Quora Plans To Expand Beyond Q&A - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/quora-beyond-qanda/ <comment><USER2> > Quora's mission is to share and grow the world's knowledge

By hiding that knowledge from everyone who doesn't sign up or log in with Facebook/Twitter? Sorry, but I'll be celebrating the day Quora dies, hopefully at the hands of StackExchange.

<comment><USER3> When Experts Exchange does this, everyone loathes and ridicules this, but some how Quora is better? It is the same tactic. For a time I found the community on Quora enjoyable, but the site is aimless, demands too much like real names, makes it too difficult to delete and manage your content. Quora comes from the school of Facebook and its product is the content others have created, and its users. Whatever the outcome, I doubt users will see a happy ending in their use of Quora.

<comment><USER4> I think you're vehemently agreeing with Irregardless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> LOL. Quora is such a Crunch-whore. I swear, the only people who know of it or use it are Arrington junkies. Why is this still a "hot" startup? It's just Yahoo! answers with VC and less illiterates.

<comment><USER6> > _I swear, the only people who know of it or use it are Arrington junkies._

Reading that was such a coming-of-age moment for me. In having me realize that HN is not the place I always thought of it as: of adults so much smarter than me, who hold nuanced take on things and discussed issues thoughtfully.

No, Quora is not full of 'Arrington junkies' -- or whatever else you want to call it to feel superior over another part of the web. Questions answered, and answers questioned are often so full of insight that I just very often browse around to pass time. It's like reading an interesting book.

I thought the description ' _Jimmy Wales' site serves as an objective reference guide for the world, while Quora offers subjective answers to popular questions._ ' was quite fitting -- Quora serves its purpose quite well, and I do think it can comfortably grow and evolve into its newly stated goal of becoming a platform for users to publish their writings on. Tone down the knee-jerk cynicism please.

<comment><USER5> LOL. OK, simple question: Do your parents know what Quora is? Do they know what Wikipedia is? Quora is unknown outside of the valley. Is there some switch they're going to hit to open the flood gates into this site, and suddenly overnight the entire country know what it is? Honestly, I don't know anyone outside of the valley who's even heard of Quora.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "South Korean Internet portal Naver (<http://naver.com>), illustrates the potential of Q&A sites. As of July, 2007, Naver handled 77% of internet searches originating inSouth Korea, dwarfing worldwide leaders Yahoo! (4.4%) and Google (1.7%) [19]. One of the reasons for this disparity is the relatively small Korean language corpus available for crawling. To address this shortcoming, Naver built a Q&A site called Knowledge iN that encourages users to type questions for others to answer, rather than relying on search results [2]. Since their 2002 launch of Knowledge iN, Naver has accumulated 70 million questions and answers, and continues to receive over 40,000 questions and 110,000 answers per day [19]."

The source: <http://bit.ly/12EHYUp>

<comment><USER5> OK, but again, it's the only source of this info in South Korea. Here, we have a very robust Wikipedia, endless health sites (for those "How I get pregnant?!" Yahoo! Answers style questions, and an infinite array of other very chatty, very dedicated sites.

I just feel like this ship has sailed. Quora reminds me of Everything2. Remember that site? It's still around, but does anyone really use it much anymore? It's another attempt to put all the info in one big pile. I just don't see that type of effort working anymore outside of a Wikipedia setting.

Also, you know what else is huge in South Korea? Starcraft. But that hasn't helped Activision's stock too much in the States since the merger with Blizzard. South Korea also has insane bandwidth to yer home. I'd much rather investors emulated THAT success than some nebulous info site's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> While it might be counter intuitive, I think the best way for Quora to grow would be allowing reading without logging in. It doesn't even have to be as open as Stackoverflow where you can ask/answer without an account, I just want to read the answers. Maybe then, ironically, I'll sign up.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, in general the pattern for getting me to sign up for a site is something like this is:

1\. Click links to a website that come up while searching for something or reading other sites 2. Notice that you are starting to see consistently good results from that particular site 3. Start to go there directly for content, and maybe even sign up & participate

For Quora this is what happens:

1\. Click links to Quora that come up while searching for something or reading other sites 2. See the blurred text, immediately click the back button 3. Start to equate Quora links with this mini hassle, stop clicking on them

Maybe their content is fantastic, but it is very unlikely that I will sign up for a site of this type that can't prove that to me first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> >> Quora and Wikipedia have long been seen as complementary <<

How is that true? I can't even search on quora without loging in.

<comment><USER11> >> Quora and Wikipedia have long been _seen_ as complementary <<

That depends on who is _looking_ ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12>
        But Quora has had trouble continuing to grow, and has yet to
        announce or implement monetization schemes. Broadening its
        scope could help.

Profound.

<comment><USER13> The beginning of the end. Reminds me of how Foursquare, Airtime, Color, etc... have all been struggling amidst these crazy times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> _The company would need to be sure the community is onboard, and even involve them in the development process_ \- has it changed? when i was there it was very much us (most users) v them (the famous few + mods). in fact the division and general hierarchical approach was more or less a feature, i thought - diversity and inclusion meant dilution; elitism was going to drive the top content.

also, does d'angelo still look like that? surely it's been a while now since his voice broke?

</comment><comment><USER15> Unless I've misread these companies, I don't quite think Medium and Quora are aiming for the same thing. Medium is more of a creative platform for storytellers (fiction) while Quora is more of a factual platform for information (non-fiction).

That's not to say Medium couldn't have non-fiction as well, just as bloggers could write about fiction and non-fiction on the same blog, though bloggers tend to stick with one format or the other within the same site.

</comment><comment><USER16> Quora should have users post answers and then others respond with what the question should be. Jeopardy-style.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think Quora's founders just need to take SEO seriously for a few weeks. Successful Q&A sites like Stackoverflow and Yahoo Answers rely on search engines for their traffic. Quora should embrace this and stop trying to be Facebook.</comment>


I'm really happy this site exists to discuss topics intelligently - <AUTHOR> I was getting tired of the repetitiveness and simplicity of reddit.  That is all. : ) <comment><USER2> Really? I find the reverse to be true. I have found it far easier to express incongruent opinions and factoids on Reddit and not get into trouble for it. Here on HN, everyone is so politically correct and expects others to be too; it's terrifying. My point again is that on Reddit, you can get away with expressing dissimilar views; this is a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER3> People on HN seem to be more open minded and curious. Reddit seems more judgemental. Just my 2 cents

</comment><comment><USER4> reddit was coopted by marketers about 5 years ago. As is every site which relies on ads.

