FundersClub Ditches Dumb Money By Going Invite-Only - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/16/fundersclub-invite-only/

<comment><USER3> This is hilarious because it's right out of the ponzi playbook - <USER2> scammers love to make their schemes invite-only since it gives clients the feeling that they're part of an exclusive club and makes them less likely to question the investment.

I doubt that FundersClub is a ponzi or even a scam in the legal sense, but it's entirely possible you'd have to be a sucker to invest and there there will be shadier imitators that are outright scams looking to pick up the people who can't get into FundersClub, especially if the JOBS Act is implemented and they can seek money from the general public.

<comment><USER4> So you "doubt" that FundersClub is a ponzi scheme or scam (a very very serious accusation), yet you accuse them of employing the same tactics?

By definition, a scam intends to mislead .. it pretends to be what it is not. So if FC does not intend to mislead, it's an honest business and you have no reason to tar it's reputation with the words you've used.

Regardless of what you think of the JOBS Act (which in many reasonable interpretations is a boon to those who would not otherwise be exposed to the opportunities now exclusive to the so called "1%"), it is wrong to tarnish FundersClub with the labels you've used, sans some sort of evidence .. which you don't have because FC is not a scam.

<comment><USER5> What makes you so sure that FC is not a scam?

<comment><USER4> It's a YC company, I know the founders, who are my batchmates, and _they are not a scam_. The model they've used to pick startups (I do not know the details) is excellent .. out of our batch they picked many of the most successful companies.

I have no financial interest in FC, btw. I have not invested in any FC co's, though I certainly would if I were in a position to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Heh, a lot of snark in the comments tonight :-)

I think this is a pretty smart move, mostly because I think there will be an interesting correction when folks realize that most startups return $0, its the outliers that return outsized returns. And the first sob story we get about how someone took their 401k they spent the last 15 years building and losing it all in start-up investing is going to be paraded about for the rage views and that is going to just be annoying.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm still not convinced that you aren't better off taking "dumb money", as long as they "dumb money" investor doesn't try to act like a "smart money" investor. Maybe I'm just arrogant (OK, I _know_ I'm arrogant, sue me) but the way I see it is: I'm the domain expert in my space, and investors are domain experts in, well, investing. So why do I want somebody who probably doesn't know anything about what we're doing in terms of customers, market, product, etc., trying to throw their weight around and shape the direction of the company?

I find myself wondering if it wouldn't be better to look for somebody who's as dumb as a brick, but hands-off. Essentially, somebody who says "here's X thousand dollars of my money, go make me more money with it".

As opposed to "Here's X thousand dollars of my money, and why don't you pivot to market 'Y', and maybe you should make this little change to the product roadmap, and BTW, I have this old buddy of mine who would make a great CTO..."

Honestly, the only real reasonable sounding argument I've heard yet for wanting involved, hands-on investors is so they can make introductions / open doors for you. But if you're relying on your investors to get you in the door of your customers, well, that sounds like a "red flag" to me.

 _shrug_

<comment><USER8> That's not how it works, at least with angels. The expectation is usually you put the money in, and if the company needs advice or help with something they'll ask you. Feel free to give unsolicited advice but don't expect the company to bend to your will.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Because you really need a bunch of people who think they're smart and want to bother you with every idea they have. Especially at the bottom of your cap table.

</comment><comment><USER10> Because it's so hard to prune all those millionaires.

</comment><comment><USER11> Invite-only always feels a bit strange to me, in a community where we celebrate the guy who made it alone against the crowd, it seem to foster self- replication. You might end-up with car parks filled with Tesla cars owned by people who all do kite-surf together on the week-end. You've lost the crazy outsider who will shuffle the industry (or make it harder for him).

</comment><comment><USER12> What about all the 'dumb money' that's already there, i.e. the existing amateur angels? Oh, they'll be the ones vetting the 'smart money' applicants. Good luck with that!

</comment><comment><USER13> when popularity doesn't work, go for exclusivity.

</comment><comment><USER14> My guess is that this was just an easier story to sell because they can just approve accredited investors and not have to deal with those who are not due to regulations. They may have planned to make it open to everyone but had to step the plan back a bit.

</comment><comment><USER15> Why not to let start-up founders decide from whom they want to accept money or not?</comment>


Viral marketing cracked? - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519361/us-military-scientists-solve-the-fundamental-problem-of-viral-marketing/

<comment><AUTHOR> link to the original paper: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.2963](http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.2963)</comment>


A fleet of trucks just drove themselves across Europe - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/656104/a-fleet-of-trucks-just-drove-themselves-across-europe/ <comment><USER2> Awesome. Trucks and taxis are a very promising target for self driving vehicles for these reasons:

 _24h availability. No need to stop the truck 8+ hours a day for the driver to sleep /eat. _ Reduced fuel comsumption as the article states. * Frees humans to work on more productive affairs.

Just awesome

</comment><comment><USER3> Previously we had western European truckers suffering big time from the competition of lower paid eastern European truckers.

Now with this driverless technology both eastern and western drivers will have no job at all.

AFAIK there are no replacement jobs to offer them and on top of that there are more than one million refugees that came in Europe last year that will be available on the job market.

Honestly I think the EU have no long term vision at all. They just get pushed by whatever corporate agenda "du jour".

</comment><comment><USER4> i was just wondering about the distance between these vehicles, and if that really would add up to some amount of finite-non-zero fuel savings as well ? for example, the lead vehicle just pushes the air away, and the rest following close by in the "slip-stream" experience less overall air resistance...</comment>


Show HN: Drag and drop dashboard builder based on CxJS and Firebase - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/codaxy/dashboards <comment><AUTHOR> A small explanation for users visiting the sample Crypto dashboard. That's a public dashboard which all users can access and modify in the same time. Firebase propagates changes in real-time so you may see widgets moving around while other users are playing with the dashboard.

</comment><comment><USER2> Should I be using the RedirectRoute widget when I want to redirect to a login page? I want to check a user object to see if the user is logged in, I would like to bind the url to the login and redirect. I am using AWS Cognito hosted UI so I can't slip it into an iframe. Any suggestions would be most appreciated.

Thanks

<comment><AUTHOR> Information about the logged in user can usually be read from a cookie or localStorage. You can put that info in the store or use it on the route like this:

<RedirectRoute visible={()=>!userIsSignedIn()} redirect="~/sign-in" />

I'm not aware if AWS Cognito hosted UI offers info about the user or you need implement that on your own. Firebase offers the onAuthStateChanged callback which is used in this app.

[https://github.com/codaxy/dashboards/blob/master/app/layout/...](https://github.com/codaxy/dashboards/blob/master/app/layout/UserAccount.js)</comment></comment>


Put Down the Pitchforks; Amazon Didn't Steal Your Dunning-Krugerrands - <AUTHOR> http://lastweekinaws.com/blog/put-down-the-pitchfork-aws-didnt-steal-your-dunning-krugerrands.html <comment><USER2> But Amazon really did screw up here.

The attackers were able to announce more specific prefixes than Amazon was announcing itself. It was like Amazon said "give me all phone calls for the 415 area code," and the attackers said "give me all calls for 415-555-xxxx." In internet routing, the most specific always wins (down to the minimum prefix size of /24 most networks filter on).

A commonly accepted mitigation for BGP hijacking is to announce the /24's of your important assets as well as the covering prefixes. An attackers announcement of the same /24 will at worst capture _some_ of the traffic, rather than being seen as a more specific and capturing _all_ the traffic.

<comment><USER3> > In internet routing, the most specific always wins

So is this flaw Amazon's fault? I think not. Even your accepted mitigation doesn't fix the hole completely. It's still an internet problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > The internet is fundamentally broken in this way; bad actors can cause > disruption and woe for huge numbers of people. It's a giant problem, to be > sure

So, now I guess we need people to explain how blockchain can solve this problem. /s

<comment><USER5> What if I told you there is an app on the market that can solve this problem using blockchain.

<comment><USER6> But is it using smart contracts to innovate and disrupt (I've lost track of whether disrupting is still hot)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Did this author "coin" the term Dunning-Krugerrand? Because it's brilliant.

<comment><USER8> It's been around for several years, probably originating on bitcointalk.org, but it was/is popular on the r/buttcoin subreddit

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Even though I knew the content deserved it, I upvoted just based on the title.

</comment><comment><USER10> Stupidity, not malice ;) [https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor)

<comment><AUTHOR> Very fair.

I'm not particularly surprised that the general media hasn't grasped the nuances of BGP; I just prefer to reserve jumping on Amazon for those moments where they, y'know... deserve it.</comment></comment>


Mobile Theses - <AUTHOR> http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/12/15/16-mobile-theses <comment><USER2> The number of people that are commenting 'I stopped reading after X' is appalling.

When you find something you disagree with coming from a reputable source, shouldn't you be insanely interested in reading it? Contrarian viewpoints are what teach you something you don't already know. Are people coming to HN everyday to get a pile of articles that affirm their world view?

My reaction to the article was a disappointment because most of these are regurgitations of his previous posts. It feels like he is beating a dead horse because to me all of these points are non-controversial. Apparently not.

<comment><USER3> It's a collection in one place of my previous posts - there is nothing at all new here ;)

<comment><USER4> What exactly is your definition of "mobile"? I usually find it helpful when an author sets up a definition of key terms at the outset of an argument.

> When we say 'mobile' we don't mean mobile, just as when we said 'PCs' we > didn't mean 'personal'. 'Mobile' isn't about the screen size or keyboard or > location or use. Rather, the ecosystem of ARM, iOS and Android, with 10x the > scale of 'Wintel', will become the new centre of gravity throughout > computing. This means that 'mobile' devices will take over more and more of > what we use 'PCs' for, gaining larger screens and keyboards, sometimes, and > more and more powerful software, all driven by the irresistible force of a > much larger ecosystem, which will suck in all of the investment and > innovation.

