Intel discontinues Joule, Galileo, and Edison product lines - <AUTHOR> http://hackaday.com/2017/06/19/intel-discontinues-joule-galileo-and-edison-product-lines/ <comment><USER2> I'm calling it, Intel is going to be a shadow of it's former self in 5 years. They have had tremendous issues competing in almost anything outside of x86 processors over their entire lifespan. They consistently get outmanuevered in gpus, ssds, low power socs, machine learning, et cetera. The x86 platform that they currently own, is mostly due to intertia and fab facility advantages.

AMD, was able to launch a pretty competitive CPU despite massive delays because Intel has barely improved the ipc of their processors over the last 5 years.

Meanwhile Apple is betting on iPads being the future computer of the Everyman and they make their own chips. Microsoft recently acknowledged that windows basically has to run on arm for the future proofing of their platform. I guarantee you start seeing more arm based windows computers soon.

Intel recently told everyone they're willing to sue for patent money, the last desperate act.

Intel better have a leapfrog cpu in the pipeline or it's over.

<comment><USER3> Intel has been "dead" before. AMD has "beaten it" before.

AMD knocked it out of the park with x86_64, which allowed a seamless transition to 64bit. Intel ended up having to license x86_64 implementation from AMD.

AMD beat Intel with their K6 and similar series of chips where, just like this time around, they were able to get way more performance per tick out of the CPU. Intel was supposedly dead in the water due to their toaster era P4 chips that ran hot as hell, and consumed way more power to get the same job done. AMD started making some serious inroads in the server CPU market with early era Opteron processors. Following that era, out came Centrino era of mobile processors, which took a different approach to the CPU architecture from the P4 and set things up for the Core2Duo etc series of processors and on in to the i7s and the like.

I'm highly skeptical that Intel is any more dead now than it was then. It has a track record of going away and completely changing the whole story all over again, and they've got the financial resources to keep on doing so.

<comment><USER4> > AMD beat Intel with their K6 and similar series of chips where, just like > this time around, they were able to get way more performance per tick out of > the CPU.

There was in interesting submission the other day about performance of the Ryzen vs i7, and how their AVX2 instruction support isn't what it's racked up to be[1]. I'm not really qualified to assess the source or claims accurately, so I'll let others read it themselves and come to their own conclusions, but it was interesting.

1: [https://hashcat.net/forum/thread-6534-post-35415.html](https://hashcat.net/forum/thread-6534-post-35415.html)

<comment><USER5> Those benchmarks mean absolutely nothing, because they obviously knew almost nothing about the processors they were trying to use.

1\. "Ryzen's AVX2 support is a bold-faced lie" To say this only shows complete ignorance. It was publicly known for many years that Ryzen will have only 128-bit AVX units, compared to the 256-bit AVX units of Haswell and its successors.

Nevertheless, using AVX-256 is still preferable on Ryzen, to reduce the number of instructions, even if the top speed per core is half of that reached by Intel.

2\. The benchmark results just show incompetence. While the top speed per core is half, the number of cores is double, so you just need to run twice more threads for a Ryzen to match the speed of Intel.

It is true that an i7 7700K will retain a small advantage, because of higher IPC and higher clock frequency, but the advantage for correct programs is small, not like the large advantages of those incompetent benchmarks. I have both a 3.6 GHz /4.0 GHz Ryzen and a 3.6 GHz / 4.0 GHz Skylake Xeon, so I know their behavior from direct experience.

While 4-core Intel retains a small advantage in AVX2 computations over 8-core Ryzen, there are a lot of other tasks, e.g. source program compilations, where Ryzen has almost a double speed, so you should choose your processor depending on what is important for you.

3\. The most stupid benchmark results are for SHA-1 and SHA-256. Ryzen already implements the SHA instructions that are also implemented in Intel Apollo Lake processors (to boost the GeekBench results against ARM) and will also be implemented in the future Intel Cannonlake processors (whose 2-core version is expected to be introduced this year).

If they had benchmarked a correct program that uses the SHA instructions, Ryzen would have trounced any Kaby Lake processor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> FYI, as someone who worked with the Edison I can't say I'm surprised. Flashing the Edison was nearly impossible and a big pain. The hardware routinely crashed. Much of the low power "specs" came from (overly) aggressive power management which introduced momentary delays and pauses. I'm happy to see them go and never want to work on such a platform again. The GPIO stopped working reliably at higher speeds despite their spec claims.

By contrast, the raspberry pis and even the Ci20 are significantly more stable and easier to work with. Their specs far more truthful.

<comment><USER7> I tried using the Galileo when it came out and was similarly disappointed. It claimed Arduino compatibility but had IO so slow that it couldn't interface with a DHT11 temperature/humidity sensor. In the end I got the feeling that Intel hadn't really thought things through :/

<comment><USER8> You understate the issue-- the GPIO pins had a default throughput of 230 Hz [[https://communities.intel.com/message/207904#207904](https://communities.intel.com/message/207904#207904)]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why did Edison fail:

      - it was too expensive compared to other BLE and WiFi capable SoCs or combinations of chips.

      - x86 compatibility doesn't matter.

      - power draw (~1W) is too high for the places where one would want to use this SoC.

      - the Yocto -based SDK was a mess. Every feature had a caveat and it was a pain to build.

      - there was never a clear commitment from Intel that they would make these in bulk for manufacturing.

The new hotness are the Espressif (ESP32) and MediaTek (mt7697) SoCs.

      - low power draw (~300mW), even lower at sleep (50mA - nA depending on what kind of sleep),

      - SDK is FreeRTOS based,

      - the "MCU features" like GPIO, PWM, etc, actually work all the time.

<comment><USER10> _\- x86 compatibility doesn 't matter._

On the contrary, I'll say that it _does_ matter --- and that's why Edison failed. It was x86, but not truly "IBM PC-compatible". Those who didn't care about PC-compatibility were unlikely to choose x86 over something like ARM, and for those who did, the Edison was useless.

If Intel had chosen to put an entire "real" PC on the SoC with, yes, plenty of legacy peripherals and such so that it could --- with suitable I/O interfaces attached --- basically act as a lower-powered desktop or laptop, I'm almost willing to bet it could've turned out very differently. They could've found applications in things like this now-dead product, for example: [http://www.pcworld.com/article/2873118/mouse-box-wants-to- st...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/2873118/mouse-box-wants-to-stuff-a-full- pc-into-a-mouse.html) (discussed at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8931999](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8931999) )

Intel's strength is the immense backwards-compatibility of x86 and the PC architecture, but in trying to make a not-quite-PC platform, they basically threw away their competitive advantage.

<comment><USER11> > not truly "IBM PC-compatible"

It's an embedded system, not a as low-power desktop.

If you are using it like an ordinary PC then you are probably using it wrong.

<comment> vertex-four Well that's the point. Nobody wants an x86 IoT device. They _might_ want an x86 embedded device - where embedded is defined in the large, i.e. systems that control lots of integrated peripherals with user interactivity built into the device, and lots of complex built-in functionality.

But at that point you're usually looking at proper Linux-based boards with lots of standard IO - even HDMI output - in the ARM space, and Edison provides absolutely nothing over those. It might've provided something if you could reasonably treat it as a bog-standard x86 computer with some extra functionality attached.

<comment><USER11> > Nobody wants an x86 IoT device.

No, you can't define other peoples use cases.

For myself, as long as the device meets my requirements (peripherals, power, tools, size, price) it can use power8 or PDP/11 for all I care.

<comment> vertex-four > For myself, as long as the device meets my requirements (peripherals, power, > tools, size, price) it can use power8 or PDP/11 for all I care.

In which case, you'll likely be using a _significantly_ cheaper ARM board which does all the same stuff, uses less power, probably uses a more standard distro, etc etc. Which brings us back to - nobody wants an x86 IoT device. They don't fit in anywhere ARM doesn't fit better.

<comment><USER11> Please read my comment again.

<comment><USER12> He did a perfectly fine job of reading your comment... you implied that you only cared about certain variables, "peripherals, power, tools, size, price". vertex-four points out that "x86 IoT devices" (ie these Intel chips we are talking about) are a bad choice in regard to those things that you care about...

<comment><USER11> I am not sure about that...

First of all, you don't know my requirements yet you declare ARM winner. What if for my particular use case Tensilica is the best choice?

Furthermore, you generally cannot define what IoT means for other people. For one person it could mean a 8-bit garage door opener, for someone else it could be an octa-core 64-bit monster.

Finally, Intel has a simplified x86 design with very good power usage for use in IoT. This CPU is not used in Galileo and alike today, but it exists.

<comment><USER12> I didn't declare anything... I have no opinion here, I was just explaining what the other guy was saying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here's the PCN for discontinuation of Edison: [http://qdms.intel.com/dm/i.aspx/C5E58142-4E04-4CBD-A7A6-BF33...](http://qdms.intel.com/dm/i.aspx/C5E58142-4E04-4CBD-A7A6-BF330573055D/PCN115579-00.pdf)

And Joule: [http://qdms.intel.com/dm/i.aspx/C3391A8F-693F-418B-B9B5-03A7...](http://qdms.intel.com/dm/i.aspx/C3391A8F-693F-418B-B9B5-03A75113F08B/PCN115580-00.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER14> This is unsurprising. My experience with the Edison: Cool little product with a lot of potential, but the stability problems, lack of timely releases of updates, lack of support for common libraries in their package management system, etc. were all bad signs. I never got the feeling that it would be safe to build a product around the Edison.