What's puzzling to me about reddit specifically is the politicisation of almost every thread.

It's exhausting dealing with that mindset.

</comment><comment><USER5> a rational site unlike HN and Reddit would have about 10 users. it takes more effort to write a rational political comment than to make a ycombinator pitch.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yes hacker news really is an oasis.

</comment><comment><USER7> it's nice but it definitely suffers from the SV echo chamber</comment>


Nassim Talebs case against Nate Silver is bad math - <AUTHOR> http://m.nautil.us/blog/nassim-talebs-case-against-nate-silver-is-bad-math <comment><USER2> As I understand it, the feud in its current form started from a tweet from Dinesh D'Souza [1] in which he interpreted Nate Silver's statement that "Dems, GOP winning House are 'both extremely possible'" to mean that they had gone from an 80% chance of winning to a 50% chance.

Taleb inexplicably chose this as the hill to die on [2] and wrote a lengthy and technical paper to refute, and replied (on the [2] thread) "When someone says are event and its opposite are extremely possible I infer either 1) 50/50 or 2) the predictor is shamelessly hedging, in other words, BS."

I've often found Taleb's ideas to be profound and interesting, and unfortunately offset by his arrogance and occasionally cryptic pronouncements and colorful colloquial "Brooklyn-ese" intentional misspellings of words (like "gabish" for "capisce"). But in this case I'm having trouble following what his criticism even is -- forecasts, especially probability forecasts, are hard, and evaluating them is hard -- the dimensions of skill vs. calibration vs. precision are hard to evaluate, and Nate Silver does a fairly good job of describing the tension.

[1] [https://twitter.com/DineshDSouza/status/1059147114826162177](https://twitter.com/DineshDSouza/status/1059147114826162177)

[2] [https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1059202026184282113](https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1059202026184282113)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, "extremely possible" is perhaps a poor choice of words, and could be interpreted uncharitably as a hedge against any outcome, but I think there's an obvious charitable interpretation too: that things that have a 20% chance of occurring turn out to occur around 20% of the time. No one would be blown away by surprise if I proclaimed "SIX!" then rolled a six-sided die and got a six, but that's even less likely than 20%.

So it's reasonable to say that, if 538 claims that an event has a 20% probability of happening, and that event happens, no one should be astonished. Of course, such events _ought_ to happen about 20% of the time, if 538's models are good. And that evaluation is precisely what 538 published a few days ago: [https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/checking-our- work/](https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/checking-our-work/)

<comment><USER4> Loads of people criticized Silver for not having "predicted" Trump's electoral victory. I imagine Silver's language was trying to hand-hold people to an understanding that even 20% probability events happen 1 out of 5 times. With so many people trying to twist and spin every headline, prediction, number, I appreciate Silver's attempt to make a reasonable guess with transparent methodologies.

<comment><USER5> I have a hard time understanding this: what does it mean to assign probabilities to one-off events?? The only way to verify probabilities predictions is to test it a great number of times. Otherwise you can say anything and never be wrong (except for 0 or 100%).

<comment><USER6> Every event is a one-off event. In particular the Trump election was the most one-off event in recent memory :)

Kidding aside, your observation is correct, you need to perform repeated predictions. 538 does just that. They keep predicting a whole lot of outcomes, so you can check their track record. They even have a challenge for the audience, where you can record your own predictions and compare them with their corresponding predictions (see for example [1] for NFL games). The scoring of the predictions uses the Brier score [2], which is just a version of R-squared for classification problems.

In the case of the November 2016 election, other prediction sites were giving the Trump team a 1-2% chance, 538 was giving them a 20% change. Considering that, 538 comes out as the clear winner.

Which brings us to what I consider to be the best measure of prediction accuracy (my own invention, it doesn't have a scientific name yet): you can compare two sequences of predictions (let's say yours agains 538) by simulating bets at some mid-odds level. For example if I say Trump's probability of winning 2020 is 45% and you say it's 35%, then I'm willing to give you 2-to-3 odds, while you're willing to take that. We then see who stays ahead most of the time in this betting simulation.

For what is worth, here's a recent survey of different scoring types for predictions: "Assessing the performance of prediction models: a framework for traditional and novel measures" [3]

[1] [https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/nfl-predictions- game/](https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/nfl-predictions-game/) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brier_score](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brier_score) [3] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20010215](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20010215)

<comment><USER7> > In the case of the November 2016 election, other prediction sites were > giving the Trump team a 1-2% chance, 538 was giving them a 20% change. > Considering that, 538 comes out as the clear winner.

One common mistake I've seen is people mistaking that 20% as the expected vote ratio. It definitely wasn't; that was hidden behind an apparently too-well- hidden toggle (buttons above the graph), and was floating around 45% Trump and 48% Clinton, with overlapping error ranges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Since Silver's forecasts begin with probability models, it's safe to assume they obey all the rules, including Bayes', and would be arbitrage-free."

I'll do the author the courtesy of assuming they've got a more expanded version of their argument in their head and just failed to express that, but I don't think that follows at all. I don't think there's a constraint on "Nate Silver has a probability model" that mathematically guarantees "Nate Silver's probability model" is correct, in any sense of that term. One could certainly provide evidence and/or proofs that Nate Silver's model follows those rules, but I don't think it just goes without saying. If nothing else the model could contain an straight-up error; goodness knows that's easy enough.

(If one wishes to add to the concept "probability model" that it must be correct by definition, than I can't accept the statement "Nate Silver has a probability model" with mathematical levels of confidence. He claims to have one, yes, but that's a long way from a proof.)

<comment><USER9> > I don't think there's a constraint on "Nate Silver has a probability model" > that mathematically guarantees "Nate Silver's probability model" is correct

If I'm understanding the article correctly, it's not talking about models being "correct," it's just talking about the probabilities of all the outcomes adding up to 100%, which means you can't place a bet that _guarantees_ you make money regardless of the outcome.

In other words, offering a bet that was based on the claim that there is a 99% chance of rain today in the Atacama Desert, and a 1% chance of no rain there, is arbitrage-free. It's still clearly a poor probability model for one of the driest places on Earth, but it's arbitrage-free.

