Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks - <AUTHOR> https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/?docId=1000765211 <comment><USER2> Calibre was always much better at generating Kindle-compatible books than Kindlegen ever was. We use Calibre in our posix-based build chain at Standard Ebooks.

The Kindle file format is just miserable, and Kindle is basically the IE6 of ereaders. Anyone who cares about ebooks should get a different device that supports epub natively. Kobo makes nice devices, supports epub, and uses Webkit as their renderer (when used with their kepub format, which is not ideal but is basically a specially-formatted epub so good enough in the low- bar world of ereaders).

<comment><USER3> Alright then, question time: I've looked into Kobo for my wife, who predominantly reads books in Spanish.

Navigating the various offerings seems like a minefield of digital rights and lockouts. Where would I go to legally buy Spanish language books no matter where I am physically located in the world?

<comment><USER4> Casa del Libro maybe.

[https://www.casadellibro.com/ebooks](https://www.casadellibro.com/ebooks)

<comment><USER3> Thanks, will give that a try.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Others specifically mentioned Kobo as an alternative. I did a high level pass over the ecosystem before choosing them as an alternative to the Amazon monopoly, they seem somewhat equivalent to Chrome vs Firefox:

\- supported formats, for the Linux issue: EPUB, EPUB3, PDF, MOBI, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, TXT, HTML, RTF, CBZ, CBR

\- no native linux client: not a deal breaker for me

\- is the company behind Kobo credible, will it be around for a while: yes, its owned by a credible company, 13.4% e-reader market share, probably shrinking

\- could it be sold? Possibly: [https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic- readers/will-rakuten...](https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/will- rakuten-sell-kobo)

\- is there an export path if they go under: its Adobe DRM, so assumably yes with their support

\- does the store work?: Yes, the interface is reasonable if slow, I could find books on it and buy

\- are prices comparable: no, Kindle is cheaper in some instances but there is a price match (I used it, it works)

\- are the books I want on there: yes, ever one of the 5 or so books I looked at are listed on the store, newest version

\- is the reader comparable to Kindle: yes, same settings I use on devices and laptop, fonts, brightness, clarity etc all comparable

One thing missing is 'X-Ray', which is neat but not essential technology Kindle has. Kobo has a book search that is ok, but not as good.

<comment><USER6> I recently bought a Kobo and it wanted to connect to my WiFi before it would do anything. I ended up returning it.

<comment><USER7> I have a Kobo. This is correct -- it won't let you do anything before you connect it to Wifi.

However, there is a trivial hack to get around this where you connect it to your computer via USB and manually edit a sqlite database to put in some blank entries on the registration. There are lots of posts on how to do this online. After you've done this, it works offline just fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The linked page doesn't actually say that Linux is no longer supported. You need to go to the Previewer Product page [https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000765...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000765261) then scroll down to the System Requirements, where it says "Windows 8.1 or later, Intel Mac OSX 10.13 or later".

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm not sure how much of a big deal this is in practice. Amazon's KindleGen tool was never open source, and Kindle-specific book formats are proprietary. And, while this is admittedly anecdotal, I don't think I'm going out on a limb by suggesting that Linux users tend toward the, hmm, _opinionated_ when it comes to certain things, licensing chief among them.

Dollars to donuts that out of the "Kindle books" generated on Linux, a substantial chunk were created as ePubs using open tools and either converted to Mobipocket using Calibre or a similar tool, or just handed off to the publisher directly and converted on their end to Kindle. All of those workflows are still available.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, you can upload an epub to Amazon's Kindle publishing portal, and it will convert it and provide a download link for the converted version (if you want to double-check it before hitting "Publish" \-- recommended).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ew. So you need a windows machine/VM just to publish on the platform?

That's almost iPhone levels of crappy.

<comment><USER12> Or a Mac. Between them that's, what, 95%+ of the desktop market? More?

<comment><USER13> Yeah, this decision makes business sense for Amazon. Updating a Linux client is a nice gesture but affects a very small parentage of desktop users.

<comment><USER14> That strikes me how enthusiasts can manage Linux software for free, but multibillion corporation cuts it for "business sense".

<comment><USER9> It's precisely _because_ the enthusiasts are doing it for free that makes it viable. When a corporation manages Linux software, even if the software is freely available, they're paying for support time -- and if they're developing the software, as in this case, the development time.

<comment><USER15> exactly! Another way to see it: engineering is the easy/cheap part. Testing, supporting, maintaining and marketing are way more expensive, and those are long-term expenses. The enthusiast usually thinks about the engineering bits, and when he's done with it he's done with it. Enterprise software is not like that - or shouldn't be :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Oh dang. I used this to publish my first (and only) eBook as the final chain in my Sphinx based workflow. It was fun to publish a book on Amazon. I'm not sure I would have tried it if the Linux tooling hadn't been there.

</comment><comment><USER17> Sigil still seems like a perfectly valid option for creating and editing ebooks on Linux (and macOS and Windows):

[https://sigil-ebook.com/about/](https://sigil-ebook.com/about/)

<comment><USER18> Sigil only supports creating ePub files, which Kindles can't natively read.

The Amazon tool that was removed, "kindlegen", was the officially supported way of converting ePub into the Kindle's native AZW format.

<comment><USER19> > kindlegen

Was this tool ever any good? I've always used the `ebook-convert` commandline tool that ships with Calibre. (Calibre's GUI is something I don't really like, it seems featureful but also a mess.)

<comment><USER20> Fwiw I like Calibre's UI. It harkens back to an older era of software design in which every imaginable use case is supported and menus are gigantic lists of features.

<comment><USER19> That's fair. I'd probably put more effort into figuring it out if I thought I needed more features than `ebook-convert` exposes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> For what it's worth, Kindle Previewer 3 runs without issue under Wine (well, at least the CLI). I use it to convert epub files to KFX to add to my Kindle.

</comment><comment><USER22> Personally I use Send to Kindle for sending ebooks (which I get from Humble Bundle from time to time) to my Kindle:

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle](https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle)

Though based on some comments here on HN I guess this tool was useful to authors, but I'm curious if it sends it to the Kindle as-is or converts it to the respective format. Oddly enough I couldn't send awz3 files to my Kindle by email with this service.

Sidenote: TIL You can send articles and wordpress posts / content to a Kindle with the appropriate plugin.

<comment><USER23> > Sidenote: TIL You can send articles and wordpress posts / content to a > Kindle with the appropriate plugin.

That's one of the most useful features of the Kindle for me. As far as I know only PocketBook devices offer similar functionality (email address to send documents to the device).

I work on Push to Kindle (a similar service to Amazon's Send to Kindle browser extension for sending web articles). Have had reports that it works better on many sites. There's also a Firefox addon for it which Amazon does not yet provide. More info on recent changes here: [https://blog.fivefilters.org/2020/08/19/push-to-kindle- chang...](https://blog.fivefilters.org/2020/08/19/push-to-kindle-changes.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Kindle can handle PDF (and plain text) natively. If you format a PDF for the Kindle screen, offering different files for different size devices, the result will look better than the reflowable AZW format. Also, it's the only reasonable choice if your book has math or anything else typographically challenging.

<comment><USER19> > _If you format a PDF for the Kindle screen, offering different files for > different size devices, the result will look better than the reflowable AZW > format_

That's not going to work well unless you can anticipate what font settings the reader[user] will prefer (e.g. you're generating these PDFs for your own personal use, not for distribution.)

<comment><USER24> You and the other reply are correct about font sizes. I thought it was obvious that, if you are generating different files for different screen sizes, you can also generate large-type versions. This can all be automated. Why bother? Because the usual format for Kindle books looks bad, like webpages. And, as I said, forget about math, etc.

<comment><USER19> Having two font settings to choose from is a degraded user experience. You're also missing the margin and line spacing settings, as well as font style. Also TTS sucks with PDFs but works excellent with reflowable formats (this one is important to me personally.)

> _the usual format for [any ebooks] looks [...] like webpages._

Because they basically are, and to most people who use these files, that's a feature. Attempts to subvert that are misguided.

> _math_

This is legitimately a pain point for ebooks, I agree on this point. However I think embedding formula as images with alt-text is a better solution than offering dozens of PDF variations.

<comment><USER24> What's TTS?

Poor typography is a degraded user experience. If a Kindle is to be an electronic replacement for a paper book, it is nice if it also has decent typesetting, like a real book.

