In a Dragon's Blood, Scientists Discover a Potential Antibiotic - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/health/komodo-dragon-blood-antibiotics.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience&action=click&contentCollection=science&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0 <comment><USER4> More then 5000 antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) have been discovered to date, the first one (gramicidin) back in 1939.

This review article provides a good overview of different AMPs and the history of their discovery: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3873676/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3873676/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I sincerely hope they are able to synthesize this, and that the synthetic doesn't lose any effectiveness over the natural compound. It sounds like an amazing breakthrough if it works out, as it's much more than a garden-variety antibiotic. FTA:

"It punched holes in the outer membranes of both gram-negative and gram- positive bacteria, it dissolved the biofilms that glue bacteria together, and it sped skin healing."

Getting through the cell walls of gram-negative bacteria alone would make this worth investigating, but the other two added to it are like icing on the life- saving cake.

<comment><USER6> Not to take anything away from the accomplishment (we definitely need more research on antibiotics), but the wound healing experiment is IMO just sloppy: they compared a infected wound treated using the peptide to an untreated wound. I could imagine that even a basic wound desinfection using rubbing alcohol will have comparative results to this peptide.

<comment><USER7> Depends what question you're trying to answer.

If the question is "Is this the greatest antibiotic ever", well, sure you'll want to compare it against a slew of other compounds. But if your question is "does this increase the speed of healing at all?" as a first test before later, more complex experiments, then this seems fine to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The peptide of interest has been named 'DRGN1' [1]. The actual full length DRG1 amino acid sequence of DRGN1 if you want to use it: PSKKTKPVKPKKVA

As a genetically encoded peptide it has a few advantages over the traditional small molecule antibiotics you might know about from being prescribed by your doctor:

\- It retains anti-biotic effect on gram-negative (hard to attack because they have a secondary wall) bacteria.

\- It's mechanism of action is less well understood, but because it's not obviously just a 'signal jammer' than a small molecule antibiotic, developing resistance to anti-microbial peptides seems more difficult than with small molecules.

\- It has anti-biofilm properties as well as well as anti-biotic properties (biofilms are a royal pain in hospitals - think catheters...)

\- Anti-microbial peptides also often have a strange effect where they activate wound _healing_ in non-microbes (people), rather than just being an ineffectively diluted poison or entirely benign (the way most small molecule antibiotics are).

\- My favorite though, because it is genetically encodable, the anti-microbial properties can be conferred to other genetically encoded tools/machines/proteins. If you fuse the amino acid sequence to another protein's sequence, the new fusion protein will likely also have anti- microbial properties.

Spider silk gloves could have this peptide woven into them - and the R&D cost to at least try it out is likely a few hundred bucks and a day or two of effort, CRISPR could deliver a sequence that produces this peptide, or a protein that contained this peptide. The peptide could be produced at commercial scale attached to another 'filler protein' to coat stents/catheters to prevent biofilm buildup - adding exactly zero production cost if such a filler protein is already being used. Or fused to a protein that other 'good' bacteria already produce to prevent biofilm formation where it shouldn't be. Because it can be encodedly produced by nearly all life, it can be introduced genetically as a one-time cost/effort, letting the organism then produce the antibiotic, rather than having to mass-produce the antibiotic in some chemical reaction.

[0] The paper: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41522-017-0017-2](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41522-017-0017-2)

[1] DRG1: [https://serotiny.bio/notes/proteins/drgn1/](https://serotiny.bio/notes/proteins/drgn1/)

<comment><USER9> Does the fact that it's a peptide mean it won't survive digestion and can't be taken orally?

<comment><USER10> On a silver lining, this may mean that people won't give this thing to cattle and it won't accumulate on the wild. That may delay bacteria resistance.

<comment><USER11> Don't farmers ever _inject_ stuff into cattle?

<comment><USER10> It's more expensive. Farmers avoid injecting things in healthy cattle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's always the problem of antibiotic resistance. With the current trend of personal medicine, we might as well switch to bacteriophages [1]. In Georgia and Russia, people have been using the technique for decades.

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

<comment><USER13> Phage would be useful but bacteria are likely to be able to resist engineered phage as well.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23819105](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23819105)

<comment><USER14> The abstract states the opposite of the parent. It says that while bacteria develop resistance in the lab to phases that co-evolve, it is unlikely to be a problem in the real world.

>Bacteriophage therapy, the use of viruses that infect bacteria as antimicrobials, has been championed as a promising alternative to conventional antibiotics. Although in the laboratory bacterial resistance against phages arises rapidly, resistance so far has been an only minor problem for the effectiveness of phage therapy. Resistance to antibiotics, however, has become a major issue after decades of extensive use. Should we expect similar problems after long-term use of phages as antimicrobials? Like antibiotics, phages are often noted to be drivers of bacterial evolution. Should we expect phage-treated pathogens to develop a general resistance to phages over time, a resistance against which only, for example, hypothetically co-evolved phages might be infective? _Here we argue that the global infection patterns of phages suggest that this is not necessarily a concern as environmental phages often can infect bacteria with which those phages lack any recent co- evolutionary history._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You know, in hindsight, _of course_ Komodo Dragons would have neat antibacterial techniques.

Interesting to learn that the "bite and sepsis" theory was debunked-ish years ago.

Also interesting to learn that they're hard to study? It surprises me that such a well-known species is still that opaque, and the article gives some hints as to why.

<comment><USER8> Curiously the peptide is derived from a histone protein. Histones are the 'spools' around which genomic DNA is wrapped. Histones are found in the nucleus inside dragon cells. There probably should be no bacteria there even under really bad infection conditions unless the cell itself is being totally destroyed. It's not immediately obvious to me why a histone would have such antibacterial properties. But it's almost certainly not the obvious "bite and sepsis" theory, as you state. I'm not sure it is an 'of course' here - <USER2> it might actually be a lucky find while playing with the truly cool sounding 'dragon's blood'.

edit: Huh - after getting curious it looks like the above is precisely my 'incongruent expectation'. From this article in 2001 about antimicrobial histone peptides found in salmon [1]:

"Most antimicrobial activity is an extracellular event or occurs in the cellular lysosomal compartment. Therefore, an in vivo antimicrobial role for salmon histone H1 might seem incongruent with this protein's assumed nuclear location and nucleosomal role. In mammals, however, histone H1 has been found outside the nucleus. It is present in the cytosol of human intestinal villus cells, from which it is released into the intestinal lumen during normal cell sloughing. Histone H1 is also found on the surfaces of murine macrophages where it serves as a receptor for thyroglobulin and it is a cell surface protein in murine neurons and in human monocytes. Therefore, histone H1 is not limited to the nucleus in all cells and it may be released to locations where it can act as an extracellular antimicrobial agent. Moreover, an antimicrobial role has been proposed for histone H1."

[1] (2001) [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006291X01...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006291X0195020X?via%3Dihub)

<comment><USER16> Interesting! Neutrophils can actually release their chromatin to engage bacteria through NETosis, so histone proteins having antibacterial activity does make some sense.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3439169/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3439169/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _Wild dragons might have even more defenses against infection, but the researchers said they were unlikely to find out.

"I wouldn't turn down wild dragon blood if it was sent to me and I thought it was collected ethically," Dr. Bishop said. "But I'm not going to go out in the wild to try to get it."_

Why the different attitude towards mice and guinea pigs?

<comment><USER13> Komodo dragons have a relatively small population which researchers wouldn't want to disrupt on a large scale.

Not that researchers collect their mice from the wild...

<comment> Digit-Al Also, they're a protected species which is fairly large and aggressive - <USER3> getting a sample without causing any harm to the animal would involve a certain amount of risk of getting significant chunks of tender flesh torn from one's body.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A related coverage of the same story by The Economist. [http://www.economist.com/news/science-and- technology/2171780...](http://www.economist.com/news/science-and- technology/21717808-komodo-dragons-could-be-source-new-generation- antibiotics-48-uses)

</comment><comment><USER19> Turns out the idea of Komodo dragons having extra bacteria in their mouths is a myth.

[http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/06/27/the- myth-...](http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/06/27/the-myth-of-the- komodo-dragons-dirty-mouth/)

</comment><comment><USER20> As animals go extinct, we lose the opportunity to borrow great ideas from their biology.

<comment><USER21> That is the annoying thing about all those "Save the planets" pitch of the green and sustainable measure. Short of nuking everything, nature will be fine a few thousands years after humanity is forgotten. That should really be "Save humanity".

Disappearing ecosystem threaten directly humanity: food, water, even climate.

That's just the tip of the iceberg though. A lot of innovation are still coming from nature. We rely on solution already found by millions of years of evolution to solve our problem. Short of AI singularity, there is no substitute.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The fact that it doesn't work in broth and only works in low salt phosphate buffer conditions is a big red flag in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER23> Very nice: a justifiable clickbaity headline.

<comment><USER24> It was either Komodo Dragons or Bearded Dragons. Not clickbaity at all for a reptile lover. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Reminds me of the other HN front page article about bleeding crabs. They lost to think you can steal animal blood and get away with the karma.

