Genetic Study Supports Carbohydrate-Insulin Model of Obesity - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@davidludwigmd/genetic-study-supports-carbohydrate-insulin-model-of-obesity-327d84be6d2b <comment><USER2> You don't even need to get into the science to dislike this article. And I'm not trying to argue against low-carb... I feel better on low-carb diets myself. But this article lays out a couple scientific facts, while shaming the reader into unquestioning agreement by saying, "This is X 101". But then lists a pseudo-scientific premise tied to their third "fact", and tries again to shame the reader into agreement. This is simply a manipulative writing style, and we should be ignoring it, not discussing it.

<comment><USER3> This is the medium post to garner attention for their journal article [1]. Admittedly the style seems like something out of the "self help" section of the bookstore, but my takeaway was: "look at this new result, it supports adopting a new theory of obesity, and I personally think this theory is the right one."

[1] [http://clinchem.aaccjnls.org/content/64/1/192](http://clinchem.aaccjnls.org/content/64/1/192)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Insulin is the Miracle-Gro for your fat cells. A child with new onset type 1 > diabetes — unable to make enough insulin — will invariable lose weight until > receiving treatment, no matter how many calories she consumes.

Does anyone know where the calories go if it isn't stored as fat? Glycogen stores? Or our digestive system just stops absorbing them?

<comment><USER5> My stepson is type 1, so saw this first hand.

Slowly the child loses weight. It's initially not very noticeable, but for example - in our case he stayed with his father over the summer and when he came back he was noticeably thin.

The child begins drinking a lot. It starts off with an excessive thirst. Can't go more than an hour without drinking. But ends up with them not being able to do anything, peeing constantly and never being able to quench their thirst. When he came back to us, he was close to this stage. He was constantly eating ice cubes as they melted slowly enough so that he felt like he was constantly moistening his mouth. After about 3 days we took him to the doctors office, where by he went to Hospital.

Fatigue - the child has zero energy and when they are not drinking they can barely move. This was rapid. He came home on a Sunday evening, and by Wednesday morning he looked like pure death.

Ketones in the blood skyrocket. This is incredibly dangerous. When blood sugar rises above about 15 mmol/L (270 mg/dl) things start getting quite nasty. Health is put in jeopardy. Quite often the child will go in to a coma if they get too high.

All of the sugars are peed out. The child's pee will smell very strongly and be a very dark colour if they are anything like my stepson.

It was basically horrific. But as soon as we got him treatment, he bounced back quickly.

We now use a carb counting system supported by a device that tracks is blood sugar and insulin intake. Regulating his insulin is a constant battle as he still thinks he is indestructible, and convincing a 14 year old boy that skipping "a few" shots every day or injecting a guesstimate as he is "too busy to do it properly" is a bad idea is not easy.

<comment><USER6> I wonder if there is an idea for a service here? If over-reporting of e.g. violence on the news can alter people's perception, maybe we can use that vulnerability to our advantage? If your son received a text everyday about someone going blind or having limbs amputated, maybe you can bias his perception by over-reporting bad outcomes?

<comment><USER7> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_packaging_warning_mess...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_packaging_warning_messages)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If this is true then why have many many studies shown that vegans, who generally eat a relatively high-carb & low fat diet, are the _only_ demographic with normal body mass index and also have much, much lower chances of developing type 2 diabetes?

In fact we have a lot of evidence linking high-fat diets to diabetes:

[https://nutritionfacts.org/2016/11/17/fat-is-the-cause-of- ty...](https://nutritionfacts.org/2016/11/17/fat-is-the-cause-of- type-2-diabetes/)

High fat diets also do a lot of bad things to your cardiovascular system. Proceed with caution.

<comment><USER9> Most nutritionists like to cherry pick studies that support their cause (even when they're low quality observational studies) and attack studies that oppose it. Michael Greger (the author of nutritionfacts) is quite the typical example (don't get me wrong, Gary Taubes has done that too in the "opposing" camp)

The most likely theory I've seen is:

1\. We have a certain amount of genetic propensity for higher-than-necessary insulin secretion

2\. How we develop that propensity is still unknown (!).

Gary Taubes likes the sugar hypothesis (i.e. something about fructose metabolism in the liver causes the system's self-regulation to fail) but thats mostly supported by observational studies - the mechanics aren't clear at all.

Michael Greger likes the lipid hypothesis (fat inhibits muscle ability to absorb carbohydrates i.e. causes insulin resistance) but that doesn't explain why the liver continues to produce tons of fat despite its insulin receptors being clogged.

Jason Fung likes the overflow hypotheis (as the muscles get fuller of glycogen, they're less able to store blood glucose, which means more insulin is needed to do it - however the liver isn't resistant and insulin upregulates its fat production) - but that doesn't fully explain how there are people who do lots of heavy physical activity yet remain obese and insulin resistant.

Its possible that any subset of the above could be a cause if excessive enough - high GI carbs to raise the blood sugar, fat to slow sugar absorption and lack of exercise to keep your muscle cells overfilled with glycogen all contribute to high insulin secretion, together.

3\. Insulin definitely regulates fat accumulation in fat cells. No doubt about it - more insulin means less fat released by fat cells and more carbs converted to fats by the liver and stored in fat cells. Insulin also blocks leptin which signals our brain that we're full, so we feel hungrier.

4\. Keto and fasting definitely work in that they remove the primary reason for insulin to secrete. You can't have raised insulin secretion if you don't have a lot of sugars in your blood to start with.

5\. Its possible that vegans (on average) also remove the _secondary_ reason for insulin to over-secrete, whatever that is. Keep in mind that vegans on average are more mindful about having a healthy lifestyle, so it could be any number of things (correlation is not causation). But if veganism itself was the definite fix, we would expect to see no long-term vegans that are obese. Good averages to compare would be long-term vegans with long-term "ketoers"

Keep in mind, the mechanisms to prevent weight gain are very different from those needed to actually lose weight. The first one is about maintaining a stable homeostatic state while the second one is about deliberately causing a different non-homeostatic state.

<comment><USER8> [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5466941/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5466941/)

"Replacing carbohydrates (mainly refined starches and simple sugars) and saturated fats with monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats lowered hemoglobin A1c and improved insulin resistance; polyunsaturated fats were also noted to improve insulin secretion. The authors concluded that in comparison to carbohydrates and saturated fats, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats had the most favorable effect on glycemia, insulin resistance, and secretion. In terms of foods, these findings support consumption of vegetable fats (e.g., nuts, avocados, olives) in place of animal fats and refined grains."

<comment><USER9> Thats a great meta-analysis referenced there ([https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4951141/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4951141/)), but the table of studies only contains baseline measures ([https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4951141/bin/pme...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4951141/bin/pmed.1002087.s003.pdf)) - I can't find the original non-aggregate data on the after-effect (benchmark) measurements of each of the analysed studies.

One thing it seems to assume is that effects of carbohydrate reduction are linear, which might not be the case. The study analysed the effect of "replacing 5% energy from carbohydrate with SFA" and found it had no significant effect on fasting glucose - this might be true even if ketosis works perfectly, since on average the trials listed there are medium-to-high carb. It would be very useful if they also had listed a table with the individual study outcome data.

Another thing that seems weird is that they deem an increase in insulin secretion capacity as good. Increasing insulin secretion capacity and insulin sensitivity will lower blood glucose, but at the expense of increased obesity - the blood sugar is going _somewhere_ and its either the muscles or fat. So it seems to me that in T2D the increase of secretion capacity only postpones the problem. Ideally what you want is the (fasting) insulin levels to drop while maintaining the same or somewhat lower blood glucose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I live in Cambodia. The Khmer people here eat white rice for every meal, four times a day. They nap at lunchtime because of carb overload. They're not fat.

<comment><USER11> That's a fairly insightful observation in that in the old days in the agricultural high carb west we balanced the obesity causing nature of extremely high carb diets against malnourishment, internal parasites, and periodic regular famines. We eliminated all three in the last century while keeping the ultra high carb diet, in fact boosting the carb intake to levels never seen before, and unsurprisingly the obesity level exploded.

For example five minutes with google searching for "khmer malnurishment" will find that about a third of the kids have some kind of malnutrition problem. Admittedly those stats come from people who's salaries depend on the problem existing and are therefore untrustworthy, but I'm sure real world rates none the less exceed a quarter.

Kinda the whole point of the obesity epidemic in the post-green revolution west is we don't have 1/3 of the population dying of scurvy regardless of how much carb they eat, and by definition we never ever fast or have any carb intake limit at all.

Its entirely possible that an ultra high carb diet as experienced in the west until the 1970s is perfectly stable as long as you have repetitive unintentional fasts (aka famines) and massive infestation of tapeworms and other intestinal parasites combined with universal vitamin deficiency such that everyone's a little sick all the time.

Its interesting to think about intestinal parasite eradication in terms similar to current discussion of probiotics and antibiotics in food. Tapeworms are gross, but so is dying 20 years earlier due to obesity... Its not a huge step in the probiotic marketing sense from unicellular parasites to multicellular parasites.

<comment><USER8> I see the same thing in Vietnam, and it's not because of malnutrition or a massive epidemic of parasites. It is mainly to do with the fact that people also consume vegetables (ie fiber) with their rice, and that they tend to be more physically active than Westeners.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Well, this makes me want to go straight to /r/keto ...

</comment><comment><USER13> What happens to the fat that you eat if you don't burn it off?

</comment><comment><USER14> Nice try, dairy industry

<comment><USER15> How would the dairy industry want this?

<comment><USER16> Dairy products are high in fat...

<comment><USER17> Full cream milk is 4% fat. That's not very high.

<comment><USER18> It's 49% calories from fat, that's pretty high. A healthy diet is <20% calories from fat. Even that is much more fat than we need.

