Intuition has no transfer encoding - <AUTHOR> http://www.yes-no-cancel.co.uk/2010/10/30/intuition-has-no-transfer-encoding/

<comment><USER2> Very good post, Martin.

My co-founder and I recently made a decision regarding a partnering with another company in a somewhat new field. We made our decision pretty quickly, and it wasn't until I was later asked why we made the decision we did that I went back and considered what had really led us down the path we took:

A mentor who works at a big hosting company talked about the way they go about choosing open source technology is not by looking at what the best technology at the time is, but at the quality of the community contributing to that technology, and make a bet that that one will "get better faster" than the others. Without thinking about it, that was the primary criteria that led us to make our decision: the company we chose isn't currently the best at what they do (which is why I had to give this some thought when queried about the decision), but they seem to have set up some systems that (we believe) will let them "get better faster" than their competitors.

It wasn't something we considered at the time of making the decision, but in hindsight, that anecdote was the "vector" that gave us the reasoning that probably contributed the most the decision, without us really being conscious of it.

Edit: Thinking more about this more now, these incredibly well-built-up and well-tested transfer functions that experienced entrepreneurs and investors have built up is what makes YC and other mentor programs so incredible. This is how Ron Conway and Jessica Livingson judge entrepreneurs so well from just a simple conversation.

It's nothing that can be taught, but through books like Founders at Work, or simply sitting and listening to an entrepreneur tell their story, and recall the tough decisions they made early on, one can probably build up pieces of this transfer function. It's what makes Mixergy interviews valuable: there's not a much traditional educational value to them, but just hearing the story of what decisions were made, when, and why, helps build these functions for the viewer.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great post, Martin. Spot on.

This is a big part of what I enjoy about teaching. Aside from all the usual stuff about not properly understanding something until you've taught it to someone else, there's something else going on, which (by crude analogy to your analogy!) is a bit like the rsync algorithm: you have a large "bitmap" to sync, and limited bandwidth to sync it over, so you proceed by checksumming the receiver's existing copy and trying to figure out what diffs you need to communicate to bring them up to date.

In practice this means that teaching is a deeply interactive activity which involves first exploring the contours of someone's existing understanding and then trying to move them to a richer understanding in the most direct way possible. Perhaps this is a more general case of what you're talking about: intuition is one thing that you can try to teach (or communicate) to another person, but maybe all you're trying to teach is something mundane and concrete like the difference between a Google account and a Google Apps account, which is less about intuition and more about having a simple but exactly correct mental model of the world in order to not be hopelessly confused by it.

</comment><comment><USER4> One of my most effective colleagues had a fundamentally different intuition for software design problems. And we were both pretty opinionated. :-) Some of our best work was the result of extremely heated design discussions, where we hammered our intuitive ideas about a problem into alignment.

It was exhausting, and probably even harder on him than me (I can be difficult about design stuff), but it was hard to argue about the quality of the results.

</comment><comment><USER5> Very cool post here - thx for this

I don't like the word "intuition" though because it insinuates that there's no logical reasoning behind the thought process.

Intuition to me is inductive thinking based on impartial information, rather than deductive thinking on complete information, which is often the case in many situations in life and in business.

It's one of the key differences between bridge/poker (logic + "intuition/feel") and chess (complete information + purely deductive reasoning).

I think of intuition more like a data bank you have in your mind, which only gets more accurate in a field that you apply yourself to over time. Accumulate a lot of data through hard-earned experience and your thinking starts functioning like a monte carlo simulation with all these reference points.

It's also why one of my most favorite tweets of all time was by PG about how studying history refines this sort of judgment or "intuition" in your thinking: <http://twitter.com/paulg/status/23203210182>

<comment><USER6> I can't believe you've played much chess if you think that it's purely about deductive reasoning. Humans can't calculate even the least part of all the possibilities in most positions. Knowing where to look -- which is just one role intuition plays -- is indispensable for a chess player.

<comment><USER5> You're right and I'm not an experienced chess player, thanks for the pointer. What I was getting at though was how it's not a game of incomplete info, as say in poker/bridge where intuition plays a far bigger role.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> After reading your footnote here is my intuition about the 2d pixels.

Whatever things we experience are stored in our memory. The way to "draw" pixels on our brain is through experiencing( as in observing through our senses). So each of the experience is a pixel according to me.

Trying to find lines and shapes in your vector graphics is basically finding patterns in the 2d pixels. Or what I would call learning in our case. What I think about learning that it is a top down approach. Each experience is very very specific. If you take any visual image from your memory, a huge amount of context is attached to it. The way we learn is we try to find patterns in these experiences and this commonality we save as a concept. Eg, we learn the concept of addition by seeing that when i get "2" "apples" from someone and if I had "3" "apples" already than I have "5" "apples". I have quoted these because in your childhood you will observer that whatever is in the quotes can very. You can have oranges instead of apples in the quote, or any other number other than 2 and 3. So by observing this you learn that if I get two numbers i can 'add' them. You need to already have an understanding of 'numbers' though. This understanding of 'numbers' or 'addition' is the pattern that you have found, we call it a concept.

So, according to me, 2d pixels are your experiences. and concepts or notions are the shapes in the vector graphics.

IMO Why you cannot convey your intuitions can be attributed to the fact that we have words associated with well known concepts. You learn words by associating them with the concepts you have learned. But many concepts do not have words associated with them. Also The concept might made up of complicated combination of small concepts that you find difficult to break down in simpler language. (I am also not a neuroscientist, but I have worked on the development of a neurology research s/w for few months.)

</comment><comment><USER8> This post really articulated something I've been thinking a lot about lately. It's taken a long time for me to realize that I should trust my gut more.

However, the description about how we learn language is completely wrong.

<comment><USER7> I agree about learning of language. Initially we learn words by examples. We associate foreign words and sentences with the one we know. Afterwards we need to know the grammar and all but first we build a vocabulary. And we have a pretty good intuition of the grammar before actually reading it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This resonates with me. I knew (or rather hoped for) what you would write about from the title alone. I think I have a strong intuition and I trust it very much, but I have a hard time explaining my feeling to my Co-founder and other people we work with. This affects everything from choice of languages/frameworks, to design and style.

I wish I could get better at conveying my intuition. One way I have of doing this is if I find say a framework or library that 'feels' good. If it comes with strong rational explanation of why this is a good design, I can offset that work and just point to that. It's the same way with design patterns and essays or articles.

The best knowledge is knowledge that you already had, clearly laid out.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think sometimes it's more about the ability to form patterns from experiences. Like intuitive play in chess. Or ghost limbs in TED video [http://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind...](http://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind.html)

Sometimes I think it's just me forgetting the details of what I've learnt so I can't explain it to someone properly.

</comment><comment><USER11> So, it's kind of a long discussion about intuition and then the disclaimer about not being a neuroscientist. The discussion makes me nervous in terms of it conflating the concepts of bitmaps and vector graphics with "How The Brain Really Works" type stuff. Is this really pontification about neuroscience is it just moral advice for startups couched in that kind of discussion?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nothing that deep. I just thought that I had come to an intuitive understanding of what I think of as intuition (meta!), and I wanted to share it. The analogy isn't scientific at all; it is just an attempt to communicate, in the hope that others might find the thoughts useful or inspiring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sounds like witchcraft to me. Pass me the wand...</comment>


Ask HN: How to get good at math if you are too bad with math - <AUTHOR> I am too bad at doing math, starting from algebra, trigonometry, calculus etc. I am a good programmer though, I can glue api's and do some pretty good programming. But I want to get knowledge and work on some advanced computer science topics. How can I improve my bad mathematics and get good at both math and CS? I have a full time job. So all i can do is study on my own. Please help <comment><USER2> check out this funny, yet effective, introduction to calculus book from 1914: <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/33283/33283-pdf.pdf>. Richard Feynman used this book and then learned calculus at age 15.

<comment><USER3> For those who want to know the title without having to examine a PDF:

Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus Phillips Thompson

<http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33283>

P.S. Gave you an upvote. Just would have preferred to know the title / have a pointer to a non-PDF reference since one was available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you want real maths and not just calculating, you'll need to do lots and lots of exercises. It's best if someone more experienced can grade them (it's hard to judge your own proofs), but looking at solutions helps too. You can get books for that (I don't know about ebooks), just ask around and have a look inside (Is there a university with a library nearby? You can try there.), different people need different books.

I like the math part of The Art of Computer Programming (in the first book) by D. Knuth. It has exercises with solutions and, as the name says, is orientated towards maths useful for programming. Plus, it's a good read. The whole series came highly recommended, but I'm still in the first part, so I can't judge it yet. ^^

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm in a similar situation. Mathematics (just like drawing and some languages) is a big item on my Someday/Maybe issue, so I collected some materials but haven't gone through most of them yet. So take the following stuff that was recommended to me _cum grano salis_.

\- George Polya - How to Solve It

Interesting book on proofs and a logical approach to problem solving. Original title was "School of Thinking"…

\- Lancelot Hogben - Mathematics for the Millions \- Silvanus P Thompson - Calculus Made Easy

Two older books that came well recommended (have been mentioned in this thread already). Not sure if that's due to the readers or their teachers nostalgia or well founded yet.

