I 3D-printed every bit of my wedding, including my bouquet - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612486/i-3-d-printed-every-bit-of-my-weddingincluding-my-bouquet/ <comment><USER2> I designed our wedding rings and had them 3D printed by Shapeways (they use a lost wax casting process for precious metal objects). It's pretty cool having a one-of-a-kind piece, plus knowing that if anything ever does happen to the ring, it can be easily replaced.

<comment><USER3> What software did you use to model the rings?

<comment><USER2> I used AutoCAD, but that's mainly because I was already moderately familiar with it, and thanks to my university affiliation it was free. Gotta respect the "hook 'em while they're young" business model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't know squat about 3D printing. Is the plastic biodegradeable, otherwise you end up replace things (like the bouquet) with things that aren't recyclable / don't biodegrade ?

<comment><USER5> PLA Filament (The most common type in personal 3d printing) is technically compostable, but realistically will likely end up in a landfill due to inadequate disposal practices in most waste management systems.

[https://serc.berkeley.edu/compostable-plastics-are-they- play...](https://serc.berkeley.edu/compostable-plastics-are-they-playing-you/)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the info. When 3D printing started to blow up I brushed it off due to the plastic waste I would produce. I need to look into it again it seems.

<comment><USER6> Also, certain types of 3D printable materials are reusable, if you put in the effort.

[https://3dprint.com/42595/extrusionbot-cruncher- recycle/](https://3dprint.com/42595/extrusionbot-cruncher-recycle/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is interesting, though the environmentalist in me can't help but think about how much plastic that is...

<comment><USER8> PLA, the most common 3d printing material, is made from cornstarch and is biodegradable under the right conditions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love the idea. I know it's a bit far out for desktop printers, but there have been articles about people 3D printing dresses even. That would have been cool to print your own wedding dress.

<comment><USER10> That's what I expected. I printed "every part" of my wedding, except 90% of everything there...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That is a cool idea. That way you can save your flowers more easily. We had a nice floral bouquet, but I'll tell you 6 years later that the ones we saved show the effects of age!

</comment><comment><USER12> I highly recommend others to do this if you have the time. Printers are dirt cheap nowadays (relatively). I designed and printed our cake topper. We painted each other's topper which was super fun. My wife crocheted all the boutineers and crosages. It was great since they were soft enough to be handled but sturdy enough to last probably our lifetime.

</comment><comment><USER13> Cool story, but I'm still not totally sold on 3d printers. Could you not achieve the exact same effect with traditional arts and crafts like origami? I'm sure if you want to spend 75+hours building a bouquet, an origami one would probably be way more impressive and even biodegradable, no?

<comment><USER8> Presumably that 75 hours is mostly just setting things to print and leaving it. Fdm 3d printing is rather slow. But you just need to check on it periodically to make sure things haven't gone haywire.

Also, the most common 3d printing material, PLA, is biodegradable, at least with the right conditions, as it is made from bio materials like cornstarch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is actually a happy story, for a moment I was worried that the person got everything 3D-printed before they even got married.

</comment><comment><USER15> Love everything but the landfill

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm getting married next month and my fiancée and I have prepared all the decorations ourselves. I designed and 3D printed table number stands and the cake topper while she added the finishing touches with spray paint. Highly economical and a lot of fun!

<comment><USER17> I agree with lots of fun; though economical I'm not so sure about

* and good luck with the wedding!

<comment><USER18> > _though economical I 'm not so sure about_

It probably is, if the alternative is trying to get something suitable without having sellers/providers realize you're shopping your wedding, to avoid immediate quadrupling of prices.

<comment><USER19> I would disagree due to the sheer amount of time it takes to print everything. 3D printers are still slow.

<comment><USER18> That matters only if you pay someone else for machine time. If you own a decent 3D printer, you just leave it on and occasionally fix whatever issue is messing up the ongoing print.

<comment><USER19> Except that requires you to babysit the printer. There isn't a "good" way of monitoring longer prints. Either you spend time just sitting next to the printer constantly, or you walk away and pray it works.

<comment><USER18> True, but that reduces the problem to "not possible for everyone". If you work remotely, and have a printer next to your computer, it's entirely doable. My coworker set up his printer at his parents' house, and built a system for remote control & monitoring, including a camera pointed at the print bed. He does remote prints this way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I 3D printed my bride.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is pretty much the least interesting use of a 3D printer I can think of.

It's about as interesting as walking into some tourist trap souvenir shop and discovering that all the key chains and coffee mugs are 3D printed.

You want me to get excited about 3D printing?

Stop making me pay $1000 for cell phones.

Stop making me buy expensive new data cables every 3 years because the plugs are different all over again.

Stop charging $90 for $2 shoes at the factory outlet down the road and just let people print them for $10.

Stop printing action figures and chess pieces.

I don't need another paper weight or bottle opener.

Help me print an entire apartment full of livable furniture wouldn't be slightly embarrassing to reveal to people.

Put a roof over my head. Give me a car to drive. Let me quit my job and just print all the status symbols I'm supposed to be chasing.

<comment><USER22> I feel like you're ascribing a lot of sci-fi dreams to a technology that lets you work with (mostly) plastic without molds. Like these things aren't replicators.

<comment><USER23> It's more like, hey wow, look at all these little trinkets that don't really change anyone's lives.

In the long run, 3D printing just seems like a niche, elitist version of hoarding.

Fill your house with arts and crafts that serve no practical use, other than to occupy space, break up a fear of the void.</comment></comment></comment>


Contextual RNN-GANs for Abstract Reasoning Diagram Generation - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.09444 <comment><AUTHOR> A dogs classifier can be thought of as training a predicate DOG(X), where X ranges over image fragments. Is there any research on training n-ary or nested relations?

I can already train something like OVER(CUP(X), TABLE(X)) as an ordinary classifier. But OVER() wouldn't generalize to predicates other than CUP or TABLE, and it couldn't take independent image fragments: OVER(CUP(X), TABLE(Y)), where X < Z and Y < Z, where < means (rectangular?) subset.

I'd like to train a GAN or similar to generate an image that satisfies arbitrary formulas in predicate logic, with a dataset of images that are tagged with formulas. Anyone have any ideas for that?</comment>


Five hundred goats save the Ronald Reagan library from wildfires - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/31/goats-save-ronald-reagan-library-wildfire <comment><USER2> Now that is a constructive, thinking-outside-of-the-box solution.

Maybe something the rest of CA can be inspired from?</comment>


Google Talk: Retire Today And Do Everything (May 5th) - <AUTHOR> http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2007/05/retire-today.html <comment><USER2> I'm halfway through Tim's book.I recommend it but there is a little 'get rich quick' vibe which I'm sure Tim wasn't trying to include. Is watching a 56 minute video included in that 4 hours of work per week?

</comment><comment><USER3> The blurb reads, "Authors Tim Ferriss (4-Hour Workweek) and Marcia Alboher (One Person/Multiple Careers) give an hour-long talk at Google about how to retire immediately or have multiple careers simultaneously."

My question is: given that their talk was one hour, what did they each do with the remaining three hours of their work week?

</comment><comment><USER4> I can definitely relate to the slash lifestyle: Architect/Software Developer/Sailor/(Overheated Biker) etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> did anyone else notice that this is a YouTube video that is way way more than 10 minutes (56:45 to be precise).

they must be making exceptions to the 10 minute upload limit.

<comment><USER6> I have noticed a lot of exceptions, some not even obviously related to youtube/google. Perhaps they have some hidden premium user function

<comment><USER7> There are "Director" accounts or something on YouTube and they have higher limits.</comment></comment></comment>


Launched on HN, got a load of great feedback that we've acted on. Now need more - <AUTHOR> http://ultimategiftlists.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys,

I posted on HN 10 days ago - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4864978> \- about our site. It is a way for you to create giftlists and to find gift ideas in an easy way.

We got a lot of great feedback from you guys that we've tried to act on. \- A proper About Page - Make the giftmark bookmarklet more obvious - Improve the sign up process - More categories and products - Easier way to save a list - Image optimization - General look and feel.

So now we are back for more - we wondered if you had any more feedback for us. If not, no worries. Thanks again and have a great Christmas..

</comment><comment><USER2> The page is blank when scripts are disabled. There's no excuse for not displaying even a "Hey, our site is cool and does this and that, but you need Javascript to use it!" message.

