Say It Is So: Baseball's Disgrace - <AUTHOR> https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/02/20/say-it-is-so-baseballs-disgrace/ <comment><USER2> One of the wildest statistics I have seen from all of the fallout of this scandal is the fact that Clayton Kershaw had thrown 51 breaking balls and got zero missed swings. [0]

I can't believe this didn't stand out sooner to analysts or if it just got glossed over. I still think hitting a round ball with a round bat is one of the hardest if not the hardest things to do in sports. And to not get a single swing and miss on a pitch that is around 70 - 80 MPH and breaking around half a foot is insane.

[0]: [https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/comments/f7w3yq/kershaw_th...](https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/comments/f7w3yq/kershaw_threw_51_breaking_ballssliders_in_game_5/)

<comment><USER3> The Astros hid behind the guise that they were outstanding at picking up "tipping" from opposing pitchers. i.e. The smallest difference in a pitcher's delivery, imperceptible to you or I, would indicate what kind of pitch was coming. Writers often talked about how Alex Cora or Carlos Beltran or Jose Altuve were just remarkable "students of the game" and would figure it out and tell the rest of the lineup who would pounce upon it.

It's kinda funny to look back on, because I remember lots of people producing videos where they would supposedly point out what the Astros were picking up on, and it never seemed very clear to me no matter how much they slowed down the footage.

Another thing to note is that there's always fun baseball stats coming out. Kershaw getting no misses on his breaking balls would just be one of several interesting tidbits talked about the next day. It wouldn't really cause suspicion, as most people would just assume it indicates Kershaw was ineffective.

For example, in the the 2017 ALCS, Astros pitcher Lance McCullers finished off the feared Yankees lineup by throwing 24 straight curveballs. This is no suggestion that Lance McCullers cheated; it's just an example that there's always odd stuff to reflect upon the next day.

<comment><USER4> Trevor Bauer has been loudly stating that the Astros' pitchers are using foreign substances on the ball to get the tremendous spin rates that they do. McCullers throwing 24 straight curveballs might in fact be suspicious.

<comment><USER5> Pitchers using stickum is pretty much an open secret that the entire league participates in [0].

[0] [https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/baseballs- st...](https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/baseballs-sticky- secrets)

<comment><USER6> I feel like the game tolerates some bending of the rules so long as the techniques were available and used in the 1920s--tar or earwax or whatever on the ball, a certain amount of incorrect calls from the umpire, and so on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player that throws a ball game, no > player that undertakes or promises to throw a ball game, no player that sits > in a conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways > and means of throwing a game are planned and discussed, and does not > promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.

I love this language, and it sticks out because it's in such stark contrast to anything a large organization would say today. It doesn't sugarcoat anything, it takes full responsibility, no double speak, no marketing euphemisms. And it says what they are going to do about it.

I think people somehow feel they are exposing themselves these days with that level of transparency, and maybe they are right. But I know that if I heard people speaking like this I would be drastically more likely to trust them and their brands. I would like to think it's still possible to communicate this way in the modern world.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think baseball is an extremely uninteresting sport. The pace of the game is very slow, as every batter is swinging for the fences, stepping out of the box, and there is usually no action for over 3 hours of "playing" time. What is the game today? On a time-basis, baseball is 99% players standing around waiting for something to occur.

Gone are the days of defensive brilliance and working players around the bases methodically with short hits, speed, and finesse. I won't miss baseball in the Olympics and I think it's rightfully falling to other much more interesting and engaging sports. The idea it is our "national pastime" is just laughable to me.

What's more, where I live, we had the Pawtucket PawSox try to extort Providence and RI for massive tax breaks and a premium parcel of downtown Providence land. Thankfully, Rhode Islanders called their bluff and let them move to Worcester. I'm glad my state acknowledged baseball is an incredibly slow-paced and yawn-inducing sport and we didn't want to pay through the nose for a stadium that hardly any of us would enjoy having.

<comment><USER9> It's funny you say that it's a negative because I think that's a positive. It's one of my favorite things to do to load up my team's games (Tampa Bay Rays fan here!) on MLB.tv and work on my side project while I watch the games. When the game is going slowly I'll pay more attention on my projects and vice versa.

But the actual game play is my least favorite part about baseball. I absolutely love the theory and statistics that goes into the front office decisions. It's this interesting mix of economics and game theory and negotiation theory. My favorite team is notoriously cash strapped (read: cheap) and I think it's fascinating watching the team wheel and deal to try to compete with teams that literally spend 2x-3x as much as they do

<comment><USER10> I want to second this. Baseball is best watched with friends or family as whatever you consider a step above "background noise." It can fill in lulls in the gathering, and when something exciting does happen it's easy to direct everyone's attention back to the game.

Growing up with baseball also plays a large part in deciding if you'll have any interest in it as an adult.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was chatting with some friends about the Astros the other day, and they pointed out something interesting.

This has caused a renewed interest in baseball. It will probably increase attendance anywhere they Astros play, because people will want to come out and root for their local team to "beat the cheaters".

It'll be interesting to see how the attendance numbers this season play out.

<comment><USER12> The old no press is bad press theory in action. It will be interesting to see what actually happens when the season starts and moves into the all-star break.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> >But Manfred also did something that may simply have been stupid, may have been craven, and may have been corrupt: extending blanket immunity to the players before launching a proper investigation

Players would refuse to testify without immunity and without player testimony it would be incredibly difficult to find the details of the cheating scheme. It also isn't even clear if MLB has the legal authority to punish players for this type of rule violation. The player's union has stated that MLB does not have that authority and MLB did not wish to fight them on it with a potential labor dispute already pending over league finances when the current collective bargaining agreement expires soon.

>Until and unless Commissioner Manfred lifts his ludicrous immunity offer and deals severely with the incriminated participating players as well as their management by banishing them all from the game, he will have thrown baseball back to where it was in 1919.

I personally think offering immunity to get players to testify and then reversing course and using that testimony to punish those players would do much more harm to baseball than this scandal.

<comment><USER14> ==I personally think offering immunity to get players to testify and then reversing course and using that testimony to punish those players would do much more harm to baseball than this scandal.==

This could very well be true. As is, the MLB has created a precedent for cheating without ever having to face penalties.

<comment><USER13> I am on board if they create a new rule that applies punishments from this point forward. There should not be an ex post facto rule that is used to justify punishments that were eliminated as a possibility through both collective bargaining and the immunity deals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Cheating to win is a universe apart from cheating to lose (or putting yourself in a position where you could be pressured to do so, like Pete Rose) when it comes to the integrity of the game. I completely support the punishments MLB/Manfred handed out and would support more. But throwing games for money (Black Sox scandal, alluded to in the article's title attributed to a child saying "Say it ain't" so to Shoeless Joe Jackson) is different than sign stealing. I suspect the managers, coaches, and front office staff will have informal punishments of being blacklisted out of the sport for life.

<comment><USER16> How does it ruin the game less than people throwing the it? It's not an earnest competition, which is the point of watching. Allowing steroids (something I am not in favor of) would ruin the game far less than breaking the premise of the game between the pitcher and batter.

Frankly I think it should be a crime to cheat—make the people have something to lose that hurts more than money.

<comment><USER17> I have zero interest in having any of my tax dollars pay to lock someone up because they cheated at baseball.

<comment><USER16> Not have I, but prisons are a separate issue. I don't think fines (or asking individuals to step down) are proportional to the level that this will ultimately destroy the sport at the national level. We already throw people in jail for public urination; why not for urinating on our national pastime?

<comment><USER17> I dont, and I cant stress this enough, give a single fuck about baseball or it status as our national pastime.

Now look, I'm not anti baseball, I'm not here to yuck your yum or say something shouldn't exist because I don't value or appreciate it. But professional baseball not existing anymore sure seems like a problem solely for the people who care about baseball to figure out, not the federal government.

<comment><USER16> > But professional baseball not existing anymore sure seems like a problem > solely for the people who care about baseball to figure out, not the federal > government.

And yet, we still arrest for public urination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm sure that we'll find all sorts of schemes like this in other sports as well in the US. Pretty obvious and easy reason why: legal sports betting is a $155B market growing at 8% annually in the US. I'd be curious to see who was making money off of the Astros.

There's way too much money chasing outcomes. Plenty of these players are vulnerable to different influence strategies.

<comment><USER19> I had a little insight into the esports gambling world at one point and it answered some questions for me about why there's so much money being thrown around there. I'm guessing (no evidence, but a strong hunch) there are a ton of shenanigans going on, as that whole side of things has a very wild-west feel yet there's a _lot_ of money moving around.

Some folks at the same place helped me figure out what Venmo's social transaction messages are useful for: illegal gambling pools. I'd been wondering why those features exist or who'd want them, then saw it used for that purpose. Suddenly made sense.

<comment><USER17> Can you explain more by what you mean about the Venmo stuff, its sounds super interesting.

Are you saying that someone out there is doing crowd sourced intelligence for increased win modeling, based on the messages people put in their venmo transactions?

Or that the default public nature of the ledger is such that people can see that the bookie (I think im using that right) is getting money from other counter parties and proves their ability to pay out in the future?

