Maxwell's demon - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon

<comment><USER2> This is definitely cool. May I ask whoever submitted it why what made them think to submit it here?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. Well, I sort of just bumped into this article while reading Wikipedia and I thought that it might be a nice addition to HN. Glad you liked it.</comment></comment>


Short-Termism Is Harming the Economy? - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/short-termism-is-harming-the-economy-1528336801 <comment><AUTHOR> The related CNBC piece cites a McKinsey study on the actual effect -- "Those in favor of guidance say it improves communications with Wall Street, reduces share price volatility and boosts a stock's value. But McKinsey & Co. found in a 2006 study that quarterly guidance didn't affect valuation multiples and didn't reduce share price volatility. The only significant benefit it observed was an increase in trading volumes, which is good for day traders but not useful for most other people."

[https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/06/warren-buffett-and-jamie- dim...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/06/warren-buffett-and-jamie-dimon-join- forces-to-convince-ceos-to-end-quarterly-profit-forecasts.html)

<comment><USER2> > which is good for day traders

So, for common folk? Or do they mean people, who do it professionally?

<comment><USER3> Day traders are people who trade the same equity within the span of a single day, basically, or that's the definition at a brokerage. If you were to flip an equity a couple times in a single day often enough, you'll be labeled a "pattern day trader" and you will be legally forced to maintain a minimum balance of $25,000.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

<comment><USER4> Isn't that only if you have a margin account but cash accounts aren't required?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A CEO at a company I worked for decided he wouldn't provide guidance anymore because he felt it was damned if he did or didn't. He noted that at the end of a conference call.

Stock dropped like a rock the next morning as if we were sure to close up shop or something the next quarter because we provided no guidance.

Even better the following quarters some silly stock people put out notes that we missed the predicted numbers. The numbers, they just made up their own predictions, and put that in the press release where they used to note guidance we used to provide.

<comment><USER6> so.. what happened in the long run?

<comment><USER5> Company chugged along like they normally did until being slow to adopt new tech caught up to them. The CEO and his buddy the CFO lined their pockets as you would expect until someone bought the company.

But they were solid earners until then as they had put themselves in a good spot and provided outstanding service (well that was me and my buddies). Stock never did much as wall street was entering the phase of demanding short term growth for no apparent reason all the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if these two big guys with lots of analytics power at their fingertips have a vested interest in this. I might be wrong but doing something like this might create information asymmetry where one guy knows better than the other where the next numbers are going to land.

 _The pressure to meet short-term earnings estimates has contributed to the decline in the number of public companies in America over the past two decades._

Anyone know paper/article which provides evidence for this? My assumption is that the number of public companies is lesser more due to consolidation is various sectors.

<comment><USER8> You must not be familiar with who Buffett is. He is basically the antithesis of a trader with "analytics power at his fingertips" (by which I assume you mean computing power). He prefers to make exactly one trade per company: buy a great company and own it forever, preferably by buying 100% of the company in cash.

He is a tireless advocate of stock prices reflecting actual value of the company (and his modus operendi is to know the actual value and buy great companies when they are at a substantial discount to it). He split BERK into BERK.A and BERK.B when the stock price got so high that people were speculating on it and it no longer reflected the intrinsic value. He doesn't say what the intrinsic value of BERK is, but he reports book value every year and has a standing order to buy if it is 1.2X book value or below, which puts a floor on what he thinks the intrinsic value is.

He also strongly believes in management thinking long-term instead of short- term, and frequently says so in his shareholder letters. This is entirely consistent with his philosophy. If you want vested interest, his buy-and-hold strategy does best when management considers long-term growth rather than short-term manipulation. However, he thinks it is better for shareholders in general, not just himself. Given that he's giving away all his stock after he dies, which can't be that many years from now, he isn't doing this for monetary gain.

<comment><USER9> "He prefers to make exactly one trade per company: buy a great company and own it forever, preferably by buying 100% of the company in cash."

I don't think you've paid attention to what Buffett does to make money in the last decade or two. He targets companies that are or may be desperate, and tries to exchange his endorsement for things like preferred stock and warrants at unbelievably favorable terms. He did this with Goldman Sachs during the financial crisis. He tried to make a deal with Uber recently. He is absolutely nothing like the folksy myth you reference.

<comment><USER10> You're factually mistaken. The extreme majority of his activity the last 15 years has not been taking advantage of weak companies and lending his reputation. He lent several massive financial entities money and his reputation during the fallout from the great recession, which helped those companies a lot and he made money, a great win for both parties.

Bank of America and Goldman Sachs came out of it in stellar condition. Both are printing record profits. Like I said, a win all around.

Uber isn't in a desperate position, thus they turned Buffett down. They're loaded with immense amounts of cash, and have no problem raising more.

So your sole examples to claim an outsized pattern of behavior, come from the great recession.

Otherwise, we have: the acquisition of Precision Cast Parts for $37 billion, buying Pilot Flying J, buying out Iscar, acquiring Duracell, acquiring Van Tuyl, acquiring NV Energy, funding the merger of Kraft Heinz and holding a huge position, Lubrizol for $9.7 billion, and Burlington Northern (2009).

A hundred billion dollars worth of acquisitions over a decade.

On the investment side: a massive investment into Apple, on a bet that they're a strong company and will continue to spit off vast profits for a long time to come. A large investment into IBM (sold). Investments into Southwest Airlines and other airlines. And so on, without another single example of your premise.

<comment><USER9> I think you're ignoring the subtlety of what he does. Profit is what counts. He doesn't make profit proportional to his investment on everything alike.

I wasn't debating his ethics, just saying he does not make money by simply buying solid businesses and holding them forever.

He has a collection of solid businesses that provide cash and allow him to collect large amounts of money on rare occasions in special situations because he's the last resort. It even has a name: "The Buffett Premium".

He made $3 billion on GS, $12 billion on BOA, some 70% on HCG...he's been called a loan shark, and that is enabled and complemented by the solid companies owned by Berkshire Hathaway.

Article about his investments in banks: [https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/07/05/a-timeline-of- warr...](https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/07/05/a-timeline-of-warren- buffetts-bank-stock-buys.aspx)

<comment><USER11> "He made $3 billion on GS"

Which is less than this year's $4.1 billion bonus pool at GS. So hardly a "loan shark".

Furthermore he made the $3 billion by converting warrants to common stock, so it's actually not like GS paid out of capital or profits. Perhaps GS stock was diluted somewhat by issuing new shares? (Not sure.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sir, it's quite possible this economy is not entire stable.

Not entirely stable!? Well, I'm glad you're here to tell us these things. Chewy, take the professor in the back and plug him into the hyperdrive.

</comment><comment><USER13> Like the reasoning, but not the idea.

1.) The only time new information really comes out is during quarterly earnings, and that's also when prices are most volatile and jumps the most. If you make it annual, then an entire year has gone by before new information has come out, and the floodgate of 12 months of data will force the price to jump even more. If a company misses an entire year of earning, it's stock is pretty much done for a while. That would seem to make it even more urgent for CEOs to manipulate their prices

2) Frequent releases help level the playing field between big institutional funds and smaller players (as much as they can be leveled). In the absence of public info, the ones with most resources can spend money to get more valuable data - field research, product analysis etc. Ex: Because the data is so valuable, it might be cost effective for a $50 billion fund to hire hundreds of people to literally stand outside a bunch of Chipotle chains all over the country and count how many people eat there. You could spend up to $20m for that data and make a huge trade based on it.

3.) You can already sort of ignore the quarterly earnings. You can tell analysts to shove it and not provide guidance and just release the minimum for SEC mandated quarterly releases without any discussion or call. You can focus on investing long term and ignore the earnings for each quarter. You can also ignore the short term price drop that comes with not providing those information. Then at the end of the year you can do a long call and go in depth. If you do this, you essentially follow the model described in the article without forcing everyone to do the same.

<comment><USER14> I think you missed the details here - the idea is not to stop providing quarterly earnings reports, it's simply to drop the forecasts from said reports.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What I'd rather see is monthly "lightly audited" financials. This would provide a lot of benefits around transparency, reduce the incentive for quarterly and annual "cramming / forward entry" of sales, and provide for more of a "continuous audit" for the various accounting firms - reducing the size of the end-of-year rush (since most audit activity should already have been completed) and making it harder for companies to fudge their figures.

<comment><USER16> What if you released raw numbers every month or constantly? How many cars sold, cash in the bank. Any number that would not help your competition. And that require no preparation.