\- The Manga Guide to Calculus

Erm, yeah. (I did like the Manga Guide to Databases, though)

\- Benjamin & Shermer - Secrets of Mental Math

How to do mental arithmetics quickly. Good for igniting the spark and impress your friends…

Also, some book on mathematics by Russian, who employ some different methods in teaching, but I can't find the book nor its title right now, must be in some moving box. (Generally, talk to Russians. They're creepy when it comes to maths and chess)

</comment><comment><USER6> I realized that most people (including me) sometimes fail to understand some maths notions because they don't try enough to understand them. What I mean is that some notions are complicated, really complicated, and often people with good will go straight on doing exercises, hoping that somehow, that will make them understand. So my advice is: dont rush. Try to understand the core principles. There are theorems, try to understand how to prove them. Will the theorems still hold if you remove some hypothesis? What can happen?

Of course the way of learning I suggest is not easy or fast, especially for someone who is busy with a full time job, but I guarantee that if you do it you will build for yourself some solid grounds, and you will feel yourself more intelligent.

Out of interest, I am curious why you need to become better at maths.

<comment><AUTHOR> I want to learn advanced CS so that i can do more interesting jobs. Like Machine learning or Large data analysis. But for most of that i will need to be good at math. So i need to learn math for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What are you interested in? How in depth are you willing to study? I'm basically in the same boat and recently out of the blue developed a passion for math. I found there are plenty of free books available online. Right now I'm studying combinatorics, but every so often I take a couple of Khan Academy classes on trig. You might also want to check out Project Euler that offers the chance to combine math and programming.

<comment><USER8> I just checked out Project Euler - awesome, thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would start with number theory and getting very good at managing numbers in your head. I bought a book "how to calculate quickly" to help me with that. MOst algebra and calculus problems could be solved quite easily by running approximations in your head that solve the equation at hand. I learned this method from prof Feynman in his famous book "you must be joking Mr Feynman"

</comment><comment><USER10> [http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/eohrr/to_everyone_who_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/eohrr/to_everyone_who_posts_about_learning_more_math/)

So head to khanacademy.org, start with algebra and work on all exercises. Then go to the other subjects.

I highly suggest you pick one particular graduate level math subjects and sounds interesting to you and make that your goal.

</comment><comment><USER11> Study algebra and trigonometry fist(basic stuff that you should have studied in high school) then proceed to study calculus. It's REALLY pointless trying to go calculus not knowing proper algebra at least, believe me :P

</comment><comment><USER12> I actually help people with this kind of thing for a living, as a personal tutor - drop me a line if you're interested.

</comment><comment><USER13> Visit ArtOf ProblemSolving.com(AOPS).That is the HN of Mathematics.</comment>


A step toward systems that can assess competence using neurological data - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/brain-scans-can-detect-who-has-better-skills-1538589600 <comment><USER2> I think it's really detecting who has more connections in a given region.

That being said, I was born with a condition which leaves the sections of my brain loosely coupled. Usually this leads to dyslexia, schizophrenia, retardation, etc.

Luckily, the mutation that runs in my family is not the kind that lowers your IQ (it increases it, with a ~30% schizophrenia chance).

Because of that, I assume this scan would detect me having low skills. When I'm reality I've always excelled (as has my whole family). My only symptom is I don't read linearly (kinda bounce all over the page).

I hope this doesn't become a thing, else it's kind of like judging job fitness based on genetic markers (I.e. race)

<comment><USER3> > I hope this doesn't become a thing

It's useful in that it's another way to find companies you don't want to work for. The whiteboard interview being another signal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Science Advances article is [http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/10/eaat3807](http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/10/eaat3807)

"Seventeen surgeons and 13 medical students participated in this study." According to Table S1 they were classified as:

\- 8 expert, mean age 35, 700 laparoscopic procedures in average

\- 9 novice surgeons, mean age 31, 60 laparoscopic procedures in average

\- 7 trainees and 5 controls, medical school year 1-4, 0 laparoscopic procedures.

The article has 8 authors.

</comment><comment><USER5> From a Facebook nonpaywalled link: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/brain-scans- can-detect-who-has-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/brain-scans-can-detect- who-has-better-skills-1538589600?mod=e2fb)

</comment><comment><USER6> Awesome... another loss of privacy at the hands of convenience and data for ignorant decision-makers

</comment><comment><USER7> [http://archive.is/yjIwH](http://archive.is/yjIwH)

</comment><comment><USER8> Either some scientist must have broken their wrist facepalming over this heading, or else it must be a scam. How have we suddenly advanced X00 years in our understanding of the brain, to the point where our scans can _reliably_ tell the difference between a brain expending slightly more energy in a vaguely defined volume and a brain fine tuned to deal with a specific problem? Of course, business owners would pay a great deal of money to make their hiring practices even 1% more "accurate," no matter how many candidates they end up rejecting because the computer says "No."

</comment><comment><USER9> surprised the article didn't bring this up, but anyways, let's defuse this entire idea with a very simple thought experiment so that we'll never have to think about it again.

the tech they have measures brain activity in different regions. great. the article mentions in experienced personnel there is less activity which would indicate conscious planning and more activity which would indicate doing. or maybe it's backwards. it doesn't really matter. what it's really saying is that people who are more experienced are more efficient at performing a task on a neurological basis, which is measurable.

but the efficiency of a brain circuit at performing a task is irrespective of whether that task turns out correctly or incorrectly. you can learn how to do things incorrectly. your brain's efficiency for performing a task in a certain way increases the more you do things that way, regardless of whether the outcome is what is desired.

so, here's the thought experiment: we have one master surgeon who is known for getting great patient outcomes via consistently meticulous, premeditated, and intentional application of tradecraft, and another surgeon who is awful, having killed half of their patients. the awful surgeon is very experienced -- just as experienced as the master surgeon, in fact.

the master's perfectionism leads the master to see small flaws in each of their executions, driving them to do better next time via careful applications of past lessons. in contrast, the awful surgeon thinks they're pretty good, but that the patients they've had who died were more or less beyond helping or perhaps that another member of the surgical team did something wrong. the awful surgeon never really learns from mistakes, and spends most operations thinking about dinner rather than thinking about how to help the patient.

who does the brain scan say is more skilled?

on the basis of the science described in the article, it's the awful surgeon every time. the awful surgeon doesn't put in as much conscious effort, leaving them to rely on the incorrect patterns that they've learned and never engaged with, which is what the scan will see. in contrast, the master surgeon's attentiveness will be perceived as inefficiency and lack of skill, even if the corresponding motor regions are as efficient as the awful surgeon's.

to put it differently, this isn't a "we can do more technology and get around this" so much as a fundamental drawback of the tech itself. you'd need to introduce other data to even start to make a case for the scans as corresponding to skill, and even then there are plenty of other issues.

</comment><comment><USER10> There are all sorts of ways that correlation between brainscan images and skill might not be causation. This might just be how familiar a surgeon is with the setting, so an experienced but incompetent surgeon shows as "skilled" and an inexperienced but competent surgeon shows as "unskilled".

I don't know if this using machine learning but one might see the whole machine learning field as resulting in a rush to correlation-based "cargo- cults" of various sorts (see "racist AI" and etc).

(wsj paywall articles are annoying)

</comment><comment><USER11> It only detected a activity on a motor skills task in the motor cortex.

This has not been generalized to cognitive skills beyond, "the subject is inactive"

</comment><comment><USER12> Should provide impetus to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility)

</comment><comment><USER13> If you are novice of course you have to think more and things don't come automatic. That's basically how they are measuring this.

</comment><comment><USER14> Numchuku skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills...

</comment><comment><USER15> I would choose a brain scan over whiteboard interviews any day.

<comment><USER16> In the end you will be getting that brain scan while you whiteboard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Can't read the full article due to paywall. Two important points:

For anything team based, skill, beyond basic competence and trainability, doesn't matter very much. A team full of mediocre team players is going to perform better than a team of selfish rockstars. Implication: focus on soft skills, organization, facilitation rather than picking the best people with brain scans.

Job aids are a really significant factor - see the checklist manifesto. It doesn't matter how good the surgeon is, they're still human. Things like checklists, automated code analysis/testing/fuzzing, best practice review processes, pair programming, and agile can make or break projects regardless of the skills of those involved.

Another implication: as a manager, you have a lot of control over how your team performs. When you say that you need to hire Johnny because he has the best brain scan, you're totally ignoring the fact that Sally can totally learn to do the work.

<comment><USER18> Click on "web" by the link to the article

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If I'm a white male, but I have the brain scan of a Latino grandmother, does that count as diversity in the workplace?

<comment><USER20> It might hurt your chances because of the fear of Las Chanclas!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If this means I don't have to sit through annoying whiteboard interviews, or talk to HR bots, and all i have to do is just send them a link to my brainscan on linked in. Nice!

<comment><USER22> Hey so we checked your scan and noticed you only have experience with .NET 4.5, we're really looking for someone with .NET 4.7.

<comment><USER23> HR will still ask for 8 years of .Net 4.9

<comment><USER24> "Actually our engineering team is looking more for CLR experience right now."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Phrenology 2.0

<comment><USER26> Right, like Astronomy is Astrology 2.0 and Chemistry is Alchemy 2.0.

<comment><USER27> Well, that's not entirely fair. Identifying a difference between an experienced surgeon an inexperienced is not at all the same as assessing skill in some meaningful manner, but could end up being used as such.

While phrenology ended up really far into, or even outside the fringes of science, one could argue that it was "based" on a true fact. A zero volume brain is going to be less useful than a brain with non zero volume. Then some rather brutal extrapolations happened, and the results were both terrible, and disastrous.

I fully believe the risk for a similar repeat of history is very real. Not because science fails us, but because society still posses many of its old weaknesses as clearly shown during the last year or so. As the performance improves, it is becoming more and more likely that we'll have to outlaw functional brain scanning for any non-medical purposes, or it will be somehow co-opted by actors wanting money or power at any price.

