Show HN: HackerBooks.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.hackerbooks.com/ <comment><USER2> I like it!

Just last week I had two people email me with similar site ideas to hn- books.com, and when I launched hn-books 2 completely other people emailed me that they were working on similar sites.

Must be something about hacker books that's in the water. Lots of sites with lots of features and such means better resources for all hackers, plus lots of folks getting experiences doing stuff like this. Most excellent!

Since I've done this, I guess I should say something pithy or insightful. I think the trick is the navigation piece. I see you have categories -- that's probably a good place to start. I started with questions, you can go to my main page, click on the hacker-related question you have, and be presented with a sorted list of answers based on your experience. (see <http://hn- books.com/> )

I'm not sure if questions are the way to go either, though, as there are a zillion questions hackers might ask. I'd still like to see somebody come up with some new ideas in this area.

I also ran into the "just what are hacker books, anyway?" question that we get over here all of the time. I finally said screw it, I'll just put things that I believe are hacker-related. But I don't think there's any easy answer to that one, either.

Outstanding site, though! I hope some of these other guys that have spoken to me will post what they've done as well.

<comment><USER3> Daniel, I really like your site and the curated list. However, I find the categories in HackerBooks.com much more easier to navigate than questions on the right side bar of hn-books.

Both of the sites still need to address the question, 'how do I present the categories without requiring too much navigation'. I know it's not sexy any more but how about tag-cloud per major category?

<comment><USER2> Tag cloud might be best.

What I found is that I keep having "feature fever", where I think of all these ways of doing stuff that might or might not have value to the user.

The site database is actually set up for voting -- you can vote up and down books and create your own rankings according to your opinion. But it was another feature I had to kill. I find the hardest thing about building a site is killing stuff. It took me forever to strip out as much as I could from hn- books. Right now I'm a bit shy of starting to put stuff back in. Over and over again it looks like whatever I add -- reviews for tools, a link to get your own Kindle, a new question category, live real-time commenting with social links -- all seems to meet with some resistance from the community. I'm never sure if I'm hurting the community or just making artistic decisions that some small percentage of people don't like.

I really like hackerbooks with the simple categories and multiple books above the fold. One of the emails I got recently was from a guy who set up a "bookshelf" with books on it -- an image of a real bookshelf with what looked like real hacker books sitting on it. That was pretty cool too.

When I set the site up, I consulted with a few HNers about this very issue -- how to sort/filter. Like you, I'm still not happy with where it is right now.

So I'm open-minded, I'm just keeping the bar a bit high for any changes right now. One of the most difficult things I am learning is to separate what might be cool from what might be best. Still working on it. If you guys keep asking for tag clouds, happy to put them in.

EDIT: Bit of trivia, if you hold down "ctrl" and click on questions in hn- books you can apply multiple filters. So say you only had time to read 1 book, but wanted to know as much as you could about "how do I make beautiful web pages" and "How do I tell people about my business". You just ctrl-click on both, then get a list of books that covers both questions: [http://hn- books.com/#BC=0&EC=0&FC=0&Q0=1&Q1=...](http://hn- books.com/#BC=0&EC=0&FC=0&Q0=1&Q1=3&QC=2) Not sure tags would work that way by default (Also this is probably a great example of something I spent time putting in that means absolutely nothing to anybody)

<comment><USER3> Daniel, The ctrl-click feature is really cool. I hear you about feature creep. I am struggling with similar issues with what I am working on. I keep reminding myself _Every piece of software I paid for recently is dead simple to use_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> My wife and I made this site to make it easier to find tech-related books.

It's fairly simple so far and more features are planned.

I'm submitting early on to get some wider feedback. Thanks to all the HNers that reviewed this before today already!

<comment><USER4> Thank you for building this. I admire the simplicity and elegance. Would be cool if the "Mentioned 2 times at Hackernews" was hyperlinked to the mention. Can this be done?

<comment><AUTHOR> It will totally be done :)

Next iteration will be on making the navigation better, so that you can click on everything that's possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting resource. Another related site would be DanielBMarkham's <http://www.hn-books.com/> ...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes I know about Daniel's site, which was released while I was working on hackerbooks.com. I decided to keep working on it anyway, but it took me a fair amount of time to release.

<comment><USER6> I recently registered fivegoodbooks.com with the plans of trying to reduce choice aversion for technical books. i.e. the top 5 referenced books by the community to start learning a subject. This is really nice work, now I'm the one to have to decide if I keep working on it :)

<comment><USER7> Interesting. I had a shower idea(tm) one morning where the combination of a rating and user-supplied biographical data at the time of the rating (e.g. "I was a novice with Python when I read it") determined a book's effectiveness.

The idea was founded on the tendency that people are skill-biased when rating books. They might dislike a book for being confusing or too easy because it wasn't designed for them at the time of reading. This was an attempt to figure out which books were just bad, and which were only rated bad because they were read without proper experience (or too much).

Ultimately, using community data, a visitor would be able to discover a "bookpath" of great resources that syncs up with their level of skill.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had something similar in mind for <http://learnivore.com> earlier on.

I wanted to create a community-edited wiki page providing a "training path" which would involve screencasts, books, articles.

I think it would really be useful actually.

<comment><USER7> Love the site and I intend to use it.

The wiki approach would be great if the data was laid out appropriately. Community-edited wiki _might_ lead to a singular view of what a good path would be.

The benefit of a multi-axis rating system is that you could lay out data using different permutations and add/subtract inputs (e.g. rater's experience at time of rating/age/hell, maybe even personality type). I'm sort of modeling this off of robust scientific questionnaires.

It does seem to require some more user involvement, but nothing a fantastic UI couldn't fix.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you mean hackerbooks.com or learnivore ? (or both ? :-).

I would love to be able to build something like you describe, but I suspect it will be time consuming, that said!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Which is the most quoted book"? or "What are the top 10 among most quoted books"? these were the questions going in my mind, while I'm browsing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just wrote that down, thanks!

I will probably come up with some kinds of list, and will definitely work on better sorting/filtering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Useful, and also a neat way to make some side-cash via your affiliate link. I suspect I'll be checking this regularly.

One thing that would be really handy - or at least interesting - is a "most recently mentioned" list. For example, when people were talking a lot about Program or be Programmed a while back, it would have been fun to see that rise to the top.

<comment><AUTHOR> It may generate some side-cash via the affiliate links - it would certainly be useful to us. We'll see how it goes anyway :)

The most recently mentioned list is a very good idea. I had something similar in mind, like a news-letter that would send the "most mentioned this month", so you can get the trends.

Would you find that useful ?

<comment><USER10> I think it could be useful for sure. Both a most recently mentioned list, and most often mentioned list. I'm more interested in the latter as it is more telling.

<comment><AUTHOR> Overall I must work on making the data more exploreable, definitely.

My pet peeve is allowing to find books quoted by X, where X is some instance of someone I appreciated on HN :)

I think I will create a labs section with various experimentations like these, so people can try them out and see if it's useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> On a slightly unrelated note, are there any UX/UI books that are targetted for programmers? I'm a complete noob with photoshopping and can't create a button to save my life. Working on side projects, this is really annoying.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'd track the comments page. <http://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments>

In this respect you'll see new Amazon links every so often in: <http://twitter.com/hackerlinks> (the tweet will begin with Amazon) <http://hackerbra.in/links>

This site is really a good idea. The Amazon links can get quite popular (I know from looking at my Amazon stats on @hackerlinks when I had the affiliate code inserted.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't know about this page - I'm currently doing a 2-days late crawling, so this will help me make it realtime instead. Thanks!

I didn't know about hackerlinks either - just subscribed!

<comment><USER12> An Amazon link will look like: <http://twitter.com/#!/hackerlinks/status/39864047344029696>

Good luck!

Perhaps I should make an Amazon only Hackerlinks-style feed! Or you could have one coming from your site of new books as they're added!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Awesome site. Is there any way you can add a filter for "free" for ebooks?

<comment><AUTHOR> Should be doable most likely. I added it to the backlog, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a great idea. Simple, yet effective, and well executed.

I wish I'd thought of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Really glad you like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is really nice looking. I am working on a concept that encapsulates part of what you've done here and I would love to have a discussion with you. I'm not ready to launch yet, but will be in a couple weeks. I gotta get moving quickly and you provide good motivation!

Congrats!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm writing to you right now :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> For books published by the Pragmatic Bookshelf, you should link directly to the publisher, in my opinion. PragProg.com sells DRM-free ebooks (in pdf, mobi, and epub) for cheaper than Amazon. They are a great value and I bet the PragProg folks keep more money this way, which is a good thing.

For example [http://www.hackerbooks.com/book/rails-for-net-developers- fac...](http://www.hackerbooks.com/book/rails-for-net-developers-facets-of- ruby/1934356204)

Should link to <http://pragprog.com/titles/cerailn/rails-for-net-developers> instead of Amazon.com.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good suggestion (me being an avid reader of the pragprogs for a very long time).

I'll try to make more "publisher-specific" linking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Awesome site! Verrrry useful for SOers and HNers.

I dont know if there is an API for it or not but if you can get the Amazon rating of a book and display it on the book description page, it will be great. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

On AZ ratings: I wrote that down. It's somewhat complicated because Amazon just made it a bit harder to embed that. It now has to be an iframe; the iframe url must be refreshed every 24 hours.