There are tradeoffs. If some things are more important to you, I would hesitate to accuse you of being "misguided".

EDIT: It hit me: text to speech. You are right about this, of course. But if you have a system for generating a selection of PDFs, including a text version would be trivial.

<comment><USER19> Sorry, that's my bad for using an initialism without clarification.

> EDIT: It hit me: text to speech. You are right about this, of course. But if > you have a system for generating a selection of PDFs, including a text > version would be trivial.

The problem with plain text is you lose the styling and images. A lot of people who use text to speech (TTS) still have some vision or even full vision, and would like to see the pictures or bolded/italic text. If there were a richer format that included those things but worked well with TTS, wouldn't that be worth offering for download? And isn't an epub exactly that sort of format?

Active users of ereader devices predominantly use them to read reflowable formats. If the aesthetics or functionality of the reflowable experience offended those users, they probably wouldn't remain users/owners of such a device for long. I'm sure there are some exceptions.

Offering a PDF, or even many PDFs, is fine. Some people prefer PDFs and their opinion is no less valid the preference for reflowable formats.

In my opinion, a reflowable format should always be offered to those who want it, but certainly not forced on everybody. I think authors like Douglas R. Hofstadter who _insist_ on strict fixed formatting are within their rights to do so, but are misguided. I own a paperback copy of how book; I wish I could _also_ own an epubs copy, but unfortunately that seems impossible due to the imposed preferences of the author.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> A fun `kindlegen` story from my past:

When the Kindle Fire was being launched, part of the out-of-the-box experience was that a) it already knew what account it was associated with and b) if you weren't already a Prime member, it phoned home and automatically gave you a non-renewing 1-month free "preview" (not a "trial", since those automatically converted into paid memberships) of Prime so you could watch Prime video, use Kindle lending library, etc. on your brand new device. As secret projects go, the Prime team was brought in very late and given a very short integration window (2-ish weeks, maybe) to determine if that feature would make the cut for launch.

Part of the user experience was getting a "personalized" letter delivered through the Kindle delivery mechanism that included the Prime logo and JeffB's signature. This letter was effectively a Mobi ebook dynamically generated before being pushed to the device. This functionality previously existed and was how notes indicating that lent items had expired were generated, however, those were plaintext and used a custom templating system that the Kindle team (justifiably) didn't want to expose to external teams. The Kindle team wanted us to generate a Mobi that they would pass along, which would have required a bunch of new infrastructure and technology we had no experience with. A former teammate who was now in Kindle made the case for us continuing to use the extensive HTML custom messaging infrastructure we had, but the Kindle team's capability limited them to hitting a single endpoint and we didn't have a nice way to bundle all of our resources (images, content, etc.) into a single file (e.g. zip, tarball). On a call one afternoon I suggested adding data URL support so we could continue to leverage our infrastructure, they could continue to leverage their's and only this small tool they shelled out to would need to change.

Of course, the kindlegen team was not involved in the discussion initially, their code did not use the tools the rest of the company used, for whatever reason they were unwilling to accept code contributions, and they wanted several months to implement the feature.

Being young and without kids at the time, I went home, knocked out a wrapper that would convert data URLs to external resources and replace the references, and then call out to kindlegen to generate the mobi, and had a working tool the next morning. The whole thing went (almost¹) flawlessly, allowed Prime to test and debug with the tools they knew, allowed the Kindle distribution team to swap out one piece transparently, and the Fire launched with that implementation in place. And like most stop-gap solutions, it was in place for several years before kindlegen finally supported data URLs natively.

This was all running on Linux hosts, and that was many many years ago now. It's a good reminder that code is like a sandcastle. It will be gone tomorrow, but the tide will continue.

¹ sure, there may have been a small bug or two, but I stabilized a bunch of their tests in the process, so I consider it a win.

</comment><comment><USER26> I feel strongly that Amazon can sell kindles and we're ok, and amazon can sell content and we're ok but having amazon able to sell both kindle and content, and direct IPR outcomes across the platform and the content, is actually pretty bad.

This is not a real substitutable space. Yes, we have other e-readers. No, there is a market dominant platform and that has consequences.

Because book IPR is bound in past practices and publishers as a closed shop, the motivations to fix this here, are mixed.

As readers/consumers I think we are ill-served by the outcome.

I suspect Authors, and authors agents would agree. its not equitable.

Not the least problem is that book IPR is very nationally focussed. Kindle is a trans-national concept. The segmented market is hugely frustrating.

<comment><USER27> > I feel strongly that Amazon can sell kindles and we're ok, and amazon can > sell content and we're ok but having amazon able to sell both kindle and > content, and direct IPR outcomes across the platform and the content, is > actually pretty bad.

Was anyone doing any of that prior to Amazon's bet on kindle?

<comment><USER26> Was anyone doing any of that prior to gutenbergs bet on the printing press..

No. Kindle was transformative. But, we do not perpetuate market advantage when things become a social utility, and to say "freedom of choice" when the IPR is not actually equally available on all readers, when Kindle can (and do) delete content from you, when they respect the global national IPR framework but also intrude adverts into the flow...

<comment><USER27> > Was anyone doing any of that prior to gutenbergs bet on the printing press..

That comment is disingenuous and outright deceitful.

Guttemberg wasn't selling ebooks that downloaded books from an online store. My question was who else offered a similar product to Amazon when Amazon launched Kindle.

<comment><USER26> Did you read the rest of my comment? It addressed the matter of substance. Ask yourself what other field of a like nature has led to an outcome of this type. Does a Sony VHS only read Sony produced films? Does a Philips CD player only play Dutch cds? Does an iPhone only play iPhone music? Does chrome refuse to show pages for Microsoft?

The Kindle imposes a strong wall that (pdf aside) says only Kindle managed epub is routinely available and then imposes constraints on how content is added 'for a better reader experience'

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Wow, huge bummer. This is how I generated and edited my Kindle book... not sure what to do now.

<comment><USER29> If you have your copy of kindlegen, it will continue to work - it is a 32-bit statically linked binary, so as long as your kernel supports 32-bit processes and 32-bit ELF files, you are good to go.

That it is available for download changes nothing; it has not been updated for years anyway. The mac version was in worse shape, it was also 32-bit, so it didn't run on Catalina at all.

<comment><USER28> Ironically I've just made a Mac-to-Linux workflow change.

I can probably still figure something out with another machine and Windows. Thanks for the tip though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > EPUB requires readers to support the HTML5, JavaScript, CSS, SVG formats, > making EPUB readers use the same technology as web browsers.

I wish people would develop cleaner FB3 (Fiction Book) rather than messy and overcomplicated ePub.

</comment><comment><USER31> How are you supposed to generate Kindle-format content on AWS, then?

</comment><comment><USER32> Haven't been able to use my Kindle with Linux for a while anyway. I regret buying the device.

<comment><USER33> What is the best alternative to a Kindle?

<comment><USER34> I can't say for you, but there are plenty of other options. PocketBook (which recently released a color e-ink ereader), Kobo, Onyx (which I have heard negative things about regarding their unwillingness to comply with the GPL for their Linux kernel), the ReMarkable (which I have heard is incredibly hackable), and the Nook. There's probably even more I'm forgetting, but Kindles are definitely not the only option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Will this affect services like Crofflr, or do they use a different mechanism?

<comment><USER36> [crofflr dev here] The binary used by crofflr will still work and the currently used version is already years old. Alternatively it would be easy to switch to calibre based tooling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> i hate how kindle doesn't support adobe DRM, which many libraries use for lending out ebooks.

</comment><comment><USER38> Anyone looking for a Kindle replacement the Boox line of products are excellent alternatives.

<comment><USER39> That's the one from China that uses Linux without complying with the GPL, right?

[https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/hl09g7/onyx_boox_chi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/hl09g7/onyx_boox_chinese_company_will_not_share_their/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> They still read epub, right?

Their proprietary format didn't have many convincingly useful features anyway.

<comment><USER41> Nope, IIRC, the only open ebook format supported is mobi.

Never used Kindlegen though, Calibre works great for me. (Although I have never authored an ebook).

<comment><USER19> They also load PDFs and plain text files (IIRC) though those are not quite 'eBook formats.'