<comment><USER19> The latter. I saw an email thread go around to organize a betting pool, using venmo (with the obvious warning not to say it was for gambling in the memo) and had a huge "ah ha" moment for why that feature exists. It's perfect for ensuring collections & payouts happen correctly and no money goes missing, or "missing".

It'd be hard to crowd source for better odds on there, I'd think, since people disguise those kinds of transactions. Same as with drug purchases, which are also prohibited on Venmo so you can't mention them but are, obviously, some part of the activity on there, though unlike with betting pools Venmo's (previously, to me) weird social ledger thing isn't a killer feature for that.

Probably they could spot betting pools and put some rules in place to make it annoying enough to use the platform for that purpose that people would stop, though I don't know why they would. I'd guess illegal activity's far from a majority of their revenue, but I bet it's still significant. Probably certain transaction patterns get _really_ common on either side of major sports events.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wait, does anybody actually believe any major sport doesn't look the other way when the right team cheats assuming it gets more butts in seats? Major sports aren't about the purity of the game. They're about money - pure and simple.

If MLB could replace all of the players with robots that played a game simulated on a computer, designed to play out a storyline as a drama instead of a legitimate competition, and make more money doing it then they would in a heartbeat and not lose a wink of sleep over it.

</comment><comment><USER21> Here's a fun (semi) technical video on using machine learning for sign stealing: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmlRbfSavbI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmlRbfSavbI)

I wonder if the signs employed by Major League teams are as simple as the ones dissected above?

</comment><comment><USER22> "A perfect sports scandal for the age of Trump."

Tying anything and everything to Trump is so tiresome and has nothing to do with the article, the Astros scandal, or the actions of commissioner landis/manfred.

<comment><USER23> Not sure why you're being downvoted -- I think your comment is a perfectly reasonable statement to make.

<comment><USER22> partisanship has got to be at all time highs. My comment is likely seen as me defending trump and therefore anyone who dislikes trump just automatically downvotes it regardless of context. 2020 is awesome

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I am an Astros fan and baseball fanatic, so I have a lot to say here as do most people that fit in one or both of the above designations. I'm getting to the thread a little late so it's possible (probable) that no one will read this but I feel a bit better letting it out.

1\. We cheated and got caught. On one hand the penalties are pretty severe. Draft picks mean that in 5-8 years we may be awful again. AJ Hinch was a DAMN good manager and when the Mets hire him in a year I'm going to be sad. Jose Altuve - for whom there is no evidence that he cheated - is one of the best hitters of the last decade and may never make the HOF b/c of this. The penalties individually and collectively are not small. On the other hand, I agree that more punishment could have been handed out.

2\. MLB has done a TERRIBLE job explaining that not only was immunity essential for getting the truth but also that punishing players would wind up in a YEARS-long dispute with the Player's Association. Fans and the sport alike get all pissy that there is no official record of steriod users...well immunity wasn't offered. Can't have it both ways.

3\. MLB is also shooting itself in the foot not releasing the Red Sox report during the height of the Astros story. It is probable that the 2018 champs will ALSO be exposed as cheaters. ANd they had the MVP that year as well. I will smirk at least a little when the Astros hatred starts to abait in June just in time for the Red Sox to re-kindle the story.

3\. I have friends that work in Baseball. Of course it's speculation but 3 of them independent of each other have told me that the 3 teams that cheat the most are Houston, LAD, and Arizona. ANd all 3 conversations ended with the punchline of how little the Diamondbacks have to show for their cheating.

4\. The sanctimony in baseball is comical AND sad. No sport likes to eat it's young like baseball. The same reporters that used the 1998 home run race to their benefit now vote against steroid players getting into the HOF. Anything to protect your 2 inches in the Sunday edition, fellas. LOL

5\. Being mindful of #1, anyone that thinks the cheating is limited to Houston, Boston or just a couple teams is sniffing glue. ALL teams and players creep as close to the line as possible. Are there players that refuse to participate? ABSOLUTELY. Are there teams that play every game on the up and up? No way. There is simply too much at stake and the transfer of players and execs and coaches between teams means that the knowledge of skirting the rules isn't limited to Houston.

5b. You want examples? The team that closes the dome to induce more short fly balls. The team that lets the grass grow longer to make grounders in the infield slow down. The team that overwaters the dirt in the base-paths to slow runners. on and on and on.

6\. MLB allowing ANY current-game film in the clubhouse is so stupid as to defy words. So a batter can walk into the clubhouse and review the at-bat he completed 30 seconds ago to look at pitch sequences and locations.....that's okay? Absolutely STUPID. Suggested result: eliminate replay on anything but scoring plays. Remove replay in the clubhouse and prohibit players from leaving the dugout except for bio-breaks with an MLB escort.

7\. Finally, if anything ever drives me away from baseball it will be this: the "inside" baseball talk. Reporters and players and former players that patronize fans with things like "you wouldn't understand..." or "there is a game within the game..." A sport that allows/supports putting a fastball in a guy's ribs if he preens after a home run. A sport that says SOME version of sign stealing is fine BUT other versions are not.

<comment><USER25> Re #3, care to point to any evidence of LAD and Arizona shenanigans? I follow baseball pretty closely and I guess I haven't seen any. We can throw accusations all we want (#5, and #5b seems suspicious because doing something like closing the dome would have the same effect on the balls the home team hits too). Agreed on #6.

<comment><USER26> Different pitchers have different hit patterns — there are ground ball pitchers, etc. Excessively watering the dirt and closing the dome aren't really cheating, just standard gamesmanship.

<comment><USER24> This is what drives me nuts about baseball. Yes, you are right. That is standard gamesmanship.

AND THAT IN ITSELF IS LUDICROUS.

What other sport allows the field of play to be modified to fit one style of play or player? Can you imagine a basketball team raising the rims 2 feet so that Giannis couldn't dunk AND IT BEING ALLOWED? Or a football team growing the grass to 8" so that a team with fast wide receivers would be slowed?

To me, baseball's rich (sarcasm) history of allowing random-sized fields and wall heights and open or closed roofs and watered or unwatered infields means that the more Circus-like elements of the sport are allowable. I too like some of this "gamesmanship". But I have a hard time understanding the difference of the allowed gamesmanship (stealing signs from second) and the disallowed and disgraceful gamesmanship (using ALLOWED in-clubhouse video to determine pitch sequences).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Frankly basketball, baseball, and to some degree football are all taking on a WWF feel.

I've basically stopped watching all pro sports, I was an athlete in school, and for a long time and avid sports fan, but no more.

The rule changes in the NBA, caused me to drop the sport, the PED scandal of MLB caused me to drop MLB, and the rule changes to football are making it feel a whole lot like The NBA.

I didn't watch a single NFL game last season, and I only DVRed the NFL playoff games, and only skipped through one game, deleting the rest.

Even college sports have lost their appeal. Only one sport left and that's boxing, but the pay per view rates have caused me to stop buying those events.

I think pro spots have peaked and will continue to decline.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'll throw in some alternate viewpoints from friends who support the Astros. The narrative I have heard is that this really is something that many teams do, to varying extents. That the Yankees have done it for years, and in fact that the Astros just expanded on what the Yankees were doing while Beltran was there.

That sign-stealing is part of the game, it isn't against the rules, and that most players who are complaining are in a gray area of hypocrisy, because they're mad they weren't in the loop on the tactic. My friends further believe that the Astros are being used as the patsies for all of MLB. The Astros will take the public blame for something most teams do or wish they thought of, and now all MLB will get on the same page about allowing or banning stealing like this.

These opinions are not my own, but I haven't seen the opinions or viewpoints of Astros defenders online - so here it is.

<comment><USER29> Sign stealing is part of the game... if you're a runner on 2nd. They were using cameras in center field, no?

<comment><USER28> The assertion by those I spoke with is that teams have been low-key sign stealing from cameras and other mechanisms for decades.</comment></comment></comment>


Just How Much Money Can Free iPhone Apps Make? Quite A Bit - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/06/just-how-much-money-can-free-iphone-apps-make-quite-a-bit/

<comment><USER2> A cautionary tale:

When I released my game on Facebook shortly after the platform launch, the company I worked for was making bank. We consistently doing $5k a day in ad revenue for a straight 6 months. But then two things happened: the ad vendors realized they weren't getting value out of the CPM they paid out and the gold rush money to buy app installs dried up. It didn't take more than a month for that revenue to decrease ten-fold.

<comment><USER3> Most of the ads I see are for paid apps. I wonder if there's any data on the ROI for these advertisers. If advertisers are paying $2 CPM, and getting, say 5*$0.99 app sales for those impressions, then it's quite possible that those CPMs could keep up. That's a 72% ROI after the Apple tax.

(Note: All the numbers above are made up.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a great question. Who here has released iphone apps (paid or free) and what kind of revenue results did you get?

Does anyone have any tips they would pass along?</comment>


Concurrent Hash Tables: Fast and General? (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3309206 <comment><USER2> I always wondered why when it comes time to create data structures we rarely if ever use a doubling of the constant factor to fix or at least reduce some of these issues.

I suppose you could call it a generational hash table, but really it's a Hash Table interface wrapped around 2, occasionally 3 hash tables.

Create a read-write hash table A. When A hits capacity, create a second read- write hash table B (a constant factor 1.0 < n < 1.5), and stop writing to A. Create a read-only hash table R, dump A into it. During this time, all reads look at [B, A, R] in sequence. Once R is created, swap the list to [B, R]. When B fills, create another RW hash C (again resized) and dump R and B into a new read-only table S and swap the list to [C, S].

