Researchers: It takes 1.5 MB of data to store language information - <AUTHOR> https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-03-approximately-megabytes-language-brain.html <comment><USER2> I haven't read the paper itself, but the article makes it sound like they simply counted the _minimum_ number of bits required to represent the English language. It mentions no neuroscience-specific insights, so the "brain" part of the title is quite misleading.

<comment><USER3> Aside from that - is there really a way to express neural connections in the brain in terms of bits and bytes?

<comment><USER4> The problem isn't whether there is "a" way; the problem is there's a multiplicity of ways and we don't know what the best one is. Part of the reason we don't have any idea what the best is is that we can't even construct any of them from a real brain, that is, the "brain scanning" technology the techno-rapture-style Singularity expects to develop does not even remotely exist right now. So we have nothing to experiment with or gain any experience with. The only ones we'd even remotely have access to right now would be some rather brute-force encoding of neurons and connectivity strengths and we pretty much _know_ that such a thing must be incredibly redundant, but we have no ability right now to remove that redundancy. And we can't do it on a very large neural set.

It has been done on small models, though, at least to some significant extent: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm)

<comment><USER5> Brain scanning techniques and simulation software have a long way to go, but there have been significant advances made:

A full fly connectome: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41684-018-0183-8](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41684-018-0183-8)

Architecture of the Mouse Brain Synaptome: [https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(18)30581-6](https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273\(18\)30581-6)

So we are past just a simple worm simulation now.

<comment><USER4> Thank you for the better links. I just meant that as an example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This describes how to summarize a language in a computer system.

I think the storage requirements for the semantics is in particular questionable. If you can refer to a particular concept somewhere in the brain you only need a pointer to it. However, single pointers might not be sufficient

The apparatus to learn a language might also not so easily distinguished from the structure to store the language or the structure to quickly recall the language. In that case taking about storage is like talking about compressing Plato's world of concepts.

<comment><USER7> > _This describes how to summarize a language in a computer system._

It describes how to summarize a language from a information theory standpoint (which is something different).

There's a good reason to believe evolution would use something close to the most information theoretic efficient implementation (and even if not, it's a good lower bound)

<comment><USER8> > There's a good reason to believe evolution would use something close to the > most information theoretic efficient implementation

Do you have a citation? I would be very interested to see it.

I hate to make analogies between computing and biological systems, but I immediately think of denormalization in databases, error correcting codes, and database replication as examples of optimizations that take you farther from information theoretic efficiency.

Information applies very straightforwardly to the study of a spike train of a synapse (source, channel, and receiver). I remain unconvinced that it systems like memory make sense as information channels.

<comment><USER9> Shannon observed this in his work towards information theory. Humans are able to predict next letters in a stream of natural language with a probability approaching optimal. The original paper is here:

[https://www.princeton.edu/~wbialek/rome/refs/shannon_51.pdf](https://www.princeton.edu/~wbialek/rome/refs/shannon_51.pdf)

The summary at wikipedia:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)#E...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_\(information_theory\)#Entropy_as_information_content)

Notably, PPM, the best compression algorithm (at the time), was not able to predict as well. So that's a quantitative demonstration of optimality in language performance that includes a faculty for understanding syntax and semantics and presumably is linked to phonology, pragmatics etc.

Chomsky discusses optimality in a 1998 talk here:

[https://youtu.be/7Sw15-vSY8E](https://youtu.be/7Sw15-vSY8E), at about 1h 7m an onwards.

He says language evolved rather quickly for such a significant function (estimating it arose quickly ~200kya). He says though many things in evolution are pretty messy, language is close to optimal design. He doesn't provide references, but I think (given the time and academic associations; anyone know?) he may be referring to Optimality Theory:

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

Separately, our knowledge of anatomy of the language faculty is that it is highly localized in the Wernicke and Broca areas of the brain. This also suggests a small modification of an existing brain structure.

Additionally, optimality in biological systems has been a productive research direction in a few areas: \- Optimality Principles in Biology - [https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4899-6419-9](https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4899-6419-9) \- Near optimal energy use in the metabolism of cell division - [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1209.1179.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1209.1179.pdf) \- [https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-math-that-tells-cells- wha...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-math-that-tells-cells-what-they- are-20190313/)

<comment><USER8> I think we may be talking about different things. You're talking about the language itself. I was talking about the neurological structures that produce the behaviors that are language.

I poked through the optimality literature in biology pretty thoroughly a few years back. There is a great deal of interest, but except in a few cases where a simple piece of natural history is nicely described by an evolutionary game, the choice of criterion to optimize is generally arbitrary. Without an evolutionary mechanism and observations of forces driving that mechanism there is no reason beyond just-so stories to apply any particular criterion.

<comment><USER9> I see the distinction but I am following Chomsky, that they're aspects of the same thing; language is a faculty in a specific, recently evolved neurological structure. That's a bold theory, but it seems to have held up better than approaches where language is an ability learned through a general cognitive intelligence mechanism. Chomsky says in that lecture that it's separate (and compact and recent) and somehow coupled to the general intelligence and performative areas located elsewhere.

I think we're at a point with language and its neural mechanism where by analogy it looks like the phenomenon of flight being closely determined by the exact form and use of a wing. Almost any shape will not do, so there is a form closely (efficiently) following function. Of course there were preadaptations for both which provide very inefficient flight or communication abilities, but something flips and the adaptive utility of the function rapidly sculpts and elaborates the form in that direction.

About optimality, generally agree though I think following thermodynamic efficiency seems a deep inductive step as that allows measure of what is arbitrary or not, e.g. in the work of England that I cited.

<comment><USER8> > I am following Chomsky, that they're aspects of the same thing; language is > a faculty in a specific, recently evolved neurological structure.

That is a bold hypothesis, certainly, but not one that you could use as a basis for argument at this point in time. I also deeply doubt it when viewed in the context of Wittgenstein's language games. A human and a sheep dog can very effectively engage in a language game, even subtle ones such as naming. Nor is it pure behavioral conditioning, as what makes various dog breeds better at particular things is selection for incidence of particular behaviors.

Then you go to a gorilla or a parrot, which can engage in quite abstract language games. Language games with parrots always make you aware of Wittgenstein's lion, though.

For Chomsky's hypothesis to be true, you would need to have a particular inflection point where language games become language, and for that inflection point to be reified as the evolution of a specific neural structure instead of exaptation of lots of aspects in the brain.

It feels too much like Watson and Crick's nonsense "one gene = one protein," which could have been discarded with a modest amount of thought before it was allowed to damage biology for decades.

