An Open Letter to Jessica Livingston About YC's Female Founders Conference - <AUTHOR> http://www.jenniferaldoretta.com/2015/02/22/an-open-letter-to-jessica-livingston/ <comment><USER2> Not quite what I was expecting with a post that begins with "An Open Letter to...". I've been trained to expect any such letters would be someone's way to make their grievances about some entity public.

Now I need to go reflect on why I feel disappointed it was so positive. Haha, only serious.

<comment><USER3> I like it. It's a nice change of pace. Not that there's anything wrong with negative open letters, but as you said, that seems to make up a majority of them.

<comment><USER4> Only a majority of the ones that (1) make the news and (2) are explicitly called "open letters". There are actually tons of public missives on the internet full of positivity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I watched most of the FFC. Like Marc Andreesen has said, software is _eating_ the world. YC is getting such critical mass now that entrepreneurs and idealists/pragmatists with world-affecting ideas are now applying for YC. Not necessarily because they'd heard of YC - but because someone they know who cares about them had heard about YC.

YC, in my opinion, is getting to a point where it can help incubate world- changing ideas that don't necessarily sell technology to consumers directly but use technology to enable more efficiency or connection or empathy (or all of the above).

Of all the presentations, Grace's was the best. I loved Grace Garey of Watsi's stories.

About how every Tuesday night, about eight or ten of the world-wide team of Watsi, in every timezone (day, afternoon, morning) would always get together for a Google Hangout to talk about Watsi.

About how she was at a busy bar in NYC with her friends and they were in the waning hours of an online contest to win $10k for Watsi. They were falling behind, and Grace had the gutsy idea to ask the bouncer to make everyone who came into the bar have to vote for Watsi on the contest site on their smartphone. They ended up winning by the scarcest of margins (1%) and the bouncer gonged a bell and the entire bar celebrated. Like Brian and Joe of Airbnb creating their own cereal, it was a gutsy move to make it to the next critical step (raising enough funds for some of the Watsi team to go full-time and all-in). And a little different.

Congratulations to the YC team on making a ripple in the pond!

<comment><USER6> YC is still stuck in a world of ideas based on controlling others through the creation of debt and claiming lifetime ownership of others' work. That they are stuck there is not entirely unsurprising, nor is it unsurprising that there is a forming gender-class that is trying to emulate the functioning of that world. To me, continuing to carry out these decade[century, millennium?]-long ideas is not very world-changing. It may be progressive enhancement, but that has slowly been happening for awhile.

The anecdote that you shared about the bar in NYC smacks of this old-world thinking:

>the gutsy idea to ask the bouncer to make everyone who came into the bar have to vote for

I'm still not quite sure if this is slavery or just tribal exculsivism. I don't know, maybe it's both?

<comment><USER7> > YC is still stuck in a world of ideas based on controlling others through > the creation of debt and claiming lifetime ownership of others' work.

I don't understand this sentiment AT ALL. There is no debt involved, so I don't see any control exerted through those means. And sure, they buy non- controlling ownership of others' work, but that ownership is sold freely. Not to mention the other consideration that lands on the selling side in these transactions. I don't think the sellers are making out nearly as badly as you seem to be implying.

<comment><USER6> >There is no debt involved

Can you provide an executed contract to confirm?

YC appears to have moved away from convertible notes (ie. debt) [1], but if you read closely it appears that PG said the reason was to avoid debt term limits and interest rate limits....so it's an even more extreme version of debt, just not 'debt' according to CA regulations.

[1] [http://blog.ycombinator.com/announcing-the-safe-a- replacemen...](http://blog.ycombinator.com/announcing-the-safe-a-replacement- for-convertible-notes)

<comment><USER8> If you read that link you posted you'll see "what the investor buys is not debt, but something more like a warrant. So there is no need to fix a term or decide on an interest rate"

Warrants just give the investor the right to purchase equity at a given price some time. They are not debt.

<comment><USER6> I did read the link, which is why I posted it. If you read it, you'll see that PG is essentially just renaming debt to get around CA regulations.

No matter what it's called: loan, debt, warrant, convertible note, SAFE, it's an instrument that attaches to future earnings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The female founders conference is probably one of the best days of the year. I saw so many friends, women I know on the Internet, and I cried tears of joy three times during the speeches. It's hard to be what you can't see. Jessica and Kat have done an AMAZING job of putting female founders in front of us so we can look and say, hey you know, Kathryn Minshew did YC, I CAN DO IT TO.

Even though our startup didn't make it into the last YC batch, we're applying again. We love the community, we love the yc philosophy and approach to building products and we want to inspire other women just like us to apply.

Thank you for writing this letter and sharing what we all think, yesterday was incredible.

</comment><comment><USER10> I nearly didn't read because so often Open Letters are public complaints, usually passive aggressive in nature and almost always divisive.

So Jennifer. Thank you. Thank you for restoring my faith in open letters. Or rather making me think hard before I pass judgement on something I've not even read.

Saunters off, with tail firmly between legs.

</comment><comment><USER11> She mentions her field of STEM (mechanical engineering) has a particularly low percentage of women among its members, and cites another site. On that site, there is this interesting list:

       39% of chemists and material scientists are women;
       27.9% of environmental scientists and geoscientists are women;
       15.6% of chemical engineers are women;
       12.1% of civil engineers are women;
       8.3% of electrical and electronics engineers are women;
       17.2% of industrial engineers are women; and
       7.2% of mechanical engineers are women.

Does anyone have an explanation as to why chemists and material scientists have such a relatively high percentage of women?

The two highest are science, as opposed to engineering, so it could be that science in general is more women friendly than engineering, but even if we just look at the engineering disciplines on that list, there still is a big difference among them. Why would chemical engineering be much more women friendly than mechanical engineering?

<comment><USER12> Maybe women on average just prefer some jobs more than others?

Really, I'm sure there are millions of factors that enter into to those stats -- about one for every woman because everyone woman is unique with her own goals and tastes -- but I think the occam's razor for this topic is that men and women on average have different preferences. Would we be hunting for a root cause in social pressure or discrimination if we found women were a much higher chunk of the audience for Twilight and men were a higher percent of Avengers viewers?

The bottom line, whatever the reason for discrepancies, is in your daily professional life to treat both sexes the equally.

<comment><USER13> There are few things in discourse I hate more than this sort of "just", the kind of ignorance-encouraging, status-quo-supporting "just" that tells people to stop thinking.

Given that we have a millennia-long history of gender discrimination and given that women got the vote less than a century ago, this "just" is ridiculous.

Look at this graph:

[http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when- wom...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women- stopped-coding)

I guess in 1970 women "just" didn't like medicine or law. (That's certainly what people said then.) And now, using your helpful explanatory framework, they "just" do! It's unexplainable! Things just happen without relation to other things. Who could possibly know anything?

<comment><USER14> Hmm... Sometimes even I say "maybe women just prefer [...]", but actually mean exactly that, what you said: There are social trends and in this case there is a social trend specific to women wrongly being taught that they are not as good as men in STEM fields. So much in fact (here in Germany) that it's kind of unsettling, when they tell you "haha I'm just not good in math haha" and you can't even, because it's so effing wrong.

I believe many (young) people will tell you that women are "just" like that, but actually mean "they are just taught to think so", because in their male position there is no need to choose are careful wording. I'm also pretty sure that, while the society at large is fault for this herd thinking about this, the parents play the biggest role in where the daughter places herself in the world.

<comment><USER13> Could be, but a lot of people take that "just" as meaning "there are essential gender differences rooted in the very fabric of the universe, so there's no point in talking about it". So if I were trying to point at the social factors that shape general preferences, I'd look for a phrasing that can't be taken for a call, as here, to ignore those factors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Could the guys on this thread please stop it with the "pipeline" discussion?! Few women actually cite that to be an issue. It's distracting. Listen more, talk less.

</comment><comment><USER16> Perhaps next there will be a forum for older-than-30 founders?

</comment><comment><USER17> When computing went "social", I expected that women would play a much larger role. That didn't happen. The "social" companies are dominated by men.

</comment><comment><USER18> Sorry ladies. It sounds like whining to me. Try Hispanic female in engineering during the 80s. I'm on my 2nd start-up in a competitive tech world. Each and every women at the FFC have had their struggles to get where they are today. So pull on your big girl pants and jump in - the water is fine - being a woman hasn't kept Tracy or Grace or Adora or Ruchi from being successful at what they do. That is the lesson that should be taken away from the day in San Fran. I went, I listen, I am inspired. Now I'm off my soap box and off to conquer my small part of the world. @vijilent

</comment><comment><USER19> "I've lived my life in a 'man's world', receiving a degree in mechanical engineering—which contains the lowest percentage of women compared to any other engineering field at just 7.2%—from an already male-dominated university."

Going on a tangent, I suspect areas like mechanical engineering and computer science are still "boy's clubs" due to one thing: social prestige. I feel that women are more attracted to high prestige areas like law, medicine, politics, or finance. Engineering in general is low prestige. It's akin to being a plumber or electrician plus extra educational requirements (high skill, high pay, low social status). Despite the maker movement, our culture at large still doesn't value science & engineering as much as other fields.

