Apple Rejects Another iPhone App For Competing With Apple - <AUTHOR> http://technologizer.com/2008/09/21/okay-podcaster-wasnt-a-weird-aberration/

<comment><USER2> I do see value in restricting redundant apps: it encourages developers to expand the platform's potential. It also means that a number like "3000 apps available for the iPhone" carries more weight, as those are 3000 unique capabilities added.

However, the onus is then on Apple to provide extensions to their "standard" applications. Don't want me to recreate Mail.app? Fine, but give me some APIs to expand Mail.app with new behaviors.

Apple's already done this on the Mac to an extent, e.g. allowing programs to integrate with the iLife suite. I don't know what the iPhone offers in this area.</comment>


Why Do We Expect So Little of Our Youth? - yo-mf http://bch.me/P6uJlW

<comment><AUTHOR> The dichotomy between STEM and liberal arts isn't real. For some reason we declare some kids math-oriented and some art-oriented, but it's bullshit. I have a nephew who loves computers and reads three grades higher than he should, and a nephew who is two grades higher at math and can't use them at all. The one wants to be a programmer, the other a veterinarian. To them, there is no STEM/liberal-arts dichotomy--they will be taught that by some well-meaning adult idiot. Kids don't emerge from the womb as STEM or liberal arts; they have a variety of strengths and can learn any subject with enough time and energy.

The idea that you can appreciate a complex metaphor in a poem or a complex philosophical concept but not solve for x is absurd. It's fashionable to be bad at math and lots of people indulge in the fashion. The proper tool to address this problem is shame coupled with better education. When your niece tries to be cute by saying she's too pretty for math, you give her the disdainful disappointed look that says this shit won't fly and then ask her what she's having trouble with.

Teaching and learning are hard. We keep looking for a simple way out of doing it. Maybe if we teach less of this and more of that, remove this requirement, write this software, etc, it'll be easy. In reality, it's just like diet and exercise. In America, we want a magic pill, but the truth is that some things are just hard. The sooner we stop complaining and start doing, the better off we'll be.

<comment><USER2> Math and science are taught extremely poorly in our schools. It's mostly a matter of memorization (often of trivia rather than fundamentals), plug-and- chug, and rote busywork.

<comment><USER3> Liberal arts teaching is hardly brilliant for many either, although teachers have a fair bit more leeway..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The big problem with the liberal arts is the subjectivity of grading.

The algorithm that works best in the liberal arts is "guess what the teacher wants to hear and say it."

The horrible truth is that this is an unreasonably effective algorithm for functioning in management. At worst, it's used by scam artists like Madoff and Ken Lay. Many executives have left a trail of destruction, moving from one company to another just before reality sets in.

If there's any attribute that will cause mankind to end up like the dinosaurs, it's like this. It's got everything to do with our inability to deal with problems like global warming and it drives the everyday mediocrity that drags us down.

Back in college I remember some of the humanities profs were known to be liberal and others were conservative. Students who had different politics frequently believed they weren't graded fairly.

The mediocracy hates STEM and has waged a war against math because, often, we can say results in STEM are objectively right or wrong.

For instance, one time I pointed out an error that a math prof made on the board and he was happy to be corrected -- it's a bit of evidence that he's succeeding at his job. But after class, a student told me he was shocked that I'd been arrogant enough to think the teacher was wrong!

On the other hand, if you don't agree with what a humanist says about Shakespeare, for instance, she might reply that "different people can believe different things" or she can be bullheaded and not admit the subjective element.

I remember having a English teacher in high school who was the most respected, but I couldn't get better than a "D" in her class because she thought I couldn't write.

A few years later I had a strech when I got most of my income from writing and copy editing so there.

<comment><USER5> > The big problem with the liberal arts is the subjectivity of grading.

I think you are doing it some disservice. Critically analyzing a piece of literature is similar to deconstruction a programming puzzle. It involves finding patterns & relations between characters and events. It involves summarizing and breaking your ideas in sections.

Even for something as ridiculously subjective as art, you can still have a formalized course. Ask students to set a goals or make a proposal of what they want to accomplish, then grade them on how well they accomplished that.

> Back in college I remember some of the humanities profs were known to be > liberal and others were conservative.

In my American college (certainly a mediocre school, not a fancy shmancy Ivy League) I had most professors behave rationally. Even the super liberal feminist professors graded fairly those that wrote well research and well- thought out paper. So that is mostly about bad professors than it is necessarily about some fundamental flaw in the subjects.

On anther level I agree. There are too many students going into those fields expecting to eventually get jobs in that field. That will just not happen. I think someone needs to sit down and have a chat with them.

<comment><USER4> I agree with you that there's a lot of value in writing, literature, reading critically and all that. There's value in formal courses too.

On the other hand, school teaches bad lessons as well as good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My girlfriend is from Poland, and the educational system there is different, compared to the USA. When she went to college, she did a 5 year program that left her with a degree that is normally translated into the USA system as a masters degree. Her focus was Polish literature.

When she got to the USA, she did a 2nd degree, this time in marketing. She was surprised by the USA system, in particular, the number of courses that she had to take that had nothing to do with marketing. She tells me that in Poland general purpose "learn a little bit about everything" classes end with high school. Once you go to college, the assumption is that you are becoming a specialist in a particular field, and all of your education goes to that specialty. Computer programmers are not forced to take literature classes, nor are those studying literature forced to take math classes.

I have the impression that in the USA, the universities are used to fix what's often seen as a broken K-12 educational system. We know that many young people arrive at college with educational deficiencies, therefore we load up the next 4 years with all the stuff they should have learned during their K-12 years. If they want to become specialists in something, well, that is what graduate school is for, after they turn 21.

I am generally impressed with what comes out of the Polish system. I've had a chance to work with Polish programmers, and they were very good, at very young ages. And, likewise, those who study Polish literature seem to understand it deeply, having spent 5 years reading all the classics (without the distraction of having to take unrelated classes).

I think the USA would be wise to fix its K-12 system, and then allow colleges to be places where people can specialize in what they want.

<comment><USER7> FWIW, Poland and the USA get very similar results from their K-12 systems, both rank quite well compared to the average OECD country: <http://www.oecd.org/pisa/46643496.pdf>

For some reason there is a perception that American schools are failing, but I don't see it in the data.

<comment><USER5> The perception is vis-a-vis the perception of economic, social and political status.

Continuing with the pun on the title, everyone expects more from America and America in turn also expects more from itself. When they hear "FWIW, Poland and the USA get very similar results from their K-12 systems" they can say "Oh good for Poland. This used to be a communist country and now it is as good as US in Education" or they can also say "Holy crap. America is now on par with an Eastern European country that was ruled by communists just couple of decades ago, how sad, we could do some much better".

Now, note, I don't endorse this binary view. I want all the countries to have good education, especially my country.

Also, I grew up in Eastern Europe and can also say that my high-school education there emphasized math, physics, literature and English (or other foreign language) a lot more than my American high-school (I also went to an American high-school for a one year btw, so I can compare a bit). I came to US in the 10th grade and was taking math courses along with high-school seniors and tutoring them. I was only above average at home in those subjects.

Overall, what I think works well for US high-schools:

* Kids have a choice already to specialize because they can each take an individualized curriculum. Some took more literature and English some took more physics. That's great.

* Frequent and objective testing. A lot of objective testing and quizzes. Keeps you on pace.

* More approachable and more informal teachers. Teachers that care seem to be really good. Yeah there are the ones that don't. But I noticed in my other high school even teachers that cared acted pretty un-approachable and just showed their care by signing you up for math and physics contests (Olympiads) we call them.

What doesn't work well for US high-schools:

* Too many what I see pointless after-school activities, too much emphasis on sports. Are all these kids going to become professional athletes. So why are they spending all afternoons bumping into each other at high speeds and getting injured.

* Social scene is fucked up and detracts from learning. Because there are so many activities and so much individualized choice on what classes to take. People form cliques and end up being not very approachable. There isn't a group of people you get to know and spend your whole day and years with. There was just less drama and mental effort spent on who is friends with whom and who cheated on whom.

* Too much emphasis on passive media aids (video) for teaching. There was a lot of "here watch this video kids".

* Too much emphasis on group projects. On a certain meta level they are great because it teaches everyone how group function and don't function. How to take advantage of others and how others get to take advantage of you. There were very few times when groups are evenly matched and everyone puts a fair share of work and end up with a great result.

What doesn't work well for East European high-schools:

* Corruption to the core. Everyone cheats. Teachers take bribes. Principles take bigger bribes. Kids cheat from each other. Those that don't cheat get left behind because those that cheat make the exams and test look like a piece of cake, so those get harder and harder ("Oh so it looks like everyone in this 10th grade knows about derivatives so well. Let's bring on the double integrals then!")

<comment><USER8> I find it odd that you've decided to equate communism with poor education. The Soviets put the first man in space, I'd say they must have been doing something right (edit: I should add they were still doing plenty wrong elsewhere but we're only talking education here). Having the resources to apply that education is a whole other matter of course.

Having said that, Poland is hardly a typical example of an ex-communist country here, they always tended to have fairly high education standards. Of the former communist states in the OECD stats linked by parent, they lead the pack with only Estonia slightly ahead.

<comment><USER5> I am not personally equating it. If you actually read my post you'll see that science and math were emphasized more in a Soviet-influenced area. What I was talking about is perceptions. That is how people in America (mostly) see that part of the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I suspect a lot of these issues have a deeper cause and one that might be summarised rather simply: there is an assumption teenagers are incapable of contributing to society. This is not an original idea but I wonder if it gets enough notice. I would argue this problem is worse in the West (at least this seems to be in line with my own experience).

