Rain Follows the Plow - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_follows_the_plow <comment><USER2> I am a meteorologist and I forecast for Nebraska. Those theories might be wrong, but agriculture has surely changed the weather, especially the summertime dew point. A single acre of corn can sweat 4,000 gallons of water a day. Those circular fields you fly over are around 130 acres each. It is noticably more humid in the summer than before pivot irrigation was used.</comment>


Blatant claim, stupid reporting. Shameful from the Hindu, India - <AUTHOR> http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/chennai/he-has-arrears-in-engineering-phd-in-physics/article5278851.ece?homepage=true This was a letter that actually prompted the newspaper to look into what they had published https://docs.google.com/document/d/148zwzQbZn6ytFwW0bn98CE9UAvYPNKHQNIgkULxnWKE/preview?pli=1&sle=true <comment><AUTHOR> This was a letter that actually prompted the newspaper to look into what they had published [https://docs.google.com/document/d/148zwzQbZn6ytFwW0bn98CE9U...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/148zwzQbZn6ytFwW0bn98CE9UAvYPNKHQNIgkULxnWKE/preview?pli=1&sle=true)</comment>


Yahoo's New Male CEO Is Making Double Marissa Mayer's Salary - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/3068987/most-creative-people/dont-be-surprised-that-yahoos-new-male-ceo-is-making-double-marissa-may <comment><USER2> Mayer got a multi-hundred million dollar compensation package to sign up with Yahoo and run them into the ground, but somehow the narrative here is that a man is being paid more than a woman?</comment>


Many free mobile VPN apps are based in China or have Chinese ownership - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/many-free-mobile-vpn-apps-are-based-in-china-or-have-chinese-ownership/ <comment><USER2> VPN just shifts the trust from your ISP to the VPN company.

It doesn't matter where they're based. If you pay with a credit card under your real name the burden of risk is always on you and if the company has agreements with whichever jurisdiction you are in then they will collaborate with LE.

that said, trust is fickle: The ultimate example of why not to put trust in companies was WoSign/StartCom.

WoSign acquired Startcom because they were a trusted fresh player with a still untarnished name and available cheaply (also thanks to Eddy Nigg and his investor Wes Kussmaul who both saw no conflict of interest and indeed claimed in public Eddy didn't know who the buyer actually was until it was too late).

When somebody shows up with a fat cheque and tells your VPN company that Christmas came early, and that they're being bought out, then you have no reason to continue to trust or? Yet people do continue to trust (see the N.N. Taleb Turkey problem). People then are forgetting their trust assumption actually doesn't hold when main mode of growth for the company is M&A and not product development & innovation.

When trust is just a commodity that can be acquired and resold willy-nilly by some people with enough cash, then the product/service is automatically snake- oil (no matter if the crypto and the implementation of the software is 100% rock solid and was written by gods).

For VPN's a good rule is to choose a neutral company that has very little in common with you. If you are doing shit in Iran don't use an Iranian VPN company. likewise if you do shit in Russia then US/UK VPN should be safer than a VPN located in Cyprus.

If you do "shit" against Turkey, with a VPN in Australia while you are based in Taiwan that's 3 jurisdictions and much better than doing shit against Turkey connecting from Australia with your VPN based in Australia.

Finally it is best not to do shit, but sometimes doing shit is the only way crimes by governments and those in power can be exposed.

<comment><USER3> I thought the VPN protects me from US tech firms scooping up my data. Private browsing + VPN means each session looks like a new person and they can't tie my browsing back to me (pretty innocent browsing but still).

Edit: right?

<comment><USER4> Not quite. Try using Panopticlick [0] for an overview of how your browser can be tracked. Less unique is better. There's also sometimes new methods discovered to track users, but that's not something you would usually care about.

Firefox has good settings you can set in about:config [1].

If you don't have WebRTC disabled, there's a good chance a service can get your public IP address directly.

[0] [https://panopticlick.eff.org/](https://panopticlick.eff.org/) [1] [https://www.privacytools.io/#about_config](https://www.privacytools.io/#about_config)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Likely the reason why a lot of VPN apps are Chinese is because there is an actual demand for VPN usage in China. You then multiply that with the population size (19% of the world is Chinese or roughly 1 in 5 people in this world) and you will have a massive market to grow for local Chinese VPN developers and for them to prosper.

The article author sounds surprised but it is quite logical if you think about it.

<comment><USER6> How do these VPN bypass the Great Firewall if they are in China?

<comment><USER7> Some are based in e.g. Hong Kong which is in China but separately administered. (E.g. Chinese residents in Hong Kong are allowed dual citizenship while mainland Chinese are not.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Heck, many free mobile VPN apps don't even encrypt your traffic. An analysis of VPN apps on Android done back in 2016 found 84% leaked IPv6, 66% leaked DNS, 38% contained malware...and 18% didn't even encrypt anything...

Study is two years old, but I doubt it's gotten any better. (Source, PDF: [https://research.csiro.au/ng/wp- content/uploads/sites/106/20...](https://research.csiro.au/ng/wp- content/uploads/sites/106/2016/08/paper-1.pdf))

</comment><comment><USER9> Is there any reason to trust a free VPN service?

At least with a paid service I might think that my money ... could be enough to sustain the company. At least it could be.

I would assume a free service would have to be selling your information just as a matter of policy / economics.

<comment><USER10> You could extend the argument on price though.

You can easily pay an ISP $50/mo for broadband, so why should you trust a paid VPN that will handle all your traffic for only $5-8/mo on top? Is the difference all infrastructural costs? What about those cheap $3/mo VPNs? Where do you draw the line?

<comment><USER11> I presume the majority of that difference is because there's a healthy market for VPNs with practically no barrier to entry, whereas your ISP is a monopoly usually, or a duopoly if you're lucky.

<comment><USER12> Not outside the US. E.g., in our apartment, we can subscribe to fiber, cable, and DSL. On fiber and DSL, there are many ISPs to pick from. However, the prices are still similar to the US (you just get a lot more bandwidth for the same price).