Popular mainstream shows like Big Bang Theory don't help. On a whole shows like this just serve to further old stereotypes of everyone in our fields as being socially inept, ugly, weirdos. Is it a surprise that most females don't want to join our ranks after seeing that?

Are there any quantitative measures on social status by occupation to validate (or invalidate) my guess?

<comment><USER20> Yeah, top jobs where women dominate are all super high prestige, elementary school teachers, nursing/health aides, secretarial, retail, food service... :)

<comment><USER19> You're missing the forest for the trees (assuming your assumptions are correct).

Business (executives, secretaries) is more respectable than IT (programmers, tech support).

I would argue that nurses and teachers have higher prestige than a programmer or engineer in most parts of the country. (Let's not confuse salary with prestige)

<comment><USER21> Still comparing apples to oranges. The most common job for women is secretary (which generated countless headlines). The most common job for men is truck driver not programmer. People always focus on CEOs and company founders being all men, but no one brings up all the people working construction, pest control, mining etc...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Before you write a comment about why women are or aren't enrolled in STEM fields, please read the Wikipedia article on it. Every time someone says a generalization like "they just choose safer employment" or "high status something, something" without first reviewing a summary of the body of research into the matter, it's kinda pointless. It's like someone saying "here's why I think computers crash" but they've never read a book on HTML.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_STEM_fields](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_STEM_fields)

<comment><USER23> You wouldn't read a book on HTML to know why computers crash. A book on advanced C, maybe.

<comment><USER22> You kinda missed the point. Someone reading a book on html night stumble upon a kinda sorta correct response.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What a sickening sycophantic declaration just to plug a very dangerous return to calendar-based contraception methods: [http://www.readytogroove.com/the- cycle/appendix-a-the-sympto...](http://www.readytogroove.com/the- cycle/appendix-a-the-sympto-thermal-method-for-pregnancy-prevention/)

<comment><USER25> I'm going to upvote you.

It's a very good point you've made here.

This founder is giving bad advice to women who don't want to get pregnant causing some women to ditch contraception like condoms... resulting in unwanted pregancices.

<comment><USER26> I think the "cycle tracking" stuff is usually more about "really want to get pregnant, having a hard time" vs "not willing to use one of the many other forms of birth control". (EDIT: although, this site does appear to promote it for preventing birth, too, wtf)

(It is always kind of jarring whenever I see that, because whenever I think of reproductive health my first thought is "omg please please please no", but there apparently are people who want to get pregnant/have kids.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I watched the FFC live and what struck me was that it was the same as any other founder conference except that it was a girl on stage instead of a dude. If we want to stop making gender a big deal then we need to stop making gender a big deal. There is no Male Founder Conference right?

<comment><USER28> > we need to stop making gender a big deal

By your own admission, FFC didn't make a big deal out of gender and is therefore doing as you ask.

Events like these are appreciated and found helpful by the women who participate in them. Isn't that sufficient grounds to be happy that they are taking place?

<comment><USER6> If the first word of the title is a gender exclusive term, and that is not making it a big deal, what would be considered making it a big deal?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> So much talk for so very little. Can we not just celebrate women in tech? We all share this world for a limited time, so who gives a fuck who wears a shinier hat. Its all a game, a game that moves our world towards a better place, a world where we can put down our hats and spend time with each other and allow our benevolent machines to take care of us.

</comment><comment><USER30> Carol Dweck has shown us that it is the belief that intelligence is fixed is a major problem.

If children are told that failure is just part of learning and not indicative of potential, they keep trying until they master the material.

Of course, if someone is uninterested in acquiring a particular skill, that's irrelevant. They may have exactly the same potential for learning, but just don't care.

We should not be trying to make people pursue careers because we don't like the statistics. People should be free to follow their own desires. They know better than "society", whatever that is.</comment>


The Underfunded, Disorganized Plan to Save Earth from the Next Giant Asteroid - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-underfunded-disorganized-plan-to-save-earth-from-the-next-giant-asteroid <comment><USER2> In a sense, it's an example of the tragedy of the commons at a national level:

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

No one nation feels it should bear the burden of doing this alone, and so none is especially motivated to do so.

To be clear, even if all nations were united under a single government, that government would likely feel little motivation too, owing to the perceived low probability of an asteroid event in any given political time period.

<comment><USER3> I think the low probability explanation is more plausible than the commons explanation.

Scientific funding for non-classified projects -- which constitutes most funding -- is partially a contribution to the commons. The development of human capital on the home front is a unique benefit to the funding country, but the results get disseminated and -- in principle -- there's nothing stopping a company in another country from commercializing first.

Also, I agree the politics of asteroids are really inractable. Lots of people think of asteroids as a plot device for egg-head sci-fi fans rather than an actual existential threat.

(FTR, I think that, in general, we should be doing a better job as a species at buying insurance policies to protect ourselves against extinction-level events.)

<comment><USER4> In my dying breath though, I would laugh that because everyone was so busy chasing the next Big Shiny, we lost sight of the big shiny which would lead to our [premature but inevitable] extinction.</comment></comment></comment>


Viral Marketing -- hitting a pinata over the web - <AUTHOR> http://cam.ly/pinatabuster Cam.ly is a video monitoring platform.  We sell cameras that stream and record video to the internet.  You can place our cameras to watch anything and you can watch from anywhere.  We originally envisioned our product as a Security Camera, but could work well as a baby monitor, nanny cam, or dog watcher.  We built this demo to showcase our product (keep posted for a blog post about how we did it).   We would like some feedback from HN.  What do you think of demo?  Does the demo help you understand our product?  And finally how do we make this go viral? <comment><USER2> Took me a minute to figure out what was going on - the ability to go back in time of a live video feed is pretty neat, though it doesn't always seem jump to a keyframe, resulting in video artifacts.

Seems like a neat idea - instead of buying one of those expensive video multiplexer with bunch of cameras, just subscribe to a service that does all of the video storage and processing for you. How much BW does each camera consume? If I was using this for something important, I'd be afraid of losing footage due to internet connection issues.

<comment><USER3> I work for cam.ly. Thanks for the positive comments. To answer some of your questions, h.264 does wonders for video bandwidth. It can be as low as 200kbps. Each camera also has an sd card slot and comes with 4GB storage standard, in case your Internet goes out ( over 24 hours of storage at 200kbps)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ask for my email before showing me something worth it? Yeah right.

<comment><USER3> Feel free to put in a fake email, but don't be sad if we can't contact you if you win any candy ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've gone twice, and it's working perfectly for my coworkers. You need to click the 'Start busting pinata' button when it shows up for you.

</comment><comment><USER6> Put something interesting on the rope, like a politician or Justin Bieber and people would be all over this. :-)

<comment><USER7> I agree! This could be made more interesting. Although maybe they want to avoid getting too controversial...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> well, I was up for my turn and then mysteriously someone else was that wasn't even on the list and I, also mysteriously, didn't get a pinata turn. Also, I have no idea what is going on UI wise.

</comment><comment><USER5> Everyone in the office is queued up to hit it now. I already went once!

</comment><comment><USER9> lame it skipped my turn.</comment>


Cause and Effect: The New Statistical Test Can Tease Them Apart - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/cause-and-effect-the-revolutionary-new-statistical-test-that-can-tease-them-apart-ed84a988e

<comment><USER2> [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cause%20and%20effect%20test&so...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cause%20and%20effect%20test&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)</comment>


Why doesn't HN get the hackernews.com domain? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Because it's taken.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know that -- I mean, has YC tried to buy the domain from the current owner?

<comment><USER3> If this were a startup that was trying to grow as fast as possible, it would be a good idea to own the domain. It would make the site easier to find. But we're not trying to grow, so we don't want to make HN easier to find.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's a filter to try to keep the riffraff down to a dull roar. It's a litmus test that helps weed out nonhackers.

\-- The RiffRaff

</comment><comment><USER5> imho: sorry guys, hn is not about links or users. this is a lead generator site to collect professional startups for ycombinator cycles. they already have too much application every year, so there is no need to broadening the market. this is much simpler than updating a very good blog. imho.</comment>


Sent to Prison by a Software Program's Secret Algorithms - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/us/politics/sent-to-prison-by-a-software-programs-secret-algorithms.html <comment><USER2> Haha, I just looked up the product sheet for Compas CORE, the software at issue:

[http://www.equivant.com/assets/img/content/Risk-Needs- Assess...](http://www.equivant.com/assets/img/content/Risk-Needs- Assessment.pdf)

It has a section titled "Make Defensible Decisions":

> Fully web-based and Windows compliant, COMPAS is applicable to offenders at > all levels from non-violent misdemeanors to repeat violent felons. COMPAS > offers separate norms for males, females, community and incarcerated > populations.

That has ... nothing to do with defensibility. Defensibility is being able to say, "Here's the evidence and the reasoning I used to arrive at this conclusion."