It doesn't take much to put together the pieces. With increasing affluence, parents were given a greater opportunity to protect their children from the realities of life. It is clear that children are not always capable of facing real life challenges. However, the age for just when they are ready for many of them, seemed to gradually shift further and further. (Something that was no doubt encouraged by the longer periods of time required to complete the education for many vocations.)

Until we arrive at the present day. Teenagers are more or less assumed to be parasites on society, incapable of true contribution to it. Until, that is, they are magically transformed at the arbitrarily chosen 18 year mark into full fledged members of society.

I would argue that all this impacts how we teach kids in schools today. Instead of introducing them to truely independently useful skills, there is an uspoken rule that they aren't actually capable of anything useful just yet. Instead we play pretend, teach them some ideas that might one day lead to something useful, and expect they'll be satisfied with the experience. Highschools often cram kids' heads full of mundane method after mundane method, with little explanation as to how they work or why they are relevant. There is a litany of seemingly random factoids to be memorised. Abstract thinking is a lofty skill reserved for the adults and we needn't waste our time trying to evoke anything of the sort with these kids.

So yes, in a way I think our expectations of what our kids are capable of, do need to change. Not only on a superficial level where we just get them to work harder within the existing broken system. But a new approach is required where their full potential can be challenged.

It's easy to make such grandiose sweeping statements of course, but I maintain one of the keys is not stopping short with purely theoretical methods but extending them to practical realities. Yes, that is more challenging. Let's stop assuming that the challenge is out of grasp for these young people.

<comment><USER9> That's really interesting, I had never really thought about it like that before. Can you elaborate a little more about your in experience in the West versus somewhere else?

While I do agree this is an issue, how would you actually go about solving it? I mean, what useful contribution can someone make in math without having learned algebra first? You need to start with the fundamentals before you can do actually important things. In fact, it seems that the ability to suck it up and "just do it" without any immediate gratification is what sets other cultures apart with respect to education.

One area where I think young people can do potentially important things is with computers, especially with programming. With only a small base of knowledge, it is possible to do many original and useful things. When I was 15, I wrote apps that were used by hundreds on thousands of people, and I don't think it requires any special talent.

<comment><USER10> They don't necessarily need to do something productive for society, but they can still 'create'. For example, my early math classes were designed around questions. When we came into the room we would break up into groups, and spend the first half of (the 90 minute) class trying to answer between 1 and 5 problems, after which their was a class discussion on the problems and any tangents they lead to, and they teacher may, or may not, point out things we missed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A newspaper or blog post is probably the wrong medium for this question. It's one I explored in detail when I was evaluating an opportunity in the education space between September and January. There are a variety of big problems in the education space, most of which centre around the problems of bureaucracy. Here the fundamental issue is that it's extremely difficult for school boards that are offering the same salary scale to everyone regardless of skills/subjects (which is the norm in Canada and much of the U.S.) to get similar levels of teaching talent for subjects that are highly in demand. This tends to lead to a notion of progress that involves reducing the math curriculum to the point where the "math" teachers you have can actually teach it well. This is often spun as giving everyone more opportunity for success or presented as innovation to curriculum, and many buy into that spin. The answer of teaching better is the best solution when it's actually possible, but the combination of convincing government to spend it, and convincing the unions to allow it to be spent well is nearly impossible. The net result is something similar to the system we have. Perhaps worst of all, entrepreneurs get scared away from the space because there isn't anything worse than dealing with enterprise style sales processes for sales numbers that simply are not.

</comment><comment><USER12> The biggest hurdle in U.S. and western education that I see, especially with maths and engineering is this strange culture of nerd stereotype and 'too pretty for math/homework' etc... I just can't figure it out. I'lived in other eastern countries where these stereotypes are non-existent and not so surprisingly, over there, you see many pretty girls who are exceptional mathematicians and programmers and they aren't considered strange or special.

</comment><comment><USER13> This entire post seems to be predicated on an invalid premise: Math is hard and liberal arts is easy. There are certainly some liberal arts majors that are easy blowoff majors. But there are also plenty of very challenging liberal arts majors.

Rather than make this a simplistic question of "Should we challenge our kids or not?", we should be asking the question "What should we challenge our kids with?". And it's not clear to me that every liberal arts major _needs_ a good algebra foundation. So why not replace it with something equally challenging that will be more useful to the students?

<comment><USER14> > Rather than make this a simplistic question of "Should we challenge our kids > or not?", we should be asking the question "What should we challenge our > kids with?". And it's not clear to me that every liberal arts major needs a > good algebra foundation.

It doesn't have to be algebra specifically, though algebra is probably the most immediately applicable and simplest set of mathematical concepts to teach. It's a more general sense, that those who are comfortable with mathematical concepts are better at constructing abstract ideas that are rigorous and consistent, which is generally a positive virtue in liberal arts. For instance, this is what distinguishes the logic-driven analytic school of philosophy from the hand wavy and largely meaningless wasteland of continental philosophy whence postmodernism was born.

Liberal arts is indeed challenging-- _if you do it right_. Not doing it right is the problem though, and it arises from from letting bullshitters pass themselves off as people making an honest attempt. This goes all the way from the top down in some fields, but less so in others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I remember poignantly an argument I had with my cousins about education. They themselves are teachers, two elementary and one specializes teaching kids with special needs. All of them are extremely dedicated and very passionate (to the point of tears) about learning and teaching. They love their jobs and the kids they work with.

The argument I had was that it wasn't teachers that were the problem. It was the institution of education that allows the problems we see. Unfortunately for my cousins and I that I was too inarticulate in showing them they weren't the problem.

Ken Robinson did my thoughts far more justice in his TED video about education paradigms [1]. To summarize, why do we educate our children along a yearly conveyor belt with compartmentalized subjects and standardized testing? The whole system mimics the factory assembly lines, complete with specializations and quality assurance.

We allow process to educate children instead of people. We can effectively replace any teacher with another and our expectations and the system itself doesn't change in any meaningful way. We squash the organic and relational learning with rote memorization and rigid structure. We don't foster curiosity or exploration. We value conformity to structure and authority. There isn't any opportunity for kids to "scratch their itch" unless it falls within the existing structure.

I do have hope for the future. Places like Khan and Wikipedia allow for the curious exploration of subjects, and the Internet allows for participation and dialog that weren't available a few decades ago. I believe we are waking up to a different paradigm of learning that has the ability to transform education from it's Industrial Revolution roots. I also believe this will give passionate teachers, like my cousins, the freedom from the rigid structure that allows them to foster the natural interests of their pupils.

If we allow this form of organic learning, then Standardization is effectively impossible. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. This gives more flexibility to tailor the education to the kids' interests. However this means we will have to accept that some people will want to grow their kids in ways that are hard to swallow. Creationism comes to mind. I don't have a good idea how to counter this.

[1]: [http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_par...](http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> > Our schools are not failing students because they are too hard. They fail > because few schools expect anything from their students and shy away from > challenging their minds.

I think this is close to the mark, albeit vague. Challenging their minds in what way? Such a statement could be misinterpreted as, "We need more rigorous test standards!" or some other specific solution that does not necessarily meet the goal.

From personal experience, for classes other than upper-level math at my college, people would constantly ask questions like, "Is this going to be on the test?"

And I was always annoyed by that. It seemed indicative of the meaninglessness of our education, and I can see why math classes are so difficult for people who learn this pattern rather than the subjects. I don't know how different it is at Ivy League or other schools perceived as high in quality, but when the majority of testing is multiple-choice, true-false, or fill-in-the-blank, it becomes easy to look at everything you learn as a task of rote memorization. It's like that saying: when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The difference with math that makes it so "hard" is you often can't rely on rote memorization. You have to actually learn the material (or understand algorithms and memorize steps to finding solutions with different initial conditions). People get discouraged (probably early on) by the fact that the skills they use for academic success elsewhere do not always work with math, and I think they associate those negative emotions with "math is hard."

I don't know the solution, but I think people need to at least realize that rote memorization is not indicative of learning. It's an uncomfortable realization because so many of our metrics for academic success rely on the assumption that memorization equals learning or understanding.

Of course, that's unlikely. The status quo is always easier. Why do we expect so little from adults?

</comment><comment><USER17> Both articles are wrong. One makes the point that art should scaled down and math should be scaled up, while the other argues that math is holding back art and should be scaled the opposite direction.

Both are wrong. Math and art are one and the same. Yes, this article in the link was correct that the problem lies in our education system, but there is no distinction between math and art. Our math just isn't applied enough or taught correctly, so students miss out on a true understanding of how math works. Look at da Vinci, that is a man who made no distinction between math and art.

<comment><USER10> Saying there is no distinction between art and math is like saying there is no distinction between art and sculptury. Yes it is a type of art, but is is a highly distinct skill set from painting. Of course the way math is taught is about as much art as a coloring book, with a well defined key.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't agree that we need "less liberal arts degrees" but having more stringent STEM courses that push students to excel is never a bad thing. Bill Gates used to say "smart people go where the money is" and so if by the author's assertion that the new economy needs people who are good at math, then the market will reward those people and the system will change to focus on math skills. This does not mean that liberal arts degrees are useless as the best innovations usually come at the intersection of liberal arts and STEM fields.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think what many fail to see is that the problem does not necessarily begin with the education system. It begins with the popular culture.

In those countries where doing well in school is almost certainly the difference between a decent life and a really bad life, there is a different mentality at play than in America, where even if one goes to a middle tier college, they can probably still lead a relatively comfortable life.

The second issue is that everyone in our society is encouraged to become a scholar and intellectual. While noble in its intent, society may very well be better off with a system like Germany, where many attend vocational schools and learn a craft that can have a real effect on the economy.