<comment><USER10> If over time, your forecasts predictably change, then you can be arbitraged.

If e.g. I know that you'll have a probability below 40% at some point in the future, and I know you'll have a number above 41% at some point in the future, then it's trivial to create a strategy over time that is guaranteed to make money.

Taleb's claim, as I understand it, is that Silver is incorporating random noise into his model and so will exhibit such predictably swings, which enables arbitrage.

<comment><USER11> If over time, your forecasts _predictably_ change, then they are not the best forecasts you could make with the information on hand (I take it that by "predictably change", you mean that they will change in a predictable way, not just that it is predictable that they will change somehow.)

If I am not mistaken, an opportunity for arbitrage is not created merely by a certainty that they will change somehow; it would require that they change in a specific way, and deterministically so. Absent this, a bet would just be speculation, not arbitrage.

<comment><USER10> >If over time, your forecasts predictably change, then they are not the best forecasts you could make with the information on hand.

And this is precisely the complaint Taleb is making.

An arbitrage is just a strategy that's guaranteed to make money. If you know for sure that something will go up and down at different points you could make money risk free. Simply buy at any point below the current price and sell at any point above.

<comment><USER12> > An arbitrage is just a strategy that's guaranteed to make money. If you know > for sure that something will go up and down at different points you could > make money risk free. Simply buy at any point below the current price and > sell at any point above.

This is not arbitrage. Also this is precisely the kind of strategy Taleb would have argued against in his book about black swan events.

<comment><USER10> Time arbitrage is arbitrage.

If someone was flipping a coin and raising their price when it landed heads and lowering it when tails, arbitraging using reversion to the means would be a perfectly legitimate arb strategy.

Taleb's argument is that Silver's estimates are based on random noise, and are thus vulnerable to this form of arbitrage.

<comment><USER13> It think it's… sort of the reverse? Flipping a coin results in Brownian motion, which is an example of a "martingale", a function whose expected future value is equal to its current value; and the evolution of a share price being a martingale (at least under a modified probability measure) is exactly the condition for the market to _not_ have arbitrage:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk- neutral_measure](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-neutral_measure)

I'm not sure exactly how the arbitrage works, though.

But the argument in the paper seems to be not that there's noise but that there's too much of it. In fact, it assumes that the expected vote share over time is subject to Brownian motion with specific parameters (which is a rather flawed assumption), but then concludes that 538's probability distribution is more swingy what he'd calculate from those parameters.

<comment><USER10> The point is that Silver's predictions are the result of coin flips, but that the underlying probability isn't. If he's updating further than he should then you can make money by updating the correct amount and betting against him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So... I wrote this. Maybe I can clarify a little what I meant by the statement "Since Silver's forecasts begin with probability models, it's safe to assume they obey all the rules, including Bayes', and would be arbitrage-free.", since this seems to be confusing some people:

What I'm addressing here is Taleb's claim that Silver's probabilities would allow for arbitrage (i.e., riskless profit, not just profit on average) if turned into betting prices. This is in the sense of arbitrage-through-time, buying low and then selling high. As I discussed in the piece, an old argument due to de Finetti says that if prices are arbitrage-free they must satisfy the equations of probability, meaning you can in some sense think of the price as giving a probability of the outcome. For time-dynamic arbitrage the relevant equation is Bayes' Theorem. All I meant by my statement above is that the converse to de Finetti's argument is also true, trivially. If prices obey the equations of probability they are automatically arbitrage-free. And since Silver's probabilities begin life as probabilities, they satisfy all the relevant equations (one would expect).

Technically, the way we'd express this in modern finance is through the Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing, which says a (complete) market is arbitrage-free if and only if there exists an equivalent measure under which asset prices are martingales. Silver's probabilities are necessarily martingales, just because of the way conditional probability math works, so unless Taleb can claim that his and Silver's probabilities aren't equivalent, meaning they disagree on what events have probability zero, then there is no chance of arbitrage. That's just the mathy way of saying the same thing I said in the post.

There are many other possible errors Silver could be making, and many other possible criticisms Taleb could have made but did not. In this case he wrote a paper claiming a mathematical result that just isn't true.

Hope that's helpful!

<comment><USER15> Aside (but not really): guessing this is you? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6P1rjJuD_M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6P1rjJuD_M) A totally awesome set of lectures... highly recommended.

<comment><USER14> Yep! Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Isn't it just one big misunderstanding between them?

Taleb thinks 538's probabilities represent a binary option price on the event, in which case, yes, the probabilities should stay very close to 50% because the vol is so high. Whereas Silver's models are actually saying "Based on current polls, if the election were held tomorrow, then the probability candidate X wins is Y%" and are thus allowed to swing more wildly. Aren't both just fundamentally different things or am I missing something in Taleb's argument?

<comment><USER17> You basically have it right.

But it's not a misunderstanding. Taleb understands Silver's approach, but thinks it's BS, entertainment not forecasting.

He's right, but I don't know why he cares. The problem isn't that Silver doesn't know math, it's that his goal is to entertain, not predict.

<comment><USER18> Taleb calling someone else an entertainer is a bit rich, sort of like a clown telling someone to have dignity. I have no opinion on Silver whatsoever, but Taleb is a bloviating ass who has gone from popular milquetoast observations, to climbing fully up his own backpassage. That this all began with the likes of Dinesh D'Souza doesn't help.

I realize that Black Swan is popular here, but it was horrendous. A single essential premise which, instead of support, rested for chapter after chapter on assertions. That's not evidence, it wasn't an argument, it was the sound of someone having one good idea and then realizing they lacked the capacity to support it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Nassem Taleb is an arrogant asshole who can't write. I tried reading "The Black Swan" and gave up in a flurry of swearing after less than 100 pages because he utterly failed to justify any of his breathless assertions with anything resembling an argument. Assertion after assertion with no reasoning linking them. Game to Silver on points. At least he can back up his arguments with explanations.

<comment><USER20> So Nassim Taleb's "Silent Risk"[1], a mathematical parallel version to Incerto, is not good enough?

