Willow Garage shutting down - <AUTHOR> http://www.willowgarage.com/blog/2013/08/21/willow-garage-employees-join-suitable-technologies

<comment><USER2> I owe a lot to the Willow Garage guys, they started something truly game changing in the robotics industry and for free.

I have used the ROS system extensively, developing my rover for the NASA Lunabotics competition. One thing everyone should know about robots, they are freaking complicated.

They have programs on every level of abstraction from low-level embedded code to high-level executive task manager to create pre-defined behaviours.

ROS has gone through quite a few changes, and still has some huge architecture changes coming to fix some of the short comings of the ROS protocol especially for integration of embedded devices which robotics heavily rely on.

Unfortunately I'm not going to be doing much robotics anytime soon. NASA has cancelled the competition for any International teams(I'm Canadian and we came 8th last year). And I'm not to keen on developing systems for DARPA.

</comment><comment><USER3> They're not shutting down, they're merging with a sister startup. AFAICT, this means: they won't be making any more PR2's. ROS is open source, seems like lots of grad students are using it. Probably it will continue to be developed and improved. Maybe it will become the "unix and C" of robotics.

<comment><USER4> ROS has really influenced the way robotics research is done at the lab where I work. A cohort of recent grads came in and replaced a lot of ad-hoc formats with ROS bags. It's also being used to exchange data and standardize interfaces in some DoD-funded work (i.e., not just student projects).

<comment><USER5> If I understand correctly, ROS development will continue and the core ROS team are being migrated over to the OSRF, another organization started by the same founder.

source: A friend works at the Open Source Robotics Foundation (osrfoundation.org)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not entirely unexpected. That said, I really respected what the Garage was trying to achieve. It is nice that most of the employees will transfer over to suitable, I am sure that those that don't will be treated well.

I have used Willow as an example of the good that newly minted millionaires can do when explaining to my non-tech friends how this area keeps going. It's amazing to watch someone with a big chunk of change from their previous endeavour to turn around and plunge it into new cool things. Non-techies think that folks just buy a yacht and spend the rest of their days in the Bahamas (or Beleize :-)) but the reality is people are driven to create cool stuff.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm sorry to hear that. I take no pride in the fact that my business survives while theirs shuts down; they were doing good work and they were doing better work than me in quite a few ways. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

</comment><comment><USER8> What will happen to OpenCV?

<comment><USER9> OpenCV is currently supported by Itseez so it shouldn't be effected

[http://itseez.com/](http://itseez.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What this really seems to mean, with the survival of OSRF & Beam, is that the PR2 is end-of-life. That's a bit sad but maybe to be expected in this field.

What will take its place with respect to research into human-level, mobile, autonomous manipulation platforms?

</comment><comment><USER11> What does this mean for ROS then?

<comment><USER12> ROS development was handed off to OSRF [1] earlier this year. [2]

[1] [http://osrfoundation.org/](http://osrfoundation.org/) [2] [http://osrfoundation.org/blog/ros-at- osrf.html](http://osrfoundation.org/blog/ros-at-osrf.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I interned at Willow Garage for three summers and all I can say is that the people there are really made the place what it was. They were amazing and I am sure they will all continue to do incredible work no matter where they are.</comment>


.IO domain name reliability issues and how we're working around them - <AUTHOR> https://getstream.io/blog/stop-using-io-domain-names-for-production-traffic/ <comment><USER3> By that argument you should also stop using:

.org, .ngo, .lgbt, .asia, .aero, .info, .mobi, .pro, , .MN (Mongolia), .AG (Antigua and Barbuda), .BM (Bermuda), .BZ (Belize), .GI (Gibraltar), .IN (India), .ME (Montenegro), .SC (the Seychelles), and .VC (St. Vincent and the Grenadines), .SG (Singapore) and .HN (Honduras) and more

All are provided or supported by Afilias, the company running .IO.

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

<comment><USER4> Author here: the post is based on my direct experience with .io. It is not very clear to me how Afilias is involved in the operational side of things, AFAIK they might have just acquired the existing .io infrastructure and kept it as it is (and same goes for the way more reliable .org TLD)

<comment><USER5> This is a blogpost by Planio about moving from .io to .com

[https://plan.io/blog/post/166816338743/moving-from-planio- to...](https://plan.io/blog/post/166816338743/moving-from-planio-to-planiocom)

<comment><USER4> > Using .io is unfair to the Chagossian People

> The reason closest to our hearts is the geopolitical background of .io > domains which we only learned about recently.

Later in the article:

> Of course, we will make sure to redirect all traffic from *.plan.io > appropriately so no existing links will break in the future.

Which to me sounds like they will keep paying for the .io domain for the foreseeable future.

<comment><USER6> "I don't like conflict diamonds, but since I have a bunch I might as well keep them — I just won't wear them."

That's how it comes off to me.

<comment><USER7> If you already have a conflict diamond you already funded the mining effort. Keeping or throwing it away has no effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I never understood why ccTLDs of some third-world countries became popular for hosting production code. There is a real risk of somebody stealing your domain due to vulnerable infrastructure and incompetence at the organizations that sometimes employ less than 10 people. The notable takeover of the .io ccTLD by Matthew Bryant [1] should have been a wakeup call for everybody.

1: [https://thehackerblog.com/the-io-error-taking-control-of- all...](https://thehackerblog.com/the-io-error-taking-control-of-all-io- domains-with-a-targeted-registration/index.html)

<comment><USER9> > I never understood why ccTLDs of some third-world countries became popular

Simple vanity.

<comment><USER10> I think it's also about awareness. Most people don't know that IO or other smaller TLDs are unreliable.

<comment><USER11> They aren't unreliable. This article blows up a single minor incident into a controversy of epic proportions.

<comment><USER12> The incident was far from minor IMO. I think .io has had 6+ hours of downtime (full or partial/non-trivial) this year, long enough to push the annual availability down to 99.93% from what I recall from memory of reading post- mortems.

That was enough to spur us to begin planning to move production traffic off our .io domain as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There is also a good, ethical reason to stop using .io domains completely, as the territory's population had no say in the governance of the TLD and are deprived of any revenue from it.

<comment><USER14> Is it expected that the population of a country would benefit directly from TLD sales? I have not seen a dime of the proceeds from .us.

I guess the money probably goes into the treasury, but it can't be more than a drop in the bucket.

I still think TLDs in general were a mistake. It always felt life a leftover from the old Usenet dominated Internet. The Internet quickly outgrew the categorization system and we ended up where we are today with most everything being shoved in .com because it was the least strict.

<comment><USER15> The population of the British Indian Ocean Territory were all deported, to clear the island of Diego Garcia for a large US airbase. It's one of the grubbiest recent bits of British imperial manoevering.

<comment><USER16> And "recent" here doesn't only mean "the 1970s". TIL: "In 2016, the British government denied the right of the Chagossians to return to the islands after a 45-year legal dispute". [1]

Also, in 2009 an attempt was made to prevent resettlement by declaring the area a marine reserve. [2]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagossians#Court_battle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagossians#Court_battle)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depopulation_of_Chagossians_fr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depopulation_of_Chagossians_from_the_Chagos_Archipelago#Diplomatic_cables_leaks)

<comment><USER17> Sounds like the UK has effectively given away the atoll to the US. The US is not going to pack up their very important torture base just because the UK asks them to. Denying the islanders permission to return is just a face-saving move to avoid admitting that the UK no longer controls the territory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if this is a factor in why large tech organizations like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft etc have been so keen to register their own TLDs. Now they only depend on root NS and their own infrastructure, and not _any_ ccTLD provider.

<comment><USER19> Yes, this is one of the major reasons that we registered our own TLDs. It's definitely not a secret.

Source: I'm the tech lead of Google Registry.

<comment><USER20> Any hint of a timeline for .app availability?

[https://www.registry.google/about/domains.html](https://www.registry.google/about/domains.html)

<comment><USER21> You really expect to hear a product update via HN comment?

<comment><USER22> Given the likes of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15353027](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15353027) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15269832](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15269832) , it is not beyond the bounds of possibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > In the first case, we would need to keep hundreds of DNS records in sync and > double our SSL certificates;

The first thing is admittedly a PITA, but SSL certificates should not be a problem. Either you use LetsEncrypt which automates the pain away anyway or you do the sane thing and buy a wildcard cert - this has the added advantage that no one can run a service discovery by simply grepping a CT log. Yes, I know, security by obscurity, but scriptkiddies will go for the low hanging fruit first, and having your domains show up in CT logs is ultra low hanging fruit.

> secondly we would need to only change our infrastructure to not use any > Route53 specific feature

You should not be locked in to Amazon (or for that matter any Cloud provider) anyway, given how easy it is to get banned from them (hint: it's enough if your Google account manages also the Youtube channel and videos on it get striked too often).

> Using a widely used TLD like .com/.net/.org is the best and easiest way to > ensure reliability.

Another caveat right here: .com and .net are operated by Verisign, while .org is operated by PIR. You should always take care to choose a different operator for the backup TLD!