What I think is especially frustrating is that in all three risk scales the product offers -- risk of new violent crime, risk of general recidivism, and pretrial risk -- they're dealing in probabilities that don't work on an individual level. That's why they're called "norms." So, if you have 1,000 offenders who match a certain profile, you might be able to fairly accurately predict that 40% of that population are going to reoffend. But being able to predict _which_ offenders constitute the 40% and which constitute the 60% is a totally different thing. There is simply no way to take these probabilities that apply to groups of people and apply them in any fair way to individuals.

<comment><USER3> Not saying it's right but isn't that exactly what we do with insurance for driving, health etc?

<comment><USER4> Many types of data are prohibited for various types of insurance decisions. This varies greatly, from general rules such as banning price discrimination due to race or sex, to specific topics like the ACA[1]'s prohibition against denying coverage due to "pre-existing conditions".

With modern data analysis methods, it is (sometimes) possible to infer prohibited data from other collections of data. For example, various machine learning techniques used on economic values such as income, home value, and proximity to good schools _might_ reveal something about recidivism rates, but it's probably finding a confounding variable such as redlining[2] or other types of institutional bias[3].

This _is_ a problem in both legal decisions and insurance, and transparency in how decisions are made is vital in _both_. That said, the impact on insurance is probably[4] a relatively minor change in price, which is very different from a Boolean decision about someone's freedom. Even in the unlikely case where the statistical biases are known and accounted for, it still isn't appropriate to over-interpret results about _populations_ as if they apply to any particular _individual_.

[1] Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare")

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

[3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXQA6D4JC0A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXQA6D4JC0A)

[4] for definitions of "probable" somewhere between "an educated guess" and "meh; whatever"

<comment><USER3> Good answer. Btw in the EU it has only recently been made illegal to discriminate on sex for car insurance rates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Consider:

\- Write the algorithm out.

\- Extract all the decision points.

\- Pay legal interns to collect all the data, apply the data to the decision points.

\- Produce a report.

\- Produce a recommendation.

\- The judge sentences based on that process.

And now tell the defense that they have no right to any knowledge about the above process. Not the decision points, and not what data was fed to what decision, and not even what the data was.

If you can't release that information to the defense because of trade secrets, then, it seems to me, it's not appropriate as a sentencing tool.

Of course, IANAL.

<comment><USER6> You could do automatic differentiation. Take each input, race, sex, age, ... and see how the output changes. If one field has a huge swing it might be a good basis for claiming variable X based discrimination.

<comment><USER7> Sex would have a major impact. At least in the US our justice system is extremely sexist, far more than it is racist. I once saw sex offender guidelines that automatically put the default sex offender sentence as medium for males and low for females (the default was used before an official evaluation was completed, and I would bet some money that the official evaluations discriminated based on sex).

While I don't disagree our legal system is also racist, the racism pales in comparison to the current level of sexism.

<comment><USER8> That's not a bug, it's a feature! User jawns posted some of their marketing copy elsewhere in this thread:

"COMPAS offers separate norms for males, females, community and incarcerated populations"

And they call that "defensible decisions"! In other words, they want to make sure the software doesn't rock the boat. If there's a bias, they want to preserve it so it doesn't look like their algorithms are "weird".

<comment><USER5> > In other words, they want to make sure the software doesn't rock the boat. > If there's a bias, they want to preserve it so it doesn't look like their > algorithms are "weird".

Isn't that what judges do when they follow precedent?

<comment><USER9> No, and judges don't always follow precedent (they theoretically have to when it is binding, but no precedent is binding on the highest court, even it's own.)

When they follow precedent, they are not matching outcomes to outcomes to avoid looking wierd, they are applying what was previously established as the formal _decision rule_.

That's a very different thing that attempting to preserve biases that may not even reflect the formally-annoubced decision rules in the cases that produced them, but may represent silent deviations from the formal rules.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's worth remembering that there are already algorithms used in determining how long a prison sentence should be, such as how much time off an inmate gets for good behavior, and whether there are mitigating factors about the conviction that would reduce the inmate's chances of early parole. Keeping track of these calculations for all the inmates isn't a trivial task in that the Bureau of Prisons has a separate complex in Texas to handle it: the Designation and Sentence Computation Center [https://www.bop.gov/inmates/custody_and_care/sentence_comput...](https://www.bop.gov/inmates/custody_and_care/sentence_computations.jsp)

California's rule for `good behavior == half the prison sentence` [0], like any algorithm implemented in the real world, is ostensibly based on data analysis (studies of recidivism) and cost trade-offs. So is the 3-strikes-law [1], which vastly simplifies the cost and complexity of sentencing judgments, while making moral tradeoffs.

And like in software systems, sometimes judicial algorithms have severe bugs. The one that recently comes to mind is how sex offenders face penalties beyond prison because of alleged recidivism worries. Apparently, the belief that sex offenders are at a greater danger of recidivism was based off of an unsupported statistic found in a magazine that ended up being cited in a pivotal Supreme Court decision [2]

[0] [http://www.latimes.com/local/crime/la-me-ff-early- release-20...](http://www.latimes.com/local/crime/la-me-ff-early- release-20140817-story.html)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three- strikes_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-strikes_law)

[2] [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/us/politics/supreme- court...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/us/politics/supreme-court-repeat- sex-offenders.html)

<comment><USER11> I worry that articles like this are driven by an unwillingness to grapple with how screwed up the _whole_ system is.

Sure, opaque decisions made by software are creepy. But mostly, they faithfully reproduce the decisions humans (judges and legislators) were already making, and are in fact trained on those decisions. Algorithms are an easy no-guilt target to write about, but I worry that it obscures deeper sentencing issues.

<comment><USER12> Say in a trial an expert witness is called -- based on the data, was this fire intentionally set or an accident? That expert might be a poor one, but the other side has the chance to cross examine and expose that expert as being unreliable.

In the case of this software, though, there is no cross examination. Say the secret sauce is simply a data set and Bayesian reasoning. How do we know if the data set is representative? If it is just an opaque box, that is unacceptable.

<comment><USER11> The arson example is an interesting one.

As far as I can tell, pretty much all of arson science was fundamentally broken for at least 30 years. What were the basic principles of the field - that arson fires burned hotter than others, that puddle marks indicated accelerants, that multiple-origin burns indicate arson - are all wrong.

Multiple people were executed for arson homicides on this evidence. Some were executed or even convicted _after_ these principles were rejected. Nor was this a "science marches on" thing. The assumptions had simply been made based on observation and intuition, with no formal testing _ever_.

So this is the sort of thing I mean. It's not a poor expert who can be cross- examined. It's an entire field producing entirely broken results for decades using unquestioned best practices. You can't cross-examine "are even textbooks in your field a complete pack of lies?" and win.

I understand the concern, I'm not comfortable with this, but I'm also not convinced that black box software is actually much different from what we have now. The grounds for conviction and sentencing are often completely opaque to the defense already.

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/09/07/trial-by- fire](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/09/07/trial-by-fire)

[https://books.google.com/books?id=GSJ7Ja95oegC&pg=PA382&lpg=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=GSJ7Ja95oegC&pg=PA382&lpg=PA382)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How do we know that the algorithm is at all appropriate? How do we even know it's an algorithm at all and not a mechanical turk? The algorithm could be to hand off the case files to some minimum wage college student and have them come up with some nice charts and graphs. After Theranos, this isn't even a hypothetical. It is clearly an injustice to use a secret algorithm _regardless_ of outcome. But once again, corporate profit must come before justice, it seems.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think that the problem is very simple:

a) The person involved has to obey the law.

b) The computer-program dictates the law and punishment.

c) In a free country, a person should be able to follow the law.

So: The person must be able to know the law, and thus must be able to know the program.

If the program is secret in any way, the person can never obey it.

So: if the punishment is based on this program alone, the person should be let free.

<comment><USER15> The program dictates the punishment, not the law. The program can be secret and have no impact on the ability of the person to follow the law which remains public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It seems to me that we are at a critical tipping point in becoming a dystopian society. If we are not careful we are going to fall right off the edge. Crazy times we live in.

</comment><comment><USER17> The obvious flipside: Sent to Prison at The Discretion of a Human Being.

<comment><USER10> Reminds me of this 2011 study of how time relative to lunch break seemed to have an impact on judges' leniency: [https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/time-and- judgm...](https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/time-and-judgment/)

<comment><USER18> This has become pretty proverbial for questioning human judges' objectivity, but another interpretation has been suggested: possibly different kinds of matters were commonly scheduled for morning and afternoon sessions (for example, maybe defendants represented by counsel, or those expected to enter a plea bargain, were commonly seen before lunch).

I forgot where I read this point, but it might imply that the judges' hunger is not necessarily the only factor leading to the different outcome.

<comment><USER11> This got passed around from SlateStarCodex, not sure where else it got traction.

But yes: a followup study found that judges schedule open and shut cases for near lunch so they won't get held up, and more ambiguous cases for open periods. Since "open and shut" usually means "guilty", the original study found higher conviction/sentence rates for near-lunch cases. Remove cases where judges can set their own case schedule and you see way less of this.