</comment><comment><USER3> HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable.</comment>


How to hire programmers - <AUTHOR> http://patmaddox.com/blog/how-to-hire-programmers

<comment><USER2> What does "pair with remaining candidates" mean?

<comment><USER3> I presume pair programming, putting the candidate at a desk with a shared keyboard and monitor and rely heavily on feedback from the evaluating partner.

<comment><USER2> Pairing two candidates against each other? That sounds pretty bizarre.</comment></comment></comment>


AWK live editor: like JSFiddle for AWK - <AUTHOR> https://awk.js.org/ <comment><USER2> Would be nice to raise a PR to have this added to gskinner's regexr ([https://github.com/gskinner/regexr/](https://github.com/gskinner/regexr/))</comment>


German University hospital conducted 192 autopsies on Covid-19 deaths - <AUTHOR> https://annals.org/aim/article-abstract/2765934/autopsy-findings-venous-thromboembolism-patients-covid-19-prospective-cohort-study <comment><AUTHOR> Due to the surprisingly high number of thromboembolic events they recommend prophylactic Heparin treatment even for ambulatory care COVID-19 patients.

</comment><comment><USER2> Seems to be 12 patients, not 192. Typo in your title?

<comment><AUTHOR> They actually conducted over 190 autopsies, the study is about the first 12 cases.</comment></comment>


How Software Companies Die - <AUTHOR> http://www.zoion.com/~erlkonig/writings/programmer-beekeeping.html

<comment><USER2> I can't count the number of articles like this that I have read. I reject the idea that these old anti-social trolls are the only ones capable of sustaining a company. That all young hungry people are bad and we noble veterans are constantly getting the short end of the stick.

Furthermore the article is clearly biased and relies on purely anecdotal evidence. Perhaps it's the authors inability to work with others and cope with younger coworkers success which is the problem.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The article is not about young vs old, or veterans vs beginners. It's about trying to control a creative process; programming is (for a big part) inventing new things, using existing components in a new way. Such creative work cannot easily be planned and controlled the same way as building a product on a production line for example. The tone might be a bit cynical, I agree, and there's much written about it, though it's an interesting perspective.

<comment><USER2> I agree that part of it is about trying to control a creative process but when it breaks down the author totally wipes his hands clean of any responsibility. Acting like "sabotaging the product" is an acceptable way to behave.

No, its the only way he could imagine someone behaving and its all the fault of the "Lousy young programmer" and the "Marketing types" with their "power neckties". The fact off the matter is that people who cannot adapt to change in a company are a poison and the biggest mistake that management made, was that they weren't able to replace him with more stable and mature (albeit slightly less creative) professional sooner.</comment></comment>


Pyrobuf: A Cython Alternative to Google's Python Protobuf Library - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/appnexus/pyrobuf <comment><USER3> Thrift is a very similar system for message serialization to Protobuf.

The thriftpy project implements a pure Python parser for thrift files that dynamically generates Python modules _without_ a build/codegen step. Also has Py2, Py3, and PyPy support.

Awesome library for this sort of thing. Includes a Cython impl of Thrift parsing/serialization, too:

[https://github.com/eleme/thriftpy](https://github.com/eleme/thriftpy)

<comment><USER4> What is the benefit of using something like Thrift to something like CapNProto or FlatBuffers ?

<comment><USER3> I suspect it comes down to the details of the serialization format.

I know that Thrift and Protobuf were developed / publicly released around the same time (~2008). They both have serialization and RPC approaches. They both have an IDL format and a compiler for codegen in static languages like C++ and Java.

Thrift was adopted by the Apache O/SS community and so it can be found in some Apache projects, e.g. Thrift is used as an interop format in Apache Storm and as a serialization backend supported by Apache Parquet.

Thrift has had a lot of client libraries for different languages come out over the years, so it tends to work everywhere.

IIRC, CapNProto and FlatBuffers were each built as fresh takes on protobuf. So I imagine they are similar, with IDLs and serialization approaches of their own. I took a quick look at CapNProto's Python module documentation and it looks very similar to thriftpy in philosophy, but I don't know its intricate details as I haven't used it.

This guide to Thrift covers all the important details of its schema approach and is meant as a cross-language guide. It should be the official docs, but alas, it's not!

[https://diwakergupta.github.io/thrift-missing- guide/](https://diwakergupta.github.io/thrift-missing-guide/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If this gets python 3 support before google's official implementation I would be much more inclined to give it a shot, but it doesn't look like it's compatible yet either.

<comment><USER6> Try now - I just merged in some changes to make it Python 3 compatible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If your looking for a speedy alternative to protobuf then you owe it to yourself to try flatbuffers.

[https://google.github.io/flatbuffers/](https://google.github.io/flatbuffers/)

<comment><USER8> Don't bother, go directly to cap'n proto: [https://capnproto.org](https://capnproto.org)

<comment><USER4> There are a couple of reasons I chose FB over Can'n Proto, Python and full C++ doesn't work on MSVC/Windows (this might have changed recently especially given the Clang compiler integration into MS backend)

Second problem is Capnproto doesn't have structs, ie. you want something like struct Vec3 {x: float, y: float, z: float} in CapnProto you have to either make Vec3 a ref type (+ pointer size and lookup indirection for each instance) or inline it manually (especially annoying given that you must manually number CapnProto fields, maybe this is a benefit in some use cases but it's of no use to me and only creates work).

CapnProto is much bigger as well - it includes it's own RPC/distributed object protocol and library - the serialization part isn't separate they are in one library - that's taking in _a lot_ of useless code that you would have to figure out if you decided to maintain it.

Also worth noting FlatBuffers on Python are actually not that fast because they are pure-python - there are Cython versions in the PR (at least last time I checked) - this doesn't matter in my use case but worth pointing out. And the Python API is very very unpythonic (C style API with even the naming completely off from PEP8) compared to CapnProto which is excellent !

I needed a cross language typed serialization format for binary files and FlatBuffers is better for that than CapnProto IMO.

<comment><USER9> > the serialization part isn't separate they are in one library

Although Cap'n Proto's C++ implementation is hosted in a single git repository, it does compile to several distinct libraries. You can use just the core serialization/deserialization part, libcapnp, if that's all you need. There are separate components, libcapnpc and libcapnp-rpc, for dynamic reflection and the object-capability remote procedure call system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> More protobuf implementations is certainly good, Google's have been really really lacking for us.

It would be _really_ nice if there was a pure Python implementation that didn't use tons of unnecessary metaprogramming.

<comment><USER11> It's really interesting to me that the top two comments on this story both wish Protocol Buffers were different, but seem to be asking for opposite things.

Your comment wishes that there was a pure-Python implementation that doesn't do metaprogramming. That would imply doing code generation, but having the generated code be more "concrete", so-to-speak (containing all of the actual implementation).

However, a different comment ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10762101](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10762101)) admires the thriftpy project which doesn't have a codegen step at all. This is in some sense the opposite of what you want: _everything_ becomes metaprogramming.

I work on Protocol Buffers at Google, and I frequently observe these kinds of opposing feelings about how protobufs ought to work. One thing I've learned is how incredibly difficult it is to please everybody. Another good example of this is whether to be pure-Python: some people (like you) want that. But it's nearly impossible to make it very fast, and lots of users are sensitive to speed (you can find various comments and blog articles complaining about the speed of Python protobuf).

<comment><USER10> I've certainly observed the same I think :) and yeah pleasing everyone is impossible -- I think though there's a somewhat coherent way to put at least part of those two things together.

Not wanting code generation might come from people who don't like the additional build step and artifact deployment. I don't like that either, but what I mean by "less metaprogramming" is that the code that's _generated_ currently makes copious use of descriptors, metaclasses, and other "complex" things in a way that makes it extremely JIT-unfriendly on PyPy. We had to completely abandon it in favor of using protoc-c wrapped via CFFI. So I care about speed (almost entirely -- protobuf powers systems for us that do ~350K messages per second).

(I do though think it would be possible to satisfy _both_ complaints simultaneously. I spent about 5 minutes trying to write a codegen-less, pure Python implementation: [https://github.com/Julian/pb/tree/master/pb](https://github.com/Julian/pb/tree/master/pb) but I didn't find the Proto3 docs mature enough to figure out the binary protocol at the time. Not sure there's enough there to see what direction I was trying to go in, but I have given this a shot before).

