though he's forced to do this, as there's little construction work around here).

</comment><comment><USER7> I went from fine dining cook to Marine Corps infantry to developer. Though the GI Bill takes a lot of the impressiveness out of a massive career change helped by a college degree.

</comment><comment><USER8> I met couple of them:

Soldier in the navy, served enough to fully retired. While being on retirement he learned HTML, CSS, PHP (around 2000s) and he is contractor to this day.

Manager in warehouse. He was working there for 5+ years starting as the lowest paid employee (some other physical jobs before that), decided to start coding. He learned front end dev in 2 years on online courses and landed his first dev job just before he turned 30.

</comment><comment><USER9> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._J._Habibie](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._J._Habibie)

</comment><comment><USER10> Probably nothing crazy but I reflect on my life. I started working as a security officer after high school. I thought: I'm going to move up in the ranks and make good money. I knew everything and I was ready to take on the world.

While my pay wage was something of a joke, although at some sites it was more than others, but 4 years later and a penny raise (boss probably did it as a joke), I realized, I was stuck in a dead end job with no opportunity to grow.

I went back to college, having no idea where I would end up. I continued working security jobs in order to help me pay my way through college. I was interested psychology (which I have my degree in) and eventually wanted to do something with career counseling -- helping college students find their place or helping people who decided to have a career change later in life.

During my latter years in college, I got out of security and worked for student life, which only paid some minimum wage, but I got to do a series of jobs such as orientation leader, secretarial work, and even campus card (I took photos of everyone), and even worked at a liquor store in downtown Chicago for a year.

Anyways, after college, I moved to Israel for a year, where I taught English to elementary and middle school students, and although it was nice, I wasn't very interested in working with kids. This nonprofit organization needed a website so I volunteered to do it for them and loved it. It gave me some insight into web design.

I moved back home and I was desperate for a job with no money and student loans to pay off... so I did the only thing I knew to do: I applied across the boards on Craigslist. I figured I had a college degree now, who wouldn't hire me? Only one company responded, a software company that licensed out their autobody shop software, a program created in Visual Basic 6.0. I had experience in it personally, having taught myself when I was like 11 or 12, but not any experience professionally, but they took a chance on me, and I worked there for a year and a half. I was hired to make the UI more friendly and fix bugs.

After that, tired of a tyrant boss, I moved on to full-time web designer for a Solar Panel company, working in Flash and did the animations for them that displayed on a kiosk for companies in their lobbies. At the same time, I also got hired as a web designer for the media (Solar Panel company on location from 8 AM - 5 PM, media company remotely from 6 PM - 2 AM). I was also freelancing on the side as a web designer. So for almost 2 years, this was my life.

I was eventually laid off from the day job and currently still have a job working for the media, but I am no longer working remotely. They gave me a choice: move across the country or get laid off. So being one of the only employees who chose to move, out of about 20, I negotiated a nice salary rise and they even paid for my move across the country.

If you asked me just a decade ago what I would've been doing today, I probably would have never guessed I'd be working as a web designer / web developer.</comment>


Ask HN: Heated discussion or flamewar? Where is the line drawn? - <AUTHOR>

After reading the discussion [1] whether there is an anti-microsoft conspiracy on HN, with pg joining in about how the flamewar-trigger was set off, it got me wondering where the line is drawn between a heated discussion and a flamewar?<p>[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6596038 <comment><USER2> If you're looking to learn what the algo rules are, you're probably not going to get a completely public response. And why should you expect one? The minute the "rules" are published, some clever so-and-so while change their behavior so that they do bad things without getting caught.

Maybe you could try sending pg an email?</comment>


Gentoo Tesla – T2 Edition - <AUTHOR> http://www.su-tesla.space/2016/04/gentoo-tesla-t2-edition.html <comment><USER2> I'm all for rooting my phones, media devices, gaming consoles...but I think I'd stop short of rooting my car. I think back to the Toyota electronic throttle control system bugs--we can hardly trust manufacturers to develop robust automotive software on their own, long before rooting and customization are thrown into the mix. The media system modded in this post _should_ be completely separate from the "brains" of the car, but that's still not a risk I would take.

<comment><USER3> I wonder what happens when you get into a bad crash, somebody decides to sue, and it comes out that your car was running modified software. Would you be exposing yourself to any liability?

<comment><USER4> Aren't you already liable for all damage in an at fault accident? If you modified it yourself, I'm not sure there's any blame that can be shifted around.

<comment><USER5> If whoever you hit's lawyer manages to make a case that the accident was worse as a result of your modifications, you might have a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _" I think the real question is whether this Tesla's daily driver will be Vim or Emacs…"_

Apparently we have long passed the era when making coffee was something novel for Emacs. Now is the time for

      M-x drive

<comment><USER7> Let me just :qa! this discussion.

<comment><USER8> vim :qa! or emacs evil mode :qa! ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting that some believe rooting a car is going "too far", yet building our entire society and financial systems with duct-tape coding and fail-early- fail-often methodologies is okay.

<comment><USER10> I think when your life is on the line people tend to take it more seriously. Think of techniques like six sigma that rose during the manufacturing of parts for the Apollo program because losing a man was considered (and rightfully so) unacceptable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This brings new meaning to "gentoo is for ricers".

<comment> Hemera- I was INCREDIBLY excited to be able to literally become the stereotype!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I showed this to my wizard ops guy co-worker and he replied with this. [http://www.funroll-loops.info/](http://www.funroll-loops.info/)

Blew my mind he pulled that out.

<comment> Hemera- I link to it at the bottom of the post. The image captions are quotes that were inspired by very real quotes from that website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's a lot of Gentoo hate in this thread. I think that's funny when you consider that the most-used Linux distribution on desktop/laptop computers is based on Gentoo. [1]

Google chose engineers for ChromeOS, and those engineers chose Gentoo. CoreOS also uses portage IIRC. Gentoo isn't for everyone, but I think there's probably a correlation between people who have used Gentoo (or similar) at some point in their life and people who know Linux thoroughly.

[1]: [https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Chrome-OS-built-upon-Gentoo- and...](https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Chrome-OS-built-upon-Gentoo-and-not-the- more-popular-Debian)

<comment><USER14> ChromeOS originally was built upon Ubuntu, but Gentoo made more sense when starting to build for a rather diverse set of hardware, various flavours of ARM etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Context for some of the jokes: [https://fun.irq.dk/funroll- loops.org/](https://fun.irq.dk/funroll-loops.org/)

Internet culture throwback.

<comment><USER16> When I was 15 I started my linux days using gentoo, back in 2003/2004.

While the hassle of compiling and all the effort it took is laughable looking back on it, I still credit it for teaching me the command line and unix in general, these are skills I carry though with me to this day.

<comment> Hemera- 17 for me, and this is exactly how it is for me. Gentoo taught me Linux, and I have enjoyed it ever since. I use other distros as well, but Gentoo will always hold a special place in my heart.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I would love to buy a car with only FOSS software or at least source available software available inside. In the long run, I think it would be much safer than the status quo and with everything becoming computer-driven.

I've thought about doing something like this with my center nav, but it deals with setting the time on the mirror among other things. Still, I can't get updated maps without paying the dealer a few hundred dollars to put a cd in it. I end up just using openStreetMaps on my rooted phone. This is a sad state of things. It feels like a feature-phone. Hopefully the future is brighter.

<comment><USER18> This is something I'd at least expect from Tesla, the company who open sourced all of their patents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can this car still be driven? Doesn't Tesla kill it as soon as you plug it into an ethernet jack?

<comment><USER20> Presumably, he got around their intrusion detection system.

<comment> Hemera- Not sure if there is one, though, I have a feeling there is. I've done nothing to make the car be upset, though. My X session is running on tty1 while the car's UI is running on tty2. As long as the car's normal UI system is running everything is happy. If you shut that down, say, starting fluxbox on that X session (this may or may not have happened), the gateway freaks out because it lost contact and forcibly resets the CID. Also, the touchscreen's input doesn't come through X, the QT apps read it directly. Every now and then I have to just tap the corner of my screen while I'm working, even when I'm in my own environment, because when you are parked and sitting there the touchscreen will turn off after 30 minutes. I'll figure out a way around this eventually.