<comment><USER17> Right with modern continuously closed accounting systems there's no reason this couldn't be done. Inertia and tradition are the only reason for releasing financial statements on a quarterly basis instead of more frequently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I found it's not necessarily short-term thinking. It's selfish thinking, reason being that most team/corp/market wide problems usually have to resolved by everybody, while the seemingly success based gains are consumed by a few.

</comment><comment><USER19> I never saw a problem with it.

The problem is with maximizing the stock price in the short terms versus in the long term. And it is all up to CEO to communicate his plan and then pressure on earnings will be less.

</comment><comment><USER20> Why isn't financial information a real-time report, updated to the nanosecond?

Why are financial reports split into quarters?

The fact that we split financial data itself into quarters is what drives this short-termism. You now have an official timeline on performance metrics.

Databases can track financial data in real time. Just give real-time information, and let each stock trader use their own measure of financial performance, whether it's hourly tracking for day-traders, or years-long tracking for long-term investments.

<comment><USER21> Because it takes real work to reconcile this information, make sure it adds up, and doesn't have errors. Doing that real time would be very very difficult for most businesses.

When a company releases their quarterly reports they're certifying that the information contained is accurate (and audited). That would be nearly impossible realtime.

<comment><USER20> Reports can be arranged so that reconciled & unreconciled transactions are separated into their own timelines. Auditing of transactions can happen daily.

It's not an impossible problem.

<comment><USER22> Wouldnt this make very little difference for regular investors because of how fast the market reacts to new information?

Suppose you found out Netflix had a $1 billion cost expense in real-time. The market would react to it faster than you or I could anyway. By the time you knew about it, the stock would have plummeted.

<comment><USER20> You'd have the same in a quarterly report surprise anyways.

<comment><USER23> Seems to me pressure on the worker would just go up, as now the shorttermism is microtermism. We need longer outlooks, not shorter. Who cares about traders?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have worked on Wall Street, and now in FP&A. I agree with their assessment for several reasons:

External outlooks rarely provide value to wall street.

They are internally time consuming for FP&A.

I'm confident that they take time and mindshare away from CEOs that could be spent on improving the company. Further, new CEOs usually have no experience with Wall Street so they must learn on the job which further exacerbates the time and energy required.

I hope that this gains traction as it will help all companies become more productive.

</comment><comment><USER25> A more recent study from McKinsey in a similar vein: [https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Featured%20Insight...](https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Featured%20Insights/Long%20term%20Capitalism/Where%20companies%20with%20a%20long%20term%20view%20outperform%20their%20peers/MGI- Measuring-the-economic-impact-of-short-termism.ashx).

Of interest, on page 2 there is a survey result: "87% of executives and directors feel most pressured to demonstrate strong financial performance within 2 years or less", and "55% of executives and directors at companies without a strong long-term culture say their company would delay a new project to hit quarterly targets even if it sacrificed some value".

</comment><comment><USER26> Dammit. Of all the articles that need to be paywall restricted. I'm down. I'm sympathetic. But I can only afford to pay for content on a couple of fronts. I wish it was more. But I cannot right now.

But if that was the article it looks like from the headline? Give it. Away. For a minute. FFS.

<comment><USER27> [http://archive.is/B211l](http://archive.is/B211l)

<comment><USER26> Honestly thank you personally. But that doesn't address my comment- I can sneak around it with computer fu but I'd think this is in the realm of what should be free. As in not like beer but bread.

<comment><USER27> It's a fair enough position, but this discussion happens on every HN discussion of an article with a paywall, yet strangely enough nothing changes!

The question of how journalism can be commercially sustainable is a very important one, but it's separate to the topic at hand :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Looks like this is a submarine story. Similar story from 2016 [https://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/21/warren-buffett-corporate- gui...](https://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/21/warren-buffett-corporate-guidance-can- lead-to-malpractice-bad-results.html)

<comment><USER29> Not a terminology I'm familiar with. What does "submarine story" mean?

<comment><USER30> A story that comes up once in a while, like a submarine.

<comment><USER31> This is a good tell that the story might be a submarine, yes, but the origin/meaning of this term is pg's essay, as quoted by 'teach.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What It Will Take to Create the Next Great Silicon Valleys, Plural - <AUTHOR> http://a16z.com/2014/06/20/what-it-will-take-to-create-the-next-great-silicon-valleys-plural/ <comment><USER2> The thing that's missing from almost all discussions of making a "Silicon Valley" somewhere else is what I think is the key to the original Silicon Valley's success: intergenerational investment. That is, a bunch of guys hit it big on semiconductors in the mid 20th century, and instead of just buying boats and joining the country club, these people set aside a portion of their fortunes to invest in the tech-related businesses of the generation that followed. And, crucially, without extracting onerous terms from those investments. That established a culture of relatively permissive angel investment that encouraged innovation.

Trying to get a startup off the ground in most other places it too hard because raising seed money is too hard, and even if you raise seed money, raising a series A is too hard, and so on. To make a Silicon Valley, you have to seed the ecosystem with an initial generation of successful entrepreneurs who are wiling to adopt the ethos of the SV angel investor, then provide an investment infrastructure to make sure that promising startups don't die on the vine.

And, as many others have pointed out, an open spigot of government money was necessary for the original SV to develop, so that's probably necessary for any copycat.

</comment><comment><USER3> >> Imagine a Bitcoin Valley, for instance, where some country fully legalizes cryptocurrencies for all financial functions. Or a Drone Valley, where a particular region removes all legal barriers to flying unmanned aerial vehicles locally. A Driverless Car Valley in a city that allows experimentation with different autonomous car designs, redesigned roadways and safety laws. A Stem Cell Valley. And so on.

On the surface this sounds kind of neat; on a practical level, this sounds like a libertarian nightmare.

</comment><comment><USER4> > In fact, this kind of competition is probably the only way to create > successful innovation clusters that can compete with the huge advantage > Silicon Valley already has. . . . That's why turning Detroit into a > commercial Drone Valley could draw the innovative people who in turn want to > be near other innovative people around that domain.

I find this akin to describing how other cities should create their own Wall Street. I don't see the point. Wall Street and Silicon Valley are both places that benefit so much from the concentration of capital (intellectual and monetary), that there is little practical reason to have more than one of each in the U.S. And outside the U.S., places with capital and technical talent will find a way to put them together.

What I'm interested in is the harder question: what will it take to create the next Detroit, circa 1950? Not just a place where new technology is developed, where wealth is created, but a place where technology creates broadly-shared prosperity and good middle-class jobs.

<comment><USER5> >> what will it take to create the next Detroit (circa 1950)?

It's happening in India and China right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> >> That's why turning Detroit into a commercial Drone Valley could draw the innovative people who in turn want to be near other innovative people around that domain.

Detroit was built the automobile. It's a bad comparison to drones. Every househould in America isn't going to own 2.2 drones. Drones aren't so incredible complicated where countless other companies will pop up, making tires and seats and radios and spark plugs and bearings.

Let's assume a successful drone-building company sets up shop and ends up providing 2,000 jobs. That's a great gain for Detroit, but you're still looking to fill a huge void in a town that used to have 10,000 workers in a single plant.

<comment><USER6> Replace "car" with "box truck" and the metaphor fits a lot more closely and remains strong. Businesses need vehicles to deliver stuff. Drones are poised to replace trucks in that regard.

Also, who says a family won't own 2.2 of them? When I forget a file at home, I have dropbox. What happens when I forget my sandwich? As reliability goes up and cost goes down, a drone becomes a very reasonable family purchase.

<comment><USER7> In the case where that happens, only a handful of times a year, why wouldn't I rather hire a drone Uber style to deliver that one package?

<comment><USER8> Perhaps. But even-so, distribute the total number of "drones", and divide by the population and I bet you'd get close to that ratio.

Whether they're quad-copters, SUVs, vacuum cleaners, or some "drone" in a factory retrieving the products a consumer just ordered ... whatever ... I'd bet that society does shift in the direction of robots or drones handling an increasingly-long list of services currently handled by humans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What will it take to create the next silicon valley? Money. Lots and lots of government money. Defense-sized pots of government money. Each year. For a decade or more. That, and the ability to live there and speak only English.

<comment><USER10> This. People just don't understand how much massive amounts of government money went into silicon valley from the 1950s onward. It takes lots of money and time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There's a phrase for things like electricity and smartphones: general purpose technology [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_purpose_technology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_purpose_technology)

As for more Silicon Valleys, it's telling that to my knowledge outside California have made non-competes unenforceable, although Massachusetts is getting a clue more than 2 decades after Route 128 died a hard and painful death.