> I think following thermodynamic efficiency seems a deep inductive step as > that allows measure of what is arbitrary or not

Until you look at, say, bower birds and realize that conspicuous waste is a signalling mechanism for fitness. There you have an evolutionary game that rewards thermodynamic inefficiency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I haven't had a chance to look at it yet but here are the links to the paper and associated Open Science Framework data if anyone is interested:

Paper: [https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.181...](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.181393)

OSF Page: [https://osf.io/ga9th/](https://osf.io/ga9th/)

</comment><comment><USER11> How would it be possible that 40,000 words translates to 400,000 bits?! Am I missing something here?

<comment><USER12> Compression I suppose. Like storing the word "compression" is easier if you already know the familiar "com-" prefix as well as the noun "pression". Which is itself easier to remember if you know the verb "to press".

I've been actively learning Portuguese and Russian lately, it's impressive how much faster I can pick up Portuguese vocabulary vs. Russian. And that's even for words that don't have an obvious cognate in languages I already know. The structure of the words, the various building blocks are just so much more familiar in Portuguese. A word like "atrever" (to dare) doesn't have any obvious cognate in languages that I know but it just "looks right" it a way that, say, "atverer" or "aterver" wouldn't. Those last two words sound distinctly un-Portuguese (I might say, un-Romance) to me. That makes it a lot easier to remember the spelling.

Eventually as I grow my Russian vocabulary I start making similar connections. Волноваться is pretty tricky to memorize on its own but it becomes easier when you know that ~ся is the reflective, ~ть is the common verb ending, волна means wave and ~овать is a very common building block for Russian verbs.

<comment><USER13> "Compression" applies very much to grammatical variants of words. It's why the only bizarre irregular verbs in a language tend to be the ones that get used _all the time_ \- be, do, go etc - because for anything more obscure the brain just forgets the special case and applies the general rule.

Steven Pinker's book _Words and Rules_ is a great layman-oriented read if this sort of thing interests you.

<comment><USER7> It also makes sense why the most common verbs are irregular in most languages: to have us pick the direct word quickly, instead of the slower way of deriving it from a rule.

So, they're like "constants" vs calling a function to calculate a value.

<comment><USER13> Not sure I follow. If (big if) there were really a measureable advantage to having us _" pick the direct word quickly, instead of the slower way of deriving it from a rule"_, it doesn't follow that irregularity makes that easier. I could memorize "goed" just as easily as I can memorize "went".

<comment><USER12> I took it the other way around: it's easy to memorize "went" because you use it all the time. If on the other hand a much less common verb like "to satiate" had a very irregular conjugation then it would regularize pretty quickly because nobody but ultra-pedants would bother to remember the exception.

I think a decent real example of that is fiancé/fiancée, those are french borrowings and have, at least originally, kept the French grammatical gender inflection. However nowadays I often see people using either spelling in a gender-neutral way since most people don't bother to learn French grammar for this one word.

<comment><USER7> > _I took it the other way around: it 's easy to memorize "went" because you > use it all the time._

That still wouldn't explain the why of having it like "went" vs "goed".

Sure, it's easy to memorize because we use it all the time, but why have it to memorize it in the first place, versus something like "goed".

So, this theory (I tried to convey above) said that it being irregular placed ensured we don't slow down try to derive it from regular rules, but instead have fast access to a memorized form.

Couldn't we just memorize "goed"? If it's just "frequency of use" that mattered, "went" and "goed" would work just as well.

But the extra idea is that "goed", being regular, would be too easy for us to confuse with thousand of other regular verbs, and not use our "fast recall" mechanism, regardless of that verb being needed all the time.

Not sure if correct - read it years ago. This seems to be related to that:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_and_irregular_verbs#Li...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_and_irregular_verbs#Linguistic_study)

<comment><USER12> Your point is interesting but I think you're falling for the same type of fallacies people often have regarding evolution (if you keep going into water for a long time over many generations you'll eventually grow gills!).

Natural languages are not designed, they evolve. The irregular nature of the conjugation of "to go" might just be a remnant of some archaic form and nothing else, in the same way some argue that the plural of "octopus" is "octopi" or "octopodes. Does it serve any linguistic purpose? I don't see how, but it won't stop some people for saying it. Look at the use of the subjunctive in "if I were you", which is one of the only occurrences of the subjunctive outside of set-phrases in day-to-day modern English. Is it really necessary? If one was to say "if I was you" would it lose some additional nuance or meaning in practice?

I often see people trying to rationalize some language features (such as arbitrary genders of nouns in many languages) as error correction or some "optimization" but I'm generally unconvinced. Maybe "I went" is just the linguistic equivalent of a platypus, some weird byproduct of a very long evolution with no other intrinsic purpose in the grand scheme of things.

<comment><USER7> > _Natural languages are not designed, they evolve._

But that's part of my point. I don't say irregular verbs were designed to be effective that way, but that they were evolved to be effective.

Hence the link with "language acquisition" being involved -- when regular and irregular verbs developed that wasn't a known theory some "language designer" could consciously follow. Just something innate that could develop because of a evolutionary advantage.

In fact, if someone merely designed, they'd probably go for all regular, rather than regular + irregular, as it's "cleaner".

> _I often see people trying to rationalize some language features (such as > arbitrary genders of nouns in many languages) as error correction or some > "optimization" but I'm generally unconvinced._

Tons of language features are indeed optimizations for different things. Cold climates for example have languages with less vowels (keeping your mouth closed more).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I believe it if they provide a program that can speak English in under 1.5MB total size.

<comment><USER15> What does it mean to "speak English"? Does a program that plays a recording of the word "I" count as a program that speaks English?

<comment><USER14> I think you know the answer: think about how you find out whether a human speaks English or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Of the various estimates that go into this number, I am most skeptical of the semantics one. I doubt that one can draw a clear line between our semantic appreciation of language and the totality of our remembered experiences.

</comment><comment><USER17> Makes me want to write a retrocyberpunk setting featuring languages loaded off floppy disks.

<comment><USER18> Do it!

Preferably, the floppy disks should be the 5-1/4 inch 1.2 MiB high-density, double-sided type, 3-1/2 inch disks sounds good too ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This seems very low. Just thinking of all of the different ways you can greet someone. The inflection and modifiers based on circumstance and audience alone seems like it would be higher than 1.5mb

</comment><comment><USER20> So, all of it fits on a floppy? Nice.

<comment><USER21> Not quite. Considering the most common floppies stored a bit less than 1.44MB.

<comment><USER18> One feature of floppy disks is that the recording technology and the format is independent from the physical medium, the limitations are mostly imposed by the disk drive, the encoding and the file system, not the medium itself.

Well, this "feature" creates significant compatibility issues as all the vendors created their own proprietary formats, sometimes with patents. As a result, together with the economics of scale, often, the standard format is not the best design, a simpler design that serves as the lowest common denominator.

On the other hand, due to this feature, it was already possible to store 1,760 KB of data on a 3-1/2 inch HD floppy on a 1986 Amiga. And in 2000, it was possible to store 32 MiB of data on a standard 1.44 MB floppy disk, by using a SuperDisk LS-240 drive (although random write is sacrificed, the entire floppy must be rewritten if a change is needed, like CD-RWs).