During resizes you only ever have 3 places to look. The Read-Write hash has to handle tombstones (and keep a count of them to keep resizing costs O(1)). I believe the main thing not handled here is if concurrent mutation traffic is faster than the copy constructor for the read-only heap. As near as I can tell the cited paper here has no solution for this.

I need to re-read Cliff Click's description of his lock-free hash table. If memory serves it has flavors of this and also answers the back-pressure problem (amortization across writers). But I suspect you can do something rather pedestrian and get similar results.

<comment><USER3> Good ole double buffering. I've used this pattern for many custom concurrency designs.

<comment><USER4> Me too. I find the pattern especially powerful with Redis's atomic RENAME command. Here's an application to aging bloom filters: [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5066970](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5066970)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Uh, I have to yet find an "enhanced" "view PDF" page, which does not make things worse.

Here's a direct link to a PDF: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1601.04017.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1601.04017.pdf)

<comment><USER6> There is also [https://www.arxiv- vanity.com/papers/1601.04017/](https://www.arxiv- vanity.com/papers/1601.04017/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The ACM website's online PDF viewer is terrible. The zoom buttons need to be pressed so many times to make any meaningful change, the document pages load lazily, there are many unnecessary animations, the scrollbar position keeps jumping around, etc. Good thing there is a download link so that I can use my browser's built-in PDF viewer or an external reader.

<comment><USER2> Infinite scroll is great when you're trying to kill time. When you're actually trying to get shit done it's a walking nightmare.

Scroll to the end before you can do a text search. Aaaargh!

<comment><USER8> Remember the era when people couldn't figure out how to make footers work with infinite scroll? Even Facebook messed it up. Try to click something and the next page would load and off the footer went half way down the window.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was once asked what career I'd pursue other than programming.

I replied that I would open a restaurant that focused on stir fries created from a limited number of finely chopped ingredients simmering in predefined locations of a large grill. Not only tasty, this arrangement would allow serving customers quickly with little overhead.

I'd name the restaurant "Hash Table".

<comment><USER10> "I'm afraid we're all out of hash buckets at the moment. Would you like a seat at our open addressing table?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I always preferred immutable sorted trees (such as found in Haskell or Scala) to concurrent hash tables when dealing with concurrent sets or maps.

You can add or remove a node from such trees without modifying the original trees, by only creating O(log(n)) nodes (tree branches that don't change don't have to be copied). So "modifying" a tree does not invalidate the previous versions of the tree, that can still be processed by concurrent threads if they still hold a reference to the root node. No longer referenced tree branches will then be discarded by the GC.

With a concurrent hash table, you have to hold a lock on the whole datastructure if you don't want it to be modified while processing it, and this makes the whole thing is harder to think about overall.

I also find it easier to implement a correct and fast comparison function (required by tree structures) than an equivalent hash function. Trees can also give you range search, and keep your items sorted, which are useful in some cases.

Trees are now my go to datastructures for map and sets unless maximum speed and minimal memory use are absolutely required. These might not be as efficient, but they make more reliable software.

<comment><USER12> > With a concurrent hash table, you have to hold a lock on the whole > datastructure

I would suspect that the entire point of a concurrent hash table is to avoid exactly that. Not much point otherwise.

<comment><USER11> Not if you don't want the hash table to change while doing some read only processing on it. Immutability ensures that the reference you get always point towards a object that is in a consistent state.

<comment><USER12> That is not the point. The point is that the hash table can be updated in a way (e.g., atomic) that is invisible to other readers and thefore they always see a consistent version of the hash table itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There was this simple GPU hash table a while ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22541925](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22541925)

Is this covered in the article? I don't see this linked, but it was just a blog post, so maybe not relevant here, and they describe the same algorithms anyway.

</comment><comment><USER14> It doesn't test the IMHO currently best. [https://greg7mdp.github.io/parallel- hashmap/](https://greg7mdp.github.io/parallel-hashmap/)

And I don't see the TSX benefits, which is Intel only.

<comment><USER15> The benefits are visible if you search for the word "TSX". It says:

"Replacing the insert and update functions of our specialized growing hash table with Intel TSX variants increases the throughput of our hash table by up to 7%"

<comment><USER16> Has there ever been an Intel CPU with working TSX that didn't get disabled by a microcode update?

<comment><USER17> Afaik Skylake/Kabylake.

<comment><USER16> It looks to me like Intel recommends disabling TSX on all SKUs due to Zombieload V2.

<comment><USER17> Well, yeah, TSX appears to be a side channel attack exploitable by a malicious hyperthread. But that's not particularly close to TSX itself being buggy on Haswell.

If you only run trusted code, Zombieload V2 seems irrelevant (on first glance. I didn't look deeper to see if there are ways to exploit it from a bytecode interpreter or such.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The actual article is here: [https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3309206?download=true](https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3309206?download=true) [PDF].

</comment><comment><USER19> I'd probably look at this one as well: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.04339](https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.04339)

<comment><USER4> See also [https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-Concurrent- Bidirecti...](https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-Concurrent- Bidirectional-Linear-Probing-Algorithm- Vegt/6d6cca94c57d408c0b1164d6ff7faea25635fedb). I used the insert algorithm from this paper in my evaluation of linear probing algorithms, where it outperformed Robin Hood: [https://github.com/senderista/hashtable- benchmarks](https://github.com/senderista/hashtable-benchmarks).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Thanks for sharing!

For single-writer multi-reader scenario this requires no atomic fences or operations on TSO: [http://concurrencykit.org/presentations/lpc2015.pdf](http://concurrencykit.org/presentations/lpc2015.pdf)

Works on any open-addressed scheme (there is also a robin hood implementation).

</comment><comment> Avi-D-coder If you have a GC HAMTs are ideal for a lock free transactional semantics. In fact all pure data structures can be generalized to give lock free optimistic transactions with a single CAS. HAMTs just have the nicest properties for minimizing conflicts.

</comment><comment><USER21> [https://archive.md/VirvR](https://archive.md/VirvR)</comment>


Ask HN: What are your must-have packages for vim? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> package manager: [https://github.com/VundleVim/Vundle.vim](https://github.com/VundleVim/Vundle.vim)

surround: [https://github.com/tpope/vim- surround](https://github.com/tpope/vim-surround)

repeat: [http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2136](http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2136)

git: [https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive](https://github.com/tpope/vim- fugitive) (tim pope plugin)

undo: [https://github.com/sjl/gundo.vim](https://github.com/sjl/gundo.vim)

for repls: [https://github.com/jpalardy/vim- slime](https://github.com/jpalardy/vim-slime)

for html: [http://emmet.io/](http://emmet.io/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I used to install vim packages years ago. Now I just get by on what comes with vim, including colorschemes (elflord). It looks like I have four packages installed, and I don't remember what they're for.

EDIT: it looks like I use nerdtree at work.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ctrl+P, NERDTree, ag.vim. Especially ag.vim. I don't know how I would have navigated around complex repositories without it.

</comment><comment><USER5> NERDtree Ctrl+P vim-plug

</comment><comment><USER6> vim-rails vim-rspec

:-)</comment>


Ask HN: What is the best language to write a REST back end in? - <AUTHOR> I am currently running Java on a tomcat as backend rest service. Which language would be good to migrate to. Good performance, future proof and I can find other people to maintain as well. <comment><USER2> Hands down DRF: [http://www.django-rest-framework.org/](http://www.django- rest-framework.org/)

To do basic CRUD stuff, you write like 0 lines of real code. Just use a ViewSet, connect a Serilizer and a Model object. Everything just works and you can save the data into Postgres in no time.

Django is a massive community and you can do a lot more complex things than a CRUD app, but the easy stuff is just soo easy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Since I develop 99% on Java I would recommend anything along the lines of Spring Boot, Dropwizard or Wildfly Swarm. With Dropwizard I can't say much since I only played with it a little, on the other hand having developed projects with Spring Boot and Swarm I can say both do the job really well, both seem pretty much future proof (even though many claim JEE is dead).

Personally I would go with Swarm since I feel there is less work configuring it. With the added advantage of being used to develop in JEE Environments.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you are planning to build a microservice architecture I can recommend my project [https://hemerajs.github.io/hemera- site/](https://hemerajs.github.io/hemera-site/) there is also a [https://hapijs.com/](https://hapijs.com/) Plugin available.

</comment><comment><USER5> It depends what you want the backend for - scale, speed of writing

Im primarily a java developer and wouldnt have a problem writing it using dropwizard or spring boot. But I'd also consider django-rest since i like django, or nodejs as alternatives

<comment><AUTHOR> How do you feel about nodejs in terms of scale and speed?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://hapijs.com/](https://hapijs.com/)

\- High qualitity plugins \- Widely used e.g Paypal, Disney, Walmart \- Very good documentation

Personally one of the best web frameworks I've ever used.

<comment><AUTHOR> What's the advantage against for instance expressjs?