And thanks for the reply, I do agree that there is _some_ conflicting concerns involved here.

<comment><USER11> Ah, that's very interesting -- your desire for more "pure" Python comes from a desire for speed. (Some people who wish the generated code was more concrete want this so the generated code is more readable).

I am curious what led you to the conclusion that descriptors and metaclasses were making Python protobuf JIT-unfriendly. I ask because most of the "meta" stuff happens at startup, when you first import the module. It uses a metaclass to generate a bunch of Python methods, but after that they are just regular Python methods, and should be as easy for PyPy to optimize as anything else. There is a bit of reflection happening in some code-paths (like the __init__ method does loop over a list of fields to decide how to initialize them), but the metaclass at least is pretty much gone after import.

For this reason, I suspect that even if we ditched all the metaclass stuff, you'd see PyPy performance pretty close to what you're seeing now. The only thing I could see potentially making a more significant difference is if there were generated parsing code that switches on field number, instead of looking up fields by number in a dictionary. But given that Python doesn't have an actual switch statement, this might not be an improvement at all.

<comment><USER12> Hi

The python code that's generated is ok, but the problem is that everything is very dynamic. If you want this to work fast on PyPy, it should really generate a bunch of getters and setters that use attribute access and not go through generic __getattr__ that does some dictionary lookups. Additionally a lot of code is written in a way that creates a lot of temporary lists iterating over all fields and double checking stuff - this is bound to be way slower than a simple C/Java stuff that does the very simplest "check type - <USER2> access" sort of stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Reduce your objects and validate using Marshmallow , de(en)code however you like.

</comment><comment><USER14> Is support for python worse than go or clojure? It seems unimaginable.

</comment><comment><USER15> why do we keep reinventing the wheel and not use asn.1?

<comment><USER16> The spec is too big, and it's too hard to implement correctly (let alone efficiently).

<comment><USER15> you are using it all the time without realizing it. [http://www.marben- products.com/asn.1/market.html](http://www.marben- products.com/asn.1/market.html)

protobuf, swift, etc happened when an advertising company thinks it is an engineering company

<comment><USER17> Perhaps they should do more marketing, because speaking as a C++ developer: I picked between protobufs, flatbuffers and capt'n proto because they were easy to use, had active communities, and they had websites which explained how and why I should use their compiler/library/protocol.

When I search the web for information about asn.1, I find very little that is of practical use. What library should I use? Why should I use it? How does it benchmark in comparison to the other tools? I've seen a few asn.1 library webpages and they all seem to take it as a given that I'm just looking for some way to deal with asn.1 data. They don't bother to try to convince me that their tool is efficient, or even that asn.1 is the right choice for my data in the first place.

<comment><USER15> you are dismissing an old and proven technology because you feel it is not marketing to you effectively, which is the backend to the global telecom system (ss7) for the past two decades? why is this a movement in computer science to throw out old things that work? this is confusing to me like nosql. but "good marketing" is something that is called cap'n proto, sounds like a joke?

if you are curious here is a good blog post [https://ttsiodras.github.io/asn1.html](https://ttsiodras.github.io/asn1.html)

i am working with asn.1 the protocol MMS

<comment><USER18> Well, the only location many programmers nowadays stumble over ASN.1 is in certificates. And ASN.1 parsing from them has a history of massive security issues and results in massive warnings of "do not touch!".

And yes, "good marketing" in the form of readily available and well-documented libraries for the languages we use is a very important factor.

I bet the telecom sector has their battle-tested libraries for ASN.1, or at least for the parts they use. Are they open-source? Are they available for all languages wanted? No? Then why would I use ASN.1, just to use a "standard", if it means using worse code or writing it myself?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pushback Derails Company That Thrived on Patent Lawsuits - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/pushback-derails-company-that-thrived-on-patent-lawsuits-11544972671 <comment><USER2> The "inventor" hasn't stopped, this year filing this junk patent for monitoring appliances, which you couldn't take a stroll through the Arduino community without tripping over a piece of prior art for.

Hey Martin Kelley Jones - fuck you. Get a real job.

[https://patents.justia.com/patent/20180285834](https://patents.justia.com/patent/20180285834)

<comment><USER3> I just don't understand how the US patent system works, if you can even use that word in relation to such a fundamentally broken thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Are we supposed to feel sorry?

I have more sympathy for drug dealers than patent trolls.

<comment><USER5> I think we're supposed to be celebrating. That was my reaction to the headline. It's just one troll of many, but it's a great start.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It would be interesting to introduce a stipulation that patents are enforcable only if the owners of the patent are doing meaningful R&D in the area related to the patent. As I understand it, the original purpose of patents is to encourage innovation. If no innovation is being done, the patent should have no power.

<comment><USER7> I can't even imagine how one would legally define the concept of "meaningful r&d". Since many SV companies started out literally in a garage, it would be a very low barrier to clear.

<comment><USER8> Yes, I think the problem isn't patenting things without R&D but is patenting things that aren't really novel, are obvious to someone skilled in the field, or are ideas where there is already existing prior art.

While an employee at IBM we were instructed to submit ideas to our IP lawyers whenever they were novel and of possible commercial importance. A number of my ideas were patented, these were generally important ideas IBM wanted to protect, some were published to establish that IBM had already invented the idea to prevent subsequent inventors from preventing IBM from using the idea, and some were so outside of IBM's business that they chose not to protect them.

My point was that sometimes I would think of things that were closely related to my work (e.g. cookies), sometimes they were unrelated to a project I was waiting on but occurred to me because I was working in an area (low latency network encryption by using counter mode encryption), and sometimes I just saw a problem at work and thought of a novel solution (security cameras with fisheye optics and software dewarping of distorted image).

In some cases I wasn't doing R&D in the area, but the ideas were still original and not obvious and I believe they deserved patents or at least publication in IBM's Invention disclosure journal to prevent other subsequent inventors from blocking IBM from using an idea with a bogus patent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Non-Paywall: [https://outline.com/N9tBpS](https://outline.com/N9tBpS)</comment>


In Vietnam, the Best Education Can Lead to Worse Job Prospects - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-20/in-vietnam-the-best-education-can-lead-to-worse-job-prospects <comment><USER2> I did an "internship" in Thai Nguyen University of Technology in 2012.

The second sentence of the article captures the first part of the problem: a tutor or professor earned ~250$/month back then, and scamming tourists in Hanoi required basic knowledge of English and some street smart and earned you four times as much.

The second part of the problem was that the university was just not very good, students were basically playing Age of Empires (yay!) all day long. It was completely different from the pretty decent European university I'd attended before the internship.

Going there was one of the best experiences of my life, I might add, but I can see why companies are reluctant to pay extra for this kind of education.

</comment><comment><USER3> "In university, we only received heavy theoretical training and a lot of Ho Chi Minh's ideology with communist party history"

"its colleges and universities are failing to prepare youth for more complex work"

This is the future for the US too ;-)

<comment><USER4> From what I can tell this is the US today.

<comment><USER5> I support what you said--higher ed in the US is kind of a shell of its former self, not on par with Ho Chi Min or whatever, but the rampant infusion of PC ideology has wrecked rational dialog.

<comment><USER6> Wait, your argument is that PC culture has wrecked all rational discourse? In all cases, at every University? I do see cases where what you would refer to as 'PC ideology' has eschewed rational discourse with cleverly disguised emotionally charged discourse. But to say that PC culture has unilaterally reduced the value of college to near zero, is quite a stretch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This has been an ongoing issue in Vietnam. I taught in Vietnam at a teacher training college four years back. Most of my students who attended had no aim to become teachers: they instead wanted to work as tour guides or translators or gain a standard white-collar office job in international business. Their reasoning was that it was too hard to become a teacher--too many applicants for too few spots. (And besides, the pay was terrible.)

The comments on 2 years of Marxist ideology are very exaggerated, but there is a general truth in that there's a large mismatch between the education and the outcome for university students. Vietnam would do well to encourage skills- building instead of limiting studies to professional tracks where job prospects are limited and theory is of no use.

</comment><comment><USER8> There is nothing that says education will necessarily lead to better job prospects. It's simply supply and demand.

Vietnam had a population explosion in the past few decades and there are tons of young grads flooding the market. If the economy can't produce enough jobs for the supply of educated people, then they will face lower wages and worse prospects.