<comment><USER40> I've personally found the pdf on kindle experience to be absolutely frustrating but YMMV I'm sure.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Plan by Jack Handey - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2008/11/24/081124sh_shouts_handey

<comment><USER2> All I could keep thinking was _"Hell, its got more of a chance of working than Paulson's plan..."_

Monkeys are much more predictable, you see.

</comment><comment><USER3> This reads like most startup business plans I've seen.

<comment><USER4> How so? It includes things I rarely see in startup business plans: a revenue model, for one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Completely off-topic, but why is it dated 24th November 2008?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's from the current print issue which I think they post-date so that it looks timely when it's sitting on the store shelves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Jack Handey is a brilliant prosist. It's close between him and Dave Barry for my overall favorite: Barry's more prolific, Handey is much less hit-and-miss.

<comment><USER7> Hertzberg and Handey, always look forward to reading them every week when they have a spot.

<comment><USER6> I'd never heard of Hertzberg before! Thanks for the name tip-off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can't believe only the New Yorker publishes poetry anymore.

<comment><USER9> Slate.com, The Atlantic, and The New Republic all publish poetry and poetry criticism. Also Asimov's, but I'm not sure the sci-fi stuff counts :)

<comment><USER6> Science fiction is the cutting edge of literature. A sci-fi writer won the Nobel Prize in 2007; Philip Dick and Frank Herbert were the foremost writers of the 50s and 60s, in terms of pushing the envelope, along with only Beckett on the proper literature side.

<comment><USER9> Well, sure, and I wouldn't be reading SF periodicals if I didn't agree. However, in terms of poetry, it's not really cutting edge at all. In fact, most of it is miserable. Exhibit A: Bruce Boston.

<comment><USER6> Wait, is there really sci-fi poetry? The only stuff of that sort I liked was Asimov's, and it was _fun_ , but not particularly _good._</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: File format like JSON/YAML that allows tables to be defined like CSV? - <AUTHOR> Whenever I take a dataset from a spreadsheet/CSV and convert it over to something like JSON or YAML, it's always annoying to have to include every attribute in every record, rather than just having the header row like a spreadsheet. Extra annoying if you ever have to rename an attribute I've even written several one-off parsers to convert between the two. This got me wondering if there's a file format similar to YAML but where you can embed a table in a CSV/TSV-like format to improve readability if desired. <comment><USER2> Maybe I'm punching in the screw with only my hammer here, but what's wrong with combining block- and flow style in YAML?

      ---
      columns: [id, name, age]
      data:
        - [1, "Alice", 27]
        - [2, "Bob", 26]
        - [3, "Carol", 45]

<comment><AUTHOR> This would certainly work as a storage format, but would require custom parsing. It would be nice to have a format that automatically expanded that into a sequence of maps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Most CSV parsers include this feature by default. Basically you can specify in the setting whether to regard the first row as a special row for attribute names or not.

So the answer is you can just use CSV like you use, but just need to use the right parser and turn on the right options when parsing to auto-assign attribute names.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right. I'm looking for embedding functionality like that in a richer object format like YAML. So you could still use the other datatypes and functionality YAML offers, but also have succinct table syntax.</comment></comment>


Early detection of Twitter trends explained - <AUTHOR> http://snikolov.wordpress.com/2012/11/14/early-detection-of-twitter-trends/

<comment><USER2> I find it interesting that, in contrast to the other things that the article mentions that techniques like this can be used to predict ("We can try this on traffic data to predict the duration of a bus ride, on movie ticket sales, on stock prices, or any other time-varying measurements."), Twitter trends are artificial phenomena, with a very precise definition that was created by Twitter, not some natural emerging thing. The actual tweets are of course a natural phenomenon, but how topics are selected from them as 'trending' is not.

Of course, that's not to say this is not impressive work - predicting what Twitter's proprietary algorithm will select as trending without direct knowledge of the algorithm, before it selects them, and before all the tweets that make them be selected are made is impressive, and no doubt not any easier than predicting more natural phenomena or emergent behaviours.

<comment><AUTHOR> You bring up a great point. To classify something as a trend or not a trend, we have to use this artificial black box to supply ourselves with examples of what's a trend and what isn't. The nice thing, IMO (and this is something I admittedly gloss over at the very end) is that doing prediction/forecasting with this method is almost the same as doing classification, even though you don't have any labeled examples when doing prediction. To do classification, we compare current activity to past examples of activity, and decide if it looks like the positive examples or the negative examples. For prediction, we compare current activity to past activity, and see how similar-looking past activity continued to evolve over time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You know this is a good explanation of the technique because in retrospect it seems obvious and clear.

</comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for the excellent explanation, and many congratulations on your thesis!:)

Could you point to any resources on time series analysis? While i am well familiar with supervised/unsupervised learning methods for tasks like classification, anomaly detection etc, analyzing time series is a different beast. And most machine learning literature (eosl?) doesn't seem to address time series data either.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'm afraid my background, like yours, is more in methods that are not specialized for time series, and so I couldn't credibly give any comprehensive references. My understanding is that a lot of methods designed specifically for time series draw heavily on the theory of stochastic processes. For example <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoregressive_model>, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoregressive%E2%80%93moving-a...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoregressive%E2%80%93moving- average_model). I once took a course called Signals, Systems, and Inference that covers some of these ideas (full course notes here [http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and- comput...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer- science/6-011-introduction-to-communication-control-and-signal-processing- spring-2010/readings/)), but that's about as far as I've gotten along that road.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's something I don't understand about this. It depends on twitter supplying its picks for trending topics. How do you use something like this in general if you're just given the stream of tweets but nothing else?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can get the trending topics through the Twitter API <https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1/get/trends/%3Awoeid>

But I think what you are asking is how such a method would come up with its own trends, given just a stream of tweets. This is a supervised approach (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervised_learning>), so for now, you would need to train it (possibly online) by giving it examples of what should be a trend and what shouldn't. It would be interesting to make it semi-supervised (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-supervised_learning>) so that you would only need to provide a small number of labels.

<comment><USER5> Thanks. That is what I was asking.

It sort of comes down to the question of what's really being learned here? Are they modeling some inherent process of topics becoming popular (or memes spreading in a population) that could be used in other situations, or are they just modeling some arbitrary algorithm that twitter uses to mark some topics as "trends"? If they're just modeling twitter's existing algorithm, then it's less interesting because that algorithm already exists. Since they're able to detect the trend before twitter does (well, before twitter announces it anyway), then it seems like they're probably onto something more fundamental.

<comment><AUTHOR> _It sort of comes down to the question of what's really being learned here?_

That's a great question. We are learning to recognize trends and non-trends based on previous examples. Since the Twitter trends algorithm gives us such examples, you could say we are learning to replicate the outputs of an arbitrary algorithm --- and you'd be right. But learning from examples is a very general thing, so the method has applications beyond detecting trending topics.

 _Are they modeling some inherent process of topics becoming popular_

No, we don't model the process of something becoming popular. (To do this, one might suppose people spread popular topics in X way and unpopular topics in Y way, and try to estimate from the data whether the topic is popular or unpopular.) The beauty of this is that we never have to build a model, because we rely directly on the data. As a corollary, this approach is applicable out of the box for any domain with time-varying data (though I suppose you might have to take care to measure the right kind of time varying data).

Does that answer your question?

<comment><USER5> I think that answers it. Thanks. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For me, the most striking thing about the article is looking at the chart of #Barclays and seeing _just how early_ the trend was detected.

I would never guess that the pattern, when cut off just after 12, is indicative of a topic that's about to trend.</comment>


Ask HN: Auth by Phone Instead of Email? - <AUTHOR> Seems like for simplicity, using a cell phone instead of email account registration and login is the way to go. Email seems so outmoded in the world of mobile communications. I think using a mobile number with some form of Authenticator for important stuff is reasonable. This would bypass all the Social logins, email deliverability and help create uniqueness as well as remove passwords.<p>How far off am I in thinking this is an ok thing to do? <comment><USER2> Your suggestion is but one sim swap away from failure for each user:

[https://krebsonsecurity.com/tag/sim- swap/](https://krebsonsecurity.com/tag/sim-swap/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've changed my phone number more often than my mail account, and for really important stuff recovery over phone is regularly considered bad because it's to easy to compromise. It also isn't that great internationally.</comment>


Show HN: My super-viral threewords.me clone - <AUTHOR>

The following HN post prompted me to make this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2168220
I have created http://onememory.me
Alright, so it's not super-viral. It has been online for about 3 hours, so far. I made two or three tweets about it, and posted it on my Facebook wall.
Within the three hours, I've seen ~200 unique visitors and had only 31 of them register. A very large percentage of that traffic all came from Twitter. Not many people seem to be sharing their URLs by way of my "tweet this" or facebook share buttons, though. I'll be making those more prominent soon.
It's a similar concept, but instead of describing people in 3 words, you just share a memory that you have about them with them. After reviewing some of the data coming in, I'm not sure if that concept is made very obvious by my wording on the site. Many people left their memories of themselves on my page. Haha.
Anyways, just thought I'd try this out and make one. Maybe it'll go super viral, too! (nobody I ask in person has ever heard of threewords.me, so it may be a new thing in my area) <comment><USER2> It might become more viral if you allow people to write the memory immediately then have them create an account afterwards?