<comment><USER25> If that sounds too spiritual to you, consider even Newton's 3rd law, "For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction". Humans are swiftly bringing their own demise in the name technological advancement.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: The strengths of different system package managers - <AUTHOR> I have, from time to time, wondered what makes each  system-level package manager (think ALPM/Pacman, RPM/DNF, DEB/APT, Portage) worth maintaining separately.
I don't particularly care about the UI part of this, because at the end of the day you can wrap a package manager any way you want; but you can't overcome the specifics of the dependency resolver or the package format.
Some of my observations:
- ALPM/Pacman has the best performance altogether. The commands are very powerful, if a bit inaccessible.
- RPM/DNF (and YUM before it) has the lowest network bandwidth utilization, on account of delta RPMs. Good choice of verbs, i.e. "update" to install updates, check-update for the less common use case of just fetching the repo data.
- DEB/APT has the largest install base, and although I've never encountered any particular strength to it, I don't think there's anything particularly bad about it. Slightly questionable choice of verbs with "update" versus "upgrade".
- pkg_add (and related random Perl scripts on OpenBSD) is not configured by default, and has some significant rough edges, but does work OK at the end of the day. <comment><USER2> If you've ever have to build packages, especially packages of complex software, then the Debian packaging framework stands out from the crowd-- simple things sufficiently simple, difficult things possible, and an exceptionally well maintained policy guide to help you make decisions. All the others focus on the simple stuff, and fail at addressing the needs of unforeseen requirements or other atypical situations.

RPM is a distant second, though still far ahead of the others. But if you've ever had to maintain a YUM repository then you might agree with me that delta RPMs are evil. I still can't figure out why the YUM databases keep getting corrupted, but I'm fairly certain it's related to the deltas. But nobody else wants to turn them off.

For the record, my server environment of choice is OpenBSD. But I wouldn't even try to compare OpenBSD's packaging system to Debian/Apt. It's just apples and oranges in terms of their respective priorities and capabilities.</comment>


Q&A: Andrew Ng - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_29596077/q-andrew-ng-chief-scientist-chinese-search-giant <comment><USER2> For those interested in the "AI threat" discussion, here's an excellent thread on Quora about it with answers from Andrew Ng, Yoshua Bengio, and Pedro Domingos (along with other random opinions): [https://www.quora.com/Is-AI-an- existential-threat-to-humanit...](https://www.quora.com/Is-AI-an-existential- threat-to-humanity)

As a side note, Quora has done some really excellent AMAs with a bunch of machine learning researchers, including Ng, Bengio, researchers at Google, and many more.

<comment><USER3> Here's a survey of AI experts: [http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf](http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf)

>We thus designed a brief question- naire and distributed it to four groups of experts in 2012/2013\. The median estimate of respondents was for a one in two chance that high- level machine intelligence will be developed around 2040-2050, rising to a nine in ten chance by 2075. Experts expect that systems will move on to superintelligence in less than 30 years thereafter. They estimate the chance is about one in three that this development turns out to be 'bad' or 'extremely bad' for humanity.

<comment><USER4> Asking about technology in 2075 is ridiculous. If you had asked people in 1916 about 1975, nobody would have gotten anything right.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps, but that's what the comment I am replying to was doing. If we are going to be making predictions about the future, we might as well take a survey of experts instead of trusting the predictions of a single one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Andrew Ng has a machine learning course online if you are interested: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine- learning](https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning)

<comment><USER6> Probably one of the best online courses available. He's very engaging and makes some pretty tough concepts seem straightforward.

<comment><USER7> I took the in-person course at stanford. I recall the first problem set in cs229 was about as hard as the entirety of the Coursera course combined...

<comment><USER8> Well, everyone can judge by themselves, the actual CS229 lectures are also available online: [https://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=A89DCFA6ADACE599](https://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=A89DCFA6ADACE599)

EDIT: And so are the problem sets: [https://see.stanford.edu/Course/CS229](https://see.stanford.edu/Course/CS229)

<comment><USER9> There is nothing to indicate the Coursera class and CS 229 are the same. CS 229 is a grad-level machine learning class that assumes heavy math prerequisites; the syllabus is completely different.

The Coursera class is closest to CS 229a at Stanford.

<comment><USER8> Fair enough, I just wanted to note that people can also watch the CS229 lectures online.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > But I hear fears of the robots taking over. What do you tell people who fear > that?

I realize it's a bit of a silly question, but strong AI is a serious issue in my opinion and I'd like to understand how one of the leading researchers in deep learning addresses this concern? I think Andrew's answer could have been much more interesting.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I was very disappointed in his answer to that. I don't think it's a silly question, and someone in his position should take it seriously.

If it's his opinion that it's too far out to practically worry about, he should just say something like: "We're decades away from this being a serious concern, but someday society will have to decide how to deal with it."

<comment><USER12> I'm on my phone, so I can't find the exact quote, but I remember him saying a couple of years ago something like he "doesn't fear AI for the same reason he doesn't fear the overpopulation of Mars".

And I'm 100% with him on that one. At the very best estimate (the one by Ray Kurzweil), we're 13 years away from it. In reality, probably 30-50. So, worrying about it now kind of feels like a waste of time, doesn't it?

Edit: also, in a study by Nick Bostrom and others, I've learned that not a huge part of AI researchers worry about AI. It seems like this sense of fear is mostly associated with those whose jobs are not really focused on AI (like Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and Ellon Musk).

<comment><USER13> "At the very best estimate (the one by Ray Kurzweil), we're 13 years away from it. In reality, probably 30-50. So, worrying about it now kind of feels like a waste of time, doesn't it?"

I think that kind of depends on how bad (or good) having AI will be.

Assuming the absolute worst-case scenario (an AI that wipes out humanity overnight), then not worrying about it because it's _only_ 40 years away seems, in my mind, ridiculous. Not to mention 13 years away. Personally, I think 13 years and even 40 years is pretty "optimistic" on the timeline, but even if it's 200 years away, we should devote at least _some_ resources to worrying about this problem now.

<comment><USER9> If the chance of the worst case scenario is an infinitesimally small number, then there is no threat. One in a quadrillion, for example.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bees May Understand Zero, a Concept That Took Humans Millennia to Grasp - <AUTHOR> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/bees-may-understand-zero-concept-took-humans-millennia-grasp-180969282/?no-ist <comment><AUTHOR> Link to publication: [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6393/1124](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6393/1124)</comment>


Show HN: Look at this thing I built - <AUTHOR> http://www.idyllicpast.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I made this.

It runs on Google App Engine and uses the new HNSearch API to get the comments.

The goal is to present people with things from the internet that they liked in the past. I think that sending people their HN comments is a good way to test the idea.</comment>


Ask HN: Tourist Things to Do in Bay Area? - <AUTHOR> I have some friends visiting soon and wondering what are some good touristy things to do in the Bay Area. <comment><USER2> "Friends" is very generic, so here's a generic answer.

[https://www.travelocity.com/things-to- do/search?location=San...](https://www.travelocity.com/things-to- do/search?location=San+Francisco%2C+California&latLong=37.787400%2C-122.408200&rid=178305&regionType=MULTICITY&countryCode=US&startDate=&endDate=&_xpid=11905%7C1)

[https://wikitravel.org/en/San_Francisco#See](https://wikitravel.org/en/San_Francisco#See)

[https://www.exploratorium.edu/](https://www.exploratorium.edu/)

[https://www.dnalounge.com/](https://www.dnalounge.com/)

[https://myfamilytravels.com/content/61909-top-ten-geek- sight...](https://myfamilytravels.com/content/61909-top-ten-geek-sights- silicon-valley)

</comment><comment> java-man Computer History Museum in Mountain View: [http://www.computerhistory.org/](http://www.computerhistory.org/)

</comment><comment><USER3> My friend was kind enough to show me around a few years ago. The highlights for me were: wine tasting in the mountains not too far from SF, driving down the pacific coast highway and stopping at some random beaches, and going to Half Moon Bay, which was completely empty on a summer weekday.

</comment><comment><USER4> If they're at all technical take them to Fry's. I think the one in Sunnyvale is the best one. (This is Hacker News, after all...)

[https://www.frys.com/ac/storeinfo/sunnyvale-location-frys- el...](https://www.frys.com/ac/storeinfo/sunnyvale-location-frys-electronics- hours-maps-directions)

Also a visit to Hawk Hill on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge offers a spectacular view of the city.

</comment><comment><USER5> Go hiking on Mt Tam. Tennessee Valley is a nice accessible spot with lots of trails around.

</comment><comment><USER6> Muir Woods.

The most twisty, turny road in America.

Walk around downtown SF.

See the Golden Gate Bridge.

Reyes Point

Reyes State Park

</comment><comment><USER7> Japanese Friendship Garden :)</comment>


Comparison of Modern Game Audio Engines - <AUTHOR> http://danikog.github.io/AudioEnginesMarkdown/

<comment><USER2> It's a bit incorrect to replace "Unreal 4" with "UDK" because UDK is only free version of UE3.</comment>


Google Cloud Print can now "print" to an Android device or local FedEx store - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/04/google-cloud-print-can-now-print-to-an-android-device-or-local-fedex-store.ars

<comment><USER2> Great!...except why do I need to give my email address?</comment>


AngelList Announces $400M Early-Stage Fund - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/article_email/coming-soon-from-china-a-400-million-bonanza-for-u-s-startups-1444622462-lMyQjAxMTE1NTEwMjgxMjI2Wj <comment><USER2> Naval is such a genuinely nice and caring guy. So many investors say they are entrepreneur friendly, but hardly any of them live up to that when things get hairy. Naval is a guy who absolutely lives the mantra of putting entrepreneurs first and goes above and beyond to help them out in so many ways. There is a long story about the stuff he went through to get where he is (when he was at epinions), google for it- its worth a read.