<comment><USER20> I recall a post somewhere where someone claimed that attempts to hack his Tesla resulted in a message about unauthorized access being detected with the threat of his mobile connection being severed if it recurred. My guess that there is a IDS was based on that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I can't tell if the pull quotes are satire or not. "With Gentoo, my 5s 0-60 is so much faster than your 5s 0-60."

Combined with the stated 3 day compile time, I'm thinking yes? Maybe?

<comment><USER22> It's a reference to this: [https://fun.irq.dk/funroll- loops.org/](https://fun.irq.dk/funroll-loops.org/)

<comment><USER21> That's immediately what I thought of as well, but I didn't want to, um, insult the blogger.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Looks like "Gentoo is for Ricers"[1] has come to its logical conclusion.

[1] [https://fun.irq.dk/funroll-loops.org/](https://fun.irq.dk/funroll- loops.org/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Sigh, really looking forward to someday affording a 4th or 5th-hand used tesla, maybe by 2022

<comment><USER25> The Model 3 is relatively affordable.

<comment><USER24> My car budget is always around $3k max

Model 3 is ten times that.

Hence 4th or 5th hand used.

I expect I'll have to rebuild the battery pack myself.

By then there should be really good documentation and cheap chinese knockoffs of the cells (that last half as long as oem).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Car tuning with -funroll-loops... what a time to be alive!

</comment><comment><USER27> If anyone was under any misapprehension that your car wasn't a PC with a some wheels stuck to it this should've cleared that up. Doom 2 port when?

</comment><comment><USER28> Programming while driving isn't illegal! :-)

</comment><comment><USER29> For what it's worth, this also got featured on cron.weekly last sunday: [https://www.cronweekly.com/issue-25/](https://www.cronweekly.com/issue-25/)

</comment><comment><USER30> Great battery life, but not very lappable...

</comment><comment><USER31> Dude you are my hero.

I look forward to the day that I can sit in my car with my friends, smoking something, watching a movie, and letting the self driving vehicle wander around LA while we look for interesting places to stop and explore.

I would never use my couch again.

Edit: If tesla begins making showers I may not even need an apartment.

<comment><USER32> If you cared to read the article, it's a girl, not a dude :)

<comment><USER33> Except the article does not state that.

<comment><USER34> Gender doesn't really matter but in the comments the author states 'I'm a KDE _girl_ myself', blogger profile has 'gender: female'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Gentoo, is in fact, GNU/Gentoo, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Gentoo. Gentoo is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Gentoo", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.

There really is a Gentoo, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Gentoo is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Gentoo is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Gentoo added, or GNU/Gentoo. All the so-called "Gentoo" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Gentoo.

<comment><USER36> Even if this is supposed to be funny (I can't tell, so I think you may have failed if so), I'd like to correct you and say that what makes Gentoo tick doesn't hinge on GNU at all. We can run on different kernels, different libcs, and coreutils are just a package you install. Might be toybox for all Gentoo cares!

As far as I'm concerned, Gentoo is the most underappreciated distro. I'm a Gentoo dev, but that's not why I'm saying so -- the causal relation is reversed!

<comment><USER37> He's just adapted this copypasta, replacing "Linux" with "Gentoo":

[http://www.lurkmore.com/view/GNU/Linux_interjection](http://www.lurkmore.com/view/GNU/Linux_interjection)

<comment><USER38> Amazing how many people took the bait (myself included). Thanks for the link!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Read Mathematics - <AUTHOR> http://www.people.vcu.edu/~dcranston/490/handouts/math-read.html <comment><USER2> One thing that I really would like to impress upon computer people is that mathematics is not (usually) a formal computer language. Symbols and technical terms change meaning depending on the author, people write with different "accents". There's a little ambiguity and informality at times, but a whole lot less than other kinds of writing.

Mathematics is (usually) written for humans, not computers. Don't attempt to read mathematics as you read code. To keep making bad analogies, it's a bit more like reading music. Picking the right tempo, the notes to accentuate, the interpretation -- this all requires a human. Computer still make crude approximations.

<comment><USER3> Why is that? Why is there not a universal way of writing mathematics that is not ambiguous and can be read by anyone that understands the 'language'?

I have a deep dread and fear of numbers and mathematics in general because I don't understand them and I have never learned. Now I learn that there isn't one thing to learn but a vast array? No thanks. I had this apparently romantic view that an equation is an equation (the same equation) anywhere in the world.

<comment><USER4> Why is there not a universal way of writing _anything_ that is not ambiguous and can be read by anyone that understands the 'language'? Because humans have a tendency to defy attempts at classification and constraint. Constructed real-world languages (Lojban, Esperanto) haven't really taken off, while non- constructed languages mix and match whenever they feel like it ("le parking", "Schadenfreude"). The same is true in maths: people use what is easiest.

<comment><USER5> Because whenever we read something we have to _guess_ the meaning. To the human mind, all communications are inherently contextual and metaphorical. To put it another way each individual has his own internal private language into which everything he reads must be translated.

<comment><USER6> It's as if we truly believe that 0 is positive charged and 1 is negative charged.

Or to take us a step further, that a certain arrangements of electrons is "negative" and the inverse arrangement is "positive"

I often tell CS people that everything in computing is metaphor and it honestly disturbs me that 80% of the time I get blank looks.

<comment><USER7> > I often tell CS people that everything in computing is metaphor and it > honestly disturbs me that 80% of the time I get blank looks

This is why people think Machine "Learning" means that the Singularity is near.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Feynman's method to understand complex problems is so simple and elegant! Surely you're joking, mr Feynman:

 _"I can't understand anything in general unless I'm carrying along in my mind a specific example and watching it go. Some people think in the beginning that I'm kind of slow and I don't understand the problem, because I ask a lot of these "dumb" questions: "Is a cathode plus or minus? Is an an-ion this way, or that way?" But later, when the guy's in the middle of a bunch of equations, he'll say something and I'll say, "Wait a minute! There's an error! That can't be right!" The guy looks at his equations, and sure enough, after a while, he finds the mistake and wonders, "How the hell did this guy, who hardly understood at the beginning, find that mistake in the mess of all these equations?" He thinks I'm following the steps mathematically, but that's not what I'm doing. I have the specific, physical example of what he's trying to analyze, and I know from instinct and experience the properties of the thing. So when the equation says it should behave so-and-so, and I know that's the wrong way around, I jump up and say, "Wait! There's a mistake!"_

<comment><USER9> Also from the same book:

 _" I had a scheme, which I still use today when somebody is explaining something that I'm trying to understand: I keep making up examples. For instance, the mathematicians would come in with a terrific theorem, and they're all excited. As they're telling me the conditions of the theorem, I construct something which fits all the conditions. You know, you have a set (one ball) – disjoint (two balls). Then the balls turn colors, grow hairs, or whatever, in my head as they put more conditions on. Finally they state the theorem, which is some dumb thing about the ball which isn't true for my hairy green ball thing, so I say, 'False!'"_

<comment><USER10> What kind of second-rate mathematician tries to prove a theorem without writing down examples? That's Proving Theorems 101.

<comment><USER11> Right. The very first step in trying to prove a theorem is to try and _disprove_ it (by looking for a counter-example).

<comment><USER12> Which are a form of example. You don't store those counter examples in your head - you write them down. If they don't turn out to be counter examples, what are they?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How I read Mathematics. First try to find the paper. First use [http://front.math.ucdavis.edu](http://front.math.ucdavis.edu) . If you can't find it then use google scholar. If that fails then go on the authors academic website. If that fails then see if the author is live and try to contact them. Then repeat for their grad students. If all else fails post it to r/math or HN and ask for the pdf.