I think it is more that the costs of running an ISP are much higher, you do not only need peering, but the networks including the last mile need to be put in the ground and maintained. Plus, in to some extend, people in areas with high-density populations subsidize expansion into lower-density areas.

The VPN market is really different. In principle anyone could start a VPN using just a VPS (it wouldn't be the best, but many VPNs are terrible anyway).

<comment><USER13> I'm pretty sure you and GP are saying the exact same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm not surprised, because the Chinese also have the most need for a VPN. Contrary to the article I think them "trying to keep a low profile" is not a bad sign at all, and you shouldn't really need to worry about privacy if you're using end-to-end encryption through the VPN.

<comment><USER15> Except if the phone itself contains an exploit.

<comment><USER16> Privacy is not a big concern for the Chinese based VPN services. It's useful for both accessing websites blocked inside China, and also Chinese content blocked outside China

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Almost all of the utility apps (battery cleaners, ram optimizers etc) are owned by chinese, and they are a bigger threat than vpn services. They have a huge footprint of devices outside of china, and have a lot of permissions granted

<comment><USER16> Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised at all. VPN is useful in both direction. There are quite some Chinese content not accessible outside China.

<comment><USER17> Can you mention an example of Chinese content that's not accessible?

<comment><USER18> Various streaming services prevent access to their site from non-Chinese IPs because they don't have distribution rights for other countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What's the best free peer-to-peer VPN?

Not a VPN that supports P2P filesharing, but a VPN where the users are the "servers", like Hola used to be before it started sucking (can't even select country now without paying).

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't recommend using one. P2P VPNs are great for people to commit crimes with, so unless every time your VPN is off, you want to be solving reCAPTCHAs all day, and not be able to make a purchase online, I would avoid it.

P2P VPNs don't offer much in the way of privacy, decentralization is only better in theory here. For unblocking services, many normal VPNs can do this fine as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The odds of a Chinese homed VPN provider not sharing logs with the Party asymptotically approach zero as time and user count increase.

<comment><USER21> Providing vpn services is almost illegal in china. The party doesnt ask for logs; it shuts down vpn services and punishes the providers. So the odds of vpn provider sharing logs with the government is ironically low.

<comment><USER22> Well... if "dissidents" use VPN that you ("Chinese government") can't monitor, what's one easy way to continue monitoring them?

Yes, offer them free VPN, what good is encryption if you're connected to a server they own/have influence over?

<comment><USER21> The party doesn't need to offer them free vpn. Instead, it figures out what vpn services they are using and shuts them down. It goes as far as using machine learning to detect vpn traffic.

I guess this is more effective because dissents is a very small subset of vpn users, and application layer encryption makes it hard to extract much information even if you can monitor vpn traffic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My guess is that the once ubiquitous Chinese VPN companies one found ads for everywhere in China have been driven out of the local market leaving people with gear and no customers, moving to courting offshore (from China) customers is the obvious move for these guys

</comment><comment><USER24> Free startup idea : Create a VPN service using lambda or some function as service and sell it.

</comment><comment><USER25> This should be the HN motto:

"If you aren't paying for it, you are the product".

Also, VPN isn't a magic cure for the disease of privacy violation. You are just choosing to trust the people running the VPN service over the people running your ISP. Should you trust a VPN company more than your ISP? I really can't say, but VPN isn't a magic fix.

<comment><USER26> Sorry, but this is just not true at all. There are thousands of open (and closed) source projects, software, and services that do not fall under this silly statement.

Does it mean that if you do pay for a product, that you still can't "be the product"?

Blanket statements shouldn't be anyone's motto.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> If they install root certificate then all your date is naked, not sure if they do tho.

But either way, you give away DNS log, http data, and possibly forced affiliate link when shopping online.

</comment><comment><USER28> and?</comment>


Golang SSA performance numbers - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang-dev/m1r8kSle30Y <comment><USER2> The last thing I'm curious about is compilation time, especially since that's taken a hit or two recently. I know it's easily a net win with numbers like that, but one of my favorite parts of Go is the quick build times, and thus quick iteration times.

Also, since Go is self-compiled, does that mean we'll have to wait until 1.7.1 for the speed improvements to hit the compiler? :-P

<comment><USER3> > one of my favorite parts of Go is the quick build times

One of my favourite parts of Go _was_ the quick build times. It used to feel like 'go build' was as fast as 'python'; sadly, that's no longer the case.

<comment><USER4> Despite the attractive nuisance of "go build", if you're in a fast save- compile-test cycle, you really want "go install". Both do pretty much the same thing (ignoring where the result goes), but install keeps the intermediate package compilations around and does the minimum, whereas build seems to discard them. Put "-v" on both of them and you can see the differences.

<comment><USER5> I think this is only true if you're building outside your GOPATH. In my case, build -v, build -v -i, and install all have very similar compile times and only show an edited file being compiled when executed from inside my GOPATH.

Each of those averaged 3.5s in my codebase, for example, on a freshly changed file. go install's second run is 250ms, but I assume that's because it knows the file hasn't changed.

go build -a shows roughly 60 packages and takes 16s, so I would notice if build or install were accidentally recompiling all of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can anyone say why the Mandelbrot benchmark, out of all of them, was slower with SSA? Any chance it was just a fluke?

<comment><USER7> The inner loop went from 15 instructions to 16 because the register optimiser is not finished yet.

<comment><USER8> Thanks. That's what I asked on the list, but HN was faster :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I just posted some results there on our own codebase.

Server load time dropped from 25.5s or so to 22.2s; a really nice win on a large and varied codebase for these improvements. I can't imagine not wanting them.</comment>


World's worst video card? the conclusion [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqY3FMuMuRo <comment><USER2> very interesting to watch. great result!</comment>


New Higgs Rumors Have Arrived - <AUTHOR> http://profmattstrassler.com/2012/06/18/new-higgs-rumors-have-arrived/

<comment><USER2> > [This is especially true since we learned last year that some well-known > non-particle-physicist bloggers have information pipelines directly into the > experiments. It is perhaps inevitable that there are scientists who see it > in their best interest to subvert the scientific process.]