I wont get into it too much, but I owe alot to Naval for where I am today. The help, advice and just conversations he gives to entrepreneurs is completely 'no bullshit, no fluff'. All in all, its very refreshing to see that AngelList has risen to the top and has helped disrupt the 'old boys / sand hill road' way of doing things.

<comment><USER3> ++

Naval is an unbelievable investor, entrepreneur, and friend. He's completely founder aligned in a way that is almost unheard of in silicon valley. Someone you don't have to watch what you say and can simply be direct with. I've only recently gotten to know Naval. But, immediately, he's risen to the top as my favorite person to work with hands down.

Truly a unique founder ally amidst the staunch traditionalism of silicon valley investing. Can't wait to see AngelList continue to change/democratize fundraising.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Blog post with full presentation and more details: [http://blog.angel.co/post/131017147560/csc- upshot](http://blog.angel.co/post/131017147560/csc-upshot)

</comment><comment><USER4> _Imagine some combination of the crowdfunding website Kickstarter and the social-networking site LinkedIn, only everyone on the site has to be an accredited investor. Early-stage startups show up, hat in hand, and 165 different angel investors, called "leads," evaluate them.

If an investor likes what he sees, he can put in some of his own money, while encouraging other investors, who are part of what is known as his syndicate, to fill out the investment with their own funds. These first investments average around $315,000 per startup._

Wait, what? We joined a few years ago and put several of our existing investors on there. We're not well connected on the west coast and I never heard from anyone major on the site. Was our company evaluated by one of those 165 people who then lead a syndicate? How does it work exactly? How do they discover startups that are on the site?

</comment><comment><USER5> It looks to be a pretty smart strategy, take the top 50 syndicate leads, put avg $400k behind them in year 1 ($20m investment).

This grows platform, in year 2 put $500k behind top 100 syndicate leads ($50m investment) as more money available for syndicate leads.

AngelList takes the management fee on the $400m ($4m a year say as a "fund of funds" at 1%), 5% carry on the syndicate. Note 99 max investors per

The syndicate leads take the carry and do most of the due diligence, CSC Upshot gets to follow on on whatever deals they like most.

<comment><USER6> > The syndicate leads take the carry and do most of the due diligence...

What leads you to believe the syndicate leads are doing real due diligence?

<comment><USER5> > What leads you to believe the syndicate leads are doing real due diligence?

Never said real due diligence, just most of the due diligence that is actually done

However, if one is investing in 1,000 startups then due diligence is actually of less importance as you approximate a normal distribution of returns..

<comment><USER6> > Never said real due diligence, just most of the due diligence that is > actually done

Which in a lot of cases is zip, zilch, nada by professional standards. A few lunch conversations and "social proof" don't constitute due diligence, but that passes for a lot of angels in Silicon Valley.

> However, if one is investing in 1,000 startups then due diligence is > actually of less importance as you approximate a normal distribution of > returns..

The problem is that the "normal distribution of returns" could easily turn out to be very different from what you expected. Markets aren't static. A lot of fund managers who rushed to buy boatloads of subprime MBS without doing their own due diligence learned this the hard way. They simply relied on the credit rating agencies and assumed everything would work out.

Here, you don't even have credit rating agencies. You have a hodgepodge of individuals ("syndicate leaders") who are black boxes. Just look at this[1]. According to [https://angel.co/syndicates](https://angel.co/syndicates), he has the fifth largest syndicate on AngelList.

Pure madness.

When it comes to investing, ignore these words of wisdom at your own peril: do your due diligence or eventually your due diligence will do you.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10036321](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10036321)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Surely they could have sourced such an investment domestically?

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure you could _easily_ find one LP willing to put up $400 million for a fund that, according to the article, will potentially make more than 1,000 investments. AngelList, because of its platform, obviously has a way to deploy this capital more efficiently than a typical firm, but these types of small early-stage investments are still fraught with challenges and I think sophisticated domestic LPs who have experience in venture capital would be very skeptical.

As the WSJ article implies, CSC may have certain motivations that a domestic LP wouldn't, such as a desire to get capital deployed outside of China. And fast.

Personally, this looks like dumb money hoping AngelList can turn it into smart money. It could very well distort market for early-stage startup investments, but it isn't likely to change the way these investments tend to behave in terms of returns.

<comment><USER8> There is a big trend in Chinese PE throwing money into the US market with expected returns that much lower than what the western market would expect, and therefore western PE is continually being outbid by the Chinese. So, even if Chinese get lower returns for their capital in the US than typical PE's, those returns are still higher what they would get domestically in China.

<comment><USER6> Yes, and the Chinese have logical reasons for accepting lower returns because they're exposed to risk in China that domestic PE firms aren't exposed to. This said, it should be noted that when the music stops, these firms aren't guaranteed a return at all. Many of them are going to lose. It's just a question of how much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It would be interesting to see the effects of a combination of something like AngelList together with robust decentralized technology for identity and smart contracts. How much work is still ahead of us until I'll just have to set up a new team on a service like AngelList which will be a globally accepted business entity?

</comment><comment><USER10> Why does AngelList needs so much cash?

<comment><USER11> AngelList isn't using this money for their own operations, they're using it to invest in hundreds of other startups.

You question is equivalent to asking "Why does KPCB need so much cash?" to which the obvious answer is "so they can invest in interesting companies where are likely to generate substantial returns for their partners."

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > We are, as ever, either at the dawn of a golden age of startups and > innovation, as technology's boosters claim, or soon we'll be shaking our > heads that investors ever believed the market for startups was as big or > fast-growing as they thought it was.

Well, for at least 10 years now, _traditional, mainstream_ US _information technology_ (biomedical is different) venture capital has been essentially stuck in the mud due to a _dirty little secret_. As a result, on average, _returns on investment_ (ROI) have been low, e.g., as reported in Kauffman

[http://www.kauffman.org/newsroom/2012/07/institutional- limit...](http://www.kauffman.org/newsroom/2012/07/institutional-limited- partners-must-accept-blame-for-poor-longterm-returns-from-venture-capital- says-new-kauffman-report)

and at AVC.com, the blog of Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures

[http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/02/venture-capital- returns.html...](http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/02/venture-capital- returns.html#disqus_thread)

Here is, apparently, what the secret is:

It used to be that venture capital firms could invest in a project described only on a napkin, but this practice was brought to nearly a halt.

How? _Traditional_ US venture capital gets nearly all its funds to invest from its _limited partners_ (LPs) which are mostly pension funds, insurance companies, wealthy individuals, sovereign wealth funds (likely Mideast oil money), hedge funds, and not much more.

Well mostly the LPs are quite conservative, invest only a tiny fraction of their funds with traditional information technology venture capital firms, and, apparently, have a relatively uniform _deal_ with such firms.

The deal: Invest much like private equity investment, that is, in a company evaluated mostly via standard accounting except instead of revenue be willing to substitute _traction_.

So, here's the _recipe_ for traditional US information technology venture capital:

Look for a company (1) exploiting information technology, i.e., Moore's law, computing, the Internet, the Web, the _cloud_ , mobile, etc., (2) with a novel product/service, (3) addressing a huge market, (4) with traction significant and growing rapidly, (5) that is desperate enough for some cash to be willing to accept onerous terms.

So, here are some of the weaknesses of this traditional approach:

(A) Any _development_ work, e.g., writing software, needed for (4) traction has to be already funded and done.

Result: This part of the _deal_ means that usually the development work has to be what a few guys can do on a diet of Raman noodles, and that severely limits what products/services can be offered.

(B) The _deal_ does not permit giving weight to real progress in research or technology; so, venture partners will not attempt to evaluate such progress and, indeed, nearly never have the background to do, or even direct, such evaluations. Again, the evaluations are basically to be much like in private equity, that is, based on traditional accounting.

Result: The companies that get venture funding are doing little or nothing to exploit original research or technology. Maybe something about a market niche, a user interface, or a partner list is novel. But, from US national security, there is now a history of 70+ years of the astounding power of original research and new technology, and, with the _deal_ of the LPs necessarily, that power is nearly always neglected.

E.g., for a joke, venture capital would have said: You build and test the first one, build and test the B-29, build a good base in Tinian, and build a good base in Iwo Jima for fighter escorts, and for 30% ownership with BoD control, a full ratchet, and 2X liquidation preference we will chip for in half of the aviation gas for the Enola Gay. In other words, that is _vulture_ capital.

We should not expect _vulture_ capital to do much to bring us to

> ... the dawn of a golden age of startups and innovation ...

and it has not.

So, as a result of weaknesses (A) and (B), the information technology startups are on average much less valuable than they should be. So, in particular, there is an opportunity to do much better, in particular, to get much higher ROI.

AngelList and YC have a chance for this progress and, thus, to _disrupt_ traditional US information technology venture capital.

If the CSC in the OP is willing to consider being an LP with a new _deal_ , then there is a chance of

> ... at the dawn of a golden age of startups and innovation ...

and much higher ROI.