[1] [http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/SilentRisk.pdf](http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/SilentRisk.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Related meta-analysis from the last go-around: [https://towardsdatascience.com/why-you-should-care-about- the...](https://towardsdatascience.com/why-you-should-care-about-the-nate- silver-vs-nassim-taleb-twitter-war-a581dce1f5fc)

(Implicitly endorsed by Taleb via retweet)

</comment><comment><USER22> I really want to be Nassim Taleb, I don't want to get a real job, I don't want to be a slave for any kind of rules or laws whether in corporates, government or academia, I am much bigger than that, I just want to make enough money trading and shorting stocks during an economic bubble and retire young and then set myself emperor of the world and make fun of whoever I don't like such those academics who can't make 6 figure until in their 50s, of course academics are much less smarter than a stock trader, otherwise why couldn't they become rich like Taleb? right?!

<comment><USER23> Well, you're being sarcastic, but he does have a point in all that.

The proof of the pudding being in the eating, and all that.

There's something to be said for respecting somebody who betted on something he called and won (especially if they did it repeatedly), especially when most others were all against the very possibility of them being right...

And being free with fuck you money does give you some freedom to say truths (even if they're just your personal truths) employees can't.

<comment><USER22> even though I am kinda sarcastic I extremely admire this kind of thinking (assuming that I got him right), many stock traders have this kind of free thinking mentality and disdain for all kinds of rules and authority, George Soros once said that the only reason people read about his philosophy is that he made a few billions, he knew from the very beginning that having enough money would make his ideas worth of being considered for smart people and absolutely right for retarded people. It's like money shifts the truth or something!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> If I understand Taleb's argument, it can be boiled down to the following:

A year before an election, there's 365 days worth of news stories, interviews, scandals, and other stuff that will be released to the public before election day. The day before the election, 364 days of that election influencing stuff has already happened and the effects of it are now known. As you get closer to an election, you have more information, and there is less time for public opinion to change, so it follows that you can be more certain of the election's outcome.

Taleb's assumption that voter psychology can be modeled with a random walk is pretty questionable, but if you give him that assumption, what's wrong with his math? The article doesn't actually address this.

</comment><comment><USER25> On the other hand, he managed to get Nate Silver so mad that he called Taleb a cuck. So who can tell who is actually right

<comment><USER9> Each person's _claims_ are either right or wrong (assuming they are objective claims), regardless of any attribute or action of the person making the claim.

<comment><USER26> There are situations where they can be both correct or wrong based on how you judge them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Russ Roberts invited them both to discuss their differences on econtalk- Nassim promptly declined. Until that happens, I think the twitter feud is without value.

</comment><comment><USER28> Taleb's response to this article: [https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1115684446081040386](https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1115684446081040386)

<comment><USER29> It's worth noting that Clayton has a much more thorough, mathematical response to Taleb's paper (written back in November): [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tQj4ZGja6jKADJGiFj- dcQAirWo...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tQj4ZGja6jKADJGiFj- dcQAirWoUFX46/view)

Since Taleb delights in make his mathematical writing as opaque as possible, it's a useful read in just to know exactly the claims that Taleb is making in his paper.

<comment><USER30> By that link's characterization Taleb's argument is pure fluff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> From a business perspective, the volatility of Silver's models seem like a feature - they enhance the drama / sensationalism of election coverage. One week, he's telling me candidate X will likely win, the next week it's candidate Y, and I'm on the edge of my seat.

If Silver really believed these probabilities were correct, he should be willing make bets with these odds, otherwise his incentives are distorted.

<comment><USER32> _> If Silver really believed these probabilities were correct, he should be willing make bets with these odds, otherwise his incentives are distorted._

Yes, the "skin in the game" argument. That is Nassim Taleb's calling card. Personally, I consider it a little unreasonable to expect people to literally put their money where their mouth is every time they make a forecast.

<comment><USER33> It's a kind of ad hoc censitary suffrage. One can only put possessions on the line if they have them, and the greater one's possessions, the greater their perceived "skin".

<comment><USER32> Yeah I get the idea, I just don't like that it encourages dismissal of opinions which aren't backed by some form of collateral.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Taleb in person at a talk is very different than Taleb with a bottle of wine on Twitter.

To both of their credit, they've expanded my knowledge of probability and statistics.

<comment><USER35> Have they though, or have they only made you feel as though your knowledge of probability and statistics has expanded? Taleb is the poster boy for "sound and fury, signifying nothing"

<comment><USER36> I don't know about Taleb, but Nate Silver's book on Bayesian statistics and prediction in general got me really interested in statistics from a general- reader standpoint. Where I ended up digging harder into the more math/sciencey books afterwards.

The part about predicting Earthquakes and his work on sports is really good.

[https://www.amazon.com/Signal-Noise-Many-Predictions- Fail/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/Signal-Noise-Many-Predictions- Fail/dp/B009HL6444/)

<comment><USER35> I agree about Silver, and that was kind of my point! Silver knows his shit and is able to communicate it in such a way that the reader actually learns something. Taleb may or may not know anything, but all he is able to convey to the reader is the impression that they've learned something (however, he is very good at giving the reader an unearned sense of intellectual superiority).

<comment><USER36> Sure but he sounds like a decent scientist to me. While it's true his organization is very much an entertainment vector rather than a more academic science output, which lowers the bar, that doesn't necessarily mean the work he's doing doesn't have some utility and value.

Probably a lot more real value than a typical news outlet these days which pump out garbage at high speeds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I stopped paying attention when Silver said the Buckeyes only had a 2 percent chance to win the title, because I knew that was bogus, team was stacked. Then he did the same thing with the Cavs when they turned around and won, so it just seemed to fit what Taleb says about "predictors" in The Black Swan. Since then, I don't listen much to forecasters, their track record is dubious.

</comment><comment><USER38> Whilst the fighting between the two is childish, I've always found this interesting in a "statistics vs probability" perspective.

They may look like similar fields of art, but are radically different in their approaches and how they seek to understand the world.

It also doesn't help that probability theory takes digs at statistics with rules such as the "Law of the unconscious statistician"

</comment><comment><USER10> >The converse to the statement above is also true: if prices form a set of probabilities, then they are consistent. Since Silver's forecasts begin with probability models, it's safe to assume they obey all the rules, including Bayes', and would be arbitrage-free.

I don't believe this is correct. You can lose money to arbitrage even with a calibrated model if you ignore data someone else has, or include random noise someone else isn't including, which is what Taleb's argument is.

<comment><USER39> Someone betting Taleb-style would have an edge over someone directly betting on Silver's forecast numbers, but technically that's not arbitrage -- arbitrage in the sense of the article means a strategy with guaranteed return, not just very probable. Is that right? So my impression is that this is an argument about words, where traders mean 'arbitrage' more broadly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> There are several problems with both of them.