The ethics of divulging LHC data before it's been fully vetted by the experimental collaborations is certainly debatable, but let's not go conflating the weird, experiment-specific rules for making public statements (which exist mainly to protect their reputation) with the scientific process _itself_.

<comment><USER2> Luckily, Peter Woit is a man after my own heart and is not above a bit of pettiness:

> Update: Matt Strassler has more about this here. He provides about 20 links > to his own blog, no link to the source of his information (this posting). It > appears that this is because I'm a "non-particle-physicist blogger" engaged > in a conspiratorial plot with some of the 6000+ people who know this latest > news to "subvert the scientific process" by sharing it with others.

<http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4772>

Preach it, brother.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've been to a few talks about the analysis of the LHC data, and the methods they are using are worryingly reminiscent of high-throughput biology: a search for statistically significant outliers in oodles of data. From a statistical point of view, the problem seems even worse than for biology, because the number of events being searched is much larger.

The problem with this approach is that small deviations from the statistical model can lead to statistically significant variations. Those deviations don't have to be in the scientific model under test, they can lie in the methods of measurement. So the fact that two groups are seeing similar anomalies does not imply that they've found a solid deviation from the standard model.

I'm not saying what they've done is useless. The LHC data might lead to follow up experimental designs which test much more specific hypotheses, and are therefore much more convincing. But I do think everybody is jumping the gun a bit.

</comment><comment><USER4> Can someone translate this to human for the rest of us?

<comment><USER5> That would be cheating :-)

Imagine you owned an intersection in a very busy city that was always covered in fog. You wonder what kind of cars they drive in your city but you can't tell because the fog obscures all the traffic below. But you _do_ own an intersection, so what you do is you start turning the traffic signals green for both directions to cause a collision. When that happens sometime a part of the cars involved flys so far up in the air that you can see it above the fog. Of course the car has just been in a collison so it can be challenging to figure out what piece of the car you are looking at. So when you see a crumpled up fender come flying up you take a picture of it, its rotating and what not but you use some image processing on the picture and try to figure out what kind of a car that fender was on, that tells you what kind of cars are crashing in your intersection.

Of course you _really_ want to know the brand of the car, and unfortunately the designers these days have very little imagination so most of the cars look the same and well a fender looks like a lot of other fenders. So you figure if you could just get a hood ornament to come up out of the clouds you would really know what brand of car it was. So you set the speed limit on your roads a lot higher and hope for even more energetic collisons. Of those of few of them will be where you can see the hood ornament come flying up over the clouds but its really small and if its edge on you can't really tell what brand it is. The longer you do it thought the more confident you are that the hood ornaments you are seeing belong to the car manufacturer you think they do.

The Higgs Boson is a piece of particle, when you crash two particles together and smash them there is a small chance that the resulting decay products will go by your detectors. If you don't crash them hard enough you won't see any (its like you see a lot of car hoods in our mythical scenario, but at higher speeds the hood and the hood ornament separate and you can see just the ornament).

Basically the LHC has boosted the energy from last year which means there _should_ be more chances to see this particular piece, and the detectors have been tuned better to look for it in a particular place, if they see what they saw last year, only more of them, then you can make the argument that the effect is really the Higgs Bosun decaying, if you don't see more then its likely some other effect.

Hope that helps</comment></comment>


Console #16: Fake Like Factories and Surviving the Surveillance Apocalypse - <AUTHOR> https://console.substack.com/p/console-16-fake-like-factories-and <comment><USER2> Submitting this _every day for a week_ seems excessive.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=console.substack.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=console.substack.com)</comment>


DevjaVu will be shutting down - <AUTHOR> http://blog.devjavu.com/2009/05/01/devjavu-will-be-shutting-down

<comment><USER2> As one of a few (very) small angel investors in DevjaVu, I'm both sad to see it go and excited to see what Jeff Lindsay will do next.

If the past week has been any indication, he's going to build a small army of web API related infrastructure projects: <http://www.scriptlets.org/> <http://www.postbin.org/> <http://github.com/progrium/hookah/>

<comment><USER3> Don't forget protocol-droid, SuperHappyDevHouse, Hacker Dojo, TIGdb, working at NASA, etc etc

I'm actually very surprised at the number of people happy with DevjaVu as a service since after the first year or so I spent very little time working on it. Except when something went wrong and then I spent a lot of time to plug the hole (and not properly fix the problem like I should have--that would require even more time).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> disclaimer: I run xp-dev.com and am probably in direct competition with devjavu

The whole hosted project/version control business is tough. For starters the market is crowded. Additionally, a lot of people do want it all for free. To top it off, it's uber resource (space + bandwidth) intensive.

There are some really good folks out there who provide a great service and devjavu's one of them. Its sad to see it shutting down, and I can empathize with Jeff on his decision to terminate the service.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I thought I could make more of a premium product to compete with the more commodity hosted project solutions ... but then you start competing with larger companies with more time in the market, existing product(s), and more resources.

I think we did okay for what was ultimately a one-man show. But I'd much rather put the kind of investment required for running a business into something more innovative.

<comment><USER4> Well put :)

Do keep all of us posted on what you're doing next!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was confused for a moment and thought that this was about the DejaVu fonts project discontinuing development. The DejaVu fonts are very complete and cover much of the characters Unicode standard.

<comment><USER6> and I thought it was referring to the odd image format: <http://djvu.org/>

<comment><USER7> You must not read enough math ebooks. It's all djvu from here to Königsberg.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hmm, I wonder if hosting ate up most of their money.

You guys could always get a slice at linode and save even more.