<comment><USER13> Really? Venture firms in the past invested into projects described on napkins? Is there any data to support this assertion ?

<comment><USER14> You have to think about that in the past building a company was actually much much harder in every respect.

You didn't just build and app or used aws. You had to spend a lot of money on getting things set up.

And if the problems where genuine enough then I think it's fair to say that this happened much more often. But I don't have any data to back it up only my own experience.

<comment><USER12> Yup.

> had to spend a lot of money on getting things

When I was at IBM's Watson lab, the PC on my desk had parts worth a total of $50,000+.

When I bought my first PC at home, from Gateway, it cost me $10,000+. Single core, 90 MHz clock.

Later a friend and I considered a startup, I went shopping, and saw that parts for a good PC would run ballpark $6,000 -- we didn't do the startup!

Later I wanted a more up to date PC, and the parts cost about $5000. So, single core 1.8 GHz processor, that is 1800 / 90 = 20 times faster for half as much money.

Now I'm shopping for the first server for my startup. I've been assuming that the parts would cost about $2000. Nope: How about $1000, for a processor with 8 cores, at 4.0 GHz, with 32 GB of ECC main memory, etc.

But I already have a spare screen and power supply, now really want to do backup from one hard disk to another, both internal, and to a 2 TB external hard disk via USB so don't need Blu-Ray.

And good 1 TB hard disks go for about $60 and, thus, make room enough for internal disk to disk backup surprisingly cheap and easier than working with Blu-Ray disks.

And main memory prices are significantly lower: E.g., the Kingston, 32 GB of 1600 MHz ECC main memory

KVR16E11K4/32

was $429 but now is easy enough to find for $230.99, nearly half price.

So, $700 gets such an 8 core box.

But, for my first server, really not sure I need the full 8 cores, 32 GB of main memory right away so could settle for 4 cores with a slightly slower clock and 16 GB of main memory and three disk drives 1 TB each, for under $400.

So, start with a $400 server and, if it stays busy sending Web pages with ads, then the ad revenue just from on the way to getting busy should be much more than needed for some high end servers.

And now 1 GbE IP routers are much cheaper, too!

And for $90 a month my ISP can give me a connection with a static IP address, no ports blocked, and upload bandwidth of 35 Mbps. Half fill that 24 x 7 sending Web pages with ads, and should be able to show a profit!

Several US locations have 1 GbE service!

Prices, they've been a coming down!

It used to be, to bring up a busy Web site, needed big bucks to, say, Sun and maybe a T3 leased line, etc.

Now nearly everything about bringing up a Web site is much easier and cheaper than 10-15 years ago.

E.g., my startup is based on Windows, so I get to use IIS and ASP.NET for the Web site, ADO.NET and SQL Server for the data base, parts of the rest of .NET for more, e.g., de/serialization of instances of classes for program to program communications over TCP/IP sockets. Some big sites use this infrastructure; it should work well enough for my startup!

E.g., I wrote my own Web site session state server key-value store using TCP/IP sockets, de/serialization, and two instances of a .NET collection class. The .NET collection class was great fun to use! Terrific infrastructure.

Much easier, cheaper than 10-15 years ago!

<comment><USER14> Wow

Thats a great way to put things in perspective. Thanks for that. If you don't mind I would love to use this as an example of the difference between now and then in one of my future essays?

<comment><USER12> Go for it! Call it OSS! Glad to contribute!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The China part bugs me.

Why?

First, there's plenty of money in he US and Europe. I feel they could have worked a bit harder to secure non-Chinese funding.

Second, like it or not the world is engaged in an economic war with China. The industrial bases in the US and Europe have been destroyed to the point that entrepreneurs have trouble finding such things as machines to sew socks. Issues abound across a myriad of industrial segments.

While some in the western world might be all hippie/feel-good about China this is at the cost of ignoring what has been going on. Before you call me a paranoid asshole consider I've been manufacturing products in the US for over thirty years. During that time I have seen, first hand, what the reality of manufacturing has become. Over the years I've seen vendor after vendor systematically taken out by China's expansion into every nook and cranny of industry, even in areas you'd think make no sense.

Now the Chinese are going to insert "probes" into thousands of startups by means of providing insignificant (to them) funding. This will give them unparalleled visibility into trends, products and whole new industries ripe for pillaging.

AngelList is a fantastic resource. I am sure they could have made an effort to source this fund in the US and Europe. In the grand scheme of things $400 million is not that much money with the clout AngelList has, particularly if spread across a range of investors. I, for one, would not want to have a Chinese investor.

Down-vote away.

<comment><USER16> Even taking your skepticism about Chinese investment at face value, having LP involvement is tremendously different from operational involvement or investment committee involvement.

Having been involved in LP reporting at a seed fund, I can say that it happens regularly but infrequently (quarterly, or at most monthly) and at a 30,000 foot level. I've really never seen LPs interact with portfolio companies at a seed stage, beyond chatting at a cocktail party after the annual meeting.

Besides, given the nature of the platform, if they're looking into trends and products, isn't that information publicly available (this is just adding money behind the top syndicate deals on AngelList)?

<comment><USER15> You are probably absolutely correct. Yet, based on watching what's gone on with China from my front seat in manufacturing I can't help but remember a multitude of instances where someone said something akin to "what's the big deal with having them ..." and few years later they are out of business or hooked to China in a big way.

China looks at things at a different time scale than we do. Among other things, companies can sell at insane prices because they make their profit at the end of the year when the Chinese government hands out 15% "bonuses" on their exports. I've been in businesses where a 15% net at the end of the year would have been a dream.

When you are dealing with someone who has been systematically eroding your industrial base over decades you have to, at one point, take pause. I know I might come off as paranoid, I get that. There's a reason for that. I have experienced the "China effect" personally. It can be absolutely devastating. And nobody is doing a thing about it (not sure it is possible to any more).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Unfortunately I had an experience with Naval completely the opposite of what you're describing. I'm a student and had heard of him before several times along with using AngelList. Earlier this year I saw him walking in downtown San Francisco with somebody else, so I thought I would say hi and introduce myself for a moment since he seemed like a nice person.

I think they must have been having some kind of very important, heated conversation because as soon as I went up to him and simply started to say "hi, hope I'm not interrupting...", he stopped me and said "we're having a conversation!!" and kept walking.

Most likely it was just the wrong time and place to do that but unfortunately I now have a pretty disappointing first impression of him.

<comment><USER11> Sorry, but in what universe is it considered rude to _not_ talk to random strangers who interrupt you in the street?

I certainly don't think you should hold this experience against him. Hopefully he doesn't hold it against you.

<comment><USER18> "We're having a conversation!" is a perfectly legit saying, even to someone who is not a stranger on the street. On the other hand, Naval is a celebrity, and it's more expected for a celebrity to get such requests - maybe not wanted, but probably common. The deeper question is less anecdotal: to what extent, to cite Kevin Spacey (who cites Jack Lemon), the tech community sends the elevator back down. In this respect, AngelList has done a tremendous change to open more opportunities to more people. It actually opened the closed doors to many, and great news they are taking it to the next level. If this fund succeed, even more funds will follow.

<comment><USER11> > On the other hand, Naval is a celebrity, and it's more expected for a > celebrity to get such requests - maybe not wanted, but probably common.

I'm not sure I agree. He might be relatively prominent within the SV startup community, but that doesn't make him a celebrity. The vast majority of people (heck, the vast majority of engineers) would have no idea who he is.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Chelsea Manning hospitalized after suicide attempt - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/11/chelsea-manning-suicide-126452 <comment><USER2> The comments on this article are both hilarious and saddening. Not to say I expect anything else...</comment>


Quadcopters build a 6 meter tower - <AUTHOR> http://www.idsc.ethz.ch/Research_DAndrea/fmec

<comment><USER2> This would be awesome, if there was video.

Seriously, I want to see video of the assembly. Somewhere I saw video from the same project of a swarm of the bots doing coordinated movements and it was pretty cool and I've been waiting for video of this phase.

Edit: found some video <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvN9Ri1GmuY>

</comment><comment><USER3> Link to the video: <http://vimeo.com/32962555>

<comment><USER4> Not to sound entitled already, but why are they so slow? They're computers and robots already, I'm wondering why they move to where they need to go and pause for a second like that.

<comment><USER5> They are trying to get vary accurate location information. What's so neat about this is they blocks are just sitting on top of each other it's the shape that holds the structure together not mortar / pins etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Damn that is cool. How long till I get my personal robotic flying slave to fetch me a glass of water and do some laundry for me?

Admittedly I'd be a bit scared of the high powered blades and getting nicked on accident.

<comment><USER7> you can get them now - see diydrones

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think robotic construction will absolutely be the way forward, but I wouldn't think that UAVs would be the most efficient way.

My guess is that autonomous retrofits of existing cranes and digging machinery will do most of the heavy lifting. I don't have much domain knowledge on construction though, does anyone disagree?