</comment><comment><USER20> "What creates wide gaps in achievement in math (and many other subjects) in minority students is lower expectations for success."

I found this sentence frustrating. It was simple-minded to an extreme, neatly finding a solution to fit all minorities.

Minorities in the middle class, e.g., may have a completely separate set of problems from minorities in poverty circumstances. Recent immigrant minorities may face a different set of circumstances from second, third, fourth, etc. generation minorities.

The author's message is essentially "try harder, think positive". Unfortunately it does not address the different nuances of being a minority.

</comment><comment><USER21> "What creates wide gaps in achievement in math (and many other subjects) in minority students is lower expectations for success." And then it links to [http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational- leadership/feb0...](http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational- leadership/feb04/vol61/num05/-Closing-the-Minority-Achievement-Gap-in- Math.aspx)

But to attribute the entire discrepancy to lower expectations baffles me. How is it that so many people are so _confident_ in their various contradictory theories surrounding educational outcomes?

</comment><comment><USER22> Seems like somebody who'd enjoy reading "A Mathematician's Lament"</comment>


The Nomadic Coder - Derek Sivers IS Caine From Kung Fu [audio] - <AUTHOR> http://techzinglive.com/?p=443

<comment><USER2> Cdbaby is a great site for finding new and interesting music and has great service.

It really is interesting to listen Derek and what he has to say. I am a big fan.

</comment><comment><USER3> Relaxed easy listening interview. I dont think anything to revealing. Perhaps that he is moving to Singapore at the end of the year. If your a fan of his usual posts which make it on here, you will most likely find some enjoyment out of this.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great guest, guys! I'm listening right now.</comment>


How to Create a Feedback Culture at Your Startup - <AUTHOR> https://medium.dave-bailey.com/how-to-create-a-feedback-culture-6ba43db875dd?source=friends_link&sk=3a4dbf0b97475759bb7f962dc7c542f0 <comment><USER2> It's a great and important article but feedback should not be overpushed. I agree that "opting out" is a way to go but mandatory feedback one-on-ones "The expectation that I set is, either you come to me with a difficult conversation, or I'll come to you with one." this can easily be taken too far at least if we're talking about IT communities. I found that encouraged open hours do work very well but you need to assure that each conversation will remain absolutely in strict confidence. Retrospectives work very well too to identify what problems cause team underperformance. And 360 reviews so far showed highest results done once every three months, each team member had time to rethink their behavior, - what's good and where to improve. So far one-on- ones were pretty stressful but that might be the specifics of the company I work in. Overall this is a great article and feedback culture is very important, thank you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great feedback — really appreciate this comment.</comment></comment>


Scaling a Real-World Node.js and CouchDB App - <AUTHOR> http://www.twilio.com/blog/2013/01/building-a-real-time-sms-voting-app-part-3-scaling-node-js-and-couchdb.html

<comment><AUTHOR> It would be nice to test the "HN effect" on this app. Vote for the best startup city here:

<http://votr-part3.jit.su/events/demo>

<comment><USER2> I voted, and you can probably guess my answer. Do you update the visualization before checking if the vote is a duplicate?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. I felt that was a performance trade-off that I was willing to make because I valued the immediacy of the update to the web page.</comment></comment></comment>


My Startup project: ErrorKey.com, a tool for hackers. - <AUTHOR> http://www.errorkey.com/ <comment><USER2> I like the idea! I like it so much that our startup last year targetted the same general audience with a custom error search engine:

<http://bug.gd>

<http://bug.gd/info/faq>

We've only grabbed error codes where we can find/recommend a solution, but when it comes from crawlers we always link to the source as well to avoid copyright issues. How are you working around that in your case? Are they coming from local sources rather than websites? (Admittedly, I doubt these companies are too worried about their error documentation being quoted in full.)

Best of luck to you! I like to see more attention to this area, no doubt.

<comment><USER3> Despite the benign assurances of the site, having to type my email address in bug.gd is annoying. I disagree with "forcing community participation" like this... how do I even know there would even be enough content on your site to make it worth my time?

<comment><USER4> You could suggest that they change their approach in getting the email address but the concept of reminding you to reply with your fix to that error is good.

<comment><USER3> I completely agree, its a good feature if its optional.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is it going to be better than just putting the code in a search engine like google or something. Most of the codes I come across are unique enough that I get a direct match pretty quickly. Also what helps me is seeing related forum posts and other comments on resolving the issue, the definition in on itself is often useless.

<comment><USER6> I have nothing to do with the site or author, but I can suggest the following:

-Google defaults to under-emphasizing results related to errors specific in newer versions of software. So when a bug in a new release comes out, info is often no where to be seen--it is obscured by older items with higher rank.

-Google includes links to both questions, and answers. I only want answers.

-Google's results are across multiple pages and obscured in forum discussions. I want one page with all the answers and info.

-Google frequently returns results from experts exchange, which involves scrolling to the bottom. Additionally, I've talked to developers who don't even realize the unobscured answer is at the bottom.

-Some code queries do not translate well into regular searches because the characters have meaning. Off the top of my head example: select * from blah

-There is not always a nice centralized place to go to share it with the world know when you have a fix.

That said, I'm not sure this site implements solutions to all these problems, but a wiki-type site could. Isn't Jeff Atwood doing something with a similar idea?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been using Google for this for a very, very long time.

Can you describe to me why I would want to come to your site next time I had an error?

<comment><USER8> Error codes, without all the other crap (bullshit paid forums, AOL nation posts) is reason enough for me.

<comment><USER9> Absolutely. I can't tell you how friggin' sick I am of inadvertently clicking on an "Experts Exchange" link in a google search set. The microsecond it takes my eyes to register an EE site and click back is one too many. I'm pretty sure EE owes me about 10 years of my life up to this point.

<comment><USER10> Member-only EE content is visible in Google's cached version of their pages. Just scroll to the bottom part of the page to see it. E.g.:

[http://188.8.131.52/search?q=cache:gRw9sjavhVAJ:www.expert...](http://18.104.22.168/search?q=cache:gRw9sjavhVAJ:www.experts- exchange.com/OS/Microsoft_Operating_Systems/Windows/XP/Q_21692879.html%3Fqid%3D21692879)

<comment><USER11> It's available from the regular version of the page too--just scroll to the bottom like you do on the cache:

[http://www.experts- exchange.com/OS/Microsoft_Operating_Syste...](http://www.experts- exchange.com/OS/Microsoft_Operating_Systems/Windows/XP/Q_21692879.html?qid=21692879)

<comment><USER12> Not for me. This 'trick' stopped working for me about a month ago, so now I have to use the cache links.

<comment><USER11> Interestingly it seems to be based on a referrer. It worked when I clicked the link from Google, not when I clicked it from here. Why are these clowns still in Google's index anyways, cloaking isn't allowed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> While working on a project about five years back using mainly Microsoft technologies, I discovered that there were a few consultants who had built their business around Windows error messages. Maybe you need to focus on the right segment of this market ;-)

<comment><USER14> Who hired their service?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> [http://www.errorkey.com/Search/Index.aspx?q=NoSuchError&...](http://www.errorkey.com/Search/Index.aspx?q=NoSuchError&btnS=Search)

Ugh, this error message is filled with errors and definitely needs copy editing. My best attempt:

      The search for "NoSuchError" did not match any documents in the system.

      For best results:

        * Type fewer words
        * Make sure you are using the correct spelling
        * Try different word combinations
        * Search the internet (???)

</comment><comment><USER16> First thought is that this seems to be much the same as <http://bug.gd>, except without the email thing. This is probably a good thing, if your results are good enough quality.

</comment><comment><USER17> I like the idea and think it will be powerful once you allow users to post info on how they resolved the errors. But Splunk already does this, no? Will this provide any new / easier / cheaper features?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think Splunk is an error search engine.

<comment><USER17> I stand corrected. I was thinking of how Splunk lets you search all your own logs for a specific error code. But I see how your use case is different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> You've created a lot of these search things haven't you? What are you planning to do with them all? Any plan on trying to monetize, or are they all just projects for fun?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our primary goal is to build tools that people can use, and then we will focus more on the money side. By the way the previous engines are already bringing in money; they are fully using the power of affiliate marketing. Check them out: qwili.com, qhoga.com, karatr.com.

Error key is a tool we build for hackers, ourselves it is more for a useful purpose than to make money.

<comment><USER19> Alas!

[http://qwili.com/Search/index.aspx?q=chu- hi&btnS=Search](http://qwili.com/Search/index.aspx?q=chu-hi&btnS=Search)

[http://qhoga.com/Search/index.aspx?q=gnomes&btnS=Search](http://qhoga.com/Search/index.aspx?q=gnomes&btnS=Search)

[http://karatr.com/Search/Index.aspx?q=replica+rolex&btnS...](http://karatr.com/Search/Index.aspx?q=replica+rolex&btnS=Search)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I know this is a really new project, and I would love to find a better way to search for errors... but how are you going to avoid "pulling a Cuil"?

The Search For : NullPointerException did not match any document in the system

For best Result:

        * Type less words
        * Type Words Correct Spelling
        * Try Different Word Combinations
        * Search the internet

<comment><AUTHOR> Please send us your search suggestion to ErrorKey at intelliverb dot com. Tell us what system you want us to research on, let's build this together thanks.

<comment><USER20> Is it possible to log all search queries that return 0 (or less than x) results, then report on that every day/week/month?

Would minimize the "I can't find xyz" type of feedback that you may or may not get.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm not sure how it works but 0xC0000005 works and 0x00000000C0000005 does not.

Is the site 64bit friendly?