I don't think I'm either malignant, or creative enough to figure out how, but someone will, because the tech will become endlessly abusable when it becomes - or seems to be - sofisticated enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Maybe someone can make this an SaaS for dating app profiles.

I've heard girls only want boyfriends who have great skills.

</comment><comment><USER29> Hm. Wonder if they have a brainscan for aholes.

<comment><USER30> Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.</comment></comment>


NASA Engineers Propose a Rail Gun/Scramjet to Fire Spacecraft Into Orbit - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-11/nasa-engineers-propose-combining-rail-gun-and-scramjet-fire-spacecraft-orbit <comment><USER2> "unlike other rocket-less plans for space entry, each relevant technology is advanced enough that tests could take place in 10 years"

Meaning a decades-long hellishly-expensive program.

Compare that to the light-gas gun, which is a proven concept and works with current technology.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_HARP>

A startup working on the concept: <http://quicklaunchinc.com/>

According to the Quicklaunch people, a completed cannon should cost in the vicinity of $400M.

</comment><comment><USER3> The comments make me die a little...

Curving the rail straight up? Building an Orion? What was done to high-school Physics teachers?</comment>


"Buy Gold" vs. "Buy Bitcoin" on Google Trends - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=buy+gold%2C+buy+bitcoin#q=buy%20gold%2C%20buy%20bitcoin&date=today%2012-m&cmpt=q

<comment><USER2> Down for me :( Quotum has been reached (not sure which quotum, I don't use Google Trends often). Can someone please post the chart?

<comment><USER3> [http://lbiegaj.netshock.pl/_/screenshot-25-11-13-052041088.p...](http://lbiegaj.netshock.pl/_/screenshot-25-11-13-052041088.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What was the event in April causing a spike in both searches?

<comment><USER5> Cypriot bank craziness, perhaps?

Bitcoin was in one of its bubbly phases at the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> And of course Peter Schiff is predictably on one side of Bitcoin vs Gold ... take a guess which one: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L7SOPDOvvI](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L7SOPDOvvI)</comment>


Brain surgeons don't hold cellphones next to their ears - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/health/03well.html?em&ex=1212724800&en=b85e4024dde0de7b&ei=5070

<comment><USER2> What a silly article. The article finds 3 brain surgeons who dont use cell phones near their ear, and it becomes news. If 4 our of 5 dentists recommend Crest toothpaste, then if I talk to 15 dentists, I can find 3 dentists that dont recommend Crest.

My favorite quote from the pseudo science fear mongering article: "researchers who have raised concerns say that just because science can't explain the mechanism doesn't mean one doesn't exist."

<comment><USER3> What's wrong with that quote? That's true of many things in science; we know the existence of a relationship but not the cause. For example, charge separation between the sky and ground is a very poorly understood phenomenon, but we know that it happens since we have lightning.

Twenty years from now, we may find that cellphones cause horrible brain problems or that they have no effect at all. What the scientists are saying is that the data we have now doesn't allow us to make a call one way or the other.

<comment><USER4> I assume the problem with the quote is that saying "we don't know how cellphones cause brain cancer" -- though technically true -- carries the implicit message that "cellphones cause brain cancer"... even though we don't know that, either.

For example: "I don't watch reality television," said Dr. Gupta, "While there is no known mechanism for reality television to cause cancer, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist."

<comment><USER5> There is no correlation between reality television and cancer, but there is with cell phone use.

<comment><USER6> Is there? I've seen very little that is conclusive.

A few studies here and there show some, but that's to be expected: a 5% confidence interval means 1/20 otherwise good studies will get it wrong.

Interaction between weak radiation and matter is very well understood (1). Unless the currently known laws of physics are completely wrong, the interaction between cell phone radiation and your brain is so small as to be irrelevant.

(1) Look up Fermi's golden rule in Landau/Lifshitz, here <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi's_golden_rule> or elsewhere. Also look up multiphoton ionization; if you've got a university library, look up Phys. Rev. A 42, 3090 - 3106 (1990).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Sweeds might beg to differ: <http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-195865.html>

The meat:

"However, researchers at the Swedish National Institute for Working Life said they looked at the mobile phone use of 905 people between the age of 20 and 80 who had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor and found a link.

"A total 85 of these 905 cases were so-called high users of mobile phones, that is they began early to use mobile and/or wireless telephones and used them a lot," the study said.

"The study also shows that the rise in risk is noticeable for tumors on the side of the head where the phone was said to be used," it added.

Kjell Mild, who led the study, said the figures meant that heavy users of mobile phones, for instance of who make mobile phone calls for 2,000 hours or more in their life, had a 240 percent increased risk for a malignant tumor on the side of the head the phone is used. "

<comment><USER8> That's fairly conclusive because there is the asymmetry of tumours and there is a control group.

<comment><USER4> There is, however, the possibility that the people who got tumors were somehow susceptible to them (i.e. would have likely gotten them anyway) and that the cellphone use merely influenced which side of the brain the tumor formed. Or perhaps there is some other factor (handedness, the side you sleep on, the side of the car you usually sit in, etc.) that both biases cancer to one side of the head and influences which hand you use to talk on the cell phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yes, but the more important question is: do urologists keep their phones on their belt or in their pockets?

</comment><comment><USER10> Did they try and balance prick bias? A lot of brain surgeons are hot shots. Hot shots like to show how important they are by using a hands free unit (Mr. Important can't be bothered to use a hand while he's rudely talking on the phone in line at Starbucks). Thus, brain surgeons are likely to use hands free units.

<comment><USER11> You might be on the right track, except I think that those brain surgeons just want to reduce any chance of getting a brain tumor themselves, because each one thinks he's the _only_ person with god's gift to remove the tumor :)

<comment><USER12> I think gifts like brain surgery comes more from the heretics that dug up corpses in defiance of the church then from god.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Fumbling with ear pieces is inconvenient as well. I wish there were a cellphone with an external antenna instead (connected via a cable). You could then keep the antenna in your pocket (shield it towards the side facing the body).

Maybe I should just get a tinfoil hat instead... ;)

</comment><comment><USER14> Meanwhile, there are a variety of other things (bad diet, not exercising, smoking, excessive alcohol/drug usage) that almost certainly _will_ impact your health quite negatively, generally for fairly simple, well-understood reasons. So, spend less time worrying about the little things and more about the big things.

</comment><comment><USER15> If one of them is the best brain surgeon in the world, it might explain his reluctance.

"If someone _else_ gets a tumor, they can always come to the best brain surgeon in the world! But if it happens to _me_ , I'm stuck with the _second_ best brain surgeon in the world, and he's a _quack!_ "

</comment><comment><USER16> "Mobile phones do not pose health problems to adults in the short term but there is a "slight hint" of a cancer risk for long-term users, according to the results of a study which could not rule out risks of brain or ear cancer for those who have used mobiles for more than 10 years."

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/sep/13/mobilephones.h...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/sep/13/mobilephones.health)

Another interesting study is this one:

"Microwaves similar to those emitted by cell phones may affect long-term memory, according to a new study by a University of Washington researcher."

[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/12/991202070403.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/12/991202070403.htm)

</comment><comment><USER17> <http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=2333>

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm tempted to see if I can cook an egg inside its shell in 2 to 3 days time by placing my phone next to it. It's not 3G though.

</comment><comment><USER19> Two "science" articles from the New York Times on the front page, from the same user, at the same time... oh dear.

</comment><comment><USER20> A first for me: the exact same post in 2 different threads.

This makes 2 NYT science articles in the HN Top Ten, one about cell phones and one about red wine, both guilty of the same common mistake in lay "science" news. So let's get this right, once and for all:

       CORRELATION != CAUSATION

Great. Now we'll have a steady dose of "cellphones are bad" and "red wine is good" from the mainstream pseudo news aftermarket for the next 3 days.

Thanks, New York Times...

"All the Science News That's Fit to Misprint"</comment>


WordPress 5.0 changes everything, both for users and developers - <AUTHOR> https://kinsta.com/blog/wordpress-5-0/ <comment><USER2> Well not quite everything. I see a new post editor but what about the underlying WordPress? I know Magento 2 isn't the bastion of modern web development but that was a definite "changes everything" moment.

<comment><USER3> It breaks most custom UI functionality that people used to implement features with the old editor -- like custom meta boxes. It's a pretty rough for people with sites already in place for a while.</comment></comment>


Load distribution on a cluster - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
A computer cluster is composed of nodes that execute jobs on files stored in that node (data locality optimization). Certain files have more jobs assigned to them than others.
Let's say we have: - file A with load X - file B with load X - file C with load 2X - two nodes in the cluster
So the best distribution is: file A and file B in one node and file C in the other node.
How can I distribute the files in the nodes? Does a greedy algorithm solve my problem? <comment><USER2> I think maybe you are looking for hadoop or ore map reduce based system? Possibly i misunderstood your question.

<comment><AUTHOR> A job could be a map/reduce operation.

In this case, my question would be:

How does a map/reduce system redistribute the chunks to balance the load if some chunks are more accessed than others?</comment></comment>


Lying with pictures: Smartphone manufacturer share by OS - <AUTHOR> http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/2749982.html

<comment><USER2> Can anyone explain the advantage of the original graphic over a nicely captioned _table_ of data?

Mind you, this is a good statistics lesson. My teenage students might get quite interested in a 'discussion' of the relative merits of various kinds of phone, before representing the data and then comparing it to UK.