<comment><USER18> I thought it was probably on SSC and I even searched there, but didn't manage to find the article. Thanks for the summary!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I found this paper[1] to be a particularly good source of information on the legal landscape of using algorithms in the judicial system.

[1] Barocas, Solon, and Andrew D. Selbst. "Big data's disparate impact." (2016). APA [https://www.accmeetings.com/AM16/faculty/files/Article_461_D...](https://www.accmeetings.com/AM16/faculty/files/Article_461_D117_SSRN- id2477899.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER20> The issue raised by this article is discussed in a broader context in the excellent book by Cathy O'Neil: "Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy". The dangers of proprietary, secret algorithms making judgements at critical junctures (e.g whether a person is sentenced or not) is raised in the introduction of the book.

The book also gives copious concrete examples of these dangers. In particular, the book describes the LSI-R (Level of Service Inventory-Revised) questionnaire and how it effectively pinpoints race even though it does not actually ask for the person's race, which is illegal.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think I've seen this Black Mirror episode.

</comment><comment><USER22> We don't have access to the sentencing algorithms in the minds of judges, either.

<comment><USER23> They don't keep their reasoning secret and sell their sentancing recommendations either.

<comment><USER24> There's reasoning and there's justification. It's entirely possible that the reason a judge does something is not revealed by the justification they present.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> As a technologist, I feel there are problems we can solve using computer, and there are problems we cannot solve using computer.

I am a big fan of smarter computation, but when it comes to legal judgement, I defer to a human. We all have heard of bizarre rulings before (I don't have to remind everyone the Stanford rape scandal last year), but the human involvement in making a judgement call is what makes justice system precious.

I am a big fan of kicking out Donald Trump out of office. I would describe this secret algorithm as Donald Trump. Some data were collected, not sure how much, how authentic, and how much bias has been introduced. We just know some answer is produced. The algorithm might be as simple as tossing a coin. If I can't trust the leader of our government, how can I trust a machine, whether secret or not, making judgement call, when human is prone to making poor and irrational judgement call.

So why human if human are prone to make mistake and to make unfair judgement? Because there should be humanity in justice. Yes, Lady Justice is blind- folded, but that doesn't mean we can't show compassion or anger.

Is there a real correlation of crime rate and number of years in prison? I heard many said criminals are likely to commit crime again because either the criminals have no other skills to depend on, or they have mental illness that prevented them from obeying laws. So if the dataset says 90% of recurrence rate, are we going to sentence people longer? Then why not lock the person up or go for an immediate execution if we want peace?

You see, the purpose we want to add to a jail senetence is correction. This is not an ideal talk. There are many convicts do turn out right and fine if they are given the chance to redeem themselves. We shouldn't be begging for a safe prison, a prison with staff ready to help, because those should be a requirement of a jail.

I can't help but to remind myself Futurama, there are robot judges (one of the cops is also a robot). We should fear people trying to robotized our humanity. If judging can depend on data, then raising a kid from infant to adulthood could be done using algorithms too. We just need lots of data, lots of simulations.

</comment><comment><USER26> Hypothetically speaking: what if the algorithm had hardwired names and probabilities? {name:"Loomis", prob_recidivism:0.99} ? Then you're just throwing him into jail because a lot of other Loomises turned out to be jerks.

He must be allowed to verify the validity of the algorithm. The current situation is just 1 step above secret laws.

</comment><comment><USER27> If the prison system actually focused on reform, perhaps history and this algorithm would be a largely trailing indicator of repeat offense

</comment><comment><USER28> My main issue with this algorithm is that it purports to predict THE DEFENDANT'S actual risk to the community. That's impossible to do.

Instead, it seems like it should provide data-centric trends based on objective data and metrics, such as age, sex, race, socio-economic metrics, housing, charges, peers, gang affiliations, state, city, ZIP, block, historical recidivism, charge severity, marital status, child status, and any other obtainable piece of data. From this, you would be able to generate concrete statistical evidence which could be used to supplement, not replace, the standard factors considered by the Court. This data could be used by prosecution or defense to counteract any intentional bias introduced by those running the numbers.

Even then, however, this data would be generalized, treated as a predictor, and applied as prophecy to the particular defendant in question. It seems like it should be inadmissible.

<comment><USER29> Here's the problem with saying include "age, sex, race, socio-economic..." as being /objective/ is that it literally repeats existing stereotypes and biases.

There's plenty of evidence that there is a huge amount of bias due to race, being poor means you can't afford good lawyers, etc. So now what happens is the information hat feeds into the algorithm is going to be something like "<X> currently receives longer sentences" leads it to just repeat the existing behaviour, but now it claims to be a machine and so unbiased, so judges defer to it.

I feel that as a defendant i should be able to ask them to re-run the algorithm with a changed race and a changed zip code so we can get a comparison and measure of effective algorithmic bias.

<comment><USER28> My suggestion was to 1) not use any data or algorithms, or 2) use an objective algorithm to figure out if poor white males with criminal records but with a new child are likely to be repeat violent offenders.

I did not suggest to use a single variable, nor did I suggest that it be used to determine guilt, explicitly dictate sentencing, etc. If there is going to be any algorithmic "fact" finding, it should involve plugging in all available data for a defendant and trending it against all available data. Not cherry picking.</comment></comment></comment>


Dr. Dobbs Still Alive? - <AUTHOR> http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/headline/240169374 <comment><USER2> It's obviously not still alive and stopped updating last December. Am I missing something?

[http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/dr-dobbs- arch...](http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/dr-dobbs- archive/240169474)

</comment><comment><USER3> some of the folks migrated to [http://theprosegarden.com](http://theprosegarden.com)</comment>


New Attempt at the Healthcare IT Problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.preacthealth.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hello fellow HN'ers -

My team and I are recent graduates from YC SUS Summer 2019 and we thought we'd be a bit silly to not try and utilize some connections and opportunities that became apparent through that avenue.

We are in a demo phase - not fully functional mind you - and need feedback. Our product is aimed at patients and healthcare professionals alike. The goal is to reduce the amount of time professionals stare at a screen by giving patients the responsibility to enter some data themselves and really brings all members into a patient-centered care team. The benefits consist of including the patient and not leaving them out, emphasizing the relationship between patient and professional at the heart of healthcare, and bringing in a healthcare IT solution that is actually modern.

We're happy to chat and answer any questions or you can provide any feedback on the site, survey or get in touch to see the demo.

Happy hunting, Erik Preact, Inc.</comment>


Twitter says it's looking at subscription options as ad revenue drops sharply - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/23/tech/twitter-subscription-earnings/index.html <comment><USER2> I couldn't shake the image of Twitter being an enthusiast, cool kids, wordsmiths only type platform from my head. Probably because I had an account since when Twitter servers couldn't take it and used to display a dolphin image(But, don't check my Twitter account, I didn't use it much) although I knew Twitter is not that anymore.

So, I always told to myself that like most other enthusiast platforms Twitter is struggling to make money unlike Facebook where its users don't care about non-contextual ads as long as its attractive and Facebook will go to any length to get a click on the Ad even if it means they are from a click farm from Philipines, Bangladesh, India; its advertisers didn't seem to mind as long as the 'Page Like' count increased.

But then, after I started using Reddit; I thought this is never going to make any money as it is a much more enthusiast platform than Twitter and every subreddit is a platform on its own where non-context content will be brushed aside. Then when Reddit introduced 'Awards', it blew me away; it seems like they have figured out the best possible way to monetise their platform. I don't know how much revenue it has brought to Reddit, but I could calculate some threads having thousands of dollars worth of awards almost every other day i.e. Normal users paying money for Internet commendation.

Twitter needs to figure out what's its equivalent for Reddit awards without compromising its integrity and becoming a Facebook.

<comment><USER3> > used to display a dolphin

Ah, the retired fail whale

[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/the-s...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/the- story-behind-twitters-fail-whale/384313/)

<comment><USER2> Ah ha! I had the image of the whale in my head but wrote dolphin! I'll let it be and thank you for the correction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I bet a $12/year "Editor" option that simply allowed those users to use <i>italics</i> would be widely used, generating $$$ without disrupting what people love about Twitter.

<comment><USER5> Just googled the replacement hacks using unicode. If Twitter offered styles for a fee, people would probably use those workarounds, e.g. to get italics 𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑔.

Although these are probably not searchable.. Edit: hmm Ctrl-F actually finds "string"!

<comment><USER6> > Although these are probably not searchable.. Edit: hmm Ctrl-F actually finds > "string"!

Depends on the search engine. And Ctrl-F is already unusable on Twitter Web anyway, because it only works on tweets in the viewport (or close to it)

<comment><USER7> Is it browser's limitation?

I had issues, when tried to search in a very long <textarea> with scrollbar. Firefox was able to find only currently visible occurrences. That was not a viewport issue, of course, but looks very similar. Would love to know more about all this.