</comment><comment><USER22> I think the real solution here is microformats, to be plugged into bug trackers and knowledge bases. Then something like this would be possible (just mocked it up myself):

<http://derefr.googlepages.com/google_errors.png>

</comment><comment><USER23> Interesting, try getting exceptions as well, that might be useful for debugging purposes.

</comment><comment><USER24> entering E_ERROR gives wierd results. If I were you, I'd save all searches, create a static page for that result and index it in google.

Since you're an affiliate marketer...

<comment><AUTHOR> Good Idea, Thanks. BTW we are not affiliate marketers; we build engines that leverage the power of affiliate marketing to deliver fairly good product search.

<comment><USER24> What may want to do is this (for all your search properties):

Let's say I am a user and I search for "Will Smith". I receive some results. I then search for "Will Smith Pictures". I receive more results. I then search for "Will Smith Pictures No Shirt". What has happened is that I received results that were not relevant, so I refined or changed my search till I found the item I was looking for.

So, my idea is that when you have a particular session searching, you aggregate the follow up queries for each search, and display them at the top of the search results to keep the users longer on your site and push more ads. Because in most cases, users will not click, but in about 10% of cases, the user will see something that he had not previously wanted to search for, but now wants to search for.

For example, I search for "Angelina Jolie", and as "recommended search" I see "Angelina Jolie affair with Max Klein", I would be curious to learn more about the affair Angelina had with this mysterious and probably dashingly handsome Max Klein, so I basically double my interaction with your site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Just a quick note: in your credits I think you mean to reference people's Trademarks, not Copyrights (you use the (c) instead of (tm))

<comment><AUTHOR> Right! We will fix that ASAP. Thanks for the remark.

<comment><USER26> I like the hints if no results are returned. this may sound more 'natural' though:

        Type fewer words
        Type Words with Correct Spelling

with regards to "Try Different Word Combinations", I assume you mean the ordering of my search keywords ("apple pie" "pie apple")? If so, why does word ordering make a difference?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Honestly I think getting into the search market is a waste of time. Too many fish in the sea, and too many sea monsters.

Also: why no API? :)

<comment><AUTHOR> API is a great Idea thanks for the hint. : )

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Great Idea!!! bookmarked.</comment>


Finally, Elastic Computing That You Don't Have To Share - <AUTHOR> http://www.rackspace.com/blog/finally-elastic-computing-that-you-dont-have-to-share/

<comment><USER2> While a cool option, they make it sound offering bare metal compute is new. SoftLayer was built on this model ...</comment>


How did Buffett obtain the large capital to initially start investing? - <AUTHOR>

I know that he was always into finding different ways to earn money since a young age, i.e. putting gaming machines in public places, paper route etc... All of these things tie into his incredible work ethic, however, they certainly didn't generate much income.
Initially he said that he started with only 10k after graduating from University. Starting with 10k is a very small amount and would take significant time to grow even if he was making several multiples on his investments.
With that said, you need reletively large sums of capital to make significant profits, so I'm guessing he was running a hedge fund of some sort in the early days and investing other peoples money and taking a percentage?
Can anyone back this up?
Thanks. <comment><USER2> In 1952,[28] Buffett married Susan Thompson at Dundee Presbyterian Church and the next year they had their first child, Susan Alice Buffett. In 1954, Buffett accepted a job at Benjamin Graham's partnership. His starting salary was $12,000 a year (approximately $105,000 inflation adjusted for the 2012 USD[23]). There he worked closely with Walter Schloss. Graham was a tough man to work for. He was adamant that stocks provide a wide margin of safety after weighting the trade-off between their price and their intrinsic value. The argument made sense to Buffett but he questioned whether the criteria were too stringent and caused the company to miss out on big winners that had more qualitative values.[citation needed] That same year the Buffetts had their second child, Howard Graham Buffett. In 1956, Benjamin Graham retired and closed his partnership. At this time Buffett's personal savings were over $174,000 ($1.47 million inflation adjusted to 2012 USD[23]) and he started Buffett Partnership Ltd., an investment partnership in Omaha.

Buffett's home in Omaha In 1957, Buffett had three partnerships operating the entire year. He purchased a five-bedroom stucco house in Omaha, where he still lives, for $31,500. In 1958 the Buffetts' third child, Peter Andrew Buffett, was born. Buffett operated five partnerships the entire year. In 1959, the company grew to six partnerships operating the entire year and Buffett was introduced to Charlie Munger. By 1960, Buffett had seven partnerships operating: Buffett Associates, Buffett Fund, Dacee, Emdee, Glenoff, Mo-Buff and Underwood. He asked one of his partners, a doctor, to find ten other doctors willing to invest $10,000 each in his partnership. Eventually eleven agreed, and Buffett pooled their money with a mere $100 original investment of his own. In 1961, Buffett revealed that Sanborn Map Company accounted for 35% of the partnership's assets. He explained that in 1958 Sanborn stock sold at only $45 per share when the value of the Sanborn investment portfolio was $65 per share. This meant that buyers valued Sanborn stock at "minus $20" per share and were unwilling to pay more than 70 cents on the dollar for an investment portfolio with a map business thrown in for nothing. This earned him a spot on the board of Sanborn.

wikipedia

<comment><USER3> "In 1950 ... Buffett had made and saved $9,800. In 1954 ... his starting salary was $12,000 a year. In 1956, ... Buffett's personal savings were over $174,000."

So with the generous assumptions that Buffett's salary was paid in full in advance each year and he made $12000 every year and he had no personal expenses and he paid no tax on his gains, Buffett would have needed a rate of return of 15%-ish to hit those savings numbers. Or 22% if he saved only $8000 per year from his paid-in-full in-advance salary. Pretty much any set of assumptions is pretty outlandish. Can someone clarify how he hit those numbers?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Couldn't tell you exact dollar amounts, but 10k in 1950 was equivalent to 100k today. That's enough to show 10-20% annual gains and establish credibility.

He fairly quickly started investing other people's money once he showed promise (one of the reasons there are supposedly several millionaire farmers in Nebraska), but his father's connections likely helped.

Source: I've been following Munger & Buffett for years.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's possible to earn extraordinary returns on a small amount of capital. Warren Buffett has stated that the highest rates of return he ever achieved were in the 1950s.

</comment><comment><USER6> One of the things that surprises me is the fantastic growth rates of the immediate post war period. I seriously doubt if Buffet can ever be repeated simply because the situation of America in the 1950s can probably never be repeated (without a globally devastating war and then a agricultural and antibiotic revolution leading to tripling of world population)

So I think just aiming for millionaire is a good target.</comment>


BlogUpp! - the easiest way to get readers and traffic for quality blogs - <AUTHOR> http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=T&ct=us/9-0&fd=R&url=http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/3/prweb743294.htm

<comment><USER2> vbactu, is this your service? I'm impressed that the link goes directly to the prweb.com press release. No more veiled submarine references here!

Here's a link to the actual service: <http://www.blogupp.com/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> pchristensen, yes, i'm the co-founder. I've given the link as shown by my google alerts for blogupp.com I'll consider your recommendation for future. Thanks.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A must try service for every blogger</comment>


JavaScript console bookmarklet for any web page - <AUTHOR> http://tlrobinson.net/misc/console_bookmarklet.html

<comment><AUTHOR> A short description:

The Console is a JavaScript console in bookmarklet form for executing JavaScript code in any web page. Features auto-completion, line editing, history, and more.

(from <http://tlrobinson.net/projects/js/>)</comment>


CSS3 interactive bird poster (HD) - <AUTHOR> http://yillustrate.co.nz/poster/index.html

<comment><AUTHOR> View with Chrome or Safari with a screen resolution of 2560px (27" iMac) for best viewing.

</comment><comment><USER2> Looks interesting, but a bit slow to load. Maybe a lower resolution photo?</comment>


Basic rules of Web User Interface? - <AUTHOR>

I'm beginning to work on our site and wondering what are the basic do's and dont's from a useability perspective. The site is intended to educated customers on our new product and entice them to download a free trial. We expect all our customers to be US based, predominantly english speaking and varying education levels. Suggestions on do's and dont's for color theme would also be very helpful.<p>thanks <comment><AUTHOR> I was looking for a slightly more resourceful response! We dont have the cash to hire someone although we could certainly afford to buy a book and begin to learn. Any suggestions?

</comment><comment><USER2> the only advice i can really give you is to hire someone to do this for you.</comment>


Macron campaign emails appear to be leaked online - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-election-macron-leaks-idUSKBN1812AZ?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=Social <comment><USER2> Active discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14277346](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14277346)

</comment><comment><USER3> > Comments about the email dump began to appear on Friday evening just hours > before the official ban on campaigning began. The ban is due to stay in > place until the last polling stations close on Sunday at 8 p.m. (1800 GMT).

What's the situation in France about the media? I know in some countries, media is allowed to report on some changes in the campaign during the election silence, and just the candidates and their campaign members are the ones that are not allowed to make public statements. Is it the same situation in France too or is the media not allowed from reporting about the changes as well?

</comment><comment><USER4> Prediction: using email for only the most vapid messages will be standard practice for politicians.

<comment><USER5> More likely: IT guys will implement 1-month retention policies, causing campaign members to save locally, offering different opportunities for attackers.

<comment><USER6> We now have retention policies on both server and local stored email, ugh.</comment></comment></comment>


The Digital Loeb Classical Library - <AUTHOR> http://www.hup.harvard.edu/features/loeb/digital.html

<comment><USER2> Why are they charging for access to ebooks, many of which are already in the public domain and available at archive.org[1]?