<comment><USER9> Heavy lifting on construction sites involves quite a lot of unknowns and is safety critical. Some excavation could possibly be automated on probably on greenfield sites. Depends very much where you are building. In the middle of pretty much any European city for example, building the foundations almost certainly couldn't be automated much more than it is all ready. This is because you never know what you will find when you are digging. Example, how would you do auto plague pit detection? There is a fair amount of automation on sites already, piling rigs are semi-automatic and use relative GPS for setting out and various monitoring systems to control the speed of drilling and inflow of bentonite etc. Where automation will work best is when you have an easily defined problem. I don't know why we still bolt steel framed structures together, this is a problem that could be relatively easily automated with robots to lift, hold and weld up the pieces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Of course in the future those bricks need not to be of any particular shape. An army of autonomous robots study pile of rocks and central computer decides which way those should be assembled to make solid interlocking structures and airtight walls. This will lower building costs close to the level of the raw material.

</comment><comment><USER11> Imagine it on a smaller scale when they bring beer.

</comment><comment><USER12> Wow. I can see all major building projects in 20-50 years being completed using this technology. Amazing stuff.

</comment><comment><USER13> Awesome stuff - a time-lapse video would complete this as a work of art.</comment>


Show HN: Where Will It Close? - <AUTHOR> http://www.wherewillitclose.com/?hn

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a proof of concept to see if people will engage with the market as a game. It should be pretty obvious I'm no designer, but the algo behind it is pretty cool taking into account various factors when awarding scores at market close, including: \- volatility that day \- when the prediction was made \- how close to the actual close the prediction was

Would love HN's feedback on what next steps should be to get people to give it a go.

Given how turbulent the market has been recently, thought it would be a fun few hour detour from my normal work.

</comment><comment><USER2> I think you should definitely expound a little bit upon why it would be interesting for a casual user to make a prediction--that is, why should I bother? Will there be a reward of some kind?

You should also explain what makes this interesting. This should be something easy to digest and difficult to miss. You could also include a page which explains how the algorithm works in a little more detail for those who are interested.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Will work on those shortly.</comment></comment>


Custom HTML elements are going to break in the next release of React.js - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/4933 <comment><AUTHOR> If you use custom elements, then now would be a good time to understand what will change and why.

I personally feel that losing custom elements in support of web-components is a step in the wrong direction. Custom elements are useful today. Web components are not and probably never will be.</comment>


The TTY demystified - <AUTHOR> http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/tty/index.php

<comment><USER2> <http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/>

They got rid of the TTY, huzzah!

<comment><USER3> Given how utterly cool plan9 is, I have some difficulty understanding how they so completely failed to find a userbase. I sometimes have wishful thinking that maybe google or someone like that is secretly running on plan 9 and that in time it will permeate out. But I think not. Anyway - not too important - the OS layer is becoming irrelevant (and yet when my parents asked what on earth I could want for my 30th I asked for a book on ncurses :) ).

<comment><USER4> I don't think things win market share by how cool or powerful they are - e.g. Betamax vs. VHS OR SPARC vs. x86 OR Haskell vs. C. Why something becomes popular has to do a lot with timing, price and creating something that's "good enough".

Other than this, plan9 is/was really cool and has a lot of interesting concepts (like a distributed architecture).

<comment><USER5> Minor nit: Betamax is a standard, but flawed example. The original betamax cassettes only worked for 1 hour, but movies last 1.5-2.5 hours. They eventually fixed it (at the cost of lowering quality), but too late.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betamax#Criticism>

<comment><USER2> And it's another example of a win not being necessarily what yo hoped for. Ok, Sony didn't get a Beta machine into every home as they had hoped, but they got at least one into every TV station.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Subgraph OS: Adversary-resistant computing platform - <AUTHOR> https://subgraph.com/sgos/index.en.html <comment><USER2> This is a Linux distribution with some clever ideas about container isolation and using the PAX / grsecurity kernel patchset.

Since it is running Linux, not some minimal RTOS, I take some of their marketing on the website with a huge grain of salt. When it says things like, "verifiably trustworthy" and is a Linux distribution, it makes baby Brad Spengler (Spender) cry. Call me a skeptic, but I'm currently using Linux, professionally have managed Linux for over a decade, and <3 it entirely. That being said, I call BS on a Linux distribution that claims what this does.

Great marketing page however!

Written from my Fedora 20 laptop with SELinux enabled and my tinfoil anti-NSA hat on

<comment><USER3> I would be more enthusiastic about a "trustworthy" and "hardened" distribution with "container isolation" if it were BSD based with jails (among other things).

A simpler system, with fewer moving parts, and contributions (perhaps) from cperciva ?

<comment><USER4> Why BSD over Linux? And which BSD would you start with?

I'd stay far away from SELinux, knowing that added complexity is unlikely to add security in practice. But is any of the major BSD kernels appreciably simpler or more secure than the Linux kernel these days? I'm sure that the Linux kernel has broader hardware support; that would yield an OS that more people can actually run without restricting their hardware choices. So on balance, Linux seems to me like a better choice.

To be sure, I'd strip down the userland, starting with the C library; I'd choose musl over glibc. Actually, my idea of a "trustworthy", "hardened" Linux distro would look a lot like Alpine Linux (the in-development musl-based version).

<comment><USER5> Truthfully it's the kernel rather than userland I'd be more concerned about. It might be open-source but it's an enormous piece of software. Heartbleed showed us that serious vulns can slip through, and AFAIK the kernel hasn't had a truecrypt-style security audit (which I believe it deserves).

I don't think BSD is necessarily more secure, despite what that Theo blowhard has to say.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hi Bruce from Subgraph here.

Yesterday we updated our website with information about a new project that we've been working on since December and made a very small announcement on Twitter about the website change and this generated more attention than we were expecting.

So I should clarify the status of the project which is that we haven't released anything yet, but we've been working on what is described on our website for the last 6 months. We predict but can't promise that we'll have something available for brave enthusiastic people to test by the end of summer. That's the point at which we normally would have announced our project here.

</comment><comment><USER7> I am sick of tired of hearing about projects, lately oten security related projects that are vaporware.

They have nice websites, nice graphics, very professional, but that is all. Nice marketing.

The title "Subgraph OS: Adversary-resistant computing platform"

Should be

"Project SubgraphOS is an idea to build a Adversary-resistant computing platform"

Take me to a really plain website, and state status on the front page

"No release, No source"

But maybe some design documents?

On top of that please say on the front page "Yet another Linux distro"

so people like me dont get the impression that its actually something interesting written from scratch.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's an operating system, supposedly built from ground up. I'm really sceptical about security if it was just released and build from ground up.

They shyly mention Grsecurity hardened kernel. So is it a linux distro or not? I don't know, no mention of linux anywhere else.

As someone who might be interested in secure OS but is not an expert in security, this website leaves me very confused.

<comment><USER9> By "operating system" they seem to mean "linux distribution". I suspect that, like most glamorous crypto project, this will turn out to be woefully inadequate. (For example, they did their own implementation of openpgp. Not clear why.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Where's the source part of this open source company?

</comment><comment> vertex-four So... what exactly is this? Could I use it as my main OS? Is it a replacement for TAILS?

<comment><USER6> Yes, Subgraph OS is meant to be used as a general purpose desktop operating system. There is pressure on TAILS to evolve in this direction by people who like TAILS and want to use it as their main everyday OS, but this conflicts with the 'amnesic' philosophy and vision of TAILS as an ephemeral read-only system. One of the objectives of Subgraph OS is to provide something more convenient to users who wish to use TAILS persistently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Subgraph OS users who install the operating system must have encrypted > filesystems. It is not optional in Subgraph OS.

I like that. All "secure" operating systems should have that, and _all_ operating systems should have it if they benefit from hardware encryption, which would make the performance overhead a non-issue.

<comment><USER12> hardware encryption is more difficult to audit, likely to have backdoors, etc.. djb recently posted some feedback on how to improve available instructions in x86 for doing the type of maths common in today's crypto code, which is far more useful.

<comment><USER13> Well, encryption with unknown back doors is better then no encryption, I suppose.

<comment><USER14> Not if it gives you a false sense of security.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Cool site, but I couldn't find anywhere to obtain the software. When will it be available?

<comment><USER16> I looked all over the site and couldn't find it anywhere, or any mention of it even being available yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Well this is good news. More choices we will have, more privacy we get. Maybe one day, this kind of OS will be default for everyone and even usable for "basic" users. I'm really looking forward to try it asap. Keep up the good work guys.

</comment><comment><USER12> cool marketing site, show us the code. back to saturday morning cartoons.

</comment><comment><USER18> Here's their github for ORCHID (tor on Java?) and VEGA.

[https://github.com/subgraph](https://github.com/subgraph)</comment>


Ask HN: What do you think of this sales email? and the ending call to action? - <AUTHOR> Hello     ,
We are a local company, we have built a (one liner intro).
You can use our service <user story>
We are already deploying in <another industry but same function>
I can give you a 15 minute demo at your convenience. Please let me know if there is a suitable time for us to connect.
Thank you for your time. Your input will be immensely helpful to a young company.
Regards, <comment><USER2> To me that's spam.

1\. find a way to personalize. visit their website etc.

2\. focus on what you can do for them. ie.

Are you looking for a way to get more customers for your new business?

Is your website getting the traffic it should?

Could your business benefit from a 1000% increase in website traffic?

<comment><AUTHOR> Should I start the second para with these type questions ? right after the one liner intro?