(1) Most of Nassim Taleb's math is more branding and showing off than actual science or statistics. It has been stated by people who are far smarter than Taleb that "if you can't state it simply then you don't understand it." If Richard Feynman can explain physics in a relatable way, then taleb can talk about statistics in the same. He doesn't because explaining is not his objective, personal branding is.

Taleb uses obscure, nonsensical math to show off and brow beat opponents. In my experience, working with people who are actually smart, this is not what very educated and intelligent people do.

The general public may fall for pictures of pages of obscure nonsensical calculations depicting god knows what, all I see is fraudulent personal marketing.

I say this having worked for and known CEOs who use the same tricks to lie to investors. It's bullshit.

(2) Nate Silver runs a media opinion network. I followed his work and early on they did very rigorous analysis and had great and accurate visualizations which did seem to accurate predict results.

For whatever reason, I saw five thirty eight evolve into a bunch of media talking points and opinion mongering. The coverage on five thirty eight for the 2016 election resembled strongly that of standard news networks.

Why? Because if you want to make money on advertising you need to completely fill the airwaves with as much content as possible and opinion content is the cheapest and easiest to produce.

My opinion is that Nate slipped. His data analysis got distracted by running a media business, which focuses on advertising revenue and being likable by target demographics.

Frankly I don't trust either of them. I also side more strongly with Taleb - predicting outcomes with random hidden variables is an exercise in chicanery.

No one wants to hear that the universe is random and that predicting it is impossible for long stretches of time. Look at the comments here, 90% of people (probably programmers) think that if they can just find the right equations then predicting the future is possible.

Nope.

</comment><comment><USER41> Academic math: deriving precise solutions to predictive equations (eg @NateSilver538)

Risk taker math: evaluating exposure to potential distributions (eg @nntaleb)

With whom would you invest? Also, a useful heuristic to detect charlatans. Our knowledge of future never precise.

more at [https://twitter.com/_NicT_/status/1115818015004688386](https://twitter.com/_NicT_/status/1115818015004688386)

</comment><comment><USER42> I really like reading Nassim Taleb's books, but he appears to have all of the social skills of, say, Linus Torvalds, when interacting with others in a public way.

</comment><comment><USER43> Some old answers on Math Stack Exchange (Asked Sep 1 '16):

[https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1911110/what-is- nas...](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1911110/what-is-nassim- talebs-criticism-of-538s-election-model)

</comment><comment><USER44> It might look bad for both for them but also a good way to drum up some twitter followers. I followed them.

</comment><comment><USER45> Taleb is smart etc but he's basically a rambling eccentric who I ignore at this point

</comment><comment><USER46> What's the probability that these guys are friends in real life who both mutually benefit from the popularity of their public feud?

<comment><USER47> I have a hard time believing Taleb can keep any friends. He thinks everyone is an idiot, and doesn't have any reservation about telling them.

<comment><USER48> He's good friends with Stephen Wolfram. Take that any way you like.

<comment><USER49> A new kind of friendship.

<comment><USER50> underrated comment

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I think nate silver is bad math because when he can capitalize on drama he does. He paints himself as a fortune teller via math but has clear demonstrable bias. When you do that as a predictor then you've thrown out your integrity.

</comment><comment><USER52> I think the world would be a better place if nobody did any election forecasting. I don't see what positive value these forecasts provide.

<comment><USER53> What positive value does American Football provide?

It gives us brain damage and entertainment, not much unlike election forecasting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I have zero respect for election forecasters because I think they are not any better than astrologers. Nate silver has used the word probability in a way that is not consistent with mathematical definition of probability so often in this context.

Taleb despite being brilliant mathematician is actually pretty mediocre when it comes to real world. A lot of his "discoveries" such as "skin in the game" are well known to economists in the form of various theories.

I once exchanged few tweets with him about his criticism of Pinker's claim that we are probably living in one of the most peaceful times in human history. At no point Pinker makes a claim it was inevitable or it being the evidence that peace will continue to exist. Taleb wrote a length paper on the topic which I found to be totally incoherent. When I asked questions his retort was that I do not understand statistics.

<comment><USER55> Do you have an example of a time where Nate Silver has shown a misunderstanding of probability? Everything I've read by him has seemed informed.

<comment><USER9> The best criticism I can come up with is that 538 probably doesn't do a sufficient job of explaining to its audience that their published probabilities are predictions for what would happen _if the event occurred today_.

This seems to be one of Taleb's (and others') criticisms of their predictions: that they don't consider the probability of major unexpected events occurring between now and the event (like an athlete getting injured in the future, or the FBI announcing an investigation of a political candidate). But as I understand it, 538 is explicitly not attempting to consider those things, and is simply publishing probabilities of outcomes if the event were to happen _now_.

<comment><USER56> That seems like a pretty big difference to gloss over. Why are they publishing probabilities for if the event were to happen today? The event _isn 't_ happening today!

<comment><USER57> I know, right? Every time my meteorologist gives me a probability of rain on a day that it doesn't rain I ask the same question.

<comment><USER58> Meteorologists don't try to predict the weather 2 months from now.

<comment><USER57> Nate hasn't been trying to predict elections that far out, either, to be fair. He has always said some variant of "if the election were held today" when discussing the model.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


FAP80, a retro computer without the retro baggage - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dekuNukem/fap80 <comment><USER2> This is cool, but there's an argument to be made that the baggage is the whole point of doing retro computing. You can emulate a Z80 on an STM32 and it will run faster than the real thing. Much faster. So why bother with a real Z80? Because there is something ineffably cool about the "real thing". It's kind of like vinyl records. Digital audio is vastly superior by any objective measure, and yet people still want vinyl. The don't want it _despite_ the clicks and pops and the annoyance of having to clean it and futz with the needle and the turntable speed, they want it _because_ of all of these things.

<comment><USER3> I suspect the vast majority of people find programming a computer with toggle switches fun for only the first 8 instructions.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GmY_UrbXnA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GmY_UrbXnA)

Hex pads and push buttons isn't much better.

[https://youtu.be/e8u_lY7RnTI?t=4m03s](https://youtu.be/e8u_lY7RnTI?t=4m03s)

These projects are very cool, but I think too much futzing for most people.