<comment><AUTHOR> They can. An account is not required, or even used, when you write a memory about somebody.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://onememory.me/>

My page: <http://onememory.me/ryancole>

</comment><comment><USER3> to be fair 31 users out of 200 visitors doesn't sound like a bad conversion rate. Reckon it would be better with fewer required options (I kind of understand why you need a display name and login name, but it would be better if it was the same thing)

Facebook Connect as a login option would lower the barriers to entry for new users willing to use it as well as increase the virality.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll work on adding the Facebook Connect login option tonight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> clean design, good hack. but what tangible value does it provide?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, for me, it provides a way of experiencing things like having to respond to user feedback, traffic spikes, thinking about user experience and trying to influence my conversion rates. It's an opportunity to use things like analytics funnels, and such. Most of these things can't be done without one thing - users using your site. These types of sites are fun ways to potentially get to deal with that. As developers, it's easy to think of things functionally. To us, it's obvious why something would be useful based on its function. But, to the average non-technical user, it takes some extra thought into how can you explain something to them in a way that allows them to understand your service and why it'd be useful to them.

I kind of rambled there, but it's a fun technical thing. For users, it's purely just for fun. I think this might be something people wouldn't mind knowing if they had the opportunity, so that kind of helps drive the want to use it.</comment></comment>


From Memes to Infowars: How 75 Fascist Activists Were "Red-Pilled" - <AUTHOR> https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2018/10/11/memes-infowars-75-fascist-activists-red-pilled/ <comment><USER2> The alt-right is a mirror image of the radical left: identity politics with the intersectional/group rankings flipped on its head. Both group make the same fundamental error of judging people by their group attributes rather than their personal merits. In doing this we justify prejudicial assumptions rather than getting to meet and encounter each other as the fascinating and unique humans we each are.

<comment><USER3> Well said. It all looks frighteningly similar from a distance. Thank you for speaking up. It is increasingly hard to voice an opinion that does not slot into one of the preveiling idiologys since the election, and we need honest open dialouge more then ever.

The political parties seem always lose their way when they attempt justify hate as a way to foster 'unity'.

<comment><USER2> I'm a _little_ surprised my previous comment wasn't aggressively downvoted. The most dangerous place to be in the culture wars is between the warring factions calling for dialogue because it's frequently the last thing either side wants. I'm convinced that if alt-right people and antifa people actually got to know each other as individuals they would have an opportunity to at least have enlightened disagreement -- which would be mutually enriching because they can connect with the humanity of the people with whom they disagree instead of being able to lazily cast them as being faceless monsters bent on their annihilation.</comment></comment></comment>


The Last Kings of Donkey Kong - <AUTHOR> http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-last-kings-of-donkey-kong-high-score/ <comment><USER2> Interestingly, despite the mention of the theoretical perfect score (1,265,000), I've never actually seen the calculation for that. I've also never seen a TAS of Donkey Kong aiming for score; if that perfect score is actually achievable, it should be possible to construct a TAS that does so.

<comment><USER3> "a random number generator determines the value of many of the prizes you encounter and the path some of the obstacles take."

Seemingly, you would still need several TAS-tries because of the RNG, right? (Unless you can rewind and the 'random' is calculated as a function of something separate from the running instance of the game.)

<comment><USER4> Some games have mechanisms to manipulate their RNG and it is even used in some TASes.

During this year's SGDQ's TAS block they had a TAS of a Sonic game that used exactly this technique: the bot waited at the title screen the exact amount of frames to manipulate the seed of the game's RNG.

Perhaps a similar mechanism can be used for DK.

<comment><USER5> Botting the whole game for perfection involves a huge number of permutations since it's a dynamic system. But fastest time is arguably a less complex problem than maximum score since fewer of the RNG events "matter" to time attacks. In a game like Donkey Kong, maximizing one score-relevant event may take away from another.

My favorite RNG manipulation is the King's Bounty TAS:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gm9cKEWbTiU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gm9cKEWbTiU)

If you don't get it, here is the summary: To win King's Bounty your hero must find and dig up the randomly-located Sceptre of Order. This normally means questing around for map pieces, combat, recruitment, etc. But with some RNG manipulation it can be placed right outside your starting point.

The run posted actually improved upon the previous one with a new bot that does a more exhaustive search.

<comment><USER6> Here are the authors' comments on the video which go into more detail: [http://tasvideos.org/2025S.html](http://tasvideos.org/2025S.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> See also: "The King of Kong", an amazing introduction to the scene of competitive donkey Kong playing.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi2lApoZ5lY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi2lApoZ5lY)

<comment><USER8> [http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1303](http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1303)

It's extremely misleading at best. It might even be fiction if you're strict enough about the facts.

<comment><USER8> [http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1310](http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1310)</comment></comment></comment>


Modeling Agents with Probabilistic Programs - <AUTHOR> http://agentmodels.org/ <comment><USER2> This is very interesting, it reminds me of Gaylord & D'Andria's _Simulating Society: A Mathematica Toolkit for Modelling Socioeconomic Behaviour_. I've been using agent modelling techniques for the past.. gosh... fifteen years.</comment>


Twitter Reports First Quarter 2014 Results - <AUTHOR> https://investor.twitterinc.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=843245

<comment><USER2> I'm at the final stage of interviewing with Twitter. Should this report make me nervous about accepting a potential offer?

<comment><USER3> Use it to negotiate more RSUs.

When the lockup expires their float is going to skyrocket which will presumably put downward pressure on prices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Timeline views grew slower than users, suggesting people aren't using Twitter as much. Hate to say Twitter may be the next myspace.

</comment><comment><USER5> Does stock based compensation of 640 million mean that they are buying 640 million dollars worth of their own stock each year?

</comment><comment><USER6> Is this a good time to buy TWTR?</comment>


Show HN: An open source WebGL renderer in 300 lines of JavaScript with 30 maps - aaron-lebo https://comanche3d.com/ <comment> aaron-lebo Hey HN,

I've been inspired by Michael Fogelman's Craft [1] and other links around here over the years to learn more about 3d graphics programming. comanche has been my path to learning. It can currently render 30 different maps - 29 of them were reverse engineered by Sebastian Macke [2] from the game Comanche (1992). There's no actual relation to the game, I just remember playing it as a kid and the file format is convenient (two pngs, one representing height, the other color). There is a lone map by me.

The goal is to build an actual game, but the focus will always be to have very readable source so that others can learn from it. I've written a blog post further describing the goals behind it as well as discussing the basics of graphics programming and the advantage of using WebGL [3]. There are plenty of links to resources for further learning and the post also includes links to 8 other projects in various languages (lisp, Go, Rust, C++, and Nim) in various states of completion.

Happy to accept questions, contributions, or (gulp) critiques. There's not a lot of optimization going on (some basic culling), but it should run fine on a modern GPU (though it did not run on my mobile phone). Some of the maps are smaller, should that help. It's not super impressive, but hopefully you find it interesting. Thanks!

1\. [https://github.com/fogleman/Craft](https://github.com/fogleman/Craft)

2\. [https://github.com/s-macke/VoxelSpace](https://github.com/s-macke/VoxelSpace)

3\. [http://lebo.io/2018/04/03/a-webgl- renderer.html](http://lebo.io/2018/04/03/a-webgl-renderer.html)

source: [https://github.com/aaron-lebo/comanche](https://github.com/aaron- lebo/comanche)

<comment><AUTHOR> What are the browser requirements? I got error - cant load webgl2.

<comment> aaron-lebo It runs fine on Firefox 59 on Ubuntu. What are you running? I've done limited testing.

Thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


Fermat Point - <AUTHOR> http://winkervsbecks.github.io/fermat-point <comment><USER2> If people have to write Chrome-only code, could they at least put a disclaimer somewhere?

<comment><AUTHOR> My intention wasn't to make something Chrome specific but, I did mess up by not testing in other browsers. Sorry about that.

Turns out that you can't set circle radius in CSS in both Safari and Firefox. For some reason Chrome supports it. Not sure what the correct spec is. In any case it's fixed now.

<comment><USER2> I could have formulated my criticism more constructively, sorry about that. Just a pet peeve I guess. Thanks for fixing the issue!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> How does this extend to higher dimensions?

<comment><USER4> Quick answer: "Triangle" becomes "tetrahedron" in 3 dimensions, and "simplex" in any number of dimensions. There is a notion of "solid angle" that works in any number of dimensions. Then the sum of distances to the vertices of a simplex is minimized (1) by a point inside it from which the solid angles subtended by the faces of the simplex are equal, or (2) at one vertex of the simplex; case 2 holds if the angle subtended at some vertex is >= 1/(n+1) of the "total solid angle" in that many dimensions, otherwise case 1 does.

I suppose I should explain what all that means.

 _Simplices_

A simplex in n-dimensional space consists of n+1 points in general position, together with every convex combination of those points.

"In general position" means they don't all lie in a single hyperplane.

A "hyperplane" means all the points satisfying some linear relationship (strictly, _affine_ rather than _linear_ ) between their coordinates. E.g., ax+by+c=0 in two dimensions.

A "convex combination" of x1,...,xk means all points of the form a1.x1 + ... + ak.xk where a1,...,ak are non-negative numbers whose sum is 1. E.g., the convex combinations of two points are exactly the points on the line segment joining those two points.

 _Solid angles_

Suppose you have a point P in n-dimensional space, and some other convex region R in the space. Consider all the rays from P that pass through R; they form a "convex cone" based at that point.

A "convex region" is one such that, if a bunch of points belong to it, so do all convex combinations of those points.

Now, take a (hyper)sphere of radius 1 centred at P and look at the points where those rays meet its surface. The (hyper)area of the set of such points is the solid angle subtended at P by R.

The solid angle subtended at any point by the whole of space equals the (hyper)area of the unit sphere in that space. There is a formula for this but it doesn't matter right now. (When n=2 the "unit hypersphere" is actually a unit circle and "hyperarea" actually means "length"; the figure is 2pi, so we are working in radians. When n=3 it's a unit sphere, "hyperarea" means area, and it's 4pi, so the maximum solid angle you can have is 4pi.)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an awesome explanation! I wasn't even aware of "simplex". Guess I'm going to have to add it to my list of things to obsess about.</comment></comment></comment>


Walmart's Evolution From Big Box Giant To E-Commerce Innovator - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3002948/walmarts-evolution-big-box-giant-e-commerce-innovator <comment><USER2> Fun to see former co-workers and managers quoted in detail. This is one of those acquisitions that everyone thought was crazy/weird/fluky on Day One but has made more and more sense as time as gone by.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you use Tableau Software? Opinions? - <AUTHOR>

I bookmarked Tableau software a while back as I've heard it being constantly mentioned on various websites as great tool to use.
I remember it being labeled as vital in understanding one's analytics and gives a different perspective in breaking down the specific business numbers.
Has anyone used it firsthand? Especially with their IPO coming up, I'm trying to get HN's opinion on the long term viability of this company.
Thanks <comment><USER2> I have a customer that uses it, they like it, but its very very very resource intensive. They had to put together a dual-10 core Xeon with 144GB of ram to have queries run fast for their dataset (something like 100k users + info). There are very few places that will run it as SaaS for less than $2k/mo (from the research I've seen) so its a little spendy, and the security included with that is a joke.

So - pony up some cash for the servers for it (windows only!) because it works pretty well, but it needs horsepower.

</comment><comment><USER3> Get someone who knows R or learn it Yourself.

I never really got that program, and have no clue who is ready to learn new expensive technology, when You get better, cheaper and with a lot more future- potential and community backing as well as practical experience and use.

Typical hype about something already done and done better, but not so much "in Your face" approach like Tableau.. decent statistician has never used it, but they are having IPO? Blah..</comment>


Encrypgen Uses Blockchain to Usher in New Era of Genetic Privacy - <AUTHOR> https://cointelegraph.com/news/encrypgen-uses-blockchain-to-usher-in-new-era-of-genetic-privacy <comment><USER2> If that raises funds we can launch an ICO on pigs that can fly ( yet to breed, of course)</comment>


My son is mistaking a smartphone for his mother - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2269679/?from=rss

<comment><USER2> I'm reminded of this quote from iusedtobelieve.com:

When I was very young, my Dad was in the Navy. Naturally I spent a good deal of time asking where my Daddy was. My mother put a big picture of him on the coffee table, so I could see him all the time, and told me "This is your Daddy." When my dad finally returned from his cruise, and we met him at the docks, I refused to talk to him, saying only "This isn't MY daddy. MY daddy's at home, on the coffee table." I believed that the picture itself was my dad. \-- Jupiter

</comment><comment><USER3> I found this the most interesting:

> My 3-year-old nephew in Seattle offers a window into my boy's future. When I > sent a video of Luka to my brother, he immediately video-called us on the > computer with his son on his lap. My nephew wanted to see us right away; _he > gets frustrated watching videos of family on the computer because they don't > interact with him. Forget videos; Skype is his "normal."_

(emphasis mine)

The next generation of internet users are not going to simply be used to an audiovisual experience, but a genuinely interactive one. I say 'genuine' because for years people have tried to sell 'clicking on links' as 'interactive web'; it's not, in the same way that 'switching channels' is not 'interactive TV'.

<comment><USER4> It's _more_ interactive than 'switching channels' because you can't submit forms with your TV. Also, you get to set the schedule, not the tv station. Compared to TV, the Internet (as it is now, or was in 1995) _is_ interactive. Just because the 'future' is even _more_ interactive is besides the point.

<comment><USER5> I don't quite understand why we're comparing reading with watching.

Books have always been substantially more interactive than radio or TV, because you can go at your own pace, you can skip forward or back at will, you can take notes in the margins and underline important parts. You can set the book down and pick up another, or look up references when they seem interesting.

Reading books and letters never got less interactive with the development of telephones or IMs, which are the long-distance extension of the face-to-face conversation, and they won't with the adoption of video chat either. The media (conversation vs. reading/writing) have completely different uses. Writing things down (or recording in general) is a way to crystalize knowledge. Talking in real time is inherently ephemeral and driven by instant reactions.

In response to the grandparent post: sitting down around the dinner table has always been an "interactive audiovisual experience" (tactile too!) – the addition of widespread video-chat seems unlikely to transform society nearly as much as the internet already has.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Eventually, he gave her a peripheral title: "Mammon," a sort of extension of his iMama. (...) since we were in Paris, [my wife] did ask a French psychologist what was going on._

'Maman' is the French equivalent of 'mommy,' but young Luka has yet to acquire his Papa's* bad habit of dividing the world into parts foreign and domestic. I suppose 'My son is learning to speak French faster than I cab learn to understand him' doesn't yield the same level of self-assurance as this ringing denouncement of telephonic inferiority.

* That's French for 'Daddy.' Those cunning froggies, always thinking they're one step ahead of us!

<comment><USER7> And here I was thinking it was funny that he was using the name of a false god from the Bible.

<comment><USER6> Indeed, but I'm not sure one pun rescues the whole thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> About a month ago, I heard my son (8 months at the time) saying "ma ma ma ma" several times, but he wasn't reaching for or even looking at his mother, just his bottle. My best guess is that he was trying to mimic Cookie Monster's "om nom nom nom" because he was hungry.

Kids around this age have an extremely limited vocabulary made up of simple sounds and few syllables. As such, they tend to overload certain words. The article noted that, for a child of that age, "mama" doesn't just mean mother, but several things associated with mother. Beyond that, "mama" might also mean something else that starts with an m (like "more"), or it might simply be babbling (my son currently says "da da da" to everything he touches.)

<comment><USER9> There's a reason "mama" has the same meaning in nearly every human language; it's the first sequence of syllables a baby can pronounce, and in nearly every culture, babies at that very early stage spend all their time with their mamas. So it's the natural mapping.