<comment><USER17> You say that as if it were objectively true, but in fact it's just opinion, which has the unremarkable honour of being the most popular view of current mainstream diet "experts".

Further, it's absurd to focus on the macro-nutrient ratios of a single calorie source. For most people, dairy is almost invariably balanced against other calorific sources, many of which are almost entirely carbohydrate, like wheat, rice and refined sugar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Insulin is the Miracle-Gro for your fat cells. A child with new onset type 1 > diabetes — unable to make enough insulin — will invariable lose weight until > receiving treatment, no matter how many calories she consumes. Give that > child the right amount of insulin, and weight trajectory returns to normal. > Give that child (or an adult with type 2 diabetes) too much insulin and > excessive weight gain will predictably result. This is just Endocrinology > 101.

This is incorrect. Giving too much insulin to a type 1 diabetic causes rapid death, not weight gain. Giving no insulin to a type 1 diabetic causes weight loss because most calories leave through urine rather than getting used or stored, not because insulin is "miracle-gro for your fat cells".

<comment><USER20> > Giving no insulin to a type 1 diabetic causes weight loss because most > calories leave through urine rather than getting used or stored

Isn't that precisely his point?</comment></comment>


Facebook admits it blocked WikiLeaks links, but won't say why - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2016/07/25/facebook-wikileaks-links/ <comment><USER2> There have been reports of malware found within leaked mails hosted by WikiLeaks - so that might be one reason for the blocking.

<comment><USER3> I've had malware show up in Google searches too, but that doesn't mean I'm going to block Google.

Any site that is big enough and hosts user content is eventually going to have malware in it somewhere.

<comment><USER4> Or maybe malware is yet another way to cover up government censorship.

<comment><USER5> Or you could download the malware yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Also appears to be censored here. Story is newer, has more points, and more comments than many other stories of higher rank.

<comment><USER7> This isn't reddit; sorting doesn't work like that.</comment></comment>


Scientists Develop 10-Minute Universal Cancer Test - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/dec/04/scientists-develop-10-minute-universal-cancer-test <comment><USER2> ..and not a word about false-positives. Until that's understood, this cannot be a home test.</comment>


Why Timehop Switched from Ruby to Go (Inside Their Stack) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.underdog.io/post/105614784787/inside-timehops-tech-stack

<comment><USER2> Love this company and all their progress from the 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo days. Great that they are still as thoughtful as ever when it comes to product and infrastructure.</comment>


Ask HN: Is Let's Encrypt Harmful? - jan-jakub I've just learned about Let's Encrypt, and it made me a little bit worried. Now, I'm afraid (correct me please if I'm wrong) I cannot easily say if the server I'm talking to is the one I think I'm communicating with; the https protocol and SSL certificates are there only to ensure message confidentiality, but not server identity.
Here are my questions:
1. Is there a way to check in a browser if the current domain's certificate has been issued by Let's Encrypt?
2. Should I trust domains with Let's Encrypt-issued certificate less than those with paid certificates with identity validation?
Perhaps my questions display lack of understanding of some fundamental concept of SSL. If that's the case, I'm happy to learn! <comment><AUTHOR> Most SSL certificates use the same validation mechanisms as Let's Encrypt. Let's Encrypt is not less secure than other providers of domain validated (DV) certificates, all they check is that the requester of the certificate has some kind of control over the domain at the time of the request.

You couldn't trust SSL for owner identity before Let's Encrypt either, nothing has changed.

If you want stronger guarantees for the identity of the owner, you'll have to look for Extended Validation (EV) certificates (Browsers generally show the company name next to the lock in the URL bar). ([https://www.cloudflare.com/](https://www.cloudflare.com/) as an example, HN or [https://www.amazon.com](https://www.amazon.com) as examples of sites that _don 't_ use EV)

<comment><USER2> Wrong.

Most SSL cert CA's check DNS for email addresses and only validate DNS entries.

Lets Encrypt only checks DNS for IP addresses and issues certs based on root access to the IP addresses.

A CA DV is not equivalent to a Lets Encrypt cert.

<comment><AUTHOR> Most CAs accept an email to an predetermined address at the domain, which validates that a DNS entry (MX record) on the domain points to a server controlled by the requester.

Many also offer the same thing as Let's Encrypt, which basically verifies if the A/AAAA record for the domain points to a server controlled by the requester.

What am I missing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Your concerns are completly right but there is a catch: Let's Encrypt is trying to lower the barrier in money and time to offer encrypted connection between a server and you. Even now there are different level of certificate in the standard, you could notice it when you see the lock icon in your browser turning green or not. Hacker News, for example, doesn't offer owner information so it's grey; Twitter instead turn green as it uses the most secure certificate.

The fact is that when you connect to my website ilikeapple.com in which I write about my experience as a apple farmer, you don't need to be sure of my server identity ('cause you don't even know my website) but you could still need message confidentiality ('cause you don't want your rival farmer to know that you are interested in planting apple tree next year).

So, don't put your credit card number in a site that not offer server identity (Hacker News for example) but don't worry too much about the certificate of let's Encrypt because are the lower level possible of certificate.

P.S. They are working to expand the same concept at "higher grade" certificate but of course is a work in progress (and is not sure it's possible)

</comment><comment><USER4> To be honest the whole way the internet has always worked is a little backwards...

\- HTTP: White background with black text.

\- Mixed content: "Scary" red cross through it.

\- Domain verified: Green

\- Identity verified (EV): Super-green

In an ideal world it would work like this:

\- HTTP & Mixed Content: "Scary" red cross through it (i.e. "unencrypted" or compromised encryption).

\- Domain verified: White background with black text.

\- Identity verified (EV): Super green.

So DV just becomes the new "normal," since all it is asserting is that you haven't been MitM-ed to the specific domain requested. HTTP becomes the new bad (which it is). And only EV gets the green padlock treatment (i.e. so you look for THAT if you enter personal information).

PS - Plus you've always been able to get a Let's Encrypt-style certified, just costs you $8 which is easy to get using stolen credit cards.

</comment><comment><USER2> 2\. Should I trust domains with Let's Encrypt-issued certificate less than those with paid certificates with identity validation?

No...

Lets Encrypt should not have the same level of trust as the basic DV level cert from a standard CA.

There is a security hole in ACME which is glossed over with handwaving from the fanbois.

</comment><comment><USER5>
        openssl s_client -connect example.com:443 -quiet

prints certificate chain, you'll see something like this -

        verify return:1
        depth=1 C = US, O = Let's Encrypt, CN = Let's Encrypt Authority X1

\- meaning Let's Encrypt is involved.</comment>


Did we learn the right things from Steve Jobs? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@bellmar/did-we-learn-the-right-things-from-steve-jobs-7f319c0e786 <comment><USER2> You know what I learned with Jobs ?

It is that if you are very lucky, you don't have to take feedback from anyone or anything. You can just roll your dice over and over again, and it will turn out great for you. Good and bad decisions will both get rewarded, and will snowball one after another to a great success story. In such conditions, why be humble, why listen to others ? You're the man, after all.

Until your luck runs out, and you get really unlucky one day. That time, all the feedback you never took will turn against you. You won't be able to make a right decision, despite everyone advising you the obvious. For example, you may get cancer, and everyone will tell you that you should get treatment, but instead you won't and you will die.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's not enough to work your ass off.

On order to be as successful as Steve Jobs, you need charisma so other people will help you make your vision become reality without questioning it and trying to influence it or change it.

Decisions by democracy or majority are rarely the best, even though I know it's against what we are being told.

Steve Jobs basically invented how to do good tech presentations on his own. He managed to make the non technical public become excited by new phones and computers.

</comment><comment><USER4> The story of Steve Jobs is also the story of capitalism.

The way Wozniak did the Atari work but Jobs pocketed the lion's share of the profit.

"And yet one cannot deny the significance of Steve Jobs's contribution to society either. The man is a challenge to curate. So much about him is selfish, abusive, and cruel."

"When people like Steve Jobs rise to prominence, we're encouraged to overlook distasteful elements of their personalities. We construct narratives around how they accomplished what they accomplished that filter out all that troubling stuff"

People who defend capitalism are always giving it credit for all the advances and wealth we have in the modern world, constructing similar narratives, filtering out the ugly stuff.

So it is fitting that the company that he founded is now #1 in market capitalization, or should we say, #1 in capitalizing?

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm no fan of Steve Jobs, but to say "Steve Jobs wasn't a genius. He wasn't even very smart." gave me pause. Could that really be true?

Now, obviously it isn't true, but, perhaps we are praising the wrong thing. If he wasn't a genius or wasn't even very smart, I don't think anybody would deny he worked his ass off. That's even more satisfying, I'm maybe even starting to like the guy...

</comment><comment><USER6> "I knew he was abusive and manipulative with his staff. I knew he was an asshole." So what? Pretty common in every corporate ladder. Pretty human actually.

Jobs wasn't a genius, but a great entrepreneur. He was fired at Apple, founded NEXT, that was bought again from the Apple. And Pixar pretty much looks like a side project from Jobs.

Takes a lot of discipline and sacrifices to be that guy. Not many want or can be that kind of person.</comment>


Emergence of Original Music Through Algorithms - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/50/emergence/how-i-taught-my-computer-to-write-its-own-music-rp <comment><USER2> No mention of what raymond scott did in the 50s?

[https://youtu.be/MDIIfAMGLhM](https://youtu.be/MDIIfAMGLhM)

Wikipedia:

> Scott developed some of the first devices capable of producing a series of > electronic tones automatically in sequence. He later credited himself as > being the inventor of the polyphonic sequencer. (It should be noted that his > electromechanical devices, some with motors moving photocells past lights, > bore little resemblance to the all-electronic sequencers of the late > sixties.) He began working on a machine he said composed using artificial > intelligence. The Electronium, as Scott called it, with its vast array of > knobs, buttons and patch panels is considered the first self-composing > synthesizer.

