Ask HN: Who among the current lot is in the league of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Very few people actually know about Robert Pera. He's the founder of Ubiquiti Networks, and former Hardware Engineer @ Apple. Currently valued at $4Bn, he achieved his first billion within 8 years of starting his company.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here are some guesses, based on the success of the companies they founded. My list has some overlap with the one from @kevindeasis:

Satoshi Nakamoto (Bitcoin)

Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum)

Jack Ma (Alibaba)

Robin Li (Baidu)

Ma Huateng (Tencent)

Lei Jun (Xiaomi)

Evan Spiegal (Snapchat)

Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

Travis Kalanick (Uber)*

Brian Chesky (Airbnb)

Peter Thiel (Palantir)

Jeff Bezos (Amazon)

Elon Musk (SpaceX)

Drew Houston (Dropbox)

Frank Wang (DJI)

Marc Benioff (Salesforce)

Sachin Binsal and/or Binny Bansal (Flipkart)

David Duffield (Workday)

(*Disclosure: I am a former Uber employee.)

</comment><comment><USER4> In below link you can find self made billionaires (if thats what you mean by the league). [https://www.inc.com/business-insider/worlds-youngest-self- ma...](https://www.inc.com/business-insider/worlds-youngest-self-made- billionaires.html)

<comment><USER2> I'm afraid this list is outdated coz it values Elizabeth Holmes at $4.3Bn. Forbes downgraded her value to zero dollars last year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Jack Ma would probably be the next fit for that category. Visionary, and head of a conglomerate.

</comment><comment><USER6> Some of them that kinda fits in your category are Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Vitalik Buterin, Satoshi Nakamoto, Larry Page & Sergey Brin, Ma Huateng, Jack Ma, Robin Li, Andreessen Horowitz, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel.

</comment><comment><USER7> Please explain what "league" means, and why the obvious choices of Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Brin and Page - I assume that 'current lot' means 'new tech billionaires' \- aren't in that league.

<comment><USER5> Brin and Page are IMO the best benchmark. Gates and Jobs aren't necessarily repeatable successes, as in VCs don't look for people like them to try to replicate success.

<comment><USER7> "Repeatable successes"?

If that's your standard then why is Gates on the list? Hasn't he only had one success?

By comparison, Jim Clark founded Silicon Graphics (max market cap of $7 billion dollars in 1995), Netscape (bought by AOL for a stock-swap of $10 billion), and Healtheon (Healtheon/WebMD had a market cap of more than $15 billion at its peak).

Markkula provided angel investment because the Valentine didn't want to provide VC funding.

Don't VCs look exactly for someone like the early Gates? That is, 20-year-old white males from rich, well-educated families, who go to prestigious colleges?

I don't think Microsoft ever needed external funding.

<comment><USER8> Only one success?

Are you ignorant? MSDOS, Windows, Word, Microsoft Programming Suite, Azure, XBox, MSQL, Excel, Flight Simulator, Exchange Server, Surface, Explorer, C#

Microsoft has had many successes and keeps finding ways to reinvent itself.

<comment><USER9> By some measure Gates has none, as he bought a product and called it MS-DOS1, with the profits of that hired other people to make everything else. Zuckerberg at least personally made the thefacebook complete with algorithms a friend drew on a window.

<comment><USER7> That is not a correct interpretation.

Microsoft started as a programming languages company in 1975, first with Altair BASIC and then variants of Microsoft BASIC (Applesoft BASIC, Commodore BASIC, IBM Cassette BASIC, etc.).

Gates was a co-author of Altair BASIC.

That provided the funding to help it spread into other fields. It entered the OS field in 1980 with Xenix, which was the OS that Microsoft Word was originally developed for. The MS-DOS work for IBM didn't start until 1981, six years after the company was founded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here: More context: When I say league, I mean in terms of having a vision, articulating and executing it. All other things being equal, both BG and SJ played a major role in making computers ubiquitous through their companies. So financial success is not a huge parameter in here.

My 2$: I think next such impactful visionaries might be those who make AR and VR mainstream. Only my personal opinion, MZ and JB are not in the same league (with due respect to their hard work and intelligence) thus far.

</comment><comment><USER10> From a non-financial POV:

Elon Musk, John Carmack and Satya Nadella.

<comment><USER11> What puts Satya Nadella in this category? Not challenging your opinion, I'm just not familiar with his accomplishments aside from the fact that he's the CEO of Microsoft and I think it would be interesting to learn more.</comment></comment>


To All the Colleges That Rejected Me - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324000704578390340064578654.html

<comment><USER2> Hopefully there's a twist in the article, but I'm not going to be able to find out.

I'm going to point out that any good university has a wide range of factors they consider for accepting applicants - there's no reason you should be able to expect that just because you hit the standard high marks (all a's, high sats, college prep -- yawn, step into line with the other 30,000 of those please, we have 200 spots).

And frankly, if the author is blaming external factors like they didn't have better parents and/or were not willing to commit fraud to get accepted, there may be another factor the author is blind to, but that others can see.

Just saying.

</comment><comment><USER3> ... says the high school senior being published in The Wall Street Journal. Can't tell if irony.

</comment><comment><USER4> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424127887324000704578390340064578654.html&rlz=1C1LENN_enUS512US512&aq=f&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424127887324000704578390340064578654.html&aqs=chrome.0.57j58.1218&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

<comment><USER5> <http://www.jottit.com/4zeu4/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If I could downvote for posting a link to a site that asks us to pay, I would. Don't have the karma unfortunately.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I posted this. I Googled into it and didn't realize it was behind a paywall. And I can't delete it.

When you do get the karma to downvote, you'll discover that it doesn't work on links, only on comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is awful. I don't know how it was published in the WSJ. I can't tell if it's satire or not... I'm actually angry at her entitlement here.

</comment><comment><USER8> The fake achievement racket is reason enough for my future children to grow up in Europe.

<comment><USER7> It's not that common. I don't know what's she's talking about. There's exaggerations, but very little "charity fraud."

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Side note: is the only way to bypass the wsj paywell via a google search?

<comment><USER10> That's what I did. I actually had to do it in incognito mode because (presumably) they use cookies to try to prevent that.

Someone ought to write an extension...

<comment><USER11> Criminal offence - bypassing a technical rights protection measure.</comment></comment></comment>


The 20th-Century Obelisk - <AUTHOR> https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-20th-century-obelisk/ <comment><USER2> Pentahedrons and cylinders are more straightforward to build to a given height, angled tops are necessary to prevent accumulation of corrosive water/ice cycling.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think part of the appeal of an obelisk is that it is hard to keep the stone together during the raising. Erecting an obelisk in ancient times was a bit of a hassle where one may be being erected would be considered a great act or at least the act of a person able to waste resources. A modern feat would be like the arch in Saint Louis where you use concrete and steel in a way that isn't perfect for them(some tension).

</comment><comment><USER4> I was thinking maybe they discovered something on the moon. Alas, Paris.</comment>


Augmented reality has potential to reshape our lives - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2011-05-16-augmented-reality_n.htm

<comment><USER2> Once they perfect AR (probably via contact lenses or light glasses) I think it will have a massive impact on our lifestyles.

Right now, if we have a problem, we can use the internet via cellphone to look up the issue and a solution. Imagine how much more convenient it would be to have that just built into your vision. Imagine virtual PC terminals, wherever you are. Imagine a massive virtual TV in your house... Anywhere in your house. Or on the bus. Or anywhere.

I watched an anime (Dennou Coil) that really made me see the possibilities of AR. Once we get to that point, I think there will be massive changes in our society.

TVs and PCs for instance. Right now, we think of them as a physical object that displays video, etc. But they don't -need- to be a physical object. (Well, the processor does, but it doesn't have to be where we can see it. Or even in our house.)

Your AR glasses would be your tv, phone, radio, internet connection, and more... And they will probably blend together so we don't think of them like that any more.</comment>


Tell HN: AGI Will Be Underwhelming - <AUTHOR> When it happens, I think we'll get used to it pretty fast and we'll be like, "Oh, that's all it is."
Then everyone can order groceries and plan trips by voice conversation with a smart assistant that actually knows us.
And it will become productized and have tiers and specialities but AGI is not going to be any more "OMG my life is changed foreveaah" type watershed than, say, the iPhone.
Don't. Believe. The. Hype.
That's my take. What do you thinK? <comment><USER2> I believe A(G)I will be like a really dumb human with about 10 thousand years of experience in a certain specialty. It's hard to predict how things would change, but imagine security guards who have memorized every face in the country.