</comment><comment><USER12> Marc Andreesen believes that someone should not be commenting on the theory of Disruptive Innovation if they have a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale.

And now he wants to tell me what?

</comment><comment><USER13> A ubiquitous, world changing, radically different innovation (like computers) in which hundreds or thousands of companies can simultaneously participate.

Is there such a thing on the horizon?

I don't think drones are it. Sorry Marc. You were in the right time at the right place and had the right skills. Don't expect this combination of timing, luck and effort to be easily duplicated elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER14> Trying to attract investors to your city is how you get a gold rush.

</comment><comment><USER14> Drone Valley? Yeah, the FAA would like a word with you about flying test planes over populated areas...

</comment><comment><USER15> This blog post seems like a good opportunity to bring up another essay I thought was very good by Andy Grove.

Andy Grove: How America Can Create Jobs

[http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_28/b41860483...](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_28/b4186048358596.htm)

The part that really resonated with me here was the issue of scaling in manufacturing. Much of his essay takes on the notion that the US will be fine if innovation happens in silicon valley and manufacturing happens elsewhere (this is an oversimplification, I'd recommend you read the essay).

But what really resonated with me here is that scaling _is_ innovation, and that by splitting the two and neglecting the second, the US has put itself at a disadvantage, not just in the jobs generated downstream from high end innovative work, but in the ability to do that innovative work itself...

"I believe the answer has to do with a general undervaluing of manufacturing—the idea that as long as "knowledge work" stays in the U.S., it doesn't matter what happens to factory jobs... I disagree. Not only did we lose an untold number of jobs, we broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution. As happened with batteries, abandoning today's "commodity" manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow's emerging industry."

One reason this resonates so heavily with me is that I actually got an MS in Industrial Engineering, and I, like almost all of my cohort, work in software now. The closes I came was writing software for manufacturing systems, and many of our clients were overseas. But I never did learn how to scale, and an entire generation of potential leaders in scaling up manufacturing the US pretty much had to find something else to do (perhaps using those stochastic processes to figure out how to get people to click on ads rather than reducing defect rates in the mass scale manufacting of solar panels).

When it's time to manufacture mass numbers of drones (per the discussion above, I could easily see the average US family owning quite a few drones). We may not make them in the US, but the reason might actually not be cost, it may be skill - we may simply not have the experience with scaling on physical systems - partly because we skipped a couple of generations and we just don't have the experience anymore.

Now (my own hobby horse), add in the fact that the US seems to be perfectly OK with watching the enrollment of US citizens in graduate engineering programs plummet (perhaps a rational decision at the individual level), and if high end work shifts along with production, we may find we can no longer wave the magic wand and get talented people to come here. Fix immigration all you like, the top talent may go elsewhere and no longer bother with the US.

I'm putting forth a bleak scenario, and I'll admit it contains a few slippery slopes, so this is meant as a call for concern, not a prediction. But I think that the US needs to pay a lot of attention to our future workforce in serious, large scale manufacturing engineering, and we're neglecting it, badly.

</comment><comment><USER16> A dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7902282](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7902282), but we won't bury it because (a) the current article is a bit longer and (b) the title of the earlier submission was Detroit-specific, which caused the discussion to be.

<comment><USER17> I may have missed a post about it, but: is this new transparency in moderation/etc/etc a deliberate and ongoing new policy? And to the extent that it is, can we expect that buried posts will always have an explanation of why they were buried?

I could understand why that might not happen, but it is generally more useful to understand why something was buried than it is to know why something narrowly avoided being buried.

<comment><USER16> I've been posting these comments regularly for months now. It's not really a new policy so much as an artifact of someone being public as moderator and focused on HN. There's no way PG could have done this; it takes far too much time. I'm not sure I can keep doing it either.

When we kill or bury a post, yes, we've been posting comments saying why. People use the terms "kill" and "bury" to mean a whole lot of different things, though, so it doesn't follow that any given expectation will be met. Also, there are other things that we do (e.g. penalizing posts for being off- topic or threads for being flamewars), that users do (voting and flagging), and that software does (voting ring detector, flamewar detector), all of which affect what appears where on HN.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Go Remote Jobs – The Best Remote Jobs in One Place - <AUTHOR> https://goremotejobs.com <comment><AUTHOR> Looking to build your office from any location? Go Remote Jobs has the best showcase of remote jobs for the digitally inclined.Our goal is to cater remote jobs to qualified professionals and make the whole process easier for both the job searcher and the company that needs talent.</comment>


Kik to shut down chat app, focus on cryptocurrency legal fight - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/kik-to-shut-down-chat-app-focus-on-cryptocurrency-legal-fight-d297ac4f-e21f-406c-8a78-400119e77048.html <comment><USER2> See also: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21055034](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21055034)</comment>


Ask HN: How Google Maps works? - <AUTHOR>

I have an idea for a website that requires to implement a zoomable/pannable interactive map, similar to Google Maps but without all the bells and whistles. The map itself is for a fictitious place, so I really need to create it from scratch.
I don't have much experience in Javascript or in maps creation, so I would be grateful if you could point me to the right direction.
In particular:
1. How the maps are normally represented? I bet they are vector-based rather than raster images for different zoom levels. Is there a common format or any standards for storing the maps? I don't need anything complex, just a schematic representation of terrain.
2. Are there examples of how to implement panning/zooming with Javascript?
I will appreciate any tips, from links to Wikipedia and blog posts covering this, to search terms that will lead me to them.
Thank you! <comment><USER2> Actually, it is a collection of images for different zoom level.For example, the lowest zoom level uses one image and the next one uses two, and then four (from what I remembered).

You can find this out in the google map API.

I imagine vector calculation is just unnecessarily complicated when simply storing the images works well enough.

In that case, panning and zooming seems easier to implement, as you are probably just moving the images around and reloading different ones when you zoom. jquery comes to mind for these tasks.

Maybe it will take some work to make it run as smoothly as Google does it, maybe not.

</comment><comment><USER3> here is a good walk-through: <http://blog.grimpoteuthis.org/2005/02/mapping- google.html>

Good luck with it :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! In the comments I found this site which looks very close to what I was looking for: <http://www.maplib.net/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> this works, I use it, it's open source, maybe a good place to start:

<http://iipimage.sourceforge.net/demo.shtml>

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks good, thanks!</comment></comment>


Hanlon's razor: don't attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity - <AUTHOR> https://effectiviology.com/hanlons-razor/ <comment><USER2> Why not both?</comment>


New Planet Is Largest Discovered That Orbits Two Suns - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/new-planet-is-largest-discovered-that-orbits-two-suns <comment><USER2> If that planet hosts a large moon live might have evolved on it («within the so-called habitable zone – the range of distances from a star where liquid water might pool on the surface of an orbiting planet»).

Compared to the Earth it would be a strange world. First there are two suns in the sky, both smaller than Sol and near to each other. Perhaps two thumbs held at an arm's distance. Then there is the big Jupiter-like planet. On this world there is no normal day-night rhythm. The moon most probably would be tidally locked to the planet. And the orbit around the binary is just above three years.

Perhaps there are no spectacular sky scenes, however. A three-year «day» is very hard on the climate. For live to evolve it would have needed a permanent thick cloud cover like on Venus. Aliens living in that dark world would have no eyes.

We could try to listen for a message from there. The star is located in the Cygnus constellation and quick googling gives distances between 170 and 1500 light years.</comment>


Anti-Europeanism in America (2003) - vezzy-fnord http://www.hoover.org/research/anti-europeanism-america <comment><AUTHOR> "You want to know what I really think of the Europeans?" asked the senior State Department Official. "I think they have been wrong on just about every major international issue for the past 20 years."

Haha this quote is great. Especially since American foreign policy in the past 2 decades has been the most destabilizing and damaging thing to world peace.

Kind of ironic to see anti-europeanism in America when one knows that the EU has been an American driven project from the beginning, especially under the Eisenhower administration.</comment>


Link Between Deep Neural Networks and the Nature of the Universe - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602344/the-extraordinary-link-between-deep-neural-networks-and-the-nature-of-the-universe/ <comment><USER2> It's not that no one understands, it's that journalists don't know that their's research that has addressed this question. The problem with intuitively understanding neural networks is that most of the weighted edges are spurious. Meaning you can remove most of them (WiJ -> 0) without negatively affecting the mapping function solution. Failing to do this we stare at a fully connected neural network which gives us no clues why it works. However , once you get rid of these spurious interactions (through perturbation analysis), then This will reveal the underlying circuit diagram for the network.