But overall this should be doable to, I'll see if I can make it usable.

Thank you!

<comment><USER18> I found AZ ratings to be mostly useless, what would be better is the total number HN/SO points accumulated from all the recommendations for that book.

edit: not a mix, but separate points for each community

<comment><AUTHOR> Mmm - a kind of book karma. Something like mixing the karma of the commenter with the heatness of the discussion etc ?

I think being able to filter on SO vs HN would definitely give different results, too.

The topics are sometimes fairly different on both sites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Minor bug report: I did a search on xbox (hoping to see Hacking the Xbox) and the Kinect system came up -- you are probably scrubbing against Amazon and it came up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually currently the search takes both the title and the description into account. The Kinect book has "Xbox" in its description.

Two conclusions:

\- how the search works needs some explanation a bit!

\- I will probably add an advanced search so you can specify exactly how you want the search to occur (eg: ignore the description....)

Thanks for your feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I really liked the site, congratulations. Just because I am a stack freak, can you tell us more about your technology stack and how fun (or not) was to develop this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! See <http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2249639> (I will blog more about that later on as well).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What language/tools did you use to build it?

<comment><AUTHOR> I used: ruby 1.9.2, ETL (extract-transform-load), vagrant, chef, mongodb, redis, sunspot/solr, rails 3, cucumber, rspec.

I plan to write a couple of blog posts explaining the "how" later on! It's been an interesting ride really.

<comment><USER21> Awesome. I recently ordered the well-grounded rubyist as I've heard great things about the book (though its on page #2 on your site). How long did it take you to complete the project?

<comment><AUTHOR> It took much too long: around 300 hours as of today.

But a large part of it (the 2/3rds) was a learning exercise around chef and vagrant, which wasn't necessary to the project.

Of the remaining third, I've got around 70% for data processing in general and 30% on pure front-end code and design.

I really wanted to learn how to deal with sysadmin in a more productive fashion, so I took the plunge :)

<comment><USER21> would be interested to hear your learning experience in sysadmin.

<comment><AUTHOR> Since I started freelancing in 2005 I've always deployed my stacks myself, learning gradually.

I always felt that doing it manually (even using well-written notes) then gradually home-baked tools was a loss of time.

I looked at chef more than a couple of times, waiting for the documentation to be more available, and for feedback from people I know.

I started using chef with the opscode platform, then went back to chef-solo as it really fits my needs already.

I'm using it for client work as well as for everything behind HackerBooks (including Rails app deployment without capistrano anymore).

The consequence is that I can boot a new ubuntu instance from scratch, completely configured with the whole stack (rvm, rails 3, passenger, nginx, solr, god, the properly configured crawler, data restored from a S3-like etc) in less than 15 minutes.

I will never go back to manual sysadmin (apart from small tips) - this really fits my way of working.

But it has been a time-sink to get in :)

Hope I replied to your question properly, if I didn't, ask again!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I like it! You might add links to the questions so people can see from the references what ground the book covers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you like it - it's planned really: you will be able to click on discussions, "quoter", author etc. I will make it more explorable.

<comment><USER22> I'm a nobody, but consider making the pages less clicky and more product page-y, with the external references that provide the structure of your site constituting something of a "topics covered in this book." I think the references/links should be at least as prominent as the book blurb that currently serves to authoritatively describe the contents. My point is that the contents may actually be described (for sufficient numbers of refs) better by listing how people are actually recommending it, how its readers are using it. You could even implement a semantic parser that constructs a new book blurb based on the words and sentences in the recommendations and references. :) Anyway, good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the suggestion!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder sometimes if it'd be worth creating a site that aggregates all the most useful and interesting information from social news sites like Reddit, HN, etc. like this site does for books on HN. I spent a long time finding all the best "life hacks" on Reddit the other day and really found some gems.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well working on this definitely gave me other ideas. I think overall, the online data should be more easily searchable/sliceable, at a user level...

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for creating this!(and thank to the community for voting it up so i could see it)... I've been searching everywhere for book recommendations to help expand my knowledge of NLP and ML, then I suddenly click on this link and there it is! Great site!

</comment><comment><USER25> Wow, good idea. I've browsed it this morning and it's an excellent website. Some things I might add is a link to the context of where the book was cited and also better categorization. (i.e. effective C++ in compiler book). But otherwise, amazing. Thank you

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

I plan to display the actual conversation in some way on the site itself, if I can. Lot of people told me it would be useful.

I will also work on some topic extraction, yes!

<comment><USER26> I agree about the context, very important to judge the value of the suggestion!

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely - thanks for commenting!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Needs more Eloquent JavaScript.

<comment><AUTHOR> Added to my todo list, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Love it! Nice clean and simple without the clutter of non-hacker type books!

</comment><comment><USER29> I'd really love a feature where people could submit exercise solutions for books that don't include them. I find exercises a lot more useful if I have a solution to compare against.

</comment><comment><USER30> Is it possible to sort in different ways? Am guessing it's sorted by latest recommendation at the minute?

I searched PHP and would like to see by # of recommendations...

<comment><AUTHOR> Not yet! But I need to work on more sorting/filtering, definitely.

It's currently sorted (in that order) by 1) textual relevance and second 2) number of quotes.

<comment><USER31> Perhaps you should put a note about this on the result page, as currently it looks like it's random.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great suggestion - note taken :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> You need to adjust your tokenization settings. --Searching for C, C++, and C# all return the same results right now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you - need to learn a bit more of solr to do that. I Will definitely to it!

<comment><USER32> It's probably not too difficult, although my guess is you'll have to refeed your content. Unfortunately I've never worked with solr so I can't offer suggestions on where the modifications need to be made.

<comment><AUTHOR> No worries really - thanks already for giving the feedback.

I know for sure it can be done with some configuration tweaking, not even sure I'll need to reindex.

Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I knew exactly what your site offered and how to use it in the first 5 seconds. Awesome job, nice info layout.

</comment><comment><USER34> I like it. I would love to see the comments without having to click through to hacker news or stack overflow.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's planned! Definitely. You'll be able to read from the site as well as go to HN/SO if you wish (and for proper attribution, too).

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Great tool. Will save me a few awkward google queries site:ac.uk "reading list" x etc

</comment><comment><USER36> I am probably echoing many when I say: Great job! How can we rate individual books?

</comment><comment><USER37> just curious... how do you parse (and find the titles) from SO and HN? Only checking from publishers/distributors links?

Keep the good work. I love it :)

My only suggestion is to offer a ranking and order the results by # of quotes

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you like it! Really :)

On parsing: it's actually a somewhat fastidious process that involve digesting a couple of GB of data, but here is the bottom line.

I look for amazon.com links in the content in general - I will broaden that to other publishers and full-text extraction too later on.

The content itself comes from the StackOverflow dump (for SO) and a mixture of a crawler allowed by PG + the previous database dump that was available at some point.

I extract all the books, quotes, users data from both, conform these into a common schema, and index the whole result.

Hope I answered your question properly - feel free to ask again if you'd wish.

On ranking: I know what you mean! I need to find some way to balance number of quotes with textual relevance, which requires me to dive a bit more into solr. I currently use textual relevance first because it gives more useful results so far.

<comment><USER37> Thanks :)

For ranking, instead of textual relevance (which will be hard to achieve :/) and # of quotes (it can be easily hacked/spammed or new announced books will have a huge weight on the ranking), I suggest you to check timelines: if a book is quoted once/twice/... a month regularly, I'm pretty sure it worths reading it

I'll love to read about the architecture behind the site... yep, technically curious :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I will offer a more advanced search with similar features, definitely!

On the architecture: I'll create a side-blog that will outline all I learned while working on this. It's been a crazy ride actually (especially because I started using chef and vagrant full speed).

I'll post it back here in all cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> You should sort the books by the number of times they have been quoted.

<comment><AUTHOR> That was what I was doing initially, but actually it has (big) sideeffects: if you search Ruby and get the most quoted book, you get... an ASP.Net book!

So I'm currently working on balancing textual relevance (eg: Ruby) with the number of quotes.

Thanks for your feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Thanks for this amazing initiative. Looking forward to more features.

<comment><AUTHOR> I welcome any feedback later on if you have ideas etc (use the form on the top of the site!).

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Have you been inspired by the design/structure of Iconfinder.com?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope! I may have stumbled upon iconfinder once, but didn't use it as a model.

Do you mean you find the sites look similar ?

I wanted to keep the simplicity of Google if I could (hence the input/submit search). Otherwise no strict inspiration from any existing site afaik.

EDIT: I did a closer analysis out of curiosity and the common points are:

\- the dual-color name

\- a google-y search input+button

\- the tagline with the number of items

\- a similar green

Note that I definitely didn't use iconfinder as a model. I guess these are quite common characteristics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I can't see any book details / list now. I haz error 500.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'm diving into it currently.

<comment><USER41> Works now.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've reduced the number of passenger instances, in hope to keep things alive until I can upgrade.

Thank you for mentioning this!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Love it. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER43> This is a great idea, and executed well! Awesome!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words! Really glad you (and others) like it after the time I spent on it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> i would appreciate a link to google books so i can preview the site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you mean some kind of google books widgets or similar ?

I'm not aware of that, can you give more details ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Wicked cool!