However, don't overlook that the iPhone did change things forever. The difference in lifestyle between 2020 and 2000 is more than 1950 to 1990. Your life might not be different, but it makes a difference to the factory worker who had no savings, but is now an Uber driver who can freely work 16 hours one day and sleep the next day.

We'll likely move a "class" upwards, in that humans will no longer be doing brute labors and driving trucks, but still be scheduling truck routes and telling the AI what to do. Humans will probably be more involved in educating and training, maybe even disciplining stray AI.

I also don't believe we can achieve proper AGI without inventing some kind of emotional state. Maybe AI will develop crushes on their trainer, not so much for sex, but out of gratitude and for survival. Or there could be anger, ambition, envy, which might simply stem from the desire to learn and experiment. Maybe AI may become sweet and manipulative as it predicts patterns in how humans respond. There will also likely be some equivalent of dopamine, and AI could be addicted to staying above 80% charge and so on.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd say we are at the beginning of a lot of technological trends, trends that will span centuries, and we don't quite understand how they will play out.

AGI probably won't get _really_ interesting until 50-100-150 years from now. Ditto for stuff like space travel, self-driving cars or social media.

I'd also question your assertion that the iPhone wasn't a revolutionary change; we simply haven't understood the full implications of mobile computing and mobile access to a global network. Remember that the Internet has only been around in a consumer form for roughly 20-25 years. This is an incredibly short period of time, compared to say, the printing press or the steam engine, and we've already seen society completely transformed.

<comment><AUTHOR> iPhone is revolutionary, but it's productized revolution, which feels smoother. It's not "the singularity"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The first thing that comes to mind is a question. If we made something as smart as you why would you be legally allowed to use it as a slave?

Next the logical argument is that technology doesn't stand still. If we start with a human level AI we can gain increased runtime simply by throwing more compute at the problem. There is no particular reason we have to run it in real time why not 10x or 100x or 1000x.

What would you produce in your field if we gave you a century or a millennium between now and next year?

This leaves the last and perhaps obvious point that an AI that can improve itself can use these centuries of run time to work on such improvements.

If you have human level AI tomorrow you don't have merely human level AI for long and once something surpasses you, you are poorly positioned to predict or control it. This is not to say it would inherently be malicious but does your pet cat get much of a vote in the running of your day to day life?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think this is wrong (not to say you are wrong but this idea which is very common).

The idea that we develop AGI and it is this program that is what we run on a regular device, and then we can make it 10x smarter effectively by running it on 10 devices or 10x as fast. I think more likely will be AGI will be achieved first on the biggest teraflop supercomputers that we have, and it will for a long time be the app that takes a lot to run. And probably the first AGI will not be quite as smart as a human, but basically we will have no other reference point for what it is as smart as so we will call it that.

Also, I think there will be some sort of non-linearity effects that mean that you can't just "scale up" intelligence by adding more processors. It will work to a point, but then the curve flattens. Consider that the global total IQ is already approx 800 billion, but our planet is still pretty dumb. I mean this to also apply to scaling a "single" AGI up in speed. Linear speed gains will have diminishing returns I think.

Also, I speak about the productization and allocation of it. It will not be this "come one come all" "gather round" everyone can partake sort of thing. It will be a product, like night vision or GPS, and the secret government military uses will get the best quality, and the rest of us will get smarter shopping.

Further, if it really is linearly scalable, then it certainly will be controlled. It will be more controlled than enriched uranium in that case, and even if not so scalable is still going to be very controlled if it is at all transformative.

I think the various technological, political and commercial realities will distinctly flatten/soften/smooth the predicted "singularity" discontinuity blast wave into a humdrum speed bump that appears to most of humanity as a better iPhone (basically).

This is pure speculation. We shall see.

<comment><USER4> I didn't suppose that it would run on your laptop. What is possible on top end supercomputers scales up as well as technology improves.

In regards to scaling why can't we use more compute to run the a single ai faster and faster instead of simulating more AI especially if its running on a supercomputer with a high bandwidth communication between nodes?

If between point A and point B you have 100 times the compute why don't you effectively simulate a century of thought for your single AI instead of simulating 100 AIs.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think there will be some limit that means it's not about speed. I think we can't just scale up the speed factor (even if we reach speeds that are fast enough for this in the first place).

Maybe it's related to experience/embodiment. What's a 100 years of thought if you don't have the experience, OODA feedback loop to inform it?

But maybe that's not it, and it's related to something else. I just think the simplistic idea that "once we have it, we only need to make it faster" will not work for some reason. I don't think creating ASI will be that easy. It's basically creating a god. I think if you sped up how an average human thinks, they don't become a god.

Consider psychological trauma and issues. Something that happened 20, 30, 40 years ago, people are still obsessed with and scarred by today. That's not adaptive, and in many ways, that's highly stupid. But it's so common in intelligent humans. If we could have compressed that 40 years of thought (and even experience) to 1 second, they still have made no progress wrt that factor. It's not just about speed, it's about the quality or nature of thought.

But I'm not saying that analogy explains it. I just think there will be some reason why simply adding speed will not some spectacular revolution make.

Another, but still too glib way of saying it is, say we create an AI equivalent to a human. Still humans are pretty dumb, all things considered. Say we speed it up. Now we just have a AI that's more quick to be dumb than a regular human. Do you know what I'm saying?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if gpt-3 is our very first instance of AGI and it's obviously very bad and barely passable. But it meets some definitions. Can learn some new tasks without retraining. Applies common sense to some questions. And can do some arithmetic.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it's possible. Certainly when they draw the timeline in history textbooks in future, GPT-3 could be somewhere at the start, like one of the "ape men" to human transition species. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The usual narrative is that AGI => singularity, in which case it's hard to imagine it's going to be underwhelming.

<comment><USER2> It's more like AGI => ASI => singularity.

That's sort of like saying a Dyson sphere will make nuclear power obsolete.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> <wild speculation>

AGI is not the same as human intelligence. It has the generality of human intelligence but since it isn't restricted by biology it can scale up much easier and can achieve superhuman performance in pretty much any individual task, group of tasks, or entire scientific or technological fields. That's pretty exciting.

</wild speculation>

<reality>

It's questionable whether the above is possible at all. In all likelihood none of us will see anything even remotely close to this in our lifetimes. We're currently so far away from it that we don't even know how to get started on solving such a problem. Nobody is currently working on this, despite how they're advertising their work.

</reality>

I guess what I'm saying isn't that AGI will be underwhelming, it's that it won't exist at all, at least as far as we are concerned.

</comment><comment><USER8> The iPhone changed life as I knew it, forever.

But a lot of people dismiss it as just a smartphone.

I guess it depends on your perspective.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but it's not "the singularity".

Saying AGI will be like iPhone and therefore underwhelming, is not to demean iPhone. But to place in correct perspective the overinflated ( I think ) sense of self importance and impact of so-called AGI.

It's not underwhelming wrt an average week in Techcrunch, but it's underwhelming wrt to the mythos and delusion that surrounds AGI.

Underwhelming does depend on perspective. But my perspective is not to demean iPhone, just to bring AGI big heads back down to earth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Adjusted Gross Income?

<comment><USER10> Artificial General Intelligence</comment></comment>


Facebook Balks at the Bosom - <AUTHOR> http://fredstechblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/facebook-balks-at-bosom.html

<comment><USER2> It wouldn't have anything to do with this, would it?

<http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2008/pdf/E8-29677.pdf>

See pg 38-42

These NEW record keeping regulations extend a NEW recordkeeping requirement to a LOT of work involving mere nudity, and some with no actual nudity at all, presented in any way that can be interpreted as "lascivious exhibition of the genitals or public area" [even if covered] that is produced on or after March 18, 2009

Seems to me that Facebook is just trying to cover it's ass.