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

You will know his popular music from the warnerbrothers cartoons :) [https://youtu.be/YfDqR4fqIWE](https://youtu.be/YfDqR4fqIWE)

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish the definition of music were a bit more specific. If you look at it as something that is supposed to communicate an composer-intended emotional narrative, this is still a long way away from that kind of music. I wonder how well AI is doing these days in terms of writing compelling plays, or movie scripts, or short stories? There, the distance between author-intended emotional narrative and work product is a bit more immediate, but in my opinion that is still an essential element even in music.

<comment><USER4> This is basically sample fragments with some very simple repetition rules, which are then picked and mixed manually.

The repetition makes it sound a lot more musical than some of the more extreme academic music you can find. But it's still a product of its source material enhanced by human editing.

There's no sense in which this is any kind of AI. There's no NN, no symbol grammar, and barely even the simplest rule-based expert system. It's more like a semi-random razor blade tape editor and mixer.

But... it's new to most audiences, who won't have heard of Autechre's more interesting experiments with Max - or any number of other projects - and who are used to a rather precious narrative about the sublime nature of musical composition, which the text shovels on with a back hoe.

It's one of the odd things about music - it's performative in more than one way. Not only are composers supposed to perform music in the obvious sense, they're also supposed to perform "I am a composer and/or performer" in very standardised genre-specific ways.

In academic music and other genres aimed at intellectual audiences that means the music has to be supported - i.e. marketed - with program notes that suggest to the listener how important, culturally significant, original, refined, and creative the music is.

If you take away the notes and let the music speak for itself, you immediately lose a lot of the impact.

I suspect most people who heard on this Soundcloud without any explanation would think "That was weird and maybe mildly interesting" and move on without giving it a lot more thought.

AI won't have solved music until the music can stand on its own without needing that kind of marketing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "The music was at once futuristic and nostalgic, slightly melancholy, and quite subtle: Even the digital noise samples it used—basically sonic detritus—seemed sensitively integrated."

I had some difficulty taking the rest of the article seriously after reading this. I know music is subjective, but I think the author may have been projecting somewhat.

<comment><USER6> Did you listen to the samples? They may not be to your taste (Katy Perry aficionados may be disappointed), but I certainly thought they had unexpected emotional tones to them.

Don't forget, this is a three year labor of engineering love for the author!

<comment><USER7> It is a very subjective thing. I listened to all the samples, trying to find one that I could appreciate. I was unsuccessful.

Before you scoff, I am a trained classical guitarist and play a variety of instruments. To be clear, nobody needs my permission to enjoy it. I found nothing that I enjoyed.

I didn't find anything emotional about them. Other than the concept being interesting, I've not found anything else to appreciate.

<comment><USER8> That's because the tempo is static, and I don't think there's any "dither" so to speak on the placement of the notes (applying lag and lead, rubato, etc.). I enjoy what the author created a lot, because I like abstract electronica, but it is not so hard to apply algorithmic techniques that create a more lively sound.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if people have spent as much time listening to algorithm music as we have reading articles about them. Seems like these approaches generate a lot of press but I wonder how much people actually listen to the music on a recurring basis

</comment><comment><USER10> This is right up my alley, very interesting! Thanks for the article as I will be listening to and reading about this in detail.

A tech note: I would prefer if I didn't have to install the SoundCloud app to listen to the samples on my phone.

<comment><USER10> Even worse, I can't get the links to open in soundcloud even after installing it... and the app tells you that you can proceed without an account, then soon insists that you need to sign in. So i still haven't heard any samples...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Soon even the pop stars need to fear for their jobs. We just gotta perfect robots to look like young humans make them appealing to their primary demographic and we're good to go.

<comment><USER12> Hatsune Miku already seems to be doing a pretty good job of handling the physical appearance bit.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpbbP8oh1p4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpbbP8oh1p4)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Every single week my Spotify 'Discover Weekly; playlist is spot on. Their algo has been magic to my ears since 2015 ([https://qz.com/571007/the-magic-that- makes-spotifys-discover...](https://qz.com/571007/the-magic-that-makes- spotifys-discover-weekly-playlists-so-damn-good/))

</comment><comment><USER14> dont know if this is kosher... but doing something similar and posted on hn previously... [https://songeater.github.io/SONGSHTR/](https://songeater.github.io/SONGSHTR/)</comment>


Front-end showdown metrics - <AUTHOR> https://rawgit.com/krausest/js-framework-benchmark/fd5e18032c37921afb2d5fdfa6b8041d6b8b0097/webdriver-ts-results/table.html <comment><USER2> This is an amazing work and presentation. I've already spent a long time in there, filtering and scrolling about. Even just knowing all the frameworks and variants is handy. I'm sure I'll be referring back to this many times in the future.

One improvement would be to encode the filters in the URL so that a view can be shared.</comment>


The Founder of Firefox Wrote His Own Screenplay for HBO's Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/04/the-founder-of-firefox-wrote-his-own-screenplay-for-hbos-silicon-valley-and-its-hilarious/?ncid=rss&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=techglance <comment><USER2> Thanks guys. This is my first stab at writing a tv script, and I'm open to feedback or ideas for future 'episodes'.

<comment><USER3> I've been waiting for a show to embrace the crowd sourcing of writing. I imagine a reddit thread with hundreds of ideas/plot lines/debate drawn out for an official writer to "pull" into the show.

What are your thoughts on that?

<comment><USER2> Oh, I misread your comment, I think. You're talking about the showrunners themselves incorporating ideas from the community, right?

That would be great, although unfortunately Hollywood is so concerned about lawsuits that show staffs aren't even allowed to read scripts for their own shows. For example, the Silicon Valley staff isn't allowed to read this script; if I wanted to apply for a job there, I'd have to write a script for a _different_ show and send that in.

<comment><USER3> Yea, are there any examples of a show like SV crowd sourcing content for it? I know that MythBusters has crowd sourced episode ideas: [https://www.reddit.com/r/mythbusters/comments/3cfn7r/suggest...](https://www.reddit.com/r/mythbusters/comments/3cfn7r/suggest_a_myth_or_item_to_blow_up_for_the/) Top comment from Adam Savage: "You guys are submitting great ideas. We should have done this a long time ago! Keep your ideas of things to blow up coming too!" But I don't know of any shows with a narrative doing this?

Would love to see SV do the same for 1 episode (they could get really meta with it)

Sad to hear there are legal barriers preventing this. I imagine that a simple "sign this release before submitting your work" still leaves room for lawsuits?

<comment><USER4> Star Trek TNG accepted unsolicited scripts. Not exactly crowd sourced, but at least they took outside scripts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Direct link: [http://blakeross.com/SiliconValleyS03E01.pdf](http://blakeross.com/SiliconValleyS03E01.pdf)

<comment><USER6> Well, that was fun! (now just have to start watching the show from the beginning because I haven't seen it yet)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> They're going to have to work hard to top this.

I'm an inside counsel guy, but I'd love a clock that counts in dollars.

</comment><comment><USER8> Surprisingly consistent and hilarious for a first ever screen play!

<comment><USER9> Only part I felt was inconsistent was his treatment of Lauren. She seems a hyper-rational, albeit overly-prudent character, and doesn't strike me as wanting to be involved with the whole boys club nonsense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Suspension of disbelief fail at "His name's on the door and they shat all over him anyway, just to hire some suit."

When would Erlich care about someone other than himself?

Also, one sentence in and he hasn't mentioned Aviato yet?

<comment><USER2> I think there's plenty of support for Erlich caring about Richard. For example, when he spots Richard crying and then immediately goes and beats up the kids who scammed him out of Adderall :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Previous discussion, which unfortunately didn't get much traction: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10168930](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10168930)

</comment><comment><USER12> Two quick thoughts:

1\. Monica's completely absent from this episode- she should appear in future ones. Would be nice to get Carla back, as well.

2\. Can Charles be British and played by Paterson Joseph, who played Alan Johnson on BBC comedy Peep Show?

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm really confused... when they say Captain Crunch are they talking about the cereal character or the "hacker" John Draper? Based on the content it could, ironically, be either

<comment><USER14> Did John Draper pioneer the field of maritime breakfast?

<comment><USER15> Did captain crunch?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So awesome - please film this one ;P

</comment><comment><USER17> While I'm a fan of exposing the absurdity of SV, I also think we have reached the point where any such attempt will, similar to war and business movies, also have the opposite effect.

</comment><comment><USER18> Why did Richard live in Erlich's "incubator" anyway? I thought he had a job at Hooli. He couldn't afford an apartment?

<comment><USER19> I have a tech job too and don't feel like the rent in SF or Palo Alto fits in my budget.

<comment><USER18> Still, he gave up 10 % of his company just for a place to stay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I thought HBO called jwz to the rescue...

</comment><comment><USER21> If he didn't get permission, that would be copyright infringement, right?

<comment><USER22> Writing unsolicited spec scripts is a standard way to break into television writing. It's a pretty low rung on the ladder because it doesn't take much creativity. The tone and the characters are already established; you're actually doing it wrong if you have them speak or behave in a manner other than what the audience is used to. It sounds like it would be fun but if you want to get hired you have to suppress the urge to be clever.

<comment><USER23> Well he was certainly true to the established characters' personalities and ways of speaking:

DINESH

Isn't it weird how fun it sounds to get laid off? Like, everyone wants to get laid. And everyone wants to get off. But nobody wants to get laid off.