<comment><USER4> author here: About your second point. We spend quite some money on AWS every month. As long as we keep paying our bills, I don't see why they would want to cut us loose.

<comment><USER23> > As long as we keep paying our bills, I don't see why they would want to cut > us loose.

I can imagine a competitor trying to boot you off by bombarding their abuse team with bogus complaints and triggering automated actions. It's been done in the past, the problem is that all major companies (not just hosting, but ANY large company!) try to save on actual customer support and even more on stuff they can't bill to the customer, like a properly staffed abuse team.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> .io domains are perhaps fashionable, but they are expensive.

For $0.88-$0.99/yr one can have a domain in the same registry as the Alphabet Inc. website's domainname. For that price, it would not be a clever name, but it could be an easy-to-memorize 6-digit number. What if it is only used for an API endpoint?

A higher level of " _reliability_ " IMHO could be achieved by use and publication of a stable IP address, perhaps anycasted if one can afford it. At least it could be a backup for emergencies, such as DNS failures.

Consider that DNS itself e.g., disseminiation of root.zone, does not rely on DNS. The IP address for ftp.internic.net is well known and rarely changes. As I recall, when it does, they notify the public in advance. Some years ago if I am not mistaken, there was a change from 126.96.36.199 to 220.127.116.11.

Another example is third party DNS providers. They too publish stable IP addresses. Sometimes users might even memorize them, or store lists of these addresses e.g. included within installed software.

As a user, I hold no bias against any company that publishes its stable IP addresses. In fact, on the issue of reliablity I would hold them in higher regard than those who rely 100% on DNS and third parties associated with DNS service. DNS is reasonably reliable, but IMO not more so than a stable IP address.

</comment><comment><USER25> .io is managed by Afilias. They took over and migrated the registry to their system in June. Afilias manages many other TLDs including:

.adult .ag .archi .bet .bio .black .blue .bz .global .green .in .info .kim .lgbt .ltda .me .mn .mobi .ngo/.ong .org .pet .pink .poker .porn .promo .red .sc .shiksha .vc .vegas .vote .voto

They are a very reliable registry operator. This was a bad screw up, and I guess it had something to do with the migration.

<comment><USER26> >To our surprise, we found out that NIC.io could only be reached via phone between 7 AM to 12 AM UTC Monday through Friday and did not expose any status about the health of the service.

That doesn't sound very reliable to me...

<comment><USER25> Afilias tech support is 24/7

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Back when we started in 2014 we decided that .io was great from a branding > perspective. Stream is a technical product and our audience is mainly > technical, so .io seemed like a great match. Using the same domain for the > APIs was more of a consequence than a thoughtful decision.

Quite a lot of tech companies are using .io nowadays. If .io reliability is an issue what is the next best alternative for tech domain names?

<comment> forgot-my-pw Some newer TLDs that can be used in tech industry (not sure on their reliability): .computer, .consulting, .design, .digital, .engineering, .enterprises, .graphics, .guide, .network, .online, .plus, .productions, .services, .site, .software, .systems, .tech, .zone

Note that some of these newer TLDs can be more expensive (up to $60/year).

<comment><USER28> The ICANN contract, which new TLDs have to sign and country codes do not, has very strict penalties for having DNS go down for any reason. They're just as reliable as com.

Disclaimer: I work for Donuts, owner of many new TLDs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> .com/net/org are also faster, especially internationally, because of more infrastructure. Algolia found the same during their testing [1].

Use the main TLDs for serving traffic and .io/* for corporate/marketing sites or webapps if the occasional outage isn't a major problem.

1\. [https://stories.algolia.com/algolia-s-fury-road-to-a- worldwi...](https://stories.algolia.com/algolia-s-fury-road-to-a-worldwide- api-c1536c46f3a5)

<comment><USER30> Some ccTLDs have good infra though. Many of the smaller ones (particularly ones ran by CoCCA, such as .cx) use Dyntld or Packet Clearing House which have pretty good servers and connectivity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Hello, I volunteer with UK Chagos Support Association, a voluntary Chagossian support group that Plan.io and other .io firms and users have donated to since this issue was raised in a tech magazine a year or two ago.

Someone Twitter tagged us and linked to this discussion and it's great to see so much support for the community.

Couple of links on the background below.

[http://archive.chagossupport.org.uk/index.php/category/io/](http://archive.chagossupport.org.uk/index.php/category/io/)

[https://gigaom.com/2014/07/02/seats-io-donates-money-to- chag...](https://gigaom.com/2014/07/02/seats-io-donates-money-to-chagos- islands-charity-over-io-domain-use/)

A couple of .io start ups set up a site to encourage others to support us and other Chagos-related support groups which allowed us to a lot more of our work - campaigning, supporting community projects and issuing crisis grants - <USER2> the past few years. Called 'The Dark Side of .Io,' it's actually offline now but the owner has assured me it'll be back on shortly.

I've no expertise to comment on technical issues. On the moral side, I've not met anyone in the community who has a serious issue with firms using the .io domain name - most are impressed that so many firms have chose to back the Chagossian community out of their own pocket. As someone mentioned below, as recently as one year ago the UK government refused to allow Chagossians to return to the Chagos Islands. The community will not see any money from the renewal of the lease on their homeland for use as a military base.

These are the main issues, and while the .io domain name is somewhat symbolic of the wider exploitation of the Chagossian people - others profiting from their homeland with the community itself seeing no benefit - there is at least a positive side to this, which is harder to find in the government's decision to continue the exile.

If anyone is interested in finding out more please see our website (not .io - but that's out of cost and ignorance factors more than ethics)

www.chagossupport.org.uk

We're actually planning a bit of a revamp of the site shortly and I'd be remiss if when posting here I didn't ask for anyone interested in getting involved in that - firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER25> "Due to its decentralized nature..." should read "Due to its CENTRALIZED nature..." If DNS were decentralized, like for example Bitcoin, so many problems like this would never happen.

<comment><USER32> True... until "devops199" randomly gives you 150 million reasons otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> "In July 2017 a security engineer from Google was able to buy the domain of one of the authoritative nameservers (ns-a1.io) and gain control of every .io domain."

Ouch.

</comment><comment><USER34> Dumb question, but why not host DNS name serving somewhere other that NIC.io so it does not go down? As I recall you can set the name server to live somewhere else, though I don't have the account pages open.

The dnscheck.pingdom.com page shows that .io domains commonly route to different name servers. Just try stream.io and slither.io and you should see different authoritative name servers. (I picked those randomly for the test.)

<comment><USER35> DNS resolution is hierarchal. You start at the root DNS servers for a TLD to find the authoritative servers for a given domain in that TLD. You can host your authoritative servers wherever you want, but you have no control over the root servers and it was the latter that had problems.

<comment><USER34> Thanks, that clears things up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Cross-posting a message I posted about one year ago because I am still mad about what happened 7 years ago:

"In 2011 I paid for and registered o1.io (I really wanted 01.io, but back then it was not available to register domains containing only numbers on .io). The .io NIC web interface is really horrible and I ended up in an inconsistent state after making the "horrible" mistake of clicking the back button. Even though my Paypal account got charged, I received an email confirming I was the owner of the domain, and so on, I couldn't access my account. Next step I took was contacting them. I got ignored and after 7 days later they made a transaction reversal on Paypal and I never heard a word back from them, even though I have tried to contact. Some time later they made the o1.io domain a reserved one and so if I wanted it now I would have to pay thousands. What a shame."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12980040](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12980040)

</comment><comment><USER37> For anyone recommending .com one of the simple factors that it isn't often a good choice is people sitting on domain names for profit or other reasons.

So either you have to think up a completely ridiculous name for your new service/product/company, pay stupid amounts or use something other than .com

<comment><USER38> use .io or similar for any customer facing websites but a .com for any mission critical api type calls. Customer never even has to know about the existence of myUglyCompanyNameApiHandler.com but all api calls are handled by it.

<comment><USER39> It's a good idea, but if your product is a website, cookies and authentication in general are going to be a real challenge. Obviously you won't be able to share cookies between the site and the api. But you have the additional challenge of having your api domain treated as 3rd party and are thus subject to all the security measures and sandboxing that come with that.

And what if your product is just an api for use by developers? Now the api is part of your brand.

It's just a bad situation all around.

<comment><USER30> > Obviously you won't be able to share cookies between the site and the api.

I don't know of any API that requires cookies from the site. Usually you use an access token or something similar for an API.

> But you have the additional challenge of having your api domain treated as > 3rd party and are thus subject to all the security measures and sandboxing > that come with that.

CORS solves most of the pain points. You just need to ensure the API is serving the correct CORS headers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> We migrated from serving production JS assets off our _.io_ domain to _.com_ after we found a number of corporates/schools in Ireland blocking the domain at the TLD level.

Since then, the number of inexplicable error reports has dropped dramatically.