So if I'm reading this correctly, "mobile" means devices running on simpler hardware and software than traditional desktops or laptops, but running increasingly powerful applications? Regardless of their size and mobility?

And the scale in terms of number of devices in the market will drain investment and innovation away from larger, more powerful hardware and operating systems?

Thanks for writing this up. Just trying to make sure I understand your theses.

<comment><USER5> "the ecosystem of ARM, iOS and Android"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> TL;DR:

The number of cars on the road is growing much faster than trucks, and far more people drive them. Even most truck drivers also own cars and often drive their cars in preference to their trucks. Most ground-transportation-related investments revolve around cars and not trucks, and there are far more car- related products than truck-related products. Therefore trucks will soon be obsolete, and all cargo will be moved with cars.

He's not totally wrong. Mobile is the future. But desktop is also the future, and server, and IoT, and special purpose devices, and hacker devices like the Pi, and smart TVs, and smart cars, and smart appliances, and ...

 _... and and and and and ..._

What's really happening is a great diversification of computing and a massive explosion in the amount of "silicon per capita." The part about "how many electric motors do you own?" is fairly spot on. But he falls down when he tries to push his argument too far and argue that mobile will eclipse desktop/laptop _completely_ and we'll all be staring at 3.5" screens. I will say this until someone shows me a viable port of SolidWorks, Visual Studio, or Revit Architect that is usable on a smartphone. I'm not holding my breath for that.

The only way I see mobile replacing the laptop/PC is either some breakthrough in interaction metaphor (VR? AR that is really useful? brainwaves? who knows) or a mobile device that _converts_ into a desktop when you plug a monitor into it and pair it with a keyboard. It would also have to be capable of being used with as much versatility as a PC, which would mean significant evolution of mobile OSes. Personally I doubt convergence... because why? Silicon is so cheap there is no economic driver for anyone to invest the development necessary for mobile to "swallow PC." It's cheaper and easier to just use two separate devices and let them deeply specialize and optimize for their respective roles. A car/truck convertible is possible too, but the result would probably be an oversized gas guzzler car with poor handling that converts into a shitty underpowered truck with poor capacity.

I also think he's wrong about mobile being the center of gravity. Mobile devices are dumb terminals for accessing the cloud. If there's an emerging new "sun" to replace the PC it's the cloud, not mobile. Increasingly I use both PCs with their big monitors and keyboards _and_ mobile devices to access common cloud resources.

<comment><USER4> Couldn't agree more with all of your observations.

I agree that cloud is currently the center of the ecosystem, and will be over the short term. Data is the blood and the cloud is the heart that stores and pumps that blood. Will become increasingly important as silicon per capita ratio increases and people look to analyze data for optimization purposes.

As another poster commented, a paradigm shift in I/O (VR/AR?) will drive the next surge in productivity as new tech adopts to a better/faster way to get it to do what we want.

<comment><USER6> Tangential but:

As a cyberpunk hippie who thinks people should own their data and control their computers (personal comput- _ing_ regardless of form factor), that's why I focus mostly on the transport and the cloud. The cloud is where your data mostly lives today and probably will live even more in the future, and having private transport envelopes to get that data to and from your multiple devices is key. In the long term I'm excited about personal cloud devices and homomorphic encryption, which would enable your own cloud resources to be hosted in commodity cloud data centers without compromising security. The next "PC" will really be a kind of amorphous blob of silicon orbiting cloud resources linked by an encrypted communication envelope.

You'll be able to access all that from a variety of different I/O devices: things with big monitors and keyboards, things with little screens and touch panels, refrigerators, cars, thermostats, etc.

<comment><USER4> Thing is, homomorphic encryption is expensive in terms of time and computing power. I can't see it being implemented for the majority of consumer grade data, which will probably continue to be mined by large corporations and governments in exchange for "free" hardware, software, apps, etc. Financial data, medical data, VIP data, crypto-junkie data - I think there's a strong use case there.

The guys developing enigma said they'd be putting out another paper at the end of the summer but I didn't see anything...any insights into what's going on over there?

<comment><USER6> I follow it a bit. Right now we know that it's theoretically possible but it's very slow, too slow for uses other than maybe very niche things.

In the next five years I fully expect to see an _acceptably fast_ implementation that will broaden use to the application areas you mention: high security stuff and crypto junkies.

At that point is where things will get interesting. To make homomorphic crypto really fast will take custom silicon. As soon as I see acceptably fast software homomorphic, I expect to see either a startup or one or more projects inside big companies very quickly pop up with the goal of producing either homomorphic silicon to pair with an existing CPU or -- more interestingly -- a CPU that computes homomorphically as its native mode of operation. _That_ could get interesting.

I predict that by 2030 you will be able to spin up a 100% "blind" sealed VM in the cloud for <$20/month that is fast enough to run what can run on an average cloud instance today.

 _All_ compute doesn't have to be homomorphic to get the benefits. You only really need it for encryption, decryption, key generation, authentication, and indexing of security critical data. Boilerplate stuff can be done in the clear. By 2030 standard cleartext compute will be so cheap I wonder if cloud providers will even bother charging for it below very large levels.

Edit: can't make this any deeper but to reply to your reply:

I'm not sure. I think that's up in the air. Right now you can do a whole lot with a small cloud instance with <1gb RAM and 20gb local storage. Software bloat seems to be increasing less rapidly than it was 10 years ago, and there are even movements toward more efficient languages today. So I just have to shrug on that one. We'll see.

<comment><USER4> Well the one thing I would push back on is...how useful will the computing power of the average cloud instance today be in 2030?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Read the whole thing. There are some well developed points near the end, but i feel many of these premises are fundamentally flawed. For example, that mobile devices will gain keyboards and become our primary computers.

Mobile is for content consumption, workstations are for content creation. Missing that key point leads many of the points here astray. Solving the disparity is one of the major open areas in HCI research.

</comment><comment><USER8> i quit reading on topic two. that's just some uninformed musings of someone who probably call themselves "tweeters" (and here you saw some uninformed musings on the same level you'd find there. so meta)

<comment><USER9> Yeah this was what killed me after topic two:

> But actually, smartphones are mostly used when you're sitting down next to a > laptop, not 'mobile', and their capabilities make them much more > sophisticated as internet platforms than PC. Really, it's the PC that has > the limited, cut-down version of the internet.

Smartphones are mostly used when I'm sitting next to a laptop... are they? Not in my experience.

The PC has the limited cut-down version of the internet? Again... complete opposite of every experience I've had.

<comment><USER10> Did you read any of his linked articles? The smartphone use comment is backed by market research. And his PC internet comment is addressed in the same article, describing the additional capabilities of smartphone internet over PC internet.

[http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/9/1/forget-about-mob...](http://ben- evans.com/benedictevans/2015/9/1/forget-about-mobile-internet)

<comment><USER9> I hadn't read that. I was probably too dismissive of the claim and the distribution of phone usage was definitely not what I'd expected it'd be. Still I'd question the language of the original article. Saying that "smartphones are mostly used when you're sitting down next to a laptop" isn't quite true to the data in that article. It suggests the person has equal access to a smartphone and a laptop but picks the smartphone because it's a strictly better experience. A lot of the at home phone use they're seeing in that study is coming from people who have just a smart phone. Which is really the beauty of smartphones, it covers all your basic needs in 1 device. But I'm not quite ready to believe that smart phones have some better version of the internet and that's why people like them.

<comment><USER10> This is just my speculation, but people might use smartphones sitting next to their laptop for a variety of reasons:

\- Streaming video on laptop while doing something else

\- You can't text message or snapchat from your laptop

\- It might be quicker to hit an app icon than load a webpage for checking the weather

\- You're on your work laptop but you get a personal email on your phone

I think the author's point about a "better" internet is that ubiquity / portability will eventually trump any other advantages you get from accessing the internet from your computer. A larger laptop screen doesn't really help if you don't have wifi access.

There are definite advantages to accessing the internet with a real keyboard and a large screen, but over time those advantages will shrink. Consider this "reversed" review of the Macbook Pro: [http://www.speirs.org/blog/2015/11/30/can-the-macbook-pro- re...](http://www.speirs.org/blog/2015/11/30/can-the-macbook-pro-replace-your- ipad)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Mobile is not the future of the internet Ubiquity is; in a sense, internet is not mobility but stationary; people interact with the internet when they are mostly still in their bodies, sitting on the bus, driving their cars, not "mobile"; cell networks allow for talking and walking, but using the internet while walking or moving is generally handled not by the user but by the bots; that being said, I am being a creative dissenter, for the benefit of all beings and I <3 u

Good wishes

</comment><comment><USER12> _...their capabilities make them much more sophisticated as internet platforms than PC. Really, it's the PC that has the limited, cut-down version of the internet._

I honestly can't think of a single way in which that's true, and he doesn't seem to provide any examples either.

<comment><USER2> He links to three articles with probably 15,000 words explaining that point, right under the paragraph.

Basically his point is that your phone comes with a camera, GPS, and persistent internet connection. Your desktop _may_ have a webcam that is annoying to point around the room. The internet is fundamentally more useful when you have it all the time and the services you are using have an idea of where you are.

<comment><USER12> Hah, ok fair point about the articles. I had no idea those were even links. Grey text with no underline or mouseover so I scanned right past them.

Maybe I really am a relic of the desktop era...