[1] [https://archive.org/search.php?query=loeb%20classical%20libr...](https://archive.org/search.php?query=loeb%20classical%20library%20AND%20mediatype%3Atexts)</comment>


How To Sell Something: Make Up A Story - <AUTHOR> http://www.trademe.co.nz/Home-living/Laundry/Washing-machines/Top-loader-6kg-under/auction-223309871.htm

<comment><USER2> But, apparently if you do it too well, folks will make false bids just to be part of the story. No way is anyone paying $350 for a crappy old washer (when a midrange new one sells for that or less).</comment>


Ask HN: What are your favorite books on the history of ideas and inventions? - <AUTHOR> I read Dealers of Lightning some time ago and I find myself wanting more (not necessarily in the field of computing). Any recommendations? <comment><USER2> "Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology is a history of science by Isaac Asimov, written as the biographies of over 1500 scientists."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimov's_Biographical_Encyclop...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimov's_Biographical_Encyclopedia_of_Science_and_Technology)

fuzz

</comment><comment><USER3> Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is pretty spectacular. He takes a travel writer's eye to the history of science and puts together an incredibly accessible and compelling tour.

<comment><USER4> Thumbs up fir Bryson. To take it a step further, Boorstin's "The Discoverers" is a longer, more encompassing version of scientific discoveries.

Also, "Empires of Light" is a great chronology of events and people(Tesla, Edison, Westinghouse, JP Morgan) leading to the modern, electric world.

One more, "The Idea Factory" is a history of Bell Labs. It is surprisingly light on programming but makes up for it in the hardware/electronics topics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> An unusually good read - James Dyson's quest to reinvent, build, and then successfully market his vacuum cleaner > [http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/955045.Against_the_Odds](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/955045.Against_the_Odds)

</comment><comment><USER6> The Innovators by Walter Isaacson

</comment><comment><USER7> I read _The Most Powerful Idea in the World_ by William Rosen last year and really enjoyed it.

Ostensibly its about the steam engine, but the idea referenced in the title is really patents.

</comment><comment><USER8> Dyson: Turing's Cathedral Feyerabend: Against Method

</comment><comment><USER9> iWoz was really interesting</comment>


Show HN: TurboHist: Turbo Histogram Construction - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/powturbo/TurboHist <comment><USER2> 1\. What's the license of TurboPFor,TurboRLE ?

2\. Have you tried comparing TurboPFor that with roaring bitmaps ?

3\. Have you tried if it makes sense putting it in lucene (on the postings list)?

4\. What forums would you suggest for low level stuff on compression,indexes,search-engine,db-engine,mechanical-sympathy ?

5\. What do you work on in real-life? Or licensing the libs?

6\. Is it possible to make lucene 10X+ faster and what would need to be done (in high level) ? (like what scylladb did to cassandra, like they didn't change the language but architecture explained here: [http://www.scylladb.com/technology/architecture/](http://www.scylladb.com/technology/architecture/))

7\. What do you think of bing/bitfunnel using bloom-filters instead of posting-lists [http://bitfunnel.org/strangeloop/](http://bitfunnel.org/strangeloop/) ?

8\. And about [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/trishulc/paper...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/trishulc/papers/Maguro.pdf) ? Distributing documents by 'term' instead of 'id' ?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. What's the license of TurboPFor,TurboRLE ?

GPL (see license in the source files).

2\. Have you tried comparing TurboPFor that with roaring bitmaps ?

No, but because of the size overhead of roaring bitmaps they can be only used for few integer arrays. For example when collecting intermediate results for queries. Whereas there are no size limits for TurboPFor functions (ex. millions of tiny or big arrays).

3\. Have you tried if it makes sense putting it in lucene (on the postings list)?

Some expriments with SIMD posting lists in lucene are reporting ~20% gains. see [http://blog-archive.griddynamics.com/2015/06/lucene-simd- cod...](http://blog-archive.griddynamics.com/2015/06/lucene-simd-codec- benchmark-and-future.html) Posting lists are only one part in a search engine. The whole architecture must be taken into account, like parallel indexing, parallel query processing, particularly intersections.

4\. What forums would you suggest for low level stuff on compression,indexes,search-engine,db-engine,mechanical-sympathy ?

I'm not aware of special forums for SE, but there are excellent academic papers on this subject. Some pointers: [https://github.com/lemire](https://github.com/lemire), [https://twitter.com/powturbo](https://twitter.com/powturbo), arxiv.org, Papers about in memory database like about SAP-HANA,...

5\. What do you work on in real-life? Or licensing the libs?

?

6\. Is it possible to make lucene 10X+ faster and what would need to be done (in high level) ?

Multicores parallel shared nothing architecture like the on in the TurboPFor inverted index app and a ram resident inverted index.

7\. What do you think of bing/bitfunnel using bloom-filters instead of posting-lists [http://bitfunnel.org/strangeloop/](http://bitfunnel.org/strangeloop/) ?

Bloom filters are lossy per definition and here again posting lists are only one part in a SE. Currently with TurboPFor, mostly frequent terms are taking in average less than one bit per posting for document ids. Term positions required for phrase queries taking the large part of an inverted index are difficult to compress.

8\. And about [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/trishulc/paper...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/trishulc/paper..). ? Distributing documents by 'term' instead of 'id' ?

It is always possible to do the partitioning by both term and doc-ids. For large scale search engines there is no alternative to a ram resident (memory mapped) inverted index, if you want maximum performance. See for ex. inverted index app in TurboPFor.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, I really appreciate it. Already follow Lemire. I think I've seen you also on encode.ru though that's only for compression. There's also [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mechanical- sympathy](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mechanical-sympathy) . Regarding the answers:

3\. About "parallel query processing". You mean like using multiple cores for 1 query ? Since data is in ram I thought it would be more efficient for single thread ? Or do you mean parallel on the segments (like lucene does) ?

5\. I meant what do you do to put food on the table ? Like Lemming is professor. Are you employed/contractor/business ?(just curious)

9\. What about "global terms dictionary" ? Or 'global document-id-->numeric- id' dictionary ? Like a service where you send term/doc-id(say url) and get back the numeric-id? Or would those make the posting lists not compresable ? (just thinking ways of lowering overhead on each shard so they take more documents)

10\. What about gpu/fpga/asic ,you know of any paper/way that can be used for a search-engine and provides enough value compared to just adding more cpu/ram ? Or they're limited too much by low memory? If yes what about having a ssd(nvme?) on the gpu like AMD intends to? Or using NVME for a ram extension, since it 'acts' like a slower+persistent ram ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your nice feedback.

3\. About "parallel query processing"....

I mean, each thread (index server) is responsible for only one shard/segment/partition. You need a local broker (1 per PC/node) to read client queries and dispatch them to all index server threads. Each thread processes the query on its own partition and sends back the results to the broker. The broker collects and merges the results and sends the query answer to the client. The client can be another global broker controlling serveral multicores PCs. Most of this is implemented in the the TurboPFor inverted index demo.

9\. What about "global terms dictionary" ? Or 'global document-id-->numeric- id' dictionary ?

I think, term dictionaries are not a problem, you can have one lexicon per PC/node (common to all local partitions) accessed from all index server threads.

10\. What about gpu/fpga/asic,you know of any paper/way that can be used for a search-engine and provides enough value compared to just adding more cpu/ram ?

For maximum performance, you must have the whole index in the GPU own memory, otherwise the memory transfer will be the bottleneck. All query processing like decoding and intersections must be done on the GPU.

<comment><USER2> 3\. I was thinking more of mmaping the index, and assuming it's smaller than ram, it will always be in ram. This way all cores have access to the same index and can satisfy all queries (and not having to keep separate data structures for each core + 1 less merge). Or you mean it's faster this way (how, meaning local-memory faster than mmap in-memory?)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you can simply mmap the index file. The index server have not to read the index at the start. The goal of query processing is to decrease the query latency, this is why it is better/necessary to do partitioning. Each query can be processed simultaneously by all threads. Intersections are very costly for long posting lists.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Annotated version of an original Deus Ex design doc surfaces - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/285520/Annotated_version_of_an_original_Deus_Ex_design_doc_surfaces.php <comment><USER2> This is cool to see.

I even more enjoyed the oral history of Deus Ex development that it links to from the intro. A really fun, nostalgic, and pretty relateable read. And somewhat in contradiction to this post, has the quote:

> From what I can recall, there was no continuously updated design doc for > Deus Ex. If there was, I never saw it and I didn't get access to it.

Another cool excerpt:

> Basic sounds in speech, like "ah" or "ooh" or whatever, they all have > frequency fingerprints, basically. Even with the low CPU power at our > disposal, I could do a really low-resolution fast Fourier transform to > analyze the speech as it was being output to the sound card, chop it up and > try to match it with phonemes. Then I could use that to send hints to the > animation system to move the lips.

> So I had the artists animate the face bones, of which we only had like two, > I think -- it was super low-poly -- and I had 'em go with eight phonemes to > animate face poses for. Except, they'd do it on the base pose and I'd blend > in the animations on the face in real time based on what the audio does.

… for a game that came out in 2000! Pretty cool.

[http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/240456/Developing_Deus_Ex...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/240456/Developing_Deus_Ex_An_oral_history.php)

</comment><comment><USER3> One famous piece of trivia about Deus Ex is that, if you look at the city skyline during the missions set in New York City, the Twin Towers are conspicuously absent. The real reason for their exclusion isn't very interesting: something to do with memory constraints. So in the game's fiction, the Towers were destroyed by terrorists. Deus Ex was released in 2000, a year before 9/11.

\----

'How deus ex predicted the future'

[https://www.google.com/amp/kotaku.com/how-deus-ex- predicted-...](https://www.google.com/amp/kotaku.com/how-deus-ex-predicted- the-future-1616252703/amp?client=ms-android-att-us)

<comment><USER4> The specifics here are that the New York skyline was originally two big textures covering two faces of the skybox. Late in production, to save video memory they cut one texture and replaced it with a mirror of the other one, of course cutting the side with the towers so that they wouldn't show up twice.