<comment><USER10> It's not just "mama", its "mama" and "papa" (sometimes baba... basically the same thing).

And then Georgian does it "backwards". "mama" is father, and "papa" is mother.

<comment><USER11> Nearly: '"father" in Georgian is მამა (mama) , while "mother" is pronounced as დედა (deda). "პაპა" papa stands for "grandfather".'

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_and_papa#Caucasian_languag...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_and_papa#Caucasian_languages)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Once you read the article it's shown that the son is not mistaken, it is the parent. The child is using a word that has 1 meaning for the parent and a different meaning for the child.

<comment><USER13> Yea it seems obvious to me that the child simply thinks that this object's name is 'Mama', and he thinks it's really cool and important because daddy kept telling him about this Mama object and teaching him to like it.

<comment><USER9> It takes a level of cognitive sophistication to think that an image on one object (an iPhone) actually represents a different object in the real world. It's incomprehensible to a baby, goes without thinking starting at the age of 2 or so, and hence represents a certain intellectual or artistic sophistication to explicitly call into question later in life: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This article seems quite careful to skirt around how much contact the mother has with the baby.

</comment><comment><USER15> Not that this is what's going on in this case, but the story reminds me of how ducklings can be made to follow anything, presumably thinking that it's their mother.

Dustin Curtis wrote a fascinating piece a while ago about similar behavior in newborn seagulls: [http://dustincurtis.com/how_niko_tinbergen_reverse_engineere...](http://dustincurtis.com/how_niko_tinbergen_reverse_engineered_the_seagull.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> My 3.5 year old son is named Luka, making this a bit weird to read.

You need to limit your personal device usage around kids. It is that simple. Taking photos might be the best exception: do it all the time.

I'm considering getting Luka a flip camera. That might be a great device to learn to make digital things at a young age without anything too addictive.

<comment><USER17> I've thought a good product would be a real, decent quality digital camera - kid proof and kid simple. LCD viewfinder & review, 1 button capture, 1 button review, USB charging (no stupid AAs - nonremovable LiIon), smart on/off. Something a kid can get used to as a tool, not just a cheap toy, and no way to get "lost in the weeds" in menus or other discouraging traps or manufacturing shortcuts. (Anyone wanna fund a startup?)

<comment><USER18> Sounds like a still picture version of a Flip Video camera.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Ok, I'm really unsure, I was absolutely certain this whole article was a joke. But the comments don't seem to reflect that. This is actually happening? Putting your kids to sleep with an iPhone? What ever happened to singing?

<comment><USER20> No one, especially small children, should be subjected to my singing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> ...or maybe the kid thinks that "mama" means "phone?"

Seems like the most obvious answer.</comment>


Terrorism Experts Say QAnon Conspiracy Theory a Threat to National Security - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/889kgp/terrorism-experts-say-qanon-conspiracy-theory-a-threat-to-national-security <comment><USER2> Apparently pedophiles are the new communist moles, who were the new witches. Who did the witches fill in for, apostates?

<comment> core-questions Are you denying that there have been tons of high-profile pedophiles, child- trafficiking rings, etc? Did you miss the whole Epstein thing? It's reasonable to assume that that's just the tip of the iceberg; not that there's any reason to believe the Q people are going to get to the bottom of any of this. Regardless, it's a reasonable open area of investigation that impacts many people's lives.

Do you deny that there was Communist infiltration into government decades ago? McCarthyism may have caused a lot of collateral damage but it's clear to anyone that there was plenty of espionage work happening on behalf of Russia at that time. Hell, if you believe the election tampering meme, it's still happening to this day.

Both of those things are/were real. We may never know the whole story, but that doesn't mean there's no reason to look into it.

Witches don't need to be brought into this, though of course it seems clear to me that Salem was successful since there aren't any witches now ;)

<comment><USER2> > " _Are you denying ..._ "

No.

It is hard to understand what you are arguing. Are you criticizing the comparison because it is not apt, or because it is?

In the mid-20th century, there really were communist moles in governments; just not as many as were claimed, and mostly not the ones accused. The craze to root them out mainly swept up, and blighted the lives and careers, of innocents.

There really were individuals who would supply poisons, but the overwhelming majority of those hung for witchcraft were women who owned property the Church wanted.

The people who take advantage of Q will not be rooting out actual offenders, and any of those who are in positions of authority can use Q to divert attention from themselves.

I suspect, but cannot support, that obsession with witchcraft arose only after, and largely because, the supply of heretics dried up.

<comment> core-questions > It is hard to understand what you are arguing.

Well, you appear to be drawing a false equivalence between pedos and communists (real, proven) and witches (not real, unless you believe in magic).

<comment><USER2> There is a very real equivalence in people promoting hysteria about pedos, communists, and witches, completely independently of their expressed targets' existence. Are there actual pederasts and human traffickers? Yes. Do you imagine they are the individuals the Q enthusiasts accuse? I doubt.

<comment> core-questions > Are there actual pederasts and human traffickers? Yes. Do you imagine they > are the individuals the Q enthusiasts accuse?

Who do they accuse whom you think has a really solid excuse? Some demonstration of a false or plausibly-false accusation would be nice.

<comment><USER2> As always in such cases, they will accuse anyone they don't like. Being disliked by demogogues is not probable cause.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> QAnon is as much of a treat as Emmanuel Goldstein was to the Ministry of Truth.

</comment><comment><USER4> So they're admitting that QAnon is to be taken seriously? That it's not fake?

<comment><USER5> Just because something is to be taken seriously doesn't mean it's "real". For example, the US took the cult of Jim Jones seriously (and this was shown to be warranted when Congressman Ryan was assassinated). However, that's orthogonal to the accuracy of the cult's beliefs-- taking Jim Jones seriously doesn't actually mean he was a prophet or Messiah. What made him dangerous was that his adherents _believed_ he was.

Just like how the Comet Pizza conspiracy theory should be taken seriously even though it's kinda silly- it becomes dangerous when people start shooting up restaurants looking for non-existent children in a non-existent dungeon

<comment><USER4> But that's the weird thing about calling QAnon a conspiracy theory: we label something as a "conspiracy theory" when it's presumed to be based on information which is...hmm, untrue? Hard to pin it down.

Jim Jones was not a conspiracy theory. It was a real belief system. By admitting the existence of the beliefs, we don't automatically recognize correctness. So why should QAnon be flat out labeled as a conspiracy theory when its existence as real as Jim Jones?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >Qanon is going mainstream and that's bad.

Is it? My completely uninformed impression was that it was dying.

<comment><USER7> "Identical shares (3%) of conservative Republicans and moderate and liberal Republicans have heard or read a lot about the conspiracy theories."

[https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/03/30/qanons- cons...](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/03/30/qanons-conspiracy- theories-have-seeped-into-u-s-politics-but-most-dont-know-what-it-is/)

How many of those 3% who have heard or read a lot about it actually believe it is hard to estimate.

I have family that are fervent believers so this hits close to home.

If you've heard or read a lot about it, it's either because you believe it or are personally invested in it (I presume most likely due to having relationships with people who believe it).

Take a rough slice and say 10% of those people who have heard or read a lot about it are believers and the other 90% are their friends and family.

Sooo... 55 million registered republicans; Guesstimate 50% of those are considered "conservative" republicans by the terminology of the Pew poll; 3% of those have heard a lot about Q; 10% of those are believers. 55 * 0.5 * 0.03 * 0.1 and that's ~800,000 Q followers.

Is 800,000 mainstream for a conspiracy theory? I wonder how many people believe the earth is flat.

<comment><USER8> The last thing you mentioned, if you made a list of it's uses, here for example... what would you find?

Consider the possibility that it's not designed to convince you earth is flat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> core-questions Qanon is silly. It's basically "Plan Trusting", i.e. the idea is that Trump et. al. have a grandiose plan that will not be revealed that will clean all the bad people out and put good people in; it's wishful thinking to an extreme, and it's backed up with Nostradamus-style non-falsifiable predictions that get rationalized after the fact.

It's harmless. It's a distraction. It's not a threat to anyone - if anything it takes people who could potentially be activists and redirects them into inaction.

Antifa is a much bigger, more real, more visible threat to national security. Where's the Vice article calling them out?

</comment><comment><USER8> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23904590](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23904590)</comment>


HN+ (a hacker news chrome extension) - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/oieefcckcbbgniifdhhialgkmghahjgl

<comment><USER2> Nice. I had been using Georgify [0], but it doesn't display deeply nested comments well.