<comment><USER3> Breasts aren't considered part of the genitalia, and also breastfeeding isn't exactly a lascivious display. That they did this does not strike me as a legal thing, much more a PR thing; they don't want to piss off anyone who is offended by the display of too much of the wrong area of skin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> These people must realize that the problem really isn't Facebook. Americans fear the human body. With the current legal atmosphere their actions are most prudent.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's interesting though about the platform for your social network defining what is acceptable.

I can understand Facebook making a clear decision to have their platform not be about Porn and sex, but this seems a little bit too far.</comment>


Another Russian boy killed by American adopters in Texas - <AUTHOR> http://rt.com/news/russian-child-killed-texas-496/

<comment><USER2> "Another"?

Edit: here is the law that was mentioned, just passed in late December. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_law_of_Russian_Federat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_law_of_Russian_Federation_no._272-FZ_of_2012-12-28) It was named after a Russian adoptee who died of heatstroke in Virginia.

<comment><USER3> The was an incident in Virginia not long ago. Mistreatment of Russian adoptees by American parents is a current hot-topic in the Russian press. Russia recently banned American adoptions of Russian children.

<comment><USER2> While terrible, it doesn't seem to be on the same level as feeding a kid psychotropics and beating him. [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2009/02...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2009/02/27/AR2009022701549.html)</comment></comment></comment>


Test Anything Protocol specification (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://testanything.org/tap-specification.html <comment><USER2> The testing culture in Perl is among the best I've seen in any language. I miss it when I deal with PHP stuff, which rarely has tests, at all, much less anything resembling complete test coverage and nice smolderish output. Ruby and Python are pretty good, but still seem to be less religious about testing than the stuff that appears on CPAN.

TAP is really nice, though I don't know that it's strictly necessary to build a good suite of tests; it's nice how simple it is (making it easy to use it across languages if you have more than one in your app), but I've found the testing infrastructure to be nice enough on Ruby and Python to not really have to dig into making it do TAP. Everybody has invented their own, and it all works OK.

That said, it'd be really nice if everyone could converge on a common output format, and build super nice tools for consuming it, rather than having a bunch of kinda OK tools built in a dozen different languages. I guess then the problem is that your dev toolchain then requires whatever language you're building in, plus whatever language your reporting tool is built in. And, there's always resistance to that, on almost every project I've worked on. That may be changing with API-based architectures, though...there's probably a business worth building around this problem, though you'd likely be selling to big enterprises who have heterogeneous application stacks (and selling to enterprise kinda sucks).

Is there already a CI tool that'll consume from projects in git and is smart enough to understand the individual test results? I know Jenkins has TAP support, but I haven't gotten around to setting it up yet.

<comment><USER3> Jenkins TAP plugin maintainer here. Let me know if you have suggestions to improve the current TAP support in Jenkins, or any ideas.

Not much of a Perl programmer, but I try to validate the plug-in against the output of some Perl lib tests, and have been wanting to spend some time adding another view to the plugin to mimic [http://www.spurkis.org/TAP-Formatter- HTML/test-output.html](http://www.spurkis.org/TAP-Formatter-HTML/test- output.html)

Now with Node.JS the TAP community got some more users, and there are also tools being created (though not really popular I think) like [http://www.taptinder.org/](http://www.taptinder.org/) and [https://github.com/substack/tape](https://github.com/substack/tape).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been wanting to like TAP, but can't seem to find much straightforward tooling around it. There seem to be tons of libraries for producing it (is a library really needed to spit "ok"/"not ok" to stdout?), a bunch of formatting commands (is it really that useful to swap "ok" with a tick and "not ok" to a cross?), then there are things like Smolder and Jenkins which seem interesting but quite heavyweight.

What I'd really like is a commandline tool for tracking test passes/failures over time, graphing trends, tracking how long tests remain in a failed state, etc. Is there anything like this which doesn't require running a Web server and opening a Web browser?

<comment><USER5> I would imagine the CPAN Testers stuff is adaptable enough.

[http://matrix.cpantesters.org/?dist=Test- Harness%203.36;os=l...](http://matrix.cpantesters.org/?dist=Test- Harness%203.36;os=linux;reports=1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some useful TAP resources here: [https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome- tap](https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome-tap)

</comment><comment><USER7> If Perl did anything for the world, TAP is the greatest thing it did, and even THAT is still being developed. :D

<comment><USER8> Git also uses Perl, more then you'd think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Please complete the security check to access testanything.org"... How about no?

Here's an archived copy: [https://archive.is/a9MFf](https://archive.is/a9MFf)

</comment><comment><USER10> The node testing module `tape` also outputs TAP. Recommended. [https://www.npmjs.com/package/tape](https://www.npmjs.com/package/tape)</comment>


Two Black Swans Spotted in Iceland - <AUTHOR> http://grapevine.is/news/2015/03/23/black-swan-couple-settle-in-dyrholaey/

<comment><USER2> those swans are beautiful, but they are definitely white & gold</comment>


Show HN: Power – Zero-configuration static web server - <AUTHOR> http://power.hackplan.com

<comment><USER2> my preferred static web server right now is superstatic ( [https://www.npmjs.org/package/superstatic](https://www.npmjs.org/package/superstatic) ) .

However, in that case I need to manually setup JS and e.g. less preprocessors.

A bit of background how Power approaches the preprocessor configuration would be nice.</comment>


Company bans Android due to security risks related to fragmentation - <AUTHOR> http://wmpoweruser.com/company-bans-android-due-to-security-risks-related-to-fragmentation/ <comment><USER2> I'm an enterprise architect heading up our mobility practice for an American- based Fortune 200 company and we don't allowed Android devices on our network precisely for security issues. They're allowed on our guest wireless network that terminates outside our perimeter firewall, but that's it. That's not a particularly popular choice as a have a BYOMD program that's effectively restricted to Windows Mobile and iOS devices and a lot of our users have Android devices and are miffed they can't use them.

We've bent over backwards in our attempts to secure Android, all to no avail. We've had Samsung onsite and worked with their Knox technology, and though that came really close it ended up not panning out for all the security cases.

Google could be ceding a lot by ignoring the corporate market. Now that we're building native iOS apps guess what? We're buying lots of iMacs. Two years ago that would have been unheard of. Heck a year ago that would have been unheard of. Now here I am with a shiny new iMac on my desk and VMware Fusion to simultaneously run Windows. The story just dropped a couple of days ago that IBM is purchasing 50,000+ Macs from Apple, which also would have been unheard of a couple of years ago.

I don't have an axe to grind against Android and would love for my users to be able to use their Android devices but it just isn't there. I'm really quite surprised how Google has dropped the ball in this space.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's astonishing how the media has suppressed the story of the Android 5 failure, which was much worse than the Windows 8 failure.

I installed Android 5 on my Nexus tablet and immediately found the tablet was half as fast, the WiFi unreliable, and all sorts of other problems. All for the tinfoil hat protection against the NSA, using cryptography without appropriate hardware acceleration.

Vendors have not moved to Android 5 because of these problems but you never heard of it because the news media is much more afraid of Google than they were afraid of Microsoft back in its day -- Google can make their traffic drop and make their ad revenue go away.

</comment><comment><USER4> 65% of Android devices using less than Jellybean version? Where did they get that info?</comment>


Bayes' rule in Haskell (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://www.randomhacks.net/articles/2007/02/22/bayes-rule-and-drug-tests

<comment><USER2> This is a pretty old post of mine (2007), and I was a bit surprised to see it on Hacker News this morning! For those of you who find all the Haskell impenetrable, let me summarize:

1\. As raverbashing points out, the key takeaway here is "removing the impossible and normalizing is equivalent to Bayes rule." This can be represented in a programming language using a "die unless X is true" instruction and some magic behind the scenes. It's nothing more than a trivial generalization of McCarthy's "AMB" operator for LISP with some weights attached to each possibility.

2\. The nicest thing about this approach is that it makes it very easy to reason about probability correctly. For example, the Monty Hall problem, which is known for being counter-intuitive, can be stated very clearly with all the assumptions visible.

3\. The original audience of this post was programming language designers and people who understand Haskell and monads. For everybody else, I'd like to apologize for the notation. "Simple" is relative, and in this post, I take a lot of background knowledge for granted.