First you want to see if this paper is even worth reading. Scan the Abstract and the conclusions. If it is still relevant then do a quick scan of the whole text and look for the things you don't understand. For everything you don't understand look up on wikipedia. Once you have found those pages then look on the citations on wikipedia to gain more understanding. If you still can't understand the paper reread it and then attempt to redo their calculations. If all else fails ask someone to help you read it. Whenever you get confused write on the paper questions. If you figure out that this paper is meaningless then look for another one.

If you figure out a new question that you want to persue more then try to answer that question. If you don't have access to professor or if they are impeding your work then use stackexchange. Either that or try to invalidate your new theory yourself. Recognize that you can be wrong.

<comment><USER14> Also a very good advice I had received a long time ago but that I had dismissed until recently: some articles are just badly written.

The author sometimes forget to mention what B actually is, changes the meaning of the multiplication operator implicitly, assumes the formula given is inside an integral.... I could go on.

A maths article is an article. A lot are imperfect, quite a few are bad. Some times it is not the reader that is lacking.

That being said, do your homeworks and only consider that possibility after giving the article one hour of your time or so.

<comment><USER15> I remember reading this exact piece of advice, but have been trying to remember where.

Would anybody be able to provide the blog post I believe we both read, which says almost exactly what Iv wrote? I could have sworn Michael Nielson wrote it, but I was unable to produce it last time I searched. So I am following OP's advice and am asking here. :P

<comment><USER15> I may have found the post by Michael Nielson I was looking for... on Hacker News!

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=666615](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=666615)

In particular, this piece of advice he gives still rings true to my ears:

 _Often, when struggling with a book or paper, it 's not you that's the problem, it's the author. Finding another source can quickly clear stuff up._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Mathematical ideas are by nature precise and well defined, so that a precise description is possible in a very short space"

"A well-written math text will be careful to use a word in one sense only"

So many papers are not that careful, and thus, not so precise. There are only so many greek letters, so they end up overloaded. I can't count the number of times I've struggled over an equation, only to find out that the reason it made no sense and/or the value for a specific example came out differently was because the author assumed one variable to mean something differently than I did (and my assumption was perfectly valid in another context. Sometimes another context in -the same paper-). The whole experience is incredibly frustrating.

Echoing another point here, if you just show a sufficiently non-trivial example and walk me through it, I grok it quickly. -Then- give me the equation if you must.

<comment><USER17> My main exposure to mathematics is via CS papers, and this is doubly true there it seems to the point where my warning bells go off if they present their solutions in equations - it's all to often a sign that they're going to hand-wave away essential details that'd be obvious were missing if they presented code or even pseudo-code.

E.g. I did my MSc. on statistical approaches to reducing error rates in OCR, and so many of the papers I reviewed for my literature review suffered from leaving out absolutely critical information when they presented equations etc. that most of the time I spent implementing a lot of the methods presented tended to be to try to reverse engineering missing information (and often that was only possible because many of the papers used one of a few well established public datasets for their experiments).

To me, for those CS papers, maths was a warning what was lying ahead was likely _not_ precise or well defined. It's incredibly frustrating as there were generally no good reason to do so - it wasn't a matter of leaving out large bulks of complicated code. Often it could be as simply as leaving out the concrete values of given parameters.

I'm not implying maths have no place in CS papers, but the CS papers that I've seen that have used it best have tended to _also_ present code fragments, or use maths very sparingly and coupled with painstakingly defining variables etc.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, my attempt at a master's in CS (before deciding the time would be better spent elsewhere) left me feeling largely the same. "Oh, isn't that equation elegant. Oh, wait, actually trying to implement it...what the hell, where is all the other information I need?! That's a gaussian...but where do the parameters for that gaussian come from? What is this variable? WHAT IS THIS VARIABLE?!" etc.

I had a 4.0 departmental in CS from the same school I tried to get a master's in, but yeah, the master's experience was so bad, and working through those issues so time consuming, I just said "Screw it, I can get a better return on this amount of time doing my own things". Even if it's learning the same things, but to an explicit goal rather than just 'understanding' (and an eventual test/assignment that may or may not relate to what I care about), and where I'm not constrained by an academic policy that prevents me from going to others to have them explain exactly what I need to know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> FTA :

>>> One can now check that the next statement is true with a certain amount of essentially mechanical, though perhaps laborious, checking. I, the author, could do it, but it would use up a large amount of space and perhaps not accomplish much, since it'd be best for you to go ahead and do the computation to clarify for yourself what's going on here. I promise that no new ideas are involved, though of course you might need to think a little in order to find just the right combination of good ideas to apply.

I hate that. When I program my computer, I specify all the steps to accomplish something. If it's too verbose, then I abstract it in a function.

I even add comments to make sure that a human reader easily and completely understands what I do.

I do that because I want the computer and the human reader to be productive in their understanding of what I do. And because I want the human reader to see that it's either elegant or just mechanical.

I'm not that pretentious to say "hey, I've hidden a few details because if you are as smart as I am, then you'll understand easily".

I had this when learning maths. As a student I was sometimes lost because I always thought maths were hard. Should I have had all the details, I'd seen it was indeed much easier than I thought and wouldn't have been intimidated. Now, I'm older, and I know all of that and I'm much better at mathematics. But what a waste of time.

And the space argument, come one. Just put all the stuff in annexes and it'll be fine.

<comment><USER19> > I hate that. When I program my computer, I specify all the steps to > accomplish something. If it's too verbose, then I abstract it in a function.

> I even add comments to make sure that a human reader easily and completely > understands what I do.

Yeah, honestly, any single time I read a maths-related paper I feel like I would be better off with an example, well-written, implementation in any programming language.

Then I recall what the code, written by mathematicians, tends to look like, and I'm not so sure anymore...

Seriously, the fact that math people choose to ignore the last 50 years of software engineering development, which was in a large part focused on readability and maintainability, instead of incorporating the techniques for themselves is really baffling. As it is, aside from a couple of really well- written articles, reading any paper has a high chance of frustrating me to tears...

<comment><USER20> Because mathamaticians have thousands of years of history where they learned how to write _math_ in a way that is readable to other mathamaticians.

Software engineering is a very different activity from the math that mathamaticians do. It makes sense that it has a different standard for what mathematicians do.

There are undoubtadly ways to improve mathematics, but it seems highly arrogant to say that your <100 year old field has discovered a massive improvement that mathematics has missed for centuries.

<comment><USER21> appeal to tradition, poor argument. not arrogance to assert perhaps a field needs to update its methods.

<comment><USER20> A software engineer suggesting that math should adopt the practices of software engineering sounds a lot like someone trying to generalize their domain into another domain; and saying that they know better then the domain experts in the field they are generalizing into.

Occasionally they are right. Most of the time however, the domain experts are right.

<comment><USER19> As I said in another comment[1], I'm not even talking about software engineering, just a good practices of everyday programming.

Could you please tell me why do you think that the name `x` is better than `element` (when talking about some set), the name `X` is better than `training_set`, and the `∑` is better than `sum`?

[1] Here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15914024](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15914024)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I disagree with 'do not read too fast':

Skim all. Skim again the next day. But the third time, get pencil and paper and take notes, and effort. If it's neither uncomfortable nor exciting, you're doing it wrong.

<comment><USER23> Just... no. If you actually have to understand it (rather than, say, peer- review it), then make a honest attempt to understand it right from the beginning. For instance, suppose it takes you 30 minutes to skim through a chapter of a math book. Then you've wasted 30 minutes you could've spent understanding the chapter's first section.

<comment><USER24> What if everyone learns differently?

<comment><USER25> haha true, I envy people that just sit down read a book/chapter/article/blog linearly and then comes enlightened, I can't, I need to first Skim almost 90% of the material, and then start again from the bottom, reading the last part and trying to figure out how the first part is connected or are important for understand what is written.

I think that people that read it linearly don't miss important info, but I just can't

<comment><USER23> Nobody is born knowing how to read effectively. It is a matter of practice and discipline.

<comment><USER26> Have you actually read any of the papers? While I tend to agree with you in an ideal situation where you may assume the writer is <probably> good - that is usually not the case with real-life papers.