For example, if there is 1 job opening for a cashier and you have a choice of hiring a high school grad or a college grad, you choose the high school grad because you know they will stick around longer while the college grad will leave the first chance he gets.

In this scenario, the college grad has worse prospects than the less educated high school grad.

So then the question is why isn't the nation/economy producing more jobs/opportunities/etc for its educated young adults? Is it a structural issue? Is it monetary/financial/investment issue? Is it legal/tax related?

<comment><USER9> Vietnamese here, can discuss some insights (although haven't visited my country since mid-2015, and later knowledge comes from reading local news, talking to friends, etc. so take any information here with a grain of salt).

Unlike many countries, typical Vietnamese people have a strong obsession with working in the public sector / government-based employments, which basically guarantees lifetime employment and not too much of work pressure. Naturally, tons of people apply for such positions, and corruption/bribery inevitably occurs.

This is one example of how people applying for public job (article in Vietnamese, but the photo speaks for itself)

[http://us.24h.com.vn/tin-tuc-trong-ngay/phoi-nang-treo- tuong...](http://us.24h.com.vn/tin-tuc-trong-ngay/phoi-nang-treo-tuong-nop-ho- so-thi-vao-tong-cuc-thue-c46a650313.html)

Right now the public sector is under severe criticism for underpaying, overstaffing and inefficiency. There are proposals of cutting _30 percent_ of staffs, but bureaucracy moves slowly, and naturally you won't expect the job prospect in this sector change overnight.

How about the private sector (say startup)? In the last 10 years there have been tremendous progress, but their scale are still small compared to public (I'm talking about Vietnamese-owned companies, foreign-owned companies like Citibank or Uber are a different matter). Vietnam is still very early game in capitalistic economic model, with infrastructure (transportation, electronic payment, law) years behind developed countries. Simply put, the condition to operate private companies in Vietnam hasn't been fully fleshed out yet. With time there will be explosive growth in this sector, but for now, the government is still a huge beast.

<comment><USER10> This was India about a couple of decades back at the beginning of economic liberalization. Give it time. Sucks for those in the present but changes rapidly

<comment><USER11> >Give it time.

Now think, where are all those public sector workers? Probably regretting big their decisions at the start of their careers.

Right now, people who go into industry right out of the school have huge opportunity. Low competition, low barriers for entry. By the time the private sector economy will pass the inflection point, and be making good money, people who choose work in private enterprises will be years ahead of the competition.

Check on how Russian IT industry rose up. Back in mid-noughties, a typical IT worker/software dev was either a high-schooler, self-taught person, or "studied botanics, but ended up in IT" type graduate. Barriers for entry were pretty much non-existent, there were nobody to push back at hiring such people with their "authoritative opinion." When the economy finally went belly up in 2014, people with ~50k incomes in hard currency suddenly became big men and among them were many people from IT. Many of such people started their own shops. Now, Russian companies have luxury to hire people with PhD level education for intern level position, because the crowd that was going into banking/lawyer/MBA/statesmanship finally turned to IT.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Getting a good job in Vietnam requires paying somebody off, often to the tune of $10k - $20k, which is a lot of money for most Vietnamese. Your diploma is next to irrelevant.

</comment><comment><USER13> You can get away from the Ho Chi Minh studies if you goto certain foreign tertiary institutions. The problem with those places is that the degrees they offer are probably more useless than what you would get at a Vietnamese public university and are mostly what we would consider to be technical college degrees.

</comment><comment><USER14> Nobody, absolutely nobody, has a greater interest in and responsibility for your education than yourself.

In today's world, the only people most of us can blame for our poor education is ourselves. Most of what I learned, I learned after leaving the university system. If anything, what my formal education did was to provide me with the skills to acquire knowledge on my own and also instill in me the desire and confidence to do so. The present day world which provides us with MOOCs, Wikipedia, freely available books from every corner of the world and from every era, ability to hold discussions with like-minded learners from every part of the world, etc., are all extremely conducive to self-education. It's a terrible shame to let this golden opportunity go to waste.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Perhaps it was your university experience that prepared you to be a lifelong learner?

<comment><USER14> Looking back, I can't claim that my university experience had anything much to do with it. It was a realization that I came to by myself: if you want to learn anything, the only person you can really depend on is yourself. Once the will to uplift yourself is there, especially in this age, you will find the materials and the resources along the way.

Poor educational system is something that India suffers from too. I think the best antidote to it is to evangelize the idea of self-learning even well after you have left the formal educational system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Doesn't check out because university generally doesn't provide job-related skills. You need internships and part-time jobs for that.

<comment><USER16> Nonsense. Plenty of what a good university course teaches you is relevant to employment: analysing information, writing reports, managing time on projects, collaborating with others. The _specific_ modules and topics might or might not be relevant to your eventual job, but plenty of what your learn will be.</comment></comment>


No, It Really Is That Easy To Manipulate The New York Times - <AUTHOR>

I've been working in PR since 1999. One of the most common things I run into with startups is that, when I talk about sockpuppets or how stuff actually gets placed on TechCrunch (usually via an influential investor), there's some skepticism.
That's understandable, but also a little frustrating because the media is now so broken, that the way we WANT to think it works is not at all how it works.
So I included here a link to something I wrote this weekend concerning how easily The New York Times was manipulated by a group of religious extremists in upstate New York, right as an investigation began into a housing development they were building was revealed to have been approved via fradulent means:
http://bjmendelson.com/2013/11/22/thanks-to-kiryas-joel-new-york-times-hanukkah-is-cancelled/
The lesson, at least I hope it is, should be clear: The media can be manipulated. The takeaway should be to change your perception of how the media works if you haven't done so already. It IS who you know and how well you can manipulate those people. Unfortunately. <comment><USER2> We are mere puppets of the system put in place by those with the biggest pay checks.</comment>


Double Fine "Devs Play" – Legend of Zelda (Hacking the ROM) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FolqIgQRtl0

<comment><USER2> This is part 4, the longest of a 4-part series. The other three parts are 10-15 min each, and talk a little bit about The Legend of Zelda as a game, and show desoldering the ROM and replacing it with an EPROM. In this part, we see how to reverse-engineer how the game stores its state, how to modify the code to do things differently, and burn the result to the EPROM so it can be played on original hardware.</comment>


Google security engineer discloses zero-day flaw in TP-Link smart home routers - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-dev-discloses-zero-day-flaw-in-tp-link-smart-home-routers/ <comment><USER2> A zero-day is an interesting label to put on a bug disclosed "after the company failed to fix the issue within 90 days". I guess, you learn something new every zero-day.

<comment><USER3> A zero-day exploit is one released earlier than the patch for the bug is exploits. There is no patch so any exploit is a zero-day exploit.

Happy April the 0th by the way, in a way it is a zero-day today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is the TP-Link SR20 the only affected model?</comment>


BT kills Ribbit's web phone platform, sends customers to the fast-growing Twilio - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/09/bt-kills-ribbits-web-phone-platform-sends-customers-to-the-fast-growing-twilio

<comment><USER2> I'm relieved to see that this doesn't affect the Ribbit Mobile service (which I use daily).

This leaves me wondering what BT will now do for an API layer to its network? Buying the Ribbit developer platform was the excuse for killing off the 21CN SDK. On the other hand most telcos seem to get by fine without an API/SDK.

</comment><comment><USER3> Any thoughts on why they did this?

what makes Twillio successful but another company willing to kill off a $100m+ investment?</comment>


Show HN: Chrome Remote Debugging Protocol interface - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cyrus-and/chrome-remote-interface <comment><USER2> A few years ago I used the Chrome remote interface and was very slow comparing to embedding a web control object for automation. How does it work now?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually I didn't notice such thing when I used it extensively around 2013 for instrumenting some page loads. Which part was slow in your experience?

<comment><USER2> If I remember well was slower than using HTMLUnit ([http://htmlunit.sourceforge.net/](http://htmlunit.sourceforge.net/)) that is written in Java, and it was much slower than writing a browser extension to achieve the same task.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see, well I've never performed any benchmark but it's quite possible that an ad hoc headless browser performs better for what concerns repeated tests. On the other hand, in this case you're instrumenting a real (really employed by the final user) browser. Possibly things will improve with this new headless mode for Chrome.

In any case this JavaScript module should not introduce any performance degradation, but if it does and you happen to give it a try in the future, feel free to open an issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> What is the use case for this? Testing? Scraping?