        US Mobile phone market share by OS and maker

        Android      51%
           Samsung   17%
           HTC       14%
           Motorola  11%
           Other      9%
       iOS (Apple)   34%
       Blackberry     9%
       Windows Mobile 3%
           HTC        2.9%
           Palm       0.1%
           Other      0.2%
       Windows 7      1.3%
           HTC        0.5%
           Samsung    0.5%
           Nokia      0.3%
       Symbian        0.9%
       WebOS          0.6%

Above needs a clearer indication that the OS percentages are totals, and then split by manufacturer. I might try a two entry table so you could get market share by manufacturer or by OS, but then quite a few are single OS manufacturers.

I find the rounding of the larger market shares to nearest percent a bit worrying given that Palm is being listed as a discrete total. The 'rounding error' on Apple's % could be bigger than HTC/Windows 7 for instance

<comment><USER3> In Europe, set theory is taught early on. In the US where it is not, the average person seems challenged to quickly visualize the relative significance of sets and subsets of numbers from a table.

In any case, I think the correctly drawn rectangular chart conveys the significance in a single holistic glance, while the table above requires quite a few "memory registers" for comparing the sets and their parts.

<comment><USER2> Alas, set theory and the Venn diagram approach has been off the UK syllabus for some time as well as in the US.

I take your point about the correctly drawn/direct proportion version of the graphic being more quickly assimilated. I just think that with such a 'dynamic range' of data (0.1% compared with 0.2% in one category compared with 17% vs 14% in another) any kind of graphic will require very high resolution to convey the overall picture. I suspect that may have been the reason for the non-proportionality in the original Nielsen graphic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The original person who noticed this was a writer from 9to5mac and he made his own more accurate graphic a few days before this post was written. [http://9to5mac.com/2012/07/13/nielsen-needs-to-work-on- their...](http://9to5mac.com/2012/07/13/nielsen-needs-to-work-on-their- graphics/)

<comment><USER5> and I was having a hard time telling what % HTC for WinPhone 7 had in the OP.

Again, this version might be proportionally more accurate, but it drastically reduces the amount of information. Nielsen's is the best so far, by far.

<comment><USER6> Hardly! The point of the graph is to show _at a glance_ who has the most market share. Neilsen's graph doesn't do that at all.

If the problem is not showing all the information, then find a totally different type of graph. Or put them into multiple graphs, one showing the 4 biggest players, then an "other" segment. Then show another graph of the "Other" segment and show the proportions in that graph.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. The "manufacturer" dimension given that 4 of the 7 OS's only have a single manufacture. Pull out the manufacturer data, size the blocks properly and you have a very informative chart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe they hired whoever does the Fox News info graphics.

[http://mediamatters.org/blog/2011/12/12/today-in- dishonest-f...](http://mediamatters.org/blog/2011/12/12/today-in-dishonest- fox-news-charts/185162)

</comment><comment><USER9> That is incredible -- I'm pretty sure a professional statistical research organisation appreciates power of manipulation of humans through visual effect.

If they pull the line that it was a mistake on the artistic front to get the text to fit into the boxes, I'll file that under criminal neglect.

</comment><comment><USER10> This looks suspiciously like logarithmic scaling which, as XKCD readers will attest, is a pretty typical technique for representing statistics which have differences measured in orders-of-magnitude. I'm not sure what all the panic on here is for, it's not as if Nielson _only_ bumped Nokia, RIM and Microsoft's column widths.

<comment><USER11> Why use a logarithmic scaling for an area chart? Given the data it's presenting, a logarithmic chart is completely inappropriate. If I take the rectangle of "HTC / Android" and add it to the rectangle of "HTC / Windows", what do I get?

<comment><USER12> If it was proportional you wouldn't be able to read the windows label in the first place. I like this setup. Works as well here as it does in disk manager, the first example I can think of commonly visiting with log scaled area.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Apologies for the fact that the legend on the second photo isn't as legible as it could be. My fault for resizing it to the same size as the original Nielsen image for easy comparison.

I've now updated it so that you can click through to a larger version of the image.

Also, since Livejournal seems to be having a go-slow, here's a link to the two images:

<http://i207.photobucket.com/albums/bb317/AndrewDucker/12.png>

<http://www.richardclegg.org/graphics/phoneshare.png>

<http://www.richardclegg.org/graphics/phoneshare.pdf> (less jaggy)

And here is 9to5Mac with an even better one:

[http://9to5mac.com/2012/07/13/nielsen-needs-to-work-on- their...](http://9to5mac.com/2012/07/13/nielsen-needs-to-work-on-their- graphics/)

<comment><USER6> Yow! Can you do something about those fonts? So many jaggies... can barely read them :(

 _Update:_ any chance you could get _two_ graphs made up? The first only showing the biggest six players, and an "Other" that is the rest of the market share, and then another which then takes the "Other" results and plots the market share again in a totally seperate graph?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I also found the inaccuracy of the chart awful and looked into producing a correctly scaled version:

<http://i.imgur.com/8wgAk.png>

The main problem was being able to still display readable text, which should lead to using another way of visualising the data instead of leading to using an incorrect graphic.

I also looked into using a stacked bar chart to display the information, more information (and code for generating plot, though I didn't put too much time into making it look pretty) here: [http://www.actuarially.co.uk/post/27156208823/smartphone- ope...](http://www.actuarially.co.uk/post/27156208823/smartphone-operating- system-share-mosaic-plot)

</comment><comment><USER14> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. - Hanlon's razor

<comment><USER15> Stupidity is the ultimate malice.

<comment><USER16> Such a cop out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I would suggest that they are using the wrong type of diagram to represent the data that they have. Clearly its messed up because of labelling. If the data is such that labelling causes misrepresentation, it has to be the wrong diagram.

The whole point of these diagrams is that one can look at it and immediately get a feel for the proportions dictated by the data. If is look like a third, it should be a third. If you have to change that, then its the wrong diagram. Or a deliberate attempt to misrepresent.

I'm betting that some one wanted to use the new funky type of diagram because its new and funky, instead of an appropriate one.

</comment><comment><USER18> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlons_razor>

</comment><comment><USER19> Quite staggering when the proportions are corrected in the diagram.

</comment><comment><USER20> I found it odd that there were no comments on the original Nielsen blog post — <http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/?p=32494> — so I left one politely pointing out the inaccuracies. It's being held in moderation. I doubt it'll ever see the light.

<comment><USER20> 24 hours later, and I think it's pretty clear that Nielsen aren't accepting any comments on that article.

<comment><USER20> To my surprise, Nielsen have (after a delay) published all comments AND fixed the graphic.

> Update 7/16: The original graphic in this post included a chart depicting > U.S. smartphone manufacturer share which did not scale proportionately. > While all data points in the original post and graphic remain accurate, the > post has since been updated with a correctly scaled image.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is just generally a horrible way to make a chart that is intended to communicate relative size - it's worse than a pie chart because visually it's much harder to compare sizes of horizontal and vertical rectangles.

To compound that by appearing to have proportional sizes, but being completely wrong, is humorously incompetent. Reminds me of those joke maps showing NYC as dominating the US.

<comment><USER3> > _it's worse than a pie chart because visually it's much harder to compare > sizes of horizontal and vertical rectangles_

Research I've seen suggests the exact opposite -- that people are great at estimating area of rectangles, and terrible at estimating area of circular or triangular shapes. They know which circle is bigger, but don't have any idea by _how much_ bigger.

That said, pie chart slices work for simple data not because of _area_ , but because all you have to compare is the simple length of the circumference segments. That's a single dimension, and easy to compare.

See "Pizzas: or Square? Psychophysical Biases in Area Comparisons", [http://groups.haas.berkeley.edu/marketing/PAPERS/PRIYA/p5.pd...](http://groups.haas.berkeley.edu/marketing/PAPERS/PRIYA/p5.pdf) for how people lean on a single dimension for size or area comparisons.

Unfortunately, as this cell phone OS chart is trying to support comparison of multiple sets and subsets, circumference segments alone are inadequate to convey the relative sizes of the sets.

The more complex the information, the more the usefulness of the nested rectangles versus pie chart slices becomes clear. Imagine for example a visual representation of drive space usage by directory and subdirectory.

Here is a drive space chart using nested rectangles:

[http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/ScreenShots/1_0-Folde...](http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/ScreenShots/1_0-FoldersBujumbura.png)

For comparison, here is an attempt do do the same using pie charts:

<http://www.daisydiskapp.com/img/d4.png>

In fact, if you use both apps, you'll see DaisyDisk is not able to give you the "grand perspective" in a single view, it requires clicking to zoom in on a slice it then expands to a full pie to drill down.

<comment><USER22> If you're interested in comparing the various market shares, a simple bar chart is much easier to understand, just look at which one is taller.

With these rectangle/tree map things, I never know what to think: well this one is wider, but this other one is taller; you have to do multiplication just to compare 2 market shares.

<comment><USER3> This diagram is a collection of bar charts. One bar chart running horizontally, showing OS, the other bar chart(s) vertical, showing manufacturers within an OS. It could be disassembled, certainly, but then doesn't as readily show the sets and subsets of who has how much relative share of the whole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This story used to be called 'Why is Nielsen misrepresenting smartphone market share?' I thought that was a brilliant headline, and it made me jump into the conversation here. I doubt the new title, 'Lying with pictures: Smartphone manufacturer share by OS', would have caught my eye.

Why do the titles on HN keep getting neutered?

<comment><USER23> Headline cleverness is a zero sum game. I'd rather have drier titles instead of a psychological hacking competition, and scan for content quality (as loosely indicated by upvotes) and subject relevancy.

<comment><USER20> Hm, one of us doesn't have a good grasp of what 'zero-sum game' means. In truth, it may be me, because you lost me there.