Often these threshold integration neurons are just approximating a simpler Boolean function so it really comes down to digital logic.

Techniques for pruning networks can be found here:

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2538912/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2538912/)

<comment><USER3> Pruning works for understanding sparse networks, but not for holographic networks, which can encode a much higher information density. Understanding a holographic network requires a large amount of effort, similar to determining the content of an optical holograph. You can try to develop a model, but if the information density is very high, it's no faster than observing the response to various inputs.

The problem becomes even more difficult if there is no clear distinctions between layers in the network, as in the brain.

<comment><USER2> A network should be no more complex than it needs to be. If you're not pruning _spurious_ interactions then you're implicitly assuming that each interaction is information bearing. If you're not pruning spurious interactions from holographic networks then you're assuming that they're all functionally relevant. I promise you they're not.

You're also assuming that holographic networks are somehow necessary for most of the tasks we require. The human brain, while having billions of neurons is still quite sparsely connected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the point is that all the patterns we deal with are a result of physic laws, so that somehow limits the solution space

<comment><USER5> That seems to be concise summary of the articles point, but my first reaction is that it's a superficial distinction.

One of the researches is Max Tegmark, author of Our Mathematical Universe. In short, he suggests every theory becomes it's own universe; physical laws are representations of patterns in some kind of calculation or proof.

As he explains, although every possible theory is a universe, "most" complex theories can be reduced to simple ones. So it seems plausible that those simple patterns are more common and more likely to be found in a random (mathematical or physical) universe.

This means that neural networks are likely to work with those common patterns. One might say it because that's closer to the nature of physical laws. But more directly, that's because of the nature of mathematical laws.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think that theoretical physics is an example of confusing map with the territory. Just because you can work out some mathematical mumbo-jumbo does not necessarily mean that it has any connection to reality.

This applies especially well to string theory which is just layers of pointless mathematics, each layer trying to make up for obvious deficiencies of lower layers.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wrote a better explanation for why neural nets work here: [http://houshalter.tumblr.com/post/120134087595/approximating...](http://houshalter.tumblr.com/post/120134087595/approximating- solomonoff-induction)

The answer is that neural networks are a somewhat crude approximation of Solomonoff induction. Solomonoff induction is an ideal, perfect machine learning method. It only assumes that the universe is a random computer program, and tries to infer which one.

<comment><USER8> Also interesting is the relation between Solomonoff induction and Kolmogorov Complexity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Take any two fields, keep abstracting away stuff and you will reach a stage where you find a link between the two fields.

</comment><comment><USER10> You should watch Max Tegmark's talk "Connections between Physics and Deep Learning" if this interests you [1].

Additionally, a paper that has everyone excited about deep connections between the mathematical analysis of physical systems and the hierarchical feature learning paradigm speaks of the connection in terms of the Renormalization Group [2].

Regardless of it's practical utility, the philosophical implications do tickle the intellect. On a dreamy note, I wonder if it would be possible to draw Category-theoretic parallels between some physical theories and statistical learning theory. There is so much to learn, and I am trying my best to teach myself (on the side) the mathematics that they don't teach in my CS grad school. So much to learn, such little time. :)

[1] [https://youtu.be/5MdSE-N0bxs](https://youtu.be/5MdSE-N0bxs)

[2] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.3831](http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.3831)

</comment><comment><USER11> > Despite the huge success of deep neural networks, nobody is quite sure how > they achieve their success.

Is that true? After reading Jeff Hawkings - "On intelligence" book (2004), for me it's pretty much clear why they are so successful on that set of tasks. Despite of HTM model built by Jeff being kind of different from DNN, the idea and origin of brain and consciousness described pretty well. All modern advances in neuroscience just prove how strong the theory in this book is.

<comment><USER12> Jeff Hawkins has some pretty heterodox theories of intelligence, many of which are not backed up by modern neuroscience. Furthermore, as neuroscience advances, the similarities between so-called artificial neural networks and actual neurons are rapidly receding. Much of the current success of convolutional neural networks is (loosely) inspired by a particular part of the anatomy of the eye, but non-visual processing and abstract reasoning seems to take place under much more complicated patterns that ANNs may not be able to replicate as easily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Going a bit further, Chris Langan's _CTMU_ characterised the universe itself as a sort of back-propagation algorithm with a global utility function.

</comment><comment><USER8> Neural networks are trained with information from the Universe. So, in my opinion, it should not be shocking at all that neural networks store some projection/model/echo of the universe (e.g. physical laws, maths, etc.).</comment>


Things I Wish I Had Known When Starting Out in Life - <AUTHOR> http://zenhabits.net/20-things-i-wish-i-had-known-when-starting-out-in-life/

<comment><USER2> He seems to be telling his younger self to do an awful lot of stuff. I'm not sure that advice would have the intended effect. It'll lead to an alternate world where he advises things like:

4\. Stop it with the relentless busyness -- take some time to just be, to stop and enjoy the life you have.

</comment><comment><USER3> _10\. Make time to pursue your passion, no matter how busy you are. I've always wanted to be a writer, and get a book published. I just never had time to write. With a family and school and a full-time job, there just weren't enough hours in the day. Well, I've learned that you have to make those hours. Set aside a block of time to do what you love, cut out other stuff from your life that take up your time, and don't let anything interfere with that work. If I had done that 15 years ago, I could have 15 books written by now. Not all would be great, but still._

I really needed to hear that.

</comment><comment><USER4> My favs:

7\. All the stuff you're doing that seems hard — it will be of use.

10\. Make time to pursue your passion, no matter how busy you are.

11\. All that stuff that's stressing you out - it won't matter in 5 years, let alone 15.

15\. Forget the drama. Focus on being happy.

19\. Yes, you can do a marathon. Don't put this goal off - it's extremely rewarding. (I'm doing one next year!)

</comment><comment><USER5> A successful musician told me this once: "Put 110% into everything you do, no matter how unimportant, otherwise when the time comes that it actually is important you won't know how to do it."

I see some variant of this in every "advice to younguns" list I come across. Admittedly I still suck at it.

</comment><comment><USER6> 11\. - unless you get fired because you couldn't push yourself hard enough to get project X done.

</comment><comment><USER7> Good rules but he may have added some more about human relationships, more general than "don't sell your van to a friend of a friend..."</comment>


Show HN: (FREE) Course on Python REST API Development - <AUTHOR> http://learn.exponential.io/courses/introduction-to-rest-api-development-in-python

<comment><USER2> The videos in this course are not playing to completion. They all seem to end abruptly, often times mid-topic and even mid-sentence.

Maybe it's something I did incorrectly?

<comment><AUTHOR> There was an error in the LMS software. I have fixed the videos by re- uploading everything.</comment></comment>


Are You Nitric Oxide Deficient? - <AUTHOR> https://www.clinicaleducation.org/news/are-you-nitric-oxide-deficient-part-1-of-2/ <comment><USER2> > NO really is one of the most important molecules produced in the human body

This made me question how much they are embellishing or even making stuff up.

> NO has a half-life of about one millisecond,[4]

The cited study claims anything from "5s or less (Archer1993, Bates 1992, Nathan 1992)" to "half-life has been reported to be 500 s (Winket al 1993)" depending on circumstances. Highest reported NO concentration rate-of-change in the study was when binding with added heamoglobin and even then was on the order of seconds.

> We see ads for things like nitrite-free bacon or organically cured > sausages—but this is deceptive marketing because we need nitrites to > preserve meat, and there are no replacements for nitrites.

In our village, we have produces bacon and sausages for generations and never added anything resembling nitrites. Add enough of plain salt, air dry at reasonably cold temperatures and nothing spoils.

[4] Hakim TS, et al. Half-life of nitric oxide in aqueous solutions with and without haemoglobin. Physiol Meas. 1996 Nov;17(4):267-77.</comment>


Origin of Consciousness (bicameral mind) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.plover.com/brain/

<comment><USER2> What really concerns me about this theory is what it implies for the 90% of the human race that isn't European. Since various human groups separated about 50,000+ years ago and consciousness is only 3,000 years old, when did _they_ acquire consciousness? Were Native Americans and Australian Aborigines unconscious until taught to read and write? Are they still unconscious?

I suppose this is probably dealt with somewhere in the book.