<comment><USER6> No, it's because Twitter Web removes elements from the DOM when they are far from the viewport.

There are two ways you can see it:

1\. Open a DOM debugger, select an element in a tweet, scroll down. Eventually the element disappears.

2\. In Firefox, scroll down, right click, "Take a screenshot", "Complete page". You'll see tweet far from the viewport, as well as header and sidebars are invisible.

The motivation is probably to make it faster, but it's unclear to me why removing (and later re-adding) elements in Javascript would be more efficient than the browser internally dealing with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It might be too little too late. Twitter made a lot of sense in 2010 when you only saw messages from the people you followed, and only discovered new people when those people specifically put their words into your stream. It was valuable, even if people were tweeting about their vacations and sandwiches.

App.net tried to launch a paid version of Twitter and it almost succeeded, but they weren't able to get a critical mass to convert all at once. Twitter was still more valuable as 8 out of 10 of your friends were still on Twitter, not App.

It has changed though. With more users and the new algorithmic timeline, If you are just starting out, you have no chance at getting good value out. Twitter decides what you see, whether you like it or not. It's like the TV from 1984 that is continuously bringing junk food into your living room. You don't get a remote, you only get a choice to have it, or not to have it in your house.

Twitter used to deliver unprecedented value 1:1, and now it extracts value from 100,000 and delivers it to 1. Unless you are the one, there is no sense in paying for it.

<comment><USER9> > App.net tried to launch a paid version of Twitter and it almost succeeded, > but they weren't able to get a critical mass to convert all at once.

Did it really almost succeed? Looking at the numbers from the Wikipedia page, it got a decent number of people joining right at the start. Then it seems to have gotten very limited user engagement from those people, and after the first year the subscriptions could only barely cover the hosting costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hate Twitter and think it's a huge hassle and a waste of time, but I would pay for a domain verified Twitter handle / namespace that could be used for product feedback / support.

Ex: twitter.com/example.com

It would also be advantageous for incumbents to make a system like that the norm / expectation because it would reduce the gold rush effect for new platforms where people rush to reserve their handles.

</comment><comment><USER11> > "We want to make sure any new line of revenue is complementary to our > advertising business,"

I know the above probably means this is a longshot, but here's what I want from a subscription:

1\. No promoted tweets 2\. Permanently disable algorithmic timeline (what Twitter calls "Home")

That's it. I pay $12/month not to see ads on YouTube, and I'd easily pay that same amount for an ad+algorithm-free experience in the Twitter native app.

<comment><USER12> I suspect that the people willing to pay $12 to avoid ads are also the most valuable targets for advertisers. I suspect in aggregate, they are actually worth much more than $12 month.

<comment><USER11> I suspect many of those who are ad-averse like me use third party clients and ad blockers, and have an inherent distrust of ads, so I doubt I'm worth much to an advertiser considering my engagement rate is zero.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I always thought Twitter should just charge people to allow additional followers. So let's say your first 5k followers are free, and after that you need to pay some amount to let additional people follow you. Incentives are aligned with the vanity and self-promotion culture of Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER14> I know people will hate this idea, but I would like to see what it would look like if they limited the amount of tweets a free account was allowed to send and even deprioritize those tweets to only show up on to their followers. Seems like it could curtail a lot of the toxicity. Obviously the other side of that coin is that it could limit discussions and interactions, but maybe it would show how useless a lot of the interactions are on the site.

Of course, I say this as someone who never tweets. I only use Twitter to aggregate news/interesting people. A bigger question is how can they make a user like me pay.

<comment><USER15> Sounds like it would give a stronger voice to the wealthy and suppress the voices of the poor who can't afford a subscription.

<comment><USER14> This is actually a good point that I didn't consider.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What I would like on twitter, and I would pay for it:

\- Option to post 1 NSFW tweet, instead on that being per account

\- My likes being private, and no one seeing them in their timelines

\- not seeing anyone's likes in my timeline.

\- not seeing any 'recommended' tweets on my timeline (tweets included because someone I follow, follow that account)

<comment><USER6> You may be interested in joining the Fediverse, a federated network of microblogging software (Mastodon, Pleroma, ...). Most of the implementations support all four of these features.

And most of it is free and/or donation-supported.

But of course, you don't get the same people as on Twitter.

<comment><USER16> I tried Mastodon a couple times. But the lack of search (can only search hashtags) made it hard to find people/discussions.

I use Twitter to follow some publisher/anime bloggers, and there's none on any federated network, at least not anyone relevant.

And people on my Twitter are more chill than the ones I met on Mastodon (and mainly the ones that used Pleroma). I remember 2 times I had problems there:

One was when I mentioned something about Windows, like, just said that I used it, so a few people started offending me (not mocking or joking).

Another time, I posted a picture when I was watching anime on the TV. Someone asked how I took screenshots from the episodes. I said that I just had a script that downloaded from Reddit. The person got furious because 'I was leeching from the community and not contributing'.

So, I dumped the fediverse and I got back on Twitter where, in 10 years, I don't remember something like that ever happening.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Charge for verified. 100 bucks should cover the cost of them actually verifying people, and allow us commoners to get access to the features currently gated off.

<comment><USER18> > to get access to the features currently gated off.

Such as? I had no idea verified users have more features other than the blue checkmark.

<comment><USER19> they get more quality filters, such as the ability to only see replies from other verified users, or only users who have verified phone numbers

<comment><USER20> A "member" tier subscription that let you restrict to seeing only content from other members (or verified users) might cut down on a lot of the noise there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can't imagine paying for that. It's one big pile of outrage that I'm not at all convinced is a net positive in my life

</comment><comment><USER22> Nationalize it and get taxpayer money

</comment><comment><USER23> A pro account for editing tweets? This can actually be quite profitable.

</comment><comment><USER24> Everyone loves to hate on Facebook for ruining societal discourse but Twitter shares just as much of the blame. I hope they both go bankrupt.

<comment><USER25> You're downvoted but I understand your sentiment.

From where I'm sitting, Twitter is doing so much more damage than Facebook that it's not even close.

My Facebook is full of old friends from school not saying much, and some local groups moaning about local goings on.

Twitter, on the other hand, is an absolute and total perversion of human communication. An arbitrary point-scoring game with a tiny character limit, dominated by activists whose skills at the game are carrying their piss-poor arguments. I've got a friend who obviously gets her opinions from Twitter and then can't formulate coherent sentences in real world conversation to defend them. It's total rot.

<comment><USER26> And to add insult to injury, so many otherwise sensible people seem to equate Twitter directly to the real-world and don't realize its being gamed by botnets and activists who are pushing political views.

Many very smart professionals literally look to Twitter for feedback and even emotional support for their work, and literally have meltdowns if the Twitverse takes them to task over some unforgivable transgression.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Could go something like this. Say Elon Musk, he will have a subscription tweet feed that users can subscribe to, all users of the subscription get to see the posts first. The free users will see them after 24hrs. Since twitters strength is real time, they can sell from that strength.</comment>


The Rich Tapestry of Fiber Optics - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/cyberspace/the-rich-tapestry-of-fiber-optics <comment><USER2> What a splendid article. I hope that it is "re-upped".</comment>


Show HN: my regular expression example match generator - <AUTHOR> http://regexio.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I made this tool over a year ago as a proof of concept. It doesn't support all features (like negations inside of character classes), but it should demonstrate the benefit that a tool like this would give you. I'd be interested in helping someone else understand the guts and make it into a public service to help out newbie developers coming to understand these notoriously-difficult-but-highly-useful expression.

</comment><comment><USER2> Oh god, I've been wanting something like this for ages. I've always dreamed of a regex driven list generator, but where I can supply constraints on repetition operators (*->{0,2}, +->{1,3}) to limit the scope, but then get a comprehensive list of all the matching strings.

Imagine using some rules to take something like a user driven entry, where they'll enter something like say...a phone number freetext, but then use some rules that turn that phone number into a regex that'll match many common ways to write that phone number, then generate all the possible matching versions of that phone number for submission against an indexed database of text documents to see if any match. It's a trivial example, but a similar concept could work for things like names that have been Romanized from a non-Latin alphabet....generate a regex to match some variants, then generate the variants and search an indexed database for those variants. It would be much much faster in many cases than scanning through all the documents with the regex.

<comment><USER2> Nearly forgot this similar effort: <http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/projects/rex/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Congrats on supporting back-references :)

Hint: Try using "1(0+)1\1" or "([a-zA-Z]+)\1" for some nifty examples of things that technically _aren't possible_ with true regular expressions, but _are_ supported by enhanced regex engines like Perl/PCRE.

Edit: too bad it only works with one back reference, eg, adding \2 apparently breaks everything, returning no matches and no code.

Edit2: after more playing, it seems that using \3 works as a backref for the second matching group... try "(a+)(b+)\1\3"...

</comment><comment><USER4> It doesn't seem to be able to handle character classes of the type [^abc], which matches any character _except_ a, b, or c. It's pretty cool, though. I tried copying and pasting some crazy regexps from the internet in there, and it immediately gave me some idea what they do. Well done!