I believe the advancements in magnetic recording technology in the past 20 years allows one to achieve even higher capacity on a standard floppy, and it can be as cheap as early floppy drives if mass produced, only that it doesn't make sense to do so.

<comment><USER22> I always wanted to know how far you could push the capacity of an old standard density floppy drive if one hacked on modern control electronics. Things like adding more tracks and variable sectors per track. Though I think you'd be limited by the magnetic density of the media and physical head size. Still, it would be fun to see just how much more data you could squeeze onto an old 1.44MB floppy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> 1.5 million what? Fix your title.

<comment><USER24> reminds me of that "hacker steals millions of internet data" joke

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Haha wrong</comment>


What are your biggest barriers to CSS3? - <AUTHOR>

Working on an eBook about CSS3 and just wondering what some of the biggest barriers for people are? Transforms? Animations? Vendor Prefixes? Any feedback would be appreciated? Thanks <comment><USER2> I'm not sure if this would really help you, but after working with a rather complicated design that had to cover all screen sizes, an effective strategy for working with media queries may be applicable to more people than just me.</comment>


Forget Wall Street. M.B.A.s Want to Work for Amazon - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/forget-wall-street-m-b-a-s-want-to-work-for-amazon-1507114801 <comment><USER2> Sigh, looks like this one's going to be the weekly HN MBA Hate Thread™. In defense of the degree:

Has it ever occurred to you guys that maybe some (many?) of these people were hackers prior to getting their MBA, and are very competent? Quite a few of my classmates had engineering (including software) backgrounds, and even the ones who had engineering degrees but didn't actually code were still clued in. Why this blanket dismissal of anyone with the degree?

This kind of generalization, "All X are bad/dumb/incompetent" would be shunned here and down voted to oblivion if X were "women", "men", "offshore developers", "no college degree", "interns", etc. But somehow "MBA" is totally OK. Bash away!

Because of this bizarre stigma in Silicon Valley (by the way, outside the valley, most companies consider it a plus), I tend to not even mention mine unless asked. When it comes up and I mention that I did the MBA thing a decade ago, I get reactions from my software colleagues ranging from "Wait, but you seem to know your shit!" to "Why would you do such a thing??" There are competent MBAs and there are shitty ones. Why can't this be acknowledged? Such a strange little quirk of our bubble out here...

<comment><USER3> > by the way, outside the valley, most companies consider it a plus

Maybe that's why they will never come up with the next Apple/Google/SpaceX/etc.

Every single MBA I have met, without exception, has been extremely good at talking and making presentations. Ask them to do real work, and they will find a million excuses.

Another thing I have noticed, is the kind of people attracted to doing an MBA. They have seen all of Steve Jobs' talks/speeches, talk incessantly about Brand Building and strategy. Ask them to dial for dollars and you get radio silence.

<comment><USER4> SpaceX? Elon Musk studied Business and Physics at Wharton/Penn and recommends that any founder should have some MBA style business training.

<comment><USER3> Late reply, but business training and MBA are 2 separate things.

Elon has categorically stated that MBAs are a bad idea : [http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201311/profiles.cfm](http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201311/profiles.cfm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm watching tech companies be more and more infested with these business types. As in, it used to be you'd see technical product managers, but they're largely MBA types now. Ditto for engineering upper/exec management. Ditto for sales engineering. Ditto for professional services. Ditto for customer support.

They churn through technical H1Bs at a shocking rate, treat engineering like shit, and add almost no value beyond blowing hot air and shorty software development practices. They always have lots of reasons why things aren't getting done predictably and slide decks on how to fix it, all of which involve further neutering engineering and especially engineering management. They like to build fake engineering teams outside the engineering organization with absolutely atrocious engineering practices but because they deliver on short notice - never mind what they're delivering is garbage - the sales idiots and execs love them to death.

They and PMO are cancers on the tech industry and it's just getting worse.

<comment><USER6> > atrocious engineering practices but because they deliver on short notice - > never mind what they're delivering is garbage

I am pretty sure this is true for most companies. Product and sales never care what the code looks like. They care about velocity. Remember your code can be a work of art, well tested, and the epitome of best practice; none of that means anything if you don't ship or if you're always pushing back on deadlines or wont switch context to fix something more high in business priority. (as engineers we build our own dream or someone else's)

<comment><USER7> I wouldn't apply startup thinking to "most companies." Things are really weird when you're just trying to build an empire to sell it off. Obviously other companies care about growth too, but knowing that your company and its products will continue to exist in five years gives everyone a reason to focus on quality and maintenance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well if that's the case, it shouldn't be too much longer before programmers don't ;)

<comment><USER9> Some of us MBA's have also written (and write) code and can also think from a dev mindset. Why all the hate for MBAs on here?

<comment><USER10> Because the tech landscape changes, and in a few years the tech skills you have will become outdated. Nobody will tell you this, though, so you'll confidently and move forward in your MBA career thinking you're still as good as you were when you developed full time. In a few years, you're going to butt heads with a developer who tells you you are wrong, but because you are an MBA and you used to develop, you must be right.

I deal with this all the time as a developer. I am tired of guys who "used to develop, so they know what they're talking about".

<comment><USER11> Would that also apply to any technical managers and directors?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Every time the topic of an MBA comes up here, I am confused at the vitriol it inspires. There seems to be a significant portion of the HN audience that is convinced that all MBA's (100%) are empty suits who add nothing but fancy powerpoints and bureaucratic layers.

This has always confused me. After, all I have an MBA and I'm not like that (I think). Furthermore the majority of MBA's I know are not like this either, although some certainly are. And what of the people that were engineers before the got their MBA? Twenty nine percent of my MBA program (UCLA) was made up of people who got their degrees in Engineering, Math or CS. Did this entire cohort lose their brains during the procress?

Why the disconnect? I have a new theory: selection bias.

Very few people I work with know that I have an MBA, because it doesn't come up or really matter. I don't have "socalnate1, MBA" as my e-mail signature or on my business cards. I rarely if ever mention my degree in conversation, even if I am using a tool I learned at B-school. My linkedin profile only mentiones it under education. My diploma hangs in my home, not at work. However, there are a number of people who REALLY want you to know that they have an MBA (weirdly, these people tend to come from 3rd tier schools). It's on their signature, they lead with it as a qualification or reason they should be listened to. I have no doubt that this group of people fit's the caraciature that is painted here.

So anyway, that's my theory. People who "make sure you know they have an MBA" are over represented in the collective Hacker News hivemind, and those competent folks who you didn't even know had an MBA are not.

<comment><USER13> _" There seems to be a significant portion of the HN audience that is convinced that all MBA's (100%) are empty suits who add nothing but fancy powerpoints and bureaucratic layers."_

Maybe we speak from experience. We witness how the three letters magically can override any level of business experience or knowledge necessary to make an organization function. C-level management somehow believes having a headcount with that diploma will magically fix their business problems or get their company on the hockey stick. It never happens.