I wasn't praising the headline because it was 'clever' though. I think the question it raised highlighted a bigger issue that still hasn't really been examined. People are focusing on the importance (or not) of accurate charts. I'm more interested in understanding why a company that exists to provide a 'complete understanding of what consumers watch and buy' is misrepresenting data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why? Because if you make them perfectly proportional, the labels are hard to read. ;-)

For example, try actually making sense out of the second diagram on that site. It's far harder to read than the first. You can actually only make sense of it by cross-referencing with the first diagram.

<comment><USER25> So now its misleading...but thats OK because at least one can read it?!?

What kind of logic is that?

<comment><USER24> All kinds of graphs are misleading if we expect them to be visually perfect. If you look at <http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/fb> for example, their graph goes from about 30 to about 31, so if you read it the same way you might think Facebook stock has been almost to 0 a bunch....

The question IMO is not whether it is visually misleading but whether it conveys information in a usable form, and whether the information it conveys in that form is misleading, and I don't see it.

If we adopt a visually perfect line doesn't that mean all graphs must be linear (no plotting on non-linear scales, even though this is useful in some contexts), start with an origin of (0,0) and so forth? What percentage of graphs do you see that obey these rules?

<comment><USER26> One-0eyed person here. Let me help you out.

The Nielsen graph clearly represents 51% Android as about 33%, apple's 34% as one quarter and the Blackberry als one-fifth. If you prefer readability of the labels over more-or-less-correctness of a graph which suggests it covers a full 100% and it's subdivisions you should maybe just use a table. As in Excel. A 30-31 x-scale is misleadin but showing 10% as 20% though is more than sloppy because you _do show_ the "origin". This has got nothing to do with visually perfect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> A simpler graphic:

        One in three smartphones is an iPhone.

</comment><comment> joe-mccann This is precisely why I wrote this article on why ecosystems are what's important -- not a fancy new handset. Nokia and RIM are near almost certain death in the next 18-24 months.

<http://subprint.com/blog/its-the-ecosystem,-stupid>

</comment><comment><USER28> Is there a cached version somewhere? nginx is 404'ing this page now

<comment><USER29> The entire journal seems to have disappeared. The post was originally on Dreamwidth, where you can still read it: <http://andrewducker.dreamwidth.org/2727548.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> 404\. <http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/> also returns a 404 side.

</comment><comment><USER31> It's quite astonishing that so many people here prefer readability over correctness. What is wrong with you? Readability is optional. Correctness is not.

That's obviously the wrong tradeoff. Never outright manipulate your data to make it more readable! If you can't make your data readable enough without manipulating it you just can't present your data that way. Period. Find a better way.

(I do not think there is any malice involved, though. Just pure stupidity. I mean, look at the amount of people around here arguing for readability over correctness. If they are out here, some are also working for Nielsen.)

<comment><USER32> It's a log scale. The bottom axis should use tick marks to make it is obvious. A poorly marked log scale is certainly something to fix. It's not the same as fudging the data.

[edit: If you wish to say a log scale is inherently misleading in this context ... go for it. That's different then saying the data is manipulated.]

[Edit2: The area is not meaningful. The widths are meaningful if there is a total ordering and the scale is labeled. ... I do however agree I am probably way overestimating how obvious a [log(1+cumulative percentile),log(1)] mapped to the xaxis is. Also the chart does scream compare areas, and those are strictly meaningless unless comparing within the same OS.]

<comment><USER33> Since when is a log scale used for market share? Ever seen a log scale of browser usage?

<comment><USER34> _Since when is a log scale used for market share?_

At least since the appearance of data sets that lent themselves towards such visualization. For example, how better to compare the growth of various platforms, from TRS-80 days to the iPad while the entire industry grows exponentially?

[http://www.asymco.com/2012/01/17/the-rise-and-fall-of- person...](http://www.asymco.com/2012/01/17/the-rise-and-fall-of-personal- computing/)

 _Edit: But I guess that's really market magnitude over time, not quite what you asked._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Hey Nielsen, we don't care who's paying you, windowsphone will NEVER be the third ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER5> I prefer Nielsen's version by a wide margin. You can make your graph as perfect as you want, but that doesn't make it better or more useful. After 2 minutes I still can't tell what % HTC WinPhone 7 has...</comment>


Fragments of World's Oldest Koran May Predate Muhammad - <AUTHOR> http://news.discovery.com/history/religion/fragments-of-worlds-oldest-koran-may-predate-muhammad-150901.htm <comment><USER2> Alright, this headline just seems wrong.

First, radiocarbon dating comes with error bars. The date range identified is from 570 C.E. to 632 C.E. Given that Muhammad is thought to have founded Islam in the period from 610 C.E. to 630 C.E., and that date keeping was relatively good in this period, this would seem to confirm rather than dispute the traditional accounts.

Second, the radiocarbon dating was performed on the parchment only, not the ink, as the article belatedly notes. Given the practice of ancient scribes to re-use parchment repeatedly, a rather unfortunate practice that has resulted in the loss of uncountable ancient texts, the age of the writing would be controlling, not the age of the parchment.

Third, I'm forced to draw a rather unfortunate conclusion from this information. The assertion in this article seems deliberately calculated to undermine the historicity of Islam. There is a very sad and shortsighted movement in some corners of military scholarship right now that identifies Islam itself as the enemy, often beginning with Huntington's "clash of civilizations" narrative and ending with some examples of sheer lunacy, such as the recent article by a West Point associate professor arguing that legal human rights scholars are "an Islamist fifth column."

Islam is one of the world's great religions, and like all religions it inspires everything from massive works of charity to zealotry, persecution, and bigotry. I have known many good people who drew their strength from Islam, and condemning an entire religion is a type of insanity that is directly contrary to the founding principles of the United States.

Islam is not the enemy. Those who would pervert it for their own violent ends are. We cannot lose that distinction.

<comment><USER3> > and like all religions it inspires everything from massive works of charity > to zealotry, persecution, and bigotry.

A few people try to claim that other religions don't inspire terrorist groups, but that's clearly bullshit.

Buddhism is generally seen as pacifist but there's a Buddhist army and probably 2 Buddhist terrorist groups. (And that's not including Aum Shinryko)

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

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/969_Movement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/969_Movement)

etc.

<comment><USER2> Wholeheartedly agreed. The ethnic cleansing by the Buddhist majority of the Muslim minority in Myanmar is horrifying right now.

I'm very disappointed in Aung San Suu Kyi's leadership thus far. I suppose we'll see what she does after the election.

<comment><USER4> I don't think you can blame her. She's in a very difficult position. She has to think of getting the country from under the throes of dictatorship before she can address civil rights. If she starts with civil rights, her effort will sputter and nothing will happen.

<comment><USER2> I agree that she's in an impossible position, with the Junta on one side and Buddhist extremists on the other, but her extreme popularity makes her uniquely capable of speaking up on behalf of the Rohingya.

Also, she seems to be constructing her party along an authoritarian model. I was a supporter of her while under detention, but today I just don't know. I very sincerely hope she lives up to her rhetoric once in power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reason why this story is doing circles again and trending high is because of a colossal, major screw-up, and no one picked up on it but a few readers yesterday.

The 8/31 rawstory "article" originally claimed the carbon dating range was 568 - 545. The 7/22 University of Birmingham press release that the story is loosely based on stated "568 - 645": the reporter copied the range wrong by 100 years and then researched and wrote rest of the article based on that. They've since corrected the number (after it trended on reddit), but not altered the narrative to reflect the change.

So you have an entirely speculative article based off of incorrect facts and sensationalized on that premise, and no one bothered issuing a correction notice because it's obviously sloppy, sloppy work and that'd be too much work or worse, embarrassing. And now, all the lazy regurgitation of trending material from other news outlets is repeating the message whose very first paragraph was so horribly wrong.

</comment><comment><USER6> >The Times of London reported that radiocarbon dating carried out by experts at the University of Oxford says the fragments were produced between the years 568 A.D. and 645 A.D. Muhammad is generally believed to have lived between 570 A.D. and 632 A.D. The man known to Muslims as The Prophet is thought to have founded Islam sometime after 610 A.D., with the first Muslim community established at Medina, in present-day Saudi Arabia, in 622 A.D.

When they test the document, how do they know the difference of when the document was created versus when the actual document was written on?

For example, paper could be created before the paper is actually used to write on.

<comment><USER7> > Small cautioned that the carbon dating was only done on the parchment in the > fragments, and not the actual ink

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > University of Oxford says the fragments were produced between the years 568 > A.D. and 645 A.D. Muhammad is generally believed to have lived between 570 > A.D. and 632 A.D.

Without a narrower range, it's ridiculous to say that it predates Muhammad. At _most_ it predates the first known, fully assembled Qur'an from 653CE.

(Aside: I realize this story comes from Fox News but its listing of dates as "Anno Domini" is in poor taste, given the subject matter.)

<comment><USER8> Why poor taste? As is common knowledge A.D. is an abbreviation for Anno Domini. You might as well say that calling Muhammamad 'The prophet' is in poor taste. For most people in the Western world the year zero is an arbitrary number and not understood as year of 'Our Lord' nor is Muhammad regarded as a prophet. Both are aids to communication not exegesis.

Not living in the US, the reference to Fox News is a bit lost on me. Perhaps it's equivalent to the seemingly obligatory sideswipe at the British Daily Mail on the part of some folk. Establishes their credentials, I guess.

<comment><USER7> Fox News are unashamedly biased towards Christianity.