<comment><USER4> [http://matt-harrison.com/moving-from-express-to-hapi-js/](http://matt- harrison.com/moving-from-express-to-hapi-js/) [https://youtu.be/Recv7vR8ZlA](https://youtu.be/Recv7vR8ZlA)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is one of these questions where everybody recommends his favorite stack and nobody is wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was mainly wondering whether to use Go or nodejs as backend. Any suggestions regarding scalability and performance?

<comment><USER6> Both are perfectly suiteable. I dont like Javascript so i would go for go :)</comment></comment></comment>


The IBM Model F Keyboard Returns After a 30-Year Hiatus - <AUTHOR> https://www.extremetech.com/computing/252014-ibm-model-f-keyboard-returns-30-year-hiatus <comment><USER2> How different are these in practice from the Model M-alikes made by Unicomp ([http://www.pckeyboard.com/](http://www.pckeyboard.com/))?

<comment><USER3> I doubt the differences are large.

I have both a Unicomp Model M and a real Model M; they are best keyboards I have ever owned, and the Unicomp version is as rugged as the original. The weight is about the same, the plastic is slightly different (in texture - quality is the same otherwise), and I have the black and grey version (I wish they made black keycaps for it).

If you want a Model M, and you can't find a real one (or you mobo doesn't have a PS2 connector, or the ones you can find are too expensive), then going for the Unicomp version is well worth it, imho.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Curated list of HN's best discussions/submissions of all time? - <AUTHOR> Kind of awesome github but for HN submissions, comments, etc <comment><USER2> Not exactly what you describe (much more limited) but a 'best of' for comments nonetheless:

[https://danluu.com/hn-comments/](https://danluu.com/hn-comments/)

I seem to remember another example that was more up to date but can't find it just now (it was also focussed on comments rather than submissions or discussions).</comment>


Jury finds Rolling Stone responsible for defamation with gang rape story - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/jury-finds-reporter-rolling-stone-responsible-for-defaming-u-va-dean-with-gang-rape-story/2016/11/04/aaf407fa-a1e8-11e6-a44d-cc2898cfab06_story.html <comment><USER2> Excellent. You can't just make things up for the sake of "starting a conversation". Either you report the truth or you're just a propaganda piece. I'm sure there is hundreds of real rape on campus stories out there (unfortunately). The Rolling Stone was fed with the lies they wanted to ear. They knew it was bullshit, they went ahead and publish that crap just "to start a conversation" ... hurting real rape victims at the same time.

<comment><USER3> > I'm sure there is hundreds of real rape on campus stories out there > (unfortunately).

Why do you think they did not go with a real one? What lies they wanted to hear?

<comment><USER4> It's a shame you're being downvoted, because this is totally a legitimate question (why do the least credible stories gain the most attention).

This is a great analysis of the incentives which lead to that being the case (and it's a bit more complex than made-up stories simply being more interesting than real ones): [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the- toxoplasma-of-rage/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of- rage/)

<comment><USER5> _why do the least credible stories gain the most attention_

Is this so obviously true that it can be stated as a bare fact like that?

I would think the very least credible stories get essentially zero attention, but then I always trip over it when people use a straightforward categorical statement as a way of emphasizing a weaker point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This has been an interesting for professional journalists (I mean, aside from all the reasons that it is interesting to anyone) for testing the "actual malice" requirement needed for a (limited-) public figure like this Dean to prove defamation, which is that Rolling Stone acted with "actual malice", i.e. a reckless disregard for the truth:

[http://www.cjr.org/investigation/rolling_stone_investigation...](http://www.cjr.org/investigation/rolling_stone_investigation.php)

Despite the main part of the story being based on someone's lie, RS could theoretically prove that they weren't being "reckless", given all the resources they poured into this story, including 80 hours of fact-checking work [1] -- being reckless is different than being incompetent/stupid. But reading the Columbia Journalism Review's investigation [2]:

> _The checker did try to improve the story's reporting and attribution of > quotations concerning the three friends. She marked on a draft that Ryan - > "Randall" under pseudonym - had not been interviewed, and that his "shit > show" quote had originated with Jackie. "Put this on Jackie?" the checker > wrote. "Any way we can confirm with him?" She said she talked about this > problem of clarity with Woods and Erdely. "I pushed. … They came to the > conclusion that they were comfortable" with not making it clear to readers > that they had never contacted Ryan._

\-- then what _is_? The RS reporter claims to have "exhausted all the avenues for finding the friends" and yet soon after the story was published, the Washington Post managed to find all 3 friends, who weren't at all unwilling to talk to the paper. Had RS talked to the friends, RS would have almost immediately realized that they would have to do additional reporting. The U.S. law protecting media from libel suits against public figures is very strong, but I can definitely see how a jury would decide against RS.

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/rolling- stone...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/rolling-stone-fact- checker-acknowledges-u-va-gang-rape-article- flaws/2016/10/25/e0e4c7e2-9aee-11e6-9980-50913d68eacb_story.html)

[2] [http://www.cjr.org/investigation/rolling_stone_investigation...](http://www.cjr.org/investigation/rolling_stone_investigation.php)

<comment><USER7> Apparently people are looking into Sabrina Ruben-Erdely's history and it resembles Stephen Glass[0] with a sex-crime angle. Poorly researched articles and lazy fact checking built her a career where RS was paying her $43,000 a story for 3-4 pieces a year that she made up herself and fed to her 'sources' to repeat back to her.

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

<comment><USER8> Is $43k per story a normal salary for journalists in the US? If so, journalism is a more lucrative even today than I had imagined.

<comment><USER6> The $43K number comes out of the revelation in court documents that her contract with RS was $300K for 2 years, for 7 stories: [http://dailycaller.com/2016/10/21/rolling-stone-paid- reporte...](http://dailycaller.com/2016/10/21/rolling-stone-paid-reporter- nearly-43000-for-disastrous-uva-article/)

That's a good salary that most journalists would dream to reach, but keep in mind a few things:

1\. It's still freelance work, which means that she's not getting paid health benefits.

2\. She's been writing at least 20 years now and she, up to that point, was highly decorated.

3\. She's based in New York.

4\. Those stories are meant to have huge impact and seen by millions. The UVA story, if she hadn't botched it, would have the potential to cause systemic change.

As a point of comparison, I did a lookup for "writer" in California public salaries:

[http://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=writer](http://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=writer)

Top writing jobs (mostly technical) are reaping $110K+ before benefits:

[http://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=Epic%20R...](http://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=Epic%20Report%20Writer%20II)

Moreover, they can retire at age 55 with a pension that puts them well above middle class:

[http://transparentcalifornia.com/pensions/search/?q=writer](http://transparentcalifornia.com/pensions/search/?q=writer)

As another point of comparison, the executive editor of the NYTimes starts at around $500K: [http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2014/05/report- abramson-...](http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2014/05/report-abramson- salary-100k-below-male-editor-188637)

That's a ton of money for journalism. But you'd laugh if you heard that that's what the CEOs of Google or Microsoft made.

Here's some salaries of top people at NPR and TAL:

[http://www.andymboyle.com/2013/07/21/an-updated-look-at- ira-...](http://www.andymboyle.com/2013/07/21/an-updated-look-at-ira-glass- and-other-public-media-salaries/)

Ira Glass had a base salary of $148K in 2010. Rob Siegel had a base salary of $320K.

<comment><USER9> >That's a ton of money for journalism. But you'd laugh if you heard that that's what the CEOs of Google or Microsoft made.

Wouldnt the correct comparison be to the CEO/president of the New York times?

<comment><USER6> Yeah you're right. Mark Thompson is the president and CEO of the Times and makes $8.7M off a base salary in $1M (the rest is stock options and other compensation): [http://wwd.com/business-news/media/the-new-york-times- reveal...](http://wwd.com/business-news/media/the-new-york-times-reveals-pay- compensation-2015-top-execs-ceo-mark-thompson-arthur-sulzberger-10396303/)

Executive editors are often at the "senior vice president" level, below the CEO and Publisher, and peers with execs who run the ad side. So I guess the NYT's exec editor is equivalent to Google's senior VPs of search, which has included John Giannandrea, Amit Singhal, and Marissa Meyer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> All the people involved with this story (reporter, editors and the lying "victim") should face criminal charges. The damage that making and promulgating false stories like this does to real victims of rape is immense, let alone to the people falsely accused.

<comment><USER11> For each party, what specific crime? Did Jackie ever file a police report?

There is still a pending civil lawsuit from the fraternity. That one will probably settle soon now that this one has been resolved.

<comment><USER12> I'm not from the US and don't know how the law there works exactly, but over here, if a person fabricates a libelous story and feeds it to a journalist - however much encouraged by that journalist - and this is published, then the person, the journalist and the publisher are all guilty of libel.

For other parties, at least the mob that trashed fraternity building should be prosecuted.

Of course one very real victim here is people who actually have been raped or assaulted at campuses. Their stories will now be harder to believe.

<comment><USER13> Yes, they are clearly all guilty of defamation, but the question is whether the defamation is a crime or a tort.

Nitpick: "libel" is defamation in writing and "slander" is verbal defamation. So perhaps guess Jackie was guilty of slander while RS is guilty of libel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Beyond feelings about the verdict itself, it is interesting that a single lapse in journalistic integrity has the potential to put a major news organization like Rolling Stone out of business. There are massive incentives to publish sensational articles, but as this case and the Gawker case have shown, there are also massive incentives to not publish specific details. The BuzzFeed model (which is perhaps shared by social media at large) is to simply provide a platform, and let other people stir the pot. I hope that doesn't become the only way to circulate ideas.