<comment><USER4> Everything, really. The protocol is a layer underneath the WebDriver protocol, and what Chrome DevTools uses. So it's pretty much the most complete API for the browser; in fact, Chrome is shipping the protocol as the 1st class API for headless Chrome .

We use it in Lighthouse [0] to reload the browser, manipulate ServiceWorkers and caches, execute a bunch of tests on pages and measure performance characteristics. I've also used it for automated profiling [1], in case you want to profile your JS with a bit more control. Using this for testing or scraping would work as well, but you might as well move a layer up and use WebDriver as the commands will be fairly common.

[0] [https://github.com/GoogleChrome/lighthouse/](https://github.com/GoogleChrome/lighthouse/)

[1] [https://github.com/paulirish/automated-chrome- profiling/](https://github.com/paulirish/automated-chrome-profiling/)

<comment><USER5> How realistic do you think it is to add to the protocol? I've played with it some and it can be great for what it has, but I want just a little bit more... like a way to view user-generated events. I'm debating whether to play with an extension, or with the protocol itself.</comment></comment></comment>


Protecting your JavaScript with advanced obfuscation techniques - <AUTHOR> http://blog.lostdecadegames.com/obfuscating-javascript-with-closure-compiler

<comment><USER2> I feel that "view source" is one the best features of the web and JavaScript, so I never obfuscate/compile/minify my code. If someone is interested and takes the time to read my code, why deny them.

What are you doing in JS that is so special that no one should be able to figure out? Obfuscation wont protect you from someone ripping off your game or whatever and put it on their own site. Someone can do that just as easily with obfuscated files.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good tips for decreasing marginal js file size with google closure compiler, but this doesn't really protect your code at all. It might make it a little bit harder for someone to immediately figure out what your code doing, but by know means will it stop anyone who isn't new to js. I have gotten used to going through competitors highly minified code to make sure they rant stealing any of my js</comment>


Why Some People Succeed and Others Don't - <AUTHOR> https://www.inc.com/lolly-daskal/understanding-your-gaps-the-difference-between-people-who-succeed-and-people-who.html <comment><USER2> I'll tell you why; because they're willing to sell their soul, play the game, and not ask too many questions. This system was built by assholes; which is why it rewards assholes, and why it's going down fast.</comment>


CSS: A New Kind of JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@Heydon/css-a-new-kind-of-javascript-fcf730d33ce7 <comment><USER2> 1) Dear god, people actually do all that JavaScript stuff at the top?

2) "CSS is a declarative subset of JavaScript, optimized for styling tasks." This is so incorrect it's irresponsible.

3) I'm genuinely confused by how he speaks as if CSS is some new revelation. "are you willing to embrace the change, or are you married to an inferior methodology?" What? Both languages originated in parallel in the mid-90s for totally different purposes. Only in recent years has it become popular to do styles in JavaScript, not the other way around.

For those who are new to this space: _do not listen to what this guy says_. He is at best extremely misguided, and in some places factually wrong.

<comment><USER2> Edit: After reading the comments, it appears that the article might have been an attempt at satire that didn't land for me.</comment></comment>


Apply HN: Financial plans as an employee benefit - <AUTHOR> -- Overview --
In addition to health, vision, retirement, etc. benefits we aim to establish financial planning as a benefit that every company offers their employees.
Money is the main source of stress for Americans and it impacts an employer through missed days, increased illness, and distractions. And many people without a solid financial foundation put their retirement at risk by not making enough contributions to their retirement plans, by taking loans from their 401(k) when they have an emergency, and by carrying too much debt into retirement.
Our goal is to help Americans break the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle and start making progress towards their financial goals.
-- Business model --
In order to reach the most people our financial wellness platform will be an add-on service that 401(k) advisors offer to their plans. We believe it will help them distinguish themselves from their competitors as well as open up a new revenue stream for them.
They will pay us a monthly per employee fee which they can either pay themselves or pass on to the 401(k) plan.
For a business model comparison think Concur for the 401(k) industry.
-- Software --
Our web-based platform will ask each user a series of questions after which they will receive a simple financial plan that contains a budget, debt payment plan, retirement plan, insurance needs, and plans for their goals whether that be establish an emergency fund, buy a house, save for college, etc.
--
WorkPlay401(k)
http://www.workplay401k.com <comment><USER2> Seems like a good idea on the surface.

How well do you know the compliance requirements for this industry?

Will you make money from the companies giving this as a benefit, or by taking a cut from users, or some other way?

How will software serve me better here than talking to someone in person?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have had my share of compliance battles over the years so I definitely understand the issues. However it is currently my understanding that the compliance onus will be on the advisory firm that use our software. Every compliance officer has their own interpretations of ERISA but I think we should be able to satisfy their requirements.

Fees will be charged to the advisors on a per-participant basis, or should a company want to provide it directly we would of course accommodate them.

I think you generally will be better served talking to someone in person however most advisors don't touch participant personal finances outside the retirement accounts. Also I do think people are increasingly comfortable not interacting with people for their financial services. I personally find going into a bank or calling a banker on the phone an inconvenience. My bank doesn't even have branches or ATMs in my state. Thank God for deposit by phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like something I would use!

Few questions that came to mind for me: \- What's the incentive on the advisor to offer the add-on service? Is it to eventually increase AUM and encourage more 401k savings from the users? Would be curious to learn if there are any numbers around this or users taking loans out, etc

\- What does the platform look like? White-labeled self-hosted? What does an integration look like for the advisor

\- What would be the general distribution plan and target market for getting advisors on board?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the questions, Charley!

The incentive for the advisor would be to gain new business (increase AUM) by being more competitive with their array of services in proposals (not to mention hopefully having some great metrics from WorkPlay401(k) to include) as well as maintaining current business by rolling out our financial wellness platform as a new service for existing clients. I think the latter is just as important as companies are constantly courted by advisors to switch their 401(k) provider.

Here is a very quick video that gives an overview:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C-FmUImG3U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C-FmUImG3U)

Basically it is a series of questions (kind of modeled off of how TaxAct works) for the participant after which a financial plan is created for them. Then can continue to use it with any transactions or information they enter modifying their goal progress, outstanding to dos, financial plan, and budget. They also receive emails that let them know how much is left in their monthly budget, account balances, the next steps they need to take, and content based on their goals, age, and personal financial situation.

I'd like to get a little farther in my sales process before making a full decision on this but I'm thinking it will be more co-labled (ABC Advisor powered by WorkPlay401(k) than a complete white-label situation. No self- hosting as I cannot even imagine the support needed to roll out to everybody from banks down to one man RIA shops. I know some compliance managers would prefer self-hosted but I have found that they are changing their tunes as their advisors are demanding to use cloud-based software and their I.T. departments are starting to use cloud based Exchange and whatnot.

The advisor has a dashboard they can access and then we will tie in with the most commonly used service desk software that the larger or more technologically advanced ones use. For compliance purposes we can also set it up to BCC them on any email sent to their participants.

Right now I have a list of 1844 advisors (though lots of firms have multiple advisors under them) that I have imported into Close.io and have begun reaching out to. I'm getting some nibbles and am learning a lot about what message to use, the kind of materials they require, and the most common objections.

The target market to begin with are advisors that do provide some level of participant education rather than the advisors that only pick investments and hand everything else off to Fidelity.

If you have any other questions please ask them here or email me at will at the domain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hmmmmm, many questions! Also, I like the alliteration of your company name.

Sorry, I'm confused about one point: Is the Software simply acting as a conduit between the client (employee of Company X) and another human (the financial planner), or would the software actually be generating advice? In the latter case, would that advice be relayed to the client via the human financial planner, or would it be delivered directly to the client?

In the latter case (where software delivers advice directly to a client), how do you plan on convincing the SEC that the software (and, indeed, your company) is a qualified investment adviser?

I'm also curious, how much "client activity" is being assumed for each client? What I mean is, you might have clients (again, individual employees of Company X) coming back for financial planning again and again over a (relatively) short time, either because they are having lots of life events happening, or because they're unsure, or because they want to explore different paths, or whatever. Have you thought of a way to prevent clients like that from making the service too expensive to run?