<comment><AUTHOR> You make me happy :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Site looks great - really great - on a macro level, but when you get down to it, it doesn't really have the content I'm looking for.

There's extreme misuse of the space on the page. When I was looking at Code Complete (a book I've been trying to get my hands on for a while), there is very little content about the book. The synopsis is cut off (!) and there are no reviews. But if you were trying to save space, why on the hells are there over 9000 books following in "quoted discussions"? You need to switch what you're truncating here. Also, I would suggest at least copying Amazon's ratings for some measure of book quality.

For reference: [http://www.hackerbooks.com/book/code-complete-a-practical- ha...](http://www.hackerbooks.com/book/code-complete-a-practical-handbook-of- software-construction/0735619670)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey - I understand what you mean, really. I really want to work on this specific page, and I'm actually frustrated to have released it this way :)

Here's what's planned:

\- instead of cutting the book description like it's done currently, you'll be able to expand with a click

\- I'll do the same on books and quotes, because hundreds of books are not useful in the "suggested books list", definitely

\- and I want to focus more on getting the actual quotes to the front (eg: allow to read the actual quotes by HNers etc) because I feel it brings significant usefulness

I'm mixed on the Amazon ratings, both because recent API changes made it unpractical to really use the content (it's now an iframe that must be used as is, and refreshed every 24 hours), and because sometimes the reviews are fake as well.

So I'll try to bring more value by letting users know what people think on HN and SO.

Would these points make the site more useful to you ?

<comment><USER46> Definitely yes, though I don't know why it would be necessary to trim the synopsis at all in most cases.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

On the synopsis: well in some (too frequent) cases, the synopsis was just several pages long, so the related books and quotes were really, really hidden.

I need to find a better middle ground.

But in all cases, thanks for your critics, it will only help me make the site better.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Advertising based business - <AUTHOR>

Is it possible (in current economic conditions) to build a sustainable business which derives most of it revenues from advertising?<p>Also, at what scale/user base, assuming minimal cost structures (no marketing/distribution/engineering costs) <comment><USER2> Yes- it is absolutely possible to build an ad supported business in the current economy. The key is to focus on a niche with a readily monetizable and under-served advertiser base for which you can be the best source of new customer acquisition.</comment>


Go 1 Beta App Engine SDK now available - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-appengine-go/IlF2b1K-rXY

<comment><USER2> This is something I've done recently in Go: it's actually an exercise I first read about in an Erlang book. It's the book "Erlang Programming". In the book he describes this exercise: "Implement a simulated world inhabited by carrots, rabbits, and wolves. Rabbits roam this world eating carrots that grow in random patches. When they have eaten enough carrots, the rabbits get fat and split in two. Wolves run around eating up the rabbits; if they manage to catch and eat enough rabbits, the also get fat and split. Rabbits and wolves within a certain distance of each other broadcast information on food and predators. If a rabbits finds a carrot patch, other rabbits will quickly join him. If a wolf finds a rabbit, the pack would start chasing it."

I've written this now in Erlang, and in Scala, and most recently in Go. It took me way more than a weekend, I'll confess.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a side note, I've been wanting to do some exploratory programming in Go to get to know the language for some time now. Can anyone comment on similar weekend-ish projects they've done in Go that they found to exercise the language's strengths and/or unique traits particularly well and would be worth implementing myself?

<comment><USER4> Things I like about Go:

The compilation speed is super fast which makes it feel like you are developing with a scripting language as opposed to a statically typed language. I typically edit code, run the tests and correct my errors without any noticeable time lost waiting.

The Go parser and pretty printer are exposed as a libraries in the Go distribution which allows for interesting meta-programming.</comment></comment>


iPad Air 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://www.apple.com/ipad-air/ <comment><USER2> One of my biggest gripes with apple mobile design is the fact that the camera sticks out from the back of the device, making it unable to sit flat. On a phone it's much less of an issue given the usual one handed use and the fact that the vast majority of people use cases(which I don't so it's still annoying to me) but on a tablet, it's basically a deal breaker for me. If it's meant to be drawn on with a stylus, it should sit flat on a table like a piece of paper.

<comment><USER3> What's peculiar to me is that Apple hasn't released a premium accessory for artists to angle their iPad for drawing.

<comment><USER4> They did. It's called a case.

<comment><USER3> You mean the Smart Folio? Which has only one angle and flexes under pressure as you draw? That doesn't smell like a premium drawing story by Apple, and definitely not very Pro.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is nice to see more iPads move to USB-C.

iPad Pro already did, now the Air has too, just leaves the "iPad" and iPad Mini. This also moves their Apple Pen support to 2nd gen from 1st gen.

<comment><USER6> Hopefully this is also foreshadowing the iPhone moving to USB-C. Lightning is OK, but the thought of being able to standardize on one cable for everything is very, very appealing.

<comment><USER7> Sadly iPhone seems to be moving to zero cables, which means relying on perennially insecure basebands for Bluetooth & WiFi.

EU tried to force Apple to move iPhone to USB-C and their response was to drop all cables.

Hopefully the market rejects zero-port iPhones and Apple finally provides local USB-C for sync, audio, wired ethernet, keyboard, external displays, etc.

<comment><USER6> I don't see Apple ever moving to a cable less iPhone (at least on all models). Wireless charging is no where near efficient enough to charge todays larger phone battery packs with anything resembling decent speed. In a car I doubt my phone would charge at all with the increased heat from sun and heat from inductive charging - heck the phone might shut down; it sometimes does on hot summer days already if I'm not really careful with positioning it.

I do admit that the majority of time I rarely plug it in, but when I do in order to get it topped off as much as I can as quickly as I can, it's really useful. External battery packs? Also very impractical and way more cumbersome.

It's a persistent rumor but I just don't see it.

<comment><USER8> I use a wireless charger/mount in the car, but it mounts in front of the aircon vent, so it charges perfectly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is quite odd for the iPad Air to have the A14 based CPU while the iPad Pro has the A12(Z?) CPU. I know the SOC in the Pro has more RAM and likely a better GPU than he base A12, but it's a really odd mix of processors.

This and the fact that the processor on the iPad Pro only did a half-upgrade earlier this year makes it seem like the Pro is in some weird between state. Certainly if you were on the fence between the Pro and the Air, the case for buying the Pro became a lot tougher.

Aside from the additional RAM, what are the big advantages of the Pro?

* Marginally bigger display. * 120 Hz refresh rate (ProMotion)/ Faster GPU * (Likely) More RAM * Bigger base memory (128GB vs 64GB) * Better cameras/ LIDAR. * FaceID

I guess it's still a pretty decent bump up for the $200 price difference?

<comment><USER10> >>* Marginally bigger display. * 120 Hz refresh rate (ProMotion)

These 2 things are huge for some people, including me. I had been using a 2019 MacBook Pro 13 until I picked up the latest iPad Pro 12.9, mainly for the pencil support (I draw things sometimes). The difference in screens is (to me) ridiculous! The aspect ratio, brightness and 120Hz make the iPad display the best 13" laptop I have ever used. The MacBook Pro looks kinds of sickly & squashed by comparison. It makes me wonder if Apple actually cares about the Mac laptops anymore.

Also, the processor in the iPad Pro is so fast, I honestly don't need any more speed for now[1].

[1] yes, yes, on an infinite timeline...etc...

<comment><USER9> I have the 1st gen 12.9" iPad Pro and love it. For the bigger size, there is obviously no option with the Air. I can believe the Pro display makes a big difference, I suspect this is one of the most under-appreciated advantages of the Pro.

I still find it a bit of a weird time for the Pro though. I'm hoping we'll see a new pro in the spring? Or maybe they'll release it before the end of the year when they put out the new Macs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So now that this is nearly indistinguishable from the iPad Pro, what does that mean for iPad Pro / ARM Mac?

Only Apple knows, but I wouldn't be shocked if the first ARM Mac is a 2-in-1 convertible that replaces the iPad Pro.

<comment><USER12> I always used to think this idea was a non-starter given the many incompatible UX patterns between MacOS and iOS. Then came the ARM announcement, including the mention that Apple Silicon Macs would be capable of running iOS apps, which would point to such a seemingly chimaeric device being inevitable.

How I think Apple will manage it is by keeping the two halves separate. No or minimal touch interactions in MacOS; no Mac desktop in iPad mode. Apple won't repeat Windows 8's fridge-toaster attempt at making a unified UI between desktop and tablet mode, but apps with Mac and iPadOS versions will automatically switch UIs dependent on context.

It will still be an enormous pile of design challenges, but for the first time, I think a Mac-iPad hybrid could actually work.

<comment><USER6> I'd love to see the Pencil come to the Mac! And Big Sur spacing out everything hints at touch probably coming to the Mac.

As a MacBook Air user I'd love an option to restore the previous compact spacing. Maybe it will still come as an accessibility option? One can hope.

<comment><USER13> You can kinda have Pencil on macOS by using Sidecar with an iPad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm kinda surprised (in a good way) that they put the A14 in the Air. But where does that leave the Pro now (with only A12Z)?

Or is the Z part of that processor so much faster that it's still got better performance?

<comment><USER15> Me too! It seems very odd (nouveau?) that Apple is announcing a new A-series chip (A14) with an iPad, rather than an iPhone. Even more so that it's not even a Pro version.