</comment><comment><USER41> It's hardly surprising sadly. Looking back through my submission history there's two instances of incompetence by the .IO handlers:

1) Storing passwords in plain text: Although the post is now down, it pointed to the fact that Nic.IO will email you your password in plain text. Something which everyone that's spent more than a few weeks coding should know not to do.

2) Another pretty major outage back in 2013 that rendered two of my sites offline.

I personally stopped using them after my last IO domain lapsed but this should serve as a stark warning to anyone thinking they can pick up a cute IO domain

</comment><comment> gator-io Remember this: [https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2017-09-27-en](https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2017-09-27-en)

I think .io was part of the issue for the delay.

After the last outage, we at gator.io took it as a 'all hands on deck' firedrill to get our api off .io. The problem is that many of our customers have scripts on their sites with the old .io endpoint. Migrating them is very difficult.

</comment><comment><USER42> If these are just API endpoints (not typed in by users, and thus, no Marketing value to the name) why not just register <random hash>.com?

<comment><USER10> That's what we do :) It's ok for the marketing page to go down every now and then. Not so nice for the API to become unavailable. (200 million end users)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> WireGuard similarly moved from the .io to wireguard.com in July: [https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2017-July/001569...](https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2017-July/001569.html)

Less trendy, but otherwise, zero regrets.

<comment><USER44> Nice, if you have the .com

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I guess that's why the domain name infrastructure should be decentralized. Though I'm not familiar with the tech involved, does blockchain based things, like namecoin, solve this problem?

</comment><comment><USER46> .io represents the suppression of the Chagossian people. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagossians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagossians) English imperialism at its best.

Do not use this unethical TLD: [https://gigaom.com/2014/06/30/the-dark-side- of-io-how-the-u-...](https://gigaom.com/2014/06/30/the-dark-side-of-io-how- the-u-k-is-making-web-domain-profits-from-a-shady-cold-war-land-deal/)

<comment><USER47> By those standards, can you provide a TLD that is not the result of some atrocity or another?

<comment><USER46> .cx? (Christmas Island), which is a Australian territory? Maybe your right. I think .io is especially egregious because of history of Chagossian people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> It's not my area, but it seems like if your application is deeply dependent on an API it might be a good idea to directly reference the IP address? Over 1000s of requests, wouldn't that save time?

<comment><USER49> It would be slightly faster. However, if you ever had to change your server's IP address (for example, because you had to move to a new hosting provider) you'd be utterly screwed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Said by the company that uses .io

<comment><USER41> I mean if you read the article the reason they say not to use it is specifically because they used it themselves and were burnt

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> TL;DR - company follows trend of misusing top-level domain of the British Indian Ocean Territories, finds it unreliable and not-so-great, starts the wheels in motion to switch away from it.

Addendum: Mind you I applaud their coming forward to report this. Hopefully people get the message. It's not the first time fashion got the better of a large number of people.

</comment><comment><USER52> Sorry, but the title is click bait. Can people just write "Our IO domain Resolution Failed, A Lesson Learned"?

In the "What Really Went Wrong" section, the author wrote:

> it does not take a lot of research to find out that the .io TLD team made > several mistakes

and went on to cite two incidents, which are not exclusive to .IO domain. So let's not blame ".io domain team" and only happen to .IO domain, try to convince me (at least the way I read it based on the title) that using .io domain is a bad idea. I should stop using .com then.

For me, I was looking for a "so we are going to switch away from .io domain in the next year or so" at the end of the post, because .io is not good according to the author. The plan instead is just add a backup domain, so it looks like the author is eating his/her own words, even though the critical stuff are going to run over .com. So let's just switch everything over, what's the big deal for your user-facing website not over .com? Do people really think a big deal now about .io vs .com when you have established a business?

Anyway, I do appreciate when a postmortem is available because I can learn something new, but I do hope we write postmortem with an objective tone. So no, if there is a downvote button on HN for the submission, I would downvote.</comment>


Far From 'Infinitesimal': A Mathematical Paradox's Role In History - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2014/04/20/303716795/far-from-infinitesimal-a-mathematical-paradoxs-role-in-history <comment><USER2> > You can keep on dividing forever, so every line has an infinite amount of > parts. But how long are those parts? If they're anything greater than zero, > then the line would seem to be infinitely long. And if they're zero, well, > then no matter how many parts there are, the length of the line would still > be zero.

Sigh. There is no paradox here, except to those who fundamentally fail to grasp the concept of infinity. Infinity is not a number. Multiplying length by infinity is a type error. This is nonsensical, not paradoxical.

I don't buy the hand-waving argument that this somewhat arcane debate had so much impact on the course of history. Obviously nobody can prove it true or false, because the alternative outcome is unknowable. I'm inclined to ignore unfalsifiable speculation.

<comment><USER3> Right. Infinite is a procedure that can be taken to be a value (with the right context.)

<comment><USER4> It annoys me when people try to argue that (0.99...) != 1 because "infinity goes on forever, it's not a number!" though, without understanding the difference between a representation of a number and the number itself.

<comment><USER5> Of course that argument only applies when talking about the standard real number system.

[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1007.3018.pdf?origin=publication_detail](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1007.3018.pdf?origin=publication_detail)

[http://arxiv.org/pdf/0811.0164.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/0811.0164.pdf)

...of course you can make a pretty good case that uncountable, uncomputable, unnameable, unknowable "real" numbers don't exist.

[http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0404335](http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0404335)

...(the impatient should jump to chapter 5). And maybe also:

[http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~norman/views2.htm](http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~norman/views2.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some interesting history, but that last section seems entirely unwarranted:

> What might have happened if the Jesuits and Hobbes had won out? What if the > infinitesimal had been successfully stamped out everywhere?

> "I think things would have been very different," Alexander muses. "I think > if they had won, then it would have been a much more hierarchical society. > In a world like that, there would not be room for democracy, there would not > be room for dissent."

> And more materially, he says, we might not have all the modern fruits of > this kind of math. "Modern science, modern technology, and everything from > your cell phone to this radio station to airplanes and cars and trains — it > is all fundamentally dependent on this technique of infinitesimals."

It's pretty unthinkable that we _still_ wouldn't have calculus at this point. And the conclusion about democracy feels very handwavy.

<comment><USER7> Yep. Ctrl+F "compact"

> Not found

Modern calculus doesn't depend on infinitesimals. The concept of "compactness" is the technical solution that lets you formulate calculus without them -- it's typically only taught to math majors because infinitesimals are less awkward to do algebra with: we can now prove that the shortcut works, so why bother with the long way unless you have good reason? They allude to this fact:

> Today, mathematicians have found ways to answer that question so that modern > calculus is rigorous and reliable.

but they bury this scant acknowledgement behind the linkbaity overstated conclusion it contradicts:

> Modern science, modern technology, and everything from your cell phone to > this radio station to airplanes and cars and trains — it is all > fundamentally dependent on this technique of infinitesimals

Besides, many of the big-name ancient Greek philosophers used inconsistent definitions of infinity or assumed properties of infinity to arrive at ridiculous paradoxes and conclusions. They look utterly silly to someone with the slightest bit of modern mathematical training in the notion of infinity, not unlike Newton and his alchemy look to a modern chemist. The Jesuits' misgivings about infinitesimals were entirely understandable in the context of wanting to avoid the same fate (not to mention wasting their time).

<comment><USER8> > Modern calculus doesn't depend on infinitesimals. The concept of > "compactness" is the technical solution that lets you formulate calculus > without them -- it's typically only taught to math majors because > infinitesimals are less awkward to do algebra with: we can now prove that > the shortcut works, so why bother with the long way unless you have good > reason? They allude to this fact:

This seems to be an unusual claim, especially since the real numbers, the traditional domain of calculus, are _not_ compact. To be sure, they are _locally_ compact, but I'm not sure that I would say that this is "what makes calculus work". That honour seems better to belong to _completeness_.

<comment><USER7> Completeness gives you limits, the simplest workable definitions of the derivative and integral, and the differentiability of many important classes of functions. It gets you 3/4 of the way there. It also doesn't fundamentally require any particularly sophisticated definitions of infinity, even though in a modern curriculum this is usually when infinity is first properly discussed. Yes, we stick the infinity symbol below many a limit, but re-phrase the limit into epsilon-delta language and the infinity disappears along with the associated philosophical difficulty.

The extra 1/4 is where the trouble starts. Proving that, e.g. piecewise continuous functions are integrable, is by far the most philosophically complicated bit of elementary calculus. It's the place where the problem of breaking a uncountably infinite domain into pieces and putting it back together again enters the picture.

Compactness is the modern answer. The historical mechanisms for rigorously solving the problem (that I've seen) look more or less equivalent to proving the compactness (or "almost" compactness) of their domain.

> This seems to be an unusual claim, especially since the real numbers, the > traditional domain of calculus, are not compact.

R might be the traditional domain of derivatives, but it's certainly not the traditional domain of integrals. Integrals are an important part of calculus, so I don't see how you can claim that R is the traditional domain of calculus.