<comment><AUTHOR> The software would be generating a financial plan for the user (clients different from users in this case) but it is not generating specific investment advice--we'll leave that up to the RIA. You might compare our algorithms to some of the various calculators that you can find on any finance site ([http://finance.yahoo.com/calculator/retirement/ret02/](http://finance.yahoo.com/calculator/retirement/ret02/)) or some newspaper sites ([http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy- rent-calc...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent- calculator.html?_r=0)) but more advanced as they feed off each other.

I'm not sure that our software will ever deliver advice along the lines of "Buy mutual fund X" and certainly would not even be able to do so before recordkeeper tie-in. An example of what it does now regarding investments is something along the lines of you and your wife have X dollars in retirement savings across three retirement accounts. You're making A, B, C in monthly contributions to each. Assuming age-based returns (your portfolio gets more conservative the closer you get to retirement) or account-based returns you will have Y dollars in monthly income in retirement which is Z short of your retirement income goal. (Often getting somebody to contribute enough is a larger challenge than asset allocation.)

Also, financial planners are not SEC registered.

I hope users come back over and over again! I'm hoping the budgeting tool, emails, and value we provide keeps them coming back. You realize the connection between life events and taking an interest in their financial plans and that indeed is when a lot of users will return to us.

Since everything is automated the only cost for heavy users would be server and bandwidth. And I truly do want to help people be financially ready for those life events so we will gladly accept those costs.

Thank you for the questions Karl!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks for posting this up. Really enjoying Apply HN.

Few questions,more out of curiosity:

How is this different to something like mint.com?

Why are companies (sponsors) asking advisers to offer these services for less?

Why are fees shrinking in the industry?

Other companies are focused on 'employers' while yours is focused on the employee, which is great, how do you plan to sign up employers

<comment><AUTHOR> I am also really enjoying this. Feels like virtual office hours.

I would say it is pretty similar to Mint.com but with a few differences. Our budget module is more like YNAB in philosophy. Our software is designed towards the 401(k) industry for use by advisors (and giving them a dashboard with metrics to provide to plan sponsors) and will have their name and logo on every interaction with the plan and participant. We will eventually tie-in with both the service desk software used by advisors as well as the recordkeeping software (thus proving a new/alternative front end for the participant to interact with their plan and make investment changes and process rollovers).

I think companies have started paying more attention to their employee benefits and making sure that their employees actually benefit from them. Plus, with the Department of Labor starting to give lip service to financial wellness the industry publications that plan sponsors read have started talking about it as well.

Fees have gone way down in my fourteen years in the industry. When I started out it seemed like most advisors were commissioned based but that really started to change about eight to ten years ago. Competition has increased. Mutual fund fees have gone down and low-cost index fund usage has gone up. And maybe most of all, much more attention is being paid to fees in the press so participants are looking at their statements and asking the questions they should be asking to their benefits managers.

I meant to mention this in the post but instead of competing with advisors, like the other startups are doing, we are partnering with the advisors so we can hopefully leverage their existing books of business. I anticipate that we will both be rolled out to existing clients as well as be a feature they list when doing proposals to prospects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sounds intriguing. Some questions:

\- Who is the team behind this, and are you working on this full-time right now?

\- How much work have you done on the software? (Planning, research, building?)

\- Why this specific product? Why do you think this is a better idea than many other possible ideas? How did you come up with it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Peter,

Thank you for your questions!

Team:

I'm a solo-founder that is working full-time on this and have been since September first.

(I have an advisor and have used a contractor for a small amount of help.)

Stage:

The first version of the software is built and I'm getting feedback from users. I've been having some discussions with advisors (and have a huge list to still reach out to) and hope to have the first paying client soon.

Why:

I've been in the 401(k) industry for fourteen years and there has not been a lot of technological innovation until very recently. And the startups that are tackling the space are doing so by becoming advisors which is a lot of compliance (SEC, ERISA, DOL) headaches in an industry where fees are shrinking.

And while I admire their dedication to providing a better employer experience, I think by focusing on the employee experience we will be able to make a larger difference.

I came up with the idea as I saw that 401(k) plan sponsors (companies) are asking advisors to provide more services (specifically financial wellness) for less. An advisor can't do that by adding more bodies, they're going to have to start leveraging technology. Also, my former firm needs this type of software and failed at creating it.

<comment><USER2> > Also, my former firm needs this type of software and failed at creating it.

Can you say more about this? Why did they fail? How will you avoid the same problems?

<comment><AUTHOR> Many reasons tje failed but I would say the main ones are:

* Lack of a clear project leader (the project had been mandated from up high so many people wanted the feather in their cap. I was an observer at a few meetings and they were a mess.) and nobody attached had software development experience.

* No dedicated resources and the two programmers that were putting any time towards it didn't know the 401(k) industry and couldn't translate the feature requests into technical specifications.

* Management mandated building it on Salesforce before any of this happened even though no department used it at all. They spent hundreds of thousands on licenses before even making a list of features.

* There was no verbalized vision for the project and never a conversation about why a user would want to use it.

* Banks are, in general, not the best and consumer facing technology.

I wasn't part of that project but watching that happen was painful. I hope that my experience will help me avoid those issues.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Netflix Uses Footage of a Canadian Tragedy "As Entertainment" in Bird Box - <AUTHOR> https://www.narcity.com/netflix-is-under-fire-for-using-footage-of-a-canadian-tragedy-as-entertainment-in-bird-box <comment><USER2> We've reached a point in cinema where people want to see realistic violence and destruction. As a result, we have CGI footage of events that look just as if not more tragic than real tragedies. Yet here we are, complaining that creators shouldn't use footage of real events and instead use something similar generated by a computer. Somehow this gives us a sense of complacency? Somehow with the removal of that clip the movie becomes entertaining? I find that pretty strange.</comment>


Malta – Alphabet X's latest grid-scale energy storage technology - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-31/alphabet-wants-to-fix-renewable-energy-s-storage-problem-with-salt <comment><USER2> Most of the comments below have focused on the thermodynamics in play for this. Let me instead speak a little on the materials chemistry:

Materials that are stable liquids at relatively high temperatures and that exhibit low vapor pressure have been investigated for quite some time as heat transfer fluids. See, for instance, the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment at Oak Ridge where a lithium fluoride-beryllium fluoride mixture was used.

The size of the phase diagram space to investigate comes from the phase rule, and the conditions for equilibrium from the Gibb's criteria. The classic materials science approach (how I learned) is to try and map the phase diagram space experimentally. This can become unwieldy for many component systems.

Common chloride salts and/or nitrate salts have been investigated as potential heat transfer/storage fluids, usually in eutectic compositions to lower the melting point. The actual ionic compositions of the molten fluids can be rather involved.

The widely used austenitic stainless steels (e.g. 304, 316) are susceptible to corrosion attack from chloride ions, so understanding of coordination chemistry around chlorine is important to determine the likely stability of a containment vessel.

It would be ideal to find salts comprised of common materials that formed moderate melting temperature eutectics, have no free chlorides (or no chlorine at all), low vapor pressure, and long term stability in the presence of common stainless (or even mild) steel. Potential candidates could be nitrates or the so called deep eutectic solvents.

Hopefully this is helpful detail,

<comment><USER3> This is probably a dumb question, but do we need to use a liquid to do the salt's job? Might we just sidestep the corrosion question by using big-ass (solid) sheets of tungsten in lieu of a fluid?

<comment><USER2> The short version is that solids have merely ok heat capacity. The molar heat capacity of many solids at high temperatures is approximately 3R or approx. 25 J/molK. Google "Dulong-Petit Law" and "Debye Model" if you'd like to see why.

By comparison, the polar molecule water, which has extraordinarily good heat capacity, due in part to hydrogen bonding, is 75 J/molK at room temperature.

So water has almost 31x the heat capacity of tungsten by weight.

<comment><USER4> It may be I'm missing some obvious implication of something you've written that I've missed due to negligible background here, but I'm confused by the numbers you've cited here.

You list many solids as having a molar heat capacity of "25 J/molK", water as having a molar heat capacity of "75 J/molK", and conclude that water has almost 31x the heat capacity, but naively comparing the numbers cited only gets you 3x. Where does the other 10x factor come from?

<comment><USER2> 3X molar heat capacity difference, yes. But water is 18 g/mole, and W is about 183 g/mole. So tungsten is about 10x heavier per mole than water.

The parent post happened to pick a solid material for a nice round molar mass ratio.

<comment><USER4> Ah, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice idea.