Eyeing the A14 vs. the A12X/A12Z, it look like it could be similar since there's 2 less cores for CPU and GPU but there's also a 2-year architecture improvements plus a node shrinkage from 7nm to 5nm. We'll see once 3rd party benchmarks come out.

This suggests that the new Pro will be significantly better, at least in the chip compartment. Otherwise Apple would've put the A13 to differentiate between the Air and the Pro lineups.

<comment><USER14> > Otherwise Apple would've put the A13 to differentiate between the Air and > the Pro lineups.

Yeah that's what I was expecting. Have any iPads (even pros) even had the latest year's chips before?

I wonder if the plan is to push the iPad Air up a notch into pro usage (would explain usb-c), and also push the Pro up another notch too even more into pro laptop territory.

It will be interesting to see how they peg the iPad Pro VS the new MacBook with apple silicon - which will they want to be more powerful? Maybe it will just be a difference of how much RAM is in there.

<comment><USER15> I suspect so too, the pricing seems to hint at this - the previous gen Air started at $499 whereas this is $100 more at $599. Now this creates a fair big pricing gap between entry level iPad at $329.

Going to be interesting in how Apple positions the new iPad Pro and the new Macbook. Dare they price the Pro higher despite it having iPad OS and not macOS?!

<comment><USER13> > I suspect so too, the pricing seems to hint at this - the previous gen Air > started at $499 whereas this is $100 more at $599. Now this creates a fair > big pricing gap between entry level iPad at $329.

Yeah, I had a base iPad, before moving to a 2019 iPad Air, but with the price increase for the Air, I'll probably skip at least this year and move back to the base iPad series.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks good, but I'll hold out for a similar upgrade in the Mini form factor. I don't see the extra size, weight, and sharp corners as an improvement for reading in bed.

<comment><USER17> If you mean reading in the old-fashioned sense (ie, books), I recommend giving serious consideration to a Kindle Oasis.

<comment><USER18> How are the Kindles with PDFs that may have technical diagrams, like O'Rielly- style instructional books or CompSci textbooks?

I want a device I just use for reading, but I almost exclusively read PDFs of technical books. I'm thinking iPad Air vs Kindle

<comment><USER19> I've found the Kindle Fire to be a pleasant reading device for PDFs and ebooks. It's not an e-ink display, but you do get full color and PDF rendering is good. It's also cheap compared to an iPad, especially if this is your primary use case (I have both an iPad Pro and a Kindle Fire, the Kindle is my main reading device now, the iPad is a portable computer with Scrivener, Blink, Textastic, and Working Copy).

<comment><USER18> Thank you. I still might hold on for an updated iPad Mini because I know I'll get the itch to set up Blink and Working Copy.

<comment><USER19> A nice thing about the Fire is that it's cheap. They had a recent sale going on the Fire HD for $60, I think it's about $100 now. It's not an either-or proposition (at least not for me), more of an "iPad now, Kindle in a month or two" (or reverse depending on your more important use-cases) proposition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Extremely disappointed it doesn't support the apple pen 1st gen. The apple pen 1st gen is still being sold, and I just bought one 2 months ago to work with my "old" 2017 ipad pro. Why force us to spend another $130 for a 2nd gen pencil when the first gen is essentially just as good.

<comment><USER21> The First Gen is not just as good. It has longer latency, no tap sensor, worse ergonomics and critically: no mount magnet or wireless charging. The lightning connector for charging would plug...where?

Type C iPads support Pencil 2, Lightning iPads get Pencil 1

<comment><USER22> > The lightning connector for charging would plug...where?

Into the adapter that comes with it that lets is be connected to any lightning cable for charging?

<comment><USER21> So now the design of the pencil, designed to be plugged straight into the iPad now has users dragging around an adapter, an additional cable (not included with either product) and the pencil that does not store on the device. Pretty clearly this is not how Apple builds things.

<comment><USER22> That's how the Apple Pencil 1 works.

You generally don't need an additional cable because you can use the same cable you use to charge the iPad.

Keep the adapter on that cable when you are not using it to charge something else. Or keep it on the pencil itself all the time instead of the rounded cover.

<comment><USER21> The Statement I was making is that the new iPad does not use that cable, it uses USB-C, meaning that a person who buys the iPad Air 2020 and then sees that they can use the cheaper Pencil 1 with it might be weirded out by the idea that you need a battery bank or power brick or a specific Type C to Lightning cable that comes with none of these devices. It just doesn't work out from a marketing/use standpoint and makes for a worse product in the long run. Plus they can sell more Pencil 2s.

Personally, I don't get why they don't just adapt all iPads to support wirelessly charging the Pencil 2 and get rid of the Pencil 1, it's really quite poor compared to the second gen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Can't wait to see what they have built for laptops with the 5nm fab process. I'm sure this CPU will break some records on its own but a boosted version with more RAM will deliver MacBook Pro level performance.

</comment><comment><USER3> What now differentiates between iPad Pro 2020 ($800) and iPad Air 2020 ($600)? Surely not the sensor.

<comment><USER24> I saw: A14 vs A12 processor, the camera, Touch ID vs Face ID, LiDAR sensor vs no sensor.

I almost regret getting the iPad Pro recently...

<comment><USER25> 120Hz - which I've never appreciated on mine

<comment><USER6> Careful what you ask for. Scroll a 60 and 120 side by side and it's very obvious. And once you see it you may not be able to unsee it.

When LCD TVs first came out I thought people were being overly dramatic with the whole motion blur thing - until I went looking for it. And then I saw it - every time a scene was still, it was in perfect clarity - the the camera panned and everything went fuzzy. Once I saw that effect I couldn't unsee it. 120Hz scrolling is the same for me too.

Ignorance is indeed bliss :)

<comment><USER26> I have both an iPad Air 2 (60Hz) and an iPad Pro 10.5 (ProMotion 120Hz). (I wanted to trade in my Air 2 but saw it wasn't worth much so decided to keep it)

Scrolling is smoother on the latter, but it wasn't appreciable enough that the iPad Air 2 looked bad in comparison. I could continue using the Air 2 without any FOMO.

Maybe it makes more of a difference for artists? (Pencil users)

<comment><USER6> It is indeed a stark difference in latency - I posted this earlier but it's worth repeating:

If you are using a pencil I understand the difference is dramatic. Excellent thoughts from Serenity Caldwell who loves to draw: [https://www.imore.com/promotion](https://www.imore.com/promotion)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Now if they'd just give the iPad Mini the thinner bezel.

A 9" screen on that would be my dream. I take my mini everywhere because of the form factor.

(Also, touch ID integrated into the top button is great)

</comment><comment><USER28> * first they mention "10x faster machine learning" * later they mention "70% faster machine learning"

seems not enough ML applied in the review process ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

<comment><USER29> Who's doing machine learning on an iPad? Unless they mean running the already trained algorithm which I think is a stretch to call machine learning.

<comment><USER30> They clearly said it's about apps leveraging CoreML models to do things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The internet is erupting in a chorus of "How much RAM?" but Apple seems to be keeping quiet about that. Maybe we'll find out from an iFixit teardown.

<comment><USER32> RAM isn't super relevant to iOS devices. Those devices have always managed to squeeze out far more performance with far less RAM than their competitors.

<comment><USER31> From what I'm seeing, most of the people asking are artists and musicians, and the apps they use are more RAM-hungry than the OS itself or the bundled Apple apps. However, I'm not sure what specific apps those are. Maybe they're ports from Windows, and their iOS-native competitors can make better use of GPU and ML hardware acceleration APIs, since those seem to be strengths of the A14 SoC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Apple is back to flat edges (similar to iphone 4s) instead of round

<comment><USER34> For whatever reason, I like the flat edges on phones but not on tablets. I've got a gen 4 iPad Pro with the flat edges and a 1st gen with rounded, and rounded both looks better and feels more comfortable to hold. Meanwhile I wish my iPhone 7 Plus had flat edges.

<comment><USER35> Agreed. The iPad 3 was the best feeling iPad to me. Easy to pick up, easy to hold.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Their new products always make me regret buying their older product line but too expensive for me to upgrade

</comment><comment><USER37> The iPad / Macbook merger seems awfully close. Same CPU, same connectivity. Macbook can run iOS apps.

If I can get an iPad Pro, which I can use as a desktop too. That'd be awesome.

I remember a year or so ago, Apple promoting the iPad or the Macbook as "The last notebook you'll ever buy"

</comment><comment><USER38> Given this, what are some valid reasons for folks to prefer iPad Pro over iPad Air ?

<comment><USER39> If (like me) you like the 12.9" form factor. That being said, I wouldn't buy a new iPad Pro right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> iPad Pro 11" (2nd model) and iPad Air 11.9" 4th gen in comparison:

[https://www.apple.com/ipad/compare/?device1=ipad- pro-11&devi...](https://www.apple.com/ipad/compare/?device1=ipad- pro-11&device2=ipad-air-4th-gen&device3=ipad-8th-gen)

the Pro comes with a better camera (ultra wide), more maximum storage (1TB vs 256GB), slightly higher resolution at same DPI and higher screen brigthness (600 nits vs 500 nits), will be interesting to see how the A14 Bionic (Air) stacks up against the A12Z Bionic (Pro)

<comment><USER3> I wonder if the "pro-motion" high screen refresh technology makes any difference for artists?