<comment><AUTHOR> I purposely punted on inverted character classes because they brought up a major usability issue that I didn't have a quick solution for. The expression /[^abc]/ should match '@', ' ', and 'q', but, by the numbers, the majority of generated matches would look like '{angry unicode that you can't even see}'. This brings up the idea that you don't just want valid matches, but a meaningful set of examples that covers different ways of matching.

Likewise, I imagine it might be useful to specify some background language that matches should be taken from. That is, you might want to tell it to show you example matches made from snippets of valid html, from email-style English text, ascii-only strings, arbitrary unicode, etc. Incorporating this kind requires a lot of original thinking about usability (and some prototyping to figure out what would even make sense).

<comment><USER5> Since the intersection of two regular languages is a regular language, you could reduce generating 'background language' example matches to taking intersections. It's unfortunate how rare it is for libraries to provide you that operation.

(Same thing for HTML: intersecting a regular language with a context-free one is context-free.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bookmarked. I had an immediate use for this, and your application filled it beautifully.

</comment><comment><USER7> This first thing I tried to do was

      [\d]+

But it didn't work. Took me a few tries to get it to work. I'm guessing it simply doesn't work with special regex characters.

You know what would be even more useful for me? I give you a string and highlight the important part I need to match, and you give me a good regex for it.

Example: I need to match the string "View conversation (5)", with the important part being that there is a number near the end of the string. So I type that and highlight the "5". Then you give me something like:

      /[^\d]+\d+[^\d]*/

Or whatever. Obviously it won't be full-proof because you don't know all my use cases and edge cases, but it'd give me somewhere to start.

<comment><USER8> My CS honours thesis involved deriving regexes (well, DTDs for XML documents, but it is essentially the same problem).

The quality of the results depends a lot on the amount and quality of the input (how well it represents what you are really trying to match). A single example string is unlikely to get you far - you would certainly need multiple matching examples. So I think this approach works best when you already have an example corpus to work from, rather than providing input manually. If you're going to spend effort providing a lot of input, then you'd probably be better off spending at least some of that effort in providing hints or possible regex answers.

Further, there are many possible regexes that would match an input set, so the algorithm also needs some way to evaluate them and choose the better candidates. In my case I used some ideas from information theory (such as MML), which actually worked reasonably well. But this is a computationally hard problem, so even with an objective measure of the optimal regex you won't necessarily be able to find it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In grad school I had a need for a tool that would generate all strings accepted by a regex of a specified size.

I wrote one myself, but was never really satisfied that I did a good job on it. I'd love to see the code of an efficient implementation of such a thing.

<comment><USER5> Doug McIlroy wrote an article on that: <http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/nfa.ps.gz>

Code: <http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/nfa.hs>

<comment><USER9> Thank you. That is actually an excellent paper. A decade late for me, but excellent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You mean you re-implemented String::Random ? [http://search.cpan.org/~steve/String- Random-0.22/lib/String/...](http://search.cpan.org/~steve/String- Random-0.22/lib/String/Random.pm)

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting module, but different target application. Part of the core of my generation process is remembering which parts of the example match came from which piece of your original expression so that (someday) there could be some nice mouseover effects that help you understand HOW some example match works (as there are sometimes expressions that match a given string in multiple ways).

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is the source to the python meat of this project: <http://pastie.org/1180230>

The general idea is that it is a command line tool that reads a regex as input (along with a number of examples to generate). It parses the regex into an abstract syntax tree, then hands it over to an interpreter to "execute" the expression/program several times.

The 'simpleparse' python library does a nice job of easing the regex-to-tree mapping.

</comment><comment><USER11> Reminded of this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1387418>. Perhaps it's too complicated? :-)

</comment><comment><USER12> One thing that would be useful is if I could select different regex engines. Python does things _slightly_ differently from Perl, C#, and (especially) emacs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Heh, its a matter of implementing a declarative model of each of the different regex engines you'd like to select. If would be fantastic if it existed, wanna try?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think that it should show for example 10 matches (not only one), so it is easier to have an idea of "all" the possible matches.

</comment><comment><USER14> I've found <http://txt2re.com/> to be very helpful for simple things.

</comment><comment><USER15> Something similar to check-out. Based in javascript and lets you visually verify basic patterns on text-blocks: <http://regexpal.com/>

</comment><comment><USER16> Using python with the re.X flag?

I can tell because it's doesn't understand scoped flags or atomic groupings.

<comment><AUTHOR> While the generation engine is written in python (source linked in another comment), the engine itself doesn't make use of existing regex libraries because they solve a different problem (deterministic matching vs nondeterministic generation).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Similar: <http://rubular.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> It look like rubular just shows you example matches out of text you've already typed in (the same situation you have when playing with any regex matching library directly), whereas regexio generates matches you might not expect out of the blue. Can you clarify what sense of similarity you mean to point out?

<comment><USER17> Yes, I realize that rubular doesn't generate the matches. But they are both web sites where you primarily enter a regex in order to explore its behavior. The similarity is obvious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What an exceptionally helpful tool! thanks.</comment>


Is Web Dev in the right path? - <AUTHOR> http://lucas-ts.com/2012/04/12/web-dev-is-in-the-right-path.html

<comment><AUTHOR> first article on HN and with a complicated subject.</comment>


Ask HN: Is Berlin (or Germany) a good place to start a startup in Europe? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Usually, I'd have said yes.

The local startup community is great. There's certainly not as much venture capital available as in Silicon Valley but first not every startup needs extensive funding and secondly the availability of VC has been improving in recent years, too.

There's more red tape involved in setting up a company than there is in other countries but you only have to go through that once.

However, GDPR currently creates a lot of uncertainty. Unfortunately, we'll have to wait how that works out in the end. Maybe, everyone involved will act reasonably and it'll prove to have been a storm in a teacup but it's really too soon to tell.

So, on that grounds I can't really recommend Europe and Germany in particular right now.

<comment><USER3> GDPR isn't new, these laws have been in place since May 2016. Overall, they're pretty common sense, actually: don't share people's personal details without their permission, make sure your infrastructure is secure, have a plan that lists all parties that you share data with and have a protocol in case of a data breach.

If you have an ethically sound company and comply with these rules you have nothing to worry about.

Berlin is awesome, I'd choose it over Amsterdam (I'm Dutch) because of the insane rents. I've also heard good stories about Krakow and Bucharest.

<comment><USER2> I agree that the intent behind that regulation is good and yes, as an ethically sound company you shouldn't have to worry about it.

However, the implementation of these laws so far has been less than stellar, to say the least. There's a lot of room for interpretation and some rules are left vague - sometimes intentionally in order to avoid having to constantly update the regulation. Given the huge, potentially ruinous fines associated with GDPR you'd want laws to be as explicit and as specific as possible in order to avoid ambiguity and profiteering.

What's more, different European countries have implemented GDPR differently - or not at all. Privacy (or the lack thereof) - in the EU of all places - shouldn't be a competitive advantage or a bargaining chip.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> No. Germany sucks for tech startups, because we have Merkel, she doesn't know anything about tech or even "the Internet". That means you can expect the government to put a lot of hurdles into anything you are trying to do.

<comment><USER5> Ha ha, at least she has a scientific/maths background rather than the majority of politicians in UK/US who are lawyers, "economists", social scientists or in some cases celebrities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yea, it's great. We run adtech entirely out of Germany, we've found lots of talented folks but we operate in a village, not Berlin.

But then also, we just need AWS, payment processing (stripe) and a bank account.

24/7 power, high-speed internet, hardware.

Every service is dirt cheap compared to the US.

Hookers are beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER7> Go where your customers are. Tax is comparable to most of western europe, salaries are higher than Poland, but way lower than SV.</comment>


US wants to impose tariffs on imported solar panels - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2017/05/29/us-notifies-world-of-possible-safeguard-tariffs-on-imported-solar-cells-effective-last-week/ <comment><USER2> My understanding when Obama wanted to do this that the Chinese were subsidizing their solar panels because it was seen as an important future industry. Those subsidies made the price very very low compared to domestically produced panels and all of our companies were starting to go out of business.

I think the view was that if we desired to have the technology to produce solar we would have to step in to assist our companies in the same way the Chinese were assisting their industry.

Figured I would get in before everyone thought this was a Trump only protectionist move, the main idea is nothing new.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/business/energy- environmen...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/business/energy- environment/us-slaps-tariffs-on-chinese-solar-panels.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Sweet, let me dig up all the usual tropes I can think of so we can all figure out if this is good or bad.

Pro-tariff:

\- "USA can do what it wants!!!!11"

\- "China = bad quality! sad!"

\- "Support American jobs!"

\- "Mercantalism is how we thrive!"