For a summary, this is an energy storage project, where the energy is stored in tanks of high and low temperature fluids. Temperature differentials can be generated by heat pumps, and can be converted back into useful energy by heat engines.

However, the theoretical maximum energy efficiency of this unit, assuming no heat losses from the tanks, will probably be poor compared to LiIon or pumped storage (of the gravity type), simply due to the fact that heat engines are strictly limited in efficiency to the Carnot efficiency (and are usually much less efficient than that).

Depending on the temperatures involved, I'd be surprised if it can return as much as half the energy that is put into it.

Also, conflation of energy and power in the article.

<comment><USER6> You're forgetting something on the Carnot cycle efficiency, which is that the efficiency of the storage cycle can be GREATER than unity. Heat pumps (of which this is an example) can move more than one joule of heat per joule of input power. I agree that the output efficiency (Joules of power : Joule of heat) is going to be low, given the relatively small temperature differential between the reservoirs, but the round-trip efficiency might not be that bad.

<comment><USER6> To correct my own comment, Joules are of course units of energy, not power...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Molten salt is one of the standard solar reservoir techniques. In fact there is such a system already deployed in California today in Crescent Dunes. It burns natural gas to keep the salt molten when there isn't adequate solar resource. There are some in operation in Spain as well.

It's frustrating when some reporter writes an article about one of these companies with great PR (Google, FB, Apple, Tesla et al) writing that since the reporter's never heard of this before (or of a web search either, apparently) that the company must have come up with something amazingly new.

Yes, google could cut the marginal cost of storage, but the economics of thermal storage make sense in thermal plants, not direct grid storage (I worked in thermal storage myself, though using a different technology). _This_ is the big point, and as cheap PV has driven funding for thermal plants away it's hard to see hw this can fit in. _That_ should have been the thrust of the article instead of breathless boosterism, especially for a magazine ostensibly aimed at the finance industry.

<comment><USER2> What is the current status of solar thermal plants in terms of commercial readiness? Are there any to pay attention to other than Ivanpah? What thermal storage technique were you working on? I may have some chemistry in this thread, but energy storage is not my day job.

<comment><USER7> There Are a few in operation in Spain and some in India that I suspect will never be operational. The economics have changed substantially just over the last five years.

I was working on supercritical (pressurized) water. Sand has also been considered.

<comment><USER2> Were you using inconel for containment? Sand would be an interesting nod to the heating towers of blast furnaces.

What changed in the economics?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If Carnot efficiency is so well known that numerous hn'ers mention it, how likely is it that a team of alphabet people wouldn't be aware of it?

</comment><comment><USER9> > In the first half of this year, California tossed out more than 300,000 > megawatts

That doesn't sound right. According to [0] that is 2/3 of total electricity generated, from all sources, in the whole of US.

[0] [http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=average+electricity+gen...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=average+electricity+generation+in+us+in+megawatt)

<comment><USER10> I have to assume that they meant megawatt-hours, a unit of energy, rather than megawatts, a unit of power.

<comment><USER11> I also think that's what they meant. Painful to read that sentence from such a large media outlet. You'd think they'd have some people on staff to help double check incorrect vocab usage...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There are better alternatives than just lithium batteries - for example liquid batteries by company with a weird name - RedFlow: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OHstY_kKUY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OHstY_kKUY).

Edit: I also wonder how balanced heat and cold is in such system? One side effect could be cooling solar cells to improve efficiency of them. I had an idea few months back - why solar cells don't come with antifreeze that could be used to warm up your hot water in house?

<comment> yoz-y I thought they did. Well, at least I know of installations that use solar power to heat water. Maybe there are combined panels that do both heat and electricity?

<comment><USER13> Apparently those are a thing!

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

<comment><USER14> Fun fact, that's actually what we had in my last house. My dad wanted to heat the pool like that, so he Googled around, found a guy with a patent, and the guy helped him figure out how to build it for the house.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I see a lot of objections based on Carnot's heat cycle. What about using waste heat as the energy input? This would make the system an effectively free source of energy. Existing data centres could be retrofitted with this technology. Instead of dumping the waste heat outside with air conditioning, you store it in a fluid tank.

<comment><USER6> It's definitely possible to combine this with some sort of "co-generation" scheme, where either the heating or cooling are combined with e.g. energy flowing off of a data center.

However -- for this to work as described (hot air spins a turbine), you need to get a much higher temperature differential than would be typical for data center waste heat. You'd still need to concentrate that heat somehow into a high-temperature reservoir (think hundreds of degrees Celsius) to have it be space- and energy- efficient.

<comment><USER16> Right. Just to elaborate, there is a difference between quality and quantity of heat. A red hot nail has high quality but low quantity. A hot bath has low quality but high quantity. Data center waste heat is like bath water.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Reading this, a question comes to my mind: how cheap does an energy storage solution has to become, to finance it through speculation on energy/power exchanges (buying in times of overproduction and selling at high consumption times) ?

<comment><USER18> Cheaper than fuel plus investment for peaker plants and cheaper than the storage of your competition. (Sorry, I'm as lost for numbers as you are)

<comment><USER19> That is the mathematical answer but Energy, in California at least, is regulated and that creates systems where we build plants we don't need. See [http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity- capacity/](http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity-capacity/) for details.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Whoever in GoogleX approved this investment wasn't aware of Carnot cycle efficiency...

Using electricity to create hot and cold reservoirs, then using the thermal difference to make electricity again cannot _ever_ exceed ~40% efficiency. There are existing fully developed technologies which exceed that by far!

Where do _I_ sign up to receive lots of money to try out a fanciful idea which goes against the basic laws of physics?

<comment><USER21> This is a misunderstanding of Carnot cycle efficiency. The thing that makes the Carnot cycle special is that it is reversible. So in principle, you can get 100% of the mechanical energy that you put in back out again, by running the process in reverse.

The usual efficiency calculation for a Carnot cycle tells you what fraction of heat energy that's removed from the hot reservoir can be converted to mechanical work. This is always less than 100%.

However, when running the cycle in reverse as a heat pump, it is possible to transfer more than one Joule of energy from the cold reservoir to the hot reservoir per Joule of mechanical energy used. That's why the round trip efficiency from mechanical energy back to mechanical energy can be 100%.

I have no idea what the practical efficiency of this system can be. But it's wrong to immediately reject it on theoretical grounds.

<comment><USER22> Indeed. The Carnot Cycle has nothing to do with the efficiency, since it can be reversed in what is typically referred to as a "Coefficient of Performance", which is always bigger than 1 (assuming you aren't using straight resistive/friction heating). I seem to recall from Thermos lecturers that a CoP for consumer fridges is often in the 4 - 6 range, and it increases the smaller the difference in temperature between sink and source is, inversely to the Carnot efficiency.

That said, due to heat capacity of pump components and conduction losses, I would be surprised if the total cycle efficiency was above 80%, putting this well below gravity and battery storage schemes. Maybe it is just incredibly cheap? Water does have a high heat capacity...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Centrifugal storage systems would be more efficient, AND last 100 years with only needing new bearings every 20years.

<comment><USER24> I assume you mean flywheels. Flywheel energy storage seemed appealing until I worked on it in an energy storage startup.

Flywheels require expensive protection against catastrophic failure. The costly part isn't fragment containment, that's affordable.

But angular momentum is conserved. That means when a flywheel crashes, it will exert a very large torque on its containment structure. If the containment breaks loose, it can do a lot of damage in moments. Containment that's safe against torque failure is very expensive.

Flywheels also have to run in a vacuum. If the rotor is s composite material, there has to be an active vacuum pump because composites outgas forever. Additional system cost and failure point.

If you don't use composite rotors, the energy storage density goes down because tensile strength of metals is so low compared to composite fiber materials. Low energy density increases overall cost/MWHr.

Rotor life is limited by static fatigue and by high cycle fatigue, which have different failure mechanisms. For carbon, glass, or aramid fibers, you can count on a rotor MTTF of ~20 years if the rotor is operated so it never exceeds ~35% of the fiber's ultimate tensile strength. But that cuts into energy storage efficiency, driving the cost up more.

There are some niches that flywheels can serve with competitive economics (grid intersection phase matching, for example). But overall, it's hard to see how flywheel economics can beat the declining cost curve of electrochemistry. The foreseeable cost floor, set by some of the system issues I listed, is too high.