It's not even the writing per se - it's the structure, or omissions instead. I would rather skim first to find which parts I may not be able to grasp right away and to find out if there's any point spending time on this, rather than go on and read the pieces from the citation list.

<comment><USER23> > Have you actually read any of _the_ [emphasis mine] papers?

What specific papers are you talking about? TFA doesn't contain a single occurrence of the word "paper". On the other hand, it contains several occurrences of the word "book". And, most importantly, it is obviously written for newcomers to mathematics, who for obvious reasons will spend more time reading carefully written books rather than papers written in a rush.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm curious if anyone has advice on how to understand all the symbols used in math papers. Frequently I find this is the first barrier for me in reading them.

<comment><USER28> Shameless plug, I write about math on BetterExplained.com

For each symbol, I try to make an analogy. For "e", for example, I have the notion of "continuous growth". The formal definition is this:

[https://betterexplained.com/ColorizedMath/content/img/E_(mat...](https://betterexplained.com/ColorizedMath/content/img/E_\(mathematical_constant\).png)

"The base for continuous growth is the unit quantity earning unit interest for unit time."

Once you see the role of each part of the definition, the idea snaps into place. I just wrote about it here: [https://betterexplained.com/articles/colorized-math- equation...](https://betterexplained.com/articles/colorized-math-equations/)

Hope that helps!

<comment><USER19> Just wanted to thank you for a great job you do on BetterExplained. I was able to understand and put to use some concepts only thanks to your articles, most recently it was Fourier transform. I'd be much better at math if people writing educational materials realized that there are more effective ways to teach (and to learn) than what they had experienced. Thank you!

<comment><USER28> I appreciate it, thank you! I have a similar wish, hoping more people would share math in the way that truly helps them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > The author usually spends months discovering things, and going down blind > alleys. At the end, he organizes it all into a story that covers up all the > mistakes (and related motivation), and presents the completed idea in clean > neat flow. The way to really understand the idea is to re-create what the > author left out. Read between the lines.

Pity there's little mathematical writing that actually _does_ contain these blind alleys and mistakes. Part of why I enjoy "Concrete Mathematics" by Graham/Knuth/Patashnik is that it's one of the rare counterexamples.

<comment><USER30> I was thinking of ideas for a talk recently, and I thought of "Things I tried that didn't work and one that did" or something to that effect. However, when I looked through my old failed approaches, I found the amount of documentation was proportional to the level of success of the approach, making such a talk nearly impossible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> There's a contrast between the comments here about Feynman, and the author's example of birthdays. The birthday data is totally random, and the author's assert this is the sort of thing mathematicians enjoy. It strikes me that Wolfram does this too, he'll demo something by saying "let's get some data" and then generate a big pile of random numbers.

I usually space out at that point. I understand the utility of it, but I find it worthless in most cases. I'd rather understand a concrete example well, then check my understanding by trying the random case, then try to think of some clever or experience based edge case or counterexample.

I think Feynman, especially later in life, probably had the gift of jumping straight to step 3: he understood that his most valuable contribution could often be simply expanding the space of possible examples. And random doesn't really get you the whole space, and certainly doesn't get you the interesting parts of the space.

</comment><comment> a-saleh One good advice our calculus lecturer gave us was:

"Proofs are not meant to be understood by reading them from beginning to end. They are usually meant to be `checked` that way. Most of the time, I start reading the proof from the conclusion and work backwards. Often I write my proofs that way as well."

</comment><comment><USER32> Good advice. Here is my advice for reading research papers. [http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2013/07/how-i-read- research...](http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2013/07/how-i-read-research- paper.html)

</comment><comment><USER33> A rather obvious but often overlooked piece of advice is to "read the masters".

IMHO it is very easy to waste tonnes of time reading papers / books that are OK but still vastly inferior to an account of a master.

Want to learn index theory: read Atiyah and Singer's original papers.

Interested in the classification of quadratic forms: read Serre's course in arithmetic.

Need to learn about the recent breakthroughs on prime tuples: read Tao!

Find time to read Weil, insist on reading Poincare, come up with an excuse to read Scholze etc.

Top mathematics literature is often spectacularly well written.

See also: [https://mathoverflow.net/questions/28268/do-you-read-the- mas...](https://mathoverflow.net/questions/28268/do-you-read-the-masters)

</comment><comment><USER34> Mathematical notation is often too vague, informal and too dependent on context.Frankly there is too much ambiguous overloading of symbols.It seems the language has evolved to be succinct and short to write, rather than being explicit and unambiguous.I know maths people say that it is meant to be read by people and not by computers. More people are acustomed to reading code than ever before.I feel that math notation needs reform that makes it formal, unambiguous and capable of describing imperative manipulations rather than be merely declarative, with clear annotations of type information of entities.

<comment><USER35> That's what type theory is for. There have been some very interesting developments in the last 40 years that you might want to check out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I like this approach. I've always been stumped by the exact phrases like "it follows easily" and my eyes tend to glaze over whenever I encounter that latex math formula typeface. Breaking it down like this suddenly helps me appreciate the other layer of communication in math writing, which isn't just about expressing a specific mathematical idea - but also about expressing how to appreciate it.

One gripe is the circular > Before you start to read, make sure you know what the author expects you to know.

How can you know what the contents of the text require before you know (read) the contents of the text?

<comment><AUTHOR> As others have said elsewhere, skim it once or twice, ignoring the detail, reading the text, getting an overall gist of the way it goes.

Then brew a fresh coffee, grab pad and pencil, roll up your sleeves, and make notes as you go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> What I most enjoy about reading mathematics is convincing myself that what I'm reading is true. I like to keep a pad of dot-graph paper and a pencil with me as I read to break down the theorems, lemmas, and expressions as I go; try derivations, etc. Martin Gardner got me into the habit as I read his articles while I was growing up.

These days I can even toy with the idea in Lean[0] or TLA+ and find different ways of formulating the results. What a time to be alive!

[0] [http://leanprover.github.io/](http://leanprover.github.io/)

</comment><comment><USER38> It's too bad in the majority of cases you won't have someone besides you answering all the questions. Without that, the reader would've gotten stuck long ago.

</comment><comment><USER39> After many years of frustration not being able to read physics papers, a helpful physics guy told me: when it's bolded, that means it's a matrix, and that other one, they didn't say so, but it's a vector, so this step is a vector matrix operation.

(that's why, today, I use numpy, where the operations are much easier to see).

</comment><comment><USER40> Also here: [http://web.stonehill.edu/compsci/History_Math/math- read.htm](http://web.stonehill.edu/compsci/History_Math/math-read.htm) In fact, I think this must be the original source.

</comment><comment><USER41> I've been struggling with this lately as I've been studying ML/Stat. Thanks ColinWright!

</comment><comment><USER42> Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas - Albert Einstein

</comment><comment><USER43> This advice could be adapted to more general advice on learning

</comment><comment><USER44> I would add - draw!

</comment><comment><USER45> Just my perspective, but mathematics seems like badly-written software to me. Shitty single-letter variable names with all the code in main() without any separation of concerns.

<comment><USER46> try reading some proofs in coq to see how badly software does in making mathematics readable.

nevertheless, i agree for things like white papers the overloading of identifiers is frustrating.</comment></comment>


Effects of Sexual Activity on Beard Growth in Man: letters to Nature (1970) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v226/n5248/abs/226869a0.html

<comment><USER2> To judge by [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v226/n5248/pdf/226869a0...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v226/n5248/pdf/226869a0.pdf), this article is unavailable. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER3> It's showing up for me: Imgur mirror for the non-academic (it's two scanned pages): [http://imgur.com/a/oE0jX#I3o57rh](http://imgur.com/a/oE0jX#I3o57rh)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> _The identity of the author of this communication has been suppressed for reasons which may be self-evident, but the author, whose work has been vouched for by a colleague, has answered a number of questions raise by a referee._</comment>


Live from Microsoft's mystery press conference in Los Angeles - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/18/microsoft-major-announcement-livelog/ <comment><USER2> built in kickstand? [http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2012/06/micros...](http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2012/06/microsofttablet0096.jpg) kinda cheezy

Cover is a keyboard? [http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2012/06/micros...](http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2012/06/microsofttablet0103.jpg)

That's actually cool

<comment><USER3> Serious question, in what way is your second picture not a picture of a more- or-less conventional laptop?