<comment><USER8> > Completeness gives you limits, the simplest workable definitions of the > derivative and integral, and the differentiability of many important classes > of functions.

Nit-picking can be continued endlessly, but, as a final salvo, the definitions of limits, derivatives, and integrals don't depend on completeness (which is a good thing in the first case, since the (uniform-space, as opposed to order- theoretic) notion of completeness _depends_ on that of limits). As you say, the _existence_ of certain limits and integrals needs completeness. (I don't know off the top of my head any derivatives that one needs completeness to compute—rather nice consequences of derivatives, like that only constant functions have 0 derivative—but that's probably my ignorance, rather than a genuine lack.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's a bit sad to me that people who write about mathematics to a general audience often have to stoop down so far below the mathematics that their writing becomes a bad caricature. They're literally forced to talk about "dividing a line in half" as quickly and as sloppily as possible so they can get to the thing they actually want to talk about, which is the history and people involved.

There may be no other way to write such a piece, or it could be that the people writing it are just not well versed enough in mathematics. Whatever it is, it makes me sad.

<comment><USER10> Dividing a line in half resulting in an infinite set of lines that can thus be divided into an infinite set of lines defines the problem quite nicely. How would you prefer to see the concepts of the continuum and uncountable vs countable infinite presented?

<comment><USER9> As stated it's not a problem with the continuum and uncountable vs countable (which did not exist in the historical setting mentioned!), but a problem of measurement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Funny thing is... they stopped using _infinitesimals_ when teaching calculus in most US math courses. I think they should be brought back into the curriculum.

</comment><comment><USER12> > "What you have to build now is some space where dissent can be allowed, > within _limits_ at least,"

Pun intended?

<comment><USER13> With mathematicians, puns are always intended.

<comment><USER14> Especially if inadvertent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's another treatment:

[http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~norman/papers/Ordinals.pdf](http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~norman/papers/Ordinals.pdf)

<comment><USER11> Thanks for that link. I too find the orthodoxy of infinity today a bit hard to take.</comment></comment>


Towards a GNU autonomous cloud - <AUTHOR> http://wingolog.org/archives/2010/04/10/towards-a-gnu-autonomous-cloud

<comment><USER2> I can't believe I haven't put the words "Gnu" and "Facebook" together in my mind before....

Of course, something like this should be done. There are important questions about the technical architecture (I only ask one thing -- DONT USE XML...), especially because of privacy, but there are also opportunities to explicitly and collectively decide processes (Yay democracy!) -- if the users of FB could vote on issues of data sharing, things there might be really, really different.

<comment><USER2> And furthermore (too late to edit) -- perhaps we could see apps regarding instant run-off voting instead of that stupid farm game...

(Also, I blithely ignored the Git / VC angle that might have been the original post -- my apologies...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've had similar thoughts in the past and brought them up on HN here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625917>

<comment><USER2> The above post links out to <http://autonomo.us/>, where Stallman talks about Software as a Service and its anti freedom implications. It is interesting reading, but I think collective projects can be Free (as in freedom) when they are collectively controlled and open; this is the important difference between Wikipedia (Free) and Google Docs (not Free). I don't think the important difference is technical, as RMS seems to (whether or not an application "belongs" local or remote).

"Collectively controlled" is the hard problem. It is probably impossible to solve cleanly without hard tradeoffs, whether in a society (do we let people shout fire? consensus versus majority vote? one vote per share or one vote per person?) or in a computer project (do we sanction bad editors? Are certain topics off limits? etc).

So... I think a Gnu FB is actually an awesome challenge, both technically and socially.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like the link posted in the first article comment: <http://onesocialweb.org/> (except their code base is not up on github yet - hopefully soon) Written in Java, uses XMPP, and comes with an Android client - at least it sounds good.

The article has some interesting points but ideas without code for a prototype implementation to back them up is not very useful.

</comment><comment><USER5> While impractical and reminiscent of 90s crypto-wankery ( _oh no clipper chip_ , et al), it's still far more worthwhile than what Stallman's been pushing lately about cloud services.

Stallman seems to think that users give a shit about software, as if everyone using the AGPL would somehow fix everything — except that thet's total bullshit — people only care about access to their _data_ , the code serving it up is completely irrelevant. You wouldn't be able to run your own instance of Facebook on localhost anyway, even if that was somehow useful.

Stallman's refusal to use any cloud services leaves him woefully out of touch with the reality of their implications.

<comment><USER6> Stallman has done lots of lovely work. Now he does some OK thinking. Just let him be :)

In my case, one must recognize that the GNU manifesto was also impractical. This totally might not work, but I think the concerns are valid, and the implementation at least sounds fun to hack on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As stated this is far too ambitious a goal. But let's say we don't worry about traffic analysis and just protect the content. What would a minimal "git with privacy" look like?

<comment><USER6> Git with privacy is a bit hard. Imagine that you determine that 123456abcde is a the SHA-1 for a bomb-making cookbook. Well then you just monitor the net for requests for that hash, and you see who's making bombs.

Tor-type privacy is also possible; but in this case I figure just delegate to people who seem competent and also aware of the problems.

Btw it's all totally way too ambitious. Who knows what will happen, though?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is absurd and will probably be about as successful as GNU Hurd.

<comment><USER9> Absolutely not, this is absolutely right to the point. I'm saddened to see people unable to understand anything.

<comment><USER2> The OP's post was sort of dumb, but he has a more general point: there is a danger that the people who get involved will see it as a purely technical exercise, ignore the user component, and quite possibly magnify complexity when they should be choking complexity down as far as possible. We don't need a concept car (Gnu Hurd), we need a Datsun B210 (Linux).

<comment><USER10> Neither GNU Hurd nor Linux have focused on the user component very much.

<comment><USER5> user ≠ grandma

Linux was written by someone who wanted to use a kernel that took advantage of the MMU in his new 386. One did not exist, and he couldn't practically fork Minix because of draconian licensing issues, so he wrote his own for himself to use. Linux was written by and for a user.

Hurd, on the other hand, was designed for several orthogonal ideological reasons, and never really written. There was never a user within sight of it, including its creators.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts - <AUTHOR> http://dustingmixon.wordpress.com/2017/12/15/partisan-gerrymandering-with-geographically-compact-districts/ <comment><USER2> Districting has time and time again proven to be a cat and mouse endeavor. Someone is always going to be able to create models to game the system one way or another. The real solution is abandoning districting for proportional representation like a true democracy. This Vox opinion piece is a great explainer, [https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2017/10/11/16453512/...](https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2017/10/11/16453512/gerrymandering-proportional-representation)

<comment><USER3> "proportional representation" is a generic term for a wide variety of possible representational systems. And each system has their own advantages and disadvantages. Those that get rid of districts entirely lose the ability for specific sub-regions of a state to have their own dedicated representative to vouch for their specific needs. This matters less in small states and countries, but can mean quite a lot in very large states. Other solutions use districts, but have multiple representatives per district, and have a method for apportioning those representatives. These are still vulnerable to gerrymandering, though its effectiveness is less pronounced as the number of representatives per district increases. But apportionment can be complicated. Some of these methods change the way voting works so that you vote for a political party rather than a specific candidate, which comes with a bunch of advantages and disadvantages.

All to say that, while different methods for representation should absolutely be considered and discussed, it's important to remember that none of these are a panacea, and we should be upfront about the nuances and disadvantages of every option.

<comment><USER4> > Those that get rid of districts entirely lose the ability for specific sub- > regions of a state to have their own dedicated representative to vouch for > their specific needs. This matters less in small states and countries, but > can mean quite a lot in very large states.

The solution to that, however politically difficult, is to break the larger states into smaller ones. New York City, for example, shares very little politically or economically with the rest of New York. Similarly with the various regions of California -- Silicon Valley and Los Angeles are as different from each other as both are from the areas north of San Francisco.

<comment><USER5> Breaking up the big liberal states has been proposed by conservatives, because they want to get more conservative leg members. We'd need to break up conservative states too. There has been discussion of breaking Seattle off into it's own state or country. That would add a Republican Senate and House Rep, since the test of the state is more conservative, so you have to do a 3 way breakup of WA state. Anyway, these things are all hard to achieve and infeasible in practice. IMHO.

<comment><USER6> There is a similar issue with switching states away from 'winner takes all' in the electoral college.

If a liberal state does it, it costs liberals votes. If a conservative state does it, it costs conservatives votes. It seems pretty clear that such a system is fairer, and yet no-one wants to actually do it.

<comment><USER7> Twenty-three states have already passed the National Popular Vote bill, which will in effect switch all states from winner-takes-all when it covers a majority of the electoral college: [http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/state- status](http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/state-status)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> OT, but there's another really interesting, related problem at the intersection of mathematics and politics, which is apportionment ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_ap...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_apportionment)). The US House of Representatives has a certain number of seats (currently 435) and, based on the results of the census, those seats are assigned to the 50 states according to their populations. But the proportions don't always divide evenly, and you can't give a state 7.35 representative seats, so you need a method for determining the fairest division of representatives. And it turns out there is no optimal solution in the general case ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apportionment_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apportionment_paradox)).