<comment><USER13> Same here. I figured they were keywords or the kind of thought you jot down quickly to research more later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I stopped reading at "Mobile is the future".

Everytime I hear this, its from a clueless manager that saw that most traffic comes from mobile so decided we should put more ads on mobile. They don't realize that the over all traffic is still the same.

Mobile is the future is what made every news outlet create their own app and force you to download on each page view.

<comment><USER2> Except that Benedict Evans is not a clueless manager, he's an analyst at Andreessen Horowitz. Everything he writes is worth a read, a lot of it is really insightful. Seems like it's your loss to stop after the first 3 sentences.</comment></comment>


MIT Announces New Institute for Data, Systems, and Society - <AUTHOR> http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/mit-launches-idss-0408

<comment><USER2> Here is the very long report that supported the decision to establish this institute: [http://orgchart.mit.edu/sites/default/files/reports/20140504...](http://orgchart.mit.edu/sites/default/files/reports/20140504_Provost_FormNewEntity.pdf)

I found it when trying to discover who their new Statistics strategic hire is. The possibility of a PhD in Stats from MIT is weird.

<comment><USER3> While shopping around for statistics PhD programs to apply for, I found it strange that MIT seemed like the only "name" school that didn't have a program. So n=1, but seems to me that they recognize that they are losing out by not having a formal stats PhD program.

Edit: Just noticed on page 20 that one of the discarded name proposals for the new program was the "Institute for Statistics and Information Systems (ISIS)."

<comment><USER2> That was also my impression, especially considering that CMU has a Machine Learning department (above and beyond their existing Stats Dept.) and there are Data Science Master's programs popping up all around. Get on the bus!

The politics and turf battles must be fascinating, because if there is one (technical) discipline that feels encroached-upon and under-appreciated, it's statistics. Finally, some appreciation, and they'd hate to cede any control to (say) a bunch of upstarts from the CS dept. who wouldn't know a James-Stein estimator from Adam.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is interesting news. It seems that all the big companies and universities are equipping themselves to tackle the data problem at a larger scale. I wonder if this is because companies like Google/Facebook/Baidu found themselves ahead of academia when tackling problems at large scale. Or perhaps data warehouses are bursting at the seams with useful information waiting for qualified people to analyze them.

You can read some about NYU's Data Science Program here: [http://www.kdnuggets.com/2014/06/nyu-data-science-program- ov...](http://www.kdnuggets.com/2014/06/nyu-data-science-program- overview.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm a grad student in the department this is replacing, but will be continuing on to the PhD program in EECS.

I'm really excited to see this happening, the department it was replacing needed a bit of help and it's good to see MIT doubling down on the idea that sociotechnical systems are worth studying.

<comment><USER6> What department is it replacing?</comment></comment>


4 in 10 Americans engaging in high-risk cleaning practices due to SARS-CoV-2 - <AUTHOR> https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6923e2.htm <comment><USER2> I visited an elderly relative to bring food and noticed that when she washed her hands she was spraying them with a well known spray bottle brand of kitchen surface cleaner.</comment>


Show HN: Hyperfine – a command-line benchmarking tool - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sharkdp/hyperfine <comment><USER2> Most -- nearly all -- benchmarking tools like this work from a normality assumption, i.e. assume that results follow the normal distribution, or is close to it. Some do this on blind faith, others argue from the CLT that "with infinite samples, the mean is normally distributed, so surely it must be also with finite number of samples, at least a little?"

In fact, performance numbers (latencies) often follow a heavy-tailed distribution. For these, you need a literal shitload of samples to get even a slightly normal mean. For these, the sample mean, the sample variance, the sample centiles -- they all severely underestimate the true values.

What's worse is when these tools start to remove "outliers". With a heavy- tailed distribution, the majority of samples don't contribute very much at all to the expectation. The strongest signal is found in the extreme values. The strongest signal is found in the stuff that is thrown out. The junk that's left is the noise, the stuff that doesn't tell you very much about what you're dealing with.

I stand firm in my belief that unless you can prove how CLT applies to your input distributions, you should not assume normality.

And if you don't know what you are doing, stop reporting means. Stop reporting centiles. Report the maximum value. That's a really boring thing to hear, but it is nearly always statistically and analytically meaningful, so it is a good default.

<comment><USER3> > Report the maximum value.

In benchmarks, assuming you run the same workload each time, you often want the _minimum_ value. Anything else just tells you how much system overhead you encountered.

(Complete agreement that applying statistics without knowing anything about the distribution can mislead.)

<comment><USER4> [This article]([https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/entries/minimum_times_tend_to_...](https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/entries/minimum_times_tend_to_mislead_when_benchmarking.html)) explaib why using the minimum time may not be a so great idea.

<comment><USER5> Just looking at the chart, your article makes a case that minimum is much better than maximum, and in fact if you report one number, the minimum is the best number to report (in that particular example).

If we go into details - sure, 1 number is not ideal, but neither is the confidence interval, because people will assume normal distribution for them. If you report 2 numbers, perhaps instead of confidence interval (which falsely implies normal distribution) it's better to report the mode and the median.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I have submitted "hyperfine" 1.5 years ago when it just came out. Since then, the program has gained functionality (statistical outlier detection, result export, parametrized benchmarks) and maturity.

Old discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16193225](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16193225)

Looking forward to your feedback!

<comment><USER6> Since you cite bench as an inspiration, have you ever thought about including the nice graphical HTML page with graphs that bench outputs? In a similar vein what are your thoughts on directly depending on and using criterion (the Rust port)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback.

No, we never thought about HTML output. However, there are multiple other export options and we also ship Python scripts that can be used to plot the benchmark results. The script is not very large, so far, but we are happy to add new scripts if the need for one should arise. What kind of diagrams would you like to see?

Also, I have never thought about using criterion.rs. My feeling was that it is suited for benchmarks with thousands of iterations, while we typically only have tens of iterations in hyperfine (as we typically benchmark programs with execution times > 10 ms). Do you have anything specific criterion feature in mind that we could benefit from?

<comment><USER6> Ah those were earnest questions, not feature requests in disguise :), especially the second question. I haven't so far had any need for either of those things while using hyperfine (although admittedly I've only used hyperfine for about 3 small projects).

I ask purely as a comparison to some of the design choices bench made for personal edification.

That being said, one of the hypothetical advantages of using criterion is that you get to piggy-back on its visualizations and statistical analyses, which are quite useful for showing friends and coworkers. I'm not sure of the specifics of how you're doing outlier detection, but Criterion's method is quite nice and I find the choice of linear regression for linearly increasing iterations to be an interesting sanity check.

Criterion can work for lower iterations as well (although tens is definitely getting into the lower bound).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I started using hyperfine a few months ago now on a colleague's recommendation and I really like it.

In the past, I've cobbled together quick bash pipelines to run time in a loop, awk out timings, and compute averages, but it was always a pain. Hyperfine has a great interface and really useful reports. It actually reminds me quite a bit of Criterion, the benchmarking suite for Rust.

I also use fd and bat extensively, so thanks for making such useful tools!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for your feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is great! I was looking for something like this a year ago for benchmarking imputation scripts as part of a paper. This would have been awesome to use. Will keep it in my in the future.

</comment><comment><USER9> hyperfine is really nice!

FWIW I wrote a rough first version of a tool that runs a hyperfine benchmark over all commits in a repo and plots the results in order to see which commits cause performance changes: [https://github.com/dandavison/chronologer](https://github.com/dandavison/chronologer)

<comment><AUTHOR> Very cool! I'd love to reference this in the hyperfine README

<comment><USER9> Great, please do. I wanted to add zoom capabilities to the boxplot visualization, but it didn't seem to be available in vega(-lite) yet.</comment></comment></comment>


Whatsapp Is Fighting to Keep Millions of Users Untraceable - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/whatsapp-is-fighting-to-keep-indias-government-out-of-your <comment><USER2> I can see both sides of the argument for and against keeping whatsapp as encrypted as it is. Nowadays it is near impossible to find a company that is this willing to keep data confidential but at the same time it can have fallback as the article highlights.</comment>


DataMaps - A JavaScript Library For Interactive Maps For Data Visualizations - <AUTHOR> http://datamaps.github.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Via Functionn - Open Source Resources For Web Developers & Designers: [http://functionn.blogspot.com/2012/11/datamaps-javascript- li...](http://functionn.blogspot.com/2012/11/datamaps-javascript-library- for.html)

P.S. Functionn contains a whole lot more of awesome resouces like jStat. There only a fraction of them I can post here at a time. Take a look if you're interested, and subscribe: <http://functionn.blogspot.com></comment>


A Mathematician's Lament - <AUTHOR> http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

<comment><USER2> Submitted and discussed many times. It's _still_ worth seeing again, and the previous discussions have been interesting.

<http://searchyc.com/lament+lockhart></comment>


Facebook Defeats Yahoo to Become America's Second Most Popular Website - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/us/2010/02/17/facebook-defeats-yahoo-americas-popular-website/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheNextWeb+%28The+Next+Web%29

<comment><USER2> I can't believe Yahoo! held onto the #2 spot for so long, especially since the sites don't seem to be tracking Yahoo!s network of sites.

I wonder what is counted. What Yahoo! network sites? Are Facebook applications included?

</comment><comment><USER3> In the first graph, Traffic:

What happened at approximately Feb-Mar '09 to benefit both sites? Yahoo reversed a decline, and FB accelerated.