I'm asking because I find the "live blog" page incomprehensible.

<comment><AUTHOR> Because it's basically a tablet, but the screen cover (3mm thick), that is attached with magnets and can be detached, is a full multi-touch keyboard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Holy Shit! STEVE BALLMER SAID THIS:

 _"We believe that any intersection between human and machine can be made better when every aspect of the experience, hardware and software, are considered together."_

I need to lay down... I wouldn't be half as surprised if Steve Jobs would announce in 2010 that they'll abandon making hardware and license iOS and OS X.

<comment><USER5> Why would this be even remotely surprising? Microsoft is currently trying to cargo-cult what Apple is doing. That they ape the same philosophy isn't unexpected.

<comment><USER6> Are you really implying that Apple's end-to-end ownership of their product has little to do with their success?

<comment><USER5> _Are you really implying that Apple's end-to-end ownership of their product has little to do with their success?_

What a funny, looking-for-an-argument response. You know what, though- I'll humour you.

Do you understand what a cargo-cult is? Are you _really implying_ (groan) that end-to-end ownership is the precusor to success? With this transition, Microsoft is guaranteed super success, right?

But let's go back to Apple for a moment: If you want to attribute their recent success to it, you must also attribute their prior _failure_ to it as well, as they went through well over a decade with dismal products and brutal sales. During the same time that Microsoft, who didn't have end-to-end ownership, was the darling of the tech industry with unheralded success.

I don't know why this sort of sophistry that is so common on here rubs me so raw. I think it's that so many are so desperate to try to simplify the world into clear differentiators, with a seeming blindness to the exceptions and the history behind their ridiculous claims.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm impressed. Construction and overall engineering looks solid, the integrated super-thin keyboard is cool, the stylus input is impressive.

Some nagging questions: battery life? price? availability? (most likely concurrent with win 8 release) screen resolution? (it looked like an IPS display from the screen shots) ram & cpu specs?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not everything is clear yet. But take a look at this. Some of the specs:

[http://www.microsoft.com/global/surface/en/us/renderingasset...](http://www.microsoft.com/global/surface/en/us/renderingassets/surfacespecsheet.pdf)

<comment><USER7> I've seen it, that's not a spec sheet. No CPU/GPU info. No RAM info. Not even display resolution info. It doesn't even tell you what wifi standards it supports except through reading between the lines.

<comment><AUTHOR> I suspect that's because they don't have a final model yet. Notice that this page states: _Actual size and weight of the device may vary due to configuration and manufacturing process_. They announce what they know will be there in the final product. When they have the full final spec, they will show it to us.

<comment><USER7> Hmm, interesting point. There's enough time before launch for that to be an option, at least for the display.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Isn't this the wrong time for a press conference? It's good for the west coast, USA, but who else is really paying attention? Most of the east coast & are at home eating dinner or getting ready for bed & it's very early morning in Asia, right? Am I missing something here?

<comment><USER9> Microsoft is very much a west-coast-of-the-US company. I'm sure they had to wait for markets to close, as well.

<comment><USER8> If they are waiting for the markets to close, does this mean they aren't even confident in their new device? Why have the live press conference anyway?

<comment><USER9> Microsoft always waits for the markets to close for events or announcements. This is nothing new.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's been a long time since I've been impressed by a MS product. Kudos to them.

<comment><USER11> Yeah seriously. Microsoft might actually become publicly cool someday soon. This was the most impressive thing I have ever seen Microsoft do -- both in terms of quality of presentation and product. I guess we'll see if it is as impressive hands-on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Microsoft Surface - Tablet from MSFT

More information: <http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en/us/about.aspx>

Looks cool to be honest. With Metro UI it can be game changer.

</comment><comment><USER13> The tablet's name is "Surface"? Isn't that a bit odd, given that the previous Microsoft Surface didn't ever really take off?

<comment><USER7> And was based on completely different technology and served a different purpose.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I feel that Microsoft is bastardizing or abandoning everything that Microsoft Surface (the table computer) was supposed to be by repurposing its name into Microsoft Surface (the tablet computer) just to compete with iPad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow,

What better vehicle for an OS generally panned as a poor marriage of touch and keyboard - than a tablet marrying ... touch and keyboard. Touchscreen laptops have been a hit so far... I suggest they add a pen.

Even the engadget page is strikingly confusing. "Hey we can use javascript to switch images as the scrolls down the page" - sure, that doesn't mean you _should_ have such bizarro design. If the reviews are correct here, malform follows malfunction..

<comment><USER15> You want them to add a pen? They added a pen:

[http://d35lb3dl296zwu.cloudfront.net/uploads/photo/image/632...](http://d35lb3dl296zwu.cloudfront.net/uploads/photo/image/6325/verge- lb-1023.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The keyboard-cover is a cool idea, but I can't imagine using it well unless I'm using a desk (at what point I'd be using a laptop.)

90% of the time I use my iPad, its on the couch, in bed, or when I'm standing up.

Still, props to Microsoft for this initiative.

<comment><USER17> You can do 90% of what you'd want to do on a laptop without the laptop. Why carry both?

A lot of people I know in a certain live coverage niche have already switched to iPads over laptops for composing and publishing content on the fly, with and without external keyboards. A tablet with keyboard makes a lot of sense over a laptop where mobility is important.

<comment><USER18> but can i sit it in my lap and type, like on my laptop?

<comment><USER19> Not comfortably. But I can more easily play angry birds on it while slouched in front of my TV. Each device has its pros and cons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Launching with Windows 8 (and 3 months later for the pro version). Pricing starts as competitive with other tablets for their 32gb and 64gb variants, going up to ultrabook range for their 128gb version.

So: No immediate launch. No major price advantage (and no pricing details either)

<comment><USER21> No mention of battery life, which I thought was a glaring omission. Either they think that "tablet" implies great battery life so it doesn't need to be mentioned, which seems unlikely, or the battery life sucks and they don't see any point in calling attention to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> A link to Verge's live-blog feed...much better than Engadget's [http://live.theverge.com/microsoft-live-blog-tablet- announce...](http://live.theverge.com/microsoft-live-blog-tablet- announcement/)

</comment><comment><USER23> I watched WWDC via Engadget using the same interface. Everything about this presentation, from the timing to the lame device they are actually announcing, seems poorly thought-out and downright boring compared to Apple's keynote.

Just one of the reasons why "Surface" was a poor name choice: Surface is trending on Twitter right now, but a search for 'surface' includes lots of tweets unrelated to Microsoft or this product. Example:

 _Terms of Virgo @VirgoTerms #Virgo can appear emotionally cold on the surface when they repress their natural kindness._

A similar search for 'iPad' shows zero results that aren't referring to Apple's iPad.

<comment><USER24> Not exactly a fair comparison, during the iPad's announcement, most of the responses on twitter were lame feminine hygiene jokes.

<comment><USER23> Yes, but they were jokes _about_ the iPad. Do a twitter search for 'surface' and you will see a significant number of tweets which are unrelated to Microsoft's tablet in anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's funny that they did a whole presentation like this without mentioning the price, aside from saying it'll be priced "like comparable tablets based on ARM," which doesn't mean much on the face of it. Just recently there was a lot of talk about how Windows 8 is too expensive for tablets running it to be priced in a range to compete with the iPad. One would think that, since Microsoft is making it in-house, it might be cheap enough to compete with the iPad; but of course we won't know until we know.

Will we get a price today, or are they holding that back?

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe, just because it was "too expensive for tablets running it to be priced in a range to compete with the iPad", they put their own hardware (without charging themselves the OS license) at the same price of an iPad or Android tablet. That way, they would make the entire ecosystem bigger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Did anyone find the Verge's live blog much more easier to use?