GILFOYLE

I wouldn't mind your mom's pink slip.</comment></comment></comment>


Box wants to let businesses control cloud encryption keys "this year" - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/box-wants-to-let-businesses-control-cloud-encryption-keys-this-year/

<comment><AUTHOR> The disappointing part: "For Box, the service would likely be aimed at only the most security-conscious organizations and not made available to individual consumers."

Still, I hope it becomes a popular area to innovate for competitors.</comment>


Chrome Hacked In 5 Minutes - <AUTHOR> http://it.slashdot.org/story/12/03/07/2352220/chrome-hacked-in-5-minutes-at-pwn2own?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29 <comment><USER2> The "hacked in n-minutes" meme around these sorts of contests is really horrible (and needs to die). Researchers work on the exploit for months ahead of time.. The amount of time taken to click "launch exploit" really makes little difference..

<comment><AUTHOR> correcto!</comment></comment>


The ABC's of Guiding the Child (1967) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://centervideo.forest.usf.edu/qpi/goalsofpar/handout04.pdf <comment> munk-a I appreciate the era of instructions where you could call a document "The ABC's of X" without then feeling obligated to actually run through the alphabet in order and crowbar different sentiments in - speaking of which, backcronyms need to go away forever now.

<comment><USER2> Was there a cut-off year after which all "ABCs of X" guides were obligated to actually run through the alphabet? When did such legislation pass?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> On a related note, here's a mobile-formatted PDF called "How a Saint corrected children"

[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wEdBKMA2VZtz0BzOsZEOGc5X7HJ...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wEdBKMA2VZtz0BzOsZEOGc5X7HJaVP0w/view?usp=sharing)

And similarly, the "Salesian Preventive System":

[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LsfGlh0MiOMOLoYco9IAlxjqWgW...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LsfGlh0MiOMOLoYco9IAlxjqWgWa3N33/view?usp=sharing)

(Taken from [http://salesianfamily.org/pedagogy/preventive- system](http://salesianfamily.org/pedagogy/preventive-system) and formatted via LaTeX.)

</comment><comment><USER4> Natural consequences: What if the child doesn't care about consequence, or what if he/she likes the consequence? In the example of being late for school, the child could consider it as a reward, that he/she doesn't have to go to school anymore.

<comment><USER5> Few parents are equipped to raise sociopaths and nearly all people respond to self-preservation. I would hope a child would be able to empathize if communicated with in way they could easily understand. 'Love and Logic' is a parenting technique where the use of natural consequences are used heavily; when kids understand you are their teacher, failure becomes an opportunity to learn. If you are simply there as an enforcer, you are viewed as a warden. They focus on not getting caught rather than gaining wisdom.

<comment><USER6> > I would hope a child would be able to empathize if communicated with in way > they could easily understand

As the parent of a four year old, I hate to break it to you, but this is not commonly true. It is not true for us, and it is not true for any of our friends who have kids this age. The child has their own order in which things are prioritized, and they _do not care_ if that is different from your order. Unless you're willing to let your entire life be dictated by what your child wants to do from moment to moment, it's not going to work to just talk to them about why what they're doing is wrong or unacceptable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is basically a listicle from 1967. You could publish this on Buzzfeed by making the title "21 Ways to Raise AWESOME Children (Number 12 Will Shock You!)" and adding emojis.

<comment><USER8> Yes listicles are lists with added flair, and this is a list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Seems like good advice for adults as well.

</comment><comment><USER10> This appears to be the related talk: [http://centervideo.forest.usf.edu/qpi/goalsofpar/goalsofpar....](http://centervideo.forest.usf.edu/qpi/goalsofpar/goalsofpar.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> Mobile Friendly View: [http://pdf.cab/centervideo.forest.usf.edu/qpi/goalsofpar/han...](http://pdf.cab/centervideo.forest.usf.edu/qpi/goalsofpar/handout04.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> I only see a white page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's some good advice here, but I don't know how evidence-based it all is. For example, I understand that there is some evidence that extrinsic rewards have problems when delivered in certain ways, but I don't think we've entirely overturned behaviorism. Rewards and punishments are a tool that the world uses on us, like it or not. It would be surprising if there were no place for that tool in child-rearing.

Likewise, I question the advice to not involve oneself in children's fights. If one child is much bigger than the other, they can impose their will on the smaller child. Growing up, I saw friends who were on the losing side of this exchange, and it can be scarring.

Still more of the advice is well meant but impractical. "Never do for the child what they can do for themselves." Suppose I have a flight to catch, and my son refuses to put on his own shoes. Am I to miss the flight then? My son can be stubborn. On one occasion I tried to follow this advice when he refused to walk himself home. We stood on the sidewalk for half an hour in twenty degree weather before I gave up and compelled him to walk home.

I suspect, like much parenting advice, this stuff works for some kids and doesn't work for others. So much of parenting advice is survivorship bias. That a particular technique works for one child does not imply it works for all children. I can buy that these points are effective for most children, but ultimately you have to do what it takes to survive, and part of that is tailoring this stuff to your unique relationship with your own child.

<comment><USER12> "Middlebrow dismissals" like this are discouraged on HN.

<comment><USER13> I was interested what the exact meaning of a "Middlebrow dismissal" is (non- native speaker). But I could only find the following in the HN guidelines which doesn't seem to mention middlebrow dismissals nor does it seem to be applicable to the toplevel comment:

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something"

What exactly is a "middlebrow dismissal" and why would the toplevel comment be that?

<comment><USER14> I'm a native English speaker and can take a stab here. Lowbrow typically means unsophisticated (as in, like a neanderthal or ape) whereas highbrow means sophisticated. I'm assuming middlebrow means, well, something in the middle.

All of that being said, the "middlebrow dismissal" observation/criticism makes zero sense to me here.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Deconstruction of Pinkie Pie's 64-bit Chrome exploit - <AUTHOR> http://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.se/2013/02/exploiting-64-bit-linux-like-boss.html <comment><USER2> My gosh. I wonder how many hours of coding he has under his belt to be able to come up with something like that. Mind blowing.

Also somewhat terrifying, glad he "works for the good guys".

<comment><USER3> Funny you say that, PinkiePie is (allegedly) 18 years old.

Reminds me of Gennady, (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gennady_Korotkevich>) who keeps getting crazy good scores on TopCoder, Google Code Jam, etc. -- and he's 18 too.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure how he keeps getting younger. He's in his 20s and in college.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those interested, Pinkie Pie has another chromium hack under his belt [1]

[1] [http://blog.chromium.org/2012/05/tale-of-two-pwnies- part-1.h...](http://blog.chromium.org/2012/05/tale-of-two-pwnies-part-1.html)

<comment><USER6> How much did he get for those exploits? 60k each?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I always wonder how long something like this takes from the start to the end.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is why I read Hacker News. Incredible.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't pretend to fully understand everything that's going on with this exploit, but I give Pinkie Pie full props for being such a genius. Reading these types of write ups always leaves me with a sense of awe for the hacker.

<comment><USER10> tbh the exploits themselves are relatively simple when you read them. its like when I say speaking 7 languages is incredible. When it's what you do all day, it's also straightforward.

what's generally impressive, is finding them (and thus writing the proper tools to find them) and having enough dedication to keep at it.

the other impressive thing is the lack of generic fixes even thus we know how to make them happen (which involve using pretty much using a "written-from- the-ground-up" OS), apparently, security is fairly low on the "it makes us lose money, let's fix it all properly" scale ;-)

<comment><USER11> Generally speaking, vulnerability discovery is fairly straightforward, just requires tenacity and a knack for knowing where to look/fuzz. Exploitation on this level requires a huge amount of creativity, to know how to fit the building blocks together into a functioning exploit. Regardless, I'd put them on about the same level of difficulty, having done both (though I've done far, far more discovery than exploitation).

> the other impressive thing is the lack of generic fixes even thus we know > how to make them happen (which involve using pretty much using a "written- > from-the-ground-up" OS), apparently, security is fairly low on the "it makes > us lose money, let's fix it all properly" scale ;-)

This is the real meat of this comment, though, and it's what I really want to respond to. We _don't_ have generic fixes that actually meet our requirements in terms of performance and developer time. The real, fundamental problem is simple: memory corruption should not be _possible_ ; put another way, pointers considered harmful. Possible solutions to this are the Singularity/RenrakuOS/SharpOS/MOSA approach, where you have a tiny, trusted compiler that takes on the security risk and generates native code, with the entire rest of the system running in safe, managed code.

I promoted this concept for a while -- RenrakuOS is mine -- but at the end of the day, the performance is just not there yet, and won't be for quite a while. But even more than that, it doesn't solve any of the problems with logic-related vulnerabilities; these become more and more important as you eliminate the lower level bugs.

<comment><USER12> > Exploitation on this level requires a huge amount of creativity, to know how > to fit the building blocks together into a functioning exploit.

This is what I consider hacking. Not writing another Javascript library.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does someone have a link to a similar deconstruction of a recent hack exploiting one of the IE's? It would be interesting to see the relative complexity of hacks for the two browsers (although I realise that it may also be an apples-to-oranges comparison)

</comment><comment><USER14> Another example why C and C++ need to be replaced.

<comment><USER15> I upvoted you but yes and no.

Replaced by what? Java? I agree that Java doesn't have buffer overflows/overrun nor free'ing / spraying issues but have you see how many critical Java bugs have affected Java lately!? That said the author of TFA itselfs comments that a rewrite in Java could help...

So I agree that with C / C++ it's always variations of the same old song: it's either a buffer overflow/overrun or it's some free()'ing / spraying issue and at one point they start getting old.

Basically what he says is that you either need compiler-based defenses or some less deterministic heap.

So, once again, randomization is the key here.