<comment><USER2> most of what I've done has been around adwords lead gen. not cold emails.

and the ads/landing page has pretty specific formula. not to say their isn't a better way.

example: [http://www.bid2mow.com/Vendor/index.html](http://www.bid2mow.com/Vendor/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > I can give you a 15 minute demo at your convenience.

I don't have 15 minutes to give, especially for a lame demo. (not to come off harsh, I'm sure it's brilliantly done)

First question-- is this relevant to me? What problems do you solve?

Recommend Oren Klaff on Pitching your idea > [https://imnotmarvin.com/deep- dive-oren-klaff-on-how-to-write...](https://imnotmarvin.com/deep-dive-oren- klaff-on-how-to-write-emails-that-get-a-response/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Skip the entire cold email and figure out a way to get the people you think should care about your thing, to care.

Generally "content marketing" is the term for that, but a better way to think about it is: think of the problems faced by the people who might use your thing. What do they think about? What other tools do they use?

Now, go write useful blog posts about that stuff. If you publish interesting things, people will actually want to hear from you. You'll earn their trust and won't need to beg or spam for it.

Seth Godin explains this well: [http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/01/permission-m...](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/01/permission- mark.html)

… and the first 4 chapters of his book are online: [http://www.sethgodin.com/permission/thanks.asp](http://www.sethgodin.com/permission/thanks.asp)

<comment><AUTHOR> great resource thank you for your insight!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great idea to ask input on HN! The message you are sending (purely IMHO) We are a local company.... - We are important! You can use our service... - Working with us is optional We are already deploying in ... Our success doesn't depend on you I can give you a 15 minute demo ... - I'll just use some of your time Thank you for your time. Your input.... - After all I said, we kinda need you.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you think of the last line? should I nix it ?

<comment><USER5> The last line is the only one I really liked. LOL

<comment><AUTHOR> LOL!!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google's AlphaZero Beats Stockfish In 100-Game Match - <AUTHOR> https://www.chess.com/news/view/google-s-alphazero-destroys-stockfish-in-100-game-match <comment><USER2> >This would be akin to a robot being given access to thousands of metal bits and parts, but no knowledge of a combustion engine, then it experiments numerous times with every combination possible until it builds a Ferrari.

No, not even close. First, AlphaZero started with the rules of chess, chess pieces, and a chess board. Second, the possible moves are several orders of magnitude fewer than the steps needed to build a working car out of parts.

Closer would be: Here's a car. Here are all the tuneable parameters. Make it as fast or as efficient as possible. But that would still be inordinately more complex then groking chess.

<comment><USER3> >Second, the possible moves are several orders of magnitude fewer than the steps needed to build a working car out of parts.

Aren't the number of chess moves, for practical purposes, near infinite? A car can be made only in so many ways, but a chess game can be won under scenarios that outnumber the atoms in the universe.

<comment><USER4> Chess has 16 pieces each in one of 65 positions, so the state space is roughly 65^16. A car has more than 16 parts each in more than 65 possible positions.

There are around 100 legal moves for any chess position, and only a handful of rules. The possible actions and rules for building cars is literally all of physics and engineering.

<comment><USER3> I didn't read it that way. You're essentially reading it as the monkeys will eventually write Shakespeare scenario.

The way I read it was, you have a robot and it:

1\. knows it has to build a ferrari (implying it knows what it looks like at least)

2\. knows nothing about building, parts, etc

3\. can engage in some sort of learning behavior

Once a robot knows it can only connect two parts by screwing them together, it will only try to screw them together, and it might even transfer that behavior over to other parts.

The possible scenarios become much more limited as the robot gets smarter.

<comment><USER4> You're probably imagining an assembly line, where one step follows another in a logical procession, and there doesn't seem to be much of a branching factor. However, each step along that line is the process of many deep optimizations. It is more complicated than you think; thousands of people work on it. Consider just the case of choosing a screw, probably one of the most simple steps in building a car. These 24 pages only scratch the surface of the choices available: [http://www.fastecindustrial.com/images/MediaCatFastener.pdf](http://www.fastecindustrial.com/images/MediaCatFastener.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm surprised how slow the press has been to pick this up. This seems like an amazing step forward to me. AlphaZero played only against itself as training and it beat one of the best chess AIs in the world that has been finely tuned with decades worth of human knowledge.

Now that Go and Chess are efficiently solved for AI...what's next? Are there any other interesting complete information games remaining? What's the next milestone for incomplete information games?

<comment><USER6> > Are there any other interesting complete information games?

How about axioms of logic as legal moves, and asking it to go from a set of axioms to open mathematical problems?

Or chemical procedures and components as moves, and asking it to tackle a disease with a known molecular structure?

It is not as straightforward as I make it sound, but these are complete information problems.

<comment><USER7> >How about axioms of logic as legal moves, and asking it to go from a set of axioms to open mathematical problems?

>Or chemical procedures and components as moves, and asking it to tackle a disease with a known molecular structure?

>It is not as straightforward as I make it sound, but these are complete information problems.

However they are not adversarial games. Self-play only works for adversarial games. Also each mathematical problem is different and needs to be solved only once, and likewise for molecular structures. Additionally, they only need to be solved once, so there is no "gradient of skill" that we know to climb.

<comment><USER8> Theorem proving in intuitionistic logic is a two-player game and maps perfectly to the kind of Monte-Carlo Tree Search that's employed here. Except that it is far more difficult than Chess/Go/etc., since the branching factor is essentially unbounded.

<comment><USER5> Can you elaborate? How could you score how close you are to a solution and what would the second player be doing?

<comment><USER8> Consider a formula made up of only conjunctions and disjunctions and true/false. The first player tries to prove the formula and gets to move at every disjunction and is allowed to select which side of the disjunction to prove. The second player tries to prevent the first player from finding a proof and gets to move at every conjunction, selecting a side of the conjunction to descend to. The final state here is an atomic proposition which is either true or false and determines which player won. You derive a value function from that in the same way as you do for Go or Chess.

You can extend this idea to full first-order intuitionistic logic and probably also to higher-order logics, as well as many different modal logics. There are also formulations of classical logic as a single player game, but that doesn't seem to be very useful here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have to say it's a completely inappropriate comparison to make since Stockfish was forbidden from using its opening book. I would like to see the results when both are at their best.

<comment><USER10> Another way of looking at it is that it would be inappropriate to give Stockfish an opening book but not AlphaZero, and I'm guessing the latter doesn't have one since that goes against its whole premise.

With that said, whether it's fair or not, I am curious to see how Stockfish with its opening book would compare to AlphaZero in its current state.

<comment><USER11> Edit: I just learned that things have changed quite a bit since I looked into computer chess more deeply, and Stockfish does actually not use a book. So they did play the default config. The below is thus completely off.

\--

These engines are built for results, not as technical demonstrators. You are testing the engine in a scenario that it was not built to cover. Opening books are not optional add ons for these engines, they mean that the heuristics are not tuned for early game, and no work is put into optimizing the evaluation in that phase of the game.

If they could have beaten Stockfish in its default configuration (using book), they wouldn't have artificially weakened it, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks like a residual network (ResNet) feeding a Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) solves the strategy optimization problem.

A critique is that the game model (rules, pieces, movements, legal moves) is still bespoke and painstakingly created by a human being. One next step would be for an algorithm that develops the game model as well as the strategy and the I/O translation. E.g., use Atari 2600 Video Chess frame grabs as the input and the Atari controller as the output. After experimentation the algorithm creates everything: the game model (chess, checkers, shogi, go), the strategy for the game, and the I/O processing needed to effect the strategy with the available inputs and outputs.

<comment><USER13> Would what you're asking for even be possible for a human? For instance, if I plop my child down in front of a game and tell them to figure it out without telling them the rules, would they be able to figure out the complete set of rules even by trial and error?

<comment><USER14> Actually, this is a game itself. I used to play it with friends growing up -- we called it "Mao." It's a card game where you are penalized for breaking the rules (at least one person must know the rules in advance). You are allowed to pause the game at any time and guess what a rule is, and the players who know the rules will confirm or deny your guess. You'd be surprised at how quickly people can pick up rules like "only face cards may be played after a 7" or "if an ace is played, the next person is skipped."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Question for the AGI believers out there:

We have this, state of the art, AI which can turn the screws and hone in on some underlying reality about "how to win at Chess", a formal game. Great.

How does this then extend into the social domain, where AGI would be operating? Like, how does AlphaZero optimize for "how to slow Climate Change"?

I can't even fathom how it would even understand climate change without an army of scientists publishing new work for it to consume. And then on top of that it will need to understand how it's adversary, Putin, will try to optimize for the opposite, "ensure global warming to open up our shipping routes and arable land".

It just seems like a non-starter to me. Saying you could win at chess, so winning at geopolitics is just a scaling problem to me is like saying I can drink a bowl of miso soup so drinking the ocean is just a scaling problem.

It would seem to me that intelligence at the highest levels isn't constrained by foreknowledge, it's constrained by the consequences of past decisions made during the (inevitably ongoing) interactive learning phase.

<comment><USER16> > Like, how does AlphaZero optimize for "how to slow Climate Change"?

It doesn't, AlphaZero is a domain specific AI. That's like asking: "Like, how does differential equation solver slow climate change?". AlphaZero can learn to play a narrow class of games given the rules, that's all it does.