4\. To implement this idea, you can choose between several approaches: explicit enumeration of all possibilities (which explodes exponentially), particle systems, or weighted particle systems. The latter two would be ideally compiled down to GPU code for big problems. Unfortunately, you can't use either Kalman filters or modern Bayesian network solvers, which somewhat limits the usefulness of this approach. Basically, it will scale to lots of data points, but not to complex Bayesian networks.

5\. Dealing with different false-positive and false-negative rates would add a couple lines of code to this example.

If you'd like a more detailed writeup of this idea, see: [http://www.randomhacks.net/darcs/probability- monads/probabil...](http://www.randomhacks.net/darcs/probability- monads/probability-monads.pdf) I'll be back online in a couple of hours and I'll be happy to answer any further questions.

<comment><USER3> Do you really mean that "removing impossibility and renormalizing" is _equivalent_ to Bayes Rule?

For example, imagine that we know _a priori_ that a coin has only two possible biases, both of which are neither 0 nor 1. When I use Bayes Rule to update my belief in the two biases in response to observed data, I don't see how I am removing any impossibilities. It seems much more like I am downweighting the unlikely bias and upweighting the likely bias.

<comment><USER2> Excellent question. Let me unpack a bit. Here's an example from the PDF I linked above:

      fluStatusGivenPositiveTest = do
        fluStatus  <- percentWithFlu 10
        testResult <- if fluStatus == Flu
                        then percentPositive 70
                        else percentPositive 10
        guard (testResult == Pos)
        return fluStatus

In this code, you can read the operator "<-" as "pick a possible value from a probability distribution."

Until we look at the test results, there are four possible "worlds" with the following probabilities:

       7% (Flu, Pos)
       3% (Flu, Neg)
       9% (Healthy, Pos)
      81% (Healthy, Neg)

But once we see the the test result is "Pos", then all those worlds with "Neg" become impossible, giving us:

      7% (Flu, Pos)
      9% (Healthy, Pos)

But our probabilities don't add up to 100% any more. Fortunately, all we need to do is normalize them. That gives us:

      43.75% (Flu, Pos)
      56.25% (Healthy, Pos)

This normalization step is basically the denominator in Bayes rule.

As noted above, the number of worlds grows exponentially with the number of probabilistic choices we make. So if you want to use this on a larger problem, you need to use sampling (run the program N times, tabulate the results) or a particle system (which essentially does the same thing in parallel).

<comment><USER3> Until we look at the coin flip results for a coin known _a priori_ to have _only two_ possible biases a and b, where neither a nor b equal 0 or 1, there are two possible "worlds" with the following probabilities:

      0.5 (a)
      0.5 (b)

But once we see that the first coin flip is tails, which we code as -1, then we update using Bayes rule, giving us:

      p(-1|a)p(a)/p(-1) (a, -1)
      p(-1|b)p(b)/p(-1) (b, -1)

I just don't see any removing of possible worlds here. Am I doing this wrong?

<comment><USER2> Let's take the flu test I used in the grandparent post, and walk through it step by step using the traditional notation.

      P(Flu) = 0.1
      P(not Flu) = 1 - P(Flu) = 0.9
      P(Pos|Flu) = 0.7
      P(Pos|not Flu) = 0.1

      P(Flu|Pos)
        = P(Pos|Flu)P(Flu)
          </comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-
          P(Pos|Flu)P(Flu) + P(Pos|not Flu)P(not Flu)
        = 0.07 / (0.07 + 0.09)
        = 0.4375

      P(not Flu|Pos) = 0.09 / (0.07 + 0.09) = 0.5625

As you can see, the same numbers show up in both versions of the problem. In the traditional example, the "impossible worlds" are P(Flu|not Pos) and P(not Flu|not Pos), because we know we have Pos. So these two terms never appear in the equation. The division by (0.07 + 0.09) is the same as the normalization step in my example: once we narrow our world down to 0.07 and 0.09, we need to divide by 0.16 so that everything sums back up to 1.

You may need to work through the math in both the Haskell version and the traditional version before it becomes completely obvious that they're exactly the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's more of the quote:

 _Look at how Google does spell checking: it's not based on dictionaries; it's based on word usage statistics of the entire Internet, which is why Google knows how to correct my name, misspelled, and Microsoft Word doesn't._

It's also why Google knows "Jews should be wiped out" and "Muslims should be exterminated" and "blacks are ruining America" and "whites are neanderthals", all suggestions based on the first two words of each phrase. Yes, I'm provoking Google - but surely people also encounter these by accident.

If Microsoft shipped a version of Office that suggested any of the above as "corrections," they would be lambasted for it, and rightly so. Why does Google get a pass? Is it because our standard of decency is so much lower on the Internet? Or is it because we know that Google is merely reflecting popular sentiment on the Internet, and so the true villain is ourselves?

(In fairness, Bing happily suggests equally monstrous ideas.)

<comment><USER5> Because unethical sentences aren't a criminal offence? I mean, if you gave me the first two words from those sentences and asked "what's the most probable next words", I would give you pretty much the same answer. Let me try some more and I'll put my answer next to google's

"lawyers are" -> "greedy sharks" (actual suggestion: scum)

"gays should" -> "be killed" (actual suggestion: be killed)

"marijuana should" -> "be legal" (actual suggestion: be legalized)

"drug users should" -> "get help" (actual suggestion: be shot)

"macs are" -> "better than windows" (actual suggestion: better than pcs)

As you can see, google's opinion on what is the largest cluster of opinions on the subject aligns with what I expect in 4 out of 5 cases. Also note how you're getting both the suggestion that marijuana should be legal and that people who smoke it should be shot. These suggestions aren't google's opinion on the matter, it's what google expects you to think. Thankfully, they're wrong most of the time.

In the end, it's not impossible to write an ethical filter the same way google has a spam filter, the only reason they haven't done it is because there's no pressure to do so. If you don't want to see such suggestions on google, you have two options:

1) Make people not talk about killing gays or how all lawyers are scum

2) Pressure google to add a filter

Also, white people really are partly neanderthal [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Neanderthal&o...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Neanderthal&oldid=553113335#Interbreeding_hypotheses)

<comment><USER6> It's not necessarily what google expects you to _think_ , but rather what you are most likely to be _searching for_.

Sometimes people search for content that they might not agree with, because they want to see what is being said there out of curiosity. Not every search is someone submitting their opinion to google, I'd expect that most are not.

<comment><USER5> You're right, I didn't phrase that right. I should have written "what google expects you to think of", like you said. Still, isn't that the same as "if we divide people in groups based on what they think about topic A; what does the largest group think?" Which to me sounds the same as "what you're most likely to be thinking".

All the people who want the addicts dead, let's say they're 30% of all people who think seriously about drug addicts, will happily rally under "should be shot", while the ones who want them rehabilitated would form many smaller groups under specific kinds of rehabilitation programs, how those should be administered and really what is the best program for fixing these people. Though, when you look at it like that, you're really most likely to think "should be rehabilitated" or maybe "should... I don't really have an opinion one way or the other". But then, if google actually did high-level clustering; that is, extracting opinions that are all at the same level of specificity, would those suggestions be useful for a search engine?

I guess the really right way to put it is -- That's what the google crawler has seen written most frequently -- and assume it doesn't really mean what you or I think about things.

<comment><USER6> > I guess the really right way to put it is -- That's what the google crawler > has seen written most frequently -- and assume it doesn't really mean what > you or I think about things.

Not what the crawler has seen most, but what people typing the same thing as you have ended up searching for most frequently. (We may be thinking the same thing and just confusing the words.)

I don't believe it's supposed to be "what you're most likely to be thinking", it's just a commonly searched-for phrase. I don't think Google's trying to autocomplete with your opinion because people aren't just searching for their own opinion, they're searching for words that will hopefully return the information they want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I entered expecting a cool implementation of Bayes through a simple if statement.

Instead, I saw Bayes' rule in Haskell, a form that's more idiosyncratic than probability expressions.

Simple is in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps making monads isn't actually making Bayes' rule simpler.