Kawasaki's Law of Pre-Money Valuation ("For each full-time engineer, add 500K. For each MBA, subtract 250K") wasn't written in a vacuum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> A common complaint everywhere within Amazon is that there are too many chiefs not enough indians. For every doer, it feels like there are 20 talkers with ideas but no ability to execute on them. Everybody wants to be the strategy guy. Good leadership, in practical terms, becomes your ability to convince a technical team or analyst to add something to their already overloaded queue of things to do, in between your scheduled pointless meetings where you talk strategy with fellow MBAs. To an engineering manager, it often feels like being told to build mansions with the budget of a house of cards.

Hopefully Amazon takes all of the MBAs and keeps them.

<comment><USER15> Partly as a joke, I've started wanting to ask the question, "Will I be reporting to an MBA?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> That would explain some of the stupid things that are going on at Amazon right now - e.g. they are now witch-hunting new sellers to prove they aren't selling counterfeits by disabling their accounts right after they list their first items literally seconds after they do it and then demand all kinds of proof. I was shown an email where Amazon stated: "you might be selling counterfeits" without company selling a single item as a fresh new account (and having reputable suppliers that don't risk supplying counterfeits). To me it seems like ML + MBA fail (ML for identifying risks with too many false positives, MBA for setting up such an insane policy since June)

<comment><USER17> Wow, this is amazing news! Amazon is actually doing something about counterfeits?

<comment><USER16> Yeah, like ignoring those Chinese companies that spawn up quickly, dump 100,000 items on the marketplace, then disappear; and instead chase naive new sellers that didn't expect to climb algorithmic wall when they paid for "seller privileges"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> While I was at Microsoft this summer I learned that the PM position has become highly sought after by MBAs from schools like Duke etc.

<comment><USER8> Maybe a lot of them just want to live out some sort of Steve Jobs fantasy

<comment><USER19> Spolsky was a PM at MS, I don't think Jobs ever was.

<comment><USER8> I didn't mean it _that_ literally. Just in general, I can imagine a bunch of people buying into some sort of faux-enlightenment aesthetic and parading around as product gurus.

<comment><USER19> I've been in the industry 20+ years and I still have no idea what a product manager actually does. As far as I can tell everyone completely ignores them. Maybe their job is just to be a warm body filling a chair in pointless meetings, so programmers can do real work? Seems perfect for an MBA when the weather's too bad to play golf.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm not sure if that's a good sign

</comment><comment><USER21> I am an MBA, and also have a Masters in Comp Sci. Technical Nerd. Why all the hate?

</comment><comment><USER22> is it just me that has a problem with the paywall or does everybody else on HN have a wsj subscription?

<comment><USER22> never mind, it seems like google is filtering my results, but bing to the rescue: [http://www.morningstar.com/advisor/t/120651764/forget- wall-s...](http://www.morningstar.com/advisor/t/120651764/forget-wall-street- m-b-a-s-want-to-work-for-amazon.htm)</comment></comment>


"Apple Says 'No '" and What That Means for the Future of Better Blocker - <AUTHOR> https://ar.al/2020/01/13/apple-says-no-and-what-that-means-for-the-future-of-better-blocker-following-our-move-to-ireland/ <comment><USER2> This made me laugh:

"How Apple could have helped: by running a few queries to update a handful of fields in their database."

It's true that Apple ought to have a process for migrating a developer account from one entity than another, but:

1\. The logic in Apple's production code probably depends on some specifics about an entity (e.g. the country it's in) being constant over time. For example, if there's some code that deals with quarterly accounting of revenues and taxes, that code would need to keep track of not just the current jurisdiction, but also the jurisdiction at each point during the quarter.

2\. It's not a great idea to 'run a few queries' that update production data, because you (a) could cause an inconsistent application state, and (b) will probably lose the ability to audit past state.

<comment><USER3> > It's not a great idea to 'run a few queries' that update production data, > because you (a) could cause an inconsistent application state,

Let's not forget compliance with laws. You can't simply "adjust a few tables" when your historical supplier data is required to be immutable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can't you just create a new developer account for the non-profit and transfer the app between accounts? I'm sure the process for transferring the app isn't trivial, but it's certainly something that's been done many times by other people.

</comment><comment><USER5> I am probably missing something, but what's stopping OP from just continuing to use their old account?

</comment><comment><USER6> It sucks for this case, but I'm glad this sort of thing is hard in general. If it were easy, I'd expect some sort of large market to sell shovelware downstream to ads/malware producers after achieving audience. Does one exist anyway?

</comment><comment><USER7> This sucks! I have no idea how people let Apple get away with such hostile practices and policies towards small ISVs. Developers should be with pitchforks and boycotting the platform after all the crazy changes and requirements.

<comment><USER8> Can't boycott your users.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> See also: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22043365](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22043365)

</comment><comment><USER9> Aral and Laura deserves so much better (no pun intended) than this! Moving to another country should not lead to consequences like these.</comment>


Video on Internet: Live Streaming in 2016? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.peer5.com/video-on-internet-live-streaming-in-2016/ <comment><USER2> Hey - We just posted a link to our open source OTT platform (Odd Networks). Would be neat to get this CDN integrated, most of the people we work with choose Akamai

<comment><AUTHOR> hi- i would be happy to discuss this with you. send me an email: firstname.lastname@example.com</comment></comment>


Test your websites in IE6 online - <AUTHOR> http://ie6test.it/ <comment><USER2> Reminder: You have no idea if they store the data you submit through the simulated web session. So please do not use this site to test anything involving a login/password.

Sorry if i'm being paranoid, just want to warn anyone who's first thought is "I wonder how my product looks in IE6..."

</comment><comment><USER3> Help > About

"This website is a joke, please don't take it seriously."

</comment><comment><USER4> Also note that it's an iframe, not a real IE6 browser. :)

</comment><comment><USER5> While this is definitely well made and cool, we've stopped supporting IE6 at our startup... and so should you! (Except if you're targeting the enterprise market, of course.)

Edit: I've now also noticed that the site is a joke. Silly me getting all riled up about IE6 again.

<comment><USER6> I was JUST about to post a snide comment saying NO before I clicked on it, when I saw your comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow, it works just like IE6

<http://i.imgur.com/Lhydg.png>

</comment><comment><USER8> Huh, Cloudflare doesn't seem to like this site for some reason. I tried plugging in my blog and got a denied notice.

<comment><USER9> Cloudflare karma at work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> IE6 is at 1% in the US. Time to stop supporting it.

<http://www.ie6countdown.com/>

Just give users a warning that they need to upgrade.