<comment><USER15> FWIW I come to HN for the comments, not really for the articles. I think maybe half of us use HN this way.

This is to say that the platform approach has the advantage of allowing actually informed/skeptical/intelligent people to do the talking. They can discuss subjects they know, at their own pace. Contrast with traditional journalism, where even when things go right you're still dealing with someone who's reporting on things outside their profession, probably on a deadline, and beset by an industry (public relations) basically devoted to deceiving them.

This is to say I'm actually fairly sure the platform approach, at least from first principals, beats the traditional approach in terms of quality.

(On a side note, I just had an awful thought: are there PR people reaching out to the top HN authors?)

<comment><USER16> Worse thought for you: top HN authors are paid PR people.

<comment><USER4> Do you have any evidence for this outrageously false claim?

I know several of the top commenters [0] and know they are absolutely not paid PR people.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders](https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders)

<comment><USER17> Referencing 0 but not including it in your post doesn't hell your argument

<comment><USER4> I'm going to thank you for providing a "polite" reminder to fix my accidental omission.

<comment><USER17> Okay...I'll wait for your thanks...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The story I read from this is that:

1\. It's very easy to be fooled by someone who is bent on fooling you, especially where they've got strong motive to do so.

2\. It's very easy to fool _yourself_ when you decide on a narrative and start looking for facts to support it.

I've long maintained, and I'm finding some good sources (skeptics-based work) that it's only in _specifically seeking to uncover truth_ that you will do so. If you instead presume some previously-determined proposition, you're simply going to make a case for that argument. Most insidious is when you don't realise you're pursuing the second avenue. As Richard Feynman said, you're the easiest person to fool.

Susan Haack, in "Science, Scientism, & Anti-Science in the Age of Preposterism", _Skeptical Inquirer_ Nov/Dec 1997 wrote:

 _A genuine inquirer aims to find out the truth of some question, whatever the color of that truth. This is a taugology (Websters: "inquiry: search for truth..."). A pseudo-inquirer seeks to make a case for some proposition(s) determined in advance._

Question your evidence, question your sources, question yourself, question your premises and propositions. Question them again. And then have someone else do the same, independently.

To draw another recent online element to this -- a week or so back a video clip circulated of the South African university student "fallist" movement claiming that science was a western imposition, and that it needed to be "decolonised". First, that neglects the long history of non-western science -- from the Middle East, Africa, Persia, India, and China. Second, it is contradicted by the motto of the Royal Society, from which the modern tradition of scientific inquiry _did_ arise: "Nullius in verba" \-- "On the word of no one". That is, science -- knowledge -- doesn't arise on the authority of any one person's voice, but on the fundamental testability and verifiability of facts.

A lesson _Rolling Stone_ and Ms. Ruben-Erdely might take to heart.

<comment><USER19> > That is, science -- knowledge -- doesn't arise on the authority of any one > person's voice, but on the fundamental testability and verifiability of > facts.

This is what I call "real science". I call it so because it can only be found in books and movies. /sarc

In reality, we are told that "the science is settled" and "the consensus is that...".

<comment><USER18> There are definitely misuses of science, and a cult of scientism.

I've run across a few references in the past few days which inform on this. Bruce G. Charlton has written a number of works, most available online (or at least substantially), including _Thought Prison_ , _Not Even Trying_ , _addicted to Dsiruption_ , and _The Genius Famine_.

Susan Haack, mentioned.

A fellow named Chris Reev has a G+ collection in which he's been posting similar items. Occasionally lost in the haze, but there's some exceptionally good critical work.

I'm also working my way slowly through Sara M. Watson's impressive, and quite possibly excellent, "Toward a Constructive Technology Criticism". Quite long- form (30k words), I've submitted this to HN though without traction.

[http://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/constructive_technolog...](http://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/constructive_technology_criticism.php#toward- constructive-criticism)

Still another element comes by way of Jill Gordon's 1997 "John Stuart Mill and 'The Marketplace of Ideas'", which takes a close look at the origin of that particular metaphor. Gordon pointedly notes that the term itself isn't Mill's, and that he applies a number of specific conditions to what minority views do and don't deserve cosideration. In particular, that they are _open questions_ (not settled fact), that they come from the _minority_ , not some well-endowed establishment voice, that the questions are _current_ \-- no re-opening closed wounds of the past, at least not without considerable evidence -- that they represent _" neglected interests"_ and that the side so considered be "in danger of obtaining less than its share".

Many appeals to the "marketplace of ideas" argument fail numerous of these tests.

There are further problems, including:

A lack of good faith on the part of those introducting concepts. A motivated message can do considerable harm to greater understanding.

The exchange and interplay of ideas is _not_ analagous to exchanges-in-goods- or-services, particularly in that there's no rivalrous transfer and compensation. That market metaphor is quite weak when examined closely.

Or, in short: there are in fact times that the science _is_ settled and consensus exists. The exceptions almost always prove to highlight failings already listed above: Piltdown man (a manifest and motivated fraud). The corporate-and-fincially-motivated disinformation campaigns on negative effects of lead, asbestos, tobacco, pollution generally, CFCs, and CO2/global warming. Continental drift and plate tectonics was a case in which a considerable revision of geological understanding came together from multiple elements of compelling evidence. Some initial resistance to the idea _was_ a valid conservative response, but with increasing and strongly-corroborating evidence _and_ mechanisms, the theory _was_ accepted. Keep in mind that this required energy and causal factors (radioactive decay and an understanding of the Earth's structure and formation) as well as much evidence of previous continental arrangement: similar landforms, fossil records showing prehistoric animal and plant ranges explained by different landmass arrangements, creep and strain measurements showing actual movements, base in part on satellite and Moon-based position measurement, magnetic field reversals evident in mid- Atlantic ridge core samples, undersea topography, radioactive dating, etc., etc., etc.

During the same period in which plate tectonics went from initial proposal to settled fact, the recognised age of the Earth itself increased from a few tens of millions of years to 4.5 billion. That's hugely significant in our understanding of numerous of Earth's processes, and humans' roles, impacts, and dependencies upon them.

The question of "real" science rapidly gets to "no true Scottsman" territory. I think though that there's a strong case to be made without relying on sophistry and tautology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Good. Yet another reason we have a flood of cable cutters and record level distrust in media.

Shame that the same journalists that played the same game with Iraq, and are doing so with Syria and Russia aren't facing the same. Something to be said about the bigger lie.

</comment><comment><USER21> In my dealings with journalists for some larger magazines and TV stations, all of them had a story already in their head, I just needed to supply the sound bites. Were they interested in the real story? No.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is a ten-member jury a normal size for this kind of case?

<comment><USER23> Yes. It depends on the state and the type of case. Since this was a civil trial a 10 person jury is correct.

<comment><USER24> Given that this was a Federal case, the jury size would not depend upon the state, nor would it depend upon the type of case insofar as we're talking about civil cases. Except where defined by statute, the size of a state court jury in a civil case is decided entirely by agreement between the judge and the parties.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For those who can't use the "web" workaround to see the submitted wsj.com article, here's the WaPo version (and FWIW, the WaPo deserves huge credit for being the first big media outlet to scrutinize the Rolling Stone article -- they even found the 3 friends of the purported victim that the Rolling Stone didn't even bother to identify or contact):

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/jury-finds- re...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/jury-finds-reporter- rolling-stone-responsible-for-defaming-u-va-dean-with-gang-rape- story/2016/11/04/aaf407fa-a1e8-11e6-a44d-cc2898cfab06_story.html)

<comment><USER25> By the way, the easy workaround for WaPo article restrictions is to open them in an anonymous window. Occasional visitors can just click directly since you get a small quota of free articles per time period, I don't remember the details though.

By the way, a German newspaper that just introduced paid articles lead to my discovery of a new loophole: Google translate. It gives me the full article. Everybody clicking on the site itself only gets the first two paragraphs.

<comment><USER6> I regularly go over the WaPo limit (it's something like 3 articles a month)...I've found it easier to direct Chrome to block cookies from the domain. This has the effect of breaking the loading of the WaPo comments section -- I think they do a sloppy check of localStorage to see if what comments have posted since you last visited -- which is actually an even nicer benefit :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Between this story and the loving portrayal of terrorist child-murderer Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, I've lost all respect for Rolling Stone.

Luckily for them, they haven't pissed off Peter Thiel yet.

</comment><comment><USER27> (throwaway to express unpopular view on touchy / inflammatory subject)

I think it's clear that Rolling Stone engaged in poor journalism. They did not properly fact check, and the story had too many questions and holes to publish. Sabrina Erdely failed in her job as a journalist.

That said, I'm not convinced that Jackie fabricated this story. From my read of the situation, Jackie was hesitant to be featured in the article. There is not much upside for a woman to be featured in a national "rape on campus" story. You risk becoming the subject of internet hate and death threats in exchange for basically no personal gain.

It has come out that many aspects of her account were false. However, just because she lied about the details of the rape does not mean she was not raped, or sexually assaulted, or that something terrible did not happen to her. It's possible she lied about the location, the fraternity, etc., and I can see motivations for that: avoiding retaliation or attempting to remain anonymous. If you believe that she was raped or assaulted, squirrely behavior like that seems more reasonable.