<comment><USER6> If you are using a pencil I understand the difference is dramatic.

Excellent thoughts from Serenity Caldwell who loves to draw: [https://www.imore.com/promotion](https://www.imore.com/promotion)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Sigh, the default storage option is still 64GB...

<comment><USER42> Why does the _default_ option matter to you?

<comment><USER19> Because the default option is a poor choice for many (if not most) users, and it's the option used to show the base price. In practice, all prices are $100-150 higher than listed when people actually get around to buying. It's a misleading tactic to get people in the door (so to speak), and then upsell them.

<comment><USER42> I'm not sure I see the problem. What you're saying is it entices people to go to the website only to discover that the one they really want is more expensive than the base model. At which point... I guess they close the browser? No harm done.

<comment><USER19> It's a way of priming people, an element of marketing. You get them in the door (or site) already committed to the purchase because they think they know the price. Then they find out the truth, but they're primed to buy your product and it's easier to sway them to the higher priced "upgrade" (which should be the base, especially in this case, as the base option is too little for many users).

This isn't unique to Apple, many (if not most) companies do the same.

<comment><USER42> But "getting them in the door" is in actuality "visiting a website." It's not like they're pot committed to purchasing anything.

This is a far cry from walking onto a car dealership or something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> With Apple's switch to Arm, is this basically the new Macbook Air in a tablet format with iOS instead of MacOS?

<comment><USER24> That is an accurate description of an iPad, yes.

BTW, Apple "switched" to ARM 13 years ago with the launch of the iPhone.

<comment><USER43> You know what I meant... With Apple's switch to Arm [on Desktop]. But touché on exactitude...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> "all screen design" is kinda pushing it. the bezels look no smaller than the side bezels on a nexus 9.

</comment><comment><USER45> > iPad Air does more than a computer in simpler, more magical ways.

They keep claiming this, but it's still not true, and this is why I'm still on the lookout for a new laptop, and not another tablet.

Tablets, no matter how fancy the hardware, are always let down by their locked down software-platform hellbent on making it an appliance rather than a computer you actually own.

<comment><USER6> Depends on who you are. While I tried the iPad only lifestyle and found it wanting (ended up back with a MacBook Air) it absolutely is true for my father. He never did feel comfortable using computers, but he loves his iPad Pro - it let's him keep in contact with friends, follow news and sports, keep track of his appointments - in other words it's a tool that does things he cares about. He doesn't consider it a computer, nor does he want a computer.

I suspect that there are far more of him than there are of us - which is why having a choice of computing styles is a good thing. It always baffles me when people (not necessarily you, just making general observation) seem to get bent out of shape that every offering doesn't meet _their_ expectations and is thus bunk. Maybe it's not bunk, but just not good for your use case.

Diversity is our strength and all that...

<comment><USER45> Not getting bent, but if what you're selling isn't a computer, don't market it as one.

If some told you you were getting a car, and in the end you are delivered a bicycle, you'd be unhappy.

Obviously that bicycle may be great for a lot of people, it may be the best bicycle ever built... But it's still not a car, so don't sell it as such.

<comment><USER6> But it is a computer. And it's no where near as dramatic as a computer vs. bicycle. I'd pin it more from nimble sports car to full size sedan in variation.

It may not be your definition of a computer, but it does everything my father wanted a computer for - without having the overhead of having to operate and maintain a general purpose computer. In that respect it's FAR superior to a general purpose computer.

If you want to call it an appliance - fine. I'm down with that. Still doesn't make it any less powerful for my dad and what he wants, and doesn't make it any less powerful for the majority of what I do either.

And honestly if text selection would have been better I probably would still be on my iPad Pro. Yes, now they have track pad support for the text selection but I'm not investing in a new keyboard with trackpad for an older iPad Pro. It will be interesting to see if I get an iPad Pro or new laptop first. Multitasking on the iPad is still a bit convoluted so I'm tending to remain in the laptop first for upgrading camp, but I vastly prefer the form factor and flexibility of the iPad Pro.

Thankfully most of my issues with the iPad Pro vs. MacBook are software and they have fixed the vast majority of them with the two iPad OS 13 & 14\. It's nice to have choices!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Touch ID in the locking button is neat but I've seen issues with the touch ID home button dying on previous generations of iPads. Wonder what'll happen with this generation.

<comment><USER47> Never heard of this. We still have some old 5S, 6S and an iPad Air 2 being used as music and cast devices around the house and all of the 1st gen Touch ID buttons still work.

My problem is the placement, I'm using my iPad daily and almost only in landscape mode. That power button Touch ID seems very uncomfortable to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Camera bump. Bleh.</comment>


Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/6250132/Catching-Fire-How-Cooking-Made-Us-Human-by-Richard-Wrangham-review.html#

<comment><USER2> "The circumstantial evidence Wrangham gathers is, if anything, even more compelling. His review of the anthropological literature, for instance, shows that no one, ancient or modern, settled or nomadic, has ever survived for more than a couple of seasons on an exclusively raw diet. Humans, Wrangham says, are as adapted to cooked food as cows are to grass."

The review communicates much about what is interesting about this new book. I've read an earlier book (a collection of articles) that included some of Wrangham's writings, and this whole topic of the evolution of human eating is full of implications for life today, with Wrangham definitely acknowledged as one of the leading authors on the topic.

<comment><USER3> That seems like an interesting anthology. Do you remember the title of it?

<comment><USER2> Evolution of the human diet: the known, the unknown, and the unknowable, edited by Peter S. Ungar. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

<comment><USER3> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Mentioned several times before, so there's already lots of discussion that might be worth checking out:

<http://searchyc.com/human+cooking></comment>


The Anti-Capitalist Software License - <AUTHOR> https://anticapitalist.software/ <comment><USER2> … or "How to make your software unusable with questionable legalese".

Not a lawyer, but I can easily imagine how "An organization of people that seeks shared profit for all its members and does not exploit the labor of non- members" could be interpreted in dozens of different ways, making the use of any such licensed software a very dicey proposition.

<comment><USER3> Pretty sure the authors of that license would consider that a feature actually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > all workers are owners with equal share.

How common is this in worker co-operatives? My guess is "doesn't exist anywhere" \-- I'm guessing there's always some correlation between seniority and ownership share, even if it's just "you have to pass a short probationary period before you're an owner".

It sounds like they haven't really thought this through. Besides seniority -- does someone who's worked there for twenty years really deserve the same share of ownership that someone who started last week does? -- there's also hours to consider: does someone who works ten or twenty hours a week deserve the same share as someone who works forty hours a week? I think most would agree that doesn't really make sense, but the current wording of the license mandates it.

<comment><USER5> > I'm guessing there's always some correlation between seniority and ownership > share

If not then you could trivially fleece them by joining then immediately leaving with your share.

<comment><USER6> Usually in a co-op your shareholding only lasts as long as you are a member

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > An organization of people that seeks shared profit for all its members and > does not exploit the labor of non-members

Sounds basically impossible to me. How do you ensure that you don't exploit the labor of non-members? If you buy as much as even an office chair, or a pencil sharpener, or a carpet, or whatever, there were probably very many people involved and some of them were being exploited in that they were paid a very low amount for their work.

<comment><USER8> To me this sounds pretty much like Mondragon: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation)

Rare, but not outright impossible.

<comment><USER9> Mondragon would not be allowed to use software under this license.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is only worth reading if you take it as a commentary/artwork. If you read it as a real licence it all feels a little bit childish.

<comment><USER11> That's a deserved, but harsh criticism of modern art.

<comment><USER12> Harsh, I agree. But deserved? "Modern art" (in the vernacular sense, rather than the art-history one) seems to me a 'thought-terminating cliché', an excuse to disdain an entire and rather broad field of endeavor without first taking the trouble to engage at all with it.

At least that's how I find I most often see it used. Perhaps that's not what is actually happening here, but nothing I've seen so far distinguishes this example from any other of the type. Nor do I see any reason why this example deserves any more favorable consideration than any other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Part of the genius of the work of RMS- his behavioral issues aside- is the creation out of whole cloth of a legal protocol that is sufficiently precisely defined, sufficiently operationalizable, and sufficiently defensible as to...actually work, to have behavioral impacts in the real world. It is hard to appreciate how incredible an achievement that is.

This license is not that, for all sorts of obvious reasons, which is a shame. Articulating a set of use principles in the extremely broad area the authors have an interest in is not impossible. Not only not impossible, but desirable. Software is leverage, and working to ensure leverage can only be used by the weaker party in any specific context is part of an equity protocol. If such a thing is going to exist, someone has to do the work to define it. One hopes they take a step back and give it another go.

<comment><USER14> Because RMS rested his edifice on the foundation of ownership in the classical sense, something that works and is widespread in the real world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Worth contrasting with other 'Ethos licenses'. There's a really good writeup of 'common' ones here:

[https://coss.media/advent-of-ethos-licensing/](https://coss.media/advent-of- ethos-licensing/)

The most famous is the JSON Good-Not-Evil one.

I particularly like the term 'crayon license' for licenses drawn up by people without experience in writing licenses.

</comment><comment><USER8> I kinda like the idea.

I severely doubt the practically and usability of this.

I would be interested to see an expert lawyers take on how to write this license, so that it could actually work and hold up in court.