</comment><comment><USER15> That's too bad, the Edison was a nice small developer board. The NUC is quite a few steps up and not quite for the same target market (I've got a few). I wonder if they're going to continue attempting to compete with ARM or they have just realized they lost the low end battle with x86

<comment><USER16> Intel's problem is that there are lots of boards to chose from and x86 compatibility is irrelevant on IoT space.

Specially when talking about CPUs good enough for high level languages like ESP32 (hello PCW 1512).

<comment><USER17> I don't think x86/PC comparability is irrelevant. ARM is not an architecture. It's just a SoC where manufactures hook random crap to random pins and make patched to hell, non-upstreamable kernels:

[http://penguindreams.org/blog/android- fragmentation/](http://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/)

Windows Mobile ARM at least required UEFI, but their bootloaders are locked. Most mobile phones don't support device tree. Even on ARM boards that support device tree, hardware support is still hit and miss:

[http://penguindreams.org/blog/review-clearfog- pro/](http://penguindreams.org/blog/review-clearfog-pro/)

I think there is a space for an x86/UEFI embedded devices. Maybe AMD should try to jump back into this space. A newer Geode?

<comment><USER16> My remark about it being irrelevant is due to the fact that for IoT applications, one doesn't care for backwards compatibility of existing applications.

IoT deployments are usually software developed for a special use case.

Then if the target platform is powerful enough to allow C, C++, Rust, Java, Lua, MicroPython, Pascal, Basic, <whatever language with rich library>, then the actual OS is also kind of irrelevant.

I am not thinking of boards to run GNU/Linux or Windows, mimicking a desktop experience.

Maybe it shows my 80's background, but for many use cases an Arduino like bare metal development is more than good enough, hence x86 being irrelevant when one has an high level language with a nice abstractions SDK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Fortunately this doesn't mention anything off the Euclid line, like their moderately cool single-box CV thing: [https://click.intel.com/intelr-euclidtm- development-kit.html](https://click.intel.com/intelr-euclidtm-development- kit.html)

We can only hope that someone at Intel has realized IoT is a total tarpit, and is getting out of the product segment entirely.

<comment><USER19> We had a chance to play with the euclid yesterday! That thing is really exiting, but gets quite hot. One of our participants was hacking an autonomous agent with it: [https://www.facebook.com/radbotsapp/videos/310382552738200/?...](https://www.facebook.com/radbotsapp/videos/310382552738200/?fref=mentions)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> And by the look of it, when the server and hedt CPUs hit the market, they'll discontinue a lot more.

They got cozy with the monopoly, seems the bills arrived.

<comment><USER21> They should have spun this line out to a new company. Intels behavior around x86 mirrors Microsofts and Win32. Classic innovators dilemma. This move only hastens the exodus.

<comment><USER16> At least Microsoft seems to have a plan with .NET, Azure and to certain extent UWP.

Intel on the other hand is still searching apparently.

<comment><USER21> The new Microsoft has made amazing strides in transforming themselves .

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> How ironic, the most succesful Intel MCU was 8051. It is 40 years old, yet still rockin

<comment><USER23> In the 1980's the Intel 8031,8051,8052 were the #1 embedded processors (Its still in the keyboard your probably typing on) However the patents expired and its now made by everyone else, but ironically not Intel!

Intel currently has nothing for the smaller (non-operating system) embedded market which is still mostly 8-bit and low pin-count and as everyone has stated ARM has already won the fight for 32-bit (though I do also use PIC32 which is MIPS)

<comment><USER24> What about a 64-bit architecture for the Cortex-M market? If they could pull off some wizardry in focusing on energy efficiency, and maybe target peripheral functions involving GPU-like parallel processors for small-scale ML/AI/etc. purposes?

I dunno, it seems like there might be a market for that sort of thing. You train your model, pop it on a chip that consumes microwatts per megahertz? Something like that could be appealing.

It might also be impossible. I don't design chips. But I do think targeting both mobility and parallel processing could be cool. Maybe something like what Parallella is doing.

<comment><USER23> 64-Bit architectures and GPUs are totally different beasts requiring MMU's and OS's and whole development teams.

My last project used a 14 pin processor with 195 lines of bare metal C code compiling to 486 bytes of Flash memory and running on an internal 32Khz clock. This is more the target 8051 market though I must admit some cortex M0 processors are getting as cheap to use here.

The Propeller Chip is awesome (no interrupts and 8 processors is a really cool concept) but at $8 it is going against the big boys (Freescale/ST/Microchip) with their more flexible memory, power management and rich peripheral sets. I would love for one of the big players to licence the propeller core but it wont happen.

<comment><USER23> .. Forgot the propeller 1 core IS open source now and still no takers, real lack of vision out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Ah and I am so lucky I never switched to Galileo while I was tempted during its release. For some reason I thought it wouldn't work out. Something felt off for some reason and I could kind of get by with Raspberry Pi.

Reading hackaday comments it's probably from the documentation and Intel's doing, not for the technology on itself. I am guessing that open source OR community > closed source or company (as in Raspberry Pi with a great community vs Galileo or Arduino vs anything else) for these kind of things.

</comment><comment><USER26> Intel just doesn't seem to get how this works. You can't just make a platform and then throw it away expecting people to like your brand...

<comment><USER27> Not the first time they did it. Now they have been on "IoT" and "Machine Learning". Beforehand it was about "NUI" and "AppStore". Before that they also tried in other areas. What happened to their cross platform endeavor with the XDK?

<comment><USER28> B....b....but _FPGAs!_

Intel is flopping around on the beach like a dying fish. They rested on their laurels for far too long.

<comment><USER29> They did $59bn in revenue last year lol

<comment><USER28> The first derivative of that number is what's important.

[https://media.ycharts.com/charts/62ec44ed2571caa3dbba144b0c7...](https://media.ycharts.com/charts/62ec44ed2571caa3dbba144b0c7f6a9f.png)

Watch it over the next few years, let's see what happens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> What does it mean for Android Things (former Brillo) project? Intel Edison and Intel Joule were ones of the few supported boards.

<comment><USER16> Android Things is cool to reuse Android knowledge, but one is better off with a board that supports GNU/Linux directly, as there is support for whatever programming language one feels like using.

<comment><USER31> Ehh, not always. It is often best to avoid a full OS in favor of something with less complexity. Android Things and Windows 10 IoT are attractive for this reason, among others.

<comment><USER16> Android Things and Windows 10 IoT are a full OS.

Given that you mention it, from a hobby developer perspective, I would rather pick W10 IoT, because at least Microsoft does offer proper support for C++, including easy integration with .NET, unlike the dev experience with the NDK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I will never understand why Intel sold off StrongARM/XScale, it seemed like it could have been pivoted into their own IoT offering.

<comment><USER33> That would have required Intel to predict the IoT craze in 2006.

<comment><USER32> What's there to predict? ARM has always had a stronger low-power presence than x86. Instead of hedging all bets on Atom, they should have kept XScale on hand as a second option. They still have a license to make ARM chips, but the capability that XScale presented never should have been sold.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I worked on a handful of products using Edison, and was speaking to Intel less than a month ago about their Joule line at a conference, where they assured me Joule was the future.

All of these chipsets had (and still have) huge promise, but have been mired in really puzzling and terrible board design issues.

You can tell that there are two different groups at Intel, the "Core" and the "Iot".

The Edison was super powerful, price competitive, and an honestly wonderful platform to dev on. YOCTO, while a weird decision, was a pretty vanilla Linux flavor and easy to pick up.

With all that promise though, the botched the silicon. The 2nd cpu on Edison, the Quark 100mhz one, never actually worked. They were shutoff in firmware from day 1 because of presumed hardware issues.

Even worse (and the reason we stopped using Edison), the SPI bus had so much electrical crosstalk on it from not being properly routed or shielded, you couldn't use it at anything over 25hz with a SINGLE bus endpoint. This removed 90% of the real-world uses for the Edison to drive displays, sensor and motor arrayset al. Intel knew it was a problem and consciously decided not to Rev the board to fix it.

Gallileo and Joule are both underpowered and incredibly overpriced devices. Today, the raspberry pi 3 is the hobby standard, and in nearly every real world use case, it is orders of magnitude more performant at 10% or less of the cost.

Intel IS is trouble, because this is their third botched attempt to enter the world of embedded computing and mobile computing.

First was the Atom, which isn't bad, but is too power constrained to compete with ARM. They made some good efforts here, but the cost is higher and perf/watt significantly lower than ARM.

Second was their foray into mobile, trying to branch from Atom. Anyone here ever use an Intel powered phone? Well they spent billions on it, never to have a mass market device actually appear. Same problems - while have equivalent performance to ARM, prices were 30-50% higher and performance per watt was significantly worse.

Now here we are with attempt 3. With the same issues. Intel fundamentally doesnt know how to design, manufacture or sell embedded chips.

It's a completely different market motion, different customers, different constraints, shorter cycles and much much different competitive landscape.