<comment><USER4> > These projects are very cool, but I think too much futzing for most people.

Why learn an instrument when you can just torrent some music

<comment><USER5> depends on what you want to do.

Do you want to make games? Using something like the PICO-8 will still mean you're gonna futz around. But you'll be futzing around on game design-y stuff, rather than on "how do I get pixels to the screen" futzing.

If you want to make game engines, then the pixels to the screen is the fun part.

I futzed around so much as a kid, but not because I wanted to. It was more because I didn't know any better, and was just trying to get to what I "really" wanted to futz with.

<comment><USER3> Yes. I don't think I was clear enough with my first comment.

Futzing is great, and I celebrate people who futz on this kind of level. The people who code golf a bubble sort to be one less instruction; the people who can cram a plasma and text scroller demo into 89 bytes; the people who really understand everything about a system from top to bottom, inside out and upside down.

As a society we're not very good at protecting those people from harm (in the form of bullying from other students) or providing them with work that makes the most of their rare talent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thought the retro people might like this - the first computer I built - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Smith_Super-80_Computer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Smith_Super-80_Computer).

Z80 based 16K ram, yes thats a K. 2MHz processor. Plugged it into a cassette player for storage. Loading programs was hit and miss. I later splurged and bought a Basic ROM, initially you had to program it in Hex. I used it for most of my uni days, running linear regressions for lab. It cost me $300 AUD then, all my school kid savings :-).

This was the book I learned assembler on [https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Z80-Rodnay- Zaks/dp/089588...](https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Z80-Rodnay- Zaks/dp/0895880695/ref=pd_sim_14_1?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0895880695&pd_rd_r=JGJVMVFNRKPHMKR3R4Y8&pd_rd_w=EdHN0&pd_rd_wg=3HMjb&psc=1&refRID=JGJVMVFNRKPHMKR3R4Y8) a classic.

Edit: It initially had just upper case characters - these were bitmaps stored in a ROM. I later bought an add on board that added lower case characters and graphic characters (like the old PC-DOS characters) contained in another ROM. I think from memory you could also add a RAM chip and load your own programmable characters, though that could have been my imagination. I have vague recollections of trying to figure out ways to make it have graphics that you could move around using the RAM, so I could make my own space invaders game :-)

<comment><USER7> The fall of Dick Smith Electronics makes me rather sad.

<comment><USER6> yes, it had stopped being an electronics place a long time ago though. Jaycar is still around

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The blog posts have a ton more detail and make for fascinating reading (or browsing the pictures):

[https://dekunukem.wordpress.com/](https://dekunukem.wordpress.com/)

It's an interesting take on retro; gives the user the feel of a retro computer without all the gnarly period-accurate hardware. Also amusing that the STM32 supporting CPU has far more power than the main Z80 CPU.

<comment><USER9> > Also amusing that the STM32 supporting CPU has far more power than the main > Z80 CPU.

I believe some Commodore drive already had two processors identical to the main processor of the computer -- effectively giving the drive more processing power than the actual computer :)

<comment><USER10> The 1571 had one 6502 inside, at 2MHz (double speed of the C64 Cpu) [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_1571](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_1571)

<comment> david-given The 8250 (the equivalent disk drive for the PET) had _two_ 6502s inside!

In today's language, one was the application processor running DOS and the other was a DSP that did the low level hardware monkeying; they were connected up to a shared data bus. Because the 6502 only does bus accesses on one phase of the clock, by inverting the clock for one processor, it was safe to connect them both up to the bus simultaneously with no loss of speed...

<comment><USER9> Ah right, I was thinking about the 8250 indeed. It made _click_ when you mentioned their curious "multi-processor" arrangement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Really nice to see a Z80-project :) I'm actually finishing my own Z80 microcomputer this weekend. But mine will utilize a symphony of exotic 7400 series chips and hard-to-get Z80 peripheral chips. All ceramic ones. So if anyone wants to build their own, it will cost several hundreds of dollars :-/. But the idea with the project was to learn how computers where built in the early 80s, not to do a modern approach, like you :-)

Fun name, by the way. Mine will be named Calculon80 or Calculon64 :-D

<comment><USER12> Is your room gonna smell like soldering rosin while you're making the device? Cause there's no "real retro" without that smell of rosin. :)

<comment><USER13> Oh, come now! Surely an impenetrable tangle of fragile little wires wrapped around a forest of little square pegs is retro enough?

<comment><USER11> I first built my computer using low quality breadboards and a lot of wires, which I tried to keep as tidy as possible, without success ;-) I designed a PCB in KiCAD and got 5 of them delivered a week ago. Sooo much better :-)

I wonder how the FAP80 was prototyped?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting. I was poking around the MAME database and found that the Z80 was used as recently as 2010 by a company called Igrosoft to make video slot machines, along with some modern PLDs and support chips. They also use a YM2149-compatible sound chip for that authentic bleepy sound.

More details: [https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/drivers...](https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/drivers/multfish.cpp)

<comment><USER15> This chip makes me laugh: [http://www.keil.com/dd/docs/datashts/nuvoton/w78e054d_w78e05...](http://www.keil.com/dd/docs/datashts/nuvoton/w78e054d_w78e052d_w78e051d.pdf)

It's a clone of an intel chip from the 80s. It's still used to make new stuff. Here's a video of it

[https://youtu.be/i3B_KKyntQE?t=15m52s](https://youtu.be/i3B_KKyntQE?t=15m52s)

<comment><USER16> The 8051 family also has a huge amount of support tooling for it -- compilers, validation tooling, etc. For a lot of jobs where the 8051 lives, a new architecture would just mean an expensive set of validation tests for no real benefit.

<comment><USER15> Wow, you're right. I figured an 8051 was popular, but its derivatives make up >50% of the embedded market it seems. I am guessing most clones offer more than 128 bytes of memory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> red-indian This is a nice project and I have no objection to it.

It's interesting that he includes an STM32, an FPGA, and other such devices, as support and peripheral emulation chips, in his effort to get his 6502 running as he would like.

Part of the education of my students here on the reservation we don't have a lot of resources. But we were able to score some nice FPGAs so they've designed and built from the gate level their own CPUs from scratch, then built compilers and interpreters on top of that. The youngest to do so was 9. It's been really convenient as well to be able to order inexpensive boards rather than having to deal with all the copper etching with chemicals as we did a few years ago.