Thus, it's very likely that Jackie lied about the specifics of the situation, but that something terrible (rape or assault) did happen to her. This interpretation is more in line with a rational persons motivations than inventing a rape story for unclear motives.

In a similar vein, I would recommend this This American Life podcast on the subject: [https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/581/...](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/581/anatomy-of-doubt)

<comment><USER10> Even if something very bad happened to "jackie" it does not give her license to go around and accuse innocent people of gang rape. Two wrongs do not make a right.

More importantly it was the amplification of the accusation through the national media that made this case so much worse. Every case of false rape reported damages thousands of real rape victims by undermining their credibility.

On the use of throwaway accounts to avoid downvoting I think you should be brave and stand by your opinion. At worst you will lose 4 points.

<comment><USER28> Does something specific happen when you're downvoted by four points? I didn't realize there was a downside limit.

<comment><USER10> Nothing in my experience other than your comment is marked as dead. If all your comments ends up downvoted then HC may hellban you, but if you have the occasional controversial post nothing much happens.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How does your company set RPC timeouts for microservices? - <AUTHOR> There are two sub-questions here. 1. Is the same timeout T set for every instance of service X making request A to service Z, or is a timeout chosen at runtime? 2. How is the static (or dynamic) timeout value chosen?<p>As a clarification, this is more of a poll to understand what people are actually doing, rather than a request for recommendation on what I should do. If you are willing to state which company you work for, I would be extra appreciative! <comment><USER2> What does the business need?

What can the service deliver?

If you need it faster than it can deliver... then setting your timeouts/paging/whatever to that point will just bring you pain and suffering.

I think you'll find a lot of people just say "what's p99 right now", add a little to it so "it won't page me", and leave it there.

Actually driving down p99... is not nearly common enough.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for replying!

I completely agree that people in most companies do not push down P99 enough.

I think this is a direct response to the second question, and assumes that people are setting timeouts statically. Is my understanding correct?

<comment><USER2> It's been my experience that people usually build systems that expect a certain timeout for a certain service or perhaps service+method.

That said, not all clients are created equal. The ads folks who used to hit my system way back when had _far_ tighter deadline requirements than the calendar or spreadsheet people, for instance.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How Puffin browser works on iPhone? - <AUTHOR>

Puffin loads pages much faster than Chrome on both Android and iPhone. It also claims that it has the fastest JS engine! I thought it is not possible because iOS doesn't approve apps using their own html and/or js engine. The question is what does puffin do to load pages faster? <comment><USER2> IIRC you just have to stick with the rendering engine (Webkit) on iOS, but you can supply your own networking (hello SPDY) and JS stack, as well as the UI elements.

Another way except fine-tuning networking and script engine parameters is to fuel traffic through minifying proxies and using more aggressive caching strategies.

<comment><AUTHOR> How one can change JS engine? Any source for confirmation? As I know WebView only allows us to eval a string as js in the page's context.</comment></comment>


How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/how-netflix-reverse-engineered-hollywood/282679/ <comment><USER2> For all the high praise that gets heaped on Netflix for their brilliant technology, I have a feeling there is some other Netflix that is concealed from me.

I have been Netflix customer for years. I thought the idea was brilliant - super-cheap movies arriving whenever you want, what could be better?! I loved Netflix. Then I slowly discovered Netflix is running out of movies I want to watch - up to now where about 95% of movies I want to see are out. Then there was that streaming vs. DVS fiasco - and I stayed with streaming. But then I discovered there's nothing for me to stream. I thought maybe my tastes are weird - so I went to wikipedia and IMDB and looked "top X movies" \- and most of them, of course, can't be watched on Netflix, except for those few that I've already watched long ago.

And that million dollar recommendation system? I've over 800 ratings, and I have hard time remembering last time their system suggested me something useful. In fact, the only reason I am keeping the subscription is because my wife has some series on her sub-account that she's watching. For me, Netflix has become almost 100% useless. So I wonder, with all the high praise to their brilliant data usage and innovative technology - am I doing something wrong? Am I missing some important part of Netflix that everybody else is seeing?

<comment><USER3> Yes, you're right. What is making Netflix gain market share are the series. Basically most people are using Netflix instead of TV, not to get Hollywood movies. The same pattern happened at my home: there are no good movies to see, but plenty of activity around TV shows and documentaries. And from a business point of view this is even better for them, because TV series make people stick around longer than a single movie.

<comment><USER4> Right, you basically still need to get the little plastic disks--from Netflix or elsewhere--if you want to watch quality movies, especially recent ones. Someone I know there told me a year or two back that people get streaming with the intention of watching movies but they end up watching TV shows instead.

This doesn't quite apply to me because I quit streaming when they did the whole splitting of physical media from streaming thing. And signed back up when House of Cards came out. But I do view streaming today as a source for TV shows and any movies I want to watch on it are basically lagniappe.

<comment><USER5> The algorithms and operations behind the storage and distribution of those physical disks is a marvel to behold though. A friend of mine was in Netflix's DVD operations for a number of years, and it was fascinating to hear what they had implemented (I can't do it justice). Imagine a bunch of Computer Scientists implementing sorting and data storage optimizations in the physical world, and you get the Netflix DVD distribution system.

If you ever meet someone from the DVD division, take him out for some drinks. You won't regret it :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A friend of a friend works at Netflix and told me how they use some of this data.

House of Cards was basically a data driven production. Based on Netflix's customer preferences, they knew that a political thriller, starring Kevin Spacey and directed by David Fincher would maximize the number of views based on the habits of its customers.

It would appear the data was correct!

<comment><USER7> Is there a post somewhere where they describe this?

<comment><USER8> Good link by yonasb.

But the comment by refurb sounds a bit misleading. As I understand it, they did not produce this solely because of the data (as if the show was born out of the data). The idea, the actors, and the production staff were already chosen before Netflix's involvement. Netflix looked at those things as they had been proposed and realized it was a good gamble to bid on the show.

<comment><USER6> I don't have the facts to contradict your statement about finding the show after it had already been made, but wasn't it a "Netflix original production"? As in, Netflix pitched it to the studios?

I know the script originated from the British series, but don't they usually only select actors after they have funding? I'm not that familiar with the process, so I may be wrong.

<comment><USER8> As I understand it, it was indeed a Netflix original, but the plans for who would be in it, who would direct it, what it was about, etc. were already in place before Netflix got involved. Again, I'm no expert on the subject either, but that's how I understand what Wikipedia explains:

"MRC approached different networks about the series, including HBO, Showtime and AMC, but Netflix, hoping to launch its own original programming, outbid the other networks. Ted Sarandos, Netflix's Chief Content Officer, looked at the data of Netflix user's streaming habits and concluded that there was an audience for Fincher and Spacey."

([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Cards_%28U.S._TV_serie...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Cards_%28U.S._TV_series%29))

See the sources linked in those paragraphs, where those statements are summarized from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Netflix's data allows it not only to recommend movies, but also to finance original productions.

Lots of businesses want "recommendation engines" to appease their cargo cult gods, few ask what possibilities their data really creates.

Sometimes data can make you better at delivering your service. Other times you can optimize inventory, enter entirely new lines of business or even obsolete your competitors.

<comment><USER10> So audience data when you're talking about original productions can be a blessing and a curse. We don't need big data to tell us that the top four favorite subjects of Netflix users are marriage, royalty, parenthood, and reunited lovers. We've been telling stories about those things for hundreds - if not thousands - of years.

The data can also be misleading, because sometimes what audiences want isn't what's good for dramatic effect. Both Dexter and Homeland suffered from audiences reacting positively to the main character, which caused Showtime to stop the writers from making creative decisions that yes, would have alienated the audience initially, but on the other hand would have made for shows that would have in their later seasons been better received.

Another example: I'm pretty sure that if you looked at the Netflix data it would show that people liked to watch movies and TV shows that either had happy endings or twist endings. The former makes you feel good, the latter makes you appreciate the writing. What people really _don 't_ like are ambiguous endings. If we based creative decisions purely on audience data a show like The Sopranos wouldn't have the ending it does. The upshot of all of this is that many writers end up 'cheating' the data to get their shows made. Take Orange is the New Black, where the creator Jenji Kohan has gone on record saying she basically used the main white, engaged protagonist as a trojan horse to get the show commissioned. What I'm basically trying to say in this rant is that using data to inform what shows to commission is one thing, but using it to direct the shows as they progress is another (and something I'm against).

<comment><USER11> You're right that audience data is going to be full of the obvious. But it's also good for watching trends, before they go bust. A number of genres (e.g. superheroes) have cycles of growing, being massively popular, then dying off for a couple decades.

If you're in the business of making content, you want to join the trend early and get out before everyone realizes it's a fad. A truly great movie can buck trends, or even change them, but there are few truly great movies. Or you could just ignore this all and make the perennial favorites, generic romance or action movies.