AMD isn't going to "beat" Intel. They have fundamentally the same problems. Both AMD and Intel aren't going to go bankrupt, but they are going to continue the slide into much smaller scale manufacture.

They are both being eaten by the dozens of ARM vendors, by the FPGA movement, and by public cloud data centers. It's a reduction by a thousand cuts, making it that much more difficult to do anything about it.

<comment><USER35> > assured me Joule was the future

It's certain that the decision came from the finance dept, not from the sales/marketing folks. Those folks were there because they truly wanted Intel to be a leader in IoT.

Just like Texas Instruments failed attempts, Intel got into this game thinking they could make decent margins and that their brand would clobber the little guys (e.g. Eben and Massimo).

Turns out supporting the IoT community properly actually requires passion and expensive commitment.

On a side note, my take is that Arduino is quickly heading towards irrelevance. With their myriad of products they are spread too thin. New products (beginning as far back as the Yun) get very little in the way of proper support/documentation and the company infighting is a terrible distraction that is hurting the brand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Boo! I really liked my time working with the Edison. A great platform and so tiny!

</comment><comment><USER37> Long overdue. I had hope that Galileo might be an Arduino/Raspberry Pi competitor, but Joule was blatantly an attempt to recoup some of the cost of their already-cancelled smartphone SoC program.

Why now? They just announced that they're cutting spending down to 30% of revenue by 2020: [https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/05/12/intel- corporation-...](https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/05/12/intel-corporation- puts-out-long-term-spending-targ.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER38> All in on Compute Cards then? Or at least, the next attempt to get into the IoT sphere with an overpriced-in-the-market and poorly community supported ecosystem...

<comment><USER39> You mean the eoma68 knockoff intel announced right after the crowdsupply campaign was fully funded? [https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68](https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This document only talks about the Galileo boards. Where did you see mention of Edison and Joule?

That would totally suck as we are pretty heavily invested in Edisons.

<comment><USER41> A better link [http://hackaday.com/2017/06/19/intel-discontinues-joule- gali...](http://hackaday.com/2017/06/19/intel-discontinues-joule-galileo-and- edison-product-lines/) with the links to all the cancellations.

<comment><USER42> From the relevant document:

Intel Corporation will discontinue manufacturing and selling all skus of the Intel® Edison compute modules and developer kits. Shipment of all Intel® Edison product skus ordered before the last order date will continue to be available from Intel until December 16, 2017. Last time orders (LTO) for any Intel® Edison products must be placed with Intel by September 16, 2017\. All orders placed with Intel for Intel® Edison products are non-cancelable and non-returnable after September 16, 2017.

<comment><USER43> Will this ruin the usability for some people? What happens to the thrown away stock?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd buy a dozen ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> It's not like Intel hasn't tried new things over the years, before becoming a huge ARM CPU vendor (XScale) they had the i960 MCU, which was pretty good and the failed i860 VLIW, which was super-promising for graphics and image processing but the compilers never delivered.

It's just that the x86 was always so huge that all the other projects never got traction.

</comment><comment><USER45> What ever happened to that original idea for an SD card form factor for Edison?

<comment><USER46> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Edison](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Edison)

<comment><USER45> That just says "they changed it", with no elaboration?

<comment><USER47> Yeah. They changed their mind without any explanation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> IoT does not yet seem to stand for Intel of Tomorrow! At least not when it comes to boards or processors. Maybe there are just more convinced by the potential of vertical solutions like MobilEye's?

</comment><comment><USER49> Not surprised: these products have only seen press release. In my bubble they were not available on any products, not to mention costs.

</comment><comment><USER50> The Edison was quite a neat little machine. Fun to work with and super powerful despite its tiny size. Sorry to see Intel abandon it.

</comment><comment><USER51> here is a weird thought : how easy or hard would it be for intel to just buyout arm from softbank ? iirc, softbank bought arm for around 32b usd, intel with around 160b of market cap can 'easily' buy it from softbank, no ?

<comment><USER52> I don't think they could "easily" buy a 32B company, no. I also think it might run afoul of regulators, ie anti-trust.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I wonder what happens to those who built products with these boards inside.

<comment><USER54> Obviously they're fucked. Luckily we are still in the hardware design phase, otherwise we'd be even more pissed.

I don't think anyone built a product with enough volume that Intel would reconsider the discontinuation.

Long-term component availability is a major issue for hardware products. Discontinuing a product basically over-night is not a nice move from Intel and I hope people will remember this when Intel launches their next IoT/robotics product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I enjoy experimenting with IoT boards but have never understood the pricing of Intel's offerings. Joule, Galileo, & Edison were many times the price of their ARM brethren. The only reason to pay so much was if you were stuck in Windows. The Curie, however, is a powerful board at a decent price.

</comment><comment><USER56> they lost position forever

</comment><comment><USER57> Surprising exactly 0 people.</comment>


3 Positive Feedback Traps Startups Should Be Wary Of - <AUTHOR> http://www.rackspace.com/blog/starting-up-is-hard-to-do-the-perils-of-positive-feedback/

<comment><USER2> I think you can get around #3 if you just tell people to be upfront with you. Half way through your pitch, stop, and ask if they're interested.

<comment><AUTHOR> (I am the author of the post) - I think you are right if you are self aware; however, when you are all amped up about your idea it is tough to stop and imagine that someone might think it sucks.</comment></comment>


Sniper – An efficient multi-scale object detection algorithm - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mahyarnajibi/SNIPER <comment><USER2> that's uh... quite a name...

<comment><USER3> It's a really really bad name for an object detection system

<comment><USER4> Why? Let's be honest, the main use for most of this new ai tech is going to be military.

<comment><USER5> Why?

Cars, household-robots, etc. all need to get around as well.

<comment><USER6> Sometimes you just gotta aim at the head.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Unfortunate how CUDA has such a stranglehold on scientific work

<comment><USER8> Why is that bad?

<comment><USER9> I'm guessing Nvidia hardware lockin

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The current title refers to the algorithm as "Sniper", but the name appears to actually be "SNIPER". According to the paper [1] linked in the repo, that stands for "Scale Normalization for Image Pyramids with Efficient Resampling."

[1]: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.09300](https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.09300)

</comment><comment><USER11> Tldr would this work on a pi3?

<comment><USER12> I'm no expert on rpi or cuda, but is it actually possible to run cuda code?

<comment><USER13> No.</comment></comment></comment>


Gravitational waves from black holes detected - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35524440 <comment><USER2> Existing discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11080701](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11080701)

</comment><comment><USER3> MIT News Page: [http://news.mit.edu/2016/ligo-first-detection- gravitational-...](http://news.mit.edu/2016/ligo-first-detection- gravitational-waves-0211)

</comment><comment><USER4> There may be a zillion references to this news item on HN but I read every one and get more and more excited each one I read.</comment>


Go Challenge 2 - <AUTHOR> http://golang-challenge.com/go-challenge2/

<comment><USER2> Winner of the first challenge here. Looks like the prizes are mostly the same (maybe identical?) as last month, so I'll probably be competing in the "Just for fun" category. Hope to see some creative solutions!</comment>


The 5/4 trick – How Harry Connick Jr. tricked an entire audience (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hYYgz-AJKU <comment><USER2> So called odd meter time signatures are not "tricks" and labeling them as such is a bit of a stretch. Most music is composed in 4/4, four beats in a measure with the quarter note getting the down beats. It's so often used it's called Common Time[0]. But there exists many other meters in most genres of music. Do you want fifteen beats in a measure with the eighth note getting the down beat? No problem!

In this video Harry does seem to do this on purpose as a little musical joke with the audience, and I'm sure that's what the title refers to.

[0][https://www.britannica.com/art/common- time](https://www.britannica.com/art/common-time)</comment>


Paper finds a surprising link between warm temperatures and math test scores - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/05/12/paper-finds-a-surprising-link-between-warm-temperatures-and-math-test-scores/?postshare=7651431446442153 <comment><USER2> Those who have been around long enough may recall the late Daniel Moynihan's discovery that math proficiency scores had a strong inverse relationship to the distance of the state capital from the Canadian border. As I recall, he thought it an excellent way for northern-tier states to raise revenue by renting out enclaves where other states might place their capitals.

<comment><USER3> For the unenlightened the point here is you need to control for race, which I doubt the study in the referenced article did.

<comment><USER4> Is it race or education policy? Hmmm...

<comment><USER3> Probably race in some way, because when you control for race all ethnic groups in America outperform the respective groups overseas. Swedish Americans score higher than Swedes, black Americans score higher than west Africans, etc.

<comment><USER4> Race is extremely difficult to control for opposed to income, employment, education, etc. It's difficult to understand from a european racial perspective, but it's like stuffing everyone from the mediterranean to scandinavia into the same race. People who are otherwise genetically disparate share skin color. This is extremely evident in Africa proper but is also evident in e.g. the american "African American" ethnicity.

TL;DR unless you're trying to correlate with a specific gene, you're gonna be called racist for trying to correlate skin color to anything. Race in general is a word that is difficult to use correctly in an argument unless you're shooting down someone else's argument. It is virtually meaningless outside of how people extrapolate phenotypes to ethnic identification.

<comment><USER3> > but it's like stuffing everyone from the mediterranean to scandinavia into > the same race

That's a perfectly reasonable thing to do almost any way you try to look at it.