<comment><USER16> I've seen comments to the effect that making the license impractical (and non- lawyer-approved) was intended as a way to ensure big companies like Google won't touch it. Not sure how I feel about that as a strategy, but there's a certain logic to it, similar to Crockford's "do no evil" license.

<comment><USER13> It is counter productive.

The GPL is a work of genius in part because it encourages use and propagation.

Creating a stupid license blocks even legitimate users, which prevents the social program from progressing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What about those companies who argue that they don't _seek_ profit, but that they profit anyways.

Also: would this then include Amazon pre-2001?

</comment><comment><USER18> The GPL is not anti-capitalist but it will in some ways stop businesses profiting of your work withing giving back.

I believe all software should be either some variant of the GPL or GPL/Commercial dual. The latter is so a company can choose not to comply with the GPL but still give back to the project (financially).

Anti-capitalism is a strange ideology given recent history. Most flaws pointed at capitalism today actually stem from problems that most capitalists would take issue with (corruption, overregulation, underregulation etc.). The people who built the Soviet Union and other socialist countries weren't stupid, the task is just impossible.

<comment><USER19> Anti-capitalists would argue that those problems (corporatism, money-in- politics, wealth inequality) are inevitable products of capitalism.

Obviously the Soviet model was a failure, but I think it's a bit silly to use the failure of one competing model as an argument that no other model could ever succeed.

<comment><USER20> The Soviet model is not proof that no other model could ever succeed.

However it (and other failed communisms) are proof of particular failure modes. Given that these are the outcomes we know about, they are a reasonable null hypothesis.

Amongst modern proponents of socialism I have not so far seen anyone actually say how those failure modes would be avoided.

<comment><USER19> The failure mode of authoritarian communist regimes was simple. They failed in the same way that authoritarian capitalist regimes like the Pinochet's Chilean government did: the people in power didn't care about the well-being of the general public, and so the economy ultimately collapsed because the needs of the public weren't being met. This is a problem solved by democracy.

Now, if you want to argue that there are problems with economic planning, I'm right there with you. I think that market incentives have historically been a more reliable way of running an economy, and that market socialism [1] is a much more viable alternative than a state-planned economy. But it's worth noting that it's hard to make strong claims about the consequences of economic planning when it's never been implemented in a democratic society.

Regardless, concerns about the failure modes of authoritarian communist states don't really make sense in the context of market socialism, since it involves neither authoritarianism nor economic planning.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> How would this be applied in the case where the user was a wholly-or-partially state-funded organization (that was neither military nor law enforcement)?

[clearly hasn't been lawyer-vetted, but any wild guesses?]

<comment><USER12> At a guess, State or NIAID or NCBI would be permitted to use software with this license - the distinction appears to be that civil government or NGO is allowed, while military or LE is not.

Not, I agree, that this would likely prove enforceable as written, but I think that's what they're going for. And maybe they're _trying_ to elicit a test case? That makes more sense than some of the speculation at hand, I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It doesn't make sense, feels like a teenager approach to the world.

<comment><USER23> Is the GPL not just as teenager-like with its radical openness? Wanting to maintain your values through a software license feels passive and sneaky and awkward, but that's how we do it. And if you value your labor and the labor of others, in a way the GPL does not, why not write that into the license?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Probably doesn't work for many cooperatives that are often a mix of owners and employees.

</comment><comment><USER24> As I read it, an individual is allowed to use this software to seek a profit, so it isn't anti-capitalist at all, at best it's anti-corporatist.

IANAL but I'm just guessing no court would take this seriously.

</comment><comment><USER10> The licence prohibits Law Enforcement use. What does that have to do with Capitalism? I'm fairly sure every socialist/communist/facist country has some form of law enforcement.

<comment><USER25> Laws and borders are just a social construct, we don't really need them.

Even if we do, the community can govern themselves.

<comment><USER26> When the community elects to police itself, if someone volunteers to watch a neighbourhood for a night are they considered law enforcement? If not, why? I recognize there's a difference but this license makes no effort to distinguish between those two things.

And if your starting point for why a term of a license is "we don't need laws", what exactly is the point of having a license anyway?

<comment><USER27> > When the community elects to police itself, if someone volunteers to watch a > neighbourhood for a night are they considered law enforcement? If not, why?

The difference would be that they would be chosen from the community by the community, not external to it and chosen by external actors.

> "we don't need laws"

This confounds laws with law enforcement. The concepts you're missing are consent and cooperation.

<comment><USER28> > The difference would be that they would be chosen from the community by the > community, not external to it and chosen by external actors.

So law enforcement chosen by the community is not law enforcement?

<comment><USER27> It is not what people call law enforcement today, correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Also give the authors background, that's more an artistic take - than a real, well thought, license.

For a "real", pro-freedom AND anti-capitalist software license, please consider GPL 3.

And for a "real", pro-freedom AND capitalism-agnostic software license, consider MIT.

<comment><USER30> > For a "real", pro-freedom AND anti-capitalist software license, please > consider GPL 3.

I wouldn't say that GPL3 is "anti-capitalist". Rather, it's extremely pro- freedom and forces certain behavior on part of the capitalists that they aren't inclined to partake in on their own volition.

<comment><USER29> true

IMHO among the various OS licenses, GPL it's the more inclined toward anti- capitalism. But that's a personal reading.

<comment><USER31> Maybe GPL started as an anti-capitalist license, but in practice it became very much pro-capitalist. It got to the point that GPLv3 and AGPLv3 were split into two licenses to satisfy capitalists.

Among various _properly written and practical_ open source licenses Parity license is probably the most anti-capitalist one.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Future of WordPress Is in Containers - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@trentlapinski/the-future-of-wordpress-is-in-containers-6ec0e27240be#.rdyfvzph2 <comment><USER2> _" So what are Docker containers? Docker containers are a piece of software that wraps around code, system tools, system libraries, and anything else you can install on a server. Using docker containers you can essentially run WordPress like an operating system, and deploy it like an application."_

Can you really run WP like an OS and deploy it like an application, securely with Docker?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes.

We can even save snapshots, and clone existing installs. For example, you could put together a dev install with all your dev plugins, save it, and every time you start a new project simply clone your ready to go dev install for a new project. Or you could take a completed project, clone it, swap out the content and launch it as entirely new website.</comment></comment>


Polar devices Python API and cli (v0.2) - rsc-dev https://github.com/rsc-dev/loophole <comment> rsc-dev This project is under development. New release soon with bunch of additional features. Looking forward for comments.</comment>


Glyphosate shown to disrupt microbiome 'at safe levels', study claims - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/16/glyphosate-shown-to-disrupt-microbiome-at-safe-levels-study-claims <comment><USER2> Glyphosate is linked claimed to cause breast cancer. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23756170](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23756170)

</comment><comment><USER3> The article doesn't link to the paper as far as I can tell. So here's a link:

[https://glyphosatestudy.org/wp- content/uploads/2018/05/MICRO...](https://glyphosatestudy.org/wp- content/uploads/2018/05/MICROBIOME-GLY-PILOT-IN-PRESS-8-5-1.pdf)</comment>


Connecting the dots: 100k protein network graph using - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/connecting-dots-100k-protein-network-graph-using-ai-kamil-tamiola/ <comment><USER2> I'm going be a little blunt here (so , sorry for the skeptical review).

I think we're still stuck with "network hairballs" dealing with large gene/gene or protein/protein interactions. The video is very pretty ... but has little actionable information.

The workflow is impressive and the navigation ~appears~ to be quick but I have no idea what the nodes and graphs mean.</comment>


Why California Keeps Having Blackouts - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-california-keeps-having-blackouts-11598198401 <comment><USER2> Probably the same reason that there were blackouts during Enron's time: 'scarcity' means that prices can be raised.</comment>


Optical illusions that flummox computers - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2017/4/12/15271874/ai-adversarial-images-fooling-attacks-artificial-intelligence <comment><USER2> I'm finishing a survey paper that discusses research with adversarial examples plus about 9 or 10 other attacks on or weaknesses of neural networks (and machine learning models in general). Overall conclusion is: much like the early Internet, we're rapidly advancing towards machine learning tech that works but isn't secure. And 20 years later, we're still trying to make the Internet secure...

If neural networks are here to stay, maybe we should slow down their public deployment for a moment and understand them better first. It would be ideal to find fundamental structural/algorithmic changes that can harden them rather than relying on heuristics or other "wrappers" to make input/output safe to use in autonomous environments. The more that is "extra", the less those security features will be implemented. (We see this rampantly on the web today with HTTPS.)

<comment><USER3> Worse is better. Sure, making the internet safe from the start seems technically superior, but I guess that it would have delayed adoption so severely we wouldn't have come out ahead.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. Which is worse overall? No Internet? Or a hopelessly insecure internet?

Should we wait till something is perfect before we deploy? Should we hold back on self driving cars until the tech is completely foolproof? What about the number of accidents/deaths that could be prevented by even a flawed autonomous car?

Sometimes insecure and imperfect now is better than delaying a technology years until it can be 'perfected'.

<comment><USER5> This is a fundamental problem with statistical approaches like NNs: we currently have no good idea when our how they will fail; it's the explanation problem.

Putting a great deal of reliance on a system in that situation seems like a great mistake. "It looks like it works under normal circumstances" is not very reliable.