<comment><USER3> There's also the problem that split brain patients (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain>) exhibit some nonstandard behaviors, but nothing that would indicate lack of conscious thought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> While this is a fun book, I'm pretty sure several parts of it were proven false in the early 80's.

Worth reading for the fun of it though.

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting but it's hard to see how schizophrenia would ever be genetically advantageous for an entire species.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have heard another option for the origin of consciousness. True or false, the theory goes that every neuron has a micro-consciousness when it is not busy and the more neurons a thing has that are not busy with things like heartbeat and breathing the more conscious that thing is.

<comment><USER2> That doesn't sound like much of an explanation. All it has done is kicked the problem downstairs, from explaining how an entire brain can have consciousness to explaining how a single neuron can have a "micro-consciousness", which sounds like an even more difficult thing to explain.</comment></comment>


Racial Profiling via Nextdoor.com - <AUTHOR> http://m.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/racial-profiling-via-nextdoorcom/Content?oid=4526919&showFullText=true <comment><USER2> We recently deactivated our account. We were excited about the idea of being able to informed of our entire neighborhood, not just our street. Instead, we found out that in our neighborhood of 8000, there are about 50 crazies that spend all day posting on Nextdoor, and everyone else had basically given up. In the real human interactions I have with neighbors, 'How's the weather?' has been replaced with 'Did you see that Nextdoor post? That was hilarious!'

Some gems in recent memory:

1\. Someone posted an urgent 'BOLO black men with what appears to be a weapon or something to be used to break in to houses' accompanied by a picture of a man with a rake. Another neighbor commented, "That's my landscaper and he's been my landscaper for 10 years".

2\. A heated debate over tearing down old houses and replacing them with bigger ones ended up with a guy crawling into someone's backyard, taking pictures of their house, and posting them and critiquing their design choices on the forum.

3\. A neighbor created a small sculpture of stacked stones, each stone being about fist-sized. Another neighbor posted photographs and personal information, asking that he take the stones down, because if they fell on a kid, he would sue him.

4\. Multiple occurrences where someone posted 'surveillance' video of dog poop not being cleaned up, which always resulted in another neighbor identifying the dog owner, and the dog owner almost always being an elderly woman, who embarrassingly had to indicate she ran out of poop bags but went back later to clean it up.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it's terrible, but deactivating your account is exactly the wrong thing to do if you're interested in fixing this sort of behavior.

Nextdoor doesn't make people be shitty human beings, but it is a local forum that augments or replaces the sorts of venues that people used to be shitty in -- town hall meetings, HOA events, neighborhood watch, political rallies, etc.

Arguing with people on the internet is (heh) usually a waste of time. But pushing for decency and respect within your neighborhood is not a waste of time if you value strong communities.

<comment><USER4> Nextdoor appears to facilitate neuroses in isolation, which was not the case with public meetings.

<comment><USER3> I don't have any data to back it up, but my theory is that Nextdoor allows bad behavior because people have been trained by millions of comment sections that confrontation on the internet is fruitless.

That's a misguided instinct when the people you are talking to live two doors down. Get a handful of people who see them everyday to say, "knock it off", and they usually will.

<comment><USER5> It's entirely possible for folks living in the same neighborhood to not actually see each other all that often, especially not in any sense beyond waving at each other from across the street.

<comment><USER6> Yep. I don't even know the names of my neighbors, and I've barely spoken two words to any of them.

Years ago, I had a couple of neighbors I'd talk to, but they all moved away. Had a few friends I talked into moving to my complex too, but they've all moved away as well.

<comment><USER3> Your community is broken. I'm sorry to hear that.

<comment><USER7> I know my neighbors and wish I didn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is sad to read. People of every race--black, white, whatever--need to make an effort to get to know their neighbors. Simply saying hello to people when you're walking, introducing yourself, pointing out where you live, telling them about your pets, children, where you work or go to school, where you moved from, etc., can make a big difference in a community. I used to live in a very racially diverse apartment complex (more than 50% non-white). I was friendly with everyone and felt like the people I got to know were almost friends. Smiling, waving or saying hello to people forms a small bond that could help these overzealous people realize that if they reach out, they will see that they are over-reacting. By being friendly and getting to know people, we can learn that most people are not threats to us, and we can all be united in watching against the people who really are.

<comment><USER7> >we can all be united in watching against the people who really are.

Almost like a neighborhood watch, one could say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've met some nice neighbors via Nextdoor (and gotten help with some small things a couple times), but the discussions do tend to degenerate pretty rapidly (so much for posting under one's real identity having any significant impact on the quality of discussion...).

But anyway, since I live in a high-crime area, by far the most common type of post is someone describing how they were just robbed (oftentimes at gunpoint), or they just saw a car get broken into, etc. It does make me kind of paranoid since I never would have known about any of those crimes had I not been on the site. I feel like my other neighbors who don't use it are comparatively clueless about just how much crime there is even within a few blocks of us. I guess that could be considered a good or a bad thing.

<comment><USER7> Isn't knowing better than not knowing? You can prepare accordingly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I, along with many other people have come up with the idea of Nextdoor.com and probably thought of this problem too. Because opening up a site for comments... Well, it seems that Nextdoor doesn't have a solution either. What is the purpose of the site if they are hurting the community more than helping it?

<comment><USER11> Like most technology tools, nextdoor.com amplifies tendencies already there. Lower cost of information exchange and actions tends to open up the extremes. The site in and of itself is not good or bad. But this is definitely an example of strengthening a bad trait.

<comment><USER12> Those are some impressive mental gymnastics. Most people would consider something which amplifies bad traits to be a bad thing.

I agree that the site is probably not _intended_ to be bad, but that's quite a different claim from yours.

<comment><USER13> It's always a balance, see liberty (of all legal kinds) legal access to alcohol, etc.

It's about being mature and responsible and learning and mitigating bad behavior via feedback loops.

<comment><USER14> Exactly. It would be trivial to have a "flag" button that after a certain amount of "boy cried wolf" complaints Nextdoor either prevents people from making crime alerts or in some other way throttles them. If this sort of behavior is causing a ton of user churn Nextdoor needs to get something in place ASAP.

It could say something like "5 of your neighbors thing you are complaining too much, but hey, don't shoot the messenger!".

Signal to noise will always be a problem in online communities because of the one to many nature of them.

<comment><USER15> > Some groups have even actively silenced and banned the few vocal voices of > color speaking up on the websites, according to records that I reviewed.

Looks like some kind of process for silencing voices is already present in the app....it's just mostly being used to silence voices that point out not all blacks are criminals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I found out about nextdoor.com from reddit. I thought it was so bizarre people would want their full names, address and sometimes pictures broadcast. I wanted to see if I could get in with a fake address and name and they do require you to somehow verify you live there (they mail you a card or you link it to a phone number) so I just gave up. Lo and behold I get an email the next week saying my account had been approved anyone because "one of my neighbors verified I lived there".

<comment><USER9> If the address is linked to your credit card, then that counts as verification too. Unfortunately, even if you move and change your CC's address, I don't think they have a process to remove people (or re-verify them periodically).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've been on Nextdoor for well over two years and have seen literally zero of these types of communications. Maybe because I'm in a racially diverse area (North Brooklyn, NYC)? All threads and replies I've ever seen are: mass transit notifications, crime notifications, lost animals, free junk, stuff for sale, asking for recommendations for local merchants.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've got a social problem - I'll fix it with technology! Now you've got two problems.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is exactly what happens in my. Sigh irbid on the other side of Oakland (Golden Gate). There are a few white residents that post suspicious person posts/images on what seems like every person that walks down the street. I've turned off all crime alerts on nextdoor because of the absurdity of it.

<comment><USER19> People whom get outside and actually examined "suspicious behavior" may be shocked to find normal, harmless people and that it was their own hobgoblins of their minds criminalizing people based on nothing more than their own fears, ignorance and prejudices, probably from watching too much TV and Hollywood movies rather than experiencing the real world.

<comment><USER20> Nextdoor should create a feedback system to incorporate this effect and help people calibrate. It could also bring in base-rate crime info to help make more accurate assessments of suspicious reports.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It sounds like this would be a target for some social activist data mining.

Scrape NextDoor, find the people who are posting weirdly racist screeds, and send a well dressed delegation to their doorstep to let them know that their name and identifying details will be posted on another site identifying them as racist bullies if they don't alter their behavior.

Or, scrap the doorstepping and just send an email blast to their employers, business partners, and facebook contacts.