What happened at approximately June '09? Yahoo's rise reversed to a decline, which still continues as of Jan '10. FB's rise went flat for awhile, then resumed a shallow rise which still continues.</comment>


Kdenlive 20.04 Beta Released (video editor) - <AUTHOR> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Kdenlive-20.04-Beta-Released <comment><AUTHOR> Its a great program even if it crashes. Its been my goto since I left Vegas and haven't quite fell in love with DaVinci Resolve.</comment>


VMware Fusion Updated Tech Preview with Big Sur Support - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2020/07/fusion-big-sur-tech-preview.html <comment><USER2> "Big Sur brings with it some really big visual changes, but also major changes under the hood. For instance, Apple has been progressively deprecating 3rd party Kernel Extensions or 'kexts' which Fusion needs to run VMs and containers. In order to continue to operate in this model, we've re- architected our hypervisor stack to leverage Apple's native hypervisor APIs, allowing us to run VMs _without any kernel extensions_. On macOS Catalina systems, Fusion operates as it always has using kernel extensions to provide functionality. However on Big Sur systems, Fusion operates entirely without kexts."

Reminds me of the discontinued Veertu app: [https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2016/01/native-mac-osx- virtua...](https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2016/01/native-mac-osx- virtualization-with.html)</comment>


Blocking a protein curbs memory loss in old mice: study - <AUTHOR> https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2019/05/blocking-protein-curbs-memory-loss-in-old-mice.html <comment><USER2> > Impeding VCAM1, a protein that tethers circulating immune cells to blood > vessel walls, enabled old mice to perform as well on memory and learning > tests as young mice ... it subdued the inflammatory mood of the brain's > resident immune cells

So this suggests: ↓ inflammation = ↑ memory. In the short term inflammation generally impedes function, so this is an intuitively reasonable result.

<comment><USER3> Specially in light of recent correlations found between inflammation and all sorts of diseases including neurodegenerative ones, previously discussed on HN: [https://harvardmagazine.com/2019/05/inflammation-disease- die...](https://harvardmagazine.com/2019/05/inflammation-disease-diet)

<comment><USER4> I always wonder if this is a design flaw, or if there is another completely worse state that the body is trying to prevent happening, a state we don't even know about until we have "cured" inflammation and all these other diseases

sort of like how we wouldn't be studying a lot of this stuff right now if such a large portion of the population hadn't gotten so old

<comment><USER5> There's a lot of evidence suggesting that it's a feature rather than a bug.

There's lots of bad things that happens as you get older and upregulation of inflammation plays an important part in that.

The thing is it's not random though. It happens in a synchronized fashion.

It does seem increasingly likely that our genetic code contains instructions to make us increasingly frail and sick as we get older,to slowly increase the probability of death.

We see this more clearly other places in nature. Closely related species that have ended up in different environments over time can have dramatically lifespans.

I have seen various hypotheses for this, including models that suggest that there's a tendency for older individuals to keep too much of the resources so that the younger generations won't have enough resources to grow and flourish.

<comment><USER6> Or it could just be that there was never a lot of evolutionary pressure for the "stay fit while old" traits. Being healthy for long enough to reproduce and provide some care for your progeny was usually good enough from the evolutionary standpoint, so the frailty-at-old-age genes weren't actively selected against.

<comment><USER5> It could be, though with a bit of Googling I found this blog post summarizing scientific studies that suggest otherwise.

[https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2016/05/16/no- animal-...](https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2016/05/16/no-animal-dies- of-old-age-in-the-wild/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> From [https://www.jax.org/news-and-insights/jax- blog/2017/november...](https://www.jax.org/news-and-insights/jax- blog/2017/november/when-are-mice-considered-old)

it appears that old mice are 18-24 months old. While mouse models in general are hard to apply to humans, I would guess that applying "old" mouse models to "old" humans is likely to be even harder.

</comment><comment><USER8> Are there any foods we can eat to lower inflammation in general?

<comment><USER9> The study was done on mice and the metabolism of mice is different from ours.

In humans refined carbohydrates and hyper-processed food in general (which includes hyper-processed meat) contributes the most to inflammation.

<comment><USER10> There's growing research to say that eating any meat (specifically red meat) increases inflammation. Among other things, it elevates levels of C-Reactive protein, which the liver makes when there is inflammation in the body.[1]

Another studied suggests that meat intake increases levels of arachidonic acid, which is another mediator in inflammation and aging.[2]

Those are just a couple of studies. There are plenty more where they came from. I highly suggest reading 'How Not to Die' by Dr. Michael Greger, to all those that are interested in way of reducing inflammation in the body. The book is incredibly well referenced, and a joy to read. [3]

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24284436](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24284436)

[2] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28146136](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28146136)

[3] [https://www.amazon.com/How-Not-Die-Discover- Scientifically/d...](https://www.amazon.com/How-Not-Die-Discover- Scientifically/dp/1250066115/&tag=httpwwwdrgreg-20?pldnSite=1)

<comment><USER9> First of all, humans have been eating red meat for literally millions of years.

Both those links are observational studies. The first link even admits that the association is weak. And the second link is a population-level study.

Observational studies are important clues, but too weak to base conclusions on, as in such studies it's hard to isolate the variables. For example given that red meat has been a scare crow, you've got the "healthy user bias" [1], in other words the people that tend to eat red meat are also those that tend to engage in unhealthy activities like smoking, eating junk food or not exercising. Scientists of course try to take such factors into account, but that's really hard to do.

Also such science is reductionist because it uses markers that may or may not have an impact on all cause mortality on or the quality of life, as such markers need to be read in context (often in relation to other markers). And since you mentioned "arachidonic acid", its rise isn't necessarily unhealthy.

Here's an article that debunks the notion that red meat is inflammatory: [https://chriskresser.com/does-red-meat-cause- inflammation/](https://chriskresser.com/does-red-meat-cause-inflammation/)

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

<comment><USER10> "For example, the traditional diet of the Masai was composed almost entirely of red meat, blood, and milk – all high in Neu5Gc – yet they were free from modern inflammatory diseases. (7)"

I get why people keep trying to fall back on Price's research into the Masai, but I'm afraid it's misleading. The Masai actually had significant rates of atherosclerosis, they just didn't die from it, at least not the ones that otherwise lived long enough to matter. [1] To say that article 'debunks' it is disingenuous regardless. It is simply a counter-argument in article form; part of a debate that could well be retorted by someone more intelligent than myself (I'm sure Greger could give it a good rebuttal).

I think we can all agree that the best way to reduce inflammation is simply to exercise. It's been shown time and time again. By using the Masai as an ideal, we're simply looking at healthy user bias but in reverse. Justifying meat consumption with a tribal population that often runs marathons to catch said meat is baffling to me; it is not an excuse to dismiss a vast amount of research, both observational and otherwise.

I've latched on to meat and its markers of inflammation because it's relevant to the OP topic, but if we're going down the route of history, really we should be basing diet on our genetic biomarkers. "First of all, humans have been eating red meat for literally millions of years." should really be "First of all, small populations of certain humans have been eating red meat for literally millions of years." From my studies on ancestral human eating patterns, it seems that most were almost entirely vegetarian, and may have only eaten meat during celebrations a few times in a year. Scientific American had a great article on the topic [3].

To quote a favoured read of mine, "Human gene variants promoting veggie-rich and meat-rich diets are still distributed among modern humans. They fall into patterns one might expect given modern cultural dietary traditions. A gene variant that promotes conversion from plant based dietary food sources to omega 3 and 6 fats necessary for brain development is found more often in India, where many people are vegetarian. A different variant that slows this conversion is found among arctic people who eat a fish-heavy diet already very rich in these fats, according to a recent Cornell study." [2] This is why nutrition science is so difficult. However, I still believe that with the modern human exercising a little as we do - even 2 hours 7 days a week, a massive amount to us now unless you're an athlete, is very little compared to our meat eating ancestors - that a need for a plant based diet is higher than ever, and that applies to everyone.

[1] [http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/95/1/26.abstract](http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/95/1/26.abstract)

[2] [https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2018/03/30/why-humans- sta...](https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2018/03/30/why-humans-started- eating-meat-critical-diet/)

[3] [https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/human- ancest...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/human-ancestors- were-nearly-all-vegetarians/)

<comment><USER9> > " _the best way to reduce inflammation is simply to exercise_ "

Exercise helps, but the evidence for it is mixed. I don't think there's any amount of exercise you can do to undo the damage of a toxic diet, which the standard diet tends to be.

And as proof there are professional athletes that end up suffering from chronic illness and inflammation. Even more so, intense training like for running marathons can make you sick, because it can lead to a suppression of the immune system due to the stress involved [1]. On a cursory search I found a meta-analysis on studies on the effects of marathon running on inflammation markers and the results are very mixed, endurance running promoting both anti- and pro- inflammatory markers. [2]

Therefore your claim doesn't stand to scrutiny, even though we can agree that exercise is mandatory for being healthy in general.

\---

> " _Justifying meat consumption with a tribal population that often runs > marathons to catch said meat is baffling to me._ "

In your original comment you pointed at a population-level study (your second link). Why is mentioning a study on an indigenous population any less valid? Is that a double standard I'm sensing?

We study indigenous populations because chronic diseases are very modern and it has something to do with the modern environment, which includes the diet, especially since many of these populations got sick after being transitioned to the western diet.

The Masai might have been exercising more and live with less stress, which might have contributed to their overall health, or maybe they ate that meat with something else that reduced the inflammation, however this is an admission that context matters and that reductionist statements such as " _red meat is inflammatory_ " are wrong.

Also apparently we burn as many calories as hunter gatherers [3], so I would be careful about such statements.

\---

> _" From my studies on ancestral human eating patterns, it seems that most > were almost entirely vegetarian, and may have only eaten meat during > celebrations a few times in a year."_

The article you linked to is entirely devoid of any tangible proof and given the editorial style I can't take it seriously.