I point out this problem because it is one of the few times you will find Supreme Court cases and writings by the Founders on what algorithm to use. A bill changing the apportionment algorithm was subject to the very first presidential veto. The first proposed amendment to the Constitution ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Am...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Amendment)) was on the subject of apportionment. When else will you find the highest levels of government debating the merits of algorithms and mathematics?

<comment><USER8> It's actually one topic I've grown to agree with my extremely conservative father on, that they should have never fixed the seats at 435. This was done long after the founding of the country (relative to the age of the country, that is), but if we had kept the original apportionment we'd have one of the largest legislatures in the world. It wouldn't solve the apportionment problem, but it would make the unfairness of any given solution much less consequential and also it would make gerrymandering harder (though still not impossible).

<comment><USER9> I think of it as a scale problem. A Representative's front office is basically a call center & triage operation. The embodiment of the Politics of Attention (squeaky wheel gets the grease).

What's the ideal size for a constituency? To maximize responsiveness, accountability, effectiveness? 100k? 200k? 400k?

I don't know, but I'd like to find out.

<comment><USER10> The Republic of Ireland's constitution guarantees a member of the Dáil (Lower Parliamentary house; similar to the US House of Representatives) for every 20-30,000 people, and districts are redrawn and reapportioned frequently.

This seems to be a pretty ideal number to me - it's about the size of the township I grew up in. Many people in their district would have personal ties to their representative, as a further detriment to attempts at lobbying/corruption.

The US constitution used to have a similar provision, but this was abandoned by the ammendment process in the late 1920's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Redistricting commissions should recruit go players.

There can be an amusing side-effect to aggressive gerrymandering. Let's say a state has a small majority of party A, but districts that are _strongly_ partisan (let's say 80%) for A or B. You only need 50% to win your district -- that extra 30% is "wasted" and would be more valuable if those voters were pushed into one of B's districts.

Which is one of the things partisan redistricters do. Now they have more districts with a comfortable 55% margin and an assured lock on more districts, right? Umm, well, now they've made it easier for the other side to capture districts too...and it happens.

There's no magic way to avoid bizarre results (check out the wikipedia pages on the districting, and on voting methods, for some eye-opening problems), but something close to algorithmic probably ends up the least controversial and most comprehensible in the long run.

<comment><USER12> It's not just about party, an unusually disliked candidate can tank most districts. In the end it's a very complex optimization problem with benefits in the short term measured vs the risk of losing redistricting power in 10 years etc. Even a slight bias can let you shift resources to more competitive races etc.

PS: IMO it's really a scale problem. If districts give a ~3% advantage that's huge in aggregate, but races still feel competitive. However, we are currently in a situation where nobody bothers to run in many races and that does not promote democracy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Article mentions the efficiency gap metric; here is another:

"Assessing significance in a Markov chain without mixing"

 _We present a new statistical test to detect that a presented state of a reversible Markov chain was not chosen from a stationary distribution... We illustrate the use of our test with a potential application to the rigorous detection of gerrymandering in Congressional districtings._

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.02014](https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.02014)

</comment><comment><USER14> In an two-stage election system, rigging the districts to make the second stage irrelevant to the outcome, well, makes the first stage relevant to the outcome.

When the first stage elections are contested among isolated ideological subsets of the electorate their results tend to extreme positions.

What I'm saying is this: it is inevitable that the REDMAP project that yielded the kinds of district-level results shown in this article will continue to generate more and more extremist election results.

Ryan and McConnell, and the whole US federal house of representatives, have bought and paid for their dysfunction with this systematic gerrymandering. The situation isn't going to improve as long as this holds.

Pouring money into contesting the general elections in these districts is entirely a waste. It enriches nobody but robocall and television companies, and doesn't affect the outcome.

<comment><USER15> I very much agree with this. What gerrymandering (and partisan voter suppression) does, is reduce the number of competitive districts in the country. Next year, the expected number of competitive House districts is 23 to 38 - out of 450! So, in over 400 districts, primaries are the only thing that matters.

On the other hand, primaries attract more motivated voters than the general. And those motivated voters tend to be motivated by their ideological positions - in other words, they're more extremist. From the perspective of candidates in the primary, they _have_ to pander to those more extreme voters to get to the general - but they have no incentive to pander to the center, because even the more centrist members of their own party will vote for them over the opposition candidate anyway.

This also sets up a positive feedback loop, where even less ideologically radical voters, forced to vote for more and more extreme candidates of their party in the general, adopt at least some of the positions of those extreme candidates over time (making it easier to cast such a vote). Which in turn makes primaries more extreme, and shifts the overall party platform in that same direction.

We've already seen Republicans walk down that road, and where it got them. Now Democrats are going through the same process (Indivisible etc). It looks like we're undergoing the last political realignment possible in the current system, and at the end of it, we'll have two "ideologically pure" parties, with most voters going for straight party ticket, and with most legislative votes going down party lines. At which point the system is going to deadlock, because it pretty much requires some compromise to function properly.

<comment><USER16> But if this process is as you describe, won't the moderate voters eventually start electing independent candidates?

<comment><USER15> The problem is that this process drags aside the two parties to the point where moderate voters in each are further away from each other than they are from extremists in their own party. More specifically, the other party becomes less acceptable - e.g. most people who voted for Moore in Alabama didn't really like him, but they couldn't fathom voting for his opponent, because of his position on one or the other wedge issue (e.g. abortion).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> While I'm as angry as anyone about the way that districts have been gerrymandered in the US, it also bugs me when I see critiques about gerrymandering that try to provoke outrage by showing the shapes of the districts and implying that districts should be square or otherwise simplistically shaped when viewed aerially. Humans don't fly, so the aerial view seems irrelevant and disingenuous to me.

It reminds me somewhat of a program on The History Channel called "How the States Got Their Shapes." And one of the really interesting parts was how states in the eastern part of the country had their lines drawn before the railroads and most in the west after the railroads. And so you see many more rivers, mountains and other natural features affecting state borders back east and a lot more straight border lines in the west. There's a very good reason (the Potomac) why Maryland's border looks the way it does, but if you just showed people the shape and told them it was a congressional district, it wouldn't be hard to convince them it was the result of gerrymandering.

I wonder whether there's a better way to visualize voting districts, perhaps using Google Maps transit data to visualize public transport/drive times to polling stations. There would still be the issue of deciding where to place polling stations, but it seems like once that's been decided, a district's shape should be derived from including all addresses that are most easily able to travel to those polling places. This would naturally create odd shapes, especially along freeways, bus/train lines and such. But making it as easy as possible for people to vote seems, to me, more important than having a simple shape.

</comment><comment><USER18> For some more content on gerrymandering, I suggest FiveThirtyEight's "The Gerrymandering Project". Episode 1 goes through the two major ways gerrymandering gets applied, and also discusses that just because a district has a weird shape doesn't necessarily mean it is gerrymandered.

And because I've never seen a social media post about gerrymandering favoring democrats, I'd like to add the efficiency gap chart from [2]. 8/26 states listed on the efficiency gap chart here are listed as favoring democrats. I fully recognize right now gerrymandering favors republicans significantly, however I'd like to note in some areas democrats _are_ favored.

[1] [https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/the-gerrymandering- project/](https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/the-gerrymandering-project/) [2] [https://www.azavea.com/blog/2017/07/19/gerrymandered- states-...](https://www.azavea.com/blog/2017/07/19/gerrymandered-states- ranked-efficiency-gap-seat-advantage/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Gerrymandering is a problem because we have a poor voting system. I'm not sure if a single transferrable vote (STV) is the best system, but it would significantly reduce the benefit of gerrymandering (and probably result in better candidates from both parties).

CGP Grey did a great video on STV: [https://youtu.be/l8XOZJkozfI](https://youtu.be/l8XOZJkozfI)

<comment><USER9> FWIW, I now advocate Approval Voting because a) superior election integrity prospects and b) nearly ideal fairness.

Score Voting and Instant Runoff Voting are a bit more fair than Approval Voting, but much more difficult to implement, execute, audit, describe / educate, etc.

<comment><USER20> Approval voting and score voting are problematic for reasons standard analyses overlook; there's no obvious mapping from actual preferences to ballot markings. Ranked preference ballots don't have this problem (well, _unforced_ ranking that allows ties doesn't, forced rankings do, but to the degree that approval and score voting do.)

Both scores and approvals are ambiguous in meaning and different people with the exact same preferences would map ballot papers differently. (In situations other than standard public elections, this may not be the case: approval is great for voting on group activities where either "approve" is a binding commitment to participate if the choice is chosen, or "disapprove" is a binding opt-out if the option is chosen.)

<comment><USER9> I supported instant runoff voting until I figured out that it's difficult to explain, implement, audit. Pretty much all the reasons election administrators dislike it.