(Source is an old IGN interview that I hunted down ages ago, because every time this trivia shows up somewhere there tends to be a comment war about how removing a building from a skyline _couldn 't possibly_ save memory, blather blather.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Deus Ex got me at the perfect time in my life (15 y/o pseudo-intellectual nerd) so I really loved the game, so reading this was great. Such was my nerd infatuation with this game, that as I was reading about the various locations, the corresponding music would pop into my brain almost immediately, a testament to the great soundtrack (eg. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FZ-12a3dTI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FZ-12a3dTI) )

Especially interesting is seeing how the times and what we expect from videogames have changed, on page 23 there's a dejected nod to people expecting a 90s first person game to have multiplayer, even though it's primarily a single player RPG, but they'll do it as a bullet point to go on the back of the box.

<comment><USER6> Definitely agree about the soundtrack. I find myself listening to it while working quite a bit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ah, the good old times, when the cost of creativity wasnt so astronomically high. If you wanted to risk something, you would just take some time of the working-charts and do it, letting the team then vote on results. No- push your idea in front of the high council, no guiding whats left of it along the pipeline, you just wrote the dialogue, scripted the mission, reused some existing assets, and polished it till it was accepted.

Those where the days.

</comment><comment><USER8> I am currently playing Mankind Divided and have been reading into the art direction from interviews with the art director.

I just love the world they have created and the way they utilize it to tell the story. One of their ethos is "show don't tell" and you can see they have really taken it to heart. The locations tell the story just as well as the dialog does.

<comment><USER9> You simple cannot compare Deus Ex 3 and 4 with Deus Ex 1. Deus Ex 1 is a much different and better game, a lot of thought went into it, the player can do so much more it's not even funny. No other game with Deus Ex in the name comes even close. Play Deus Ex 1 first and come back later, though some may never get into DX1 because the graphics hasn't aged that well.

<comment><USER10> We used to play Deus Ex 1 in a pair. The game was so different for each player and their playing style that it never got boring. We completed the whole game in this way.

One highlight that I remember was the explanation of mass surveillance being a replacement for less religion in a society. In the past people censored themselves because God was always watching. It was hoped that people would continue to censor themselves because Echelon was always recording and datamining.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b-bijO3uEw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b-bijO3uEw)

This was an optional cut scene and not part of the main story -- my friend found this, I never got this cut scene when I played.

I agree that Deus Ex 1 is so special that anything after does not compare. This does not belittle the sequels, its just that the original was so good.

<comment><USER11> "God was a dream of good government" is a very interesting idea to ponder.

<comment><USER12> If you'd like more to ponder, the formation of the Roman Catholic church may be worth exploring.

<comment><USER11> Eastern Orthodoxy, with its "symphonia of powers" caesaropapism, is equally interesting IMO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Fascinating how the design doc simultaneously seems to describe an entirely different game yet already shares so many similarities with what would finally become Deus Ex.

EDIT: The postmortem linked at the end of the post also includes an even older pitch for the game from 1994 which has even less in common with the final release. It's amazing how the game mutated from "rugged ex-cop action movie shooter" to "cyberpunk conspiracy drama" where it's actually possible to beat the game without killing anyone.

<comment><USER14> > where it's actually possible to beat the game without killing anyone.

It's been a long time since I last played the game but I don't believe that's true without cheating.

<comment><USER15> without any bug exploiting, you can use killphrases on anne and run away from gunther (or use killphrase too). I think Howard Strong is the only guy you have to actually kill.

<comment><USER16> Technically you also kill (indirectly) the crew of the ship you scuttle, Maggie, the Area 51 staff who are outside when you diverted the missile etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is the actual PDF available somewhere instead of having to jump through Scribd hoops?

<comment><USER18> It's shared via Google Drive from the reddit post[0] linked in the OP: [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2_-knUokw90RzIwUEJsU2pYdWs...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2_-knUokw90RzIwUEJsU2pYdWs/view)

[0]: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/5crvld/full_dx1_desi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/5crvld/full_dx1_design_doc_with_annotations_by_warren/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> [https://nuwen.net/dx.html](https://nuwen.net/dx.html) also has a ton of information about the game

</comment><comment><USER20> Reinstalling.

<comment><USER16> The installation along with mods is less than a GB so I optimised by not uninstalling it in the first place.</comment></comment>


Synchronous languages - <AUTHOR> http://www-sop.inria.fr/meije/rp/ROS/Tt-SM.html <comment><USER2> I worked on Lustre as an undergrad student in my third year of studies. The goal of my internship was to develop a tiny system layer to allow dynamic scheduling of Lustre tasks, rather than only having static scheduling (which has a lot of advantage wrt formal verification possibilities). I remember having a lot of fun doing so (partly thanks to the people I worked with, but also because Lustre is a very cool language to play with).

My internship report, which contains a few snippets of Lustre code, is here if anyone is interested: [https://pablo.rauzy.name/research/undergrad/verimag.pdf](https://pablo.rauzy.name/research/undergrad/verimag.pdf)

Internship defense slides: [https://pablo.rauzy.name/research/undergrad/verimag- slides.p...](https://pablo.rauzy.name/research/undergrad/verimag-slides.pdf) (ewww these colors… sorry for what 2010 me did with that).

</comment><comment><USER3> What's a synchronous language? I don't see the term explained on the page

<comment><USER4> A synchronous language models everything as a mathematical function that is completely evaluated every « tick » of a clock (hence the term synchronous). It is very convenient for real time software: the resulting executable code is a single function that is evaluated repeatedly against its input every t seconds.

Disclaimer: looks easy, but if you take a few non trivial examples with concurrent state machines and contemplate the resulting C code, you will quickly understand why having a dedicated language is a good idea as opposed to trying to do it by hand.

<comment><USER2> In addition to that it allows to have fixed and known constraints in terms of resources. Actually the semantics and implementations of synchronous languages enable proving a lot of safety properties using model checking. This is very important for real time critical systems.

The paradigm is also adapted to graphical programming (using boxes and wires) which is quite an advantage for some field of engineering where the specialists are not programmers.

SCADE is an example of a successful industrial product that use synchronous programming: [http://www.esterel-technologies.com/products/scade- suite/](http://www.esterel-technologies.com/products/scade-suite/) (it is actually more based on Lustre despite the company being called Esterel Technologies).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've read some about Esterelle, but no other contact. Had anyone had any experience with any of these?

One of my professors had an idea about distributed synchronous programming, but nothing ever came of it.

<comment><USER2> > One of my professors had an idea about distributed synchronous programming, > but nothing ever came of it.

It shouldn't be too difficult to distribute synchronous languages, and it is a quite natural idea. Most have a semantics based on Kahn networks [1], which is already a distributed model of computation :).

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

<comment><USER6> > _It shouldn 't be too difficult to distribute synchronous languages, and it > is a quite natural idea. Most have a semantics based on Kahn networks [1], > which is already a distributed model of computation :)._

I don't think this is correct. Kahn networks are asynchronous (and therefore well-suited for distributed systems), but synchronous languages are – well, synchronous.

For every pair of nodes that exchange information, there has to be a rendezvous between them after every non-instantaneous step [1], which is terrible for performance in a distributed system (but virtually free in typical single-clocked, synchronous digital circuits).

[1] You can devise heuristics which reduce the frequency of those rendezvous in some cases, but conceptually, they're still there.

<comment><USER2> Mh, you're right.

However, there is a notion of synchronous Kahn networks, but maybe it is only used by functional synchronous and dataflow languages (e.g., Lucid Synchrone, ReactiveML). Compilation of such languages involve clock calculus (i.e. typing for scheduling) which I think makes it possible to compute the maximum size of a queue in the network (or maybe at least guarantee that the size is bounded?). This would mean that what you call rendezvous points would be statically computable (in the case of pure synchronous languages it should be easy as the maximum queue size is zero, or one depending on how we count).

Anyway, you're right that I was mistaken to think that it was an easy problem.

EDIT: Heh: [https://www.lri.fr/~mandel/papiers/MandelPlateauPouzet- MPC-1...](https://www.lri.fr/~mandel/papiers/MandelPlateauPouzet-MPC-10.pdf) :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some examples on the usage of synchronous languages: [http://zelus.di.ens.fr/examples.html#ex- bouncingball](http://zelus.di.ens.fr/examples.html#ex-bouncingball)</comment>


Nationalism Gaining Ground in India - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-12/why-hindu-nationalism-keeps-gaining-ground-in-india-quicktake <comment><AUTHOR> Not sure of Bloomberg's objective writing this article. Are they saying Narendra modi is a great leader?</comment>


Splinter: Python tool for acceptance tests on web applications - <AUTHOR> http://www.franciscosouza.com/2011/05/splinter-python-tool-for-acceptance-tests-on-web-applications/

<comment><USER2> I think what you've done is cool, but lets be clear that this is not really a testing tool, per se. It's just an interface that is compatible with several browser automation tools.

Cucumber, FitNesse, and robotframework are testing frameworks. xUnit frameworks can act as one. If you look at Robot's architecture ([http://robotframework.googlecode.com/hg/doc/userguide/RobotF...](http://robotframework.googlecode.com/hg/doc/userguide/RobotFrameworkUserGuide.html?r=2.5.7#high- level-architecture)) what you've written would occupy the "Test Tools" tier.

A nit pick - 'acceptance testing' really refers to the purpose of the test, whether it's automated or manual. Splinter is a test tool - it would work equally well for regression testing, smoke testing, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> tl;dr Great library, thanks for helping the Pythonistas keep up with the rubyists, can't wait to try it.