<comment><USER4> > That's a perfectly reasonable thing to do almost any way you try to look at > it.

...why? Europe is a culturally, politically, and genetically diverse place. It makes no sense to group them by "race".

<comment><USER3> > genetically diverse place

On a relative basis, no it isn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I suffer from allergies compounded by an injury. This has led to a varying degree of obstructed breathing and discomfort.

Warmer weather tends to bring greater allergic and perhaps other factors influencing this condition. I notice a significant cognitive decline under these conditions.

When I work in air conditioned environments, I perceive my cognitive ability to increase as the cooler, drier, and filtered air gradually mitigates the symptoms of congestion and discomfort.

In my experience, there is _a lot_ that medicine and formal study do not recognize nor study. For lack of a better word, a "hollistic" perspective that looks beyond easily reducible and isolated factors is significantly absent and is so particularly with respect to acknowledging and addressing current conditions as opposed to promoting one particular theory or product.

So, it's anecdotal, but for me, I have little difficulty believing such a correlation is possible. One might think that populations would adapt to warmer environments to not be cognitively challenged by them. But we've been moving around a lot, and changing our environment a lot, in recent decades. As just one possible reason why not.

</comment><comment><USER6> Something I have always looked at was that, from a historical point of view, the fastest development in the industrial revolution occurred in more temperate areas, up to a pint where severe winters curtailed the effect. Thus Manchester developed more than Moscow.

A long time ago I came up with the half baked theory is that people in these climate zones had to work harder for food and shelter, and that the hard work for that had a motivating effect, or perhaps increased the reproductive success for those willing to put in the work. Whereas someone in a warmer climate could be half-assed with their shelter and food production and still get along fine.

It's possible that warmer temperatures just slow down brain function as well. People from warmer areas tend to have slower, drawn out speech patterns. Maybe there is something in it.

<comment><USER7> You might be interested in Guns, Germs, and Steel. It has a similar N-S vs. E-W thing going on.

<comment><USER4> And with all geographical determinism there's gonna be too many edge cases for the theory to hold any water. See: diamond's academic reputation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _"I've got to tell you, we puzzled over that for at least a year, to try to > really wrap our heads around whether we're doing it right and what might > explain such a pattern of results," said Graff Zivin._

I don't understand the reason for puzzlement. The result is straightforwardly intuitive. Discomfort is distracting, not to mention it takes a lot of energy to maintain homeostasis when it's either too hot or too cold. If anything, the researchers should be trying harder to falsify the obvious conclusion rather than dig up more reasons to believe it.

Googling "temperature" and "productivity" leads to multiple articles explaining how different office temperatures influence workers' productivity. The sweet spot seems to be somewhere between 70F and 75F, and productivity decreases as the temperature moves away from this range. Why would children respond any differently to discomfort? Does anyone seriously believe that the temperature has absolutely no impact on productivity?

So discomfort itself can be a confounding factor. I would very much like to know whether discomfort explains all the variance, or whether there's something else about high temperatures that affects the human brain in a different way. (Are our brains like CPUs that need to throttle down when they get too hot?) Likewise, I'd like to know whether acclimatization can explain the lack of long-term effects, because if so, the "global warming is making us stupider" angle is just plain stupid.

</comment><comment><USER9> > But poorer math performance...on particularly hot days

> Overlay test scores with the average temperature in the county where they > lived

Wait, what? Is the study about hot days or warm climates?

<comment><USER10> You cut off the quote too early:

> "... _on the day of testing._ "

The "average" means they're not taking the high or low for the day, but it's definitely warm days, not warm climates.

<comment><USER11> Much more likely to have warm days in warm climates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a HUGE claim. As many have said, the larger (stranger) the claim, the more skeptical we should be and the more evidence should be required ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcello_Truzzi#.22Extraordinar...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcello_Truzzi#.22Extraordinary_claims.22)).

<comment><USER13> I like how you provided a citation for that, in case anyone disagrees.

<comment><USER12> The history of attribution is pretty interesting. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hang on...

So in the second part of the study, these guys are trying to determine if the heat effects are cumulative, and find that they are not (obviously, since susceptibility to permanent damage due to > 70 degree weather would have crippled our species intellectually from the get go).

They then go on to explain that parents are somehow "adapting" to this by, for example, sending kids to math camp, thus negating the cumulative effect. Huh?

</comment><comment><USER10> They explain the possible A/C confound like this:

 _"We don't know what the kid is doing 2 hours before the test implementer arrives at the house, it's quite possible the kids are outside," he says. "It's quite possible these kids are exposed to some heat even if they can then come in and cool off."_

I actually had a different and precisely contradictory explanation: the test- takers on hot days were more likely to be in heavily air-conditioned environments and thus the air in the test-taking environment is too _cold_ (and dry, and probably mouldy).

It's certainly an interesting effect but they need to do a lot more work to establish the cause.

<comment><USER15> It also could be the effect that it's a nice day outside and you are inside taking a test (regardless of a/c)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Interesting; I was recently binge-reading some old blog posts and came across this[1] not dissimilar claim from 2012. Maybe it wasn't so crazy after all.

[1] [http://squid314.livejournal.com/320770.html?thread=2386178](http://squid314.livejournal.com/320770.html?thread=2386178)

</comment><comment> lloyd-christmas Beyond being just a crappy study... People have lower performance when they are uncomfortable? Who knew.

<comment><USER17> Or when they'd rather be playing outside.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> if this isn't an exercise in correlation not being equal to causation then i don't know what is.

<comment><USER19> The part about the researchers being surprised that the effect isn't cumulative seemed like something from The Onion.

<comment><USER20> All the trust those researchers have on their finding, and all that certainty that the correlation isn't cumulative because children in hot weathers must study more.

No, the Onion wouldn't be able to get away with an article like that. People would claim up front that it's too contrived and unrealistic for comedy.</comment></comment></comment>


Git add -p: The most powerful git feature you're not using yet - <AUTHOR> http://johnkary.net/git-add-p-the-most-powerful-git-feature-youre-not-using-yet/

<comment><USER2> This is worth knowing about, and the video is fine, but it took me less time to just read the manual. I guess I'm a textual animal.</comment>


Fed Issues Rules to Cut Debit-Card Fees; Visa, MasterCard Fall - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-16/federal-reserve-moves-to-reduce-debit-card-fees-visa-mastercard-decline.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Being a Canadian I have always been surprised at how limited debit card use at retailers is in the US. Part of it is due to my card being from Canada but it also has to do with the antiquated system of fees for using the interchanges.

<comment><AUTHOR> I assume this post was down-voted due to the "fed" being political. I find the topic more interested in that it is a field/service that needs disruption. Too bad it was a government policy change that had to do it.</comment></comment>


Draft of OCaml Scientific Computing book - <AUTHOR> https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/ann-draft-of-ocaml-scientific-computing-book <comment><USER2> Each year I think wether should I learn OCaml or not. What is the current state of multi-thread OCaml? Is that a game changer or just a cool feature? I can't understand why OCaml doesn't have mass adoption.

<comment><USER3> > I can't understand why OCaml doesn't have mass adoption.

Probably for the exact same reason each year you think about learning OCaml you decide not to (I mean this sincerely, not trying to be snide).

I think the main reasons it doesn't see mass adoption in industry:

* There are only two major companies that do a substantial amount of OCaml that I can think of off the top of my head, Jane Street and Ahrefs. Facebook does some OCaml too but I don't think it's a core part of their stack.

* The tooling is lacking.

* People have an easier time learning Python or Java so you'll have a larger pool of candidates if you use one of those languages.

<comment><USER4> > Facebook does some OCaml too

Using an ML or a Lisp for language tooling is the way to go. Nothing else in that league.

<comment><USER5> How about Haskell?

<comment><USER6> Haskell is like the nerdy cousin of the ML family. Everyone knows he's smart, but no one would think to ask him to fix the kitchen sink or install the new dishwasher.

Seriously, Haskell is massively impressive, both as a research language and as an implementation. But it does not shed that certain research attitude. Every known problem seems to be boring. "Oh you want a proxying http server? No problem, this is just the inversion of the endofoo over the category of abstract Monobars!". Sometimes I get the feeling that no one focuses on shipping actual software with Haskell.

<comment><USER7> Facebook uses Haskell in a critical portion of their user-content publishing pipeline.

[https://engineering.fb.com/security/fighting-spam-with- haske...](https://engineering.fb.com/security/fighting-spam-with-haskell/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Love OCaml. One of my favorite languages. But I'm using Julia for this kind of thing, it just seems much better suited. Likewise, I wouldn't use Julia to write a programming language implementation, OCaml is much better suited for that.

<comment><USER9> It's the same for me, Julia is perfect for scientific programming - it has basically replaced Python, it's even starting to be used at my work. I don't think Ocaml has its place in this domain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Online version is available on [https://ocaml.xyz/book/](https://ocaml.xyz/book/).

Pretty interesting. Reading it, seems closer to a tutorial in using Owl, an OCaml-written package for technical computing (what e.g. Matlab is; though architecture differs according to post).