If nothing else, they'll stop posting to NextDoor.

Yep, it's rude, crude and thoroughly within the reach of any group of activists that want to get some notoriety. It's also one of those things that will drive home just how panoptic our society has become.

</comment><comment><USER22> Sad, I wonder why the neighbors don't know each other better. We found that organizing block parties was a wonderful way to meet people who have moved in and share with them experiences and stories. Our neighborhood has gone from probably 95% white to now 30% Indian, 40% Chinese, and some Russian and probably the rest typical western european decended whites. Through out that as people move out and people move in we try to make people feel welcome and they really do appreciate it.

</comment><comment><USER23> I did not have a positive experience with Nextdoor despite being pretty excited about the service at first. First strike was people posting spammy/pyramid scheme type sale stuff. My attempts to contact the local admins did not result in any change. More spam kept being posted.

Strike 2/3, I did not want to reveal my full name when first signing up. One day I got an email informing me that my account was deleted (not just suspended) because I did not use a real name. There was no chance for me to remedy the situation.

Too bad. Anyone know of an alternative?

</comment><comment><USER20> Sort of a weak article - no stats. It'd be much more useful if it simply stated things clearly. Something like "90% of reports are for Xs, while only 40% of the crimes are by Xs". Or even better, "out of n Xs, only m commit a crime". Then show incorrect biases there. (The only stat I saw was % of black population vs % of detainees being black - that's not so relevant without knowing actual crime rates. )

(Edit: I see why they didn't include this stat. According to [1], over 80% of suspects for various crimes were black. So that would explain why the police are pulling over a higher %, right? This still doesn't excuse base rate fallacy but sort of dismisses the one stat the article does provide.)

Or more usefully, provide better characteristics off which to classify. If race, gender, and clothing have no predictive power, demonstrate that and show what does.

Nextdoor could even build priors into the site, over time and help provide accurate predictions. After all, they have both the suspicious report info plus the actual crime info. Imagine if it would rate your post: "Based on your report of a male walking at 6am, the probability this is a criminal is 0.02%" That'd go a long way towards making people update internal models as well as making them look silly for using non-predictive characteristics. (Though if most crimes are committed by young males, it might be called out as ageist and sexist, but hey if that's reality...)

Plus you could grade individual users. So combining the base rate of crime, significant characteristics, and past performance of a user? "MaryX, given your past suspicious activity record, there's a 99% chance this post is incorrect."

Without this, all it takes is a busybody to report everything they see (and they can select on anything: race, gender, hair color, shoe size) and eventually get a correct hit. Then ignore the times they were wrong and point out how "see I reported this X and it was a thief!"

1: [http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/johnson/article/Oakland- crime-...](http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/johnson/article/Oakland-crime-issue- goes-far-deeper-than-racial-5355633.php)

<comment><USER24> I like where you go with this in the second half, because I believe that racial profiling is pragmatically ineffective anyway. But I take issue with this statement: "If race, gender, and clothing have no predictive power, demonstrate that and show what does."

I think the burden of proof is on the person using those tools both to show that they have predictive power, and to show that the action being taken on that prediction is reasonable.

Put a different way: a couple of principles which I think most Americans probably believe in are: 1) innocent until proven guilty 2) no guilt by association (there are laws that allow restrictions on known felons associating with one another, but at least in that case, the association is based on convictions for actions the individuals have taken, not assumptions about a class to which they happen to belong due to who they were born to).

I don't like the idea that someone can look suspicious, without acting suspiciously. I know there's inevitably a lot of overlap and gray area between those two things. But what I'm saying is that even if you have some statistical model which you believe has good predictive power based on inputs of race and dress, and your model says that scruffy looking black men are more likely to commit crimes, you still don't get to investigate someone just because that person's a scruffy looking black guy.

(sidenote: I just noticed this reply sitting unposted in a tab I opened a few days ago, so this might not even get read, but it was already written, so whatever.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> What a drag this is. It's pathetic that humans always manage to misuse a tool for evil.</comment>


Making of April Zero: Part 2 - <AUTHOR> http://aprilzero.com/journal/making-of-aprilzero-part-2/ <comment><USER2> It doesn't matter how long you practices the art of design, there are few people that can pull this off by themselves. I believe this guy has natural design talent coupled with years of practice.

<comment><USER3> I see talent. This is a nifty display of technical prowess. I don't see discipline or any concern for the experience of the user.

Having spent some time in the explorer section, what I see is something pretty, but unreadable. After the novelty of the interface choices fades, it's about as engaging as an XML document. There's no story here, no human element. I am seeing some interesting ideas and uses of space wasted displaying useless data. The experience is disjointed, the navigation is not intuitive, the page does weird things on scroll, and it doesn't work in IE11 (which is more offensive to me than it likely is to most of his audience - I switched to chrome to play with this).

If I were looking through this as a portfolio piece, I would be impressed with the technical elements of the design, a bit put-off by the usability problems, and confused (and a little upset) as to why a record of travel to 72 cities is presented in such a dehumanized manner.

<comment><USER4> In his defense it was a personal project; not a product for paying customers. I find it impossible to get "upset" at someone's personal project.

But haters gonna hate.

EDIT: Count all the haters above coming out of the woodwork. We can't see the points so we'll never know the real number.

<comment><USER3> Let me clarify. None of that was an insult. He has talent. It takes a lot of experience to harness and balance it properly. As he matures he'll figure it out. He's 24.

Building something pretty is one talent. Building something novel yet still intuitively usable is another. Building something engaging is yet another. They (and more) are all linked. If he gets them all (or even just a few) down and balanced he'll be someone to look out for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands [http://aprilzero.com/journal/making-of- aprilzero/](http://aprilzero.com/journal/making-of-aprilzero/)

I like at the end of part 1 where his buddy texts him and asks him if he wants to go to Hong Kong and to meet in 5 hours at SFO.

Must be nice. . .

</comment><comment><USER5> This is some hugely impressive amount of highest quality work done by a single person. I cannot recall seeing anything more astonishing than this.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is cool. I want this to be an app.

<comment><USER6> And I just realized he's releasing it as one - [http://gyrosco.pe/](http://gyrosco.pe/)

<comment><USER7> He should put some text on that website.

<comment><USER8> yeah actually can someone verify that this is related to his app? I can't really come to terms with entering my email into a blank third-party website.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry. It's real but pretty rough, I put that page together really quickly. Working on an upgraded version now that should feel less shady</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


PacketZoom: 2-10x faster content load times - <AUTHOR> https://packetzoom.com/

<comment><USER2> Is this based on fountain codes?</comment>


Germany to build the Internet Berlin Wall - <AUTHOR> http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/16/germany-to-build-the.html <comment><USER2> Given Germany's prohibition on Nazi expression, it seems likely this will also be used, in the near future, to block white supremacists.

</comment><comment><USER3> The issue here isn't that this law is bad in and of itself. There's no legitimate reason why child porn should be accessible. It's a crime and there is a definite victim so censorship of it is something that should happen. The trouble is, what ELSE gets censored in the future?

<comment> alan-crowe That is muddle headed. The crime is the sexual abuse. It is being photographed. Discovering the photographer and rescuing the children is a good deed. Hushing it up? Not so good.

<comment><USER3> I really doubt that keeping pedophiles from accessing said pictures will stop the police from prosecuting those who posted them in the first place. Your logic makes no sense. Just because you make it harder for criminals to access illegal material doesn't mean you can't go after the providers too.</comment></comment></comment>


Slides before Powerpoint - <AUTHOR> http://blog.duarte.com/2012/11/back-to-the-future-slides-before-powerpoint/

<comment><USER2> I would argue that the analog of "thrown together in an hour" PowerPoint presentations is not a professionally made stack of 35mm slides, but instead something more akin to an overhead projector: you could easily type them in your office and could make on-the-fly changes (albeit the result would be blatant it the slides weren't already hand-written).</comment>


Mobility Trends from 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/scapecast/accenture-bubble-over-barcelona-2013-mwc-mobility-trends

<comment><AUTHOR> Just remembered my presentation from last year - the major trends mentioned in there actually accelerated. If I had to update it for this year, what would you suggest to include?</comment>


Sqwiggle: Someone is watching you - <AUTHOR> http://www.chriskranky.com/sqwiggle-someone-is-watching-you/ <comment><USER2> I used Sqwiggle for a few months but a software update sometime late last year made it something I refused to use.

The changes meant that:

1\. You can prevent somebody initiating a video call by setting your status to "busy".