Approval Voting seems like the best compromise between fairness and simplicity (to better ensure election integrity).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Dammit. For some years now I have been pointing out to people who would listen that what we need are policy solutions rooted in mathematical analysis, my go to case being gerrymandering. It seemed quite obvious that we could use geometric smoothing to set district boundaries based on census data to remove people from the process and therefore gerrymandering. Guess I had an untested assumption which wasn't true, which is humbling.

<comment><USER20> Removing people from the process doesn't remove gerrymandering, it means that the gerrymandering will be done by analyzing the short and long-term (based on demographic trends) effects of different mathematical criteria, with partisan actors legislating the most advantageous criteria.

You eliminate gerrymandering by eliminating single-member FPTP legislative districts in favor of multimeter districts with a system producing proportional results (Single Transferrable Vote or some similar candidate- centered method, or a party-list method, though I prefer the former.)

<comment><USER16> You don't eliminate gerrymandering in that way. You limit it.

STV works best in limited magnitude districts (three or five seems to be preferred) or else the number of options becomes too difficult for humans to express a coherent useful and accurate set of preferences. Once you limit magnitude, you can draw your districts to benefit you. For instance, perhaps you'll discover a preference for two or four seaters in reasonably strong Democrat areas and three seaters in reasonably strong Republican areas. You need fifty percent plus one to get a majority of seats in an odd numbered district, but fifty percent plus one only gets you fifty percent of the seats in an even numbered district. I can imagine Americans spending huge amounts of political capital for years getting STV in, only to discover that one party still has a manufactured majority because they wasted votes efficiently.

Its true that gerrymanders per se become harder and harder the higher the magnitude, but if your problem is you have a political system that is opposed to hearing the will of the people they're going to find a way to stuff their ears no matter what voting system you pick.

(Aside: Open list PR is both candidate centred and party-list. You vote for Fred Nurk of the Purple Party. That helps the Purple Party win more seats, and it moves Fred Nurk up in the list. It seems to be the only tick-a-box election system which doesn't devolve into FPTP in a district magnitude of 1 so it might be appealing in the US, where several states only elect a single representative. e.g. You vote for Gregory Hsien of the Maroon Party, who stands in a group with Josephine Yusuf of the Red Party. The Red-Maroon group win one more vote than the Blue-Cyan group even though the Blue party got more votes than the Red party. Reds win because you voted for their ally, the Maroons.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm reading the paper, but the example on the webpage is pretty contrived. Yes, the resulting "nice looking" districts are mathematically simple to specify, but narrow triangle-shaped wedges won't pass the smell test for most people. Or any triangles!

The world underneath is full of other facts on the ground, like municipal boundaries, county lines, and the like. Districts that deviate too far from these other entities -- entities that are already being used for governance and administration -- then clearly some trickery is going on to deliberately cherry-pick people for some reason.

Tying districts to more closely resemble existing administration boundaries won't magically solve this issue -- packing, cracking, nonsensical groupings are still a danger -- but it's a sensible baseline expectation that can be used to build on. When applied together with nonpartisan redistricting, perceived compactness, and efficiency gap metric, as the article notes, it can produce reasonable results.

<comment><USER23> > the example on the webpage is pretty contrived

That's true, but the point of the demonstration is simply that the snaky, salamander-looking shapes are not necessary.

There's every reason to believe that you can achieve stunning examples of partisan gerrymandering under various "nice shape" criteria. You are correct that the "n-1 split lines" is simply very easy to state mathematically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Michigan Radio reported this morning[0] that some group turned in a petition with more than 400,000 signatures for getting how in-state districts are drawn revampted.

[0][http://michiganradio.org/post/redistricting-drive-step- close...](http://michiganradio.org/post/redistricting-drive-step- closer-2018-ballot)

</comment><comment><USER25> I've been wanting to play with code for awhile to see how effective a "huddle" algorithm might be. The idea being that people with similar interests tend to huddle together into areas of a large city or regions of the state they feel match their lifestyle.

I'm not sure exactly how it would work but I imagine some kind of flood fill where you start with a population center and grow outward from it. Those should fill up quickly and by the end you should have large rural districts to finish off the state.

<comment><USER26> Effective at what? One potential goal of gerrymandering is packing your opponents into as few districts as possible.

Which is ultimately the problem with algorithmic approaches; "fair" isn't an objective measure.

<comment><USER27> Efficiency gap is a decent objective metric of fairness.

<comment><USER26> It's not an algorithm for drawing districts though, it's a score computed for a given plan.

And it depends on selecting binary sides. How do you objectively deal with a popular moderate?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have been thinking on a "simple rule" that could mitigate gerrymandering:

1\. No congressional district can span more than 1 partial city and/or county.

This will force districts to be drawn to cover whole cities/counties and would stop ridiculous districts such as the Texas 34th which covers parts of at least 8 counties from the gulf coast up to San Antonio

<comment><USER20> > No congressional district can span more than 1 partial city and/or county.

State legislatures control the definition of administrative subdivisions of the state just as much as they do Congressional districts, so that rule does nothing. A state that is really committed to gerrymandering will just move city and county lines when it redistricts.

A smarter but still corrupt state legislature that wants to gerrymander without disrupting functional local government will make "city" and "county" names of ceremonial subdivisions used for limited purposes, so that redrawing their lines doesn't have much practical effect, and adopt a different set of subdivisions with overlapping lines for most functional local government purposes ("urbanizations" and "parishes", perhaps.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Here's a relatively new PR method developed by a grad student at Harvard. It's an interesting twist on STV that avoids the ballot complexity.

[https://email@example.com/place-voting- explained-129...](https://email@example.com/place-voting- explained-129e65cbb625)

I agree with others on this thread that the only solution to gerrymandering is some form of PR. PLACE voting is interesting because it doesn't require a change in the ballot and retains the notion of geographic districts.

<comment><USER20> Not requiring a change of ballots when you are doing very different things with them is, IMO, a negative traits because it creates a false familiarity.

When you are changing how ballots work, this should be _unavoidably obvious_ , even to people who spent the time the change was being debated in a coma or Antarctic research expedition.

Also, STV in small (~5 member) districts gets much improved proportionality from the status quo, keeps geographic districts, and increases the proportion of people with someone representing both their ideology _and_ district simultaneously.

<comment><USER30> > Not requiring a change of ballots when you are doing very different things > with them is, IMO, a negative traits because it creates a false familiarity.

I don't think that's something you can really do with voting systems, though. Lots of voting systems are based around the same input assumptions, i.e., people are submitting a rank-order of preferences. And nothing's saying you'd have to switch to PLACE from STV rather than from FPTP. Regardless I think it doesn't make a lot of sense to associate ordinal ballots with STV specifically rather than just, well, what they are, which is a rank-order of preferences, that will get used somehow.

<comment><USER20> > I don't think that's something you can really do with voting systems

You can sometimes, you can't others.

> Lots of voting systems are based around the same input assumptions, i.e., > people are submitting a rank-order of preferences

But FPTP is _not_ based on that input, so changing from FPTP to a more proportional system (many of which rely on that kind of input) provided a clear opportunity to have a clean break without false familiarity.

> And nothing's saying you'd have to switch to PLACE from STV rather than from > FPTP.

The false familiarity is FPTP -> PLACE.

<comment><USER30> Ah! I misunderstood. You're talking about the possibility of "check one, go by that candidate's endorsed ballot". (Something that could really be added to just about any voting system; I hadn't really considered it as essential to PLACE in particular.) Yeah, that's an interesting point against that feature, then. Hadn't considered that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Sadly it is a bit out of date (requires Flash), but there is a neat game/simulation where you can test out different redistricting strategies SimCity style: [http://www.redistrictinggame.org/](http://www.redistrictinggame.org/)

There are no easy answers. I believe the game makers advocate for independent non-partisan commissions who are restricted in how they're allowed to create maps.

<comment><USER7> You might be interested in this web-based/mobile/PC game about gerrymandering from this year: [https://chequered.ink/districts- game/](https://chequered.ink/districts-game/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Here's an idea:

1\. decide how many congresspeople there should be

2\. allow anyone to run

3\. allow anyone to vote for anyone

4\. once someone has #voters/#congresspeople, they become a congressperson

5\. no one else can vote for that person

So, you're not actually competing against another person. You're competing get enough people to say "this person represents me".

<comment><USER33> Interesting idea. It has a some troubling flaws, though.

First, in order to make the lockout in #5 work it would seem that the votes need to be tallied in real time as they are cast.

This could be addressed in a couple of ways.

(A) Allow votes of the form:

      Vote for candidate C1
      If C1 is locked out, vote for C2
      If C2 is locked out, vote for C3
      ...

That would allow processing votes in batches, ordered by time stamp.

(B) Instead of a lockout, allow a candidate to receive more votes than the #voters/#congresspeople threshold. Each voter starts with a weighted vote with weight 1, and provides a list of alternative candidates similar to from (A).

If C1 gets a total weighted vote above the election threshold, choose t such that if each voters weight is multiplied by t the total for C1 will exactly equal the threshold.