Anti-tariff:

\- Mercantalism kills everyone

\- Consumers suffer, corporate cronies prosper

\- People will find ways around the tariff

\- US made does not always mean better quality</comment>


Navy's Railgun Now a Reality – Uses Lorentz force to hurl projectiles at Mach 7+ - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/04/electromagnetic-railgun-launcher/

<comment><USER2> > "[It] will give our adversaries a huge moment of pause to go: 'Do I even > want to go engage a naval ship?'" Rear Admiral Matt Klunder

ah, yes. Because a railgun is the determining factor when considering attacking the US Navy. "Well darn, they now have railguns. Let's call off the nuclear Armageddon guys!" As cool as this may be, our military industrial complex is hopelessly delusional.

<comment><USER3> Be fair to the guy and use the whole quote:

 _"[It] will give our adversaries a huge moment of pause to go: 'Do I even want to go engage a naval ship?'" Rear Admiral Matt Klunder told reporters. "Because you are going to lose. You could throw anything at us, frankly, and the fact that we now can shoot a number of these rounds at a very affordable cost, it's my opinion that they don't win."_

In a lot of domains a rail gun is a game changer.

<comment><USER4> If we had rail guns 30 years ago, how would history be different?

<comment><USER3> Naval gunfire would have played a greater role in the Iraq war, especially the last one; the previous, as well as Vietnam and Korea, had Iowa class battleships available for that role, although there's quite a bit of difference in what this rail gun can do, 23 pound kinetic shell out to 100 miles vs. 16 inch caliber AP and HE shells 100 times as heavy out 1/5 of the distance.

In a future serious war, imagine what one of these, with drone spotting, could do Communist China's PLA naval forces. Note that Taiwan is 110 miles from the mainland's coast, ships with these guns could be in the general vicinity of the island and as long as they had sufficient reconnaissance completely control the surface, reducing an invasion attempt to what's sometimes mocked as a "million-man swim".

They wouldn't have to move as much, which would help with the treat of slow, quiet submarines waiting for you to come into range.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure that I've really read anything about the Iraqi Navy's grand defense slowing us down.

And I can't really see us going to war with China any more than we went to war with the USSR.

<comment><USER3> For the former, you're evidently not familiar with the role naval gunfire support played; if not those instances, e.g. I remember the Royal Australian Navy(RAN) _Anzac_ using its 5 inch gun in support of the combined US and British Royal Marine push into the Al-Faw Peninsula right flank, read up on e.g. the WWII invasion of Sicily or D-Day, when Omaha beach had two old US battleships dedicated to it (would have hated to be a German on the other side when e.g. the _Texas_ used it's 10 14 inch guns to "clear" a beach exit).

For the latter, the misattributed Trotsky quote " _You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you._ " applies. As does the principle of deterrence.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's with the C++17 Special Math? - <AUTHOR> Looking through CPPreference I found the `special_math` targeted for C++17 [1].  Most of these functions look very specialized and I would expect there to be fairly non-generic optimized implementations.<p>What makes these functions generally useful enough for inclusion into the STL?<p>[1] http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/numeric/special_math <comment><USER2> Machine Learning</comment>


First test broadcast of SuperHD (7680x4320) between BBC and Japan at 24Gb/s - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11436939

<comment><USER2> Honestly, I'm just excited about the 60fps video that this brings along. Resolution is always a plus... but this 30fps (and sometimes even 24!) nonsense has gone on for too long.

The flicker was particularly noticeable during Avatar - if only James Cameron had gotten his way when he proposed to double framerate while filming that.

Also, for any who want to learn more: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Hi- Vision>

</comment><comment><USER3> Perhaps, one day, many decades from now, recordings of these broadcasts will be rediscovered, similarly to the rediscovery of these photos:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1575383>

"Recession-Era SHD videos"

</comment><comment><USER4> While this is really awesome news, the most astonishing thing is trying to contemplate how much archival storage space is going to be required to keep video at this resolution.</comment>


Dimple: An object-oriented API for business analytics powered by D3 - <AUTHOR> http://dimplejs.org/ <comment><USER2> [https://dc-js.github.io/dc.js/](https://dc-js.github.io/dc.js/)

<comment><USER3> Very slick. Wonder if this lib could speed development of custom visuals for an existing product like Power BI, which are also based on d3 ([https://github.com/Microsoft/PowerBI- visuals](https://github.com/Microsoft/PowerBI-visuals)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've said it before and I'll say it again, I'm always skeptical of any wrapper around D3 that tries to make it more reusable. D3 is built with reusability in mind, considering it uses functions and objects for everything. I wrote 300 lines of D3 that made a graph which has all the features we need, and no single D3 wrapper library could have provided all that functionality for us, nor could they be mixed together to provide it for us. That said, I enjoy seeing new ones come out because they usually offer new ideas for different ways to visualize data or interact with it.

<comment><USER5> You see these things because d3 is fairly low level. If I just have some data and want a bar chart, I basically want to pass the data to "BarChart", with some possible configuration options.

You can't do this with raw d3. With d3, you are responsible for drawing and spacing your bars, creating your axes, etc.

This is intentional, of course. d3 aims to give a set of building blocks that you can be used to create any possible visualization you can think of. It's not aiming to be a high-level graphing library with a limited set of pre-built graphs. But those libraries fill a perfectly valid need as well.

<comment><USER6> Basically this - we opted for google charts rather than d3 for a few projects because we wanted to keep the investment low and essentially all we wanted was barChart() pieChart() methods that we pass data into. Yes we could have built it once and reused but the uglier google chart was already there.

<comment><USER4> That's a good point, and in fact I may look into Google Charts once more. Thanks for the perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What is business analytics?

<comment><USER8> I'm glad I'm not the only one that is confused.

Is it just making graphs about performance?

<comment><USER9> More or less, yes. Past, present and future performance of various business variables.

<comment><USER8> It is amazing to me how many industries have similar problems that can be simply abstracted and applied to a larger scope.

We have profiling, they have "business variable monitoring." I love how the same program solves both problems, just needs a repackage.

<comment><USER10> One key difference that makes business variables more complex to track are the people involved. You need to connect all theses numbers back to individuals and teams that don't stay put. Additionally you should probably be comparing it to ever changing quotas. These aspects come with specific expectations regarding visuals and options available for reporting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hm... That's nice and all, but why this particular technology stack? How do you typically use internal business data? Is javascript really the best language for mucking about with large datasets?

There is nothing wrong with building abstractions though. In the end, they will need to be complex too, to be generic enough. I am not sure I like the model though, especially when looking at the advanced examples - it looked like there was a lot of imperative coding going on.

An alternative is using R for analysis work. I think that the hard part is typically getting the data and getting it into shape for plotting. Having done that I am a few lines of code from generating nice charts with ggplot2.

As an example, I have some small scripts that I run (myself or by jenkins) on a somewhat regular basis. They generate and update a bunch of static images attached to Confluence pages, using some loaders in java and analysis and render in R.

They images look extra nice with theme_xkcd :-)

<comment><USER5> With R, you won't be able to create interactive graphics that other people can explore on a web page, for example. If you need that, I don't think you can avoid javascript.

<comment><USER12> Shiny does just that: [http://shiny.rstudio.com](http://shiny.rstudio.com)

<comment><USER5> Well, it just does the JS conversion for you. I guess you can call that avoiding JS...

<comment><USER11> As long as you don't have to debug the output, yes :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nice, but when is somebody going to create an easy way to build advanced dashboards on the fly for non coders? That's how Tableau is making a dent on Ms Excel market share right now.

<comment><USER10> [https://www.domo.com/businesscloud](https://www.domo.com/businesscloud) ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Love the way it drops lines on axes when you hover over the point :-)

</comment><comment><USER15> plotly.js

<comment><USER11> Ah. Yes.

That is also an alternative. Can plot directly to plotly from R too :-)

In my case, I can't send sensitive data around - it might even be illegal, and did not want to shell out a large sum of money for my own personal instance, but for non sensitive stuff or when it's worth the money it seems to be the bees knees!

<comment><USER16> plotly.js is the MIT licenced[1] charting library released by Plotly, which you can use to create plots without shipping data to anyone else.

It can be used from R (IIRC), since the corresponding Plotly library just generates a declarative JSON plot description, which plotly.js can use.

[1]: [https://github.com/plotly/plotly.js/blob/master/LICENSE](https://github.com/plotly/plotly.js/blob/master/LICENSE)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Plottable was the easiest and most flexible for me to use.

</comment><comment><USER18> "Fork me on github" leads to a 404 page.</comment>


Exercism – Level up your programming skills - <AUTHOR> http://exercism.io <comment><USER2> This looks useful for learning the basic syntax of a new language, but the exercises look to be somewhat generic. Most of the exercises seem to be duplicated across languages.

Once you've mastered the basic syntax and control constructs of a language, it probably isn't worth your time to try a dozen different string manipulation exercises.

Perhaps this is beyond the scope of what this site is aiming for, but, I would hope for some exercises that help me understand what each language is commonly used for.

Potential examples:

\- Swift: Learn to display and manipulate a GUI

\- Ruby: Learn to write a web application

\- Python/Julia/R: Learn to fit some data to a model

\- Javascript: Learn to use a web framework

\- Go: Learn to handle some network connections, concurrently. (I see they have one exercise that emphasizes concurrency, which is a step in the right direction.)