<comment><USER9> $1100+/month + $700 in setup fees? Probably. EngineYard is friggin _expensive_. I would have gone with something like Linode if you're starting out and need to be frugal.

<comment><USER10> They had some kind of deal with EngineYard, where EngineYard customers got free devjavu service. I'm pretty sure they got a discount on hosting for that.

Since EY's customers are mostly Ruby developers, it must have been hard competing with GitHub + Lighthouse:

[http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS145946+29-Ap...](http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS145946+29-Apr-2008+PRN20080429)

<comment><USER3> We did have a deal with Engine Yard. We were one of their first partnerships. It was initial a verbal agreement for exchange of services, which meant free hosting! Eventually when they got big and wanted to formalize the agreement to a cash exchange, they had less use for us and so while getting a major discount, we still started losing money.

Ultimately it was time that was the reason I decided to wind down. I barely had time to keep it running, let alone all the cool stuff I wanted to do with it. If I had the time to switch hosting providers, I would have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Jeff, sorry to hear the news. I'll always remember you pitching Devjavu back in 2006 in the stairwell at STIRR in SF.

<comment><USER3> Of course you will, cause I totally bombed it. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> :-(</comment>


Reddit startled Digg with its traffic and leaded the glory. - <AUTHOR> http://www.smooshable.com/reddit-startled-digg-with-its-traffic-and-leaded-the-glory/

<comment><USER2> Leaded: containing tetraethyllead.</comment>


Font Loading Checklist - <AUTHOR> https://www.zachleat.com/web/font-checklist/ <comment><USER2> At risk of being downvoted, I reject the advice in this article and instead advocate designers sticking to "core fonts" (Tahoma, etc) or CSS's built-in family names.

I accept that brochure-style websites genuinely benefit from being able to use the corporate identity's prescribed typeface for prose, but for non-branded content-heavy pages such as blogs and, uh, "content" the actual utility provided is, in this commenter's opinion, overrated.

A great argument against custom fonts on the web is that the "core fonts" have been designed for the screen, especially low-DPI environments - whereas I imagine a typical latter-day web-designer will be using a Retina-screen on a Mac - causing them to lose empathy for their 96dpi brethren who have to suffer with blurry and misaligned fonts on their webpages that were clearly designed for print, not screen, use.

I filter web fonts in my main Chrome profile and I'm in no hurry to re-enable that functionality.

<comment><USER3> I'm actually a fan of using the "system font stack", so your viewers get a font that's optimised for their particular device/browser.

For headings/titles where you want a specific font.. maybe some kind of trick with an svg+fallback text?

Web fonts often cause a noticeable delay of unreadable text for me, presumably because of not fantastic latency due to being in Thailand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it just the case for me or does that page itself suffer from FOIT?

It's quite visible when refreshing without cache (Ctrl+F5 on FF under Linux/Windows).

</comment><comment><USER5> I block custom fonts everywhere:

\- They make the page loading slower and consume bandwith

\- It does not look the way I like it

\- It can cause security issues

<comment><USER6> I would love to do this but too many sites use web fonts to provide custom icons with crucial functionality. E.g. media playback controls or e-mail actions.

Without web fonts a lot of app style websites become a guessing game of which squiggly box does what. :/

Really, what Id like is an easy "functionality level switch". Base level (default): article websites. minimal js, no mouse events, no keyboard events, no fonts, no css hover effects. Level 2: apps. Fonts, full css, more js, still some limitations. Level 3: full trust / compatibility mode.

If there's any such plugin, I'm all ears. uMatrix is a step, but not exactly in the right direction.

<comment><USER7> Font Awesome (a very popular icons library) started supporting SVG + JS as an alternative to CSS + webfont.

Not a perfect solution though as people blocking webfonts are likely to block JS as well.

<comment><USER6> This doesn't really help me as a web user, though. If I had the power to reeducate the entire world on how to make websites, I might have a few more items at the top of the list before font icons made the cut :P</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Linux on Laptops: Asus Zephyrus G14 with Ryzen 9 4900HS - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/linux-on-laptops-asus-zephyrus-g14-with-ryzen-9-4900hs/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for this, prolong battery life will make this much better one.</comment>


Mathematics for Computer Science - Lecture Notes - <AUTHOR> http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-042j-mathematics-for-computer-science-spring-2005/lecture-notes/ <comment><USER2> This is useful, but pretty standard undergrad material. There are more interesting OCW courses, such as Street Fighting Mathematics:

 _This course teaches the art of guessing results and solving problems without doing a proof or an exact calculation. Techniques include extreme-cases reasoning, dimensional analysis, successive approximation, discretization, generalization, and pictorial analysis. Applications include mental calculation, solid geometry, musical intervals, logarithms, integration, infinite series, solitaire, and differential equations. (No epsilons or deltas are harmed by taking this course.)_

[http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-098-street- fightin...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-098-street-fighting- mathematics-january-iap-2008/readings/)

<comment><USER3> cool, are there any vids for this course?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope there are no videos but the notes are simple to understand since they are very clearly explained.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have always been intimidated by college level math and secretly wished I was smarter to not just understand, but to _enjoy it_ as so many people seemingly do. I tried but failed to attain that level of proficiency multiple times.

The mistake I was making was that I was trying to read lectures/blogs/books recommended by random people who knew nothing about me. It doesn't work. The thing is: math is big. It's HUGE, it's a whole world with something for everyone, and not everything in there excites me. I discovered this by accident by picking an easy and fun book about cryptography called (I think it was called The Code) - it was fascinating, it took me to wikipedia and I started to explore this world following _my own interests_ And then it clicked: suddenly even "boring" aspects of math showed me their exciting sides.

<comment><USER5> Is the book you were referring to "The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography" by Simon Singh?