</comment><comment><USER11> Ops! <http://ie6test.it/?url=localhost>

</comment><comment><USER12> Very cool idea and implementation on the web! Suprisingly my css3 based website looked just right, does this works just as IE6 for real?

<comment><USER13> You'd better check on browsershots.org than this joke site :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> <http://www.liked.ro/2011/05/04/oh-god/></comment>


A UK Public Transport Agency Begins Testing E-Paper Technology at Bus Stops - <AUTHOR> http://www.infodocket.com/2013/09/01/a-uk-public-transport-agency-begins-testing-e-paper-technology-at-bus-stops/

<comment><USER2> The Centro news post[1] has costs. £50K for the prototype. Planned timetables don't change that much around here, say twice a year. West Midlands buses are tracked, and you can send an sms message with a code to get the 'next bus' times, so there is _some_ real time information on the displays. I might pop over and have a look next weekend.

[1] [http://www.centro.org.uk/newsroom/PressReleases/PressRelease...](http://www.centro.org.uk/newsroom/PressReleases/PressRelease68134.aspx)</comment>


More Sex is Safer Sex (1996) - <AUTHOR> http://slate.msn.com/?id=2033

<comment><USER2> There're some questionable assumptions in this paper, notably this one:

"What we really want is to minimize the number of infections resulting from any given number of sexual encounters; the flip side of this observation is that it is desirable to maximize the number of (consensual) sexual encounters leading up to any given number of infections."

He's saying that there's this ratio, infections per sexual encounter, that they want to minimize. And the easiest way to minimize this is to increase the denominator. If you have a universe with a skewed (self-selected) distribution, then as you add more people to a category, you'll increasingly get more marginal people. In this case, it's people who have fewer sexual partners and hence are less likely to carry AIDS, resulting in a reduced chance of infection.

Whether this is the metric you care about is debatable. If you're a public health official, you probably care about the absolute _number_ of infections, not the number per sexual encounter, and so this only helps if it brings the probability low enough that the disease can't sustain itself.

Similarly, if you're a married guy who just wants a faithful and devoted wife and kids, you don't care about the chance of infection per sexual encounter, you care about the absolute chance of infection within your life time. This is minimized by not having sex with anyone, or, failing that, having sex with someone who only has sex with you.

Only people who regularly have sex with lots of partners would benefit from this - for them, the metric is chance of infection per sexual encounter (since they'll be having lots of sexual encounters anyway), so why shouldn't they?

<comment><USER3> "If you're a public health official, you probably care about the absolute number of infections, not the number per sexual encounter"

Perhaps they made the assumption that the total number of sexual encounters over the entire population is roughly constant. With this assumption the distinction would not matter.

<comment><USER4> They're arguing for "increased sexual activity by conservatives" which obviously means they're arguing for increase in total number of sexual encounters over the entire population.

<comment><USER3> No, they argue that this would lead to less demand for prostitutes, which would balance it out.

In effect they say that disease would spread more slowly in a graph with less highly connected hubs and more balanced number of connections per node. This is quite unsurprising.

<comment><USER4> Sure, this is quite obvious though I did not understand how they could balance out the increase, so I did not even mention this option.

The point about prostitutes was just a thought experiment, and it looks rather far from reality. The second thought experiment about Joan hooking up with Maxwell seems much more realistic, but I don't see why Maxwell wouldn't hook up with someone else the same day. Actually, the more promiscuous side usually takes the initiative, so I'd say it is quite likely that if not for Joan, some other poor girl would get AIDS anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> HIV infections per encounter will go down if you have a lot of sex, this is true.

And it will to zero forever once you get infected.

But its the likelihood of infection overall that I am concerned with. The more sex you have, the likelier it is that you will have an infective encounter earlier.

the fact remains that if people never have sex, they will never get infected. If they only have sex with one person in their life, and that person follows the same rule, no one will be infected either.

But that's not reality. so we should follow some simple rules, which can be found at <http://evensafersex.com>

</comment><comment><USER6> Although tfa is slim on details, it seems that the economist is assuming that the total number of sexual encounters per unit time is constant, and that increasing the activity of some people would only change the distribution in the number of sexual contacts.

Fair enough-- if you could change the distribution, that would probably slow down the epidemic. But, counter intuitively, it would also increase the number ultimately infected.

This is something network-theorists have spent a lot of time on. See for example: [http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/274/1628/2925...](http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/274/1628/2925.full)

<comment><USER7> The article made the mistake of analyzing only a tiny piece of the system and attempting to draw conclusions for the whole system.

One of the mistakes the article makes is in the statement that, if "conservative" girls went out twice as often, the chances of an HIV transfer are decreased because the guy has twice as many potential partners who are HIV-negative. What's missing is the recognition that, if the guy is already HIV positive, he now has twice as many potential partners who he can pass the infection on to.

The changed network could either slow down _or_ speed up the spread of HIV, depending on various specific details (how many men have HIV, how many women have HIV, how many connections to non-carriers do the men have vs the women, and so on.)

As you correctly note, even if this particular change slows down the rate of infection in the present, it may ultimately increase the total number of infections. It may even slow the infection rate for a few years and then suddenly speed it up as some particular critical threshold is reached.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article sounds a lot like Russian roulette. Increasing the number of chambers making it safer to play. It's not clear to me that the virus would just die out. I'll probably end up talking out of my hat but with graph of all the connections (sexual encounters). Would it not be possible to show that you'd need a very connected graph where most people have a small number of encounters and that almost everyone sticks to a low number. One hyper connected infected person (or multitple), could end up infecting a large part of the graph. I would assume that if he affects a large enough number of people, they (before discovering their infection) could infect their connection and ... snowball. In their model, they seem to say that even if their are very promiscuous people, getting non promiscuous people to get more connected would improve the odds. I don't see how that would reduce the number of infected people and kill the virus.

Like I said, I have no clue if this is correct or complete crap, never done anything related to disease and how they spread.

<comment><USER3> I think what the article argues is exactly this: there would be less hyper- connected nodes if the nodes would be more locally connected. The spreading of the disease would happen much more slowly in this case. This fits in with the theory of scale-free networks.

links:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_networks>

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

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

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93R%C3%A9nyi_m...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93R%C3%A9nyi_model)

<comment><USER8> I think I understand that now. Although, not sure that people who are very promiscuous would enjoy having more competition ;0)

Thanks for the links, this article made me want to go back and look into this stuff more. Relevant to my current work also.

<comment><USER3> Also, if you want a more readable and entertaining introduction, I highly recommend the book "Linked: The new science of networks" by Barabasi.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Two questions come to mind:

1\. It would be pretty simple to write a computer simulation to test this, no? Would anyone care to do so?

2\. I don't know enough about the AIDS situation in Africa to say whether it is empirical evidence for or against this paper. Is anyone else more familiar with this?

<comment><USER10> "1. It would be pretty simple to write a computer simulation to test this, no? Would anyone care to do so?"