The poor taste is because it is an article about one religion's prophet but uses a date suffix which effectively translates as "our God is Jesus". It is difficult to be academic about the subject matter if your word choice is highly partisan. This is why academics use "Common Era", aka CE.

<comment><USER9> Using CE -- either as "Common Era" or "Christian Era" \-- dating from the same origin date as A.D. (and as a synonym for A.D.) is just as much of a Christian-origin and Christian-centric system as A.D., and is several hundred years old.

The idea that it is somehow more "neutral" and appropriate for academic when compared to A.D. is a fairly recent idea that ignores the history, origin, basis, and meaning (which directly holds Christianity as the norm) of the label.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is highly unlikely as the parchment contains diacritical marks which were not introduced until 4 caliphs/leaders after the Prophet who had all already died/been killed. This has been mentioned by many critics as well.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics#history](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics#history)

This seems more like a means to incite Muslims rather than science.

<comment><USER11> Not JUST the diacritical marks. The writing style looks like Nashk, which came much MUCH later than the Koran.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The last paragraph says:

        Small cautioned that the carbon dating was only done
        on the parchment in the fragments, and not the actual
        ink, but added "If the dates apply to the parchment
        and the ink, and the dates across the entire range
        apply, then the Koran — or at least portions of it
        — predates Mohammed, and moves back the years that
        an Arabic literary culture is in place well into
        the 500s."

Nothing to report yet then?

</comment><comment><USER13> So if the parchment's carbon dating window contains the _known_ date in reality, doesn't it make more sense to throw away the _low_ end of the window?

(Unless of course, you just want to undermine the religion.)

<comment><USER14> You're right. If the range didn't overlap _at all_ , that might be _something_. It's hard to believe that professional researchers would be this obnoxious, so I somewhat suspect that Discovery has the figures wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> While I would actually like this to be true (just to see how it would affect Muslim beliefs), I don't think it is. But what surprises me more than anything else is how a legitimate historian can come to the conclusion that this finding changes in any way what we know already, especially since the same person admits that the radiocarbon dating only applies to the ink and not the parchment.

The quotes from Tom Small are unremarkable considering his previous publications and statements about Islam.

</comment><comment><USER16> The likelihood that the entire Koran was written from scratch after the birth (and during the life) of Muhammad is pretty slim. The Hebrew Bible was canonized* after the Babylonian exile and there have been copies found containing different versions of other books. The Old Testament has additional books to the Hebrew Bibles (Maccabees) that were never canonized in the Hebrew Bible but remain an Historical Jewish cannon (The Great Revolt). There are also varied versions of the New Testament such as additional Gospels and Epistles that were not canonized at all or did not survive transition from proto-Christianity into Orthodox Christianity (Or sub sects like the Coptic and Syriac Bibles).

The original works that make up the New Testament was most likely been written in Classical Hebrew, Hellenic Hebrew and Greek (Since some canonization was conducted in as late as 300-400CE also possibly Talmudic Hebrew), there were quite a few sects during the Hellenic period of Judaism that either converged into Christianity or into Judaism so there was quite a bit of cross pollination between various religious texts that some were canonized in the New Testament, some were canonized as the external canon in Judaism and some were lost for ever.

So it would be quite surprising if the Koran was a body of work that was exclusively written during the life time of Muhammad since it's much more likely that it's been gathered from existing works and rewritten and adjusted just like the Hebrew Bible to fit the required goal during it's final canonization. It is also highly likely that adjustments would've been made after the canonization it self since variations can be found both the Hebrew Bible and the Old and New Testaments, as far as the Hebrew Bible goes with the exception of the Hebrew Bibles that is used by surviving Judaism derivatives like The Samaritans, Karaim, and Beta Israel is standardized since the 9th century (a handful more recent versions were discovered with alterations over the years but not in masses) and the New and Old Testaments were altered with each new translation pretty much upto the modern era.

On a side note, I am for one actually surprised that this work was conducted dating early Islamic artifacts and texts tend to generate quite a big shit storm.

*I refer to Canon as the agreed on final collection of works that made it into each book, minor variances such as ones regional differences between existing schools and different translations are not treated as separate canon.

<comment><USER10> That's a lot of "facts".

</comment></comment><comment> saiya-jin apologies for my simplistic agnostic point of view, but what's the big deal? that some historic records from 1400 ago may not be that super accurate? anyway from big enough distance, isn't christianity just a sect* of judaism, and islam just a sect* of christianity? they share most prophets, events etc. and god should also be roughly same guy up there somewhere. __

* by sect i mean forking given official doctrine at that time by claiming that all before didn 't get it right but you did, god showed it to you specifically etc. just like gazillion variations of chtristianity forked from original catholicism (well, I suspect that even catholicism is now are quite a bit different religion from the original one in early AD centuries).

 __something tells me I just insulted half of this planet, but cannot help it - from rational point of view, what holy books contain are just some old stories, not more or less interesting then say Myths and legends of ancient greece, or Aesop 's fables. now imagine somebody would base their whole life around those, feeling he is right and all others got it wrong. funny, no? no... From purely rational point of view, I fail to see any added value of religions in these times. There are many irrational - emotional aspects where they work, but I just cannot turn off my rational critical part of me that asks questions and doubts anything not provable by experiment, repeatedly. And the Ultimate truth, I mean THE truth, should be able to stand any test of logic with flying flags and should be as solid now as 1500/2000/3000 years ago.

my 2 lousy cents

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm very interested in how research into this will develop, but I'm also concerned about zealots going out of their way to slow down any such research. If this is true, it could be a major turning point for many of the Abrahamic religions, not just Islam.

Hopefully this encourages more skepticism than aggressive idealism.

<comment><USER10> Do you think Muslims will trust a group that is to them a bunch of random British researchers that just happened to come across an old piece of parchment with Arabic writing just lying around in a British university? Also this is coming from a country that to them seems biased against them. That my friend is just plain crazy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why not date some of the ink?

<comment><USER19> I seem to remember reading they re-used paper a lot back then, scraping off old ink. Paper could've been much older than the author.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why the hell it is on front page of all IT news sites?

<comment><USER3> There's a bunch of information hidden away in University libraries.

These things get rediscovered every now and again.

Isn't it exciting, interesting, that there's a bunch of knowledge to be gained from stuff we already have?

Isn't "finding out about this stuff" relevant to hackers?

A bunch of Victorian authors were recently de-anonimised when we found notes by Charles Dickens. [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/charles- dicke...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/charles-dickens- notes-solve-the-mystery-of-unidentified-victorian-authors-10384128.html)

Here's an HN discussion about the possibility of dinosaur feathers being discovered in amber [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10145685](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10145685)

And here's how Al Jazeera reported the discovery of this Quran

[http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/07/world-oldest-quran- man...](http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/07/world-oldest-quran-manuscripts- uk-150722110034399.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > 568 A.D. … 645 A.D. … 570 A.D. and 632 A.D. … 610 A.D. … 622 A.D.

It's 'A.D. _year_ ,' not ' _year_ A.D.'! Sheesh.

<comment><USER2> When discussing history, especially Islamic history, it would be better to use _year_ C.E.

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

<comment><USER22> But CE's still just the same numbering system as AD. Much better to use AUC[0].

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

<comment><USER2> Well, really we should use the World Calendar, as specified by the League of Nations, or the Hijri since we're discussing Islam, or good 'ol ISO 8601 as this is Hacker News.

Heh, yeah, it all does become a little silly.

The important thing is communication. Using Christian dates is needlessly upsetting when discussing world religions. Upsetting people disrupts communication, so I avoid it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are there any famous non-tech people that use Linux on a regular basis? - <AUTHOR> CEOs, CTOs, entrepreneurs, politicians etc.  I'm looking for examples for a class I'm giving. <comment><USER2> Easy, every one of them with an Android phone :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Stephen Fry [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Fry#Computing_and_soft...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Fry#Computing_and_software_freedom)

</comment><comment><USER4> Author Neal Stephenson, he writes about this in "In the beginning there was the command line".

<comment><USER5> He switched to OS X when it came out. I would not be surprised if he _also_ has Linux machines or VMs though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_adopters](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_adopters) might be relevant.

</comment><comment><USER7> > CEOs, CTOs, entrepreneurs

Linux is pretty common in the startup world. But if your CEO is running around telling everyone what OS he uses instead of sealing deals you might want to rethink those stock options.

<comment><USER8> If the CEO is just a glorified salesperson, you definitely want to rethink those stock options.

      *cough* Adam Neumann *cough*

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You probably mean the Android operating system. Every celebrity out there already uses linux on their android phones. PSA: the linux kernel is just one tiny irrelevant component of an android system. It's google's system level utilities and user applications that make android a complete operating system.

</comment><comment><USER10> Probably not the kind of famous you're looking for, but there was this article [1] about an author who cut Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple from her life who of course would have to use Linux because no Microsoft or Apple allowed.

1: [https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-the-big-five-tech-giants-from- my-l...](https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-the-big-five-tech-giants-from-my-life-it- was-hel-1831304194)

</comment><comment><USER11> Linux There are 132 interviews in this category.

[https://usesthis.com/categories/linux/](https://usesthis.com/categories/linux/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Wil Wheaton.

<comment><USER13> Non-tech. He was an ensign on a warp-speed spaceship!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> You mean the Linux kernel? Or GNU/Linux?</comment>


What's really happening with Bitcoin and a few other cryptos - <AUTHOR> https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/ax.asp it roots from the space of investment banking and traditional trading. Source: me, hedge fund algo guy and with family in the "masters of the universe" industry. The banks are a side-show. <comment><USER2> Clickable [https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/ax.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/ax.asp)</comment>


Our gods are assholes - <AUTHOR> http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/08/our-gods-are-assholes.html <comment><USER2> Strong words coming from a man who is currently parading around British TV flogging cheap car insurance alongside an incredibly creepy puppet likeness of himself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Had to look it up. Really quite creepy and annoying.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhBnEV3ElvY>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cocaine is a hell of a drug.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sounds like someone stoned and rambling. Get off my lawn.