<comment><USER11> I am not sure why you are getting downvoted. If you had not posted the direct link already, I would have done so. Perhaps the downvotes are about the second part of your comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Skimming through this book, one thing i was constantly wondering, is how well does this ocaml framework use the hardware.

Leaving ocaml aside, the connection between scientific computing and hardware is the one thing I miss the most in "scientific computing" books and courses, because it sooner or later limits the science that any researcher doing scientific computing can do.

To give an example, earlier this week, one of our scientists was waiting 10 minutes between each interactive iteration of their data-set, so I was called to help, and the only feedback they gave was that "its slow", to which I replied "slow with respect to what? how fast are you expecting this to be and _why_?".

The answer to these questions is the difference between "maybe they just need a faster computer", "maybe they need a different algorithm", or even "maybe this problem cannot be solved today because computers this fast do not exist".

From their facial expression, it looked to me that they actually had never thought about any of this, probably because whatever they did before was always fast enough, but now this issue was limiting their science and they were lacking the bare minimum set of tools to even get proper help.

If you are doing scientific computing, chances are that the problems you are going to be dealing with are going to be getting bigger and harder as you advance in your career. For many scientists, the first problems will actually be big enough for the hardware to matter.

I wish scientific computing courses and books will at least provide the most basic tools to these scientist for them to at least be able to get meaningful help. Having someone on call for when this matters is quite expensive.

<comment><USER13> Let's face it, is this researcher ever going to read a book on scientific computing in OCaml? Most researchers won't even read a book on scientific computing.

<comment><USER14> Why do you think that?

That's like saying "most programmers would never read a book about science, or finance...", or whatever field they are writing software for.

<comment><USER15> > Why do you think that?

Observation in research support, I'd guess. It typically no longer seems to be the case that you do whatever you need to for your data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In my opinion, static languages don't bring a whole lot to the table with numerical math. There's not many types for one. You basically just use matrices and vectors of floats most of the time.

What would really be a bigger deal is some limited dependent typing to avoid errors from mismatched array sizes. Until then though, Julia is a bit more practical choice for me.

<comment><USER17> These old papers might pique your interest

Shape in Computing [[https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/234528.234749](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/234528.234749) ]

A Semantics for Shape [[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0167642395...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0167642395000151) ]

[https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-FISh-language- defi...](https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-FISh-language-definition- Jay/cc414b98ba5e65f47c18470a5739195f4a63a209)

[https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s100090050037](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s100090050037)

The page for FiSH used to be online. I cant find it now.

<comment> cole-k This sort of thing (if I understand the abstracts correctly) can also be done with dependent types: [https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/jeremy.gibbons/publications/a...](https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/jeremy.gibbons/publications/aplicative.pdf).

This paper was my introduction to dependent typing, so if you have a little Haskell background, you should be able to grok its gist too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Indexing, slicing, and broadcasting are three fundamental functions to > manipulate multidimensional arrays.

...

> Indexing and slicing is arguably the most important function in any > numerical library.

These statements are undoubtedly true. The first question any practitioner familiar with other systems will ask is: what does basic arithmetic, array manipulation, and linear algebra look like?

But from what I can tell on a very quick skim, that question isn't really answered until the section starting with these sentences, on page 123. I've noticed this situation every time I look at the Owl docs webpage too, FWIW (have not looked recently though).

I understand the need to be perceived as fully-capable for modern tasks -- and that's fine for a 2-4 page set of teaser examples up front -- but I think this book would become much more approachable if the basic mechanics of doing math were presented first.

<comment><USER17> If anyone wants a quick access to see how slicing and indexing is done [https://ocaml.xyz/book/slicing.html](https://ocaml.xyz/book/slicing.html)

An older thread on HN on slicing [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20457884](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20457884)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good stuff! Love OCaml and functional programming in the spotlight.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think the work the author has done is amazing. I Just looking at the commit history - the core contributor has definitely been super busy.

[https://github.com/owlbarn/owl/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/owlbarn/owl/graphs/contributors)

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting idea to use an ML for scientific programming, but I don't see any practical reasons not to use Julia or Python. I'd rather take advantage of everything Julia already offers (+ Python with PyCall.jl) than wait for the same support in a language not widely used in the first place.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can use PyML to call python from OCaml in the same way, and it works fine to pass an owl ndarray to numpy.

As a user of both, I think they have different treadoffs. I tend to use OCaml when I am playing around with the code because I find it infinitely easier to refactor (and to figure out what I was doing if I leave the code rotten for too long)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm beginning to think of learning either OCaml or F# for data sciency-kind of things. Any points of comparison between those?

Library ecosystem seems better on F#, but I must admit I'm somewhat wary of the behemoth that is .NET .

What else should I consider?

<comment><USER21> Data science and interactive programming are actually the main focus of the next release of f#. Not saying it's bad now, but Microsoft wants it to be a strong option in data workflows.

[https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-f-5-preview...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-f-5-preview-1/)

I had originally been learning ocaml but switched to f# because it has much better tooling and more uses (e.g. better web server support since I use .net libs)

<comment><USER20> Interesting, thank you!

From just preliminary research, F# seems both loved by its devs, but also found to be a bit of an unloved child on a sidetrack - that was probably another reason I hesitated in getting started. Do you think that is justified?

<comment><USER21> I wouldn't say its unloved or on a side track, it's baked into .net as a first class citizen and has dedicated engineers at Microsoft working on it.

When I started I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to download .net core on a mac and not do anything else to use F#.

Its less popular than C# so its there's not as much documentation from 3rd party sources, youtube videos, etc, but you can use any C# modules in F# so you'll get used to reading C# docs.

I would highly recommend this overview of the .Net ecosystem: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEfBfBQq7EE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEfBfBQq7EE)

I really like how it showed a preview of "modern C#" at 12:20 which is being influenced by F#.

After that, this talk opened my eyes to the power of f# philosophy and type system: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JB1_e5wZmU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JB1_e5wZmU)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've never encountered a real OCaml project or anyone who uses it in my career (same is true for Haskell). I have assumed these languages are a hobby for CS academics and get used for pet projects by their devotees. Not that that's bad - they're interesting and the ideas are cool. I would just be afraid of locking myself into an isolated ecosystem that it's hard to hire experienced people for. Is anyone on HN actually using these languages for scientific computing, or other large production projects? Curious to know what the pros / cons are in practice and how common that is.

<comment> non-entity I've talked to at least one persons who works on production Haskell applications, and Jane Street, a company that was discussed on HN just yesterday makes heavy use of OCaml, but yeah they're pretty rare and I suppose the people working with them are just lucky. I've heard particularly about the Haskell market that if you want a chance of competing for the few jobs available you have to be among the top-haskellers, but I'm not sure.

<comment><USER23> Jane Street being the only company that anyone ever mentions when discussing OCaml is even worse in my opinion. It means the ecosystem is going to be heavily driven by their needs, not to mention that banks tend to have idiosyncratic development cultures.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is not the only one though. There are Ahrefs, Tarides, Tezos, Citrix (XenServer and a part of Xen are in OCaml), Inria, Facebook (for compilers, typecheckers and ReasonML), Bloomberg (was Bucklescript/ReScript, now at facebook though I believe).

There are also some academic projects with industrial uses. Directly to mind come Coq, Frama-C, Mirage and the Zélus compiler.

EDIT: added Inria and Frama-C

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Owl, the array/scientific computing library that this book introduces, has been discussed on HN before. Dropping those links here, in case people are curious about the comments.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20449595](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20449595)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14751236](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14751236)

</comment><comment><USER24> As someone that likes and uses OCaml a lot but uses Julia for scientific computing, it's not worth it, just use Julia.

The Julia code is going to be shorter, faster, and more elegant. The libraries will be sooo much better. The static typing of OCaml doesn't really help in this area and sometimes actually hurts (statically typed DataFrames don't work so well).

<comment><USER15> What makes Julia code shorter and more elegant generally? I strongly disagree with static typing not being useful in scientific computing. Most of that I see isn't dealing with data frames, though I've seen confusion with types in those with R users.

<comment><USER24> I would say the biggest difference is broadcasting. So let's say I have an array of returns, r:

      r = [0.0001; -0.00002...]

I might be interested to find the cumulative returns:

      cumprod(1 .+ r) .- 1

Or just apply a function f to it:

      f.(r)

In Ocaml I can't vectorize any notation:

      List.map ~f:(fun x -> x - 1)) @@ List.cumprod(List.map r ~f:((+) 1))

      List.map r ~f:f

Julia allows you to write code in a very vectorized, array language style. OCaml does not. This is big big issue, imo. Also with multi-dimensional arrays and slice notation, Julia is just very convenient for working with higher dimensional data. OCaml, to put it mildly, is not very good at this.

Scientific computing and array languages go hand in hand. Also the lack of polymorphic functions is a big problem in OCaml. For example it would be impossible to define an addition function in OCaml that transparently worked with arrays:

      1 .+ [1; 2; 3] == [2; 3; 4]

      1+1 == 2

      [1; 2; 3] .+ 1 == [2; 3; 4]

      [1; 2; 3] .+ [1; 2; 3] == [2; 4; 6]

Julia makes this easy. A real array language like kdb+/q or J is even better.

This is great for linear algebra (matrices and tensors). You can write very math-like equations using very high level functions. With OCaml you will always be burdened with the nitty gritty of mapping and folding over the lists/arrays.