<comment><USER12> Actually their recommendation engine is a little too accurate. It drives as much as 70% of their views. They have to purposely randomize it. For those curious how it works: See the brilliant talk from the guy who heads it up himself (this was a great talk to attend in person) [http://www.mlconf.com/mlconf-2013/mlconf-2013-agenda/xavier-...](http://www.mlconf.com/mlconf-2013/mlconf-2013-agenda/xavier- amatriain/)

One reference I could find for the statistic from google: [http://blog.kissmetrics.com/how-netflix-uses- analytics/](http://blog.kissmetrics.com/how-netflix-uses-analytics/)

I don't think they'll have to worry about this anytime soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Haven't people gone to jail for scraping a URL and enumerating its possible values?

<comment><USER14> Yes. When they knowingly are collecting data they know they shouldn't have access to, unlike the data in the article.

<comment><USER13> Not defending the law (which I think is pretty terrible), but that seems like an incredibly fine distinction. I doubt Netflix would agree that I'm supposed to be able to download a list of every possible genre.

<comment><USER15> It is a fine distinction. The effort in a CFAA case to resolve the distinction will focus on evidence of intent; of the state of mind of the person committing the acts.

The CFAA is a very bad law, but it's hard to resolve "authorized" versus "unauthorized" deterministically without coming up with absurd situations. I think a better thing to look at is CFAA sentencing and severity, which currently scale up with the counter in your "for()" loop and quickly produce dizzying penalties for minor offenses. Taking the piss out of CFAA sentencing would also reduce the incentive that US Attorneys have to throw the book at petty offenders.

<comment><USER16> > _it 's hard to resolve "authorized" versus "unauthorized" deterministically > without coming up with absurd situations_

Like in other cases when computers meet the law, it's often a "colour of bits" distinction. I recommend this article:

[http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23](http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23)

<comment><USER17> I don't think that's really what is going on here. "colour of bits" is distinction between process and result. The question of authorization comes down to intent and what fits societal norms of fair dealing. It's a complex mess and there's no alternative to it, vs. colour of bits where there are two sane points of view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> At the top of the article is a Netflix genre generator. That is worth the price of admission all by itself.

But then there's a fairly entertaining look into what happened to content at Netflix after the million dollar challenge.

<comment><USER19>
      Rogue-Cop Viral Plague Tearjerkers Based on Real Life Set in the Edwardian Era

<comment><USER20> I'd actually watch that.

<comment><USER21> "Sherlock Holmes and the Influenza (zombie) Pandemic of 1918."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What would be really cool is if this list of genres was open-sourced somewhere. I can see Netflix not wanting that, but it would really save time for however many hackers read this article and decide they want the same data.

<comment><USER23> I was just thinking how sad it is that Netflix has all this great data on movies (as Pandora does for music), and it's locked away from us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I find the part at the end about the Perry Mason aspect very interesting, and actually my favourite part of the article.

And the final sentence, feels like the real reason this was posted to HN: "And sometimes we call that a bug and sometimes we call it a feature."

Edit: Also, the 'Gonzo' genre of Post-Apocalyptic Comedies and Friendship seems it's got its first one in "This Is The End".

</comment><comment><USER25> Meanwhile, their client still can't separate my daughter's kid shows from mine. It took them several years to implement profiles on iOS and then another to do it on Android.

Now implemented, "My Top Picks" last night were still dominated by My Little Pony.

Also would like to choose which shows she can watch, but the client doesn't support that. </complaints-over> ;)

</comment><comment><USER26> There's also jinni.com which has a similar system, not limited by UI issues and that can be used globally. Usually i get great recommendations from them , and they're fun to play with.

<comment><USER27> I signed up for that a year ago and everytime I am reminded of its existence, I kick myself for not using it more often. Especially a time like now when the TV shows my wife and I used to watch are not on and we are looking for something new.

Just finished Broadchurch over the holidays, very entertaining for those interested. BBC murder mystery

<comment><USER28> Broadchurch was aired on ITV[1], not BBC. (And in typical fashion, when bringing it to the US, it needs to be a remake because US audiences are apparently too stupid -- according to the television network execs -- to watch British television without heavy localization -- by Fox Networks in this case).

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITV_%28TV_network%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITV_%28TV_network%29)

<comment><USER27> Already brought to America on BBC America, which is why I said BBC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For those who are data curious: [https://gist.github.com/agibsonccc/8230583](https://gist.github.com/agibsonccc/8230583)

I cherry picked this from the source for those who might want the generator. I "think" that's everything, correct me if I'm wrong there. I didn't really test it, just took a few seconds to grab what I saw for later.

</comment><comment><USER29> I get a kick out of the genre names. My wife and I both use the same account, and each rate movies ourselves. Whenever something comes out of left field, we say, "Look at your movies..."

I wonder if Netflix can tell if multiple people are rating movies. Does it think we are one confused person, or two distinct personalities?

<comment><USER30> Have you tried their multiple profiles feature? [https://movies.netflix.com/EditProfiles](https://movies.netflix.com/EditProfiles)

<comment><USER21> We have multiple profiles now, but before that there were 10 years of Netflix and five of them dominated by a child who enjoys "Curious George" and "Super Hero Squad."

It's going to take a while to get back to normal.

<comment><USER29> Makes me wonder about time decay to account for changing tastes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> 76k micro-genres seems much. For my website [http://5000best.com/movies/](http://5000best.com/movies/) I created 40 main genres using IMDb tags together with the 100 million ratings from the Netflix Prize data (I was 43rd in that competition).

Additionally, earlier I extracted and named 12 new genres (those ones on the right) from the Netflix ratings alone - I described the process here: [http://arek-paterek.com/book/predict_sample.pdf](http://arek- paterek.com/book/predict_sample.pdf)

<comment><USER32> What do you mean much? When working like this the more the better. There's an opportunity for an open source variant of this technology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> How is this any different from that Pandora did with music?

<comment><USER34> > _The only semi-similar project that I could think of is Pandora 's once- > lauded Music Genome Project, but what's amazing about Netflix is that its > descriptions of movies are foregrounded. It's not just that Netflix can show > you things you might like, but that it can tell you what kinds of things > those are. It is, in its own weird way, a tool for introspection._

I have both Pandora One and Netflix, and am very satisfied with both. When I read why Pandora served up a particular song I have sometimes gone "hmm," but not much more.

But I can still remember pausing when Netflix put "critically-acclaimed cerebral dark thrillers" or "visually-striking foreign sci-fi & fantasy" in front of me. Not only did it map my preferences to films I hadn't seen, but it told me something new about my tastes and thus myself.

<comment><USER35> Just an FYI if you didn't know this, but Pandora will show you the same kind of information if you hover over the song (web) and pick "Why was this track selected?".

"Based on what you've told us so far, we're playing this track because it features electronica roots, house influences, danceable beats and vocal samples."

<comment><USER36> Pandora's genome doesn't seem to have enough sub-genes to distinguish between songs and groups that are noticeably different to the ear, particularly in obscure sub-genres where the music is similar, but the vocal styles are wildly different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> > There are so many that just loading, copying, and pasting all of them took > the little script I wrote more than 20 hours.

I want to see that script.

<comment><USER38> It ran on a netbook and was actually controlling a browser and copying and pasting. It's not optimized, but it got the job done, so I'll applaud anyway. Great article, I expect we'll see more like this soon. ;-)

<comment><USER39> It actually looks pretty wasteful, since it probably needed to load the full webpage instead of just the html.

<comment><USER40> It was enough for the author to write a good story on it.

Wastefulness be damned, it got the job done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I wonder how often there are "new generes", that is a complete creative movie that doesnt fit an existing one. Someofthose quirkly little movies that seem to win oscars may be such.

</comment><comment><USER42> I wonder if NSA would find that data useful. You know, to profile netflix users.

</comment><comment><USER43> What about the Perry Mason thing? That's scary shit.

<comment><USER44> Theories:

1) Assuming there's some clustering algorithm in use, it could just be some tradeoff edge case that isn't worth optimizing away.

2) It could be that one of their reviewers had an overly-aggresive and non- standard genre-tagging approach for Perry Mason and classified a bunch of shows in such a way that the source data was polluted. This could be something stupid like most other movies having many reviewers giving higher confidence, while a large number of Perry Mason shows and DVDs only had a single reviewer who was either through a bug or through overweighting, given too much influence. This seems to be the most likely cause of the bug--some skew or amplification in the source data.

3) Intentional poisoning of the results, like cartographers putting in bogus features, or data sellers seeding their data with watermarks, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Royalty is America's second favourite topic?

<comment><USER46> Nobody loves monarchs more than someone who has never had to live under one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Anyone else wish that "Taken 3: Lil Bub" was a real movie?</comment>


Revenue Updates for A Dark Room et. al - <AUTHOR> http://amirrajan.net/app-dev/2015/11/13/adr-revenue-updates/ <comment><USER2> So he has a net income of about 150k first year for a successful game. You also need to factor in already spent development time, but on paper this sounds ok. But the second year the net income dips down to 40k. Oops!

How long can you do this? Is this sustainable? You probably have to churn out successful games year after year for the rest of your life. But this is a gamble. What happens, if one game is a failure? One year of development just went down the drain. Oops!

So, how can you survive as indie game developer? What I believe:

1) Either you do this for fun in your spare time. But this gets more difficult the older you get, if you consider family and children. Finishing a polished game that way is possible but tough, I guess. If you're doing this for fun, maybe release the game for free.