I'm on it. Results in a later reply.

<comment><USER10> Preliminary results: holding sex drive and promiscuity constant, decreasing societal shyness (i.e. making single people more likely to go out and meet someone to fuck) seems to increase population infection rates rather than decreasing them. This is true if shyness is independent from promiscuity. (My simulation tends to send more promiscuous people out to meet someone to fuck more often by increasing their partner-switching rate, so shyness is indeed independent.)

Don't just take my word for it, run my code: <http://github.com/philwelch/SexSim>

If anyone's interested, let me know and I can work up a blog post and improve my code. (Also, if my code is wrong, let me know or send me a patch.)

EDIT: I have a bug which may invalidate my results. Stand by for fix.

EDIT 2: No, results still valid. Possible fix pushed.

<comment><USER11> I took game theory back in college. I noticed something wrong about that article: a complete lack of math. It's not that I don't believe there are counter-intuitive things that can happen. But I sure don't believe them without proof.

And your simulation is a lot more interesting than anything found in that article.

<comment><USER10> It was a fun exercise. It was great for remembering a handful of things about statistics and experiment design--for instance, it was impossible to get good results until I started doing controlled runs on the same randomly generated population rather than regenerating, because the effect of changing social shyness (while there) is way, way smaller than the effect of the random variations in promiscuity and sex drive.

I may want to play with adding condoms to the simulation, though. My transmission rate is based upon the HIV transmission rate for unprotected anal sex, which is pretty clearly an upper bound--that's why especially slutty or outgoing populations get >50% infection rates after 20 years seeding from 1% infection rate. You also see the odd run where you just have a 1% infection rate after 20 years--probably cases where the randomly seeded HIV+ individual is especially shy and has a low sex drive.

Also, it would have been a lot more interesting if I could have generated random values along different distributions, or...well, lots of things would have helped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> ©1996 Microsoft Corporation (?)

<comment><USER12> Article from Slate magazine which they used to own before The Washington Post bought it in 2004.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Incidentally, any problems with my sex life are likely not due to unsubsidized condoms.

</comment><comment><USER14> It's a pretty good book too (I enjoyed all of Landsman's books).

</comment><comment><USER15> Articles like this are what we should find on Digg. I don't want to be that snooty bastard, even though I am.... I'm not sure how this is relevant to Hacker News? However, I'm impressed by the mature comments. Can we not turn into Digg?

<comment><USER16> It seems a lot of people are concerned about HN turning into other communities. How is this avoidable? Require everyone to debug a snippet of code before registering or logging in? I personally wouldn't mind this.

<comment><USER17> Don't worry about it and it's all good. HN is self-balancing. I've been here for 884 days according to my profile, and I've _always_ been hearing these worries since day 1. Somehow, thankfully, HN works. It has not turned into Reddit, Digg, or MySpace regardless of what people say. Yes, it has changed over time, no it's not a worse place.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, kind of thought so--a little diversity can be refreshing imo. I noticed that HN redirects you to a previous submission if you use the same url. Perhaps the same could be done if you post something with the same url used on a previous reddit or digg submission.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is Hacker News. As long as masturbation doesn't cause aids, all is good.

<comment><USER17> It's clearly a hacker question. There's math, simulation, and girls involved. A true hacker can turn interesting articles like this into very hacker-ish engineering puzzles - read the other comments and see what I mean.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> pointless article it can be summarized in two sentences

assumption: woman don't want to have sex, men do.

conclusion: it is better for men if women are more promiscuous.

<comment><USER20> Your summary has nothing to do with the actual content of the article.</comment></comment>


Would you (do you?) trust your company's source code to github? - <AUTHOR> We've always hosted our own SCM repos...it's not hard, so why not?  Well, my company is now (partially due to me) putting more and more stuff "in the cloud" (AWS, et al.), and the git repos are next.  It makes total sense from a resources perspective to use github, but I (and the other partners) are concerned about theft, loss, and/or leakage of our proprietary (gasp!) goodies.  Are we (overly) paranoid, or is github actually no less risky than the disgruntled emp problem/general hosting failure problem (e.g. If we were to just put our gitorious on a rackspace slice or something)/our in-house backups failing problem? <comment><USER4> Hell yes I would.

My current boss would rather die and take us all with him before letting code out of our network. But he is actually slowly killing me and the other devs each time the svn webserver takes a dive, by having me maintain the ACLs, and by preventing us from using git until we build out our own infrastructure.

We're not in the business of SCM. If I was in charge, I'd pay the experts to do SCM, especially the ones like github that make tools that make developers very happy. Furthermore, I have more faith in github's security team and model than the network and servers the junior sysad that was let go 6 months ago put together.

As far as protecting intellectual property...

I know it seems like the world to a software company or a developer, but your raw code is actually worthless. Your team, and how the use, integrate, improve and _sell_ the code is where the value is. Not `server.py`.

Any employee can walk out any day with a copy of the repo and knowledge of how it can be put to use. But the chance of him putting this to work for himself, putting you out of business, is practically zero.

In short, I would do what's easiest for everybody and relax.

<comment><USER5> This sounds like an accurate assessment from someone who doesn't own the code. You get paid to write the code, so it means nothing to you if a competitor steals the code and starts a similar business. Or what if a competitor steals the code and can more easily implement some of your features or find flaws in the product an exploit them.

As an owner of code, I would never put the code in the cloud. I don't even put binaries in the cloud without obfuscating them. Every little bit helps.

And I also disagree that the code is worthless. Imagine the value of your company if all the code suddenly disappears! Not only do you have to rewrite everything from scratch, but you can't support your existing customers while you are doing it.

Final point, doing what is easy for everyone else is exactly the kind of thing that limits your competitive advantage. If all your competitors are using Github and github loses all their data, you win!

<comment><USER4> Like I said, my boss has the same attitude as you and I understand it and comply with it. It's definitely not a bad rule for a lot of businesses.

But I'm not sure what "owning code" means these days.

Almost all the software I get paid to write is based on open source software. I assume competitors are constantly looking at the same OSS projects I am, and do know about the features (and flaws) within.

Perhaps this puts us at a competitive disadvantage, but if we had to write everything from scratch in secret so we could "own it" and make sure nobody ever saw it, we wouldn't have a product yet. Actually we wouldn't be in business at all.

Also, there's almost zero possibility with git of not having a recent copy of the code somewhere, whether github is accessible or not, as a few other posts have noted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Fortunately, reliability isn't that much of an issue for distributed source control. On the few occasions when GitHub has had an extended outage, we just put up a temporary shared repository on a random server and everyone pushed/pulled from that until the outage was over.

For security, it depends on just how much security you think you need for your source code. What's the attack model? Do you have competitors who have so much to gain from reading your code that they'd risk industrial espionage? Is there sensitive data checked into your source control that would put you at risk if there were an accidental leak?