<comment><AUTHOR> owl ndarrays come with operations that support broadcasting though

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wonder if there's any overlap between this and [https://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists/...](https://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists/index.html), or would it still be helpful to read both of them?

<comment><USER10> That's what the kind of book it came to my mind when I read the title. No, they differ though there is slight overlap and yes, someone should read them both. OfS first, OSC next.

Specifically. OfS is an introductory OCaml book (first half) which has example usage of interest to scientists (second half). OSC though it has some introductory text per section is mostly concerned in showing Owl, which is what you'll end up using.

<comment><USER26> Is OfS available anywhere? Not that I advocate for piracy, but the site seems abandoned and the payment link is dead.

<comment><USER27> The author is 'jdh30' on reddit. You could always ask him.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why the $160 Suit Makes Sense - <AUTHOR> http://www.mensjournal.com/style/outerwear/why-the-160-suit-makes-sense-20131113

<comment><USER2> wow, these look awesome</comment>


Facebook has hired the Patriot Act's co-author as a general counsel - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2019/04/22/mass-surveillance-r-us.html <comment><USER2> "Jennifer Newstead helped craft the Patriot Act, a cowardly work of treasonous legislation foisted on the American people in the wake of the 9/11 attacks;"

Source seems a little biased. Treasonous? That's gotta require a lot of cortortion around the definition of treason.

Patriot Act provisions have been repeatedly reauthorized by the democratically elected legislature since it was originally passed. This isn't a case of foisting anything upon the people, the people are perfectly happy to vote in supporters of the Patriot Act. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act#Reauthorizations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act#Reauthorizations)

<comment><USER3> It's well known that many members of congress passed through the act _without having read it_. Given the enormity of the act's effects on the country, this is quite a problematic thing.

I don't it was democracy that saw that bill through. It was crisis politics. Democracy requires a well-informed public, and capable representatives. With the USA PATRIOT act there was neither.

<comment><USER4> With the current state of campaign finance, congress is essentially two corporations with congressmen/women as employees. If you don't vote the party line or you don't secure funding for the party you get defunded on your next election. Surprising they don't bother to read the bills they are told to pass.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A perfect fit really.

This guy figures it's ok to allow personal records like telephone, e-mail, financial, and business records to be surreptitiously captured without full due process/transparency.

Facebook would love to push the (no-)privacy envelope much further: a complete data free-for-all for their commercial gain.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's unfortunate that mods decided sink this story. Any explanation as to why?

</comment><comment><USER6> What exactly... do they think is going to happen when news outlets hear this?

<comment><USER7> The 30 minute news cycle we've had for the last 3 years of course.

<comment><USER8> Yeah unlike when the Patriot Act passed, and the news media spoke truth to power or whatever, and saved us all from that treasonous law.

Apologies for the snark but it's been like this for more than 20 years.

<comment><USER3> To add to your comment. _Manufacturing Consent_ came out in 1988, 31 years ago. That book manfully built the case that this stuff has been going on for well over a century, but that it really kicked up in the post WW2 era with the erosion of labour-class news media.

Today 6 US media companies control 90% of US media, and any hope one has of the internet disarming them dims more than a little at the sight of a P.A.T.R.I.O.T act author crossing over into the arms of a tech giant.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google's Balloon-Powered Internet for Everyone - <AUTHOR> http://www.albanydailystar.com/technology/google-s-balloon-powered-internet-for-everyone-12008.html <comment><USER2> I must be especially dense this morning because while I get that low altitude solves the latency problem of satellites, I don't see how these work - won't the wind just blow them away?

I suppose you could tie them down but a 90,000 tether is going to weigh quite a bit and how do you stop planes from flying into it?

Am I missing something obvious?

<comment><USER2> So I found this which sheds some light:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQDQ3Ps_-b4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQDQ3Ps_-b4)

tl;dr: they just let them ride the wind.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is your favorite Open Source personal Finance App? - <AUTHOR>

Hi Hackers,
I tired using google doc to keep track of my personal finance information/budgeting.
So what is your favorite personal finance App? Prefer open source and web based with mobile clients (Android, iOS) <comment><USER2> GnuCash - [http://www.gnucash.org/](http://www.gnucash.org/)

Edit: Sorry but no mobile or web versions. But available for Windows, Linux and Mac and is pretty much the most awesomest free accounting software there is.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ledger: [https://github.com/ledger/ledger](https://github.com/ledger/ledger)

<comment><USER4> +1 Ledger. Works well with cryptocurrencies and fits into my command-line centric workflow well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well not really open source but i seem to find Toshl (toshl.com) to be very nice ... a bit limited on the free use but not enough

</comment><comment><USER6> PayApp :)

[https://payapp.io](https://payapp.io)

<comment><USER4> I don't see any source code for this.</comment></comment>


Why I Was Wrong About Liberal Arts Majors - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/experts/2016/06/01/why-i-was-wrong-about-liberal-arts-majors/ <comment><USER2> "A well-rounded liberal arts degree establishes a foundation of critical thinking."

There are enough _truly_ bad Liberal Arts degrees out there that the more difficult ones (philosophy and economics spring to mind, at least at my school) get dinged by proximity. What people are really worried about hiring is someone with four years of multiple choice and BSssays under their belt - that is, experience only in perverting performance metrics. A college experience like that is almost impossible in STEM, rare in a few LA fields and _extremely common_ in the rest.

Also: taking the initiative to learn to program and switch careers is a strong signal that you weren't one of the people who tried to engineer their good school into behaving like a degree mill.

<comment><USER3> I did both computer science and philosophy at a top tier college, the computer science courses were far easier.

<comment><USER4> Just for another data point, I double majored in English Literature and Mathematics with a CS emphasis, and I did have to work harder to get a lower grade in the advanced math and CS classes.

Just to be clear, I do consider humanities to be an excellent subject for study, and philosophy and literature, when studied with integrity, are rigorous fields. There's also, of course, a chance that I'm just naturally a bit stronger at humanities and weaker at math, and I suppose it might be the opposite for you.

I did have to work meaningfully for my "A"s in humanities, but I had to struggle hard for my B+ in real analysis.

Also, I do recognize you mentioned CS, not upper division math, but lower division data structures and algorithms pushed me pretty hard. And the course I saw my friends go through at Berkeley looked insanely difficult.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So degrees like Philosophy and Economics aside, since rigour is assured no matter the university, my issue with the statement:

"How can this be? It's very simple. A well-rounded liberal arts degree establishes a foundation of critical thinking."

Jumps the gun. The brevity of my counter argument may belie it's truth:

Selection bias perfectly explains his experiences.

Of course I'd rather an English major that has learned to code at the level I require over a Computer Science major. The English major that is able to hustle his or her way into a programming career almost certainly has a greater IQ than the average Computer Science grad. What is not seen is the vast sea of English majors not going down that path, but rather ending up in a career that is far less challenging.

<comment><USER6> > What is not seen is the vast sea of English majors not going down that path, > but rather ending up in a career that is far less challenging.

It's almost like they went to school for something completely different ;)

I don't see why selection bias matters though, as it's not terribly relevant to the author's point that humanities students bring a different/valuable perspective to the table and shouldn't be written off as technical hires. To me, the real goal should be encouraging students from both STEM and humanities backgrounds to learn from each other and cross streams a bit. No more Physics for Poets or Shakespeare for sysadmins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> In my humble opinion, it really depends on what you're programming:

3D Gaming engine: A genius with lots of CS training/education.

Simple business app with weird rules that requires a lot of customer feedback: A kind-hearted person who can listen and noodle around and is tenacious.

<comment><USER8> I agree that more technical projects require more cleverness/training, but most things don't require genius. Terry Tao, field medalist, argues strongly that one does not need to be a genius to be a professional mathematician. [https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one- have-t...](https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-to-be-a- genius-to-do-maths/) Likewise, this implies that one does not need to be a genius to program difficult things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Programming jobs need critical thinkers and problem solvers with a mathematical ability. What degree such students were attracted to at the age of 18 is neither here nor there really. An undergraduate degree is not really training you in anything formally. How many of us actually use, or for that matter remember, what we learned in our undergraduate degree program? In my case it was pure Mathematics, and to this day I have not had to use Field Theory, say, in my career (and I would likely fail abysmally if required to).

The most important bit is the 'critical thinking' coupled with a passion to learn, build and being creative. At the end of the day writing software has a huge creative component to it. Sadly most companies require STEM degrees for an entry level Software Engineer position. I agree with the author that we need to be more open and be the meritocracy we thump our chests about so loudly. Conversely for liberal arts jobs ...

</comment><comment><USER10> Uh-oh, somebody better not tell this author that people can be great programmers, leaders, and team members _without going to college at all_. I really wish we could just kill this whole notion of "This degree I got X years ago makes me innately better at my job" and the pointless hierarchy that always seems to stem from it.

Engineering degrees don't magically turn someone into a robotic human with no capacity for creativity or self-leadership, and liberal arts degrees don't make someone incapable of understanding logical reasoning.