Indeed, the diet of apes and monkeys is composed of leaves, nuts, fruits and insects. However this is a very bizarre argument. Us becoming omnivores and starting to hunt animals and eat meat is what allowed us to adapt to harsher environments and to grow our big brains. Eating meat is what made us human and what drove us to develop tools made of stone for hunting or for collecting the bone marrow, it's what drove us to use fire for cooking, in order to increase the bio-availability of the meat and the starches that we eat.

First of all because our big brain can only be explained by the availability of high-calorie foods. High-calorie foods are not very available in nature in edible form. We couldn't have digested many of the high-calorie starchy plants that were available. The prevailing theory is that fire was first used for cooking in order to cook starchy plants that were toxic otherwise. But the first known use of fire was only 1 million years ago [4] and does not coincide with the expansion of our brains.

Use of stone tools however coincides with the expansion of our brains, yet routine use of fire may have began only 300,000 years ago [5], which means starchy plants weren't very available for us to eat, certainly not enough to explain our high-caloric diet.

The best indications for what our ancestors ate comes from looking at modern hunter-gatherers and we've got plenty of such populations observed [6].

Observed hunter-gatherers obtain most of their energy from animal foods [7]. From the groups studied in that reference, they found ...

\- 46 groups that obtained 85% of their energy from meat, fish and eggs (with no groups obtaining this much energy from plants)

\- 133 groups that obtained 65% of their energy from meat, fish and eggs (only 8 groups that obtained 65% of their energy from plants)

\- the median average obtained 70% of their energy from animal sources, 30% from plants

Note that this report has been criticized to have some flaws, but there is a substantial body of evidence for the theory that, on average, hunter-gatherers got 70% of energy from animals [8] [9] [10].

\---

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/the-running- blog/20...](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/the-running- blog/2015/aug/27/the-elite-athlete-paradox-how-running-a-marathon-can-make- you-ill)

[2] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5650970/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5650970/)

[3] [https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0040503)

[4] [https://www.pnas.org/content/109/20/E1215](https://www.pnas.org/content/109/20/E1215)

[5] [https://www.pnas.org/content/108/13/5209](https://www.pnas.org/content/108/13/5209)

[6] [http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/worldcul/10-2gray.pdf](http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/worldcul/10-2gray.pdf)

[7] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10702160](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10702160)

[8] Cordain, L. "Implications of Plio-Pleistocene Hominin Diets for Modern Humans," pp 363-383 in Peter S. Ungar, ed., Evolution of the human diet: the known, the unknown, and the unknowable, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

[9] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10702160?dopt=AbstractPl...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10702160?dopt=AbstractPlus)

[10] [https://www.unm.edu/~hkaplan/KaplanHillLancasterHurtado_2000...](https://www.unm.edu/~hkaplan/KaplanHillLancasterHurtado_2000_LHEvolution.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Before people start eating extreme low protein diets, that should be "Blocking _a_ protein".

<comment><USER12> Also, there is the whole "in mice" bit.

One of the more valuable science twitter accounts to follow is the one that that just retweets every sensationally misleading pop-sci headline that ends up being based on rodent studies with an all-caps IN MICE! comment.

<comment><USER13> Trendy, yes. Valuable, not sure. Maybe to keep track of the bleeding edge of basic research. This is much better news than the headline "Nothing we do seems to affect memory loss in mice." It means we're starting to understand how memory works at a molecular level in mammals.

<comment><USER12> Right, it's good that we have the very beginnings of an understanding of how the process might work. In mice. Applications to humans are, if previous track records are anything to go on, five to twenty years out and uncertain.

Meanwhile, gullible people with poor reading comprehension will see the headline, or hear the badly interpreted third-hand reporting on the study during the science puff piece section of the nightly news. Some fraction of the hypochondriatic will take it up as gospel, and begin preaching it, and the sum total is a contribution to the mountain of medical misinformation that is floating around in the popular consciousness.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


New York's Staten Island to Get America's Other Big Wall - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/staten-island-seawall-climate-crisis-design/index.html <comment><USER2> Why the hell would we do this for Staten Island but not Manhattan and Brooklyn?

<comment><USER3> Manhattan is behind Staten Island and Brooklyn. Brooklyn has a natural barrier thanks to Fire Island.

So what remains is Staten Island.

i don't think this will be very effective tho

<comment><USER2> Staten Island shields Manhattan from _some_ waves. A wall protecting Staten Island from flooding doesn't protect Manhattan at all, tho. And as we know from Sandy, Manhattan and Brooklyn are equally vulnerable to flooding — and far more costly to allow to flood.

<comment><USER3> equally vulnerable is a stretch... Staten island was really wrecked

I tried looking for a breakdown of cost per area but didn't find it. but having seen articles at the time, I wouldn't be surprised if it was worse.

building a sea wall seems like an ok choice

the cleanup also had a big focus on infrastructure in and out of Manhattan so I think Manhattanites felt it less

<comment><USER2> I'm just saying that from an ROI perspective, doing this for Staten Island but not Manhattan seems short-sighted.

Also, the bit where hundreds of frail elderly people were stuck on upper floors of high rises without water for about a week.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Epic Fail Yale Art School website. Is is hacked? - <AUTHOR> http://art.yale.edu/

<comment><USER2> Likely not:

"This website is a wiki. All School of Art grad students, faculty, staff, and alums have the ability to change most of this site's content (with some exceptions); and to add new content and pages."

<comment><AUTHOR> Shouldnt the "Art" school have a website with some basic sense of aesthetics ?</comment></comment>


Will Apple's History Repeat? - <AUTHOR> http://continuations.com/post/241521402/will-apples-history-repeat <comment><USER2> while the Adriod market isn't really open enough, given time it is still going to open a can of whup ass on Apple and their * control everything and lock the user in app prison *strategy.

Given time their will be apps and services (starting with Google Voice) that just cant be in the app-store and are to compelling to live without.

The age of the phone-computer has just begun.

<comment><USER2> Meant "Android". Doh.</comment></comment>


The (One-Sided) Anatomy Of A Startup Failure - <AUTHOR> http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/07/18/the-one-sided-anatomy-of-a-startup-failure

<comment><USER2> Right after Scoble was hired, I was invited to a coming-out party organized by Podtech (in Mountain View). That was the first time that I heard Scoble speak in person and I remember telling myself that this had to be the beginning of the end for Podtech. This is not meant to be a negative on Scoble or John (who had a vision that involves Scoble). But I was thinking that if Podtech were to be a media company (which it wasn't until hiring Scoble and other "superstar") then not only does it need to be authentic (which Scoble certainly was and still is) but it had to be relevant as well (to its growing population of free subscribers and more importantly to its paid customers). I was not convinced that Scoble was "sustainably" relevant to increase listener base beyond a small niche (which is a big problem for a VC-backed startup since they expect huge payback). Soon after that I decided to unsubscribe Podtech altogether because a listener, I was confused. Podtech as a media company did not have a unique genre and the contents were all over the place (too much talents, may be, to put it mercifully).

</comment><comment><USER3> Has there ever been a successful exit (repaid the investors) by a company that was founded with the direct participation of a 'social media superstar'? I can't think of any. I can think of several 'superstars' that got their launch from successful companies, but none the other way around.

Big egos do not lead to good decisions.

<comment><USER4> Depends on how specific "successful exit" is. Otherwise: <http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2008/07/nowpublic-buys.html> (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=242417>)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The commentary about PodTech reveals that everyone involved with the company is even more clueless than they realize. The lists completely miss the point. The reason PodTech failed is simply because they made something nobody wanted.

</comment><comment><USER6> never heard of it.</comment>


Wuhan lab phone records show 'possible shutdown' in October - <AUTHOR> https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/wuhan-lab-phone-records-show-possible-shutdown-in-october-20200510-p54rid.html <comment><USER2> Good grief, so much propaganda here. This is HackerNews not FoxNews.

The 2019 Military World Games, officially known as the 7th CISM Military World Games and commonly known as Wuhan 2019, was held from October 18–27, 2019 in Wuhan, Hubei, China.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Military_World_Games](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Military_World_Games)

This is why the roads were closed and phone usage changed its normal patterns.

<comment><USER3> The article, though, describes dates that do not overlap the games:

> The report, carried out by private experts, suggested there may have been a > "hazardous event", specifically at the institute's National Biosafety > Laboratory, between October 6 and 11. Analysis of mobile phone data from > around the institute also suggested roadblocks were in place between October > 14 and 19.

This doesn't rule out the possibility that the discrepancy comes from a drill or other preparation for the games. However, it does make this information worthy of deeper investigation.

<comment><USER4> The data is a small subset of actual cell phone use, making it misleading and useless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >Experts urged caution, suggesting the report may be based on limited commercially available mobile phone data, and that there could be other reasons for varying levels of phone usage.

Is there much more to it than this? Much more will be read into this than should be. Investigate by all means, but everyone should really know that there's only one answer that the present US administration is interested in with this investigation - that this virus did not develop but was released - the good intentions of researchers be damned.

<comment><USER6> It's much easier to write a report when you're told what conclusions to reach beforehand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's a typical FUD campaign. Reality is irrelevant to the narrative, and discussion is railroaded into drawing conclusions while accepting the premise without questions.

It's Iraq's WMDs all over again but even weirder because it is a topic that has very little practical value. This is purely political.

Now, if the US can really pinpoint mobile phone calls within a building, in the middle of China, surely that should be the scoop here.

(Btw, the first week of October is a national holiday in China, and the Military World Games were held in Wuhan later that month)

<comment><USER2> This is what scares me the most--more so than the virus itself. Stupid Americans believing stupid conspiracy theories and rushing to war just to get an idiot re-elected.