For each C1 voter, split their vote giving t of it to C1, and 1-t of it to their C2.

Iterate through this until it converges. (I think it must converge, but offhand do not have a proof).

Second, you need to know the number of voters in advance to set the threshold. Note that you need the actual number of people who will vote, not just the number of eligible voters, because if you use the later you will be setting the threshold too high.

Third, if the number of people running is large, it is quite possible nobody reaches the election threshold. You need a procedure to whittle down the number of candidates.

<comment><USER16> Congratulations, you've just devised the single transferable vote used in Ireland, Malta and Australia. Assuming that "the procedure to whittle down the number of candidates" is "exclude the worst-performing candidate and continue to their C2".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> We desperately need to get away from the hyper-partisan, two party system. An Either-Or system was not what the framers had in mind and is damaging. While not the most popular position, I ALWAYS vote for the 3rd party candidate with reasonable policies for the sake of our country.

<comment><USER35> I used to think the same way about 3rd party, but now I'm beginning to view the 2 party system including the primary as just a 2 round playoff. If you really have enough support to contend as a third party, you can easily win the primary of one of the major parties.

Your most important vote is in the primaries (especially in areas dominated by a single party), and I think the country as a whole is beginning to realize it.

<comment><USER36> We shouldn't have to go through one of the 2 major parties to contend as a third party candidate. One way to solve this could be putting caps on campaign financing which would level the playing field for smaller 3rd parties. But that would never happen because the major 2 parties make the rules and that would hurt their dominance. By voting for either party we are essentially enabling the either-or system to continue

<comment><USER35> >By voting for either party we are essentially enabling the either-or system to continue

I used to agree, but the parties have no ideology attached to them. Their names are just generic terms regarding democracy and you can see how much their platforms have changed and moved over the last century. At this point they are just the Urban and Rural divisions of our election playoff.

They are just the ideology of the people elected. If you change the candidates of the party, you have changed the ideology of the party. Trump figured this out and instead of sticking with the Reform party, he just took over the Republican nomination.

<comment><USER36> > the parties have no ideology attached to them

That statement is simply incorrect. Both parties have a clear ideology that ebbs and flows for the sake of remaining in power

> If you change the candidates of the party, you have changed the ideology of > the party.

That is also incorrect. The 2 parties may slightly adjust their ideology for the sake of power but the core of their ideology remains the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Does anyone know why gerrymandering only includes Democrat and Republican parties? Surely some states like New Mexico who, at the time, had a third party Governor must have had districts that voted in majority for third party candidates.

</comment><comment><USER38> The framers of the US constitution were remarkably prescient about a number of things, but my guess is that they did not anticipate gerrymandering, or at least its effectiveness. I would be very interested to hear otherwise.

<comment><USER39> Gerrymandering is a very old idea. The term itself was coined in 1810, and was in practice well before then. The 1788 election in Virginia was gerrymandered, the same year the Constitution was ratified. [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the- lea...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-league- of/309084/)

There's a significant difference in the modern era in that gerrymandering can be much more precise. The 2010 districts the Republicans drew in several states are very sophisticated works of statistics, GIS, and political science. I fear what machine learning techniques are going to do in 2020.</comment></comment>


Mars's ice-filled Korolev crater - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/who-wants-to-go-ice-skating-across-this-wintry-martian-1831232767 <comment><AUTHOR> This article reminded me of Geoffrey Landis's "Polar Landing Site for a First Mars Expedition" [1], which seems like an interesting idea (easy access to water ice has some real benefits) except that the polar ice cap is probably about the most boring place on Mars to land.

Some place like Korolev crater might be a good compromise, with (possibly) easy access to water ice while retaining access to non-ice-covered Mars terrain.

[1] [http://www.geoffreylandis.com/pole.html](http://www.geoffreylandis.com/pole.html)</comment>


Prototypes that feel native, straight from Photoshop - <AUTHOR> http://standin.io/

<comment><USER2> Wow! If this is as easy to use as shown in the video, then designing apps and prototyping them will be 10x more enjoyable. I can imagine this helping me be more creative as I am much faster drawing out my ideas in photoshop than storyboarding in xCode or writing html/css/js. (or using any of the other prototyping software I've used before...) Thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER3> This is seriously cool. We had a tool like this in Xbox back in 2010 as we were redesigning the shell. It's probably the only tool chain I miss from Microsoft. So stoked to see a product like this out in the wild</comment>


Cryptic survey - <AUTHOR> http://www.yourvoice.xyz/ <comment><USER2> This is pretty cool, what's it about?</comment>


Y Combinator Founder Paul Graham Issues New Warning to Start-ups - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/kathleen-kim/y-combinator-advisor-sends-seed-funding-warning.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+inc%2Fheadlines+%28Inc.com+Headlines%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher <comment><USER2> Just so everyone understands, I was not saying that Google Ventures is a bad investor and should be avoided. If we thought that, the email would have been a lot shorter. I was just talking about a structural problem that happens when you've already raised some money on a convertible note with a valuation cap, and an investor offers to invest at a lower cap.

That sort of offer puts founders in a bind, because if you take it (a) it can anger the earlier investors, and (b) perhaps worse, it can, like a "down round" give investors the impression that your prospects are getting worse.

My overall advice about fundraising is to do breadth-first search weighted by expected value. I.e. talk to every investor who's interested but focus on the most promising ones. This is one of many situations whose solution follows from that rule. An investor offering you money on worse terms is at least offering you money, which is better than nothing. But all other things being equal, the expected value of such an investor is lower than that of one willing to invest on the same terms as your existing investors, so you have any of the latter you should focus on them.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps Google is leveraging their name and their value as a resource? Google Ventures investing in you could also be seen as a strong positive signal too. And not that I know what those resources offered might be, and not saying it is fair to earlier investors, though I would give someone with say media reach more value than say a local silent investor who has nothing other than money to offer.

<comment><USER4> Google Ventures is not the "Google" of venture funding. And there are about 5-7 firms that would have this type of brand-value that don't even _consider_ these kind of tactics.

<comment><USER3> It's still called Google Ventures to leverage Google's name. Regarding tactics, I guess it's a matter of knowing your poker hand and trying to put your best foot forward. I can see a point to perhaps doing such a lessened risk with incubator-founded startups, in that the model isn't yet proven of how the average incubator startup can compare to an external team that would have very different dynamics of being processed. It's in an incubator's best interest to make things look good - so the startup gets funding and the incubator's equity becomes more available - though it doesn't mean it was people on the team itself that could have achieved the same, nor that those same resources would continue to be available to the team (or at the same amount) once away from the incubator.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't know if this is true or isn't true, but Google Ventures' counter arguments are red herrings:

      "I don't know what Paul's thinking," Maris said.
      "It's just not true. Our portfolio speaks for itself."

and

      "We've already closed investments on companies from this class,
      so they don't seem to feel that way," Maris said.

Neither of those things mean that what PG is saying is false. Google Ventures is a desirable investor and entrepreneurs would be willing to trade lower caps for a Google stamp of approval on their round. The question is whether it's a matter of their policy to quote a cap at half of a company's existing one, and whether that is an ethical policy. Because they are skirting the question, it certainly makes them look guilty to me.

<comment><USER6> How could it be unethical? I could offer Ferrari $500 for their latest model -- they would would tell me to stick it where the sun don't shine, but it hardly makes the offer unethical. If I was Jay-Z, they'd probably accept my offer for the publicity value, which is what Google is hoping happens to them.

<comment><USER7> It'd be unethical if you knew $500 was undervalued _and you thought Ferrari didn't_ , i.e. if they were inexperienced and possibly accidentally undervaluing their own car. Then you would be taking advantage of them.

<comment><USER8> I disagree. The CEO of a startup is an adult, maybe a young one, but an adult no less. They need to know what is over and undervalued for their company. On the other hand, the investor has a fiduciary responsibility to get the best round possible for their fund. In Google's case it is for their shareholders.

In other words it would be unethical for the VC to not work to get the best valuation.

<comment><USER7> Interesting code of ethics you're proposing there: that it's actually unethical _not_ to take advantage of people, and your only ethical responsibility is to the people who pay you. Convenient, I'm sure.

<comment><USER8> If you invested what you consider to be a large amount of money with a VC to produce a return for you over a 10 year period would your rather they:

A) Care deeply about producing the highest return for you and in doing so use their expertise as negotiators including their competative advantage as a well branded firm (google). And in doing so dilute founders and less experienced investors in the process...

B) Ask them to negotiate in a way which maximizes other investors' returns and founder returns at the expense of your own returns.

Both cases you are paying them a fee to do this.

If you answer B, I encourage you to leave a response explaining your position.

Then consider you are a pension advisor who needs high returns to make sure that you will be able to pay the pensions of fire fighters. Would you make the same decision?

<comment><USER9> Your argument applies as well to Google Ventures as to Enron. I'm sure there's a line in your head that companies are not meant to cross in serving their investors, but it didn't make it into the argument.