It seems that randomization is one of the most important trick against attackers. In some cases ASLR can already not be defeated anymore (on 64-bit Linux systems, in some cases). I hope people learn from that and start using more and more randomization and more heap protection techniques (as apparently OpenBSD is doing... Of course OpenBSD!).

Now the good thing is that these exploits are starting to get increasingly difficult to write and people can get paid lots of $$$ to write them legally, so it seems that there starts to be quite a healthy community of highly skilled white-hat hackers finding them.

And it's good because any white-hat hacker finding an exploit before a black- hat means that the exploit gets patched and that it's one less venue for the bad guys.

As to me I surf inside a VM: a KVM. I'll probably see if I can run a SELinux inside that KVM.

Because it sure sounds like we're still not anywhere close safe browsing.

<comment><USER16> Well , Java itself is implemented in some lower level language so the JVM can potentially have heap/stack overflows of it's own.

Java does make it harder for the end user programmer to add these sorts of vulns to their own code though.

<comment><USER14> Not really, unless you are speaking about Oracle's JVM.

<comment><USER16> how so?

<comment><USER14> There are many implementations of the Java programming language.

Interpreters, JIT VMs and native code compilers.

Most developers are only familiar with the official VM you can download from Oracle, which uses a JIT for code execution. This one is a mix of C, C++ and Java code.

However alone from Oracle (previously Sun) there is a VM implemented in Java (Maxime), a VM only with C bindings for hardware access with everything else done Java (Squawk), the C++ code for Hotspot might be replaced with Java (maybe around Java 9 timeframe, project Graal) and the embedded edition of Java also supports native compilation.

The Jikes RVM, like Maxime, is a meta-circular VM fully implemented in Java.

Additionally there are native compilers like JET Excelsior.

Despite what people think Java != VM. It is only a question of bootstrapping.

<comment><USER16> Sure, but my point is that any bugs in the low level code (which must be present somewhere until we have CPUs that can natively understand bytecode) can bubble up the stack.

<comment><USER14> Sure, but that is assuming you produce bytecode at all.

But you're right a program is only safe if the full stack is safe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Chrome is 64 bit now?

<comment><USER18> Chrome for Linux's been having 64-bit builds for a while now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The complexity of this exploit is pretty insane. Just makes me realize how many people so much smarter than me are out there.</comment>


Before You Build Think - <AUTHOR> I dunno maybe 8 years ago I was running a music sharing service replete with lyrics and album covers from my 13" MacBook on Facebook.
Users could share their fav songs and they would show up on their profiles their friends could listen to their playlists.  It was cool.
A static IP a domain a streaming server running on a pathetic MacBook.  In my apt in Oregon.
Hmm. But Facebook made it impossible to drive anyone to it because they were courting Spotify.
Hmmmm. Makes you wonder sometimes what's going on in tech.
But before that, I built a ddg, that stripped tracking links from Google searches and I had ten million hits pee month before the govt shut my data center down.
Hmmmm. Makes you wonder what's going on in tech.
This same data center was running another another hobby project where before https was in vogue, I offered ssh connection to a VPN proxy to surf the web, cvia a browser plugin.
Hmmmm. Makes you wonder when you start getting creepy calls from the govt and your data center gets shut down again.
Then I had an app on the app store that apple refused to approve unless I removed iCloud from it.
The review rejection call after 6 most of development went like this:
"We don't want people storing files in iCloud" Soon after it was one of the most popular utulities on the Mac app store outside the US.
Then apple introduced iCloud files. Hmmm.
Are you getting the same feeling I am? <comment><USER2> If at first you don't suck seed, FAANGovt will make you.</comment>


Ask HN: Which Schools Offer PhD in (AGI) Artificial General Intelligence? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> People working in probabilistic programming can be seen as working towards AGI, in some ways.

I'd take a look at the work done by Tenenbaum at MIT and Goodman at Stanford. There are also lots of academics related to them in different places. You can reconstruct this graph by looking at Google Scholar citations and co- authorships.

A great starting point is: [http://probmods.org/](http://probmods.org/)

</comment><comment><USER3> What have you found already?

As AGI isn't something that is widely agreed upon to be currently extant you'll want to search for Computer Science and more specifically Cognitive Science instead.

Read a bunch of papers. Find some authors that think like you. Reach out to them.</comment>


North Korea Signals Willingness to 'Denuclearize,' South Says - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/world/asia/north-korea-south-nuclear-weapons.html <comment><USER2> Not what they're signaling... [https://www.38north.org/2018/03/yongbyon030518/](https://www.38north.org/2018/03/yongbyon030518/)

...just what they're selling. This is the usual cycle of trying to look good internally by squeezing concessions out of the rest of the world. This time they're asking for a "security guarantee" from the US, which means no US troops on the peninsula. Last time it was just trying to get money, food, and fuel.

They're not crazy, they're criminal, and they are damned good at exploiting others with a combination of threats and promises, all while never diverting from their real goals.</comment>


First Woman to Beat a Man at World Darts Overwhelmed by Response - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/dec/22/fallon-sherrock-first-woman-to-beat-man-pdc-world-darts-championship-billie-jean-king <comment><USER2> Impressive. She hit six 180s. A 180 (or "Ton-80") is three darts in the treble ring of the 20 "slice" of the board. (The top slice, above the bulls-eye).

So, she placed 18 darts (3-at-a-time) in the treble ring. While larger than the bulls-eye, the triple 20 is worth more (60 points) than the 50 points of a bullseye.

The world record for Ton-80s is 22 in a single match.

I've gotten ONE triple-sixty years ago, and was quite proud at the time. The biggest challenges for me were "bounce-back" when hitting the wire and "dart- splitting" (Robin-hood style).

<comment><USER3> At one point I played a lot and also got a single 180. Probably several dozen bounce-backs from the wire but not a single split dart. Always found it strange that people say this happens often.

<comment><USER4> Split dart happens when the board is higher quality than the dart.

<comment><USER2> Interesting... I never thought about that. I guess if the bristles board were very tight packed, the force of the incoming dart wouldn't be enough to move the dart out of the way?

I had a good bristle board, but I recall spending much more on darts (weighted, various shaft materials, and an uncountable number of flights, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> TIL this had never been won by a woman before, surprising.

</comment><comment><USER6> That's just awesome. Glad to see it.</comment>


Automatic Differentiation via Contour Integration - <AUTHOR> https://keplerlounge.com/neural-computation/2020/01/16/complex-auto-diff.html <comment><USER2> The more relevant link is [https://keplerlounge.com/neural- computation/2020/01/16/compl...](https://keplerlounge.com/neural- computation/2020/01/16/complex-auto-diff.html). Where the author discusses why this repos exists. This isn't a very good way to do AutoDiff and isn't exact(Look at standard reverse mode AutoDiff or Julia or Swift's implementations instead). The point of the repo is that the author believes it is a biologically plausible mechanism for neurons to be trained. Whether it is or isn't is the interesting question.

<comment><USER3> Ok, we switched to that from [https://github.com/AidanRocke/AutoDiff](https://github.com/AidanRocke/AutoDiff). Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The discrete approximation to the integral involves sampling the function at a finite number of points and then computing a weighted sum of the sampled function values. In the case where _N_ = 2, _θ_ only takes the values 0 and _π_ and the approximation is _f '_( _x₀_ ) ≈ 1/2 * ( _f_ ( _x₀_ +1) - _f_ ( _x₀_ -1)), i.e. approximating the derivative with a simple difference.

So I don't think this is more biologically plausible than neurons using finite differences to do gradient descent.

<comment><USER5> There's evidence that signal differences in neutrons in the visual cortex is used for object recognition, whose behavior gives rise to some of the optical illusions we experience. Weak evidence for temporal differentiation also having the same underlying mechanism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a standard technique in numerical analysis for complex-differentiable functions, it's just not so common to have inputs be guaranteed to be holomorphic so people don't use it often, [http://mpmath.org/doc/current/calculus/differentiation.html#...](http://mpmath.org/doc/current/calculus/differentiation.html#mpmath.diff) ([https://github.com/fredrik- johansson/mpmath/blob/981102736a8...](https://github.com/fredrik- johansson/mpmath/blob/981102736a843ae30c26f73b388fdba622a46270/mpmath/calculus/differentiation.py#L198))

<comment><USER7> Indeed a standard technique in numerical analysis. Among the advantages of doing things this way (when applicable, i.e., when one has holomorphic integrands) are significantly better accuracy & stability: [https://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/trefethen/sirev56-3_385.pdf](https://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/trefethen/sirev56-3_385.pdf)

(Haven't looked closely at the posted code so no idea how directly relevant this is.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This isn't automatic differentiation.

An important feature of auto-diff is that it's numerically exact. This can be shown in a few lines to be equivalent to finite differencing.

That doesn't take away from that fact that it's a neat technique though!

<comment><USER7> I quite agree this is not exact and is not automatic differentiation (which _would_ be exact up to round-off). However, for holomorphic functions, contour integration can be much more accurate. The reason is that under fairly general conditions, the trapezoid rule for contour integrals is geometrically accurate. Thus, using stepsize _h_ gives errors that are O(e^{-c/h}). (See the Trefethen paper cited in my other comment in this post.) In contrast, standard centered difference has error O(h^2). Moreover, finite differences are unstable: because of loss of precision in taking differences, the relative error tends to blow up as h goes to 0. Contour integration, though more expensive (because it needs many more function evaluations for the same stepsize h), does not, because integration is better behaved numerically.

<comment><USER8> The reason the the difference in accuracy is that this method has N steps instead of 2.

Another poster in the thread mentioned this as well.