<comment><USER6> Devil's advocate: suppose humans succeed only 99% of the time, but we can understand and characterize the 1% of failures fairly well. Now suppose machine learning-based approaches succeed 99.9% of the time and only fail 0.1%, but that 0.1% is for totally unknowable reasons. Is the former better than the latter?

It's fun to imagine someone constructing adversarial examples to cause self- driving cars to crash. But is that really a big deal? Humans can just as easily be tripped up by an "adversarial" example: I can pretty easily point a laser pointer from my window at random humans driving a car. The legal system has well-defined mechanisms for dealing with this.

<comment><USER5> Collectively, we have a lot of experience with the foibles of our visual system (to the extent that we don't notice what it does poorly, which is a problem, too). Further, we've arranged civilization to play to its strengths, which is one of the reasons we're so interested in facial recognition.

The recognition systems look like they are doing the same thing we are, but they're not. Adding an adversary taking advantage of the difference is just sauce on top of the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> TLDR: high-energy (sudden changes from one pixel to the next) overlays "fool" AIs. If you think about it you can see why : they change the statistical properties of an image a lot "without" disturbing it.

Less so, obviously, if you do something like downsample it or otherwise soften or ... with filters first. Nor do they fool neural networks with attention (they simply at some point decide it's not worth looking at and identify the picture by something else).

And the ridiculous example given does not work without being able to read the mind of the neural network (the misidentified panda).

Most neural network classification mistakes are "understandable" (e.g. look at the misidentified carousel). These are really 99.99% or more of the total mistakes make. Also that network probably needs more Indian elephants in it's training set (kids make stupid mistakes classifying animals they've never seen or only seen very few times as well [1]).

Given how a lot of animals look, I wonder if this doesn't work on "real" brains as well. I for one have trouble seeing zebras in pictures, and it's of course not for lack of contrast. Counting them or accurately judging distance is just out of the question. But many animals look way more colorful and contrast-rich than seems advisable, from chickens, of course peacocks, to ladybugs.

A number of optical illusions seem based on high contrast patterns being included in images. Especially if, like in the examples here, the high contrast patterns don't line up with the objects in the image (e.g. moving a vertical and horizontal slit filter over an image and you will not be able to see through it, however in any freeze frame you won't have that problem).

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnJ8UpvdTQY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnJ8UpvdTQY)

</comment><comment><USER8> Burying the lede:

> The fact that the same fooling images can scramble the "minds" of AI systems > developed independently by Google, Mobileye, or Facebook, reveals weaknesses > that are apparently endemic to contemporary AI as a whole. [...] "All these > networks are agreeing that these crazy and non-natural images are actually > of the same type. That level of convergence is really surprising people."

<comment><USER9> This isn't surprising to me at all, since these systems are only "developed independently" in a very narrow sense. Each company may have it's own implementation (Tensorflow vs. Torch, etc) but they are implementations of nearly identical underlying models, namely deep convolutional neural networks. We shouldn't be surprised that they all agree since they are all the same under the hood, probably even down to the level of choice of hyperparameters (stride length, filter size, etc) since there is plenty of research on what kind of deep net works best on particular applications.

<comment><USER2> That would be convenient, but even when the machine learning models are implemented differently, as long as they accomplish the same task, the attacks often transfer from one to another. Papernot et al.'s latest research suggests that it is the space of the embeddings within a network, rather than the weights and nodes themselves, which define the effectiveness of adversarial examples. Models which accomplish the same tasks often have spaces that overlap, and that overlap multiplies by dimensions, if I read it right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In nature, the natural neural network called brain seems to weigh in the information from multiple sources instead of relying on just one. Not just in terms of number of sense but even for the same sense. Vision for example: it gets input from 2 eyes and if the data between the two is too inconstant, it sometimes drops it.

The machine learning systems will probably use similar tricks at some point. You might need to double the resource needed to process data twice or more, but you end up with a harder to fool systems. At least with the current adversarial attacks.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

[0] [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/two-eyes-two- view...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/two-eyes-two-views/)

[1] [http://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/story/20150130-how-your- ey...](http://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/story/20150130-how-your-eyes-trick- your-mind/)

<comment><USER11> Even the human brain often gets things catastrophically wrong. The problem is that it's only evident when it happens to other people, not so much when it happens to you. And if you're surrounded by people all of whom have the same bug in their wetware, then it gets _really_ hard to tell.

<comment><USER12> This is a really interesting avenue to explore. How easy is it for humans to misunderstand something such that it leads to "catastrophic" failures. Here, a catastrophic failure could be something as simple as a huge fight between two people for a simple misunderstanding. If humans can have "breakdowns" based on simple misunderstandings, what are the cascading effects from a simple misclassification that can happen?

<comment><USER11> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_war](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_war)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What happens if you train the system with these optical illusions in place, as well as the original images? Will it become harder to find new illusions? Or will illusions always be able to trick the system no matter how many illusions you trained with?

Remark: I noticed that even a watermark in the lower-left of the image (as you see on TV) can totally mess up DL prediction.

<comment><USER2> This is called "adversarial training" and is ineffective because of transferability. Also the space of adversarial examples is thought to be large (especially as dimensionality increases), making robust adversarial training intractable in practice. See [https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6199](https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6199) and [https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.05328](https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.05328)

<comment><USER13> Interesting, what do you mean by transferability?

<comment><USER2> Training a model on adversarial examples essentially is a type of "gradient masking." ([https://blog.openai.com/adversarial-example- research/](https://blog.openai.com/adversarial-example-research/)) A model trained on one set of adversarial examples in an attempt to harden it against all adversarial examples is still vulnerable to adversarial examples produced from a totally separate model that performs the same task.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The real issue here is that imagenet doesn't have enough funny glasses. Same reason detection networks will think that gravel is broccoli, a network learns just enough to distinguish between the categories it's presented.

Improvements in datasets, transfer learning, and online learning will help. Unfortunately this underscores the issue that giants such as google have more pictures of funny glasses than anyone else...

<comment><USER15> No, that's not the only issue (it's not just that it doesn't have enough adversarial samples), as you would know if you'd read the papers involved.

<comment><USER14> The central issue is that networks are trained on a limited database of images (usually imagenet) and then frozen in time. Going beyond this involves evolving the nature of networks, and there's nothing the human brain can do that can't be done.

The design of networks is limited by the dataset, since researchers are just trying to hit the metric for the dataset. Better datasets will lead to better networks. Better data eventually means billions of cameras, for example.

<comment><USER16> The issue is that the networks are using a trivial, nonessential stimulus feature to base classification decisions on. It's like basing the decision on a very small-eigenvalue feature eigenvector. That could be a training set issue, or it could be something about the network structure.

The article was kind of interesting to me because it reveals that networks are probably sometimes making decisions on highly discriminating but non-essential stimulus features.

It's like the networks might have a high success rate with large number of replicated examples, over sample size, but not over a large number of distinct examples.

They're overfitting, but in a way that isn't immediately obvious because the test stimuli tend to be limited.

My guess is the answer is to incorporate into the training set a lot of quasi- random or structured but abstract images as controls for training.

<comment><USER14> Yes exactly, they just barely work for the examples shown them. It is caused by the training set, the network structure, and the metric which are all intertwined.

The design of the network is a direct consequence of the dataset+metric because researchers focus on accuracy scores against the test data. Given a better dataset and metric, researchers will solve it with a better network design. I guarantee it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> " _To add to the difficulty, it's not always clear why certain attacks work or fail. One explanation is that adversarial images take advantage of a feature found in many AI systems known as "decision boundaries." These boundaries are the invisible rules that dictate how a system can tell the difference between, say, a lion and a leopard. A very simple AI program that spends all its time identifying just these two animals would eventually create a mental map. Think of it as an X-Y plane: in the top right it puts all the leopards it's ever seen, and in the bottom left, the lions. The line dividing these two sectors — the border at which lion becomes leopard or leopard a lion — is known as the decision boundary._ "

I am not sure I buy this theory. Moving an image across a nearby boundary shouldn't result in the image producing a _higher_ confidence value, should it?

I'm thinking of the panda/gibbon example in the article.

<comment><USER17> Yes, that's exactly what it does.

By shifting it a few points across the boundary, it creates a higher confidence that X is actually Y instead of X.

The problem is that without studying the neural network and trying out different inputs and seeing the results, it's hard to figure out exactly what will shift things across the boundary. Even if you could get the same starting data set and attempt to train your own, you don't necessarily know which data was used for testing vs validation.

You'll likely come up with similar boundaries but not the same therefore you don't know the effectiveness of your adversarial approach until you actually try it against that particular system..

<comment><USER5> But how do you go from 60% certainty that it is an A to 90% certainty that it is a B?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Uhhh, this has me a little worried that they are digging in territory that could contain basilisks. Humans are neural networks. Please do not generalise a means of hacking me? Thank you and much obliged.

<comment><USER19> Neural networks have very little in common with how our brains work

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> "My, what a shiny red motorbike."

Totally what happens inside of a NN :D

</comment><comment><USER21> You know you probably could extend this to AI magic tricks, where you are able to make certain objects do things they are not supposed to, perhaps with an AI viewing video.

</comment><comment><USER22> Note that to generate perturbations you need access to the underlying model. The attack is just optimising towards a specific class with added cost for visual differences.