Also, is anyone aware of a way to "pause" a live blog? That would be worthwhile if say you get a call...

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't know of it while the presentation was happening. But now I've checked it, and you seem to be right, it looks much better.

Also, had checked a live coverage from Ars ( [http://s3.amazonaws.com/liveblogs/microsoft- tablet/index.htm...](http://s3.amazonaws.com/liveblogs/microsoft- tablet/index.html) ) but they had just a few pictures. (Now, it seems that he had a problem: "I wish I could take pictures, but EOS Utility is being awkward for me unfortunately." )

Anyway, while following this coverage, I was also watching the live streaming from Cnet. You can watch also their live-blog: [http://live.cnet.com/Event/Microsofts_mystery_event_in_Los_A...](http://live.cnet.com/Event/Microsofts_mystery_event_in_Los_Angeles?Page=5&tag=Column1;BottomPagination)

Both, the verge's and cnet's are better for the ones coming now :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> My Apple fanboi buddies are telling me that the Surface is ugly. I don't really get that... seems like every tablet is just a border + glass at this point, and mostly indistinguishable from the others. If the delta is just the kickstand + keyboard, I'm a fan. Given that I own an iPhone, Kindle Fire, and X-Box I claim brand neutrality in the religious war. :)

</comment><comment><USER27> does anyone else think this engadget live stream interface is absolutely terrible?

<comment><USER28> It is atrocious. When you move the images "inline", they end up being 100 px by 100 px thumbnails.

The Verge liveblog is much better: [http://live.theverge.com/microsoft-live- blog-tablet-announce...](http://live.theverge.com/microsoft-live-blog-tablet- announcement/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Multitouch keyboard on a cover. Brilliant!

</comment><comment><USER30> Kudos, Microsoft. Glad to see somebody give Apple a little competition. Been looking for a way to get my Chrome extension and scripts onto a tablet form- factor.

</comment><comment><USER31> When they called it Surface I thought it would have that haptic feedback screen that lets you feel different types of resistance based on what's shown on the screen. The keyboard/cover thing is pretty cool, though (although I don't know how comfortable/responsive it'll feel when typing really fast).

This seems more like a showcase of how small, powerful and efficient new chips have gotten then anything Microsoft has accomplished.

<comment><AUTHOR> No. If you want to see it that way, it's more of a showcase for their own hardware engineering. They stated and repeated: "Every micron matters within Microsoft Surface."

And take a look at this pictures: [http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2012/06/micros...](http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2012/06/microsofttablet0171.jpg) and [http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2012/06/micros...](http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2012/06/microsofttablet0185.jpg) and [http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2012/06/micros...](http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2012/06/microsofttablet0145.jpg)

<comment><USER31> My point was that not more than 2 years ago you would not have been able to make a tablet that thin, quiet, cool, fully featured and with an x86 processor inside to boot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Any word on pricing, availability and whether the x86 will have a locked down bootloader (as the ARM will probably have)?

BTW, even for the locked down bootloaders, I read somewhere Red Hat was going to use Microsoft-provided keys to sign their boot images. I wonder if that means they'll be able to have Fedora on an ARM device.

</comment><comment><USER33> I find the stretched rectangle proportions awkward to hold in portrait mode which is how I usually want to use my Asus Transformer. But then I'm more of a reader than a movie/game person.

</comment><comment><USER34> Steve Ballmer: "We designed Windows 8 for the world we know, in which most computers are mobile."

That explains EVERYTHING!

</comment><comment><USER35> My weird guess: eventually Microsoft will end up buying Vizio.

</comment><comment><USER36> The keyboard is so cool. Its hard to believe its real.

</comment><comment><USER37> Any links to the actual video of the conference?

<comment><USER7> No such video exists.

<comment><USER7> Looks like it does now: [http://cdn-smooth.ms- studiosmedia.com/news/mp4_mq/06182012_S...](http://cdn-smooth.ms- studiosmedia.com/news/mp4_mq/06182012_Surface_750k.mp4)

<comment><USER37> Good one. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The multitouch cover/keyboard is very interesting. I think this could be a game changer if it works well.

<comment><USER39> When I saw that, I thought "they've managed to turn a tablet into a laptop." and I actually thought the exact opposite of you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I wonder what Microsoft's hardware partners think of all this. It's not just competition, they actively disparaged the others by saying that it was as powerful as all the ultrabooks out there.</comment>


Amazon in Its Prime: Doubles Profits, Pays $0 in Federal Income Taxes - <AUTHOR> https://itep.org/amazon-in-its-prime-doubles-profits-pays-0-in-federal-income-taxes/ <comment><USER2> Hmm.. the chart at the bottom puts things in an interesting perspective. Amazon has been paying federal taxes fairly regularly. It's just the last two years that it has had negative effective tax rate. There's probably a bunch to dig in to there to understand why, exactly.

The way that article reads, it seems like at least for the last year it's entirely due to the tax cut legislation congress passed last year. Essentially the legislation did exactly what it was designed to do. Amazon hasn't really done anything dodgy there.

This article really just emphasises the need to hold congress accountable for their actions.

<comment><USER3> > _This article really just emphasises the need to hold congress accountable > for their actions..._

That's hard though, because ideology gets in the way. Everyone has this, almost "quasi-religious", devotion to their politicians. So it becomes a lot easier to say, "Hey, look at all these rich banks and wealthy companies taking advantage of all their tailor made tax laws!", than it is to say, "OK guys, we have to sit down and get a list of everyone who voted for these advantageous tax laws that these rich companies are using."

The one is more "sound bite"-y. It's easier to get people behind such a twitter storm. The other requires a performance review of each of our political leaders, which is just not the way we as Americans have typically operated. Not to mention the fact that it requires further action. You have a list, now what do you do with it? For instance, game theoretically speaking, it may be better to hold it over the current politician's head, than it would be to get rid of him/her immediately? Or maybe we just want to send a message, and get rid of all these men and women as soon as the law permits? I mean, it just opens up a lot of questions about how best to proceed.

The other option, you know how to proceed. You just join in on the twitter storm so to speak.

<comment><USER4> Yea I've always found it odd when people blame bad legislation on corporate lobbyists. Lobbyists don't pass laws, politicians do. Directing your anger towards lobbyists is literally giving your politicians a free pass. If a politician accepts a bribe, the politician should be the one taking the heat (along with the system that enabled this to happen), not the one giving the bribe.

For example, tax filing in the U.S. could be as simple as you verifying the information they already have on you, saving you from the time and hassle of having to fill everything out yourself (often through software like TurboTax that costs money). Many countries already do this. But anytime I read an article on the subject, the narrative is that we're stuck with the status quo because companies like TurboTax with a vested financial interest in making tax filing difficult have fought tooth and nail to keep your tax filing difficult. Uh...no, this is not why we don't have simpler tax filing, it's because crooked and/or clueless politicians aren't voting it through Congress.

<comment><USER5> I disagree. Politicians, like everyone else, simply respond to incentives. As long as the incentives aren't changed, it doesn't matter much who's in office. Changing the incentives in this case means limiting corporate contributions to politicians, for starters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A big part of it is that they reinvest a large portion of revenue back into the company in the form of growth. So while they're not paying income tax because of lack of profit, they're building fulfillment centers and hiring like crazy. This means income tax for all those new employees and property tax on all the centers they're building.

<comment><USER7> Is there any way of proving this? My skeptical mind says they're stockpiling a large portion of that money in banks/stocks and getting massive returns with interest/dividends.

<comment><USER6> If they stockpiled revenue in banks, it would be counted as profit and taxed, which is clearly not the case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm really sick of articles like this. Amazon or $insertCompany that isn't paying taxes didn't do _anything_ illegal. Don't hate the player, hate the game. If shit like this bothers you, write your local representatives and ask them to change it.

<comment><USER9> > If shit like this bothers you

It does.

> write your local representatives and ask them to change it.

Done and done.

Here's the problem: my voice, plus the voices of all of those who agree, have far less of an impact on the beahviour of the politicians than Amazon does.

<comment><USER10> Amazon doesn't elect politicians, voters do.