<comment><USER7> Yes and no -- of course if one uses more points the result can be more accurate. The real difference between a center difference and contour integration is that differences suffer from loss of information in finite- precision arithmetic. For example, in (f(x+h) - f(x-h))/(2h), the numerator actually contains very few bits of information when h is small. The Cauchy integral formula, in contrast, behaves quite well so long as the point of evaluation is bounded away from the contour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Gotta escape those TeX \cos functions. And probably I should stop making this not so useful comment, since it's so common? At some point I should rather go find some opensource code and just make it give a warning, not really sure where though...

</comment><comment><USER10> This reminds me of Squire & Trapp[1] which seems to be a special case. That paper provides a way of estimating Jacobian-vector products (aka forward-mode autodiff) by adding a tiny imaginary noise vector to the input. The complex output will have the function value in the real part and the Jacobian-vector product in the imaginary part.

The cool thing is you can make the noise vector arbitrarily small (up to machine precision), so it doesn't have the issues that finite differences has. I'm not sure if the same is true of the method described in the article.

[1] Using Complex Variables to Estimate Derivatives of Real Functions, [https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3de7/e8ae217a4214507b9abdac...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3de7/e8ae217a4214507b9abdac66503f057aaae9.pdf)

<comment><USER11> There's a more leisurely blog-post-style explanation of this complex-variable trick at [https://codewords.recurse.com/issues/four/hack-the- derivativ...](https://codewords.recurse.com/issues/four/hack-the-derivative)

<comment><USER12> That's neat. It's perhaps worth mentioning that this trick is only needed when your computer understands complex numbers (1,i) but not dual numbers (1,ε), where i^2 = -1 but ε^2 = 0.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Due to Taylor's theorem, any differentiable real-valued function may be > approximated by polynomials so Cauchy's method is applicable to any function > that is differentiable.

Sorry, what? Pretty sure this is not Taylor's theorem (and it's false)?

<comment> dan-robertson Well Taylor's theorem is that any sufficiently differentiable function can be approximated by a particular polynomial plus a particular error. It just turns out that the error term doesn't need to be very well behaved (eg consider the Taylor series at 0 for f(x)=exp(-1/x^2) ).

I think instead this is an application of the fundamental theorem of applied maths which states, approximately, that, in applied mathematics:

\- all Taylor series converge

\- all functions are piecewise smooth

\- all sums and integrals can be transposed

\- if the solution must be x if it exists, then the solution exists (and is x)

\- if it looks right then it is</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Suggestions for low cost homebrew "HPC" beast? - <AUTHOR> Over the past few years I've been playing around with the idea of building large number crunching applications for fun and personal research. While the applications I had in mind aren't trivially parallel, they should map well to a parallel architecture.
There are generally two options for running a big parallel application: 1. going to a commercial provider, which is prohibitively expensive; 2. affiliation to a research lab, which is not the case for me and usually requires a research project for you to get compute time, no playing around with toy application.
I was wondering if anyone has experience with building a small homebrew number crunching machine on a budget. The best idea that I have so far is getting a few used server machines with decent GPUs. <comment><USER2> There is no one thing as "HPC". It is a lot of normal computer components joined together to form a big "HPC" system. First, identify which kind of scaling you need - are you limited by CPU or memory if you run the code on your PC?

On a side note, please don't think about buying HPC hardware before actually write the code. You can build the code to solve real problems on your normal PC with a multi core CPU and GPU. Then you can benckmark your parallel code to determine what you acutally need.

I could help you out if you can give me more details of what you actually want to achieve.

</comment><comment><USER3> The one factor that distinguishes a typical HPC installation from what we would typically call a 'cloud' system is the throughpout. HPC installations are designed to provide maximum throughput and this requires very specialized hardware and networking infrastructure (InfiniBand). Cloud installations in contrast make use of widely available commodity hardware (e.g. Raspberry Pis). Unless the tasks you want to do will require an enormous amount of throughput for inter-node messaging within your cluster, then I'd suggest orienting your plans towards the 'cloud' model aka using commodity hardware and taking advantage of an open source cloud platform like OpenStack.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you don't need to leave it running between computations, this seems like a reasonable EC2/GCP use case.

University scientific computing labs cost millions of dollars; anything you're going to build and run at home will be a small-scale replica.

<comment> Const-me > anything you're going to build and run at home will be a small-scale > replica.

If you're OK with the performance of a top-tanking 2010 supercomputer, and the task is a good fit for GPUs (=the numbers being crunched are single-precision floats, not too much bandwidth is required, the "hot" set of the data is within a few GB i.e. fits in VRAM), you can build one at home spending very reasonable amount of cash.

Here's a top 500 list for June 2010: [https://www.top500.org/lists/2010/06/](https://www.top500.org/lists/2010/06/) As you see, the system at #10 delivers 433 TFlops. That's just 40 modern GeForce 1080Ti GPUs. What once costed many millions of dollars and consumed 4 megawatts of electricity, now costs $40k and consumes little over 10KW.

And because cryptocurrency craziness, many-GPU motherboards, cables, PSUs and other components are available on the market and aren't too expensive. For example, Asus offers B250 mining motherboard with 19 PCIe slots for $140.

</comment></comment><comment> Const-me Depends on what exactly you gonna crunch.

If you're OK running on a GPUs, you essentially need a cryptocurrency mining rig, there lots of articles about them.

If you need CPU performance look for used servers on eBay, either complete ones or separate components.

</comment><comment><USER5> You can get very far with just a normal desktop computer with a bunch of CPUs. E.g. [http://veekaybee.github.io/2017/03/20/hadoop-or- laptop/](http://veekaybee.github.io/2017/03/20/hadoop-or-laptop/)

</comment><comment><USER6> A low cost HPC number cruncher implies you seek the highest performance at its lowest price. The energy used over its lifetime will be the main factor. The capital cost of the processor will probably be less important than the price for the bulk memory.

First you should identify the price performance per watt of the systems (processor+memory+network) over their lifetime in your use case. This turns out to be very difficult. The few benchmarks you find online can not be easily compared. The interesting choices are usually just released and have no benchmarks yet. More problematic, benchmarks seldom list the energy and cost of a system

every year I try to design the lowest price/performance/watt system I can find, I spend a few weeks on this. Even with that much effort I have not been able to establish if a cluster of raspberry pi's is faster and cheaper than an AMD EPYC with several cpu's. Establishing the cost is even harder, if you want to manufacture enough of the systems to benefit from scale. (not a problem in a homebrew system)

Currently I guestimate that the best price/performance/watt system is some mass produced $1-$3 ARM (soon RISC-V) with two DRAM chips and a fast network connection like an FPGA with high speed SERDES link fabric switch. Price per core plus memory must be way below $10. Raspberry pi's are no contenders, they only have 200-300 Mbps network for 4 cores to share, that should be several gigabits/s to be competitive.

A custom build AMD EPYC with several GPU's networked together can turn out to be faster and cheaper. The retail price needs to be lowered and you need to build a similiar network fabric switch.

You can find better performance if you tailor the processor design to the task. So a system with the best price/performance/watt will be different for different software.

Even cheaper will be systems where you can rebalance part of the compute recources between different programs. The system will can less efficient because the hardware reconfigurability has has a high overhead, but that is offset by being more efficient for one program. You could for example balance transistors between integer, floating point, cache or network-on-chip (NoC).

We are currently making prototypes of our own design of a reconfgurable manycore processor with NoC fabric. Around $9 per core in an FPGA. The entry system costs around $80 and $500.

We plan to build this as an ASIC, the price will then drop to $1 per core including DRAM.

Even cheaper will be if we not slice the wafer into 22000 chips but leave it whole. You get over 100.000 cores with little memory with petabits/s network for less than $6000. Half the wafer is reconfigurable logic that can be reprogrammed at runtime as GPU, TPU, CPU or any other custom optimisation. The energy cost of the wafer can be zero if you use the wafer as a water heating element and lower if you only run it on solar PV during the day. (If you share two wafers with a user on the night time side of the earth, you both can have 24 hour computing on $0,02 per kWh of solar PV). We can make a 180nm $500 version and a $1 version but they would not be as good as the 28nm $6000 version. A future 7nm wafer scale version might never be cheaper than the 28nm version, we will have to wait and see.

An silicon optical network on the wafer (also $6000) would allow two or more wafers to be networked at several terabits/s. This overcomes its small memory problem.

Think of it, you want to get rid of any overhead in the system, like pcb, chip package, connectors, cables. You want to put everything on a single large chip, the whole wafer. Because we have different CMOS technology for DRAM or processors, we wind up with needing one wafer.

We are confident in 30 years we can grow the wafer(or 3D block) and the solar panel from CO2.

<comment><USER7> Can you elaborate on this? I am a programmer by day, amateur scientist by night and I am interested i this exact process. Where can I read more about this? Do you have a corporate landing page for me to start at?

<comment><USER6> You can find my email in my profile.

Which exact process you want me to elaborate on? I can gather some papers to read more on this. [https://scholar.google.nl/scholar?q=siliconsqueak](https://scholar.google.nl/scholar?q=siliconsqueak)

Our corporate landing page is a mess this month, with broken links [http://morphle.com](http://morphle.com)</comment></comment></comment>


Build Your Own Web of Things Gateway - <AUTHOR> http://iot.mozilla.org/gateway/ <comment><USER2> Can we please stop promoting the Raspberry Pi stuff as "open".

The Raspberry Pi is _NOT OPEN_. If you wish to build your own Raspberry Pi, you can't do it. Broadcom won't sell you the chips. You can't even get the documentation.

There are other options that work just as well both less powerful and cheaper (Espressif and similar) or equally as powerful and same price (Beaglebone and similar). And these are genuinely open.

I really don't get all the Raspberry Pi love among open source folks.

<comment><USER3> There's 2 separate but somewhat related communities here - open source and open hardware. Most open source people don't care that much about hardware. They just want a cheap and tiny Linux box, maybe with some GPIO pins.