Amazon link - <http://amzn.to/dlNAeO>

It's on my reading shelf right now, but I have not gotten around to reading it. I think your comment just might make that happen. Thanks for the recommendation

<comment><USER6> I've read that book although I admit I did not take the final challenges. Still I found that to be a very interesting book, very well written where you can actually learn something useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is stuff that's usually taught in a course called "Discrete Mathematics". As far as textbooks go for this type of material, which do you all like? I own Rosen's famous book ( [https://www.amazon.com/Discrete-Mathematics- Applications-Ken...](https://www.amazon.com/Discrete-Mathematics-Applications- Kenneth-Rosen/dp/0073229725) ), but it's the "James Stewart's Calculus" of Discrete Mathematics books. I purchased some really old books too, but I haven't yet found one that I like a lot (I settled for a Dover text that's mostly passable).

For the specific topic of set theory, though, I haven't found one I like better than Paul Halmos: [https://www.amazon.com/Naive-Theory-Undergraduate- Texts-Math...](https://www.amazon.com/Naive-Theory-Undergraduate-Texts- Mathematics/dp/0387900926)

If I could only find a number theory text that I like as much.

</comment><comment><USER8> Good find. Note that the Fall2005 offering includes solutions to the assignments and in-class problems while Spring2005, the one linked, does not.

[http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and- comput...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer- science/6-042j-mathematics-for-computer-science-fall-2005/lecture-notes/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Do the page "The ZFC Axioms" contain errors? I can't understand the following proposition:

∃y∀z(∃w(z ∈ w ∧ w ∈ x) ⇒ z ∈ y)

Shouldn't it be:

∃y∀z(∃w(z ∈ w ∧ w ∈ y) ⇒ z ∈ y)

</comment><comment><USER10> are there any lecture videos available for this course?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope ;-) I even searched for related math books by these course instructors but no luck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Mathematics gets way more attention than it deserves in computing -- particularly with today's sophisticated libraries/frameworks.

Just because a topic can be challenging doesn't automatically make it worthwhile.

This is a trap that many people fall into.

<comment><USER12> I think the more common trap, into which you appear to have fallen, is thinking that computer science and software engineering are the same thing.

<comment><USER13> The other common trap to fall into: thinking that all programming problems are solved. All you have to do is code the "business logic".

A corollary of this is that it's impossible to speed up "business logic" at all. You have to drop from Java (typically) directly into assembly language.

<comment><USER11> Not all programming problems have been solved, but your time is not unlimited either. You need to spend your time on what really matters for your development.

<comment><USER7> Who are you to say that this doesn't matter for someone's development? This thread reads like you're trying to convince yourself that you don't need to understand this stuff.

<comment><USER11> I've taken quite a lot of university math courses. Not much is helpful for what I do in my development.

In fact, not even the algorithms courses I've taken are all that helpful since most of the hard stuff is already done for you in libraries/frameworks.

<comment><USER7> _to what I do in my development._

What I pointed out above is that there are people who do this stuff in their development. (-:

It seems like we're caught in this cycle where every 2 or 3 years, a new framework comes out that everybody rushes to embrace. _Someone_ is writing the code to build these frameworks, and I guarantee you someone had to worry about what made their algorithm O(n^2) instead of O(log(n))

I think the reason you're being downvoted though, isn't because you simply pointed out that some people don't need to know this stuff, because (although somewhat pointless to state), that's true. Rather, I think the problem was when you said

 _Mathematics gets way more attention than it deserves in computing_

Because you made no attempt to back it up, producing only evidence of your particular situation.

<comment><USER11> _It seems like we're caught in this cycle where every 2 or 3 years, a new framework comes out that everybody rushes to embrace. Someone is writing the code to build these frameworks, and I guarantee you someone had to worry about what made their algorithm O(n^2) instead of O(log(n))_

The number of people working on difficult libraries/frameworks is rather small compared to the total number of developers.

<comment><USER14> Many of those people read this site, however.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Research Football - <AUTHOR> https://research-football.dev/ <comment><USER2> I'd be interested in seeing something like this where each individual player has skill levels for different actions, varying across both positions and teams. Not sure how to make the competition fully fair then (perhaps a sum skill level "salary cap") but it would be cool to see what strategies might arise when a team knows the strengths and weaknesses of their own players and can learn (maybe starting with a reasonable ballpark guess from "scouting") the weaker points of a given opposing team.

To make a ridiculous analogy to the other football, in NCAAF video games the mascot mode had every "player" on every team have 99 ability in all possible skills. Which means that any player standing on the field could throw as well as the quarterback, punt as well as the punter, etc. Opening up many unrealistic trick plays.

But even adjusting for positional differences, I think a lot of the cool sports stories have involved seeing how a particular team strategizes against another particular team, which goes away when all teams start with equal across the board abilities.

<comment><USER3> There is an upcoming contest to write an AI for an (American) football based board game, Bloodbowl. The players have different stats as you describe, and the teams can be asymmetrical (though for the competition, both teams select 11 players from a fixed 12 player roster, so not too asymmetrical).

Here is a link to the competition: [https://njustesen.github.io/ffai/bot-bowl- ii](https://njustesen.github.io/ffai/bot-bowl-ii)

(As an aside, just wanted to mention that the original article is actually about soccer, rather American Football. The comment I'm replying to is certainly about American football, so I feel my comment here is fair.)

<comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing, I've never played Bloodbowl but heard about it a few times now, will have to look into this!

(I honestly don't know enough about soccer to know how much positional variation or asymmetric skills matter. I assume they do but probably to a lesser extent than football, which I also know way more about, hence going on a bit of a tangent when trying to make the idea concrete.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The mentioned blog post is mislinked in the article but it's been on HN before with a bit of discussion. It has some video and a better overview.

[https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/06/introducing-google- researc...](https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/06/introducing-google-research- football.html)

Thread at:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20135726](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20135726)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for pointing out. Fixed the link on the page.