Personally, I don't think anyone has much to gain from reading my company's source code. GitHub has much more to lose from a privacy breach than most individual customers, so they have the best incentive to secure their systems. They also probably know more than I do about keeping the repositories secure. On the other hand, if I had an exceptional need for security, I'd want to hire an expert myself and keep full control over the servers and processes.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't say we have an exceptional need for security, but we do have reservations about dropping the only thing that has any real value in our company right now into what looks like a helluva honey pot.

I'm not sure I can even properly enumerate the risks -- if I could, I'd be able to make a calculation pretty easily. Espionage _seems_ absurd, but who am I to say that that's not a possibility?

That said, we're getting by by cutting back on our extraneous costs, which means exactly the opposite of "hire someone ourselves and keep full control".

<comment><USER7> Definitely seems overly paranoid to me. The _real_ value that your company has is in your brains. The things you've learned about your customers can never be fully captured in source code. Especially considering there's no real potential for loss of the code, only exposure, I'd say the tradeoffs are worth it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nobody cares about your source code - most people struggle to understand their own.

</comment><comment><USER9> Would you (do you?) trust your company's source code to Rackspace/Slicehost/Linode?

They're equally likely to suffer the kind of failure that would directly expose your code.

<comment><USER5> No. I obfuscate it all before I upload it. Call me paranoid. Not only is it a risk to have the code compromised, but if sufficient steps aren't taken to control access to trade secrets, then they can't be called trade secrets. IP has value.

<comment><USER9> I've never heard of someone losing trade secret protections because the security of their hosting provider was compromised. Have you?

<comment><USER5> No, but it is necessary to show that every effort has been made to protect the trade secrets and obfuscating code is one step in that direction.

I am no lawyer, but that's what the lawyers told me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> We recently migrated from self-hosted SVN repositories to GitHub. It's proven quite beneficial in terms of allowing access to developers at off-site locations. With GitHub's use of SSH keys for authentication I haven't had to worry much about security, and as far as disgruntled employees go it's easy to revoke access to the repository (i.e. set it up so everyone has their own GitHub logins and then you can add/remove access as needed).

</comment><comment><USER11> Yes; github is a great service and I have now been using it personally & professionally for quite a long time (june 2008) and never had any security issues.

There are the occasional downtimes, but as its dvcs thats not really a problem, just push using ssh to your sites instead (wait 5 minutes, make a cup of tea, etc)

Like other posters in the thread I agree the real value is the people writing the code, not the code itself.

I would say if you're that paranoid about code leaks setup a gitorious server (<http://gitorious.org/gitorious>) on your network and save the monthly fee (and the worry).

You will, however, miss out on the other useful things github has to offer. Every repo now gets its own wiki & issue tracker, so no need for trac.

My current favourite feature is gh-pages (<http://pages.github.com>). You can make a named branch on your repo and it will be hosted as a website. If you have an API that can be your public documentation branch; you can also use it for simple sites (my blog is a github page). All pages are hosted free of charge on their shiny new rackspace servers. These days they also support cnames mapping.

Edited for typos...

<comment><USER5> _never had any security issues_

You don't know for _sure_ that you haven't had any security problems. All you know is that you haven't noticed the results of any security compromise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Do you actually intend to use other github features? (apart from git hosting itself) If not, then what exactly are you trying to achieve by putting your code there?

\- as you said git is relatively easy to maintain locally (at least compared to the standard customer-facing stuff)

\- there's no difference in reliability / backup security really imho - <USER2> you trust your local hardware less than "some random host in the cloud"

\- not sure what your code does / is, but if you don't publish it, you don't even have to think about information leak (apart from standard host security)

\- does the hardware cost play that big role for you? you didn't mention any other gain

\- tbh, I'd be more worried about someone discovering that you host your public services' code online and starting to look for security holes just for fun - normally you don't need to think about the security of some one-off utility that you commit, but when it's online, it can tell more about your internal arch. than you want to show

So if you have a dedicated host for git and want to get rid of it, sure - <USER3> the private hosting will be cheaper. But is it more important than the other issues.

<comment><AUTHOR> User management, SCM visualization, and forking is all easier compared to gitosis + gitweb et al....which we live without, but would be nice to have.

Our real aim is to eliminate all in-house hardware. Sysadmin is definitely not our core competency, as they say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> doesn't github provide a private, off-site option for this reason?

edit: <http://fi.github.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, which is outrageously, painfully expensive:

<http://fi.github.com/pricing.html>

I'm not trying to have my cake and eat it too -- I recognize that there's a different risk profile to outsourcing hosting of any service compared with doing everything in-house. I just want to make sure I'm not veering too far off the tracks in this case.

<comment><USER14> How much would you be willing to pay? How about $3600.00? Would that be too much? Is it the per user cost of fi that is too much or just the overall cost? What if the $3600 included as many users/repos as you wanted (given your hd space) and 1 year of free upgrades.

How about $999.99 (same as Adobe Photoshop so it should only require middle management approval)? What if you got a box like the yellow google search box (it could be called that the "premium version")?

An unknown factor in all this is how many companies would be even interested in buying a github server in the first place. If it isn't that many the costs might be too low to sustain development. I am betting that for the GitHub guys it makes a ton of sense for them to sell the private small accounts on github (and only manage/fix 1 github version). and for the big guys sell them a big package.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fundamentally, we don't want any hardware on-premise at all. What we really want is some kind of real statement from the github guys that speaks to all of the issues raised here (encryption, theft, malicious injection, auditing, the "honeypot"/juicy target problem, etc?), as I suggest to PJ below.

I'm guessing that's not going to happen, so I suppose our options are the status quo, host in a less-conspicuous location and manage our own security (as best as one can in a hosted environment), or go with the crowd and seek safety in that quasi-anonymity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think you are being overly paranoid, specially because if you're using git and a disaster happens with your SCM server, chances are that probably everyone has a recent, full-history clone of your repo(s). For older repos, you can just backup to S3 or whatever you feel comfortable with.

</comment><comment><USER16> we've been using it for almost a year now, and are pretty ok with it. There are occasional downtimes that are annoying, but as others said, not a big deal. We are also reasonably happy with the simple issue tracker, although it misses some _really_ important features it is ok for our needs (but damn, I'd love attachments).

</comment><comment><USER17> I wouldn't.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for clearing things up for me. :-P

<comment><USER17> What's the problem here? You asked, I answered.