<comment><USER6> The US cannot go to war with China. So that's at least a little relief.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hmm, seems like cherry picking. How often do these events occur? Did it happen in September, August, etc? Did it happen last year at the same time? Seems a bit premature to draw conclusions immediately one way or the other.

</comment><comment><USER8> Assuming this is true knowing that there is no way to definitively find out, would it have been possible for China to limit the spread at the time? If is was true and they were open and transparent about it?

</comment><comment><USER9> So the whole 5 eyes report has basically been exposed as likely a fabrication at best, and they are coming up with some other nonsense now.

It's clear FUD.

And all this does not change the fact that whether it escaped a lab or not is completely irrelevant (other than the fact that it makes the Trump admins decision to pull US researchers from the lab even worse, since if they hadn't pulled them to save peanuts, and it did escape from a lab, the US and the world would have been aware of this in October).

There is no reason to believe Western countries, many of which did not start acting until late March although information about the CoronaVirus has existed since the beginning of the year at the latest, and Asian countries had already started acting on it in mid Jan to Feb, would have behaved any differently.

</comment><comment><USER10> What is the mechanism that enabled US intelligence to get this phone data?

<comment><USER11> I wouldn't be shocked if it came from NRO satellite data. The frequencies cell phones operate at will readily escape to space.</comment></comment>


Google takes Chrome 64-bit for speed boost on Windows - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnet.com/news/google-takes-chrome-64-bit-for-speed-boost-on-windows/

<comment><USER2> "Chrome's renderer -- the part of the browser that interprets the Web page coding and turns it into something a human can look at -- crashes about half as much as on the 32-bit version."

Surely they should fix the renderer code, not rely on 64bit protection to stop it crashing.</comment>


European Investment Bank to phase out fossil fuel financing - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/15/european-investment-bank-to-phase-out-fossil-fuels-financing <comment><USER2> The contrast with the other front page article "Paypal stops payouts to pornhubs models" is interesting. On one hand we don't like it when banks use their power to implement their moral panic regarding otherwise legal activities, on the other it's nice that they use it to avoid financing things we consider bad for the commons.

<comment><USER3> Not sure what's supposed to be interesting about that.

It is good when good things happen and bad when bad things happen, yes.

We don't need to lock ourselves into some kind of universal ethical conclusion here.

<comment><USER4> They're also entirely different issues. One is about handling to payment for people who are not really harming anyone (or at least not doing massive environmental damage). The other is... doing massive environmental damage.

Cool, so I guess we just downvote stuff we disagree with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For the past five years O&G E&P companies have been realizing significant loses in a shale driven production world. Where NA producers are quick to turn on the taps and drown the market in oil once $WTI hits $55/bbl. with this comes instability and loss of Wall Street backing. Banks are labeling this as a way to show them in a good light. I.e. 'fight climate change.' The actuality is that the want better returns in a more stable environment.

I apologize for poor formatting on my phone.

<comment><USER6> Exactly this, and if looks good from a social perspective that's just an added bonus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Soon decisions like this won't make headlines because it will be normal not to invest in industries based on increasing suffering.

Do we support investing in blood diamonds, no matter how profitable?

<comment><USER8> $XLE for those that want to pick up cheap stocks.

Till there's a global solution to the energy problem we'll need oil. Existing solutions are nowhere close to being sufficient, therefore divestment will have no impact on the amount of oil burned. It's ridiculous to think that clicking a sell button on some assets will fix global warming, that's not how the world works.

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

As Bill Gates says, we need to fight two fronts of misinformation: a) that global warming is not a problem, and b) that it is an easy problem.

<comment><USER9> > $XLE for those that want to pick up cheap stocks.

A nuance is that you don't want to buy into these stocks while people are moving away from vice stocks.

However, once the trend is stabilised and there are no more marginal investors to adopt a vice-free portfolio, then you should buy all the vice stocks as they will have a more favourable discount rate.

<comment><USER10> I remember immediately after Deepwater Horizon, RIG dropped something like 50% to $40 a share or so. I invested heavily in it, proud of my own savviness and cynicism.

That worked out well.

<comment><USER11> I found that investing in BP when people were at their most pessimistic about the well being capped _did_ work well.

Unfortunately, following up that success by buying into TEPCO once it had dropped by half after their accident turned out not to be a good move.

However, one may console oneself that it was a public service in providing some cash to the Japanese pension funds, proverbial widows and orphans and whatnot that were selling at that time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The European IBank is an arm of the European Central Bank. The mandate of the ECB is to provide a stable currency, not to combat climate change. That is something for the European parliament and the governments of EU countries to tackle.

<comment><USER13> That is not the mandate of the EIB and has never been. From their website: "The European Investment Bank is the lending arm of the European Union."

From the first paragraph on Wikipedia: "As a 'policy-driven bank' whose shareholders are the member states of the EU, the EIB uses its financing operations to bring about European integration and social cohesion. It should not be confused with the European Central Bank."

About their mission: " As the 'Bank of the European Union'. the EIB's mission is to make a difference to the future of Europe and its partners by supporting sound investments which further EU policy goals."

So this is exactly the kind of thing they do.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Looking for a talk on naming things - <AUTHOR>

I remember seeing a talk by a man online that covered naming things. One of the points he made was that prefixing a method with get for accessing a property is actually weird. I don't remember the exact arguments he made, which is why I'm looking for it. An example was that get could mean > to go after, take hold of, and bring (something) for one's own or for another's purposes; fetch which then makes no sense for a property because you're not fetching it in the sense that it's not at the other place after you fetched it. Compare it with getting the milk. <comment><USER2> I'd suggest reading the book Clean Code, for some insight on how to write, well clean code ;)

Chapter 2 covers naming conventions

Also note that conventions are different for different languages.

You can also look up the Google style guides for Java, Python, etc...</comment>


RIM reportedly agrees to license BlackBerry software to Samsung, HTC and others - <AUTHOR> http://www.bgr.com/2012/01/05/rim-reportedly-agrees-to-license-blackberry-software-to-samsung-htc-and-others/

<comment><USER2> RIM has a few competitive advantages: They are the only company that provides a secure handset. Their integration with corporate email systems through BES is unrivaled.

If they license their software to less trusted handsets then they lose the first. There are companies like Good that are already eroding this for IPhone users but it has a way to go. It's questionable how long they can last on the second.

</comment><comment><USER3> So basically we arrive at the same point that Apple did in the mid 90s. Will there be a lazarus like comeback in a couple of years or will the cloners eat the rest of RIMs already half consumed lunch ?

</comment><comment><USER2> This is a huge shift for Blackberry. It seems that the stifling stranglehold of Mike Lazaridis may be broken in time to save the company. But I wouldn't bet on it.</comment>


Transforming How We Collect and Visualize Information about Urban Accessibility - <AUTHOR> http://projectsidewalk.io <comment><USER2> I have lived without a car for like a decade. It is shocking how much the world is designed for cars. This winds up being a de facto "screw you" to everyone else, including people reliant on public transit. Many people reliant on public transit are either poor or handicapped (thus can't drive) or both.

I wish this project well. Glad to see it on the front page.

<comment><USER3> As a white middle class male and native english speaker in a western country, deciding to ride my bike to work or the shops was the first time I ever felt like I was in a minority group.

<comment><USER2> Makes me think of this piece:

[https://alittlemoresauce.com/2014/08/20/what-my-bike-has- tau...](https://alittlemoresauce.com/2014/08/20/what-my-bike-has-taught-me- about-white-privilege/)

(Of course some folks object to that piece: [http://grist.org/cities/please- people-stop-using-bikes-to-wh...](http://grist.org/cities/please-people-stop- using-bikes-to-whitesplain-privilege/))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nicely done. This is the kinda of stuff I like to see machine learning and mapping used for.

I have a friend who is in the wheelchair and walking around DC with them it's really apparent how some of the places are just impossible access, or if it is possible it's unnecessarily annoying. Some of the things are fixable such as potholes some are harder, such as the ramp is missing. Some places we just had to give up and change plans because we get to where we were going.

Project results page are throwing a proxy error currently probably because of the HN traffic. In the meantime here is the GH page:

[https://github.com/ProjectSidewalk](https://github.com/ProjectSidewalk)

</comment><comment><USER5> The idea is commendable, however I find it unfortunate that they did not choose to use already existing data on OpenStreetMap (perhaps because it's a competitor to Google Maps?), for instance reusing the weelchair routing efforts started in 2010: [http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Wheelchair_routing](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Wheelchair_routing)

OpenStreetMap already has metadata that could not only help with tracing weelchair paths (pedestrian crossings have a "curb" field designed especially for weelchair accessible; POIs such as shops and buildings have a weelchair- accessible boolean; etc.), but also indicate which sidewalks contain, for instance, tactile pavings for the blind, besides lots of other useful metadata.

Also, there is a lot of effort already invested in OpenStreetMap, and more contributors are always welcome. The overall utility of the maps should help ensure the data will remain used by the community at large, and hopefully up- to-date in the long term.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for your comment. In short, we agree. We have recently been working with OpenSidewalks ([https://www.opensidewalks.com/](https://www.opensidewalks.com/)) on figuring out the best way to integrate our data into OSM. We have also been communicating with Wheelmap.org, which is complementary to our efforts as it focuses on POIs rather than sidewalks/streets.

Our progress is slower than we'd like but we are purely an academic project and our team is comprised solely of students and faculty. We are quite resource constrained and so must manage our goals carefully. Plus, we are OSM neophytes and so we are slowly learning about the community and possibilities.