</comment><comment><USER17> When i was a kid, i had a Mattel Aquarius. Those early days were great. Whilst this project does rekindle some of that nostalgia, I'm not sure I'll be FAPping anytime soon.

</comment><comment><USER18> _So instead of trying to recreate the "good old days", I made the decision to liberally use modern parts to simplify the design process..._

Then uses a thru-hole Z80.

If that's not a perfect illustration of nostalgia, I don't know what is. Remembering the good parts without all of the fuss of the not so good. Very nice project. I'd probably buy that as a hobby kit.

<comment><USER11> Maybe the Z80 should be retro but not the rest? :-) A small surface mounted Z80 would modernize the FAP80 a bit more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Cool... the idea reminds me of TempleOS, which was meant to evoke the spirit of the C64 but run on and take advantage of modern hardware.

</comment><comment><USER20> I would also recommend looking at the RC2014 project. Kits are available for order on Tindie. The mailing list is very active and new developments happen regularly.

[http://rc2014.co.uk/](http://rc2014.co.uk/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Awesome project. Kind of off-topic: I wish I could buy such a machine or something similar as fully assembled mini laptop device with a large character LCD display.

I've been looking for fully programmable, full keyboard devices with extremely long battery life (weeks not days) for years, and all I can find are old pocket calculators and vintage machines from the 80s. I've had high hopes for the PocketChip, but there you go: 5 hours battery life only. :(

</comment><comment><USER22> I really would love someone to build something like this on one of those FRAM chips so there is no volitile memory on the system. I'd love to write an opterating system for such an enviroment (like those non-volatile time sharing systems from the 80s that made use of stateless microkernels and really pushed the limits of disk).

<comment><USER23> The peak transfer rate of NVMe SSDs is getting close to theoretical DDR1 SDRAM speeds; not sure how well random access works in comparison, and if there's an easy way of interfacing them, but it should be able to keep an alternate history-retro machine with a ~100 MHz system clock occupied.

Another possibility would be to use an obscene amount of SRAM (by retro standards) and a battery to keep it powered at all times.

<comment><USER24> > Another possibility would be to use an obscene amount of SRAM (by retro > standards) and a battery to keep it powered at all times.

Like the DUO Mega [0]? 16 Atmega328P's in concert, with 32kb of SRAM.

[0] [http://www.ostracodfiles.com/mega/menu.html](http://www.ostracodfiles.com/mega/menu.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think your project is awesome. Wish I had something like this 30 years ago. Having the Z80 clock controlled by a microcontroller is pure genius. We used an in-circuit emulator, and always wished we could write code for the ICE.

</comment><comment><USER26> I love it when people make stuff like this.

</comment><comment><USER27> Super cool. I'm impressed.

</comment><comment><USER28> Is there a youtube video of it in action?

</comment><comment><USER29> FAP? Really ?

</comment><comment><USER30> I assume awkward name is intentional.

<comment><USER31> It is juvenile, and hurts the project. Too bad because it is pretty cool.

<comment><USER32> If you go looking for issues, you'll find them, alright...

From the repo: "FAP stands for FPGA Assisted Processor, inspired by Steve Ciarcia's 1981 book Build Your Own Z80 Computer, in which he called his computer ZAP, short for Z80 Application Processor."

<comment><USER33> Go looking? It's literally the project's name. Or do you think people see "FAP" and go "oh, jeez, that's such an unfamiliar word, I guess it's an acronym? wonder what it stands for"?

<comment><USER32> It's in the repo. There is no guessing necessary.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


New command for Philae - <AUTHOR> http://www.dlr.de/dlr/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10081/151_read-16365/#/gallery/21643 <comment><USER2> "During the night of 21 December 2015, a weak signal was received by the Rosetta spacecraft and examined by the mission team. Their analysis revealed that this was not a transmission from the lander."

This seems like something that deserves a little more elaboration.

<comment><USER3> That got me intrigued too. Found a bit more info on it in the comments of a reddit post here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/3xtu76/comet_lander_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/3xtu76/comet_lander_philae_still_alive_ten_seconds_of/)

<comment><USER2> Thanks. This seems to be the key relevant quote from that thread: "The RSSI telemetry showed a single value sticking out of the noise, that's it."

So, just something random. Computer glitch, cosmic ray whacking something, or similar. Not aliens, alas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Comet landing was November 2015? Is the mission really that recent? I thought I heard about it earlier.

<comment><USER5> It's a typo, the landing occurred in Nov 2014.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Low-tech, but powerful app activity troubleshooting utility for Linux - <AUTHOR> https://tanelpoder.com/psnapper/ <comment><AUTHOR> I built Linux Process Snapper for making application activity analysis (task states, syscalls, kernel waits) easier. This is a python script that does not require any installation and only samples files that are available in Linux /proc filesystem. Therefore no application tracing or kernel modules are needed and in many cases not even root access is needed.

This tool is useful for production use and for people who end up troubleshooting stuff in lots of different servers where their favorite observability toolsets are not installed (or wouldn't even work due to an old Linux version).</comment>


IOS+Android SDK for deep linking to in-app purchase funnel - <AUTHOR> http://blog.app.net/2011/09/13/now-available-deep-link-sdks-for-ios-android-more/

<comment><USER2> Very cool to see this go public. I used the SDK in the closed-beta period in several of my apps to help promote purchases... works great. The funnel analytics to show the user flows were very helpful also.

Highly recommended if you are an app developer with IAP.</comment>


Alan Kay on how many books you can read in an year - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mmeditations/alan-kay-on-how-many-books-you-can-read-in-a-lifetime-e0f08682b13d <comment><USER2> I never understood how people can read so quickly and still comprehend everything. I feel like that is the limiting factor for me reading a book every day.

<comment><USER3> For me, comprehending everything in a book is not a goal. A good book goes past my limits at the time. It creates questions and curiosity. Later maybe a read something else and the thing I read earlier suddenly makes sense. Comprehending everything is contrary to another thing I find helpful...no compulsion to finish every book.