For example, Hillary outspent Trump 2:1, yet still lost.

<comment><USER11> In addition, she also won 3 million more votes and still lost.

Seems a little bit more relevant here.

<comment><USER12> the game wasn't played to win the popular vote. if the rules of the game are different, the game is played differently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> ProPublica published an article that is related to this a couple months ago. It's worth a read: [https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-irs-was- gutted](https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-irs-was-gutted)

Furthermore, one of the authors was just on a truly excellent episode of the podcast _Why is this Happening?_ , which does a great job of summarizing the article and offering additional insights. [https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/can-we-tax-rich- jesse-...](https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/can-we-tax-rich-jesse- eisinger-explains-ncna970581)

</comment><comment><USER14> Do you have to have the heft of an Amazon to take full advantage of loopholes, etc.?

Can the existing tax law be fed into some software which will outline an appropriate path to owe $0? Its all just a bunch of rules, sub-rules, etc., likely with thresholds. If it is similar to personal taxes (e.g. claim medical costs if total is over 7% of adjusted gross) then this is something software should be able to handle.

Or is corporate tax law an area that only can be done with a large team of humans?

<comment><USER15> My understanding is that the problem space is too big to automate, and most loopholes only make sense at the scale where a large tax staff is both a drop in the bucket from a resources perspective and arguably needed either way just to stay in compliance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There's no reason to demonize companies that try not to pay tax they can legally avoid paying. Many of us do the same: take available deductions, possible tax harvesting (if we invest), etc.

Companies are legally obligated to get the best "deal" financially for their shareholders they can. Purposely paying tax would be in breach of their fiduciary responsibility. Blame stupid politicians, not companies.

</comment><comment><USER17> Good for Amazon and Netflix for helping to draw attention to broken tax law by taking full advantage of it. I hope this pushes more people to engage with the government to close ridiculous loopholes and simplify the tax code.

<comment><USER18> Serious question: almost every economists thinks we shouldn't have corporate taxes. So why can't we just get rid of them and properly tax money as it LEAVES companies in the form of dividends or imports?

Recently, stock buy-backs are causing people to get around income tax, so we'd have to fix capital gains, too.

Taxing companies seems like a cop-out. It doesn't seem to have any impact at all on inequality. And it just makes American businesses less competitive.

<comment><USER19> excuse me? "almost every economist"?

taxes serve as both revenue and incentive generation. turns out that when you have 0% corporate tax you lose the ability to incentivize corps via taxes. there are externalities e.g. pollution that one can no longer incentivize via taxation.

you're also bound to hear the same excuse, can't afford to pay the labor now that their tax rates are higher, guess we'll move somewhere else!

<comment><USER10> Taxing pollution has nothing to do with income taxes. Taxing pollution is "internalizing the externalities", not "they made some money let's take a slice."

<comment><USER19> it does in the sense that if corporations pay 0% income taxes then there is no money that can be offset from e.g. pollution tax breaks. think about how the mortgage deduction influences homebuying behavior for private individuals.

<comment><USER20> Well, if you're charged roughly X per kwH for energy, and Y for each # of waste your company produces, this encourages cutting those costs beyond the costs of those parts alone. This would have a more direct effect than simple income tax incentives and be more direct.

There's still an incentive, it's just it's not tethered to income which has _MANY_ ways to work around in other ways with the current structure and the companies wind up not reducing pollution and waste.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> For those wondering how amazon is able to do this it is from using excess stock-based compensation deductions and accelerated depreciation deductions. They also have $600 million net operating losses being carried forward and $1.4 billion in tax credits resulting from R&D spending. The operating losses and tax credits can be carried forward to future years but eventually they will run out of them.

<comment><USER22> And despite these losses Jeff Bozo is the richest man in the world. Clearly these companies are abusing the tax laws to avoid paying their share of taxes.

Amazon depends on the roads that our tax dollars fund. Amazon depends on intelligent people to run its business, funded by the US government through various mechanisms such as research grants. Amazon depends on the protection of the US military. Amazon and companies like Amazon need to pay their share

<comment><USER23> And Amazon pays billions in property tax, SS taxes, and all sorts of other taxes, and generates billions more in income for workers.

Their "share" is what the law says.

I doubt many posters here pay more than required by law, and take tax breaks when applicable, from mortgage deductions, healthcare deductions, schooling deductions, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Second ITEP article on HN recently that bemoans a tech giant not paying taxes, without any substantive discussion of why. Corporations don't just decide to not pay tax; Amazon is operating within the law.

It's nothing but punditry to decry Amazon's tax rate without seriously discussing why it's so low and whether that underlying reason is good policy or not.

</comment><comment><USER25> Reminds one of:

Amazon's electricity rate discounts have pushed up utility costs

Source: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-20/amazon- is...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-20/amazon-isn-t-paying- its-electric-bills-you-might-be)

</comment><comment><USER20> Personally, I don't mind corporations not paying taxes. Companies aren't people, and eliminating taxes should be done in conjunction with restricting political support.

Corporations should either give dividend and/or diversify/expand. If paying dividends, shareholders can then pay income taxes. Amazon has a growth model. What I'm against is corporations holding on to unutilized or underutilized assets in a longer term.

It's the spending and changing hands of money that promotes a healthy economy, having cash or capital sitting unused doesn't really help anyone all that much imho.

That's just my take on it... I'm not in favor of corporate protectionist policies and would rather see a lot of it be torn down to an effect of both reducing corporate power as well as the influence of tax incentives.

</comment><comment><USER26> another clickbait article from this organization. "${TechCo} paid X% in taxes but it should have paid Y% * Current Year Net Income".

What specifically is ITEP arguing for? GAAP profitability is not Taxable income is not Net Cash flow. The IRS has different multi-year schedules for various asset amortizations/depreciation than GAAP so of course the tax rates can be significantly different if the company is investing in growth.

</comment><comment><USER27> I find it interesting that (some of) this community complains about companies taking advantage of the same deductions that many of it's members I'm sure are take advantage of. That is the capital loss after their stock/options for their startups fall below the value they were issued or the deductions from losses they incur while gaining momentum in their startup.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is blog spam. They publish this exact same article about different companies every time one of them reports earnings.

</comment><comment> throwaway-1283 Anyone hit hard this year by the new $10k limit on State and Local Tax (SALT) deductions?

</comment><comment><USER29> When I see headlines like this, which isn't the _rarest_ thing, I wonder why we even bother with a corporate income tax.

The companies that can afford to engineer out of it, will, making it oddly regressive in certain circumstances.

</comment><comment><USER30> Well if corporation are people then why not tax them like people. have marginal tax rates with no loopholes.

</comment><comment><USER22> Any politician promising to raise corporate, capital, and estate taxes _automatically_ has my vote

</comment><comment><USER31> How much capital gains tax has been generated due to appreciation of AMZN stock sales?

</comment><comment><USER32> I am surprised we don't have the equivilent of AMT for corporations.

<comment><USER33> Except we did, and decided to do away with it for a variety of reasons.

[https://doeren.com/tax-reform-individual-amt-corporate- amt/](https://doeren.com/tax-reform-individual-amt-corporate-amt/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> To quote someone else on HN:

> Why is it desirable to transfer money from job-producing companies and > investors to the government?

The government is a money pit. We're long past "essential services". I'm happy to see companies paying 0 tax into the waste pit.

<comment><USER17> Come on.

Who guarantees amazon isn't immediately overwhelmed with ten thousand copycat sites with similar URLs?

Who built the roads upon which employees drive to get to HQ? Upon which delivery drivers drive to get packages to customers?

Who ensures Amazon doesn't need someone riding shotgun, with a shotgun, with every delivery driver?

I'm not even scraping the surface here. Libertarianism, I presume? The free market would have done a better job at building a sovereign system in which Amazon could thrive?

<comment><USER35> Out of your points, only the first (trademark litigation) is handled at the federal level, and extremely inefficiently at that.

Roads and police are (mostly, with some exceptions) controlled by the states.