2) You try to copy as much stuff from the previous game as possible and try to go for a short release cycle. You go for the long tail, so the more games you release the better! The result: 455 total games per day on the app-store ([http://www.pocketgamer.biz/metrics/app- store/](http://www.pocketgamer.biz/metrics/app-store/)). Good luck competing with them.

3) You go in full-time. Yeah right... My wife would declare me insane for doing this.

The bad thing: regardless which path you take,it takes a lot of time and dedication. And in most cases, there's no money and no reward waiting for you. Most people do not even consider spending a buck for your endless evenings spent in front of your monitor trying to make something entertaining.

Ain't this sad?

Previous discussion on reddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/3syzuc](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/3syzuc)

<comment><USER3> It was 65k from both of his games combined though.

You have to also consider that his games have been featured on the app store multiple times - and he's not even making that much. It's a risky path, but it can pay off if you work hard and are smart about it (e.g. I'd try to build communities around my games that I could get to play my next games as well, immediately getting them up from the bottom of the app store where nobody goes).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find these statistics depressing when considering the wealth you can get out of really much simpler games ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10254187](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10254187))

<comment><USER5> Bah. You can make even more money selling toothpaste. The guy is making a living writing games that he wants to write. Everything after that is gravy, IMHO.</comment></comment>


Real Value of Facebook – Douglas Rushkoff – Medium - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/s/douglas-rushkoff/the-real-value-of-facebook-19d1d6cb3003 <comment><USER2> "But now that Facebook seems destined for irrelevance, I find myself wondering if there may be a positive use for the platform after all. No, not to make friends or communicate with people — neither of which were ever Facebook's strong points anyway. The real value we can derive from Facebook comes from interacting directly and purposefully with its dark innards: the algorithms themselves."

Well, it has been and continues to be great for me, and millions/billions of others, for both communicating with people around the world, and making friends. What kind of blindness people have to be able to wonder "if there may be a positive use for the platform after all" I don't know.</comment>


The future of the Symbian platform - <AUTHOR> http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/features/item/12223_The_future_of_the_Symbian_plat.php <comment><USER2> This is a very comprehensive overview of the recent history of Nokia and Symbian, including the distinction between the core OS and the UI layer, as well as a good analysis of the reasons for the recent announcements. It's a worthwhile read for anyone who thinks that "Nokia is dead" or "Symbian is an outdated OS": the facts are more complex, and significant.

tl;dr: it seems like Nokia's new priority #1 is improving their traction with developers, and is demonstrating it by taking pretty bold steps in that direction (e.g. canning large amounts of development in progress because it would have led to more fragmentation between UI toolkits). It also looks like priority #2 is improving their UI.

These are signs that their new management team a) gets it, and b) is willing to make difficult decisions.

<comment><USER2> Some of the comments on the article are worth a read as well (but only if you're interested in the topic, as they're quite lengthy and surrounded by dross).</comment></comment>


A Vibrator That Hides In Plain Sight - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/31/vesper-2/

<comment><USER2> After some press coverage, everybody will know what it looks like... No more "hiding effekt"

</comment><comment><USER3> nope it pretty much looks like a dildo.</comment>


New Data Suggest the Coronavirus Isn't as Deadly as We Thought - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-data-suggest-the-coronavirus-isnt-as-deadly-as-we-thought-11587155298 <comment><USER2> Shh, gotta be careful with things like that, or people might start resenting the eternal house arrests ordered "for their safety"</comment>


Why I decided not to enter the $100k global warming time-series challenge - <AUTHOR> http://andrewgelman.com/2015/12/09/why-i-decided-not-to-enter-the-100000-global-warming-time-series-challenge/ <comment><USER2> The first lesson in any experiment is to understand the question you're answering. This is a great example of that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Those who believe in climate change should just reframe the argument in the face of skeptics.

Just say, "you're right, we don't know the science is true but just like people/companies take out insurance in situations of risk so should we." Because when the problem is reframed as an exercise in risk mitigation then it is very hard to argue against. Especially when said activities have not been shown to have a measurable impact on the world's economic activity. In fact huge benefits will come if we invent largely free energy.

<comment><USER4> I am against climate change people because they invariably suggest that the governments should do something. Often this is a good opportunity for the governments to grab more power and take away our freedoms. In my opinion this can bring more misery to humanity than the climate change.

For example Indian government is pushing Solar power without must thought. Billions of taxpayer money is being spend on solar panels which we are not sure if they will work. Same amount of money could have produced more energy through conventional means, supported more industry and helped few more million people get out of poverty, I am not sure that by using Solar panels Indian government has saved million people in future.

I think a small invention like a floppy disk might have saved more trees that all government efforts put together. Environment might be changing but I would bet on people like Elon Musk any day than the government.

<comment><USER5> > I am against climate change people because they invariably suggest that the > governments should do something.

I'm not sure that you are aware of just how ludicrous, this sounds. Do you have the same complaint when someone's house is burning down and people suggest that firefighters 'should do something'?

<comment><USER6> Is the purpose of a government to do something about climate change in the same way that the purpose of a firefighter is to do something about a burning house? Why?

<comment><USER5> Citizens assign functions to governments that are impractical for individuals or markets to handle. It doesn't make sense for everyone to buy a fire truck and there isn't a good business to be made from putting out fires.

A classic case where individuals may band together to invoke government is is where a 'tragedy of the commons' situation is threatened.

Left to its own devices, it is perfectly rational in the short term for an individual or business to continue polluting, over-fishing, deforesting or using the atmosphere/oceans as an infinite waste removal resource. In the medium and long term it isn't such a good idea and governments provide the least worst mechanism that we have for citizens to collectively enforce actions that can protect people, society or the environment.

<comment><USER7> >there isn't a good business to be made from putting out fires. //

This used to be how it worked, at least in the UK. It's probably quite a good business; there I'd a question of mutual destruction for the rich if they just let poor people's houses burn but also I feel there's a factor of social morality at play too. It is socialism, at least in part, that has brought democratised healthcare and schooling, firefighting and policing. Profit motive thankfully isn't there only social driver.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Andrew Gelman is a wizard

</comment><comment><USER9> I think that the best way to go about this would be to home in on the "random" natural variation and really analyze the noise. Random noise should have very different spectral characteristics than real temperature data, which may have ~decadal periodicity (from the Pacific Decadal Oscillation) or similar non homogeneous frequency content. But with highly down sampled data like this a lot could be lost.

That being said this is basically a Turing test with snippets of conversation selected by an antagonistic mediator. As Gelman has shown, the expected ROI is very low and any climate scientist worth her salt is better off using that effort in the grant proposal contest instead; more money and better odds.

</comment><comment><USER10> Reminds me of [http://www.patrickcraig.co.uk/other/compression.php](http://www.patrickcraig.co.uk/other/compression.php)

</comment><comment><USER11> I'd like to see a graph of the histogram with the three Gaussians superimposed. In this cases, sigma is bigger than the difference of mu, so the overlap of the Gaussians would be big and the series in the middle would be difficult to classify.

This is not as detailed as the analysis in the article, and it doesn´t provide an estimation of the difficulty of the challenge, but it's a nice visual representation of the problem.

</comment><comment><USER12> _You could say that the above all demonstrates Keenan 's point, that you can't identify a trend in a time series of this length._

You could, indeed.

<comment><USER13> You could, but you would be wrong, as the remainder of the paragraph you started quoting argues quite convincingly. Fiddle with the free parameters of the contest and it "demonstrates" whatever you want it to.

<comment><USER12> That's a fair synopsis of the paragraph, but that understanding only supports "Keenan's point". If "parameter fiddling" is out of bounds, we're back to the drawing board for more climate models.

<comment><USER14> Conflating "climate model" with "parameter fiddling" seems like the more significant logical failure.

<comment><USER12> The first link when one googles "climate model parameter":

[https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch8s8-1...](https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch8s8-1-3.html)

<comment><USER14> Nice non-sequitur.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It turns out the fellow who posted the challenge is a crank. Not surprising that it is negative expected value.

<comment><USER12> _Non sequitur!_ Most lotteries and similar contests have negative expected values. The house always wins!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What language is that in the code snippet?

<comment><USER16> Most of them are R, with some Stan mixed in later.

<comment><USER15> Thanks. Stan looks interesting! Seems this guy is a major figure in its development too.

Link: [http://mc-stan.org/](http://mc-stan.org/) ("Stan is a probabilistic programming language implementing full Bayesian statistical inference ")

HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10244771](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10244771)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why doesn't Apple... - <AUTHOR>

create a Wifi-only (in other words, non-3G) iPhone? This would still be highly useful, and would likely persuade <i>millions</i> of cheaper folk to get iPhones. <comment><USER2> They have one: it's called the iPod touch.

<http://www.apple.com/ipodtouch/>

</comment><comment><USER3> That's an iPod Touch isn't it?

<comment><USER4> agreed on this end, especially with all the new voice solutions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The sweet spot for me would be a normal iPhone outfitted with an iPad data plan. (You can do this now if you buy both gadgets and swap the sim. It's a lot of money though.)

Have they added a real gps to the touch yet? I think that's one of the best parts of having an iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you buy your iPhone directly from Apple it cames with no plan (you need to find yourself a telephony provider) and you can use the iPhone with your home Wifi. I suppose you want one for programming and you don't plan to use it as a real phone, no monthly fee for you ...</comment>