It took me a long time to stop treating quitting a book as an intellectual failure. It was hard, in part I think, because I had learned to read books as if it was an academic assignment and as if there would be a test on the material next Tuesday. There isn't. The measure of success from reading a book is that it might have value at some point later and that later might be years later. And comprehending a little about the contents of a book means I can comprehend something else in some other book.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the most useful HN thread you have saved? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> How does one overcome the need for instant gratification?[0]

What's your process for learning?[1]

How do I fix my posture after years at the computer?[2]

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14751439](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14751439)

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14637859](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14637859)

[2]: [http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=14773820](http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=14773820)

<comment><USER3> Link [2] is dead for me both http and https. Is it available elsewhere?

<comment><USER3> Looks like .org was the culprit: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14773820](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14773820)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13859961](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13859961)

About an old programming language I'm interested in mostly because of its builtin database.

</comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone take the time to review other users' public favorites?

There are "best of HN" threads to search for.

<comment><USER6> How does one review other users' public favorites?

<comment><USER5> [https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=Mz](https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=Mz)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like threads about books and the stock market, but yet to save one...</comment>


Creator of YOLO and SSD algorithm stopped CV research due to ethical concerns - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/pjreddie/status/1230524770350817280 <comment><USER2> Has anyone on Hackernews ever worked or interacted with Joseph Redmon? From his CV/Twitter/GitHub he seems insanely eccentric.

</comment><comment> 0-_-0 For those not familiar with the guy, here's his CV (Curriculum Vitae, not Computer Vision this time):

[https://pjreddie.com/static/Redmon%20Resume.pdf](https://pjreddie.com/static/Redmon%20Resume.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think pjreddie invented SSD, at least he's not on the author list.

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.02325](https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.02325)

Yolo is great though and a fork is very actively maintained on GitHub at alexeyAB/darknet. Darknet itself is a nice library that doesn't need any dependencies aside from CUDA. It's all C (albeit uncommented) and quite easy to walk through if you want to see at a low level how deep learning frameworks work.

</comment><comment><USER4> CV: computer vision

I had to google</comment>


Creating your own Wallhack – How to use DirectX11 to reveal models - <AUTHOR> https://niemand.com.ar/2019/01/13/creating-your-own-wallhack/ <comment><USER2> Why not just post the link directly rather than the tweet to the link?

[https://niemand.com.ar/2019/01/13/creating-your-own- wallhack...](https://niemand.com.ar/2019/01/13/creating-your-own-wallhack/)</comment>


A practical guide to protocol buffers in Go - <AUTHOR> http://www.minaandrawos.com/2014/05/27/practical-guide-protocol-buffers-protobuf-go-golang/

<comment><USER2> The current golang protobuf api / implementation is unsuitable for large scale system. See [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Golang- nuts/vxJNXdiM...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Golang- nuts/vxJNXdiMhrc) for discussion (you have to scroll down the thread a bit).

<comment><USER3> That thread points out a lot of problems with both the current implementation of protos in Go and the inherent difficulties mapping of a code generator that was designed for C++ onto Go. I have had to deal with those issues and more using protos in Go.

However, it does not make them unsuitable. We have many large scale systems at Google written in Go using this proto library. Some are high QPS, some use large protos, some have complex definitions. Each requires care and thought, but they work.

<comment><USER4> Whenever you get a chance, would you care to share some of the main pain points to look out for from your experience as well as the workarounds? I haven't encountered major issues (small issues yes, major issues not yet) so far implementing protos , however my projects scales are typically not as massive as Google's. So for the sake of my quest to expand my horizons, any feedback will be greatly appreciated

<comment><USER3> The most important piece of advice is not proto specific: use pprof. It may sound obvious, but even though I have been using it for years, I find myself still not running it enough.

Proto decoding specific: if you're parsing a message with lots of fields, you can define a new message with just the fields you care about. I.e. if you're parsing

        message M {
          optional int32 F1 = 1;
          // ...
          optional int32 F100 = 100;
        }

but you only care about F1 and F2 in this message, define

        message SmallM {
          optional int32 F1 = 1;
          optional int32 F2 = 2;
        }

If you use SmallM to decode your messages, it will skip a lot of work filling out fields F3-F100, saving you a lot of CPU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Lots of double exclamation points in there. I hate that I have a hard time taking it seriously because of such a trivial detail, but I do.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, it made me view the whole article as amateur and stopped reading.

<comment><USER7> It's a blog, not a peer reviewed ACM article. I read and learn from others no matter how they decide to express themselves as long as the content is relevant and helpful at solving current or future issues.

<comment><USER4> Thank you, I appreciate the comment

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thoroughly interesting with just the right amount of detail to get off and experimenting on my own projects. Nice one!</comment>


China's expanding war on Islam: Now they're coming for the Kazakhs - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/chinas-expanding-war-on-islam-now-theyre-coming-for-the-kazakhs/2019/03/01/16ebbe76-38ff-11e9-a2cd-307b06d0257b_story.html <comment><USER2> US is trying so hard to alienate Muslim countries from China. Reality is no Muslim countries care about Xinjiang except a little troublemaker who joined NATO, Turkey. Every Muslim country has its own extremists/separatists to fight against, they know the pain.

</comment><comment><USER3> Non-Paywalled: [https://outline.com/3ntgAr](https://outline.com/3ntgAr)</comment>


Hadoop's Game of Life - <AUTHOR> http://www.datasalt.com/2012/05/pangools-game-of-life/

<comment><USER2>
       **
      **
       *

Hey Downvoter, did you not get it or did you think it was not contributing? This is one of the most amazing little life patterns and I hoped that it had turned up, instead there are two far more complicated patterns that have much shorter runs.

Try it!

<comment><USER3> That is the R-pentomino which has a life span of 1103 generations, but they were running it on a non infinite grid, so the boundaries probably caused it to die off much sooner.

I don't understand why they are using finite grids (probably efficiency reasons, but with the right data structures you could still implement it fast, see hash life).

<comment><USER4> I too did not understand why they were using a finite grid, the article seemed somewhat naive w.r.t. life, more a cute exercise for Hadoop...

As a side note, the links to a java applet to run through the patterns they found was a non starter for me, so I used <http://secretgeek.net/gameoflife_.asp>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Using larger grids and combining this with the famous HashLife algorithm to "compress Space and Time" (<http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/184406478>) would be awesome!</comment>


Hoop List (crowdsource collection of where and when hooper can hoop) - <AUTHOR> https://hooplist.carrd.co/ <comment><AUTHOR> We're building a comprehensive list of where and when hoopers can hoop. Help me grow this potentially global list.</comment>