But I agree with your sentiment obviously. We're _n_ technological breakthroughs away from AGI, where _n_ is unknown. We have approximately zero idea how to move from DNNs to AGI - or weather DNNs are the right approach.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, seems like weather DNNs might be the right approach for solving Climate Change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can any computer chess/stockfish experts comment on the choice of 1 GB for hash size? I have no chess or computer chess domain expertise whatsoever, but it strikes me as a suspiciously low setting for a memory-related parameter on what was probably at least a 32 core machine. It makes me wonder if they simply dialed down the hash size until they got a nice convincing win.

Update: took a look at settings used for TCEC. Looks like they used 16 GB in season 7, 64GB in season 8, 32 GB in season 9, and 16 GB in season 10. Two observations: (1) interesting that they've decreased hash sizes in recent years (2) definitely seems like 1 GB is not reflective of how an engine would be configured for TCEC.

<comment><USER19> It does seem low, but I doubt the effect on performance would be huge. Certainly not enough to affect the major claims of the paper.

For example, on my 4-core machine I just loaded up two instances of Stockfish, one with 32MB hash and one with 512MB, and assigned 2 cores to each. I loaded up a few random middlegame positions, and after analyzing for 1 minute, the evaluations and main lines were generally the same (within the margin of error for repeated runs of the same engine). when analyzing the Kasparov's immortal game, it was a toss-up which engine would find the famous rook sac first.

1GB is probably suboptimal on the hardware they used, but the difference is probably minimal.

</comment></comment><comment> forgot-my-pw Some in the chess community seems to be still in denial phase.

The Go/Baduk community has experienced the similar thing early last year.

\- Jan 2016 (AlphaGo beat Fan Hui): Fan Hui was only a 2p and European champion, he's no way near the top

\- Mar 2016 (AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol): AlphaGo still lost 1 game. The #1 rank player can probably still beat it

\- Jan 2017 (AlphaGo Master beats 60 pros): Ok, AlphaGo is strong, but those are only online games with short time control.

\- May 2017 (AlphaGo Master beats #1 ranking, Ke Jie): ...

\- Oct 2017 (AlphaGo Zero beats AlphaGo Master): Ok, nothing we have right now can probably beat it.

<comment><USER16> Denial of what? That one chess engine dethroned the currently best one? This happens every second year. And doesn't make sense why the chess community would be in denial, did you mean chess engine community?

<comment><USER20> The difference is this is an entirely new paradigm of chess engine. So it's not just Stockfish getting an edge over Houdini that year or whatever.

There is plenty of "they didn't give stockfish enough memory, the hardware isn't comparable, the time controls were too short, etc etc" in the chess community so there is certainly some denial. But nobody thinks any human would stand a chance.

But I agree it's nowhere near the Go denial since the chess community gave up on humans remaining competitive with computers long ago.

<comment><USER16> I see this as scepticism, not denial. Denial implies that you don't want something to be true, which is perhaps the case with engine developers, not the general chess community.

<comment> forgot-my-pw I think you're right. Scepticism is more correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> AlphaZero and Stockfish did not run on the same hardware.

So it's not clear if the algorithm is better or the algorithm was just run faster.

<comment><USER22> Still, when you look at the games, it's hard not to think something genuinely new has happened. Several grandmasters have expressed amazement at the style of play. AlphaZero won some games in a romantic style that's reminiscent of old champions. It's definitely not the kind of play we've been accustomed to with chess engines : AlphaZero seems to rely on a deep strategic understanding of piece placement and dynamism opportunities.

It's difficult to attribute some of these wins to a simple superiority in computing power.

<comment><USER21> Imagine a computer with a simple brute force algorithm but unlimited computing power. It would win 100:0 against AZ.

Would the grandmasters look at the games and say "Yes, it won every time but it's style is rather clumsy"?

<comment><USER20> Hard to say, since we don't know what such perfect play would look like. But I expect it would look quite boring, yes.

It's important to state, though, that calling an engine's play "romantic" is not a value judgement. Stockfish and other engines play in a way that give a clear concrete advantage after X moves, whereas AlphaZero relatively prefers move that are "creative" or "beautiful" in the sense that there's less of a clear definite benefit, but instead some sort of slight positional advantage or more attacking chances or something similar. It's harder to prove that it was a good move, but it just "feels" good. In that sense humans enjoy it either since it's surprising, or maybe closer to how we're able to think.

As an example, there is one game I saw analyzed where AlphaZero gradually gives up more and more material with little clear compensation, but gradually its position gets better and better, until Stockfish is completely out of good moves. It then turns the corner, snatches up more material than it gave up, and converts into a winning end-game. Such imbalanced style of play is much more interesting to watch than previous computer slogs of slowly jockying for slight advantages until one side can grab a pawn without giving up much and build into a win from there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> You will see here how Stockfish improvements are tested.

[http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests](http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests)

Some code or weight is changed, then they have it play to see if it leads to better performance.

An exhaustive, sort of manual work. On the other hand Deepmind's bot is fully automated and they have it just running day and night improving itself on a large hardware configuration.

</comment><comment><USER24> Yesterday's discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15858197](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15858197)

</comment><comment><USER25> Amazing. I assume AlphaZero knew the basic moves of the pieces, but had to figure out defensive moves etc. against the other computer 'on the fly'? Are those learning games included in the statistics (which include ZERO losses)?? If so, it is a remarkable learning engine.

Shades of WOPR. "This is a game nobody can win..."

<comment><USER6> Yes, it got a set of all legal moves, of which it had to choose one. It was trained for 8 hours where it only played against itself, only using the knowledge of which moves are legal. After self-playing for 8 hours, it played 100 times against stockfish. In those 8 hours, it was apparently able to infer all human knowledge on chess acquired over centuries, and surpass it.

And, when the legal moves are replaced with the moves of other games (like Go for which it was actually written, or Shogi), it did exactly the same thing. Redevelop millennia of human knowledge and go beyond, all within 8 hours of compute.

Makes you wonder what will happen when instead of the rules of chess, you put in the axioms of logic and natural numbers. And give it 8 months of compute.

<comment><USER26> Amazing achievement. Still, "eight hours" is a bit misleading. That's eight hours on thousands of parallel TPUs.

<comment><USER27> More interesting would be how many games it has played in that time.

<comment><USER28> 44 million, according to their paper, and they used 5000 TPUs, which are capable of 4.6×10^17 operations per second.

(The operations the TPU can run are far simpler than what supercomputers can do, but just for the sake of comparison, the current top supercomputer in the world can do 1.25×10^17 floating point operations per second)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Nielsen is eager to see what other disciplines will be refined or mastered > by this type of learning

> of course it goes so much further

> The ramifications for such an inventive way of learning are of course not > limited to games.

>But obviously the implications are wonderful far beyond chess and other games. The ability of a machine to replicate and surpass centuries of human knowledge in complex closed systems is a world-changing tool

Okay then. Let's go beyond games already!

</comment><comment><USER30> While interesting, it's comparing 5000+ Tensor Processing Units against 64 CPU threads. I suspect this isn't a fair comparison by watts spent.

<comment><USER31> No - 5000 TPUs were used for training, but the 100-game matches used just 4 TPUs (bottom of p4 in the paper)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> >This would be akin to a robot being given access to thousands of metal bits and parts, but no knowledge of a combustion engine, then it experiments numerous times with every combination possible until it builds a Ferrari. That's all in less time that it takes to watch the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. The program had four hours to play itself many, many times, thereby becoming its own teacher.

This absurd comparison would raise my eyebrows coming from an English tabloid.

Having said that I've looked the author's profile and was appalled to learn he's a chess prodigy. Then I also seen he's a Chess Journalist. Apparently he became much more a journalist than a chess master...

</comment><comment><USER33> What I'm reading: an existing chess engine that runs on much poorer hardware and for some weird reason was deprived of its usual initialization data achieved 73% draw rate against a ridiculously hyped "deep" neural network/MCTS algorithm.

It's interesting that AlphaZero was finally applied to a different game, though. I wonder what architectural changes they had to make. I've read that pure MCTS isn't that good at playing Chess. How true is that?

<comment><USER34> AlphaGo and AlphaGo Zero are different than Alpha Zero.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'd be curious about how it's strength relative to Stockfish might change as the amount of time per move is varied.

<comment><USER36> There's a graph of that in the Arxiv paper submitted yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15858197](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15858197) (page 7)

As it looks, for move times < 0.2s, Stockfish is stronger, anything above that, AlphaZero is stronger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Personally I was always interested if it's possible now to use them (NN, DL, etc.) to infer theorems on it's own. Because if the difference between it and a human would be as big as we see in these expert-systems (trained only to do one thing) then it could provide amazing results.

</comment><comment><USER38> Did DeepMind publish anything about this? Is this literally a straightforward plug of the AlphaGo Zero techniques into a chessboard with no novelty? Don't get me wrong, I'm impressed, I'm just looking for a more primary source.

<comment><USER39> The arxiv paper is here: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01815](https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01815)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I think the real measure of an AIs success in this field is the absence of pathological boards like this one.

[https://lichess.org/analysis/8/p7/kpn5/qrpPb3/rpP2b2/pP4Q1/P...](https://lichess.org/analysis/8/p7/kpn5/qrpPb3/rpP2b2/pP4Q1/P3K2b/8_w_-_-)

Is it still easy to find positions that alphazero totally misunderstands?