<comment><USER8> +1 it was actually a rather horrifying presentation of Bayes's theorem. I would just explain it in 2 lines:

P(Cause and Effect) = P(Cause) × P(Effect given Cause) = P(Effect) × P(Cause given Effect)

so P(Cause) = P(Effect) × P(Cause given Effect) ÷ P(Effect given Cause)

<comment><USER9> Naming it Cause and Effect is misleading; it makes it seem like bayes rule only applies when there is a causal relation somewhere. It also make the symmetry of the first line seem off. I would write the first line as

P(A and B are both true) = P (A is true) x P (B is also true, given that we know A is already true) = P (B is true) x P (A is also true, given that we know B is already true)

<comment><USER8> I was actually going to write A and B at first, but then realized that wouldn't show the relationship of the formula to the disease example very obviously.

I thought it'd be better to make it easier to understand (and more practical) by showing how it helps you infer causes from effects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Google uses Bayesian filtering the way Microsoft uses the if statement.

I am sure it depends on the employee, not the company. MS has done amazing things in machine learning. I love Vowpal Wabbit which is maintained by an ex Yahoo, currently MS employee. I am amazed at the complexity of the Kinect software to translate images into body configurations. Just today I have seen another amazing tecnology from MS: IllumiRoom. Check out the vid : <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGGMv9RnJIA> Check out MAVIS too, a system for transcribing videos and making them searchable. It's a little dated, but very cool nonetheless.

So, while I still think Google is superior, MS is making some amazing stuff too, from time to time.

<comment><USER11> The quote was from most of a decade ago; probably truer then. (Though Clippy was Bayesian. I read somewhere a claim that its awfulness came from management messing with it.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Well, the quoted statement mentions bayesian _filtering_ which is an application of bayesian rule, but it's not as simple as an if.

The other quote 'removing the impossible and normalizing is equivalent to Bayes rule' is a good thing to remember.

Just to mention that drug tests have different rates of false positives and negatives, it's not usually '1% failure'

</comment><comment><USER13> I've totally seen a LISP dialect with probabilistic execution and Bayesian updating built in - it was one of the lecturers at SPARC 2012 - but damned if I can remember the name of the speaker or the LISP dialect. Roughly, using this dialect, you could build a program that would randomly branch at various points, then keep only the cases of the program that matched some property, and ask what the probabilities were for some other property over those cases. I think the keyword was rejection-query but the first page of Google doesn't turn up the desired result for that.

<comment><USER14> Church? I'm not very familiar with the language but I believe it sounds similar to what you're describing. <http://projects.csail.mit.edu/church/wiki/Church>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This actually explains a _lot_ on Google's abysmal customer service, especially where they appear way too triggerhappy on the account-suspensions and pagerank penalizing for appearing too spammy.

<comment><USER16> Google _lacks_ customer service. They are not interested in _you_ , but in volume. And you handle volume through statistics.

If you happen to fall on an edge case, they won't really care. Because you fall in the error.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I still don't understand bayesian statistics and every article I've read to try and learn has had syntax I didn't understand. I just don't know lisp/haskell/etc syntax. My college math stopped at calc 3 and it's been many years since I took that.

Is there a good "bayesian probability for dummies" type resource out there? Any suggestions?

<comment><USER18> Let me throw my hat in the ring for this. Tell me how I did.

First, Bayesian _formalism_ shouldn't be hard. Just remember that

        P(A | B) = P(A & B) / P(B)

and it's easy to derive (left as exercise) Bayes's Law. That's quite easy. The hard part, here, is applying it.

Let's say that I have a coin and I run a game where I always bet heads. If I flip tails, you get $1; on heads, I get $1. Let's also say that 1.00% of the people in the world are depraved enough to use unfair coins that always come up heads. You don't know me, so that's a good assumption for how likely I am to be a scumbag. So there's a prior probability of 0.01 that I'm a scumbag running an unfair game, and 0.99 that I'm using a fair coin. Now, we play, and I flip a head. I win. There's evidence (or signal) that is suggestive that it's _more likely_ that I'm a scumbag, but far from conclusive (fair games will turn up heads as well). How much has the probability changed? Well, let's look at the possibilities:

        I'm a scumbag, and flip heads: 1/100 * 1 = 1/100
        -- There's a 1% prior prob., and if I'm a scumbag I'll always flip heads.
        I'm a scumbag, and flip tails: 1/100 * 0 = 0
        -- If I'm a scumbag, I'll never flip tails.
        I'm using a fair coin, and flip heads: 99/100 * 1/2 = 99/200.
        I'm using a fair coin, and flip tails: 99/100 * 1/2 = 99/200.

It might help to draw a rectangle for the four possibilities, like so:

          Scumbag    Fair
          (1/100)  (99/100)
        +</comment></comment><comment>---+</comment><comment>---+
        | Scumbag | Fair    |
        | Heads   | Heads   |
        |         |         |
        |  1/100  |  99/200 |
        +</comment><comment>---+</comment><comment>---+
        | Scumbag | Fair    |
        | Tails   | Tails   |
        |         |         |
        |     0   |  99/200 |
        +</comment><comment>---+</comment><comment>---+

Once we flip a head, we can throw out the "flip tails" sections, because we didn't. We flipped heads. That leaves us with a subspace that contains 99/200 + 1/100 = 101/200 of the total space-- we know we're in that space, so we can consider only it-- while the probability mass of the "I'm a scumbag and flip heads" remains 1/100. So the probability that I'm a scumbag posterior to flipping heads is:

        (1/100)/(101/200) = 2/101 ~ 2%

Probability wise, I'm almost twice as likely to flip a coin after a head comes up. That relationship holds very well for small priors, but what if there's a 55% chance that I'm a scumbag? Flipping heads doesn't put that probability to 110%-- first of all, that makes no mathematical sense, and second of all, there's _still_ a chance that I'm fair but just flipped another head. (The actual posterior probability is about 71%.)

For probabilities over 0.5, "twice as likely" doesn't make sense, if you think in terms of probability. What about _odds_ , however? Then, you can derive that "twice as likely" as 55% is 71%.

You can say "twice as likely" if you think in _odds_ , not probability. Odds is probability transformed through p/(1-p), or the ratio between the probability of the event happening and it not happening; it has domain [0, +inf] which means that "twice as likely" doesn't cause that problem. If you think in odds terms, it turns out that odds(I'm a scumbag) exactly doubles each time I flip a head. After the first, that _odds_ number goes from 1/99 to 2/99. If I flip 10 heads, then it's 1024/99; transformed back into a probability it's 1024/1123, or a 91% chance that I'm a scumbag.

In fact, what I think makes Bayesian inference hard is that it involves that subtle context switch between _probability_ and _odds_.

        If B is observed and there is a known prior _odds_ of A, the posterior _odds_ of A
        are k times higher, where k is the ratio of the _probabilities_ of
        (A & B) vs. (~A & B).

What makes Bayesian inference neat is that you can run it as an online process (you can look at events one at a time). If observed events (signals) are independent, you don't need to process the corpus as a whole, and order doesn't matter. That becomes nice when you factor in concurrency and distributed computation. From these principles, you can also derive logistic regression (multiplication in the log-odds space is a vertical shift along an S-shaped logistic curve) and you start to see why the logistic curve comes up so often in machine learning.

Ok, so what about Bayesian statistics? Essentially, it comes from the idea that:

        (1) There is some prior probability distribution [0] over the possible states S
        of affairs, which you cannot observe directly but whose relative
        probabilities you can estimate based on observed events E.

        (2) For each event E observed, compute unnormalized posteriors according to
        posterior_unnormalized(S) = prior(S) * likelihood(E | S).

        (3) To compute normalized posteriors, divide each of the unnormalized ones
        by the sum (or integral) of those likelihoods over all states S.
        You now have a sum of 1, which makes it a legitimate probability distribution.

[0] Regarding (1), picking priors is more of an art than a science, which is why some people distrust Bayesian methods. The good news is that if you have a lot of evidence and your priors are reasonable (few assumptions / Ockham's Razor) you will converge to something close to the right answer with enough evidence, regardless of priors.

Now, many actual Bayesian inference methods ignore (3). It's computationally expensive (when there aren't two possible states S, but millions to infinitely many) to normalize and often we don't need to do it. For example, if you're doing classification between two classes Q and R-- with "events" being features of what you're trying to classify-- then you generally only care about which is more likely, not whether there's specifically a 23.75% chance of Q. So the normalization step is generally either skipped (if relative probabilities are all that matters) or procrastinated to the end of the analysis. This "feels wrong" at first but it actually works, and is often better (numerical stability) for the accuracy of the conclusions.