</comment><comment><USER5> I notice no one is attacking what he said, just the man.

<comment><USER6> What is he saying? This reads like the ramblings of a mad man, of a recording of a therapy session in a mental institution. There is nothing to attack or praise because it's empty rhetoric, although in the mind of the author undoubtedly profound and insightful. I don't know the website this is on, but I don't see why this is a 'letter of note' - at best it's a 'letter by someone somewhat famous'. That's one way to fill a website I guess.

<comment><USER7> 'That's one way to fill a website I guess'.

Although I can understand your not enjoying this particular letter or agreeing with its inclusion on a blog named Letters of Note, to hear you then use that as a stick with which to beat my entire website - a website you admittedly know nothing about - does smart a little. I'd suggest maybe having a poke around; you may come to the conclusion that today's letter simply wasn't to your liking and that, actually, the website does have some value.

<comment><USER6> To be able to make an accurate assessment of your website, and proclaim my expertise on it as such, I should look around more than base my conclusion on one post, that much is true. That said when one makes decisions, it's usually based on incomplete information; and the lower the stakes, the faster the decision. When reading this letter I only had the one in front of me to decide if I was going to read any of the others, to see if those were better, and considering the very low value of the one I saw I didn't see it as good use of my time (or more accurate, the most suitable thing to waste my time on...) to browse other letters.

I guess the snide remark didn't contribute anything to the point of my original post, and that that post would've been off just as well without it. Well such is the nature of a forum - I would like it too if I had hours and hours to hoohah over each sentence I write and get to compile them into nice internally consistent and rhetorically perfect masterpieces. Alas I'm just a programmer posting in between compilation and simulation runs, so the style is much more conversational, and conclusions are often more haphazard than any that would stand up to rigorous scientific standards.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Introducing Runcible the round smart phone - <AUTHOR> http://coolhunting.com/tech/monohm-runcible-device

<comment><USER2> I like.</comment>


PLATO (computer system) - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_system

<comment><USER2> If you're interested in PLATO, stay tuned. I have been working for many years on a book that tells the story of the PLATO system. It's what I am working on full-time at the moment, 7 days a week.

Three years ago I put on a 2-day conference at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the creation of the PLATO system. Videos of all the sessions are available on YouTube at YouTube.com/platohistory.

If you want to know more about the book and what it covers, go to [http://friendlyorangeglow.com](http://friendlyorangeglow.com)

<comment><USER3> Yes, I will buy your book. I hope it is a better replacement for actually participating in PLATO or browsing the Cyber1 archive. Perhaps not the first, but hindsight is sometimes better than being there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Georgia Tech had a lab of CDC 721 terminals and used PLATO for at least one class. It always felt weirdly futuristic (or Hollywood fake) for a seemingly "dumb" terminal to switch into a graphical touchscreen mode. I wish we'd had some of the more fun stuff running on them, but they were already being overtaken by X-Windows (Sun 3s and Macs with A/UX), Macs, and PCs with a mix of DOS and early Windows.

<comment><USER5> I remember using PLATO at tech, but can't remember what class it was for. Chemistry maybe? Or maybe, strangely, Intro To Psych. The terminals I remember were in the Lyman Hall building, which was also the freshman chemistry lecture/lab building at the time.

<comment><USER6> I never saw this before. I used to like walking past the old data center in the Rich Building at Georgia Tech. It was hard to imagine what it was like in its hay day with punch cards and all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I coded on Plato in the mid 80's ("Tudor" language). I was paid minimum wage (about $3.25 per hour), and had various tasks maintaining courseware. I was brianb@udel

What everyone says is true: with the forms of chat and email that were prevalent, and things like the friday afternoon dogfights, the future of massively connected computing became "obvious". Based on what I saw then, I worked in computer networking after graduating from college, moved to silicon valley, and recently founded my own company building high speed distributed databases.

I bought my first computer over Plato: I found a guy in Illinois who had an older Xerox CP/M machine, we agreed to the price over email, I sent him the check and he sent me the machine. This would have been about '83.

</comment><comment><USER8> An aside on UI: am I the only one who still romanticizes about monochrome yellow/orange/light-blue-green on black line-art interfaces? That second PLATO terminal on the article reminded me of that (kind of like this LCARS screen: [http://lcars.org.uk/lcars_files/LCARS%20MSD_Enterprise%20B.g...](http://lcars.org.uk/lcars_files/LCARS%20MSD_Enterprise%20B.gif) edit: or this: [http://www.lcarscom.net/all_mini_avis.gif](http://www.lcarscom.net/all_mini_avis.gif))

When I'm on Wikipedia or some tutorial site, I still sometimes imagine myself looking at the same content in a futuristic monochrome view.

</comment><comment><USER9> You can try out the PLATO system today by getting a signon on [http://cyber1.org/](http://cyber1.org/)

Plasma display technology was invented there.

</comment><comment><USER10> I remember playing on the PLATO system a few times as a single-digit-year-old. My parents were grad students at UIUC.

There was a game called ANTWAR. You would be shown an army of enemy ants in a rectangle in a certain number of rows and columms. The trick was to multiply the rows and columns and choose the size your army to be exactly one more ant in number.

They don't let kids hang out in datacenters anymore. But kids have more interesting games at home anyway.

</comment><comment><USER11> As a South African, I'm fascinated to learn that during the 1980s, PLATO was deploying for tertiary-school education, even in discriminated-against (e.g. black, 'coloured') colleges.

It's bizarre to think that in the dying days of apartheid there was already some faction of the government seduced by the promise of third-world techno- utopianism.

</comment><comment><USER12> Freshman year at UofI I enrolled in a Philosophy course, 108 I think. Mostly liberal arts majors, another engineer and I were in the same study session. The philosophy graduate student TA gets us together for our first study session of the year and walks us through the syllabus.

TA: This semester, we'll be talking about Aristotle, Descartes and Plato. Engineer: We'll we be taking our tests on PLATO? TA: Yes, we will have two midterms and a final and we will cover Plato. Engineer: No, I mean will we be taking all our tests on the PLATO system. TA: I don't know what you mean, but yes, you will be tested on Plato. Engineer: No, I mean. Me: The TA is talking about the philosopher Plato while Mr. Engineer is talking about an online testing computer called PLATO. Rest of class, befuddled, me rolling my eyes.

</comment><comment><USER13> > games such as Avatar and Empire (a star-trek like game), which had both > accumulated more than 1.0 million contact hours on the original PLATO system > at UIUC

I hated these dudes. Play on your own time, I gotta do another CircuitTutor unit.

</comment><comment><USER14>
      CDC President William Norris planned to make PLATO a force in the
      computer world, but found marketing the system was not as easy as
      hoped. PLATO nevertheless built a strong following in certain markets, and
      the last production PLATO system did not shut down until 2006,
      *coincidentally* just a month after Norris died.

Emphasis mine. Is that some bitterness I detect? I guess it's a mark in Wikipedia's favor that things like that stand out, but still...

</comment><comment><USER15> In 1980 there was a PLATO installation at our local University (UWC) in South Africa when I was in high school.

It was used by first year students for some tut work and by high school students from the surrounding area for maths courseware.

It was an interesting experiment and novelty but I don't think it fundamentally changed how the varsity did or approached it's teaching.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wouldn't this be the real precursor to the internet instead of the often-hyped arpanet? Is TCP/IP really what makes the internet the internet, or sharing ideas and collaborating with abstractions on an electronic network in general?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is actually why I posted this. It seems PLATO has never gotten its due for the truly revolutionary concepts it introduced. I remember - in the early eighties - playing networked games and participating in tournaments, sending "personal notes" which were emails, participating in discussion forums with people from universities all over the world, taking lessons to augment my schoolwork...There was even instant messaging. All from a PLATO terminal which was made out of wood and metal and connected to the university mainframes at 1200baud.

<comment><USER16> I dunno about that. I walk by a nice little wall display about it whenever I'm at Siebel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> posting wikipedia articles isn't news

<comment><USER18> Hacker News is only 'news' in the Usenet news sense of the term.</comment></comment>


Unix makes Computer Science easy - <AUTHOR> http://glomek.blogspot.com/2007/12/unix-makes-computer-science-easy.html

<comment><USER2> I've actually thought for quite some time that programing might be taught best via shell scripting.

By starting off by learning shell, you'd get all the basics like iterators, functions, variables, etc... You can then extend the newbies knowledge with stuff like regular expressions, pipes (parameter passing) etc.. At the same time, however, you'd be teaching a new programmer an incredibly useful set of tools that they can build on.

It took me 3 semesters of Java before I could code non-trivial programs. In one semester of Unix shell scripting, I wrote a flat file database with a decent user interface. I learned more about programming in that one semester than I did in 3 semesters of Java.

<comment><USER3> Leave it to a Java programmer to extol the virtues of shell scripting.

Java's really that bad, is it?

<comment><USER2> :)

I haven't willingly used Java since those classes, however.