<comment><USER17> Which are governments, which levy taxes...

<comment><USER35> The thread is about how much federal income tax Amazon paid.

<comment><USER17> I don't follow. The state exists only as an aspect of the federal government. If the federal government didn't exist, the state would just have its own taxes to fund the education system, judicial system, military, etc.

<comment><USER35> Yes that's true, but there is no a priori reason to assume that they would be as outrageously wasteful and inefficient as the US federal government, which:

(1) spends about as much per capita on healthcare as other OECD countries, with dramatically worse coverage,

(2) spends about 10x the world average on military, per capita,

(3) has a political system that is set up to make meaningful reform almost impossible,

and so on...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Tax it's income, not profits

</comment><comment><USER37> >the Trump Administration and its congressional allies included lavish new giveaways such as immediate expensing of capital investments.

So this is obviously considered a bad thing by the author, but wouldn't the cost to the government be the same regardless of whether it was expensed in one year or multiple years?

</comment><comment><USER38> I wish we got rid of all taxes except for income tax on people.

Anyone versed in finance can tell me why that's a bad idea?

<comment><USER39> The simplest counterpoint is that the wealthier people are, the less their wealth relies on income and the more it relies on capital gains; using money to make more money. Squeezing the middle and lower classes while giving a free pass to the very rich seems counterproductive in terms of policy.

<comment><USER38> Well, in my proposal, capital income is just regular income as well.

When you sell stock, sell property, etc. Basically everytime you cash out, that would just count as additional income for that year.

So I'm not sure in that way I understand how it would squeeze the middle and lower class?

<comment><USER39> To be fair, this "proposal" is something you in no way included the details of in your comment. It would be impossible to guess that you were using a novel definition of "income tax" to include capital gains tax as well.

<comment><USER38> Yes, I recognise that.

I guess my thought is more, why not only tax income?

Not exactly, why not only keep the existing income tax and get rid of all others.

Only taxing income (all forms of them), and just using a bracketing system would simplify the whole equation so much. And make filing taxes quite simple.

I'm sad to see people have mostly downvoted me, and provided no rational for what would be worse about such a tax scheme. It seems that's telling to why we are probably very far from a tax reform, people seem to be irrationally attached to the way they're used to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Good for them.

This is why politicians say they want to help the middle class. They are always paying the majority of taxes.

The politicians hardly ever live up to promises.

The important thing to remember is that, fortunately we don't live in a one- world government so the US is forced to compete with Ireland or other countries on taxes. There is a ceiling on how much you can tax before companies say F this I'm going else where.

The "problem" is small US businesses can't replicate easily.

The obvious solution is to level the playing field and make the US competitive on tax rates or drop taxes all together.

<comment><USER41> > This is why politicians say they want to help the middle class. They are > always paying the majority of taxes.

87% of income taxes are paid by the top 25%; 70% of income taxes are paid by the top 10%. The middle class in the US pays an extraordinarily low effective tax rate. The US has a _very_ progressive tax system.

The 50% to 25% income bracket, which makes up most of the middle class, has a 7% average federal income tax rate. Few other developed nations come remotely close to having something like that.

The politicians pander to the middle class out of virtue signaling (it's a great ideological sound bite) and for votes (it's still a large voting block).

<comment><USER40> > 87% of income taxes are paid by the top 25%; 70% of income taxes are paid by > the top 10%.

Do you have an reputable source of truth for this?

> The 50% to 25% income bracket, which makes up most of the middle class, has > a 7% average federal income tax rate.

Any source of truth for this? I'm a sample of one but I pay at least quadruple this rate every year since I can remember and I'm not an edge case. 7% is a joke. I would love to pay that.</comment></comment></comment>


Use Word's no-width optional break character to facilitate wrapping - <AUTHOR> http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/msoffice/use-words-no-width-optional-break-character-to-facilitate-wrapping/5385 <comment><USER2> When writing a document one shouldn't have to worry about this sort of things. This is a rendering problem not an editing/writing problem and should be addressed as such. LaTeX do it pretty good on its own for instance.

There's also several JavaScript libraries which do this hyphenation job automatically. But this is again the wrong approach IMO. The browser should do this at rendering time.

EDIT: How cool! It seems Firefox 6 and nightly webkit finally have this! (Only for english at the moment I guess). If you have those you can try the hyphenation using `-moz-hyphens: auto;` and `-webkit-hyphens: auto;` in CSS.</comment>


Running Pow Over SSL - <AUTHOR> http://www.scottw.com/using-ssl-pow

<comment><USER2> I used to think this was a good way to test SSL, but it's a lot more work to bootstrap a developer and doesn't maintain good separation of concerns. SSL should belong in all your non-desktop/laptop boxes -- production, staging, test.

In test setup blocks:

      @request.env['HTTPS'] = 'on'
      @request.env['SERVER_PORT'] = 443

You can stub out TLS/SSL. Then, ensure your require SSL definition in your controller returns a HTTP 426 status if it's not over SSL.

Your tests expect a 200 response, not a 426 or 302. 302 is bad -- you've already submitted via plaintext once (I'm looking at you, ssl_requirement). Fail fast and fix your code.

SSL will be disabled for only localhost requests.

      def ssl_enabled?
        !(request.local?)
      end

This has been tested on dozens of computers.

<comment><AUTHOR> If this was only about code, I would agree with you.

However, there is more more to this then verifying it renders. For that, I still need to be able to see it in a browser right in front of me.

For me, the two minute setup time for this is well worth.

Thanks for the suggestion/comment.

<comment><USER2> > However, there is more more to this then verifying it renders.

How do you mean?

<comment><AUTHOR> Verifying scripts work properly under SSL, verifying the experience between other 3rd party services (such as payments), etc.

Again, this could all be done on a dedicated test/staging server, but the cost of doing it locally is virtually free, so why not?

<comment><USER2> I follow.

I should preface it by saying I'm working with a team of about 10 developers. For every developer to have to the software working on their local machine, it's a burden.

Our unit/functional tests run clean when SSL is stubbed out from client requests. We use webmock (<https://github.com/bblimke/webmock>) to mock 3rd party integrations. Upon deploy to staging, integration tests (Selenium) sweep through.

Our monitoring software ensures the app and its 3rd party services are responding to those integration points.

So yeah, developing by yourself, it's ok-ish. Though I still prefer having infrastructure be predictable. Mocking the SSL _configuration_ through a reverse proxy feels brittle to me...it usually isn't how production is configured.

I guess another way of putting it -- I'd rather not inspect to make sure the app and its components behave over SSL. I'd rather it not work. Fail fast as they say.

I should draft up our approach and clarify the points. Maybe this weekend.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: askaround.me - Local questions - <AUTHOR> http://askaround.me/

<comment><USER2> This is a great space which is still in its infancy.

Check out <http://www.localmind.com/> for one of your more interesting competitors.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it is an interesting concept. What are some scenarios where you think this might be used? You might want to provide some examples of the site. You could use a stronger call to action.</comment>


Memory map of the Apple II ROMs - <AUTHOR> http://www.easy68k.com/paulrsm/6502/MEMMAP.HTM <comment><USER2> Not being an Apple guy this is the first I've heard of SWEET16. Does anyone know how widely this was used?

<comment><USER3> Apple II guy here. SWEET 16 was not used that much. The Apple II+ -- introduced 2 years after the original Apple II -- used up the whole ROM space for the BASIC interpreter, so there was no longer room for extra stuff like SWEET 16. The original Apple II only sold ~40,000 units, so the Apple II+ memory map became the standard one.

OTOH, it is true that, pretty early on, it became common for the ROM space to be switchable. Instead of reading the on-board ROM, you could have the system read from ROM (or, with the "Language Card", RAM) on a plug-in card. That means that a typical Apple II-whatever in the 80s would actually have had SWEET 16 available, although somewhat hidden, not well known, and without readily available documentation.

Still, I did a lot of low-level programming, and I never used SWEET 16. Nor did I ever run across any code that did, except stuff sold by Apple, like the Programmer's Aid #1.</comment></comment>