<comment><USER2> That's not entirely true:

> If we transfer adversarial examples from one model to another model trained > with one of these defenses, the attack often succeeds, even when a direct > attack on the second model would fail [PMG16].

[http://www.cleverhans.io/security/privacy/ml/2017/02/15/why-...](http://www.cleverhans.io/security/privacy/ml/2017/02/15/why- attacking-machine-learning-is-easier-than-defending-it.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Clever 2 level pun with "Hi" hidden in the Magic Eye <-> Magic-AI.

</comment><comment><USER24> More blatant "SEO walks into a headline" jokes, anyone?

</comment><comment><USER25> But these aren't optical illusions!

<comment><USER26> They are for image classifiers.

<comment><USER25> It's anomalous data for half-baked, fault-intolerant software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Actually a pretty interesting article.

The ease at which you can 'fool' machine learning right now adds an additional layer to practical machine learning in the wild - risks from malicious attacks.

Imagine someone putting up a lawn sign that tricks self driving cars into seeing something that isn't there and applying the wrong behavioral pattern because of it. Or even simpler, someone taping a sticker over the self driving car's cameras that cause erratic behavior. Can have really bad consequences and seems really simple to do.

<comment><USER28> I wrote a bit on this subject just last week, each paragraph mentions the problems of increasingly uncontrolled environments, finishing up with actively hostile environments like the examples you just mentioned.

[http://www.aomartin.co.uk/what-robots-can-and-cant- do/](http://www.aomartin.co.uk/what-robots-can-and-cant-do/)</comment></comment>


Federal sites leaked the locations of people seeking AIDS services for years - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/11/07/federal-sites-leaked-the-locations-of-people-seeking-aids-services-for-years/ <comment><USER2> Highly misleading title.

Nothing was leaked. The entire article is about apps not using HTTPS and the theoretical risk that could impose.

I agree, they should be using HTTPS, I just disagree with the misleading way the journalist has framed the topic in order to mislead the uneducated as to the implications/risks.</comment>


Timidity Does Not Convince - <AUTHOR> http://prog21.dadgum.com/35.html

<comment><USER2> This reminds me of the "Shut Up and Code!"-argument when it comes to comparing programming language features.</comment>


The war between Los Angeles and its mountains (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/64/the-unseen/los-angeles-should-be-buried-rp <comment><USER2> This explains how the debris basins and flood control channels manage the mud and sand that flow out of the San Gabriel mountain foothills. Los Angeles County spends many millions of dollars cleaning and maintaining these structures during heavy rain years, especially after fires have burnt the hillsides.

I've always felt that the people who live right up against the mountains, the people with nice expansive homes in the foothill communities, are effectively subsidized by the rest of the county. OTOH, those people pay a bigger price in terms of insurance and fire risk.

Still, that foothill real estate is expensive. Maybe they should be taxed more heavily??</comment>


Resistance is futile - <AUTHOR>

$ curl -About sonsuzdongu.com | aplay <comment><USER2> playing in bits and pieces, each one less than a second. better is to store it somewhere and then play

$ curl -About sonsuzdongu.com > temp

$ aplay temp</comment>


Covid-19 Report on ICU Outcome of 2561 patients in the UK - <AUTHOR> https://www.icnarc.org/DataServices/Attachments/Download/76a7364b-4b76-ea11-9124-00505601089b <comment><AUTHOR> Very TLDR: If you're unlucky enough to get into ICU because of Covid-19, your average survival odds (life/death) are about 76/24 for 16-49yo , 54/46 for 50-69yo , 32/68 for 70+yo. Odds get worse if you're male and obese with comorbidities. And odds get terribly worse if you get to the invasive respiratory support stage (intubation/ECMO).</comment>


Renaissance's Medallion hiked investment caps 50 percent after Trump's election - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-16/renaissance-s-medallion-made-stunning-shift-after-trump-election <comment><USER2> It's interesting that the Medallion fund generated an 11.6 percent return during the first six months of this year, lower than the gains of 21 percent and 18 percent during the first halves of 2016 and 2015, respectively. It's also only marginally better than what a passive investment in the SP500 during that same period would have returned.

<comment><USER3> That makes sense. The point of investing is not to beat the market in any given year, but to minimize losses. The market in general is doing fantastic right now, so it's hard to beat even for Rennaisance. But when the downturn comes you can bet they'll be ahead of the game.

<comment><USER4> What makes you confident in this fund in particular vs the rest given that in aggregate they can't beat the market? The history of past returns I assume?

<comment><USER5> I don't have a source on this but from what I read they returned ~80% in '09.

From the research I've done on them, they generally make tons of very small bets on assets they think are mispriced. Generally speaking, when volatility goes dramatically up is when more assets are mispriced thus leading to larger gains for them. However, we've seen historically low volatility so it makes sense that they're not returning as much right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article from a year ago, summarizing Millenium's history and culture, was a fascinating read as well. It certainly sounds like a place packed with geniuses, but I can't help but notice that it also sounds eerily similar to LTCM.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-21/how- renai...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-21/how-renaissance- s-medallion-fund-became-finance-s-blackest-box)

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

<comment><USER7> Considering how well-connected they probably are I bet they can augment their genius with some insider knowledge from time to time.

Some years ago I knew some Wall Street guys and they all pretty much said that the successful traders have information that's not available to the rest. Some get greedy and get caught but the others are just a little more subtle.

<comment><USER8> Impossible to know as an outsider, but it's interesting to me that Simons tried pretty hard to isolate Renaissance from Wall Street & other hedge funds. He hired people out of academia, saddled them with an extremely onerous non- compete agreement, and was leery of Wall St. traders because he figured if they left their current fund, they'd leave him, too, once they learned the secret sauce. And he put the headquarters in Long Island, away from the loci of Greenwich and Wall St.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> RenTech is unparalleled and Medallion has proven itself for decades.

This interview with Jim Simons is fantastic: [https://youtu.be/QNznD9hMEh0](https://youtu.be/QNznD9hMEh0)

<comment><USER10> Very interesting guy! They should show this to every high school in the USA. Teacher: "See this, that's why you need to learn math!"

<comment><USER9> Jim founded an organization, Math for America, to help: [http://www.mathforamerica.org/about/board/james- simons](http://www.mathforamerica.org/about/board/james-simons)

(This story appears to have nothing to do with Trump, despite the headline.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's amazing how a fund's focus switches from when it makes money collecting management fees from other people's money to when it only invests the partners capital:)

There aren't too many funds out there who actively give back capital on a quarterly basis to investors to ensure they aren't over capacity, and the ones you do hear about are usually shutting down a fund or kicking out the outside money all together.

> The firm told staff that they would be allowed to increase their Medallion > stakes by at least 50 percent. The catch: they had just weeks to come up > with the money.

This seems a bit punitive to the "rank and file" employees as if RenTech is like any other fund then...

\- most of the executives probably have orders of magnitude more money in the fund already so a flat 50% increase benefits them alot more.

\- its much easier for someone will 100's of millions in existing assets to get a loan in a week than someone with single digit millions or less.

As a side note, the link in the article was posted before but its still a terrific article if you want a look at RenTech

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-21/how- renai...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-21/how-renaissance- s-medallion-fund-became-finance-s-blackest-box)

Just for fun RenTech just filed their 13F here are positions they sold or reduced:

AMD US (Advanced Micro Devices Inc), CVS US (CVS Health Corp), PCLN US (Priceline Group Inc/The), TEVA IT (Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd), TSLA US (Tesla Inc), AET US (Aetna Inc), CMCSA US (Comcast Corp), FB US (Facebook Inc), MRK US (Merck & Co Inc), PX US (Praxair Inc),

and positions they added:

ADSK US (Autodesk Inc), AIG US (American International Group Inc), MCK US (McKesson Corp), PFE US (Pfizer Inc), WDAY US (Workday Inc), BMY US (Bristol- Myers Squibb Co), CL US (Colgate-Palmolive Co), DPZ US (Domino's Pizza Inc), EA US (Electronic Arts Inc), NVDA US (NVIDIA Corp)

Top holdings: NetEase Inc.-ADR: up 456,300 shares, to 2.73 million valued at $819.5 million

Johnson & Johnson: down 970,500, to 6.13 million valued at $811.2 million

Bristol-Myers: up 7.02 million, to 13.5 million valued at $751.6 million

Gilead Sciences Inc.: up 2.7 million, to 10.4 million valued at $736.7 million

Colgate: up 2.9 million, to 9.75 million valued at $723 million

The hedge fund manager's disclosed holdings rose 9.5 percent in value in the second quarter to $78.3 billion. The Standard & Poor's 500 index advanced 2.6 percent.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. I wonder what (if anything) the 13F means for a company like RenTech. Who knows how long they hold positions for (minute or less, or days and beyond), perhaps this could have just been a snapshot of an instant, or no? I ask this, since humans apparently do not trade there, they are not like a more traditional fund like Appaloosa, where humans decide when to get in/out of a position.

<comment><USER12> RenTech is not a fast-twitch fund, they generally hold their positions for a significant period of time.

<comment><USER13> Even if you were to subscribe to that notion, it's still on a quarter lag.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone understand how too much money in the fund can lead to diminishing returns?

<comment><USER15> Eventually you go from playing the market to BEING the market.</comment></comment>