I'm just saying that for the basic stuff, you can actually learn quite a bit just by learning how to write shell scripts. And the learning curve is quite a bit shorter than in Java before you can get something remotely useful done.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is Demand for Developers Exploding? - <AUTHOR> At my current job, we've been trying to fill a couple of positions for about 6 months. We're trying to get mid/senior level people. We've interviewed a few entry level types, but only a couple of suitable candidates. We have one coming on board next week. So 6 months to find a candidate isn't too bad really.  It definitely feels like the people with jobs aren't looking.
Also, I've been interviewing around since December, and every company I've talked to, and several previous companies I've worked at, are all trying to hire mid to senior developers (java mostly, a former manager is trying to fill several .net positions).  I"m getting hit up constantly on linkedin by recruiters.  Through contacts, I've heard of no less 150 java/.net positions coming up, and this is a medium sized mid western city.
So, is anyone else seeing this? This is a demand for developers I've never seen before.  And salaries are going up accordingly. I do know that some of these companies aren't competitive on pay.  One offer I got recently, I was told they had to get sign off on my proposed salary from a senior exec and still low balled it.  Just seems like a weird time in the job market. <comment><USER2> I can tell you that developer salaries are growing. I have tried telling my senior management that the average senior developer salary in Boston will go from 120k in 2014 to 140k by 2017. I don't think that 16% can be called "exploding", since it's just 5% y-o-y, but it's definitely growing faster than the rest of the economy, and one of the few jobs where "real income" is growing.

Finally, my observation is that the biotech boom in Boston has created unique housing pressure in Boston, particular South Boston, Cambridge and the North End (East Boston is the only affordable place). So many biotech IPOs in the area have created newfound millionaires over night, and helped support a housing boom in the area. Combine this with DraftKings, Wayfair, Buildium, Amazon acquiring Kiva Systems, Samsung acquiring LoopPay, and other major tech companies coming into the area over the last 5 years, and you suddenly have markets where there is huge competition for labor but really expensive housing. This necessarily entails salary hikes or relocation. Relocation requires the board to negotiate with other states to relocate talent, which is always treacheous for high end white collar jobs.

If you want metrics to validate your assumptions, I recommend using CareerBuilder rather than these newer places like Hired.com. CareerBuilder has great analytics tools which show you where your salary offerings rank competitively.

Also, I can say that I don't think our problem is really salary, so much as the fact that so many developers lack adequate training in _engineering_, which entails solving real problems related to total cost of ownership, stability/uptime, throughput, etc. If you work for a _product company_, it is very hard finding these kinds of engineers, for two reasons: (1) they tend to become specialists or architects, but your replacement reqs are generalist roles like full-stack developers (2) 60% of all developers are contractors, and never acquire sufficient depth to solve real hard engineering problems.

End note: I work for erecruit, enterprise staffing software. I have tons of data about the market.

</comment><comment><USER3> The EU expects a huge shortage of developers in Europe in the nearby future [0]. And we already have a shortage currently. But perhaps there's just a shortage of cheap developers.

Just 2 weeks ago Ordina was looking for a mobile dev for certain position at a bank, so I got a call. I said the price they asked wasn't agreeable for me so I could not accept. Now, 2 weeks later they do want to contact me. I'm tempted now to raise my hourly rate for this particular opportunity.

\---

[0]: [http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240225794/Lack-of- coding...](http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240225794/Lack-of-coding- skills-may-lead-to-severe-shortage-of-ICT-pros-in-Europe-by-2020-warns-EC)</comment>


Why I'm sick to death of being a "woman in tech" - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@nikkidurkin99/why-im-sick-to-death-of-being-a-woman-in-tech-5a38e8b77e59?source=latest&

<comment><USER2> I guess it depends: One of the smartest "women in tech" I ever met told me that she loved being the only woman on our team. Why? because men (consistently) only cared about the results, not pecking order. Needless to say we loved her back: it is hard not to love people like her who are brilliant and meet us where we were.

<comment><USER3> That qualifier hurts, and you probably don't even notice how you're using it. You say she's one of the smartest women you know in tech, not one of the smartest people you know in tech. Does that mean you don't think she's comparable to men in tech who are better than mediocre?

That's one of the thousand papercuts that gradually bleed off so many women's will to pursue this career.

<comment><USER2> Late but for you or anyone who reads this later: how did you miss that I wrote "women in tech" in quotes? Furthermore, if you read a little closer do you notice another subtlety: she isn't the only one.

You seem to look for a reason to get offended. That isn't a good strategy if you are going to work with some of us. Otherwise we're quite ok and happily work with anybody as long as they stay technical instead of going off like you did above. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> >The reason my startup failed was a combination of poor decisions on my behalf...

I can't tell if that's just an error of language or not. I'm guessing from the rest of the article that she meant to say her decisions and just phrased it awkwardly.</comment>


Ask HN: Why do people not like news personalization? - <AUTHOR>

Like many I am a bit of an information addict with my main sources being rss, twitter & hackernews/reddit. It takes a lot of work to extract the decent information from all of these sources (probably about 10-15% of the information I receive is any good). The obvious solution to this problem seems to be applying a learning algorithm to create a personalized feed of news items. However I know there have been a few sites which have done this in the past with little success. Can anyone suggest any reasons why they have failed? Is it the implementations or that news personalization just doesn't work? <comment><USER2> Personally, I mostly dislike news personalization. For instance, I always log out of reddit unless I'm actually going to post something or add a comment, because of the personalization issue. My selection of techy-related aggregators like reddit and HN are enough personalization for me.

The problem for me with personalization is that it's annoying to always see the same set of things. For instance, I'm mostly a Python programmer. But I've found that if, for instance, I'm subscribed to the Python reddit, I get too much Python-related content in my news feed. That's not really my focus -- I'm really a programmer first, and a Python programmer second. I'd rather see interesting programming things -- regardless of the language or focus -- than I would in seeing Python-related content.

As anohter example, I've found the same is true with political stuff, which I've mostly tried to handle using RSS feeds. I can subscribe to political content that I'm interested in, but then I find that I just end up reading the same things and viewpoints over and over again. I'd rather read political content that's interesting and well written -- regardless of its political stance -- than I would read political content related to some sort of viewpoint or interest. That's the value of a "logged out" reddit/hacker news, or the front page of a newspaper; I'll see the most important things first, and then do my own seletion of whether or not I want to read the stuff contained therein.

One interesting sidenote is that reddit basically dropped the personalization filter thing a long time ago. You may recall that they used to have a "recommended" articles tab, which was supposed to learn about what you were interested in based on your voting history, and then by clicking on the tab you'd see the top articles that it thought were relevant to you. AFAICT this feature no longer exists, and now they just have the sub-reddits system where you get a simple mix of content from subreddits you're subscribed to. I'm not sure exactly why they dropped that (it never worked very well), but that might be something to ponder a bit.

<comment><USER3> It seems to me that what is really going on here is that the personalization is lousy. The point of personalization, one hopes, is to show you what you want to see. But you say the personalized version does not do that. That being the case, the personalization has completely failed. Which might answer the OP's question about why people don't like personalized feeds.

On the other hand, it could be that you are upvoting not things you want to see, but things you agree with. Tragically, many people do. In that case, it's your own fault (or the fault of anyone who does such upvoting, and dislikes the results); the personalization algorithm is doing it's best, but it's getting bad data. And since upvoting based on agreement is so common, this also might answer the OP's question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some guesses:

One reason might be that the existing range of news portals is good enough for most people to get approximately personalized content. People can find one or more news outlets, aggregators, or blogs that more or less reflect their interests, whether it's HN, Reddit/Subreddits, Slashdot, CNN, Fox News, DailyKos, Lambda the Ultimate, or whatever, and they just read those, supplemented with links passed on from their friends via Twitter/Facebook/etc. So your market is the people who can't find any combination of those that works for them, which maybe isn't a ton.

A different reason might be that Google News does personalization (via the "Recommended" box), and so already captures a decent part of the market for news personalization, at least in the newspaper-articles sense.

A third might be that it's hard to do well. To really catch on, people need to rarely get articles they don't care about, and often have this feeling of, "yes! this is _exactly_ the kind of news I want to read, and which I wouldn't have found otherwise". That's probably hard to do! The Google News recommendations don't really blow me away, for example, even though I've been using it long enough that it should have decent data by now.

</comment><comment><USER5> I liken this problem to browsing a library or bookstore vs searching its card catalog or asking for specific information. If I have a problem, I know what I want and it may not be something I've wanted before. If I want to relax and browse, I often want something different than I've wanted before.

So I think it is a hard problem, as said here, serendipity is hard to program. However, I am absolutely sure we have not yet figured out the best way to browse. Search seems pretty good, but internet browsing can easily be too time consuming and aimless.

</comment><comment><USER6> No shared context. You cannot say "Did you read the article in the NY Times about XXXX" and expect that your friend, who you know reads the NY Time (online of course) may have done so.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's not possible to can serendipity. No algorithm can make a leap like a human mind, connecting two things that a machine would see as separate. This is why I've never used any personalization. I don't want to see only what a machine "thinks" I should see.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, the best articles are always the ones which take you in a completely new direction. However I have also found that those same interesting articles are often not very popular which leads me to think social news sites have their flaws. Perhaps the solution needs to not look at what is popular/similar to what you already like but rather new concepts (not that I have any idea how to achieve that)</comment></comment>


What happens to ex-cons who go from prison to startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailydot.com/technology/last-mile-prison-coding-program/ <comment><USER2> A person doesn't have to take classes to do this. I'm an ex-con, and I am on my second startup since my release. My first one failed due to being in too- small of a geographic market for the service.

My current one is now 30 months old and is growing. We have myself and one other full-time employee and two part-time employees. It is a factory business and I am looking to build it to about 40 full-time employees.

<comment><USER3> I'd be interested to hear more about your story.</comment></comment>