And really, you can take it further - is espressif really better? You can buy the chip, but it's not like they give you the actual transistor-level design so you can modify it and redistribute it as you so choose.

<comment><USER2> > Most open source people don't care that much about hardware.

That may be, but, in this case, Mozilla _needs_ to care and should know better. Especially when there are perfectly fine alternative options.

Broadcom can torpedo this if it starts impinging on their own business in some way. That's not the kind of power you want to hand to somebody when you are trying to promulgate something.

<comment><USER3> > Broadcom can torpedo this if it starts impinging on their own business in > some way. That's not the kind of power you want to hand to somebody when you > are trying to promulgate something.

Not really - if broadcom torpedos it, tomorrow the raspi guys buy Mediatek or Allwinner chips instead or we switch to a different board maker. They don't go bust on the spot and almost everything software wise would remain the same even on a different board. Plenty of similar boards are already using these other chips, there's lots of competition in the ARM SoC space.

<comment><USER4> I think they only picked Broadcom because the founder used to work for them and knew how the chips worked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hmmm, the lack of documentation on this confuses me.

Is this meant to be a unified interface through which to pipe my IoT interactions? Which maybe they have an app for?

This is so vague.

</comment><comment><USER6> This appears to be billed as a stand alone thing but it uses a standard Raspberry Pi and Z-Wave / Zigbe USB sticks. What is potentially novel here is being able to get up and running just by using their SD card vs doing the work to install drivers and a UI typically needed to get the protocols working.

I've been running my own Linux based hub just fine without this but it does seem like a good entry level device for cheap.

</comment><comment><USER7> > [https://github.com/mozilla- > iot/gateway/blob/master/README.md...](https://github.com/mozilla- > iot/gateway/blob/master/README.md#install-nvm-recommended)

In my experience nvm just trash the bash experience. I had to remove it from my .bash file and rather source it everytime I need it.

</comment><comment><USER8> And not a word about security or even how to update.

That makes it a true IoT device....

See also... [https://twitter.com/internetofshit](https://twitter.com/internetofshit)

Please stuff boxes like this in a separate VLAN that can't talk to the Internet and/or firewall them away completely...</comment>


Her iPhone died. It led to her being charged as a criminal - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/her-iphone-died-it-led-to-her-being-charged-as-a-criminal/ <comment><USER2> You know what irks me? Besides the fact that the fine for not paying is atrociously high, besides the fact that such a transgression can even show up on a Visa query, besides the fact that this couldn't be resolved without a court, besides the fact that the reporter missed their court date...

What irks me is that some company spent millions of taxpayer dollars designing this contactless payment system and couldn't be bothered to provide a real- time readout to the ticket inspector where the passenger could just provide their name to confirm they paid.

But even more than _that_ , I irks me that TFA came away from this experience hating Apple Pay. This singular component in the entire chain which was completely blameless.

<comment><USER3> In my reading that's how it would've worked if she'd registered, am I off? Not sure how it'd be possible so sort out on the spot without that.

But of course ridiculous that it took such hoops to fix after the fact.

<comment><USER4> I find it ridiculous that the payment was accepted if the requirement was that the source of payment needed to be registered and that somehow, if you had the app or phone on you, that is valid without registration of the source, but if later you're trying to avoid a fine that payment isn't valid without registration.

<comment><USER5> Think of it this way. If you buy a ticket you can show the ticket and it's valid even though you never provide proof of identity, and the person checking is just verifying that the human entity in front of them have a piece of cardboard. No problem there. Buying a ticket with Apple pay just puts the "cardboard ticket" in your phone.

Now you could also buy a monthly travel card, and register it to your identity, which is great because now if you forget the card, but can prove your identity then no problem, since they have the records.

The issue here is that she has a non-identified cardboard ticket on her dead phone. Which doesn't enjoy the benefit of being tied to her Identity.

Apple pay isn't really any different from the coins4cardboard tech here. If you buy a cardboard ticket with a credit card and throw it away, then you can't show bank statements to get out of a fine. The expectation of the cardboard ticket is that you keep it on you to prove you have it. If that had been the case and she's dropped a ticket out the pocket of her coat, would they be blaming the coat brand?

<comment><USER4> Except for the fact it wasn't a paper ticket, it was an electronic ticket which likely has all sorts of records and metadata connected to it as well as being verifiable via a server - which would be needed anyway otherwise they have likely a huge electronically generated counterfeit or an accounting problem.

I'm guessing if the police wanted to check an alibi of an individual claiming to have taken the train at some point that the records of that electronic ticket would be dug up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this is a systems design problem in the category of failing to include a functional system/business method for reversing an invalid record, i.e., an incorrect record of non-payment.

SF Muni also has a phone payment app, but even most people who don't use it do not have a physical receipt. If for any reason the Muni inspector can't scan your BART/Clippper card there needs to be a reasonable way to use other proof of payment to correct an erroneous record of non-payment. This is the same situation as if one's phone died after using Apple pay to get on the bus.

The failure to create system methods/business methods that allow for reasonable correction of erroneous records is unethical, but unfortunately common. Think of: cleaning up after "identity theft", or trying to get removed from the the no-fly list. I privately think of this as a 27b/6 error.

</comment><comment><USER7> Eh. In Easter Europe passengers beat up inspectors.

Also, it's illegal not to have an ID with you at all times. So people usually carry wallets. I carry cash all the time. Better to get robbed (small chance) than get stuck somewhere without money (i.e. CC doesn't work because the bank is having "software issues" or the POS terminal is broken or whatever...)

<comment><USER8> This isn't about being caught without cash. Whenever I've gone to London I've used my contactless credit card to pay for transport, not because I don't carry cash, but because it's convenient -- you just hold it near the gate and go through; no need to visit a ticket machine.

A problem with this convenience is that you don't get any kind of physical receipt to prove you paid. Perhaps in my case, a ticket inspector could scan my credit card to check it was used to pay, but in the case of a dead phone, it can't be queried.

<comment><USER7> It helps to have cards that are bought and topped up online, that last for a month and cost 10€ and you can ride anywhere everywhere unlimited for a month. You just need to carry the card and "tap it" on the NFC reader, and have an ID in case of inspection. Or you can use a phone to buy a "temp" card, except it causes so much trouble nobody uses it, including for reasons of bad chips in the readers that refuse to work with some phones, bad app, bad infrastructure (i.e. no 3G signal and the reader in the bus can't validate your ticket so it refuses it, but the phone app already took your money)...

Technology is great when it's thought out. If not... may the deity of choice be on your side in the bureaucratic maze of modern society intertwined with digital/electronic and paper/human-based data carriers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The original FT story [https://www.ft.com/content/e8a177d4-dfae-11e9-9743-db5a37048...](https://www.ft.com/content/e8a177d4-dfae-11e9-9743-db5a370481bc)

Frankly, this remark by a _zdnet_ journo was rather bizarre:

>She's a writer for The Financial Times. Please don't let any personal thoughts about that get in the way of her story.

<comment><USER10> Many people with leftist and anti-capitalist political views attach a strong negative bias to anyone who works for an entity they deem supportive of the capitalist economic system, such as major financial media.

<comment><USER9> Well, sure. But that still looks just as out of place as it would in the Daily Mail.

FT is known for excellent journalism, zdnet is known for nonsense stories like [https://www.zdnet.com/article/unsecured-mongodb-databases- ex...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/unsecured-mongodb-databases-expose- kremlins-backdoor-into-russian-businesses/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Next, she heard that her court case had happened and she'd been found > guilty.

If she missed her court date then I don't know what she expected... You will lose by default if you don't go.

<comment><USER12> In Poland people have learned about lost court cases from Court debt collector in the middle of freezing their assets. All because there is no Service of process procedure, courts just send ordinary letter to the registered legal residency address.

<comment><USER13> Heh, I had an account with HSBC for monthly AdSense payments.

When I moved, I guess only the mailing address got changed, not the « registered » address.

So I continued getting monthly statements and all was well.

Tax time comes and I realize I hadn't gotten statements in some months.

I go to the branch and they said the accounts been closed. Uh oh.

Turns out they sent all those communications and a draft for 5 figures to the registered address I didn't live at anymore.

Ugh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This scenario is like the early days of a dystopian future of course. But I am constantly irritated by people who carry only their cell phone and use it for everything, and if it goes out (runs out of power or dies) they are helpless. Geeze

</comment><comment><USER15> Ignoring the whole court case thing (it's ridiculous, but not really relevant to the tech itself), this story includes a most of the issues with using a smartphone for payments that are why I don't consider doing that to be a wise thing.

</comment><comment><USER16> > she was charged with, well, not providing proof of payment.

How is this not guilty until proven innocent? You have to prove you paid, otherwise you're assumed guilty.

<comment><USER17> There is a specific law in the UK requiring production of a ticket to a railway inspector. Doesn't matter if you paid - you are convicted if you are unable to produce a ticket when asked.

Considering that, I'm very surprised this reporter had her conviction quashed - it looks like she broke the law, even if she didn't intend to. (Intent is not required for a conviction for this law).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'ts not tech to blame but lack of care/ planning. If she'd had paid cash and get a paper ticket and lost such ticket the same thing would happened.

</comment><comment><USER19> I guess the moral of this story is, if you're about to get on the bus, make sure you have enough battery left on your phone to last until you reach your destination. I use my phone to pay for a bus ticket every day, but I only have to show it when I get on. If I only had 1% left on the battery, I'd probably buy a paper ticket before heading to the gate though, just to be safe.

<comment><USER20> In London the buses are entirely cashless, Contactless (Card or Apple Pay) or Oyster (Transport for London operated cashless ticketing system) only, no paper tickets are accepted.