[0] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ofjfdfaleomlfanfeh...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ofjfdfaleomlfanfehgblppafkijjhmi)

 _Edit_ : After a few minutes of clicking around, Georgify still feels prettier.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for trying it out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice, but it disables DTrejo's keyboard navigation extension. Can you please add J-walking?

Help from the DTrejo's extension:

        Current style of hotkeys: gmail style.

        Key — Action
        j — move down
        k — move up
        o — open / view comments
        enter — same as above
        r — reply to comment or post. Only works on article pages
        w — upvote (win)
        s — downvote
        Sample Workflow
        Hit news.ycombinator.com
        hit 'j' a few times to get to the 3rd post
        hit 'o' or 'enter' to view the comments
        hit 'o' again to read the article
        hit ctrl-w or cmd-w to close the tab
        hit 'j' to scroll down the rest of the comments
        hit 'r' to respond to someone who is wrong on the internet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, I will look into this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is kind of interesting, but there's a lot of grey-on-grey on the top bar, and I'm not sure if it's an accident or not but the top bar extends down to underneath the first headline.

It would be neat if you moved the search somewhere more prominent too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hm, the top bar should not extend down to be underneath the first headline so that might be a bug. Mind taking a screenshot for me?

And I almost completely forgot about the search box, will fix it. Thanks.

<comment><USER4> <http://i.imgur.com/i3y8u.png>

I figured out what it is, it's the browser being zoomed in. When it's zoomed out it's right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Could you by any chance make the source code easily accessible? I don't know about others, but I prefer to verify the source of any extensions that have access to sites into which I log in.

</comment><comment><USER6> Table's <tr> height can be reduced, and add search on the top to the <tr> -> <td>

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm not a huge fan, it's a cool plugin but I want to see HN, not Google.

</comment><comment><USER4> Also comment collapsing ala reddit would be frigging awesome!

<comment><USER8> [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hockhafcdegocajmjh...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hockhafcdegocajmjhafgjncjpodihkd)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> And we've whitespace..!</comment>


Show HN: Our entry into the 48 hours BrainSTEM build-a-thon. Feedback? - <AUTHOR> http://ropuzzle.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Tested on Chrome only. For a hackathon project, I think thats OK.</comment>


To MBA or to not MBA - <AUTHOR>

I apologize in advance if this has been asked before or gets asked a lot.
The question at hand is, whether as an entrepreneur, going out and getting an MBA makes sense?
A little background. I have an engineering background and have already started 2 separate companies, one of which is a software company. Things are going well but I feel like I am lacking some core business background if I want to take things to the next level such as: 1. Start a bigger company, 2. Defend against huge competitors, 3. Understand deeper intricacies international business (current have the opportunity to enter into a global partnership with another company). 4. To be able to rely less on Lawyers, accountants and other business professionals.
I am totally down with the idea of DIYing it. Have read a bunch of books, etc but really want to arm myself with all the knowledge possible to help my current companies and future companies succeed.
Oh, I have a BA in Philosophy from UC Berkeley and would only go to MBA school if I got into a top school.
Any thoughts or experiences would be appreciated. <comment><USER2> _4\. To be able to rely less on Lawyers, accountants and other business professionals._

Why, that is their area of expertise and unless you are going to bring yourself to their level of education in their field of expertise then you should rely on them. Especially accounting and major legal situations. Missing a detail on either of those could cost you far more than it is worth. Law and accounting are the two disciplines I specifically advise people to cover first when getting out on their own.

As for the MBA, if you are on your own then numbers don't add up. You can get the education for free so why would you pay for it if a piece of paper is not going to affect you bottom line. As well, there are serious concerns that formal documented education outside of some specific disciplines may have past it's golden age (in relation to job qualifications). The market is hyper inflated due to lending practices so the numbers are really bad on a degree for a degrees sake.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree that nothing can replace good counsel in a sticky situation. I just want a greater comfort level on the topics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you can do it part time, I say go for it. I did an undergrad in CS and then did my MBA after working for a few years. At the same time, I started my first company and the knowledge from the MBA really helps. Little things like basic accounting principles to big things like contracts and corporate finance really do help out.

Perhaps the biggest benefit is becoming more comfortable with working in groups where not everyone is an engineer, which is _very_ challenging. Engineers have a certain way of thinking and it's easier to deal with those who think like you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice. Yeah I would definitely be doing it part-time. Yeah I too want a better comfort level with accounting, finance, contracts esp and hopefully topics like big acquisitions ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Most people that I know that get mbas are trying to move up in a big company. It seems like to me a lot of the information is theoretical... like Porter's five forces. I would research the curriculum and see if it matches up to what you want to know. where are you thinking about going?

<comment><AUTHOR> I live near Chicago so I am thinking either the part-time program at Northwestern or UChicago. Definitely considering the Berkeley-Columbia program also.</comment></comment>


Cities see homesteads as source of income - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/us/26revenue.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

<comment><USER2> Too bad federal law prevents them from accepting homesteaders from places where people would jump at the chance.</comment>


Redox: NextGen operating system written in Rust - <AUTHOR> http://www.redox-os.org/ <comment><USER2> _This page will be updated to further explain the foundational principles of Redox, once I have finished writing some code._

This is a mindset the world could use more of. Best of luck.</comment>


Buyer Beware: Rating Nintendo 3DS Launch Games - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2011/03/3ds-games-buyers-guide/ <comment><USER2> That launch games for a console are pretty mediocre isn't really news. It's always like that.

Also, I see Professor Layton didn't make the English launch. I was surprised to see it as a 3D game at all (since all the art was previously 2D) but the game plays nice enough... They throw in a puzzle that has 3D (but doesn't -really- use it) once in a while, too. And all the conversations use 3D characters. It's actually pretty what you'd expect from a word-puzzle game being made 3D. lol</comment>


Show HN: Woyera – Automatically Detect Errors in Your Data - <AUTHOR> http://www.woyera.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys! I have built a Web App and API to detect common and some uncommon errors in your data and give you details. You can upload a csv on the webapp or call the API with your data. Feel free to provide any feedback and hope it helps!

<comment><USER2> Congratulations on launching! Your website looks very neat. Some questions before using:

What kind of data issues are you able to detect?

What data formats are you accepting?

Is there a limit for data set size?</comment></comment>


Loko Scheme, an optimizing R6RS Scheme compiler - <AUTHOR> https://scheme.fail/ <comment><USER2> Looks cool. Writing code that runs in bare metal is not my specialty but it is something I have wanted to try.</comment>


An Argument for P=NP (2005) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://kryten.mm.rpi.edu/scb_pnp_solved22.pdf <comment><USER3> OK, it says this:

        For example, the Steiner Tree problem (STP) is
        known to be NP-complete ... Nonetheless, a simple
        physical process (termed an analog computation)
        can apparently solve it quickly.

No, it can't. Small, trivial cases can be solved, but I believe it's been shown that when you get to mildly interesting cases it's just as likely to find non-optimal solutions, and sometimes even more likely to find non-optimal solutions.

This is at the top of page 2, and it doesn't bode at all well. Section 3 of Aaronson's paper[0] discusses this explicitly, and comes to the conclusion that, not to put too fine a point on it, it doesn't work.

In essence, looks like complete nonsense to me.

[0] [http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0502072v2.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant- ph/0502072v2.pdf)

<comment><USER4> I see that sort of thing a lot, where a simple model appears to violate some algorithmic boundary, but a more complete analysis reveals that all is well.

For example, take "spaghetti sort." This is a weird physical sorting algorithm where you represent each number to be sorted as a physical strand of uncooked spaghetti of corresponding length. To perform the sort, you grab the spaghetti in a bundle and place it on a table so the bottom of each spaghetti strand is on the table. Then you put your other hand on top, find the longest strand, and pull it out. Repeat this process once for each strand, and you then have all the numbers in order.

This is described as a "linear time" algorithm because you perform the same procedure once per number, so it's clearly O(n). It's obviously impractical for real-world use, but if you had some utterly ridiculous quantity of numbers, maybe it could be the best way!

But of course this ignores important factors. For example, the radius of the bundle will increase with the square root of the number of strands present within it. Whatever you use to select and retrieve the longest strand must move at some finite speed to traverse this distance, which means that the actual running time is O(n^1.5), substantially worse than the theoretical O(n log n) limit!