\---

I've been developing a DSL for acceptance testing (not unlike Cucumber, but more pythonic and with further bias towards on web acceptance testing) while concurrently implementing a test suite for our startup's web application.

A tool like this has been seriously lacking within the Python community and I'd like to take the time out to say thanks!

I'm probably going to stick with my own selenium + mechanize scripts for the first version of this suite, but I'm definitely going to check this library out as we move on. I'm sick of writing multiple tests for the same functionality.

As for people who are complaining that this isn't a Cucumber replacement... you're right! However, the point of this library isn't to replace a framework like cucumber, but rather to enhance it. The idea is that if you write your cucumber/whatever tests using this library, you won't have to repeat yourself w.r.t. the various types of test you might want to investigate (e.g. a mechanize test is much faster than a heavyweight selenium run).

</comment><comment><USER4> Seems useful.

Is there a way to integrate this with a development version of Django? I.e. the Client() is really useful to test the backend but it could be great to also use this library to test the front-end. I mean, it's a bit "late" to test the front-end if it's already live no?

<comment><AUTHOR> If my live front-end breaks, I certainly want to be the first to know that.

Yes. I have cron-jobs running tests on live sites looking for broken things.

<comment><USER5> So that means you can only test read-only features of your site then? I can't imagine you want dummy test data floating around your production servers.

I don't know if this really qualifies as an acceptance test, it's more like an advanced version of Pingdom.

<comment><AUTHOR> It really depends on how your application is structured. If only the test sees the test data, you can easily do it on the live site. If there were a hundred test accounts in gmail sending mail back an forth to and from other services, you would never know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How's it different than <http://seleniumhq.org/> ?

<comment><USER7> You could think of it as an alternative API for Selenium WebDriver. It uses Selenium to be able to drive Firefox and Chrome, although the idea might be to add other back-ends in the future. Splinter's API may or may not be better, but Selenium's major advantage is that many test cases can be written with little to no code using Selenium-IDE. QA can generate test cases without programming resources.

Splinter seems to inherit some of Selenium's weaknesses. There's no way to test HTTP status codes and headers, so you can verify that the _user_ sees the error but you can't verify that the _user agent_ sees it. You can't test that static resources are being properly cached (or not).

It also seems to add new limitations. Selenium has complete support for drag- and-drop, moving the mouse around, etc. I don't see equivalent functionality in Splinter.

Timeouts seem to be handled worse than Selenium. There's a default timeout of 2 seconds for requests. I guess your test is expected to assert that the content is there after each request, to fail on timeout. Since partial content can be delivered (on rendering errors and possibly on timeout during rendering), I guess you need to check for the footer's presence. Timeouts seem like such an exceptional condition that I'd just throw.

Perhaps because of the version of Selenium they're using, the sample sleeps for 10 seconds after doing an asynchronous file upload because it can't wait for the IFRAME to load. This means that the test case can't finish faster than 10 seconds (a problem for large suites) and the test can fail (if the file is large enough or the network is slow enough) even when the application's behavior is correct. Selenium (in trunk, at least) has waitForFrameToLoad/wait_for_frame_to_load that looks like a better solution.

None of these are fatal problems, especially for a young project. A good API can be a very worthwhile thing.</comment></comment>


What number is halfway between 1 and 9? - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/thinking-logarithmically-1005.html <comment><USER2> According to the research discussed in this article, when the intensity of some sensory stimuli increases exponentially, our minds somehow _unconsciously_ perceive the increase as linear. Our perception, in other words, is often logarithmic.

What I find most fascinating about this is that our _conscious_ minds are not very good at thinking about exponential growth. My favorite example is that of the twin brothers who invest with annual gains of 12% each: one twin saves $2,000 from age 19 to 26 (a total of $16,000) and then stops saving; the other twin doesn't start saving until age 27 but then puts away $2,000 every year until age 65 (a total of $78,000). Do the math, and you will see that the savings of the second twin, growing at 12% every year, _never_ catch up with those of the first one.

Our perception might often be logarithmic, and we might understand the math of exponentiation, but our brains are not very good at 'seeing' exponential growth!

<comment><USER3> > My favorite example is...

This exact thing caught me out a few weeks ago, it still boggles my mind. I started a pension recently and I was given examples of how much I would be worth if I started as soon as possible (my 21st birthday) or if I waited until I was 22, 23, 24... if my total monthly contributions are $2,000 and I start on my 21st birthday I will be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars more than if I started at 23, or 25, but my brain thinks that is insane and even though I _know_ it's true, I still can't get over it. The difference between 21 and 23 is $160,000!

going even more on a tangent, it's really a great shame this sort of thing isn't taught in schools. It seems obvious _now_ after being taught that savings can vary so much this way with so little time, but until I was explained it I had no idea. I figured waiting until 25 or 30 to start a pension made most sense!

<comment><USER4> Those estimates are often wrong though, because the idea of annual 12% returns is complete fiction. In fact the idea of any particular percentage annually is fiction. For instance, I only recently started a pension, however if you look at the stock market history (for simplicity), had I started in 2000, the net gain I could have expected was almost precisely zero, if not negative. If I could have found something that paid 12% from 2000 to 2012, sure, I would have missed out on a lot, but there in fact not only was no such beast (in the broad sense), there was also a lot of ways to experience negative gain.

This is one of my favorite visualizations ever: [http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/02/business/20110...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/02/business/20110102-metrics- graphic.html) Be sure to _carefully read_ what it is actually visualizing; I've posted this a couple times and people often knee-jerk a reaction to it based on a complete misreading of the chart.

<comment><USER5> Interesting chart.

Strange, at one point it says "High inlfation led to negative returns". When money is worth less, then you get more money when you sell something. In this case your share of a company. So why would the returns of investing in the S&P be affected by inflation?

<comment><USER6> Inflation affects the number that you use to value the worth of a company.

Say you buy one share at $10 of a company with a billion outstanding shares. That company is worth, on the market, $10 billion.

Let's say that next year, the company's share price is still $10. Let's also say that inflation in that period was 4%. The company is still worth $10 billion, but each dollar is worth 4% less. The company's total value has dropped.

Inflation didn't cause the total value to drop. The company's value dropped for other reasons (bad sales, company president went crazy, market jitters, whatever causes these things) and inflation simply moved the numbers a bit in the opposite direction.

In short: inflation doesn't affect your returns, but it affects the numbers you use to measure them.

<comment><USER5> You say "In short: inflation doesn't affect your returns". And thats what I said. But the linked article says the opposite: "High inlfation led to negative returns".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 1.8 (harmonic mean)

Seriously though, I thought we already knew that human perception is mostly logarithmic (for example, the eye performs well across 9 magnitudes of brightness – a linear system doesn't make sense). On the other hand, human perception of future value has generally found to be discounted hyperbolically, which is illogical (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_discounting>).

I wonder is there is a correspondence with the harmonic mean but I can't get my head around it at the moment.

<comment><USER8> Not illogical: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_discounting#Uncertai...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_discounting#Uncertain_risks)

<comment><USER9> The reason why it is usually considered irrational/illogical is because hyperbolic discounting leads to dynamically inconsistent preferences. For example, under hyperbolic discounting I may prefer $100 today to $150 in one month, but prefer $150 in 61 months to $100 in 60 months. It's the same rate of discounting in both cases ($50 for an additional month of delay) but my preferences are not consistent.

Of course, there are other criteria for rationality besides coherence/consistency (as the wikipedia article alludes to).

<comment><USER8> But if you view the payoff as not certain, $100 now is worth a lot more than $150 in a month - because you are here now with $100. The $150 is worth its normal discount rate multiplied by the strength of the probability that you will be here in a month with $150. The discount rate here is entirely due differences in risk of nonpayment - which are marginal when comparing 60 months to 61 months, but massive when comparing now to an hour from now.

According to criteria that would label hyperbolic discounting irrational or illogical, debt collectors are equally confused for not accepting the promise of a $100,000 payoff 50 years from now rather than a settling of the debt today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "But pose the same question to small children, or people living in some traditional societies, and they're likely to answer 3."

Citation needed! I mean, if "half" is not understood as mathematically half, how can traditional societies even have an economy?

<comment><USER11> It's not "half," though, it's "halfway between." This implies a mean, but which mean to use is not explicitly expressed. Choosing the arithmetic mean gives 5, choosing the geometric mean gives 3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Radiolab's Numbers episode covered this fascinating topic back in 2009: <http://www.radiolab.org/2009/nov/30/>

</comment><comment><USER13> Where is the study that showed "But pose the same question to small children, or people living in some traditional societies, and they're likely to answer 3."

Without a source on this, it's a difficult article to take the article seriously. It offers no support for its most prominent claim.

</comment><comment><USER14> "Hi, quick question: Which number is halfway between 100 and 10,000?"

"1000. No, wait..."

(I might actually say that)

</comment><comment><USER15> Interesting... this has been something I've postulated for several years now. My reasoning had most to do with our vision system. As we perceive distances, the distance between something 10 feet, 100 feet, 1000 feet away, etc, becomes less about knowing the absolute difference and more about relative distances; someone is more likely to determine that something is 110 feet away than they are to realize something is 1010... but realizing something is 1100 rather than 1000 feet away will feel about as off as suggesting something 110 feet away is really 100. Our vision measurements are further reinforced as we observe parallax scrolling as we are driven around the country in our youth.

I've also felt that teaching a number system that is linear means that it is harder to understand the difference between 100 and 1000000000. Even many adults find it difficult to understand the magnitude of numbers when you approach a billion or a trillion. I think this is largely because we are taught to think in a relatively small range of the number line and perceiving numbers outside that range, we try to relate it back to what we were taught in schools.