Oh, and though Google provided some initial funding for our project--via a Google Faculty Research Award--they have never, at any point, restricted what we do or aim to do or how we do it.

Thanks again for your feedback. I hope that in 2018 we can focus more of our efforts on OSM integration. If you're connected to that community, would love additional pointers. Thanks.

-Jon Froehlich (PI on Project Sidewalk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Haha a site about accessibility doesn't support mobile. All I see is a nice sorry~not~for~you page.

<comment><USER8> It's a site about accessibility in physical world, not about responsive web design.

<comment><USER9> Would still be nice if it could be used on the go via mobile phone...

<comment><USER6> We completely agree. This has been on our TODO list since Sept 2016: [https://github.com/ProjectSidewalk/SidewalkWebpage/issues/28...](https://github.com/ProjectSidewalk/SidewalkWebpage/issues/282). We are working on it!

Note that we are a small, academic project with no professional developers. So, unfortunately, some TODOs take longer than we expect or want.

Thanks for the comment and for the nudge to work even hard on this!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Funded by Google, uses MapBox

<comment><USER11> I like the idea that universities can take money from corporations and not feel as though they have to bend their work to support their funder's business models. Kudos to Google and the University of Maryland here.

<comment><USER12> I suppose the level of influence depends on the institution and the degree of corporate support. I've been involved in research where PIs were fiercely emphatic about their unwillingness to share findings to funders prior to publication.

That said, this isn't classic research / journal pub work, and so presumably Google could decide they didn't like the direction and yank funding or threaten to yank funding.

<comment><USER6> To be clear, the funding here is via a Google Faculty Research Award, which is a one-time payment largely focused on supporting one grad student for one year.

[https://research.google.com/research- outreach.html#/research...](https://research.google.com/research- outreach.html#/research-outreach/faculty-engagement/faculty-research-awards)

Google is typically fairly hands off with these awards and we have not, at anytime, felt pressure to pursue a certain direction because of Google funding (though of course, there may be implicit biases that we are unaware of). Most of our funding is via the NSF.

Project Sidewalk _is_ quite dependent on Google Streetview and its API. I don't believe there is a good alternative out there currently (Mapillary is a possibility; Cyclomedia is another but they work via private contracts, which would likely be prohibitively expensive for us). So, if Google decides to end Streetview or significantly change its API, then it will dramatically impact Project Sidewalk's viability. Our hope is that Streetview only becomes more robust and updated more frequently, which will make it an even more valuable "urban science" dataset.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What about WheelMap?

<comment><USER6> Definitely. We've been in contact with them as well, and we hope something comes of it. As I mentioned above, WheelMap focuses on POIs but not _how_ to get to those POIs, so our work is complementary.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is a CS degree necessary?  - <AUTHOR>

I'm a student at a good California university, but I am having trouble staying as one.
Throughout school I've had ADD pretty bad. As long as I can remember my teachers basically told me I underperformed grade wise for my intelligence. College has been no exception, and as it goes on things keep getting harder. Initially I was a computer science major, but my GPA turned out to be just barely too low so I have chosen to pursue a B.S. in mathematical sciences, which I figure is applicable in CS. I'm now in summer session to catch up and will be going into my 5th (I took some time off last year) year. I still have a serious uphill battle ahead of me before I get any degree at all. This is assuming they let me pursue the math degree.
Now, I am a good programmer. I have a great internship at a startup in the area which is really taking off (SaaS in RoR). I can best just about anyone who has actually graduated from the CS program at my school in an interview, and on the job, I just don't have the degree. I know a whole lot of good people in the industry, and I've got beaming recommendations from anyone who's ever seen me program.
I love everything about programming and it just makes sense, which is probably why I can spend some much time on it despite my concentration issues. I love to learn about new technologies, and how to solve the often intricate problems which present themselves in CS. Almost everything that I know is self taught, from about equal parts of reading and hacking around with things. I know I am good, and I want to be great, but every time I get my grades back I am discouraged.
What I am looking for is some advice. I know that a degree is an important thing to have in this day and age. Should I keep working towards a degree that I only partially want? Or should I try to go elsewhere (possibly a lesser school) to get the degree in CS? Would I be missing a lot of the fun stuff (like compilers and OSes) if I continue with the math degree? Is it possible to jump onto the computer science carrer path with the experience that I have? If so where should I begin? Should I ask the startup I'm working for if they would take me on full time? Anyone hiring?
Thanks in advance <comment><USER2> Hiring: Yes, lots of people are hiring.

Degree requirement: You don't need a degree but more options will be available to you if you have one. There are still a lot of places where having a degree is a requirement to get into the door.

Degree type: For some places, having any degree would satisfy the requirement to walk in the door. Some places may require a CS degree. It all depends on who is doing the hiring, they can ask whatever they want. Check job ads to get an idea.

Missing out: You won't be missing out on anything you don't want to miss out on. You don't need to take CS to learn the things a CS degree would teach you. If you want to play with compilers, then play with compilers, you don't need to do that in a classroom.

Other Notes: If you are close to being able to complete the degree, then it would be a shame to drop out. However, some people were just never meant for school, and those people should recognize early that school is not for them and quit wasting the time and money. If you aren't anywhere close, then it's a toss up.

Being forced into alternate options due to bad grades is unfortunate, but if you were to find yourself in a position where you couldn't even continue on the Mathematical Sciences track then you will have to make hard decisions. Going into something such as business might not be a bad option if you could make that switch. Otherwise, as you mentioned, you would likely have to find a different school for CS.

Important! School is ultimately work. You have to manage your time, your work load and be able to focus on many different tasks thrown at you. You have to do much the same in the real world of work.

I had the same sort of problems in school as you are having, but I later found that those problems didn't go away when I left school. I now face the same challenges daily as a web developer as I did in school. Some projects are more fun and aren't as much of a problem. Other projects are a lot of drudgery and I really have to force myself to work on them. Had I known then what I know now, I would have either skipped school completely rather than waste the time and money or I would have done whatever it took to get through it just as I have to do with my work.

If you have what it takes to get through a large and complex development project, then you probably have what it takes to get through school. In a perfect world, you shouldn't have to do anything that you aren't interested in, but life doesn't always turn out to be that perfect. Do your best to identify the reasons you are doing terrible in school and try to figure out a way to defeat them as you will likely need those skills later in life. Programming is a lot of finding solutions to problems, try applying that problem solving to school.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> _Throughout school I've had ADD pretty bad._

Your school almost certainly has someone who can tell you whether that self- diagnosis is likely to be accurate or not, and if it is accurate, there are treatment options available which have been lifechangers for some people I know.

Someone with demonstrable programming skills who has a bachelor's degree in just about anything is in a pretty good position in life. People at universities care a lot about what the exact wording of your degree is. You'll find that that is considered fairly eccentric in the real world.

I strongly suggest that you do not drop out, though. Among other things, dropping out suggests you're incapable of accomplishing clearly advantageous things if you're the least bit challenged by them, since we give degrees to basically anyone with a pulse. People probably can't legally not hire you for being ADD, and in our industry a certain attitude with regards to follow- through does not make one all that much of an outlier, but "cannot get stuff done" is a bad place to be.

P.S. You may already know this, but if you haven't figured it out already, "I am ADHD" is something that it makes very, very vanishingly little sense to broadcast, regardless of whether you have been diagnosed with it or not.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't mention it but it is diagnosed by a neurologist in 2006, and I am meeting with someone at the university tomorrow for an evaluation with them to see what options are available to me there.

I hadn't thought about the stigma of being a drop-out so much. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I didn't read computer science. So my advise will be general in nature. If you've have gone this far already, i will advise, you try and finish it. Unless you intend to launch your own stuff since or are happy to work with only startups, otherwise get the degree. Also if you are sure that at the psychological level it won't affect you impression of who you are, then you can skip it. The richest men in the world do not have degrees but they are entrepreneurs. So if you won't finish the degree, do you own start-up, working for another man's start-up is fine until you get layed off or it tanks. Investors can push you off managing a start-up where you are a co-founder if it takes off, but your stock remains. So you don't loose out in thesame manner a sacked employee does.

But then if the startup you are in succeeds and you are still with them at that point,then you you might not need a degree. But the time it would take it to succeed is sufficient for you to also finish your degree. My advise keep combining both. Switch to maths since you are already a good programmer and have done CS for a number of years.

On a final note, a degree doesn't guarantee anything but could be a fall back position if everything else fails ie startups, consulting gigs etc. A degree only gives you the possibilities to live an average life. No guarantees to a good or fulfilled life. So understand its worth.

</comment><comment><USER5> Well you asked for advice ... I would suggest switching to a CS degree because (1) you seem more interested in that than maths; and (2) it is a more 'useful' qualification given your aptitude.

You don't need a CS degree to be a good programmer, but given two good programmers one with a degree and one without, I would hire the one with the degree. Just like I prefer to go to dentists, doctors and lawyers who have good degrees and lots of experience.</comment>


Would you want it if it were free? - <AUTHOR> http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2009/07/would-you-want-it-if-it-were-free.html

<comment><USER2> I think this makes sense. I spent almost a year working on a startup because it was novel technology, easy money and good market timing. I never really stopped to think about the fact that I didn't even like the service. What a waste of time.

</comment><comment><USER3> This stuff send like useless navel gazing to me. So, the future is just a massive increase in advertising? Wow, that's innovative. Also, who is going to be able to afford to advertise without revenue? Are advertisers going to advertise their advertising? Is the future of the Internet going to be a meta- circular vortex of nothingness?