Fiduciary responsibility is independent of ethics. You can't use ends to justify means.

<comment><USER8> _Your argument applies as well to Google Ventures as to Enron._

Exactly! Enron would be the equivalent if Google Ventures decided to falsify their valuation documents they were sending to investors saying they were getting much better valuations than they actually were. Then one day in 6 years they said all of those financial reports they submitted to the SEC were falsified so there is a total loss in the Google Venture line. In doing so they violated their fiduciary responsibility.

 _I'm sure there's a line in your head that companies are not meant to cross in serving their investors, but it didn't make it into the argument._

Of course there is, but an arm's length negotiation with CEOs of angel invested startups seeking to be the CEOs of the worlds largest, most innovative companies is well within that line.

 _Fiduciary responsibility is independent of ethics._

Fiduciary responsibility is the core of business ethics that should never be violated. Within fiduciary responsibility you still can't do anything illegal. Of course ethics are always a grey area which is why there is a discussion about this topic here, but I disagree where the line is clearly with you.

 _You can't use ends to justify means._

That is not what I am doing.

Seriously, ask yourself what you would want the VC you entrust with your money to do.

<comment><USER9> _"Seriously, ask yourself what you would want the VC you entrust with your money to do."_

Is that _all_ you need to ask in considering how ethical an action is?

The whole point of ethics is to reason in the context of tensions. Tensions between what you want and what others want. Companies have responsibilities to more than their investors. Their employees, their communities, their customers, their environment. Focusing exclusively on one side of the tension has nothing to do with ethics.

Focusing disproportionately on investors is also ethically convenient, because their interests are often aligned with yours.

 _"an arm's length negotiation with CEOs of angel invested startups seeking to be the CEOs of the worlds largest, most innovative companies is well within that line."_

It may seem obvious to you, but it's clearly not obvious to grandparent since _that is what the argument is about_.

 _"Fiduciary responsibility is the core of business ethics that should never be violated. Within fiduciary responsibility you still can't do anything illegal."_

I think this position doesn't require the word 'ethics'. You can get by with just 'laws'.

This isn't a rhetorical device. I think lots of people think this, and honestly am ok with it. At the least it's internally consistent. It just fails for me because it doesn't permit asking, "what should the laws be?"

<comment><USER8> We are discussing CEOs of startups and their negotiation with professional investors. In that scenerio, I cannot imagine a reason why a VC should give up something in the negotiation because he feels like the startup doesn't know what they are worth. Both sides have lawyers and advisors and the CEO is an adult who can analyze his future as well as anyone else.

If the CEO is unable to negotiate what they are worth, they should hire a dreaded MBA to help them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't think the problem here is with Google Ventures. The problem is that founders don't understand convertible notes with caps. More by Mark Suster here: [http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2012/09/05/the-truth- abou...](http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2012/09/05/the-truth-about- convertible-debt-at-startups-and-the-hidden-terms-you-didnt-understand/)

<comment><USER11> Maybe it's not that the founders don't understand convertible notes. Maybe they are taking the funding at a lower valuation because they're willing to gamble on the likelihood of a (big money, not acqui-hire) acquisition by Google later down the road is more likely.

<comment><USER12> Google Ventures, in my experience, tells entrepreneurs that they have little to do with Google. They do not invest in things because they are synergistic with Google, and they may even invest in things that compete _with_ Google. They make it very clear up front that Google Ventures is a separate organization. At most, they may tap into their network within Google to assist you if it makes sense, but any investor worth their weight in Silicon Valley can connect you with Googlers and other important companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The phrase I've heard is "Google Ventures is not the Google of venture capital."

<comment><USER14> It is in Google's nature to try and dip their feet everywhere

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Coincidentally, I was just reading this rather insightful essay on press releases <http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html> yesterday, and remember a line that stood out:

 _> 'why he's writing about this subject at all.'_

Makes one wonder what PG today, would say in response to PG (2005) :p

<comment><USER16> @wamatt, agree regardless of the "why" PG's email feels petty, YCombinator and its way too many startups are jumping the shark

<comment><USER17> With their business model, the more startups the more likely they are to get a homeruns and base hits, as long as they can maintain a minimum standard that's strongly correlated to outcome (which PG seems to have figured out). It's an odds and numbers game.

<comment><USER16> YC is billed like the yankees, but singles more likely, how did the Seattle Mariners do with Ichiro all these years?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Source link [http://www.businessinsider.com/paul-graham-y-combinator- goog...](http://www.businessinsider.com/paul-graham-y-combinator-google- ventures-lowball-offers-2012-9)

</comment><comment><USER19> The warning:

"According to the website, the incubator's prominent founder said: "If you're talking to Google Ventures you may be part of a pattern. The pattern is: you've already raised some money at a cap of $x. Then GV says they're interested and wants to invest at a cap of $x/2.""

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm a bit confused. Is the Google Ventures dig referring to companies that have already raised seed money from GV, and then try to get series A from them? Or is GV just doing this across the board for all startups that have raised seed rounds using convertible notes?

</comment><comment><USER21> Why are startups often disasters internally, as PG says in one of the linked articles?

<comment><USER22> This was my favorite line from the article, actually.

The quote in question: "Practically all start-ups internally are disasters"

Not just "often", but "practically all" start-ups. It's true in my experience, and not necessarily a bad thing. Of course, it would be great if everyone acted thoughtfully, didn't let ego get in the way, planned things just enough (but not too much), etc., but that's not just not the way it happens.

Acknowledging this fact, getting okay with it and still forging a highly functional team in the midst of such chaos and tragedy is the key. That's a tall order.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> One of the worst mobile website I've ever seen. I can scroll down on the article, so I click "go to full site". That takes me back to the main page, which is annoying, but I manage to click back to the article, at which point I am put through to the article on the mobile site again. And that's on top of the fact that I have to view a loading throbbler for a text article. Chrome for Android and the Android Browser

</comment><comment><USER24> Meta: the Inc.com mobile website offers an horrible experience on my Desire w/ ICS + Chrome. Slow, cluttered and buggy (wouldn't let me scroll to the bottom, kept bouncing back).

It's text content. Why not just a nice simple HTML page: instead of all the 'HTML app' cruft on top?

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm sure this is both true and reasonable for some companies that did notes with absurdly high caps earlier (which many have) and are now raising more money. Nothing to see here.

</comment><comment><USER26> So is GV consistently approaching startups that are already being funded, i.e., making offers after the project has had a little time to mature?

</comment><comment><USER27> If Google are willing to invest in your startup then why the hell would you turn that down?, it's like turning down a BJ from a supermodel, because she demands you do it at her house.

<comment><USER28> That's not what an investment is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Did Apple,Google, Facebook, Twitter or Microsoft use an incubator company? Why do people think they are required to be successful?

</comment><comment><USER29> It seems pretty hypocritical to be warning people "don't let google rip you off with lowball offers" when you run a company whose business model is "rip off college kids by taking a huge stake in their company in exchange for nothing". Wouldn't "dear google, please don't out-compete us in the ripping off college kids game" have been more honest?</comment>


Ask HN: Looking for constructive feedback on my Start-up - <AUTHOR>

Hey everyone,
I posted this quite a while ago, but since have improved a few things.
I'm looking for some feed back on my start-up for algorithmic traders.
The address is: https://algxchange.com <comment><USER2> Does it do anything yet? Or is this just a fake landing page for harvesting email addresses for future beta accounts?

I only noticed the very top bar the second time I loaded the page. I was looking for more content to help me determine whether this was a legit site or not, and I couldn't find it.

Breaking the bullets out into the grey boxes is awkward.

"Its pretty advanced" I'm not sure you want to put qualifiers like this, it's either advanced or it's not. If your target audience knows about the techniques you are using for the calculations, there's probably not a need to even say it's 'advanced'. Maybe you could get away with 'sophisticated'?

<comment><AUTHOR> First of all, thanks for the attention, and help.

It's up and functional (predictions API and the virtual trading API).

What type of info should I add? (What would someone look for on a page)

I'll try and figure out the bullets, and will rewrite the "Its pretty advanced". I missed it.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: A front end developer tool kit - <AUTHOR>

What would you say every front end developer should know?
A OOP Ruby java php?
jQuery SQL What's on your list and why? <comment><USER2> As a front end developer the things I would advise someone new to get into are: HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, WordPress + Git(Hub) on the coding side && branding, copy writing, color theory + good UX/UI principals on the design side.

Edit: Some server admin stuff [ cpanel, phpmyadmin, dns ]

Hope that's helpful (:

</comment><comment><USER3> Having just started diving into front end web development, I'm personally finding java and jQuery super useful. I'm also getting excited by some of the new things HTML5 has to offer.

</comment><comment><USER4> jQuery. x100. If I had to pick one tool for a front end developer to know, it'd be jQuery/Javascript.

</comment><comment><USER5> jQuery and Bootstrap. Learn how to make Ajax calls, and get comfortable encoding/decoding JSON.</comment>