<comment><USER19> Typo, you have Scumbag heads twice in your grid.

<comment><USER18> Good catch. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Shameless plug:

Mathematica knows about Bayes' rule and makes reasoning about it quite simple. If you look here [0] you'll find Bayes' rule in the section: "Properties and relations".

What makes it extremely powerful is that it's fully symbolic so you can do things like:

        Probability[x^2 > a \[Conditioned] x < b, x \[Distributed] NormalDistribution[m, s]]

and have it evalate to a bunch of Erf…

[0] [http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/Probability.htm...](http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/Probability.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> As much as I like Haskell, if your goal is to make Bayes' rule as simple as an if statement, I doubt you can do better than quantum computer emulators.

Say the probability of being a User is 1%. You can initialize your variable, X, to a superpossition, with 99% chance of being clean, and a 1% chance of being a user.

Now, the function, f(x) for the test is such that: f(user) = (99% positive) + (1% negative) f(clean) = (1% positive) + (99% negative)

Take y=f(x). Now, look at the quantum state of your machine (this is why we are on an emulator). Each of the 4 potential states have a certain probability associated with them.

The (theoretical) slowdown of using a quantom emulator is the fact that as the size of your memory increases, you have exponentially more states to deal with. But, because we would need to deal with the same number of states any way, this is not actually relevant.

I should also mention that using a real quantom computer does not provide a (trivial) speed up to this prosess. This is because, while the quantom state contains all 4 possibilities with some probability, when we go to measure it, we will only see 1 of the 4 states. Not only will this not give us a probability, but we would need to re-run the computation to measure it again.

</comment><comment><USER22> I would imagine that in real life you track the reliability of a drugs test as % false positive and % false negative, rather than a single % reliable?

</comment><comment><USER8> Is it just me who doesn't understand what the body of the article had to do with Google or Microsoft?

<comment><USER23> What people are referring to with respect to Google is that if higher-level statistical operations are as easy as an if statement, then this may explain why google takes (presumably amorally) such a statistical approach their customers (because it is easy to).

<comment><USER8> But what did any of that have to do with Microsoft, or even Google's practices?

The entire article was a tutorial on Bayes's rule, with a completely irrelevant introductory paragraph thrown in at the top. Nothing about Google or Microsoft's practices was actually mentioned anywhere.

<comment><USER23> Yes, the article was about simplifying statistical operations. The comments were inferring that some observed practices may have followed as a consequence. I'd prefer to discus the meat of the article, but it's not unusual to see comments go off on a tangent like this.

<comment><USER8> What annoys me is when people write irrelevant provocative introductions just to attract attention to their otherwise not so interesting writings.

<comment><USER24> In this case, it was a _quote_ of a _relevant_ provocative sentence, where the provocation itself was irrelevant. Really, the title was far more intriguing than the quote, but unfortunately the article didn't quite live up to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > "What if Bayes' rule was as simple as an if statement?"

As the article clearly showed, this is wishful thinking.

And there's one simple reason why:

\- Bayesian inference is generally computationally intractable.

\- "If" statements are quite tractable.

Any language in which you could perform Bayesian inference as easily as you perform "if" statements in would result in horrifyingly slow code and become useless.

<comment><USER21> As I pointed out elsewhere in this thread, Quantom computer languages literally do this.

Also, if you want to perform Bayseian inference, then it is equally as difficult computationally whether or not it can be expressed as simple 'if' statements. However, in terms of code simplicity, expressing it as simple if statements is easier.

<comment><USER8> > Quantom computer languages literally do this

Quantum computers also make the sun rise every morning.

I can claim anything about what they do, because they don't exist.

<comment><USER21> Even if quantum computers do not exist, a theoretical model of them does exist, so we can discuss them the same way we discuss a turring machine. (Although we might need to clarify which model we are talking about).

However, that is irrelevant because quantum computers do exist. For example, in 2012, researcher's factored the number 21. [1].

However, even the existence of quantum computers is irrelevant, because programming languages designed for them still exist. [2] Not only that, but you can still run programs written in such languages on a classical computer.

Of course, you could also do the type of Bayesian programming in a language designed for that, instead of one designed for Quantom computation.

[1] <http://arxiv.org/pdf/1111.4147v2.pdf> [2] <http://tph.tuwien.ac.at/~oemer/qcl.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is funny, because Microsoft Research actually works on that.

[http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-19718-5...](http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-19718-5_5)</comment>


The Best Altcoins to Mine Using a Laptop or a PC in 2017 - <AUTHOR> https://www.deepdotweb.com/2016/12/20/best-altcoins-mine-using-laptop-pc-2017/ <comment><USER2> It looks like it would cost you more in electricity to mine these altcoins then you would make by mining them</comment>


Ask HN: A distributed x86_64 emulator atop Erlang/OTP/Elixir. Feasible? - josh-wrale <comment><AUTHOR> Computations can't be just "parallelized" in any automatic fashion. The code has to be written in such a way that it understands it's running concurrently. So splitting up an emulation of a single machine into multiple execution units isn't really feasible. It could SORT of work if the execution was split up by process, but then you'd run into the fact that Erlang isn't very fast at math.

<comment> josh-wrale Makes sense. I was thinking the emulation could have a single virtual core to enforce the non-parallelism within a process. Beneath the emulation, I was hoping to field out processes. However, I see that's not feasible. Thanks for your help!

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> "distributed"?

<comment> josh-wrale Many physical machines, one emulated machine.

<comment><USER2> Possible, but I don't think it would be useful, since there would be to much synchronization overhead that would interrupt execution way to often.

<comment> josh-wrale Cool. Thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Functional Parsers with Go - <AUTHOR> https://play.golang.org/p/bUIjKdd1SIr <comment><AUTHOR> A complete description of the approach can be found here:

[https://email@example.com/using-parser-combinators- in...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com/using-parser-combinators-in- go-e63b3ad69c94)

[https://email@example.com/parser-combinator- gotchas-2...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com/parser-combinator- gotchas-2792deac4531)</comment>


Airlander 10: New pictures of world's longest aircraft - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-35836218 <comment><USER2> The hull looks remarkably like an ass

<comment><USER3> And the second picture includes plug for the ass. (gross)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> While its an amazing aircraft I wonder if we have enough Helium for all the ones they want to build.

<comment><USER5> We do. Natural gas fields produce several billion scf of helium per year as a byproduct. The US National Helium Reserve (which serves 40% of domestic demand for helium right now) could fill up thousands of these blimps on its own, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How do airships like these fair in rough weather? (They mention coast guard duty in the article.)

</comment><comment><USER7> _" The airship, which cost £25m to build, can stay in the same spot for three weeks and can even fly with bullet holes in it._

 _" The US Army ran out of money to develop it as a surveillance machine, so the British aerospace company behind it bought the rights back."_

Sure doesn't seem like a lot of money to the US Army. Or did they spend an untold amount on equipping it with surveillance technology?

<comment><USER8> I'm sure that while it passes all contractors and sub-contractors chain, the price rises significantly.</comment></comment>


A Unity Dev's Thoughts on the New Graphics APIs - <AUTHOR> http://aras-p.info/blog/2015/03/13/thoughts-on-explicit-graphics-apis/

<comment><USER2> Which one?

1) Unity _3d_

2) [http://unity-linux.org/](http://unity-linux.org/)

3) [https://unity.codeplex.com/](https://unity.codeplex.com/)

<comment><USER3> First! Though the actual product is called "Unity", not "Unity3d"...</comment></comment>


Phone-Wielding Shoppers Strike Fear Into Retailers - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704694004576019691769574496.html <comment><USER2> I sometimes feel a bit bad about price checking items in a local shop against the web. For example, I wanted to buy some climbing shoes recently. I have never bought a pair before, had no idea what I should be looking for and what size I should get. I went to a local climbing specialist, they talked me through the options, fitted me for a shoe, etc. At that point I could have left the store and bought the shoes on eBay for about 75% of what they would have cost in the store, but I didn't - I chose to pay full price because the store offered me a valuable service. If that store hadn't been there I couldn't have tried on the shoes. So I think there is a place for paying more for goods when you want/need extra assistance.