<comment><USER11> It is some what expected for posters on HN threads such as this to explain their response in a concise fashion giving other readers a clear handle on the pros / cons of the situation and in this case helping the op to come to a decision.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


26 people who inspire me - <AUTHOR> Over the past year I was lucky enough to interview a bunch of people who inspire me through a site I worked on called ZIDILIFE.
My friend and I decided to create a coffee table style book featuring the 25 people we've interviewed. We hope people find the stories contained in the book as inspiring as we did.
Here's a free PDF of the book - https://www.dropbox.com/s/wpdmt03hjtof83j/Inspiration%20for%20a%20modern%20generation%20-%20ZIDILIFE%20Book.pdf?dl=0
And here's a free eBook https://itunes.apple.com/lt/book/inspiration-for-modern-generation/id996042032?mt=11
thanks! <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable:

Free PDF of the book - [https://www.dropbox.com/s/wpdmt03hjtof83j/Inspiration%20for%...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/wpdmt03hjtof83j/Inspiration%20for%20a%20modern%20generation%20-%20ZIDILIFE%20Book.pdf?dl=0)

and free eBook - [https://itunes.apple.com/lt/book/inspiration-for-modern- gene...](https://itunes.apple.com/lt/book/inspiration-for-modern- generation/id996042032?mt=11)</comment>


Ask HN: Are there any good alternative Google Cloud Platform docs/examples? - <AUTHOR> I find it much harder to get new things done with GCP compared to AWS. It's more difficult to understand the  GCP concepts from the docs alone. The examples are often incomplete and assume knowledge from three other places while dependencies and requirements are never just listed but linked indirectly through some git repo elsewhere. AWS feels more solution oriented (as in products) whereas GCP seems more feature oriented (as in engineering).
For example there is one documentation for datastore queries [1] and one for appengine datastore queries [2], but the docs were seemingly written by different groups?
Are there any good alternative learning resources?
[1] https://cloud.google.com/datastore/docs/concepts/queries#datastore-cursor-paging-python [2] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python/datastore/queries
PS: The capabilities of GCP are awesome so its worth it / AWS docs also have their weak spots / all subjective personal opinions <comment><USER2> I'm still new to GCP - but I've found the tutorials helpful.

The Manning book "Google Cloud Platform In Action" has been somewhat helpful in providing additional examples above what I've seen in the official docs - it's a MEAP so still being written. [https://www.manning.com/books/google- cloud-platform-in-actio...](https://www.manning.com/books/google-cloud- platform-in-action)

The "Google Cloud" YouTube channel has some videos I've found interesting : [https://www.youtube.com/user/googlecloudplatform](https://www.youtube.com/user/googlecloudplatform)</comment>


Cloudflare.com is 37% faster than maxcdn.com - <AUTHOR> http://tools.maxcdn.com/ping?d1=www.cloudflare.com&d2=www.maxcdn.com

<comment><USER2> Not sure how you got to this result. I just ran it and MaxCDN was 63% faster :)

[https://www.evernote.com/l/AHyH888TAp1GfIQcPuwlszY3DEBzQgRdx...](https://www.evernote.com/l/AHyH888TAp1GfIQcPuwlszY3DEBzQgRdxZYB/image.png)

</comment><comment><USER3> And ...</comment>


Skripal attack: 2,800 Russian bots 'sowed confusion after poison attacks' - <AUTHOR> https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/2-800-russian-bots-sowed-confusion-after-poison-attacks-zf6lvb3nc <comment><USER2> I don't think there is any need for bots on this one.

'We should see the evidence': public react to spy poisoning [https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/16/we-should- se...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/16/we-should-see-the- evidence-public-reacts-to-spy-poisoning)</comment>


Ask HN: What is noprocrast and showdead settings for on Hacker News? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> noprocrast is a way you can keep yourself from wasting too much time on HN. Turn it on and set a "min away" time and you won't be allowed to visit HN unless the "min away" time has elapsed since your last visit. Set a "max visit" time and you won't be allowed to spend more than "max visit" time on HN in any given session.

showdead lets you view "dead" posts. Posts go "dead" due to flagging or action by the moderators and maybe a couple of other reasons. From what I've seen, most of them are pure spam, and I - for one - don't advocate turning showdead on. But you can certainly experiment with it and see what you think.

</comment><comment><USER3> When showdead is on, you can see submissions and comments that have been flagged to death.

When noprocrast is on, you may only view HN for _maxvisit_ minutes at a time, and must stay away for _minaway_ minutes before returning.

</comment><comment><USER4> Both your questions are answered in the FAQ, linked at the bottom of every page on HN.

<http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html></comment>


Probability and Statistics Cookbook [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~tdw/files/cookbook-en.pdf <comment><USER2> There's a lot of great material to learn statistics on the Internet. I have several resources on a github repo:

[https://github.com/melling/MathAndScienceNotes/tree/master/s...](https://github.com/melling/MathAndScienceNotes/tree/master/statistics)

I did a little write-up on my blog:

[https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/12/30/learning- probability...](https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/12/30/learning-probability- and-statistics/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Web link to page: [http://statistics.zone](http://statistics.zone)

<comment><USER4> Thank you ~!

[P.S.A] This might not matter a lot, but just incase: The PDF link on this website links to a 2017 version (vs 2011 version on the parent thread).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A lot of these "formulas" become way easier to understand once you've derived them yourself (a few times), just as a heads up. Memorizing mathematics, if you care about taking it seriously for the long term, should be done at a minimum.

<comment><USER6> For sure, but a cheat sheet can still be useful. For example, the I find matrix cookbook very useful when I don't feel like rederiving derivatives of nontrivial linear algebra expressions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> And where was this 10 days ago in time for my probability exam, may I ask???

<comment><USER8> A google away, with the term being "probability cheatsheet". There are cheatsheets out there for many subjects.</comment></comment>


Gateway Inc. co-founder Mike Hammond dies at age 53 - <AUTHOR> https://finance.yahoo.com/news/gateway-inc-co-founder-mike-hammond-dies-age-152923375.html <comment><USER2> Very sad. His wife died of cancer a few months ago, and 53 is far too early.

Condolences to his family.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anybody know why he died at 53?

<comment><USER4> yeah I mean don't they presume anyone reading that wants to know what happened?

<comment><USER5> Unsure if this is sarcasm or not :/

<comment><USER6> I didn't see that as sarcasm. If you say somebody died 25 years below the average life span, really there's no excuse not to either put the cause of death, or specifically state that it wasn't released, or that "at time of publication, was unknown or witheld" And you could put some information around it if there was a previous illness reported or a history of X in the family.

Yahoo does get points for using the word "dies" instead of "passes away" Any journalist / editor worth anything knows everybody "dies". You don't try to soften the articles with fancy language. But they failed the "who what when where why."

<comment><USER5> If the cause of death was health related (mental or physical) is it really any of our business? I feel these are private matters, and if the family wish to withhold the cause of death then that's their prerogative. We should not expect nor be entitled to demand to know how a person passed away under certain circumstances. The fact of their death is enough for me to know.

<comment><USER4> on the one hand I agree with you.. death is a personal affair. on the other hand I feel like if they are going to put it in the public domain, they should expect that people will want to know the cause of death, especially (as someone else pointed out), if their death seems to be at a reasonably younger age...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>