Another factor that is often ignored is the fact that analog systems don't actually have infinite precision. If you look at their actual (or even theoretical) precision and convert that to bits, it's not all that many! Lots of analog solutions can look extremely clever and quick, until you realize that it's just solving the problem for a 28-bit number, or whatever.

<comment><USER5> I consider those the Brownian ratchets [1] of computing. Interesting to model and see what's going on!

Here's another variation: arrange the sticks in a line. Have a pole scan the sticks from the top, and when the pole is impeded, record it's height. You've just computed max(a1,...,aN) in O(1) time?! (disproving is left as an exercise -- note you can even assume the pole is weightless and infinite!)

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

<comment><USER4> All too easy!

Relativity tells us that disturbances in the pole cannot move faster than the speed of light. Therefore the time it takes to find out that your pole hit something is O(n), since the location of the tallest element will be on average halfway down your line.

Of course, there's the much more obvious problem that "arrange the sticks in a line" requires manipulating each stick, and is thus O(n)!

<comment><USER5> Correct, of course :) Maybe it's not that good example... I was trying to come up with a way to obfuscate the speed of light limitation (one usually thinks of poles as rigid). A thing I like about those is even if they're really simple they highlight limits like the Bekenstein bound: you can make your experiment arbitrarily large, but if you allow it to shrink arbitrarily (as a function of n), you get unexpected results (essentially BSS machines[1] versus Turing machines?) -- in your example you could actually sort the numbers in O(n).

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blum%E2%80%93Shub%E2%80%93Smal...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blum%E2%80%93Shub%E2%80%93Smale_machine)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "The bottom line regarding normality is that the burden of proof is surely on those who would maintain that the formal machinery of digital physics is in principle insufficient to model something as straightforward as submerging nails in, and retrieving them from, a bucket of soapy water."

I think the idea of alternate physical systems doing computation is really fun. I personally have a throbbing heart-on for cellular automata, specifically Rule 110 and inspired by Greg Egan's "Permutation City". But that's SF. But that's just emotional attachment.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wonder, is there a relationship between P!=NP and Hilbert's 10th problem? It seems to me that P!=NP is pretty much saying that integer solutions for certain class of polynomials are easy to check (once you have them) but hard to describe as a set (there isn't always a representation with the polynomial algorithm), but I don't know how to put it formally.

</comment><comment><USER8> If anyone with expertise has been lured in by this nonsense paper, do any of you think (like me) that P=NP is undecidable in ZFC?

<comment><USER9> Scott Aaronson wrote a survey about that topic here: [http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/pnp.pdf](http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/pnp.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The dismissive attitude towards proofs and apparent disregard for the important distinctions between "proofs" and "arguments" is kind of upsetting. It's an interesting paper, but it's hard for me to get past this attitude, it just seems like someone is being intentionally obtuse to sound clever :/

</comment><comment><USER11> Has anyone followed the history of this article? Is it known to be satire?

</comment><comment><USER12> > The original reduction was given by the well-known Cook-Levin theorem ...

That's easy. The NTM is just a condensed representation of a DTM, and in each case, the machine encodes an algorithm for whatever NP problem you are working. "Guessing correctly" has no bearing on NP, and it's not a scary or impossible property that it works for people to believe implies P == NP is false. "Guessing correctly" ( otherwise known as branching ) is simply a property of the NTM occupying more than one subsequent state. As long as you construct an algorithm such that the NTM branches on its guesses in P time ( or equivalently the DTM is P size), then you have the P time algorithm. Pretending a valid reason for P == NP being "widely believed to be false" because there would then exist "an NTM that supports guessing correctly as a primitive operation", as if this should be somehow intuitively magical and impossible, is obfuscation, "guessing correctly" has nothing to do with NP and makes no problem harder or easier. "Guessing correctly" won't make a shit algorithm good ( it's not like an oracle in a quantum algorithm like Shor's ), it's just another way of describing a NTM. All you need to worry about is making that P time algorithm for some NP problem. Whether you want to implement that as a DTM or a NTM, is totally up to you. If it's a P time algorithm it's still a P time algorithm. I can make an EXP time algorithm in a NTM too if I like. "Guessing correctly" is not some magical speedup equivalent to P == NP. Too suggest that, or imply that, by suggesting that such a machine would somehow be magical is either the result of someone who doesn't understand this, or someone who is choosing to obfuscate this. So either you don't understand it, and you are pretending that you do. Or you do understand it and you are needlessly fabricating to try to argue for P !== NP, simply revealing how tenuous you fear the arguments are, and how deeply you lack any substantive ones that you must fabricate them. Your language is an attempt to obfuscate and incorrectly attempt to confuse people who don't understand. If you really know this space, doing that is just balderdash. Well played.

</comment><comment><USER12> > because it is condescending

yes exactly.

you have perfectly summed up how its percieved by those in the defeatist culture around P can not be == NP, and this really goes to the heart of what is inefficient and not working here.

and that is especially what im talking about when I speak about the psychology of compelling pay offs for believing this, and the strong attempts at defensiveness when its being considered that the majority response doesnt work.

NP defeatists can not stand the feeling they percieve of being condescended to when their choice to abandon a problem they failed to advance on or make a faster algorithm on, is unmasked from beneath the cloak of being "impossible" they covered it with, owing to their religion that P can not be NP.

instead of owning their choice to give up, they disguised the problem as impossible. when that disguise is revealed, they face their choice and face the possibility their failure was not excused by its being impossible, and their belief in intellectual superiority is challenged, and they percieve it as condescension.

the core contradiction is that the origin of the insecurity they are protecting against is their own choice to surrender, yet they try to blame it on the revealing of that choice by pretending its condescension. so they want to fight the voice that says the problem can be worked on ( and pretend its making them insecure ), to preserve their own narrative that it can't, instead of fighting their self defeatest narrative which gave them cause for the insecurity in the first place.

its a common misattribution of responsibility to preserve a protective delusion:

"it is not my fault i didnt solve this, the problem is impossible"

"it's not the fault of my choice to give up that I feel insecure, it's their fault for unmasking that my giving up was a choice."

misattribution of responsibility is a common maladaptive ( non workable ) response substitute instead of choosing to try another approach and create some results.

it so important to think about the culture of defeat around this because the stakes of these opportunities are so high: efficient acheduling, and dispatching, and gene sequence matching.

and the culture of defeat is essentially inefficiently systmeically and structurally draining resources from working on this. its of a significance that the psychology of this becomes important.

science works when it embraces questioning, including self questioning, of its methods, including its structural, systemic and cultural methods.

these are after all the operations or support and infrastructure faculties which support the work of science.

the culture of defeat and fake excuse around P and NP, lets people off the hook, as an excuse to shutter advances on whole classes of problems, and excuses a lack of results in making more efficient algorithms to meet those opportunities.

it becomes indoctrinated, a dogma, that P can not be NP, and the true believers as we have seen are all the more fervent to compensate for the absence of proof of impossibility.

and this slows progress, which doesnt work.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's cool that this paper exists as a counterpoint to the pervasive culture of defeat around P == NP.

People want to believe P != NP so they feel better about how they failed to prove it, or make a faster algorithm.

This is ridiculous and doesn't help advance the cause to solve it. It's an illogicality at the heart of the CS establishment, everyone is "confident" P != NP, with no proof, simply so they can move on to other things.

What happened to backbone, determination and persistence?

Their confidence in impossibility smells of self-justification of failure, and fear. And the irrational "culture of belief" ( without proof ) is the very antithesis of good science.

Your downvote makes you complicit to this culture of defeat.

<comment><USER13> i spent years thinking about p vs np, under the same intution you have - <USER2> figured p must equal np.

i even had it on my license plate:

[http://s3.neyer.me/pnp.jpg](http://s3.neyer.me/pnp.jpg)

after nightmares involving np complete problems, i finally started considering that p didn't equal np, and suddenly the world made much more sense.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUD9fDxiWKs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUD9fDxiWKs)

<comment><USER12> I hope sometime you come back to the light. Stay strong.

<comment><USER13> see my response here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10074890](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10074890)

a world where P = NP is a much darker world.

<comment><USER12> Dude, with all due respect, that's what the church said when the possibility was raised of the Earth not being the centre of the universe.

"We cannae conceive how it can be bearable to be so" !==> "It can not be so"</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>