<comment><USER41> Such positions are not interesting to Alpha unless it might run into them. If Alpha would never choose moves that lead to this position, it needn't have any insight into them.

If a Hold'em AI would never choose to bet 72 off it doesn't need to have an opinion of what to do when that bet is raised by the opponent.

<comment><USER40> Sorry, I missed this response. The goal, to me, for a chess playing AI, is not that it be very effective at the game. We have already shown that simple algorithms exist which are better than humans. The novelty presented by Alphazero is the generalization of positional evaluation with deep learning structures. If you present Alphazero with this board, and ask it to learn how to play starting from this position, what does it discover? Does that translate to other "similar" pathological boards?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This is of course all very, very impressive, but it would be great to see more details on this. We are told AZ only started with the basic rules. What was included in the "basic rules"? How were they codified? The engine looks at 80.000 positions at second, so obviously it has some evaluation function. What is the position evaluation function? Presumably it was codified in some way in the beginning, and then got improved by the training period? It would be very interesting to see the first 100 games, or so, the engine it played against itself.

</comment><comment><USER43> Does anyone know how well a system like AlphaZero can be applied to a field like material science? It would seem that you could make a scoring function against how well the material meets the desired criteria.

<comment><USER44> Pretty well. There are several active research groups working with AI/ML for materials science research. Since you asked about AlphaZero, here is an article directly about the DeepMind guys working on this problem: [https://qz.com/1110469/if-deepmind-is-going-to-find-the- next...](https://qz.com/1110469/if-deepmind-is-going-to-find-the-next-miracle- material-experts-dont-know-how-theyll-pull-it-off/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> If AZ is truly superior to Stockfish, why was Stockfish given an amount of RAM that could only be considered standard for the 1990s?

</comment><comment><USER46> Completely dishonest title and first 1,000 words of the write-up. That's when you get to the words:

> pointed out that Stockfish's methodology requires it to have an openings > book for optimal performance.

I went from amazed, utter shock like "What!! No way. This is unreal. This is absolutely unreal. What? What? What?" to a total feeling that I've been reading 1,000 words of fake news.

I feel cheated by this write-up and flagged it for this reason. They need to mention it in the first couple of words, not after selling that it has deduced 1600 years of human chess knowledge in 4 hours.

</comment><comment><USER47> It's interesting to consider what it means when the AI can succeed without using brute force.

Suppose at every turn there are n possible future states of the game based on the rules. To avoid "brute force" the AI must be able to ignore many of those states as irrelevant. In effect, the AI is learning what to pay attention to, not just considering what might happen, thereby conserving computational resources.

Chess and Go are interesting for two nearly opposite reasons: 1) because they are _too large_ for humans to consider the reasoning obvious, and 2) because the input to the reasoning is simply a small (and easily perceived by humans) grid of rule-constrained pieces.

But when you think of AI in an information theoretic way, so that given representative training data the system (if large enough) will always "learn" perfectly, it's not really all that remarkable. It's just a different computational way of doing the same transformation from input states to moves. Given a problem (chess, go, etc.) the researchers must simply learn what network structure and training regimen will do the job with the least computational cost.

To see why this is relevant, consider a deep learning model that could continually generate successive digits of pi (or primes) without having the concept baked in already. Would the result be computationally cheaper than highly optimized brute force algorithm? No, because what it would "learn" would be something already known by humans. Perfect chess is simply a function from input states to moves that humans do not already know the definition of. Most humans do know the definition of this function for the game of tic tac toe by the time they reach middle school.

I'd argue that while this is useful it's ultimately not hard. Comparing it with Stockfish mainly demonstrates how _chess is hard for humans_ to reason about and hence hard for humans to write non-brute-force algorithms to solve.

Thus, I think this is an example of "weak AI" even though humans associate chess with high degrees of exceptional human cognition. Chess data contains no noise, so the algorithm is dealing only with signals of varying degrees of utility.

I'm looking forward to AI that can be useful in the midst of lots of noise, such as AI that analyzes peoples' body language to predict interesting things about them, analyzes speech in real time for deception, roulette wheels for biases, and office environments for emotional toxicity.

Chess is interesting because we can't introspect to understand what makes humans good at chess (other than practice). So many human insights and intuitions are similarly opaque yet the data is noisy enough that it will take significantly better AI to be able to do anything that truly seems super- human.

</comment><comment><USER48> Number of humans that could put together a Ferrari from parts: ~10000?

Number of humans that can beat Stockfish: 0

<comment><USER49> Number of cats that can meow: ~1000000000000?

Number of cats that can beat Stockfish: 0

<comment><USER50> And therefore meowing is simpler than beating Stockfish which was parent's point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> But now please Houdini and the rest. Stockfish doesn't play interesting, and has less ELO than Houdini. Though that new search will beat Houdini also I guess.

</comment><comment><USER52> seems like the real untapped potential goldmine here is to carefully observe millions of workers, notice when they are working and why and when they are slacking off- and enforce penalties and rewards relative to their peak performance to motivate increased productivity. measure average key presses, response times, eye engagement, fidgeting and body motion, facial expressions. do you really need robots if you can train the human network to be more robot like? the 21st century assembly line is so delicious, think of the possibilities.

going to need stimulants to work at 100% or your company AI will cut your pay.

</comment><comment><USER53> Four hours to learn on a high speed computer is what millions upon millions of games? Thousands of human lifetimes lived out in four hours. The four hours to learn thing is fake news and distorts the reality of how many games and trials the machine actually went through.

<comment><USER54> I don't think so. It seems to me that the whole point of AI is how many real world human years it saves by mastering and executing things fast. The fact that it can learn this well at all, after any amount of time, makes it impressive, and the fact that it learns quickly makes it all the more useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Another really impressive feat is Elon Musk's OpenAI which defeated a number of world class dota2 players in a 1v1 match.

This is a real time strategy video game. The number of decisions you need to make in this game are mind boggling. It takes most people many months, if not longer just to get to the point where you're not clueless.

A recap video is at: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAu1ZsTCA64](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAu1ZsTCA64)

<comment><USER56> On the other hand it quickly got figured out how to beat it. And it could only play one hero.

<comment><USER55> But it still beat a bunch of top players.

I've played dota-like games in the past (at a medium-high level). The skill gap in this game is remarkably huge.

It's a type of game where a new human player would get absolutely destroyed with a 0% chance of possibly ever winning, even in a minimal scenario where only 1 hero were involved.</comment></comment></comment>


If you use Google+, anyone can email you without knowing your gmail address - <AUTHOR> http://gmailblog.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/reach-people-you-know-more-easily.html

<comment><USER2> This will be interesting. My initial reaction was that it doesn't reveal your email address and a Google account is required so there probably won't be much spam potential, but then I started thinking about all of the suspicious- looking accounts that have been circling me daily for the past 6 months. At least they're making it easy to turn it off.</comment>


Apache Hadoop 2 goes GA - <AUTHOR> http://hortonworks.com/blog/apache-hadoop-2-is-ga/

<comment><USER2> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3403924](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3403924) about "Hadoop Reaches 1.0" almost a couple of years ago.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it possible to build this (or any other 2.x) with homebrew, or do I need to build it manually?

<comment><USER2> Assuming you mean installation (not build).

Don't think you can install with homebrew (yet). Apache Ambari, another apache project that helps install and manage Hadoop stack, should very soon be supporting installation of 2.x both on single node and on a cluster.

<comment><USER3> Apologies, I did mean install. Thanks for the tip- I'll check Ambari out.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Feedback on my valentine's day promo page? - <AUTHOR>

I'd appreciate any feedback but especially any low-hanging-fruit that'll likely increase my conversion rate.  Marketing suggestions also welcome.<p>http://knottablenecklaces.com/Valentines-Day/ <comment><USER2> Hey pdenya,

I think you need to improve the flow i.t.o getting the majority of the content above the fold.

For example, I would: Reduce the heart image size slightly and save it at the same resolution (it's too big - loads slow)

Rethink your selling points (next to the heart) Wear it formally or casually - as opposed to? Bend to your will? Wear them differently? Get them by Valentines day = call to action? \----- Things you need to bring to light is; the fun factor (shape it anyway you please) the hip factor (it's shiny, formal during day, snazzy at night ~ shape to fit) the perceived value factor (will mostly be from testimonies ex. I wear it all day)

The Get it by Valentines day should be a summary introduction to the products on sale, ex.

Order now or before Saturday, 11 February to receive your gift on or before Valentines Day. (Note the keyword) (Followed by 3 columns, 1 for each product with a templated design with 'Add to Cart' underneath them)

Doing the above, your testimonies (perceived value) will raise above the fold.

Just for some added value, your links ex. in the footer should look differently from normal text.

All the best, hope you make a ton of sales (don't forget to attract attention)

<comment><USER2> Almost forgot to mention why the templated product design - it's so people can compare the products in terms of look, price and testimony/feedback :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not exactly marketing, but: I gave one to my mathematician girlfriend last year, and she pointed out that adding a lock would make these necklaces much more flexible ("nontrivial knots").

</comment><comment><USER4> Low hanging fruits: 1) Get some pink in there, 2) less text, 3) orange/red and bigger Add to Cart buttons.

<comment><USER5> Bigger photos.</comment></comment>