I would be interested in seeing what types of people are drawn most to each though. For example, many of my friends who went the engineering path did it because they wanted a stable career, and they knew engineering was a solid way to earn that, even if it's difficult. In contrast, some of my friends who went to smaller liberal arts colleges (in most cases for political science) cited "networking" opportunities and "making connections" as important for their careers and reasons why they went the LA path. Both sets of friends are very capable, but as someone from a solidly middle-class background who was raised to view hard work as the only way to succeed, the notion of "networking" and playing the social game to move up has always seemed alien to me. I know it's not true in all cases, but it makes me wonder if taking the risk on a LA degree in some cases is correlated to greater economic privilege (ie, people with better safety nets who don't need guaranteed income that more economically valuable degrees provide). I wonder if those are the people that the author is so enamored with here.

<comment><USER11> > Both sets of friends are very capable, but as someone from a solidly middle- > class background who was raised to view hard work as the only way to > succeed, the notion of "networking" and playing the social game to move up > has always seemed alien to me. I know it's not true in all cases, but it > makes me wonder if taking the risk on a LA degree in some cases is > correlated to greater economic privilege

From my experience of college (and that of most people I know), especially in the social sciences, the degree itself was only worth it because studying is cheap here. About 1500 euro a year, and we received about 250 euro a month from the state, more if we lived in a dorm, and could top that off with a very, very friendly loan up to about 600 euro total.

The biggest value, aside from intrinsic interest in the topic and having mediocre-at-best lecturers provide us with reading suggestions, was indeed the connections we made during those years.

Most of the people I met in college now have interesting work or positions in their field (and often via said connections). I partied with them, hung out with them, had discussions with them, started book clubs with them, and became friends with them. If I need to talk to a good journalist, accountant, lawyer, entrepreneur about something, there's one from my network available. If I have questions related to philosophy, physics, literature, etc., well, that's just an appointment and a few beers away.

While it's possible to create these connections without going to college, it's much harder. By going to college it happens automatically, especially if you join some student organization.

Whether that's worth the insane student loans people have to burden themselves with in some countries is up for debate, but the value in the network is huge.

I'd also like to note that it doesn't _feel_ like playing a social game and networking. It's making friends and acquaintances and sort of 'falling into' using the advantages. A bit like how I suppose most people who date other people _are_ looking forward to getting laid, but it doesn't feel 'sleezy' because it's not your primary objective (of course, if it is and you're up- front or okay with that, that's fine too).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have a post-graduate degree in History, and even though I've never "used" my degree in my professional career, the benefits have been incalculable. A good understanding of history is what allows one to have a good understanding of the present.

</comment><comment><USER13> I remember a video where the early Steve Jobs is talking about the company he built. One of the things he mentioned was that Apple stands at the intersection of art and computers. He then mentioned that every person at Apple is not just a software developer but also a poet, a musician, and other liberal arts type professions. It is for that reason, he believed, they come up with an incredible computing experience.

Personally, I always complain I wish I knew what a normal person would want. A technical person very quickly falls to an abnormal and complicated approach of doing things.

</comment><comment><USER14> Don't you just love when people suddenly "realize" the value of liberal-arts degrees (probably obtained by rich or connected colleagues) over the apparent total inability of engineering and science majors to think for themselves?

/s

No really, what gives people the impression that STEM majors can't think independently or well?

<comment><USER15> a decent percentage can't. trying to talk to some of my friends about political topics or history or anything else is frustrating because of their lack of knowledge. They know their major and they know about the video games they play but that is it. "who is joe Biden?" is a real question I've heard. many perform abysmally on critical reading portions of tests and can't form persuasive arguments effectively.

<comment><USER16> Are they capable of critical thinking if you choose an area of discussion that they _are_ knowledgeable about? Can they make clear, reasoned judgements within the limits of their knowledge? If they can't, then you have a point (which is really sad).

<comment><USER15> yes I'd say so. problem is sometimes they may not know when they are arguing about something they are knowledgable about versus things they aren't. once again I'm talking from anecdotal experience and there are always exceptions.

honestly the biggest problems I've seen from my peers(college aged and new grads) are superiority complexes and not realizing when they are out of the bounds of their knowledge base.

<comment><USER14> Dunning-Kruger is something pretty much everyone lapses into sometimes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > A well-rounded liberal arts degree establishes a foundation of critical > thinking.

So, not those liberal arts majors who are protected in "safe spaces", who have "trigger warnings" on their classes, who complain about how they feel threatened when someone wrote pro-Trump messages at their school.

Look, there are a lot of good, high-quality liberal arts schools that are teaching students to think for themselves, and giving them a good breadth of background to orient them to the stuff that they encounter. But there are unfortunately also a lot of liberal arts schools that just coddle the kids, and turn out little better than 22-year-old high-schoolers. The first is valuable; the second a waste.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm sure hobbyists with liberal arts majors and liberal arts majors with computer science minors can both be very good developers and leaders, but to really be "by far the sharpest, best-performing software developers and technology leaders" I think would still require a CS degree.

I have a BS in CS, but from a program with relatively lax minimum course requirements, particularly in math, from what I've read about other CS programs. (Only Calc II and Discrete Math.)

This allowed me to actually take more non-STEM than STEM courses while still earning a CS degree. If I was required to take higher-level math or more advanced CS subjects, I probably would have failed at the time. Yet I still got aspects of a CS education that I wouldn't have if I just minored in CS, which have provided a good base for exploring higher-level CS topics on my own.

At the same time, the program has everything available for students who want a more rigorous courseload.

So I'd say that except for producing top individual contributors in STEM domain programming (physics simulations, etc.), low-level algorithms, and high-performance system-level programming (which admittedly comprise a large number of software engineering jobs, but probably not the majority), a high- quality CS program where you can still take mostly non-STEM courses, and that doesn't use math courses effectively to weed people out, would on the surface appear to be ideal for the vast majority of software developers and technology leaders.

</comment><comment><USER19> >A well-rounded liberal arts degree establishes a foundation of critical thinking.

This is the sort of thing you tell people when you can't point to anything measurable. It's the college grad's equivalent of "I'm a people person!"

<comment><USER20> Not everything in life is easily quantifiable, but that doesn't mean those things that aren't are meaningless

<comment><USER19> Yes, but it also doesn't mean they _aren 't_ meaningless. I have yet to see any evidence whatsoever people with Liberal Arts degrees possess better than average critical thinking skills compared to other college graduates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Critical thinkers can accomplish anything. Critical thinkers can master > French, Ruby on Rails, Python or whatever future language comes their way.

I guess an example of this is the Italian girl that won last year's Dyalog APL student competition: [http://www.dyalog.com/news/102/420/2015-APL-Programming- Cont...](http://www.dyalog.com/news/102/420/2015-APL-Programming-Contest- Winners.htm)

She was studying Latin and Greek, then was exposed to APL, enjoyed it, and was apparently very good at it...

Fine, that makes some sense. But, if the goal is learn APL (or any programming language), why not just learn APL? Is it really true that learning French prior to Ruby on Rails gives you a unique advantage?

<comment><USER22> Even just within programming, I'd say ever successive language you learn gets easier, as you're able to apply labels to patterns you see, and think abstractly about language features.

I don't think that if your goal is to learn RoR, the best way to accomplish it is to learn French first. But if you take two programming newbies, and one of them knows a couple foreign languages and the other doesn't, the former will have an advantage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why do many people have a knee-jerk reaction against the humanities? I'm genuinely curious what others think. I mean - where do they think Game of Thrones, The Wire, The Sopranos, i.e. all of our culture (popular and otherwise) come from?

<comment><USER24> They come from digital cameras, cgi and editing software all delivered over the internet

<comment><USER6> Those cameras write a hell of a script.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Honestly, I think the failing is that computer science majors (unlike some other STEM majors) are rarely offered as liberal arts programs with stronger breadth requirements that are typical in B.S. programs (in lots of institutions, you can get a B.A./A.B. in other STEM fields like Mathematics or Chemistry, but not Computer Science.)

While I don't think all (or even most) CS majors need to be produced out of liberal arts programs, I think it would be good for the field and the software industry to have more of those.

<comment><USER26> It depends if the CS department is in an engineering college/school as part of the larger institution. In colleges without engineering programs, its often in a liberal arts and sciences school.

<comment><USER25> Often, "liberal arts and sciences schools" offer both liberal arts (B.A.) and sciences (B.S.) degrees, the former having more breadth requirements and the latter more depth in the major field; quite often they offer both types of degrees for some STEM fields. IME, which may not be representative, Computer Science is far less likely to have B.A. programs than either Math or most physical sciences.

<comment><USER27> BA vs. BS can be quite confusing in STEM fields. In the United States, there is no standard for how they differ. All of the following exist in the wild:

• BS only. (Caltech, for example. In fact, Caltech only offers BS for everything. Even English majors--and yes, there is an occasional English major at Caltech--end up with a BS).

• BA only. UC Berkeley is an example in this category for math and physics.

• Both are offered, with identical coursework and requirements. You can have whichever you want. Some will even for a small fee give you two diplomas, so you can use whichever seems appropriate for the situation.

• Both are offered, from the same department, with different in-major coursework and aims. One may be aimed toward students aiming to go into research, and one toward those aiming to go into teaching, for instance.