<comment><USER4> With all (human) competitions cut or postponed, watching a bit of zany machine football was especially enjoyable, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> RoboCup was founded almost 23 years ago. While the physical robot leagues often garner most attention, there has always existed a simulation league, of both 2d and 3d varieties. [https://ssim.robocup.org/](https://ssim.robocup.org/)

<comment><USER7> Yeah, but in RoboCup 3D the robots fall all over themselves and can barely play: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T1ElDs5eSQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T1ElDs5eSQ) \- RoboCup seems focused more on simulating robot movement than the game itself.

This new Google competition appears to be more about ML and playing the game, judging from videos: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8DcgFDT9sc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8DcgFDT9sc)

<comment><USER8> That's a fair characterization; the 3D league is meant to incorporate physical constraints, and learning "through" those to the higher level aspects of the game is challenging. That's what the 2D league exists for though.

The Google simulator lets you learn from pixels if you want to, but the agent that you're controlling only has 8 actions [1] available to it, so the learning problem here really has no bearing on a robotics application or anything in the real world that I can think of.

[1] [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.11180.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.11180.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Awesome. Finally we'll know if possession is the true answer.

After looking at the video, I get the feeling I could beat the winning team; it definitely misses tons of clear passing opportunities that would open the play.

</comment><comment><USER10> Happy to see it is about "actual" football. I am embarrassed to say that football is one of my life-long passions, especially now that I am older than most players. But I would love to work in any area even tangentially related to it.

<comment><USER2> I don't know much about this football so it is probably way more nuanced than I'm giving it credit for, but I'm actually disappointed this is not about American Football. I think it is an interesting problem in that there is both the play calling decision made by the coach, and then the choices each (highly specialized) agent makes during execution. In addition to learning the physics to actually execute well of course.

There is also a nice hierarchical structure i.e. there is a clear outcome to each play, to each set of downs, to each possession.

Obviously this mostly has to do with personal preference, and I know that's all you were commenting on. But I've encountered enough people that seem to think football is a mindless game that I wanted to get a comment out there when I saw the topic come up.

<comment><USER11> I think one difference between American Football and Football is that American football tends to have specialized events happening. You have field goals, you have turnovers, you have punts, and so on. Each of them require specialized instructions, someone who is a wide receiver will not share the same skill as a QB. In Football, by and large the skillsets that everyone develops is the same, i.e. good ball control and fitness. There is specialization when it comes to specific positions, but it is not as drastic a change. This could allow you to get away with simpler player models in Football, everyone can basically be modeled by a simple "footballer", instead of different people for "kicker", "quarter back", "line back" and so on. Potentially, this can make sport simulation environments for RL like this easier for football.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Disney did some absolutely fascinating research here a few years ago. I suggest anyone interested in Deep Learning and Soccer checks out the following video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI- WL2cj0CA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI-WL2cj0CA)

"Data-Driven Ghosting using Deep Imitation Learning"

<comment><USER13> Supposedly Liverpool are using this "ghost" technique as well. in training to change player behavior, using the "expected goals" stat as the main metric or representation of the field state. It works well with Klopp's system.

<comment><USER14> Are there any regulations against transmitting data to wearables during play? I only see a regulation saying that data _from_ wearables can't be used during a game. Is there anything preventing players from wearing e.g. a device that vibrates when they're not optimally positioned, according to camera tracking

<comment><USER13> I'm pretty sure it would violate the "spirit of the game" rules by FIFA. Not sure if during halftime teams using digital analysis would even be allowed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've played with this a bit (I work in football analytics and play with tracking data a lot) and it's disappointingly unlike real football. Defenders are mostly useless ghosts and shooting seems wildly more accurate than in real life. Also a shame that the multi-agent track of the tournament is only 5 players - most of the off-the-ball behaviour of agents with the existing checkpoints is terrible.

If you wanted to think about this stuff with real football in mind, there are worse places to start than here:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUBFJYcag8j2rm_9HkrrA7w](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUBFJYcag8j2rm_9HkrrA7w)

<comment><USER16> I haven't played around with this system, but judging by the videos it seems they should have vetted their physics system against some priors from real- life such as defender's advantage (attacking is harder than defending) and relative difficulty of actions (defending shouldn't be so much harder than shooting, dribbling and passing). It might also be good to have basic structure for off-the-ball behavior to make it more realistic and organized (e.g. maintain 4-4-2 shape), so that there is always 1 defender behind each opposing player when the team doesn't have possession. That way, it won't look so much like a schoolyard game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> So the state includes the positions of all players and of the ball? That doesn't sound like solving football at all.

Why not build on the RoboCup 2D Football simulation league? It is a more realistic environment, where each agent has to sense the environment and decide what to do with some limited communication with other agents and with the coach. Furthermore, it already has some state-of-the-art teams. And finally, it is a step on the road to actually having a team of physical humanoid robots playing against a human team.

As is, this does not look very interesting and does not look too dissimilar from the Atari reinforcement learning.

</comment><comment><USER18> Interesting - this goal is scored by hacking the offside rule: [https://youtu.be/c3dv8s2SR0c?t=54](https://youtu.be/c3dv8s2SR0c?t=54)

The scoring player was not in offside because they are on their own half of the field when the goalie passes the ball.

<comment><USER19> That's hardly new - every 8-yo central defender in half-decent teams is taught never to cross the midfield line precisely for that sort of situation.

<comment><USER20> Two recent(ish) examples in real life:

Salah vs Manchester United: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STjxoGgFIzk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STjxoGgFIzk)

Torres vs Barcelona: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKOXBLTsu3s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKOXBLTsu3s)

<comment><USER21> Torres for Barca is because it's 90th of the minute of the game and Barca are about to be knocked out of CL. At that point, everyone goes up. If the ball went for a corner, the goalie would come up as well. I'm assuming it's something similar for that Salah goal as well. Context matters as well.

<comment><USER22> Torres was a bit of a flop at Chelsea. This goal was kind of a saving grace.

<comment><USER21> What has that got anything to do with the parent comment?

<comment><USER22> It's a random comment on a random website. Chill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Neat!