On the tube one can purchase paper tickets, though these are somewhat rare now and cannot be purchased at all stations.</comment></comment>


Immigration Bill Could Challenge Tech's Ongoing Fight for Skilled Worker Visas - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/23/immigration-bill-could-challenge-techs-ongoing-fight-for-skilled-worker-visas/ <comment><USER2> here's the bill: [https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate- bill/226...](https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate- bill/2266?q=%7B%22search%22%3A%5B%22H1B%22%5D%7D&resultIndex=17)</comment>


Tony blair webmail hacked - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/mn6Dhgcd

<comment><USER2> Thanks for posting, but I don't understand something. Are these... important people? I've searched for a few president names and none seem to appear. I've also searched a few names on the list and couldn't really understand who they are.</comment>


Ask HN: I've Got a Project, You Tell Me The Language - <AUTHOR>

So this summer I want to begin development work on a new web project, but I am having trouble deciding on a language to implement my ideas.  Maybe it doesn't matter, I don't know. I thought I'd tell you what I want to do, what I'm good at, and YOU tell me how my time will be best spent.
Project Idea:  Create a web-based recruiting tool for our graduate department to keep track of interested/prospective students.
What I'm really good at:  Matlab! What I'm ok at: PHP, C#/.Net (And I love visual web developer!) What I'm not good at, but interested in learning: Python
I currently have shared hosting (LAMP), but I wouldn't be opposed to buying another plan for C#/.Net if that would be the best way.
Any ideas? <comment><USER2> Try Django. Documentation on their site should be enough for you to get going. Also there a plenty of reusable django applications available on the internet, like djago-registration, django-comment-utils, which will allow you to create a website with a lot of bells and whistles in a day or so.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip. As per my comment below, is there an IDE similar to Visual Web Developer? This is what I'm most comfortable with and enjoy using.

<comment><USER3> Try <http://www.wingware.com/doc/howtos/django>

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome. I can't wait to try this out!

<comment><USER4> If you're used to Matlab, C#, and PHP...you are going to like Python. It's a real breath of fresh air.

Django is a pretty robust framework too. Like Python, it (for the most part) just makes things easy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It depends on how much you want to learn a new language. If you just want to get the job done, use what you know already. If you want the to leverage the project to learn new things, pick a new language (or a new OS, or editor or version control system).

<comment><USER6> This is really the crux of the argument: What do you want to have when you finish?

If you just want the completed application ASAP? Go with what you know, and don't waste time on learning anything new.

Want a completed and familiarity with a new language + framework, at the cost of delayed launch? Go with the new language.

The application you've described is simple enough to be done with any framework + language fairly quickly, so no worries there. Just weigh your motivations and get to work!

On a side note: I'd go for rails (ruby), then django (python), then symfony (PHP) by personal choice. The generators for all of these languages will save quite some time, likely.

<comment><AUTHOR> I love learning new languages. I'm trying to pick up (on average) one per a year. The problem is that I become knowledgeable about a bunch of languages but not really an expert in any of them! Granted, I know there are some underlying similarities between all languages.

I want to get the job done quickly, but I'm not opposed to spending a number of months working on it. I just want the application to run really well and be easy to maintain and grow.

I just keep vacillating between that crux that you mentioned. I kinda wish there was an easy way to create a web application with Matlab, since its easy and powerful (and I know it pretty well). But I also keep getting pulled back into the "well, maybe I should pick up a more 'popular' language because that's what seems most web apps are constructed with these days"

<comment><USER7> I have also become familiar with several languages (C, C++, C#, Java, PHP, Python, and Ruby), but when I wanted to start a big project, I realized that I only knew the basics of the language (i.e., synatx). I had no real exposure to the vast libraries available. Once I realized this, and that was only within the past month, I decided to focus just on C and C++. This decision was driven by the fact that I am starting an MSFE program this fall and all I have read about quant work says that I should be well versed in C++. The reason I have also chosen C is because the project I am spending this summer working on is building the statistics and probability portion of a quantitative finance library. I am using two libraries as a reference (Quantlib and GSL) and one is written in C++ and the other in C. Like it has been said, I think it might be a good idea to focus on what you already know and work on improving the skills in that language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> PHP. You don't even need to know it to whip out something in php. The application domain is pretty much all that PHP is good at, boring websites, and since it's an intranet application you don't have to sweat the security. It shouldn't take more than a week to do, leaving you plenty of time left in the summer to learn a real language, like Python. And finally, should you ever get bored with it, you can always find someone to finish it.

When in doubt and apathetic, copy and paste php code.

<comment><AUTHOR> I want to love PHP. I really do. It seems like everyone and their mom uses it, and thats why I tried to pick it up before. The problem for me has been an easy way of coding it.

I mentioned Visual Web Developer in my OP. I'm not lying. I absolutely love the intelli-sense, the tab-finish, the debugging, the easy UI.

Is there something I could use that does the same thing with PHP?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe you could try IronPython. You can use it with the ASP.net MVC framework. Then later on if you decide to rather go with Django you already know Python.

</comment><comment><USER10> if you happen to choose the Microsoft way, you'll have Visual Web Developer (and it's very Advanced) and ASP.net MVC (powerful for AJAX Application). Also you can integrate with it, Microsoft Expression to design your site when working with VWD!! You'll have also MS SQL Server which is very powerful and customizable. (and a big set of tools you can use).

Drawbacks: The tools are very expensive (VWD pro to Expression to SQL will cost), the Windows hosting is also very expensive. If you have sufficient money then it's the best choice, look at the performance of stackoverflow.com

another drawback is there's a little "veryyy little" Open Source code (try codeplex.com) but still enough to make your own

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, your right. I've got enough experience with C#/.Net to really really appreciate VWD. But alas, cost.

Also, porting Matlab scripts to .Net works quite well.

If I can find something like VWD but for something like PHP instead, then I'd be sold.

<comment><USER10> VWD and SQL (Express) are free, you can start with them, I'm starting with them. Go step by step (slowly), also there's a lot of work for asp.net developers (.net in general) the market is very demanding

<comment><USER11> You can do a lot more than "start" with them -- they are full-featured products and (at least for Visual Studio) there are no restrictions on use for commercial products.

EDIT: Perhaps the largest cost would be once your product is finished. Your university (or host) would have to purchase Microsoft products for the web server.

<comment><USER10> I think this will change, some hosting are making plans (pay as you go) that can scale if needed and pay only what you use. The future is more promising, I even quit PHP and starting to learn ASP.net MVC. Microsoft has done well by making the new asp.net MVC respects the standards

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> python is better for future work with matlab-related stuff like data preprocessing; or its matlab competitor library (scipy).

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm gonna recommend .NET here, mainly because that's what I use and like, but my top reason would be flexibility.

You don't have to use only one language, use many. If you already know C# you can start with that. If you get tired of it you can pick up F# to write algorithms and calculations. Want to learn Python? Get IronPython and use it to write Unit Tests or a rich interface with Silverlight. You name it, everything under the same platform.

If there isn't a requirement that prevents you from using .NET, I don't see a reason not to use it.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's not, aside from the general misgiving I have about the black-box nature of .Net stuff. Sometimes I feel like I'm not really hacking. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Stick with LAMP - PHP, Mysql, Linux - you've got the tools. Don't fall for the Ruby/Erlang/Lisp croud. Don't struggle with the language. Get it done and worry about the details, not the language.

</comment><comment><USER15> You mean like this? <http://corsair.cs.iupui.edu:20181/prospect.php>

I wrote this last semester, nothing fancy, but it does what the assignment required, which is very similar to what I think you're trying to do.

</comment><comment><USER16> What I think would help is picking a web framework. That would pretty much guide you towards a language and eliminate a choice.

Look around at the popular available frameworks and choose the one that appeals most to you.

</comment><comment><USER17> If you already know PHP then go with Codeigniter MVC framework. It runs fast, very straightfoward, and the documentation is superb.

</comment><comment><USER18> check out <http://drupal.org>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip. I've tried Drupal before with another site. It's pretty slick, but it has a ton of stuff under-the-hood which I don't think I would need. As a result, my site ran ridiculously slow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> what every language you can be most productive in to get it done. If it time frame doesn't matter, any language that interests you.

</comment><comment><USER20> Haskell. Why not go the whole hog?

</comment><comment><USER21> RUBY/RAILS. As productive as Django. More books, good community and so on.</comment>


Beme Is a Social App That Aims to Replace Illusions with Reality - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/17/the-debut-of-beme-a-social-app-that-aims-for-authenticity/?ref=technology <comment><USER2> This is like Narrative (looks to be formerly called Memoto), a wearable camera for capturing moments. After watching the video about how to use Beme, the fascinating thing is that if you are right-handed and you choose to create a Beme, you easily move to cover the proximity censor by taking your phone in hand to your heart. Rather than a selfie of your face, it's a symbolic selfie from your heart.

Link to Narrative: [http://getnarrative.com/](http://getnarrative.com/)</comment>


Turnbull uncoops 'electronic pigeon hole' for all Australians  - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/397526/turnbull_uncoops_electronic_pigeon_hole_all_australians_/

<comment><USER2> This creates a lot of possibilities for data breaches, especially with a single database. Maybe it would work better with 2-factor auth dongles. But the hardware & software side has to be auditable.</comment>


Why Is the DOJ Bragging About 'Catching' a Suspect That Turned Himself In? - <AUTHOR> http://coinjournal.net/thomas-clark-alleged-silk-road-adviser-arrested-in-thailand/ <comment><USER2> Because they did it! Americans have special powers. See for example Scott Adams: [http://blog.dilbert.com/post/134861704021/my-offer-to- stop-d...](http://blog.dilbert.com/post/134861704021/my-offer-to-stop-donald- trump)</comment>