2\. The busy flag is removed when you are the only person in the chat room.

3\. The camera indicator is disabled when nobody else is in the chat room.

4\. You don't accept incoming video chats, they happen automatically.

Given that I mostly used Sqwiggle in a browser tab it was very easy for me to lose track of that fact it was running. It's one of many tabs and there is no indicator my camera is active if I'm alone. I typically have headphones in too but don't always wear them, so there is often no audio cue that a chat just initiated.

This is actually something that happened. I had an active call for 3.5 minutes that I was completely unaware of with video and audio streaming to the remote caller without my knowledge, after I had set the busy flag.

I work at home, and the ability for somebody to have a live audio/video stream into my house without my permission is unsettling. Especially as the only protection mechanism I have for that is to remember to terminate the application or close that browser tab every time I walk away from the computer or want to prevent video/audio sessions.

It's been a couple of months now since I last used Sqwiggle, so perhaps the clearing of the busy flag has reverted back to earlier behaviour, but ultimately I think unless I can change my profile to prevent automatic connection of video calls I'd never be comfortable with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey there, Eric here from Sqwiggle. Thanks for the detailed comment! Seems like you may have encountered a bug with busy mode. If you have it enabled, no one should be able to initiate a conversation with you. They can, however, "ping" you, which will allow you to choose to accept the connection. But it's possible I mis-understood what the exact issue was, if so, feel free to clarify :)

We definitely resonate with the general privacy concerns and are working on a mode which will allow you to turn the camera off, which we'll have completed very soon.

If you end up giving it another try, please let me know if you run into any issues or have any further feedback. Thanks!

<comment><USER2> Hi Eric,

I meant to drop you guys a message a while back, but just never found a moment to do it.

There was a redesign a few months ago, notably this was when the camera became inactive if you were alone in the chat room. The issue with the busy state is, prior to this software release/version the busy flag was never removed unless you removed it or initiated a chat (after you accept the ping).

After the redesign, the busy flag was removed when any of the following conditions occurred:

1\. You manually removed the busy flag.

2\. A video chat is initiated (you are pinged and accept the call)

3\. You became the only person in a chat room.

As I mentioned, it's been about 2 months since I last used Sqwiggle, so I'm not sure if the above is still true.

<comment><USER3> Bradley, we're also changing busy to be persistent across devices and sessions in the next few weeks, I think this will help your situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Both the author of this post and the commenters here are correct for taking note of the privacy implications of Sqwiggle, but to completely dismiss the entire product seems to be both silly, and missing the point.

Proclaiming "I won't use Sqwiggle because then people could see me" is exactly the same as saying "I won't work at my desk because people can see me". Both traditional offices and Sqwiggle allow one to achieve privacy if they'd like. For an office, you go into a conference room or something similar. To achieve the same effect with Sqwiggle, you simply close the program or browser tab.

Sqwiggle's stated goal is to replicate the ease of determining colocated team members' status/activity when you are not colocated. No one is insisting you run it 24/7, just like no one insists you live your life at your desk at work.

A very strange and dismissive article overall. The paragraph starting with "I don't think Sqwiggle will be around long though" seemed especially cynical.

<comment><USER2> I read the article as positive and the "won't be around long" comment seemed more directed at an acquisition rather than a failure due to lack of demand.

I don't really see my comments as silly. I work for a startup and Sqwiggle was used exclusively while I was in my home. Apart from completely terminating the application/tab I had no way to prevent a live video and audio stream that happened to be able to look into my living room and pick up audio from anywhere in my house (it's a small house).

It wasn't 24/7 but the team did have a strong insistence that it be running while working and that is somewhere between 12 and 16 hours a day, 6 days a week.

That's not much private time in my home for me or the rest of my family. I liked the product and a few tweaks would probably make it acceptable to use.

Fix the busy flag clearing and allow my profile to disable auto video call connection. The other strategy that might solve it while keeping the spirit of instant chat would be to default to the busy state and have a timed non-busy state. e.g.:

/Here 3H

Which disables the busy state for 3 hours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My team and I tried to use Sqwiggle but kept running into problems with the video or audio track not loading. But these bugs can be ironed out.

I have one major gripe with the concept of capturing a photo on an interval. What if it catches me picking my nose? That could be embarrassing. Not picking my nose is not a solution. I am a primate with fingers and I like to pick my nose.

<comment><USER2> I'd say it caught every member of our team picking their nose at least once, obviously with a permanent record via screenshot for posterity ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's nothing weird about finding a camera in your home that you only have partial control of unsettling. If you think YOU get to decide when my webcam is active, then I am going to refuse to install your dumb software.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is slightly off topic - I get the impression Sqwiggle isn't "doge- fooding". Could be wrong, but that's the impression. I'm hoping to be wrong though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm what gave you this impression? In fact we've been using Sqwiggle daily since our very first prorotype :) Tbh I don't think we would get half as much done without it, we certainly wouldn't be as connected given that we're a distributed team.

<comment><USER7> Mostly because you're stating SF as a location for dev roles :) - I guess I was wrong. Thanks for clearing that up. Interesting...

<comment><USER3> Ah, thanks for the note - I've changed the Angellist to clarify this :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> wouldn't a simple motion-detected: yes flag or motionLastDetected:XX:XX:XX be less invasive?

<comment><USER9> As the article states, it's helpful for others to see whether or not you're on a call or eating or whatever else.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's also a personal element. It's nice to see the faces of the people you work with throughout the day. Certainly has helped to create a tighter social bond on our team.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you're interested in this, you might also try [https://echoplex.us](https://echoplex.us)

<comment><USER11> cool. thx for the link! Demo: [https://chat.echoplex.us/](https://chat.echoplex.us/)</comment></comment>


How Red and Green Became the Colors of Christmas - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2016/12/20/506215632/how-red-and-green-became-the-colors-of-christmas <comment><USER2> The idea that Coca-Cola created the current version of Santa Claus is an urban myth. Popularised? Maybe. Created? No.

[http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/santa/cocacola.asp](http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/santa/cocacola.asp)

<comment><USER3> I think the argument is that Coca-Cola solidified Santa's look. Proto-Claus were seen in blue and green coats, for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't buy it. Sinterklaas, the primary source for santa claus, has been historically been depicted in red: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinterklaas#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinterklaas#History)

Further red and green are the traditional colours of the christmas tree: Green of the tree and red of the christmas balls that used to be apples.

</comment><comment><USER5> The takeaway for me is that many core aspects of our society that we take for granted are not as 'holy' and from time-immemorial as we assume them to be. This questions their nobility or the concept of the noble tradition since apparently many things are the result of somewhat random or opportunistic evolution.

This is exciting because it means that we should feel free try to break from the bounds of tradition and readily invent new or at least incrementally better frameworks.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's because green and red are the two most economical laser colors.

</comment><comment><USER7> Like a lot of so-called 'traditions': advertising.

(See also: engagement rings, Mother's Day)

<comment><USER8> is that necessarily a bad thing? i take joy in mother's day regardless of its origin.

<comment><USER9> I still see it as more of a civil holiday, and a needed one. As you say, regardless of it's origin, what made it stick is that it's not something entirely absurd.</comment></comment></comment>


Reporter bios don't improve readers' trust in news outlets - <AUTHOR> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/02/readers-dont-care-that-you-were-editor-of-your-college-newspaper-and-reporter-bios-alone-dont-improve-trust-in-your-news-organization/ <comment><USER2> Here's a study that might be even more interesting:

1\. Have a reporter write a series of stories on several topics.

2\. Label these stories with the same author name and have Group A read them.

3\. Label these stories with a bunch of different names and have Group B read them.

4\. Have both groups rate the trustworthiness of each story as they read them.

My theory is that we tend to trust sources we _know_ more. I would expect that Group A would report higher levels of trust for the last stories they read, even if they disagree with the author, because they've been told they're reading the same person's work.

The way I personally read news reflects this. There are many authors on the news sources I frequent who I am familiar with. Some I consider to be heavily biased or idiots but, being familiar with their shortcomings, I feel I can get a better picture of the objective truth from their work than I can from reading something written by someone I know nothing about. I trust authors based on what I have read from them in the past rather than their biographies.

For this reason, bios and clearly visible author names/pictures may not increase the reader's trust in isolated articles, but it may help build trust with regular readers _over time_.