Watching the games, it looks like the effectiveness of dribbling is unrealistically high. Most scoring plays consist of dribbling around 1 player, then dribbling straight at that back line and hoping to win the take-on.

</comment><comment><USER24> I would love to see some sort of AI be able to play and then understand the rules correctly. Then eventually replace/aid referee's on the field.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'd be interested to watch some video from some of the games, if anyone knows if there is any?

<comment><USER7> Here's a trailer video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8DcgFDT9sc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8DcgFDT9sc)

Here's an actual game: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7KiAPtAPwg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7KiAPtAPwg)

More games at [https://research-football.dev/11vs11/ranking](https://research- football.dev/11vs11/ranking)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Google's answer to Amazon's DeepRacer?

<comment><USER27> Deep Racer extended to mario kart "combat" features would be a really interesting topic. So they had to learn deiving and combating and everything is a tradeoff between these two functionalities: Maybe driving a little bit worse will result in a better position if you can E.g. better target your opponents with the shells.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I got confused when the Google thing wasn't in American English.

</comment><comment><USER29> Nitpick, but it recurs:

s/challange/challenge/g

<comment><USER30> FWIW this is from Zurich-based folks so they're presumably not native English speakers... and challenge is not exactly phonetic :)

<comment><USER29> They are also presumably comfortable with improving their work with feedback, even in relatively small ways. Some HN readers seem to believe otherwise, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Looks more like soccer to me.

<comment><USER32> Dude you're either trolling or you're just extremely oblivious.

Do you realize that football is the most popular sport in the world and almost every country call it football? (you know, because you're controlling a ball with your feet)

<comment><USER33> > Do you realize that football is the most popular sport in the world and > almost every country call it football?

So? Hacker news is an american site and we call it soccer.

> (you know, because you're controlling a ball with your feet)

Actually, football is a class of games which involve kicking a ball to score a goal. Everything from "football" to soccer to rugby has kicking to score goals/points.

"Sports commonly called football include association football (known as soccer in some countries); gridiron football (specifically American football or Canadian football); Australian rules football; rugby football (either rugby league or rugby union); and Gaelic football."

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

If you really want to be accurate, then you should call it association football. And the word soccer is derived from assocation football.

[https://www.etymonline.com/word/soccer](https://www.etymonline.com/word/soccer)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> " Google Research Football Environment is a novel Reinforcement Learning environment where agents aim to master the world's most popular sport -- football."

</comment><comment><USER35> Are we done with games yet? I thought it's been well shown that you can beat any computer game using RL. Would like to see people move on from these types of things and engage more with the difficulty of solving real world problems with AI.

At this point, I'm not really sure that the progress in playing games is carrying over to much in terms of solving real world problems, but curious to see if anyone has good counterexamples.

<comment><USER36> There are still lots of things that are more easily answerable in games to see if they exist.

For example, can we get AI to play deceptive strategies without being explicitly rewarded (Open AI hide and seek game, StarCraft fog of war plays, etc)?

As to whether it can translate to solving real world problems is arguable (there are some cases yes), but it definitely helps out in weeding inference models or training strategies that are not viable in games (and probably not the real world).

edit: Forgot to list an example. Using the same reinforcement learning strategies not to play games, but to design them.

<comment><USER35> Thanks for the perspective. I have been asking this question for a few years now, and I think Deepmind's marketing has been pretty deceptive on this. What examples do you have in mind where the research from playing games with RL has carried over into solving a real-world problem? Probably the state of the art has advanced as I have focused in applying supervised learning on some applied problems that interest me.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why do solitaire random deals never seem random - <AUTHOR> On computer solitaire games, either PC, Mac or mobile, random deals seem to not be random at all. <comment><USER2> Perhaps because the subset of all possible deals that "seem" not entirely random to human eyes is immense.

</comment><comment><USER3> Without any analysis, this "seems" to be somewhat spurious.

TL;DR: Default RNGs aren't generally cryptographically random.

That said, the human mind is good at finding patterns where there aren't any, e.g., apophenia, pareidolia, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> I use "seem" as I have not done a thorough analysis, so yes, anecdotal.</comment></comment>


Is the name of your freemium offer losing you revenue? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.priceintelligently.com/blog/bid/172319/Is-the-name-of-your-freemium-offer-losing-you-revenue

<comment><AUTHOR> How many of you have "free" in the title of your free plan?</comment>


Show HN: Poemr: The Imgur of Poetry - <AUTHOR> http://poemr.com

<comment><USER2> Nice! Shared it with all my poet friends.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, thanks! I appreciate it.</comment></comment>


The Most Annoying Website – JSConf US 2018 [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFZ-pwErSl4&feature=youtu.be&t=16 <comment><USER2> Don't know whether to laugh or cry at this. Flashback of Windows 95-era viruses but created in a modern web browser. The GNU LibreJS project should link to this video. It shows clearly, perhaps too clearly, what is wrong with running untrusted code in the browser.

To those who can't be bothered to watch the whole talk and don't mind force- quitting their browser, skip right to the action at [https://theannoyingsite.com](https://theannoyingsite.com)

I had no idea things like these were still possible in the browser. Very inspiring, in a wrong way. Thanks for sharing this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Creator of the site here :) Thanks for the nice comment. "Very inspiring, in a wrong way" is what I aspire to with my hacks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Fuck me, that is annoying!</comment>


Japanese schools demand students prove their hair colour - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.co.jp/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/japanese-students-hair-color-2017-5 <comment><AUTHOR> The measure is designed to uphold "strict" Japanese standards regarding physical appearance</comment>


Eclipses and Sunspots - <AUTHOR> https://kirstenhacker.wordpress.com/2020/04/06/sun-spots-and-eclipses/ <comment><AUTHOR> The comments and discussion with the author of [https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/](https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/) are worth looking at. He studies astronomy as more than a hobby.