I'd love to see schools teach a logarithmical number line instead of the linear system kids are taught today.

</comment><comment><USER16> Perhaps the fact that human brains seem hardwired to perceive relative differences by orders of magnitude is an argument for graphing logarithmically by default, instead of linearly.

</comment><comment><USER17> Musical scales are exponential as well. (octaves are frequency doublings) There's also this experimental evidence about sensing loudness, weight, vibration, lightness, saltiness, thickness and several dozen other things. From: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevens%27_power_law> ...

The general form of the law is

ψ(I) = kI^a

where I is the magnitude of the physical stimulus, ψ(I) is the psychophysical function relating to the subjective magnitude of the sensation evoked by the stimulus, a is an exponent that depends on the type of stimulation and k is a proportionality constant that depends on the type of stimulation and the units used.

</comment><comment><USER18> Radiolab did a good piece about this. <http://www.radiolab.org/2009/nov/30/innate-numbers/>

</comment><comment><USER19> What does it mean when you can't answer the question properly and said "4.5"?

<comment><USER20> You're either a math major or an engineer. We can't do simple math anymore. Please give it to us in the form of an integral.

Also, there's the ambiguity of "inclusive or exclusive? And, which side?"

[1,9], (1,9], [1,9) or (1,9)?

<comment><USER21> Those ambiguities make no difference to the answer. Answering 4.5 just means you forgot that starting a count from 0 gives a different total than starting from 1.

<comment><USER20> If you're using the set of integers, then [1,9) is equivalent to [1,8]; and that would have a different answer from 5 for "what the center is"; so, it does affect the answer.

<comment><USER21> [1,9) is not equivalent to [1,8]. The center of [1,9) is infinitesimally close to the center of [1,9]. Its exactly equal when you take the limit.

<comment><USER20> ... I was using that nomenclature for the short hand of "inclusive/exclusive". 1 to 9 exclusive is 1 to 8 in the integer set. Sorry for the lack of clarity. Perhaps now we can get to my original point?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> For anyone who hikes or goes outdoor, this might be obvious.

If you notice how we perceive distances, it's logarithmic too. It's really hard to judge accurately the time to arrive over long distances. Like the child's example on the OP, people often perceive 1/4 of the distance as being "halfway there". It's some kind of psychological phenomenon.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm wondering if somehow our predisposition to think logarithmically is related to Benford's law - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benfords_law>.

<comment><USER24> I think it is related to Benford's law in that they are both a manifestation of the fact that a log scale is the most natural (most uninformative, highest entropy) distribution (or prior) for things that have magnitude (having a parameter that can't go into the negatives such as height or length or volume as opposed to a positional parameter which can be negative).

I do believe this is a property of the universe and not just a psychological phenomenon. Our mind here is simply following the natural distribution and Benford's law is just the observed manifestation of this pattern.

This type of pattern is not odd if you are believer in the Bayesian interpretation of probability theory. The shape of Benford's distribution follows the shape of a maximum entropy, most uninformative distributions for a value of magnitude (as I mentioned, positions do not follow benford's law).

Take street lengths for example. Assuming that they follow a log prior simply means that for a length of street L, if you pick another random street, you are as likely to pick a street within the length range L/2 to L than L to 2*L. From the original street length, to get a street twice as short, you need to subtract much less than you would have to add to get a street twice as long. That is why this distribution is not linear or rather it is linear on the multiplication and division operation, not on additions or subtractions.

If instead you'd assume that a street x meter longer is as likely as a street x meter shorter you would end up with impossible probabilities. For example, for a street of 1 km, a 3 kilometer street would be as likely as a -1km street? Even if you'd assume probabilities were equal for all lengths between 0 and infinity that would mean you think there are as many streets measuring a tredecillion billion km long as there are street 5 km long. This is simply not how things are sized in the universe. Smaller things are in greater numbers. Log priors are one of these areas where the math predicts the universe logically and the universe is mirrored by the math beautifully iff you do your calculations properly (using Bayesianity). It seems evolution has made our psychology reflect this reality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> i wish it had described _how_ people were asked. i guess it's through some graphical means. anyone know (original paper is paywalled)?

<comment><USER26> That question only seems to appear in the press release - it may be a reference to an earlier study, but press releases don't tend to cite sources. The paper in question is theoretical, although it gives an example with the intensity of various human and animal sounds. (I have access through my university)

<comment><USER27> One thing not mentioned in the paper is also music. Each octave increases exponentially (each is twice the frequency of the previous). However our ears perceive the difference between notes as linear (it is actually linear if you take the log of the frequency). One theory is due to the shape of the inner ear, where the individual hairs that hear sounds each octave apart are spaced lineally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Did anyone permit for the possibility that _some_ people may be wired to have an affinity for one and some for the other?

</comment><comment><USER29> Could this be related to the recent post about software estimates?

<comment><USER30> Software estimates are just another unit of distance. That's a valid application of this general idea: Halfway between a day and a month is a week.</comment></comment>


Warner Music Group Breach Letter - <AUTHOR> https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7201631-Warner-Music-Group-Breach-Letter-BC.html <comment><USER2> Why did they even store the CVC number?

<comment><USER3> They were pirating them. & then another pirate stole their booty trove.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anyone have their dreams analyzed? - <AUTHOR> I am getting weird dreams lately with code, aliens, foreign lands. Is there something called scientific dream analysis? <comment><USER2> (I am not a doctor and none of the following should be construed as medical advice.)

Well, there is dream interpretation as part of psychoanalysis; see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoanalytic_dream_interpret...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoanalytic_dream_interpretation) . However, you'd need to find a therapist/psychiatrist who subscribed to that theory and, even then, well, it's unclear what, if anything, you'd get out of your undoubtedly quite expensive sessions.

If the dreams are strong enough to trouble you or disrupt you sleep, you might want to seek medical attention directly. They can suggest stress reduction techniques, lifestyle changes, and, as a last resort, provide medication that suppresses dreams such as prazosin.

</comment><comment><USER3> I find my dreams get very weird when I do a lot of coding. You over-use those poor neurons and then they fire off crazy stuff all night. If you're concerned about your dreams, take a day off and get some exercise outdoors.

<comment><USER4> I dream more now I am coding less. I love what my imagination can conjure up. Many times a night now I get woken up and I am angry that I won't know how the weird story will end. I try to think how it would have ended.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Dreams are like if your train of thought suddenly became your surrounding environment; like reality itself collapsing around pretty bizarre local states.

</comment><comment><USER6> Dreams are just random firing neurons.

Hacker news is not a therapist.

<comment><USER4> I think of it as neurons taking a shower and singing loudly (they are being flushed clean of toxins).</comment></comment>


Daily Fantasy Sports MLB Data Exploration - cole-maclean http://cole-maclean.github.io/ <comment> cole-maclean As part of transitioning to a career in data science/AI, I'm currently enrolled in Udacity's Data Science nanodegree. As part of that, one of the projects was to pick an interesting dataset to perform some exploratory data analysis on using the R programming language. I chose to explore some MLB statistics in relation to Fanduel Scores. Thought some of you might be interested.

This analysis doesn't even come close to exploring all the available relationships, but was a fun project and I discovered some useful information to aid in building a predictive model.

Hope others enjoy it.

-Cole</comment>


Faulty Iowa App Was Part of Push to Restore Democrats' Digital Edge - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/04/us/politics/iowa-caucus-shadow-app.html <comment><USER2> Insane. "It was so rushed, they said, that there was no time to get it approved by the Apple store. Had it been, it might have proved far easier for users to install. Instead, the app had to be downloaded by bypassing a phone's security settings, a complicated process for anyone unfamiliar with the intricacies of mobile operating systems, and especially hard for many of the older, less tech-savvy caucus chairs in Iowa.

The app also had to be installed using two-factor authentication and PIN passcodes."

Why on earth did they make an app which they didn't even have time to get approved? This could have been done easily with a website. Honestly, they could have used Google Forms. A highly secure, off the shelf, and much cheaper option would have be to setup a G Suite workplace, mail security tokens to the caucus leaders, have them make accounts on a computer, and submit the results through a form.

<comment><USER3> Probably because the entire software development process, including the bidding conducted by the Iowa democrats, was done using Waterfall. The client delivers a 50 page document detailing every single requirement that must be exactly followed, and delivered by a specific date, and who cares about incremental milestones.

If they had followed the agile process, the very _first_ thing they should have done is get a bare-bones app uploaded and approved onto the app store, with just one or two features. Let the actual users download the app, and report all bugs and usability problems. And make sure these issues are fixed early on, before the app grows into a bloated mess with rotten foundations. Maybe they wouldn't have been able to get every single feature implemented on time, but they would at least have something that does some things really well.

Agile gets a bad rap these days, but stories like these are exactly what happens when people regress back to waterfall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is ridiculous. It sucks that the IDP didn't have anyone on staff to be able to legitimately evaluate if this was feasible of not, or even if Shadow Inc. was selling bullshit.

We need to educate the government + parties about tech!

</comment><comment><USER5> They should have worked with the USDA (D for digital)</comment>


Maintaining the Integrity of Our Platforms - <AUTHOR> https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/public-policy/maintaining-integrity-our-platforms/ <comment><USER2> TL;DR:

> _We disabled 210 channels on YouTube [...] coordinated manner [...] related > to the ongoing protests in Hong Kong. [...] consistent with recent > observations and actions related to China announced by Facebook and > Twitter._

> _we have taken action to protect users in Kazakhstan after credible reports > that its citizens were required to download and install a government-issued > certificate_</comment>