\- Perl/PHP/Bash: Learn to cry bitter, sorrowful tears.

<comment><USER3> >\- Perl/PHP/Bash: Learn to cry bitter, sorrowful tears.

This is a common misconception. PHP tears are actually almost sweet and not bitter at all. The only saltiness comes from hearing the opinions of other programmers talk about your primary language.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, no, not when your primary language still can't get lexical scope right, or distinguish between arrays and hashtables.

<comment><USER5> The lack of distinction between array vs hashtable isn't a big deal. Array as a map from integers to items works fine in practice. Even speaking of algorithm performance, it's fine for the uses you have on a web server. (Any other use of PHP is clearly insane. :) )

You speak like someone who hasn't worked much in PHP. When you do, a lot of quirks and flaws really bother you and slow down during everyday tasks, but the ones you mentioned aren't they.

<comment><USER6> > a lot of quirks and flaws really bother you and slow down during everyday > tasks

Would you mind sharing a few that bother you? q

<comment><USER7> The fact that `false` isn't always false. Or that '0' or 0 or null are all 'false'.

There's a bunch more quirks in Zend Framework that I use every day that are much worse than all the rest of PHP though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I just signed up and while it looks like a great resource I really wish they would grade your submissions on pass/fail based on the test cases that are included with each module. I thought it was weird that I submitted something that was not passing but it didn't complain... because if that's the case, why even submit? As a commentator I would like to know if I'm commenting on solutions that are passing or failing first, before writing any comments. Just my thoughts.

<comment><USER9> One reason to submit before it passes is so that you can see how others did it. If you're learning a new language and don't even know where to start, it can be useful to get help from others first then try to implement it yourself.

<comment><USER10> Isn't that cheating?

<comment><USER11> IIRC, exercism doesn't really encourage completing things for points, and didn't especially heavily gamify the learning process. Copying answers really just seemed like shortchanging yourself when I was using it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Been using this for a few weeks to practice for interviews, it's a slick setup. Unit tests setup to test all input and output, plus since you download the exercises you can use your editor of choice.

While there isn't much reviewing going on, I've found it useful to poke through a few other submissions for exercises (especially the ones with comments). I've learned a few things from other users' code.

</comment><comment><USER13> I love the site, but I have yet to have any of my submissions get reviewed by anyone else. Great concept, but maybe there is more they could do to encourage experienced developers to review the submissions.

<comment><USER14> I signed up last week and have been using it to learn Erlang. I have some experience with Elixir so Erlang isn't totally foreign to me. I'm experienced dev and have only commented on 1 submission. The problem with commenting on submissions is that I'm learning the language as well so there lacks the authority of knowing what would be the <INSERT LANGUAGE> way.

<comment><USER15> Thanks for the reminder; I used to do some Erlang commentary on the site, will go look again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This looks pretty cool. And since it hasn't been mentioned here yet, Advent of Code 2017[0] is ongoing right now and there's still enough time to catch up. But you can always go back to years 2015 and 2016 to sharpen a new language on.

I've been learning Elixir for this year's challenges and it's just the right amount of challenge required for understanding the idiomatics and idiosyncrasies of a language.

[0] [http://adventofcode.com/](http://adventofcode.com/)

</comment><comment><USER17> I attended a talk recently given by Exercism's creator (Katrina Owen) about the trials and tribulations of being an open source maintainer, and how success can turn a technical problem-solving delight into a thorny people- management tarpit. A process that programmers may not initially possess the skills to handle.

One big takeaway was how thankless and un(financially)compensated the task often is. If you find Exercism useful, I strongly recommended clicking the "Donate" button at the top.

</comment><comment><USER18> Can someone tell me what this has over, say, Codewars and Leetcode? It seems like there are not too many practice problems yet.

<comment><USER19> The biggest upside compared to other code challenges I tried (HackerRank, CodinGame) is that the code is ran on your machine, and the pass/fails are from unit tests. So you code using your editors in a real development environment rather than in a web based sandbox.

Also, as the checks are from tests, there are no single right answer. I've seen some code challenge services (can't remember the name) that would mark fail if you didn't write it exactly as they were expecting, to the line break.

<comment><USER18> that indeed could be an advantage. on codewars it sometimes takes a while for tests to run.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I didn't think I would enjoy this, but I do: [http://exercism.io/submissions/4778291c472d4c60b79360e02dd75...](http://exercism.io/submissions/4778291c472d4c60b79360e02dd7556f)

<comment><USER21> Wonderful, well played sir!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I really enjoy this site. I signed up last week to help me learn Erlang and am using it to brush up on my Elixir. One thing that stinks is the inconsistencies between the languages. For instance, Erlang uses rebar3 to run the tests "rebar3 eunit" whereas Elixir makes you use the "elixir xx.exs" command, meaning you have to point to the test file. It isn't that bad except a lot of the test files have really long names. That being said, it is a minor gripe I have with the site and I have otherwise enjoyed it.

<comment><USER22> Try `mix test`, assuming you have a mix project.

<comment><USER14> That's what I'm used to but it doesn't come with a mix project, which is frustrating. It is just the ex file with the code and the exs with the test. If I have time, maybe I'll do others a solid and try changing the tests to use mix (if that's even possible as an outsider)

<comment><USER23> > if that's even possible as an outsider

It's all open source. Check out [https://github.com/exercism/elixir](https://github.com/exercism/elixir). I've made some minor contributions in the Rust track and found the maintainers very pleasant to work with.

<comment><USER14> Awesome, thanks! I'll start trying to help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Similar to this, I'd recommend people check out Codewars, which has challenges that you then submit and get compared/graded against others' solutions. It's a real neat way to learn other ways of achieving some solution than the one you came up with.

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

</comment><comment><USER25> Thank you. Been looking to dive further into rust but needed some challenges. Unfortunately leetcode doesn't support it. :(

</comment><comment><USER26> Awesome, I was just teaching someone to code and a lot of the coding challenges are super lame. I really like these.

</comment><comment><USER27> I run a business on wordpress, but can't code. I want to learn some php and javascript to be able to better work with my programmer, and make some small modifications myself.

How suitable would this be?

Note: I have learned in the past, for about six months, went through K and R's C book, Udacity's intro course, and made some python scripts which are still in use on my site. But, that was five years ago, so I've forgotten everything.

So, I'm not exactly a total beginner, but I currently am unable to do anything through neglect.

<comment><USER28> If you have a local wordpress meetup it would probably be worth it to go down there and check it out. Its useful to find someone to ask questions of and maybe they offer some training.

The bostonphp group (Now almost defunct, excepting training) ran a class on setting up and running a drupal site, which was good. They had people that run drupal sites helping with the class so if you had questions there was someone knowledgeable). That being said, I've never run a production drupal site, but I feel like I have some idea whats involved.

Many years ago I took a redhat kernel extension programming class. Again with someone knowledgable teaching the class, it was quite helpful. Since it was all people from my workplace in the class we were able to ask the relevant questions about the scheduler and other information we needed.

<comment><USER27> Ah, great idea, thanks! I found a local wordpress meetup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Yesterday the page worked just fine, today all pages give me "Application Error", any news on if they are addressing this?

</comment><comment><USER21> It includes detailed pages for Common Lisp, Julia, Racket, most ML languages and Haskell.

I'm satisfied. Very comprehensive language list.

</comment><comment><USER29> I came here specifically to write some things that other people already said, so here is a TL;DR:

The idea is great: have a test suite and program your exercises against it. But in my opinion, exercism makes you write a lot of __non-idiomatic code __. There is value in that, but only so much.

</comment><comment><USER30> Great concept promising potentially more in-depth experiences than the cpomtetition. I think that the single point of failure of the site would be failure to build a large enough community of reviewers.

</comment><comment><USER31> The tasks are good, but I wish it was graded and you could list the top submissions by likes and speed etc. Something like codeforces where you can learn from the best by studying their code..

</comment><comment><USER32> Exercism is great at building code review chops. Assuming if you are in an active language community and have finished a number of challenges.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is basically Ruby Koans for every language?

</comment><comment><USER34> No HTTPS enabled?

</comment><comment><USER35> What I'd love to see is a series of case studies on software architecture with lessons learned.

<comment><USER36> That seems totally unrelated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> hmm. a lot of exercises but how hard will they be? I like codewars kyu levels.

<comment><USER38> They're working on Exercism v2 that includes the difficulty level on the exercises: [https://v2.exercism.io/tracks/lua/exercises](https://v2.exercism.io/tracks/lua/exercises)

<comment><USER39> so exercism v2 is served over https but v1 is not. strange.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Quite Interesting.

</comment><comment> surrey-fringe No thanks</comment>


'Wearable Eyes' Make You Appear Friendly, Social Even When You're Not - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/wearable-eyes-agencyglass-emotional-cyborgs#.U0f-Iaw6oMY.hackernews <comment><USER2> I'm sure there's something to this, but it looks like hideous Chindōgu.</comment>