</comment><comment><USER2> Did anybody else cringe at "the Sun and the Earth _weigh different amounts_ "?</comment>


Ask HN: Do you use any systems/automation for household tasks/chores/life admin? - <AUTHOR> I'm thinking things like planning meals, grocery shopping, household maintenance, chores, any general 'life admin' things. What systems do you have in place to put these on autopilot?<p>Of course these can't avoided, it's part of being a human and maybe the best solution is to find pleasure in them. But on the other hand it's nice to free up time or mental energy to throw at other things. <comment><USER2> Yes since my cleaner stopped because of Covid.

You can't automate that much but you can make manual stuff easier. Unsurprisingly this all costs money.

Floors:

I bought an Ecovacs Deebot n79s robot vacuum and it's great for the price as stage 1 cleaning - this starts as I wake up.

I also bought a iRobot Braava 390t, some extra northstars, spare washing solution and generic cloths from eBay and this is stage 2 for floor tiles and wood flooring that starts after the vacuum finishes.

Surfaces:

We then use disposable wipes last thing every night on kitchen and table surfaces and everything is wiped onto the floor for the vacuum to deal with.

Windows:

I bought a Karcher window vacuum and that reduces the effort in cleaning windows and shower. I didn't buy a window cleaning robot because they are pretty expensive.

I live in an apartment so no need for a robot lawn mower.

This tech has taken some annoyance out of cleaning and more importantly my place is cleaner than it would be because I'd have certainly not bothered on some days.</comment>


How Nokia got bamboozled by Hollywood - <AUTHOR> http://daltoncaldwell.com/nokia-hollywood-bamboozled

<comment><USER2> Few points:

1\. I don't believe it's an accurate statement to say Nokia is dead (if even as a stand-alone company). They have several great things going for them today, it's just hard to see if you're not looking beyond the current quarter or two (which I've found is a common symptom of blindness).

2\. I don't believe it's an accurate statement to say they flushed every piece of software they have ever built down the toilet. Firstly, they're still releasing non-WP phones. Secondly, a lot of their skills are in innovating within hardware, which they're very much still doing great stuff with.

3\. The takeaway from the article is that if you are a tech company, you shouldn't become a media company (or get into media). Firstly, wouldn't Apple, Google, and Microsoft have never entered the media industry if they would've followed this? Secondly, this takeaway is a great example of the innovators dilemma [1]. The two opposing strategies could just as well lead to failure -- a. Following this "takeaway" advice and being too afraid to join new "value markets" (e.g. innovating within media), and so you just keep on running with what works [3a]; and b. Not following this takeaway advice because you realize you can't stay on top forever with your current strategy, and so you make an attempt to enter new disruptive markets even if it means cannibalizing yourself [3b].

[3a] I think this blanket advice has problems -- media may have been a good thing to get into because the media integration could have caused (or did?) a major disruption in the existing market (I believe this was Nokia's belief and a cause for why they did what they did). Thus not trying new things like this could cause failure as well, as new players enter the market and take their marketshare (e.g. Apple with music and media at its core).

[3b] Though Nokia failed at it.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Innovators-Dilemma- Revolutionary-B...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Innovators-Dilemma- Revolutionary- Business/dp/0062060244/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1340596253&sr=8-1&keywords=innovators+dilemma)

<comment><USER3> > _2\. I don't believe it's an accurate statement to say they flushed every > piece of software they have ever built down the toilet. Firstly, they're > still releasing non-WP phones. Secondly, a lot of their skills are in > innovating within hardware, which they're very much still doing great stuff > with._

Ehh... While Nokia does still have a significant number of non-WP phones, most of them are "feature phones" (non-smartphones). With the price differential of smartphones plummeting at its current rate, even as the phones become more powerful, I strongly suspect that the "feature phone" market is going to largely evaporate outside developing nations within the next few years.

(The remainder of Nokia's phones are running Symbian OS, which is widely regarded to be an evolutionary dead end. Nokia, unaccountably, still has some phones in the pipeline which will use Symbian, but I doubt there will be many more, nor that they will be very popular.)

As far as hardware innovation goes, as long as Nokia sticks with Windows they're going to be pretty limited in that respect. My understanding is that Microsoft has some pretty strict hardware guidelines for WP7+ devices.

<comment><USER2> I agree most of the non-WP phones are feature phones (though the Aisha line is on the border from my understanding), and that feature phones are going to evaporate outside developing nations, however the "developing nations market" is still very large and potentially very lucrative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nokia also didn't get the whole movie tie-in thing. The version of the Nokia 8110 featured in The Matrix didn't exist as a purchasable product. This defeats the purpose of product placement.

<comment><USER5> I had that phone to develop content for it. Ah, wap and page deck days... or something.

It was fricking cool. The same phone as neo. With a feature that they left out of the final cut in the film. ...Aim lower end of phone at someone a few feet away, press button, laugh as target takes a piece of plastic to the face.

That started to happen a few months after we got the phone. So it's pretty obvious why it never 'existed' as a consumer product.

<comment><USER4> They did later release the Nokia 7110 which had the spring-loaded cover, so I guess they got it to work. The phone in the second movie is not even a Nokia, it is a Samsung SPH-N270. Samsung sold it as a limited edition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Content is Not King, version N.

[http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/ar...](http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/833/742)

<comment><USER7> Odlyzko is among the few true geniuses of the Internet era. Calls the Emperor has no clothes and backs it up with solid reasoning and hard data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My Nokia N86 came with The Matrix trilogy (on a propietary, DRM format). I really didn't "get" it (though they did show off the screen nicely).

Other phones came with popular bands.

After reading this article, I understand why they did.

</comment><comment><USER9> Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't nokia still the biggest seller of mobile phones worldwide, by number of units shipped? not smartphones sure, but just general mobile phones.

<comment><USER10> Not anymore. Samsung claims that position now. [http://www.slashgear.com/samsung-knocks-nokia-from-global- ph...](http://www.slashgear.com/samsung-knocks-nokia-from-global-phone-top- spot-27224993/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> In other news, "bamboozle" is a word. Wow.</comment>