• Both are offered, from different departments. For example, UC Berkeley's College of Letters and Sciences offers a BA in chemistry, and the College of Chemistry offers a BS in chemistry. Computer science can be taken at Berkeley in the College of Letters and Science for a BA, or in the College of Engineering for a BS.

• Both are offered, with the same in-major coursework, but differ in out-of- major requirements. So, the BA and BS would require the exact same science and math courses, but the BA has specific breadth requirements to produce a well rounded education, whereas the BS lets you take pretty much what you want as long as you satisfy the math and science requirements and any general requirements of your school.

I generally just say that I have a bachelor's degree in mathematics. If someone thinks they need to know if it is a BA or a BS, I ask what they are really trying to figure out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It is a fact that students at top tech schools (think Caltech, MIT, Harvey Mudd, etc.) study longer compared to students at comparable liberal arts schools. I believe it takes time and practice to get good at anything. Students at tech schools in tech majors just spend more time practicing their craft. Obviously that doesn't mean some English major can't pick up math, computer science and physics later in life, but such people are the outliers.

</comment><comment><USER29> The trivium and the quadrivium are what a true "liberal" education is about, and are things that shouldn't be restricted to any particular major and should be taught even before high-school.

The real issue is that the oligarchs don't want a populace that is truly educated in critical thinking.

For a treat, try page 7 of the Norman Dodd report to the Reece Committee.

[https://www.scribd.com/doc/3768227/Dodd-Report-to-the- Reece-...](https://www.scribd.com/doc/3768227/Dodd-Report-to-the-Reece- Committee-on-Foundations-1954)

Bonuses:

[https://www.amazon.com/Leipzig-Connection-Basics- Education/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Leipzig-Connection-Basics- Education/dp/0897390016/179-1848850-1151606?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0)

[https://www.amazon.com/Deliberate-Dumbing-America-Revised- Ab...](https://www.amazon.com/Deliberate-Dumbing-America-Revised- Abridged/dp/0966707117/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1464824056&sr=1-1&keywords=dumbing+down+of+america)

</comment><comment><USER30> Those degrees aren't worth their cost.

A better recommendation, and a path that some STEM students have already taken, is independent study of the Liberal Arts curriculum.

Unfortunately, even if you do this, you will still have to deal with condescending fools telling you that you can't see the forest from the trees, and are constrained by memorizing commands or syntax.

The fact of the matter is that you have no critical thinking skills, can't see the big picture and lack the soft skills – the people skills – that help to understand customers and bring the staff along. Everybody here can see it, why can't you? You'll never make anything of yourself, nerd.

(Those quotes are directly from the article. It's super condescending towards STEM people. No better than similar articles aimed at Liberal Arts students.)

<comment><USER31> > liberal art's curriculum

Is this the result of independent study? ;)

In all seriousness, my linguistics degree was worth every penny. Spending that much time with incredibly bright people with broad perspectives focused solely on sharpening your understanding of the world is something that's very difficult to replicate independently.

<comment><USER30> Fixed.

I can imagine that even if it is difficult to replicate broad perspectives independently it is worth trying to do so. I think the internet will certainly make it easier to do so now, too.

Additionally you have a lot longer than 4 years to engage with material. Autodidactism eventually wins because it is unconstrained; though the educational experience might get a lot of breadth out fast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Articles like this are ridiculous, because essentially all they say is "guess what, there are some smart people in X group!" There are smart/hard- working/passionate/etc. people in nearly _every_ group. The question is, what are the ratios?

</comment><comment><USER33> I sense a serious sample size problem here.

</comment><comment><USER34> Arts Major here.

An Arts major is great for your personal growth because it's broader and more generalist than STEM but it doesn't add much value to society on short term. Once it doesn't add direct value to society, society doesn't reward it also. This translates into an high probability of a stagnated life after graduation. Choose carefully.

<comment><USER35> Pick your degree and major carefully.

I wanted a degree in physics but it doesn't pay as much as a programming job would. So I took computer science instead. Teacher/Education degrees are good to get because of a teacher shortage but don't get paid as well as most other jobs.

When I went to a university it was 1986, I learned Turbo Pascal which is nothing compared to modern IDEs now. I learned Turbo C in 1987 and that helped me learn Ada, COBOL, FORTRAN, Visual BASIC, and many others. Once you understand the concepts you can learn almost any other language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is a terrible thesis/headline position that doesn't even reflect the author's own experiences. He posits that the STEM label don't work well, then proceeds to use another label in its place. What his experience should tell him is:

"Critical thinking and the ability to learn and adapt independently is the most important ability in a professional. These abilities are more pertinent than one's conferred degree. Find people with these characteristics wherever you may find them. Independently acquired skills outside of one's undergraduate studies may be correlated with an increased likelihood of possession of such aptitudes."

Not judging people by their labels cuts both ways. Plenty of liberal arts majors lack critical thinking, and vice versa and any combination thereof.

</comment><comment><USER6> These discussions are always so stupid. I was a lit major, have worked as a PCB designer, taught myself some coding and all that jazz, and now put around on the internet doing digital marketing stuff. College major is a terrible indicator of intelligence, work ethic, and so on. Sure, liberal arts majors can be annoying (I probably have a lot more first hand experience with that than you do), but at the same time, plenty of STEM folks write like freshman in high school and start stammering when asked to explain whatever declarative statement they just made further. The condescension from the STEM crowd sure gets old though.

<comment><USER37> The attitude from the STEM "crowd" is a real issue. I've experienced it myself while talking to kids about technology. People have interrupted a comverstation just to say that art is stupid. I just change the subject and continue with the conversation. But its really hard to motivate kids and young people to be creative with such an idiotic attitude. We don't need more engineers, programmers or whatever. We need more creative people with drive. Period.

<comment><USER38> People like this are why I don't like to call myself an "engineer" anymore. They've ruined the word for me.

I spent a year at WPI, and its fucking lousy with these stuck up losers, sharing lame "engineering memes" putting down lib arts majors. Mind you, these were not even engineers, just engineering _students_ , most of whom hadn't built a single useful thing in their life outside of school.

<comment><USER39> I'm not certain, but aren't these memes always done tongue-in-cheek?

<comment><USER6> lol, definitely not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Someone who majored in liberal arts but is able to themselves to code is likely to be an intelligent and motivated individual. I suspect that more readily explains the successes of these individuals than their liberal arts studies.

It's also my personal observation that someone's college major has no bearing on their ability to think critically.

<comment><USER41> Yeah, there's a lot of selection bias with this sort of thing. The average computer science graduate is probably going to go on to become a software engineer or otherwise work in tech in some way. This means that you will meet all of the average CS graduates every day. The average liberal arts major will not go on to be a software engineer. The only liberal arts major software engineers you will meet are the ones who are interested enough in programming to bother learning it and talented enough to become proficient in two mostly unrelated fields.

I do think there's a lot of value in studying non-technical, potentially useless, even esoteric things, but this argument is not extraordinarily convincing.

<comment><USER26> This. Most people with liberal arts degrees don't have pre-existing knowledge of/interest in all things tech/programming. The people on here who say they have graduate degrees in history, etc aren't even remotely the average LA degree holder. Without a lot of extra studying/bootcamps/programming since you were 12/post bacc certs/second BS degrees in computer science, a plain old average liberal arts degree I'd wager is much, much less valuable than a BS in CS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> A STEM degree is more valuable than a Liberal Arts degree both financially and in terms of the economic contribution it makes to the nation.

The hard sciences and engineering are accountable to reality while Liberal Arts is accountable only to popular opinion.

</comment><comment><USER43> > A critical thinker is a self-learning machine that is not constrained by > memorizing commands or syntax.

But is a critical thinker creative? They can think, but if you put them in front of a blank sheet of paper, a blank whiteboard, or an empty Vi terminal, can they create and build something new and original?

Creativity is not at all like critical thinking - one analyzes things that exist, one actually creates things.

Creativity is at the heart of software craftmanship.</comment>


Hygiene Paper Used by White House Coronavirus Task Force - <AUTHOR> https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3549276 <comment><USER2> This was referenced in today's press conference by Dr Birx [1]:

> ALL OF THIS INFORMATION CAME FROM A PAPER THAT DOCTOR FAUCI PROVIDED FROM > THE AUSTRALIANS. FIRST AUTHOR DALTON. YOU CAN ACTUALLY LOOK AT THE > SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE THAT INFORMED EACH OF THESE GUIDELINES, BUT WE WILL BE > PROVIDING THAT THIS EVENING IN GREAT DETAIL SO THAT EVERY MOTHER FATHER > CHILD SON DAUGHTER CAREGIVER WILL KNOW PRECISELY WHAT TO DO AND WHAT TO ASK > FOR.

I was struck by this part because it seems phrased in order to be part of a public anti-disinformation strategy. Odd, coming from what seems like the COVID19 office of disinformation-in-chief. Regardless of many prior bad acts, this is a good move by this administration. (also note a clear big headline on [https://www.whitehouse.gov/](https://www.whitehouse.gov/) that links directly to CDC's COVID19 page).

The briefing's countless mentions of "under the President's leadership" bits sound like needless Dear Leader worship.

[1] [https://www.c-span.org/video/?470172-1/coronavirus-task- forc...](https://www.c-span.org/video/?470172-1/coronavirus-task-force- briefing&start=816)</comment>