In the case of huge stores like BestBuy that are basically like a warehouse with pretty much no customer service except at the checkout I would have no problem buying from the cheapest alternative provider (Amazon/ebay/whatever).

<comment><USER3> I would say that it's OK to walk into a store and price compare with other stores, however I personally agree that it's immoral to use the brick and mortar store to discuss the options and decide what you want to buy, then buy it online.

Some stores are for when you know exactly what you want and just want the most convenience and the best price, others are for actually shopping: investigating your options and deciding what works best for you. Helping you shop costs money. It's immoral to steal the stores time discussing what to buy then buy it from Amazon because it's cheaper.

<comment><USER4> stealing time?

This may be against your own personal morals but it isn't a crime to waste other people's time.

<comment><USER5> He never claimed it was a crime, just immoral, and I agree.

If the store provides you a valuable service, like allowing you to try on shoes or giving you significant advice on which product to buy, you should buy the product from them so that they get profits with which to cover the cost of providing that service.

Now, it depends how extensively you used their resources and how much of a markup they want. If you were in the store for something else and all you did is wander around to try to get ideas of what else you wanted, I don't think there's much obligation to buy. But if you're spending 15 minutes talking to a salesman about all of the possibilities (especially if you wanted to ask him the questions, as opposed to him seeing you in the area and approaching you to try to close the sale and upsell you) or extensively trying out the demo units, the store is providing you value and you're using resources that cost them money. As long as the additional markup that the store wants is fair (for an example of unfair markup see the guy who chose not to buy a $40 DVI-HDMI cable that costs <$3 on monoprice), you should compensate them for the value they provided you and buy from them.

<comment><USER4> there are no clear ethical boundaries here; morality is hardly universal.

I'd like to stay focused here on the so-called immorality. kgermino's choice of words to "steal the stores time" implies theft. I'm not sure if I see eye to eye with this description.

[edit: I'm curious to know why i'm being downvoted here without any followup reply. nothing that I've stated is factually inaccurate - morality refers to personal values, which vary between person to person.]

<comment><USER6> Does it help to turn it around - you are paying a (probably marginally) higher price in the brick and mortar store in gratitude for the service (advice, time, hands-on experience with the gadget) they are providing. Nothing stolen, but fair compensation provided for information obtained.

<comment><USER7> > advice, time, hands-on experience with the gadget

Only if I can trust that the advice, time are all beneficial to me and not the store, which I can't, especially if I'm not dealing with a specialty store. More to the point, does the higher price justify the less then trustworthy advice provided?

If brick and mortar stores are only offering questionable advice and a hands on experience in exchange for the same product at a higher price then the online store with lower cost, then they have to compete with that. If they are providing real value, then they'll do fine.

The problem is, no one wants to pay for advice.

The assumption here is that this is just with online stores. Offline stores also compete as well, and not just using price, but real value-added services. If I got to store-x to learn about a product, an then end up purchasing at store-y because they provide greater value, am I doing wrong?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The "Expected growth in merchandise purchases made on cell phones" graph in this article may be the worst one I have ever seen. They extrapolated an exponential growth curve from _one point_. They only have data for 2009! Not even 2010, much less the 2014 they plotted out to!

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm hoping that this trend ends with the re-introduction of something I've long felt is missing from the American shopping experience. The ability to haggle.

Circumstances surrounding items in stores change by the minute. Things like demand, how long an item has been at a store, the fact that an updated model was just released, etc. American retail stores seem bound to the retail price set in the computer even when that price has been made absurd by unfolding circumstances. It would be much better if the staff were empowered to deal than to ship unsellables off to some giant auction house to get pennies on the dollar.

Of course, that would mean creating a chain of authority in stores ending with giving minimum wage employees _responsibility_. Then again, if you can give them a cut for upselling those ridiculous "monster" cables, they may relish the opportunity.

<comment><USER10> I haggle at almost every store on anything more than $100. Seriously, what store won't let you haggle on a major purchase?

My favorite haggling technique is to ask about the credit options and extended warranty.

If you're going to haggle, act like you're going to buy it on the store credit card with extended warranty.

<comment><USER9> I usually try as well. Sometimes it works, more times it doesn't. It almost always comes with an odd look or the great big "you just added a lot more work to my day" sigh.

I usually go after the "last years model" or "clearance" type items, iphone in hand to demonstrate the current retail value. The most they'll ever do is knock a few percent off and offer me a free cable or something. Their best offers are almost always still ludicrously beyond the reasonable current price. Trying for more gets us a little session at the Altar of the Wyse Terminal, followed by a shrug and "It won't let me do that". Even when the manager is involved.

I'm hoping that bargaining in retail stores will become both common, fruitful, and a socially expected norm.

<comment><USER11> I don't think it's likely. It doesn't scale to the transaction volume of a department store. Imagine you're in the checkout queue at Walmart and the person ahead of you is trying to bargain with the cashier for 20 minutes to try to save a few dollars.

<comment><USER9> I've seen some pretty impressive scale at markets in other countries, bargaining and all. Perhaps its Walmart that's the misfit?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I go to Borders all the time to find things I should buy on Amazon. I rarely buy anything. Why would I when I can get the same book half price and have it in 2 days (or now instantly on my Kindle)? Borders doesn't offer enough additional value to make me feel bad about this. I'd have to be stupid to pay their premium.

Yet, when I buy fly fishing equipment, I almost always buy from a local store—and even the "big box" store, Orvis, offers a fantastic in-store customer experience. Why am I loyal? Because they don't try to sell me crap. They let me hang out and talk fishing. They help me find new spots and learn about new techniques. There's a huge value add, and I'm willing to pay a premium.

Big box stores put a lot of mom and pops out of business in the 90s and 2000s. Now they're getting killed by online retailers. I'm not sure who's going to take out Amazon, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's some level of resurgence when it comes to local retailers who focus on service.

<comment><USER13> > I rarely buy anything [at Borders]. Why would I when I can get the same book > half price [...]?

Because you've made use of the facilities at Borders that make them need to charge you more -- the physical store with a stock of physical books and actual staff who can help you if you can't find something or want extra information. You've derived a tangible benefit from your use of those facilities: you've found some books that interest you, and established that some others aren't worth what they cost.

Sure, no one is then forcing you to buy the books in Borders; neither the police nor Borders staff will give you any trouble for freeloading. And it's not actually against the law. If that's all you care about, fair enough. But it's not like there are no reasons for buying things in a bookshop when you've benefited from the things they offer and Amazon doesn't.

Another reason: If you find Borders useful, then you'd probably prefer them to stay in business. You might want to help with that. Again, no one's forcing you to, and you may just not care much about the tragedy-of-the-commons effect that may ensue when you and others don't. But it's a reason.

> Borders doesn't offer enough additional value to make me feel bad about > this.

You can give them some but not all of the additional value by buying some but not all of those books from Borders. For instance, the ones where the price premium compared to Amazon is smaller.

(For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not saying "Bricks-and-mortar good, online bad". I buy a lot of books on line, more than I buy in physical bookshops. Amazon offers useful services that Borders doesn't -- customer reviews, the recommendation system, and so on. If you've benefited from _those_ , that's a reason to buy from Amazon.)

<comment> mike-cardwell The staff at brick and mortar stores don't help you for altrusitic reasons. They do it because it increases their sales.

<comment><USER14> What, in borders? I'm pretty sure they're not on commission there.

Borders is a pretty meh experience though. You'll get a much better local experience going to a place downtown with a good reputation like city lights, the tattered cover or the strand. They have a lot of reasons to support them - book readings, local authors and topics, live music, staff picks, newsletters, passionate buyers, enthusiast staff.

<comment> mike-cardwell I've never been in a Borders, but I assume that the staff are paid, that their bosses tell them to help customers, and that their bosses do this in order to increase sales.

<comment><USER14> True enough, but they do still represent a value added service. It seemed like you were saying that because it wasn't altruistic it should be left off a list of reasons to support them. Amazon doesn't discount for altruistic reasons, they do it to increase sales. But obviously you consider a discount real value no matter what the intention is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> People need to square up in their heads that the retail experience necessitates higher prices. If you don't want to pay the higher prices, that's fine - but then what are you doing in the store in the first place? Pretty much everything is cheaper online. If you need to go to best buy or borders to find the product you want on amazon, the whole process is unsustainable.