</comment><comment><USER3> No surprises there. Just yesterday, I saw someone comment online that a particular opinion article was poorly researched and written like an amateur. Where the author has a Pulitzer and a Gerald Loeb Award with decades in the business at major periodicals and newspapers. It seems clear the judged "quality" of the opinion has mostly to do with whether the reader agrees.

<comment><USER4> Well aren't Pulitzers more about what you uncover than how well you write and research in the book learning sense? A half illiterate crank who exposed real and concrete evidence of a massive scandal say for a deliberately nonsensical example "Microsoft is bribing the FBI to assassinate rivals" would dessrve it even if half of his works were about lizard people.

Obviously being a crazy idiot doesn't help but being a good investigator and a good writer aren't the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Isn't this a positive? Society would be better off if we avoid appeal to authority and instead focus on evidence-based decision-making.

<comment><USER6> > Society would be better off if we avoid appeal to authority and instead > focus on evidence-based decision-making

While this sounds awesome in isolation (and is perhaps even a goal to aim for), I am in two minds about the reality of it.

In our society as it currently exists, most people are not in a position to collect, correctly understand and evaluate evidence for things outside their expertise. And some, like me, have very limited spheres of expertise to begin with. So people rely a lot on a "chain of trust" for informing their opinions and decisions. This is of course gameable and is indeed often gamed.

But I am not sure this is avoidable. It does not seem possible today to teach oneself to a point where as an individual you can form a fully independent opinion, solely based on the study of evidence, in any reasonable time for very many different things.

Maybe I am just pessimistic!

<comment><USER5> I agree with you, and no one can take the time to research everything from evidence. The chain of trust does have a place.

However I'd also argue that this is the only time in history that we have almost the whole of human knowledge accessible at our fingertips from anywhere in the world within fractions of a second. If there ever were a time that we could look up actual evidence without expending inordinate effort, that time is now!

<comment><USER7> > this is the only time in history that we have almost the whole of human > knowledge accessible at our fingertips from anywhere in the world within > fractions of a second. If there ever were a time that we could look up > actual evidence without expending inordinate effort, that time is now!

This is also the point in time where we have the most _disinformation_ swimming around the internet as well. And it takes effort, possibly an inordinate amount, to cull the bad information from the good. Or else we're in the same conundrum as we always have been about whom to trust.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I misread this as "bias" rather than bios. I must be predisposed to associate the words "Reporter" and "bias".

<comment><USER9> My mind read it as "BIOS" at first and I figured it was a typo. Then after reading your comment I finally realized "bios" is short for biographies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the study is missing a condition.

Both of the biographies they used suggest that the article was written by generic, if competent, journalist. Neither include details that might push you towards trusting _this specific person_. Since the test article was about a 'superbug', imagine one profile said "Jim completed a masters in immunology at Columbia University before moving to NYU'S Carter Journalism Institute." Without that, it's hard to know whether readers just ignore these blurbs altogether...

</comment><comment><USER11> Single human beings can no longer report.

The internet means they can be fact checked immediately. Which means they immediately will be found in error, large or small.

No one trusts any reporter anymore, that time has passed.

</comment><comment><USER12> >"Using a personal photo and including personal details in a reporter's biography made participants feel they knew the reporter better, but this feeling didn't influence readers' attitudes about a news organization more broadly,"

IME, people trust individuals more than institutions. So, their level of trust for the news organization doesn't really matter if they trust the specific journalist.

</comment><comment><USER13> Yes it does if they have earned our trust. For instance, I trust stuff from Matt Levine. I don't trust opinion piece tho

</comment><comment><USER14> No one with any real sense trusts journalists anymore. You can blame the internet, the rise of sensationalism, or the total lack of effort to cover politics in a neutral fashion, but the press lost its credibility a long time ago and frankly I see no reason to trust them now. The biggest use of the press in my life is to follow what the current popular talking points are.</comment>


Xbox One pricing in the UK: goodbye next-gen - <AUTHOR>

So £599 for an Xbox One and £89.99 for Call of Duty: Ghosts according to Amazon pre-order pricing.......yeah ok, I'll give that a miss Microsoft <comment><USER2> Amazon does this on pre-orders occasionally – the real price is unknown, so instead of providing a low estimate, they deliberately have a high estimate. In reality you'll only pay whatever the real price is – they don't take you money at this point anyway.

I guess they'd rather say to early customers "Hey, it's half what you might have expected!", rather than "Ah, turns out it's double what you thought".

</comment><comment><USER3> They're pushing game pricing up significantly, Ghosts is £40 preorder on Xbox 360. That's ridiculous.

EDIT: Actually, I guess we need to be careful. From Amazon: "Pre-order Price Guarantee: order now and if the Amazon.co.uk price decreases between the time you place your order and the release date, you'll be charged the lowest price."

So basically these prices are upper bounds, they could easily come down.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hello PS4?

<comment><USER5> Also the same price on preorder</comment></comment>


How To Pitch To Investors In Under 2 Minutes - <AUTHOR> http://vidinterest.com/video/2953/how-to-pitch-to-investors-in-under-2-minutes

<comment><USER2> must watch videos for startups !</comment>


Alcohol consumption is positively correlated with exercise - <AUTHOR> http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/does-exercising-make-you-drink-more-alcohol/?src=me&ref=health

<comment><USER2> "Can regular exercise avert or undo some of the harm associated with binge drinking?"

My guess is that since exercise is good for mental health and alcohol is bad for mental health, people who exercise are able to get away with drinking more before suffering the affective consequences.</comment>


MaxMind Makes Life Miserable for an 82 Year Old Woman - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/maxmind-data-makes-life-miserable-for-a-kansas-farm-2016-4 <comment><USER2> Original source link (and more interesting, detailed version of the story): [http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch- kansa...](http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/)

</comment><comment><USER2> This sad story is what happens when people treat inherently inaccurate data as ground truth. What's worse: A lot of those people are in law enforcement, and they really ought to know better.</comment>


Physics Invader = Space Invader + Physics - <AUTHOR> http://www.nekogames.jp/mt/2008/10/physics_invader.html <comment><USER2> Why is this so popular? There are more interesting ways to integrate physics in a classic game, like this one: <http://www.referencegames.com/>

<comment><USER3> You completely miss the entire point of video games: fun.

<comment><USER2> IMO, a video game that goes to the 1st place on Hacker News' front page has to be clever, not fun. Having this game make a very simple (and typical) use of physics doesn't make it terribly clever.

<comment><USER3> If you want a "clever" (read: interesting; read again: intellectual; read once more: poignant) game, play Chess, or Stratego, or Risk. If you want a game that's _not fun_ , well, I'd probably just say "lighten up".

<comment><USER4> The context isn't what games hhm wants to play, the context is what games (if any) hhm wants to see at the top of hacker news.

<comment><USER2> Exactly. Also, if you want good games, I used to be a games developer so I could post cool & fun games, but that's not the point of hacker news.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The physics don't do much to the gameplay, but they make the game very good- looking. Physics aren't just useful, they're also sexy.

<comment><USER2> That's right, but the idea isn't new. There are many physics demos that make even shooting to boxes (or even just seeing them fall) interesting. This game doesn't add anything else to such old idea, excepting maybe having been done in Flash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This game is so cool! What a neat spin on a classic game. They should take this game social on iminlikewithyou's new platform.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is typical innovation... mixing two things together to make a third thing.

Next physics invaders... + [add your own mix]. I choose +pony.

<comment><USER8> > _This is typical innovation... mixing two things together to make a third > thing._

I'd argue that _every_ innovation involves mixing two (or more) things to produce a third. So calling it "typical" is a gross understatement.

If you don't find the game compelling, it's not because the combinatorial (a + b = c) _form_ of innovation is somehow uninteresting, but because the elements are.

I agree that (space invaders) + physics = (moderately more engaging version of space invaders).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I got to level 9.

<comment><USER10> I hit 42, but my "lives" is negative 20. I died and one of the falling balls finished the level so the game got confused. This seems like a common problem with flash games I think finishing the level and the death counter must be on separate threads or the flush the pending event's after you finish a level but I have seen this before.

<comment><USER2> This is because people just show a "game over" banner and don't set a death flag or something like that. Then you see that the game is over, but sometimes you can keep moving the ship (I don't know if this happens in this game) or events that happen in the game can make a different game over message show. It's a bug in the game, not in flash, but a very typical bug.

<comment><USER2> It's fun that I was downmodded for explaining exactly why this problem happens. I used to be a game developer, and believe me, that's the true reason behind the problem.</comment></comment></comment></comment>