<comment><USER4> Actually I think this guys way analyzing a business sounds pretty good to me. Forget the price, do you want to wake up running this business (or doing this idea etc) tomorrow after the deal is done. Not sure if it had anything to do with 'free' even though he tried to tie it in.

<comment><USER5> The same reasoning works well when considering whether you'd like to sign up for a service. If I'm going to have to spend hours on the phone with machines and inept customer-service people, do I really want this service? Or, at the very least, do I want to patronize this company?</comment></comment></comment>


DigitalOcean Kubernetes Is Now Generally Available - <AUTHOR> https://blog.digitalocean.com/doks-in-ga/? <comment><USER2> Congratulations! A personal fan of DO because of its simplicity and its easy to understand transparent pricing.

I hope that with the addition of more features, DO still kept its simplicity.

Not really into Kubernetes yet (no personal project that requires it, but at work we used it), but the first time I tried Kubernetes was at DO (the guide on getting started need some improvements).

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool I remember when digital ocean gave me 100 bucks on their platform for being in school maybe it's time to take another look.</comment>


First smartphones with unGoogled /e/OS also in Pink color - <AUTHOR> https://vimeo.com/349603967 <comment><USER2> Not bad. It would be cool to ungoogle all the Huawei/Honor phones</comment>


Can I be taken seriously with a social science background? - <AUTHOR> Quick summary: BSc Econ 4.0 CPGA, data analyst/science exp, several years of R, SQL, and SAS programming, late twenties. Passed CFA level I & II exams.
Still struggling to make a decision as to whether to go ahead with the second degree CS program at UBC, or self study. Would I ever be taken seriously as a software professional with this background if I self taught with teachyourselfcs & developed a portfolio?
Curious to hear from developers with a background in Econ or a social science. Do you wish you had gone back for a second degree in CS? Or did you regret it if you did?
Should I try to leverage my data analysis background and rebrand as a data engineer, focusing on learning python & spark etc?
Or should I deliberately delve into difficult topics, and program in C or C++ to be taken more seriously?
I think I'm going to end up studying this stuff anyways regardless, starting going through SICP and loving it. <comment><USER2> TLDR- Yes

An Econ background and great grades means a lot. If you can build some skills toward the CS work, you can prove that you'd be great at whatever you want to do.

so, What do you want to do? Bring an analyst angle to a dev team? That seems like an easy win.

No one really cares about your degree. Heck, I have a degree in Fine Arts. Start doing what you want to do. If you find you need some coursework, do it. If you find someone who wants you to have a CS degree, have them pay for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this! I could self teach and my work in the public sector would let me go on 1 year of unpaid leave to try out a software dev job.

In some sense though, just on a psychological level, I feel like I'd still have lingering doubts. That I'm just an amateur hacking away etc., and that my resume will just get screened out without a CS degree. How did you deal with that, if you experienced it? And would you mind giving a few details of what it is you do now? Thanks again for the encouraging comment.</comment></comment>


1/3 of the world's largest collection of autism brain samples destroyed - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2012/06/11/freezer_failure_at_brain_bank_hampers_autism_research/

<comment><USER2> Single page:

[http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2012...](http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2012/06/11/freezer_failure_at_brain_bank_hampers_autism_research/?page=full)</comment>


Artificial Intelligence Stack Overflow about to start - <AUTHOR> http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6607 Got Research level questions or answers about data mining, statistical inference, machine learning, neural networks, clustering, support vector machines, genetic algorithms, heuristics and so on?<p>We want you! <comment><USER2> The first question should be "What is Artificial Intelligence?" That has always been a surprisingly hard question for which to get a consensus answer.

EDIT: Searching shows that the definition is still all over the place. See the comment <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1982919> for an reasonable example of disagreement over definitions.

Perhaps the question is - can any vital scientific discipline to have a simple definition? I'm remembering the old joke where "Biology is really chemistry, and chemistry is really physics, and physics is really mathematics."

<comment><USER3> Russell and Norvig's book has a nice table that talks about what the community perceives AI to be.

Preview from Google Books: <http://goo.gl/U4Xyn>

<comment><USER4> This may be myopic of me but after reading Russell/Norvig I more or less equate "AI" with "the kind of stuff in Russell/Norvig". Or, (I hope) less lamely, it's more about a paradigm or perspective on programming - "agent- oriented programming" - than about any particular technique or result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Am I missing something with all the separate Stack sites? Wouldn't it be better to keep all the questions from the different sites together and create a better tagging categorization system?

I think that having all the questions together on one site would facilitate cross pollination and accidental information learning while simply browsing.

<comment> T-zex It makes Jon Skeet harder to submit answers to all the questions :) If seriously, as a passive user I would agree with your point, but as an active one I'de like to be a leader and such segmentation would encourage to achieve that. Also specific sites attract proffessionals of the subject.

<comment><USER5> I can see your point. I just think the same could be achieved with everything together. Questions could be assigned a category. Each category could have it's own associated css style and simple URL to give it a uniqueness. Also user reputation could be calculated on a per-category basis in addition to a site wide basis. You would end up with little kingdoms and little kings, while keeping it all together.

Just an idea.

But with the community process of the different Stacks I have a feeling there are reasons other than technical for the separation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was hoping that this was going to be an article about an AI to answer questions on Stack Overflow.

<comment><USER7> When I first read the title I thought it was going to be how the interconnected nodes of the stackexchange network was evolving into an AI. ;)

<comment><USER8> Doug Lenat keeps saying that inteligence is "one million rules", throw enough structure at something and it may come alive :)

<comment><USER7> From stackoverflow.com -> "1,133,721 questions" (08/12/2010 15:34)

Looks like it's pretty much there then.

<comment><USER8> Correction, "10 million rules"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Got questions or answers about data mining, statistical inference, machine learning, neural networks, clustering, support vector machines, genetic algorithms, heuristics and so on?

We want you!

<comment><USER9> Why are genetic algorithms included? They are just a tool to explore multidimensional search spaces, and have nothing to do with AI unless they happen to be applied to an AI problem.

It would be nice if this was separated out into "old-fashioned" AI (data mining, statistical inference, machine learning, etc) and bio-inspired technologies (genetic algorithms, cellular automata, neural networks - although the latter may be a grey area).

Alternatively, a better name than "Artificial Intelligence" should have been used for the site. Probably too late now though..

<comment><USER10> The definition in the Russell and Norvig textbook is nice: "computational rationality"

<comment><USER11> ...but given the widely-accepted computational theory of mind, humans are artificial intelligences too.

<comment><USER12> Excuse me, but I'd really like to see your evidence of how the computational theory of mind is "widely accepted".

<comment><USER11> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_theory_of_mind>

> This view is common in modern cognitive psychology and is presumed by > theorists of evolutionary psychology.

<comment><USER13> > common in modern cognitive psychology

Only among a small besieged minority-- the majority have moved on to neurocognitive research.

>and is presumed by theorists of evolutionary psychology

That's just straight-up wrong. Perhaps there's some theorist who buys into it, but it's certainly not common.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Situations where I see the term "artificial intelligence" used:

(1) a legacy hold-over from the bad old days when people thought symbolic inference was central to human intelligence (e.g. AAAI, JAIR)

(2) research on extending old-fashioned AI to be actually useful (e.g. Markov Logic Networks)

(3) most commonly (as in this case), a vaguely defined desired outcome and a bundle of poorly understood cool-sounding techniques.

"We'll making computers learn-- with neurons! And Evolution! And Prolog?"</comment>


Because "Classified Ad Killer" Doesn't Have the Same Ring - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leslie-harris/because-classified-ad-kil_b_190965.html

<comment><USER2> Jesus christ, maybe we should have called the Green River Killer the "River Killer"; we wouldn't want to give Tacoma a bad name either.</comment>


Why Was Dark Knight Rises Open-Ended? Christopher Nolan Explains - <AUTHOR> http://filmcomment.com/article/cinematic-faith-christopher-nolan-scott-foundas

<comment><USER2> It's a brilliant film, but it really isn't open-ended to anyone who has read A Tale of Two Cities. In Dicken's book, the sacrificial death of scoundrel Sydney Carton "recalls to life" his aristocratic double Charles Darney. And then as Carton walks to the guillotine we share his vision of a post- revolutionary France that has moved past destructive class conflict and emerged "peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy." Ergo Carton's line that "it is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."

Resolving the ambiguity of the ending is the entire point of this extended allusion. We have the sacrifice of a negative character (Batman) redeeming his positive aristocratic double (Wayne), and then general images of social redemption (even down to the visuals of children returning to the garden) as Gotham moves beyond the political/economic oppression that the film claims has thematically resulted from Batman's vigilante behavior and his refusal to trust in the norms of democratic society.

A great movie and widely misunderstood! And very suitable for the HN crowd given that it operates as an extended critique of the American war on terror. Some more thoughts for anyone curious:

<http://popupchinese.com/the-dark-knight-rises.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> Nolan: "I left it open ended because anyone can be Batman."

Warners Exec: "Leave it open ended, Nolan, so we can make sequels, or you're never getting another dime from us."

<comment><USER4> Warner can/will make sequels anyways... I believe what he said in this interview.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> They really drilled that idea about Batman being a symbol in the last two films. So after reading this explanation I have to say I was disappointed. I was hoping Nolan would explain why he allowed us to wonder if the very last scene where Alfred sees Bruce in the cafe was reality or not. Batman being a symbol was pounded into the audience so hard that I feel like you can't _not_ get that and the answer Nolan gave leaves much to be desired at least for me.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why is this on hacker news? I don't see the connection, is this reddit now?

</comment><comment><USER7> tldr; he doesn't really explain why / if it is.

</comment><comment><USER8> This movie sucked. Don't care.</comment>