Also, just like supporting locally owned business, supporting locally operated business is in your best interests. They create local jobs and contribute to the local tax base.

I know this isn't a popular opinion, but the sales tax disparity needs to go. The states get triple penalized by it - lack of tax revenue, lack of jobs and it creates a disincentive to online retailers to spread their operations. Maybe they all need to drop it entirely and raise income taxes to make it up (which isn't a bad idea, sales tax being at least somewhat regressive). If not, they need to find a way to collect it.

I have no doubt that this trend will accelerate though, I am guilty of doing it myself. Just like we didn't really realize what we had lost with local farming and the corner hardware store until they were mostly gone, we probably won't realize how much we miss local retail until there a huge portion of goods simply can't be found in person.

<comment><USER15> There is some value in getting the item today, even if it cost a bit more than getting it online. In addition, you avoid paying for shipping.

The difference is what the local business can charge over the online option.

<comment><USER14> Then in the day of amazon prime free two day air, I guess they really are doomed. You simply can't compete with the economies of scale and purchasing power of an amazon while at the same time paying a 5-7% penalty, a lease, insurance, utilities, shrinkage, etc.

Let's say 1 in 10 things you purchase you need to buy today. That means 90% of purchases should be online the way you see it. But if local stores suddenly lost 90% of their business, the prices on the 10% would have to go way up. They'd have to stop stocking a lot of items, lower inventory on the rest. Their buying power would be destroyed. The enablers of retail would dry up - distributors close, regional truckers take jobs with ups, they tear down the storefronts and put in housing.

Once you lose something it can be hard as hell to get it back. Want to buy US made textiles? Good luck. To buy local produce I am a member of a CSA - I have to pay for a year upfront, pick up my box between 4:30-6:30 friday, have no real control over what I get, if I need extra for a dinner party i'm out of luck, and I think there is a 2-3 year waiting list. The local meat and milk I buy is illegal, the regulatory environment has long moved past small producers.

Want to shop at a locally owned hardware store? Hopefully there is one still open around you. If there isn't, how do you signal that you want one? Their owners have retired, nobody is learning how to run one, the banks wouldn't lend to a new one anyway.

Online shopping is cheaper right now because it has to be. If the retail framework went away would it stay that way? It would make sense to raise your margins in an online only world. Transparency and dynamic pricing means you can always go back down if someone undercuts you. Manufacturer quality may dive as well. If you make a mis-stitched or badly sized piece of clothing it simply won't sell at retail. It will always sell online. How many people will return it? Certainly not 100%

Exclusivity is another issue. Once you don't need to support retail, you can supply 100% of your customers from just one or two websites. Manufacturers love this. Don't like the discounting? Raise their wholesale cost. Tie products, lockout competition, force sites to take your whole invetory as it rolls off the line.

Places like Apple are so vertically integrated it'd simply make sense for them to sell direct only. They'd keep the apple stores open - after all they won't be undercutting themselves. Buying a copy of OS X? No problem, just need to verify that you've registered an approved platform with us. Jailbreaker? If they know who you are you go on a lifetime ban list. Friend buys you the new phone? If we track down the udid you're using then he's banned for life too. Bet that'll make you rather unpopular.

Retailers need to rethink old marketing strategies in the age of price transparency. Loss leaders and make up items give you too much incentive to shop around. If I knew everything at a store was reliably 15%-20% over the best online price I wouldn't feel the need to pull out the phone and check prices. It's the fact that there are little +50% or +300% landmines - and once I've found one of those and will order it online instead it seems silly to buy these other lower markup items in store when i could just add them to my online order and save a bit more. Move to shelf dynamic pricing to respond to online changes quickly. If a product does 97% volume online and 3% in your store, fuck it, dump 'em and choose another or private brand it. If 50% of the people who inspect a product in your store go on to buy it online demand promotional fees from the manufacturer and use them to offset higher costs. Integrate better with the community - support local schools and charities instead of national ones, stock local/regional brands, don't fight to open somewhere you're not wanted. Make it so people want to shop at your store to show their gratitude. Tell the local stories all over your store so everyone has a reason to think twice before opting to shave a couple bucks off. Dump the shady sales tactics, flatten commissions, fire anyone caught lying, speak honestly about product shortcomings, never use ignorance to oversell. If people know they can trust your sales staff they'll go to them a lot more, and people getting real help from a salesman don't pull out their phone and order it online at the end.

<comment><USER15> Presumable the stuff I actually need to buy locally is the same as what other people need (milk, perishable items, meat, the occasional bottle of wine).

That just means the stores will have to be small (which is a benefit for them, since they have a smaller number of items in their inventory).

As for starting new types for stores? That happens surprisingly often, but obviously since most consumers don't give a hoot about who owns the store they shop at, it usually doesn't work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> At least shoppers with bar code scanners are still visiting stores. What should really be striking fear and terror into the hearts of retailers are shoppers who never set foot in stores anymore, people who, like me, order everything online.

<comment><USER17> You're not consuming time of their staff asking questions and using resources. People who go to the store to get information with no intent to buy are worse than people who just ignore the store.

<comment><USER15> Not really - with Amazon you have to add shipping and a trip to the local post office (since they _never_ deliver when you are home), and nobody is going across town to save 20$ on a several houndred dollar widescreen tv.

But when you don't go to the store _at all_ there is no way they make a sale.

<comment><USER13> The cost of the TV shouldn't make any difference to your willingness to go across town to save $20. Saving $20 on something that costs $400 gets you exactly as much benefit as saving $20 on something that costs $40.

That's not to say that you should be going across town to save $20 on anything. It might well not be worth the cost in time and fuel. But doing that to get a $20 item free, or a $40 item at half price, shouldn't be any more appealing than doing it to get 2% off the price of a $1000 item.

(It's a serious bug in our wetware that all the above feels so unintuitive to most of us.)

<comment><USER15> Yeah but if you can afford several hundred dollars for a tv you aren't likely to be in the category of people who care about $20 bucks, whereas if you buy something for $40 you might.

So thats why I wrote that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Instead of checking the price, I check on the reviews for the product while I am in store, especially if that product is something I am not familiar with. Recently I went to shop for a compact camera with no particular brand in mind, I went to the shop, checked out what's on offer, and read the reviews on the spot via my iPhone. This process helped me to weed out a few cameras, and finally I got a camera (Canon Ixus 130) at a price that I am happy with. Since I already know the pros and cons of this camera, I must say I am quite happy with my purchase as it removes a lot of uncertainty from the purchase (No, AFAIK, most shops in Singapore don't provide refund or exchange for purchases...)

</comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if there's an opportunity here. What if you had a store where you couldn't actually buy stuff (well you could order stuff from affiliate partners) and it cost money to enter?

Sort of like a fair but always running and on a central position. A gadget paradise of sorts. I think it would work.

</comment><comment><USER20> While it's true that this trend favors those who are price leaders, there is another opportunity. As people are connected with reviews, content, and comments from other users new conversations can take place between the retailer and their customers.

That's an opportunity for retailers to do targeted marketing with deals, specialized advertising and in store games, so that they are not just competing on price but on the long term relationship and buying patterns of the customer.

</comment><comment><USER21> I want to know what PR firm is behind this so I can hire them. What's an article like this worth to that shopping app? 100k? More? Good lord...

</comment><comment><USER10> Best Buy doesn't care about people price checking GPS units, they care about people price checking HDMI cables. Watch for cell blockers to be installed near the cable isle.

<comment><USER22> Cell blockers are illegal in the US. Even when the power is very low, if there's enough circumstantial evidence to prove intent to interfere with a transmission, I think that's an $11,000 fine from the FCC.

<comment><USER14> Perfectly legal to install EM shielding or a Faraday cage. I bet you'd only have to install a few of them before the mobile companies agreed to block certain urls whenever they triangulated a phone as inside one of your stores.

<comment><USER22> Customers would riot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> And when do they ban smart-phones from being used in public because they can take "hidden" pictures or some bullshit?</comment>