<comment><USER23> In-ground installations protect against failure

This mob seem to have it all worked out "[http://beaconpower.com/"](http://beaconpower.com/")

<comment><USER24> In-ground gives additional protection, but things can still get away.

Beacon Power is AFAICT the leader in deployed flywheel electrical energy storage. Their units are all underground.

One of their failures dislodged a heavy concrete and steel lid on the unit [1]. Part of their emergency shutdown routine is a water dump into the flywheel chamber to dissipate energy. The water flashed to steam and blew a multi-ton lid partly off the unit. The spinning rotor did not escape, so all was well.

More about Beacon Power technology: [2].

[1] [http://eastwickpress.com/news/2011/07/a-mishap-at-the- beacon...](http://eastwickpress.com/news/2011/07/a-mishap-at-the-beacon-power- frequency-flywheel-plant/)

[2] [http://www.sandia.gov/ess/docs/pr_conferences/2014/Thursday/...](http://www.sandia.gov/ess/docs/pr_conferences/2014/Thursday/Session7/02_Areseneaux_Jim_20MW_Flywheel_Energy_Storage_Plant_140918.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Good luck searching for "google Malta" and getting decent product help. I just spent the last two nights battling to find online solutions for a login permissions error in their new "google backup and sync" product.

You would think Google would recognise the benifits of owning a namespace.

<comment><USER26> > Good luck searching for "google Malta" and getting decent product help.

Why would you search for "Google Malta" for product help when Malta is from X, not Google (searching for "x malta" gets more relevant results up front than using the wrong company name) and is a project, which has not yet produced a product (and any product may well have completely different branding.)

Plus, when it does result in a product, it'll be a utility-scale energy storage system, so I'd hope anyone needing product help isn't just doing a web search, anyway.

> You would think Google would recognise the benifits of owning a namespace.

X isn't Google, though they share the same corporate parent.

<comment><USER27> > X isn't Google, though they share the same corporate parent.

To be fair, that used to be Google, with corresponding "Google X".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Along the same line of thought: [https://www.energy-storage.news/news/german- utility-ewe-want...](https://www.energy-storage.news/news/german-utility-ewe- wants-to-build-giant-redox-flow-system-in-underground-ca)

</comment><comment><USER29> Any data on the energy density and the price per kWh?

Would be interesting to know how it compares to flow batteries.

</comment><comment><USER30> Hot and cold stores can be used to heat or cool a building as well as provide hot water. So, the efficiency could be better by not converting back to electricity.

</comment><comment><USER31> This isn't really a climate change issue like the article suggest (and which doesn't sell well commercially) but an arbitrage idea. Store energy when it's cheap and use it when it's expensive.

<comment><USER32> It is a climate change issue in the sense that every green energy source we have is intermittent (except nuclear, whose non-viability has been discussed on HN today). If we want to run the whole world on sustainable energy sources, large scale energy storage must be an integral part of our grid.</comment></comment>


How Intercity Buses Are Changing the Way We Travel in Germany - <AUTHOR> http://www.young-germany.de/topic/live/travel-location/derailing-the-train-how-intercity-buses-are-changing-the-way-we-travel-in <comment><AUTHOR> "Long-distance buses were, quite literally, forbidden. All of this changed at the beginning of 2013, which saw the liberalization of a German law resulting in the sudden and aggressive rise of the Fernbus."</comment>


How to avoid unwanted wakeups when killing lots of processes - <AUTHOR> https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/ProcessKillingTrick <comment><USER2> There is a continuation post the next day: [https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/CodeRea...](https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/CodeReadingNarrowness)

It's because there are three or four different things that could be the reason behind the code he talks about, not just what he described in this post.

</comment><comment><USER3> There is a problem though: the code wakes up all the processes with SIGCONT even if some of them were stopped by some other program (not by systemd) intentionally.

<comment><USER4> Which of those processes will _not_ have a pending SIGTERM/SIGKILL action as their very first thing to do once continued?</comment></comment>


Fiplab's Mixergy Interview ($30k/month bootstrapped from internship income) - <AUTHOR> http://mixergy.com/modha-sharma-fiplab-interview/

<comment><USER2> I interviewed these guys after reading the conversation about them on HN.</comment>


Who's Lying to Us and Who's Telling the Truth? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/books/review-talking-to-strangers-malcolm-gladwell.html <comment><USER2> Can we change the title so that it reflects that this is a review of Malcom Gladwell's new book? The current title ("Who's lying to us and who's telling the truth" is much less informative and transparent.</comment>


How Nym improves on traditional mixnet designs? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/nymtech/how-nym-improves-on-traditional-mixnet-designs-219cd36724a0 <comment><USER2> Free Software community implementation stemming from the same research: [https://katzenpost.mixnetworks.org/](https://katzenpost.mixnetworks.org/)</comment>


JQuery Mobile Alpha 2 Released - <AUTHOR> http://jquerymobile.com/2010/11/jquery-mobile-alpha-2-released/

<comment><USER2> Trying the demos on both a Galaxy S and an iPad, I'm struck by how slow everything feels. Buttons don't react when you press them, but a second later, which isn't acceptable when you're competing with native applications. However, it looks good and they have time to fix the speed issues. I might look into using this instead of something heavier, like sproutcore.

<comment><USER3> Their demo seems to be loading content from the internet when you click a "stuff >" button. That's a terrible metaphor to use, since the expectation when hitting a button like that is instant feedback. Had they left links looking like links, you would expect a delay while loading and therefore not be disappointed.

To make it worse, putting the "loading" dialog up actually makes the operation seem slower. If I was building a site using this library, that's the first thing I'd figure out how to disable.

<comment><USER4> looking at the api, you can also do a number of "pages" within a single html page, and just have it cycle through those when you click links (much like jqtouch worked).

While it is kind of slow to load each page with ajax, I do like that they have made that easy to implement, as it was rather difficult to do with jqtouch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been using this since the hour it was released, and colour me impressed; the jquery team works _fast_. The amount of improvements in this release are astounding. great work guys!

</comment><comment><USER6> I coded my first JQuery app (www.quaverly.com) using JQuery Mobile last weekend. It was ridiculous how little time it took to make something look semi-presentable--it would have taken me maybe a week to code the equivalent in GWT, and it wouldn't have looked as nice, either!

</comment><comment><USER7> It doesn't seem to working for my Blackberry Bold. I see only the plain HTML text.</comment>


Obama says he can't pardon Snowden - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/21/13697072/obama-snowden-pardon-nsa-trump-pompeo <comment><USER2> Of course he can. Ford pardoned Nixon. The pardon power is without restrictions. The real question is why would Obama say this? Does he think that the German press are idiots without access to Lexis/Nexis? Or is he really saying, "I want to pardon him but they won't let me?" His comments otherwise make no sense.</comment>


5 irrational human behaviors you can use to increase conversion today - <AUTHOR> http://www.conversioner.com/blog/5-neuromarketing-tricks-every-marketer-know/

<comment><USER2> looks very interesting! do you also optimize google landing pages?</comment>


Netflix dumps Exchange, other on-premise software in cloud-first strategy - <AUTHOR> http://www.citeworld.com/cloud/22091/netflix-dumps-exchange-other-premise-software-cloud-first-strategy

<comment><USER2> Might want to edit the title. This article really isn't about Netflix using GMail.

It's about Netflix's use of OneLogin and SAML to manage single sign-on for their corporate cloud apps. That umbrella includes Google Apps like GMail, but it also includes apps like "Dropbox, Docusign, Workday, Safari Books, SD Elements, ServiceNow."

Single sign-on is a downright essential feature for a lot of B2B cloud apps. Asking corporate users to constantly log in to a loads of different cloud apps is a fast way to make sure that most of those apps don't get used. It's only natural that a service like OneLogin would come around to help companies manage single sign-on.

<comment><USER3> Disclaimer: I work for OneLogin, but do not speak for OneLogin. :)

\--

For sure. It's no coincidence that before recently moving to OneLogin from a short-term contract at Gap corporate, my biggest pain at work was getting access to do my job.

I think it took a week of onboarding to get on WiFi and in the ticketing system. I worked at Gap for six weeks (everything but the systems are pretty cush). The entire time I had an insecure password set by a network administrator because the password reset form was broken.

I had access to my Gap Exchange account for nearly two months after I left - longer than I worked there.

Perimeter-based security typically leads to a situation where the people who need to get their job done can't conveniently, but anyone with half a cluestick can waltz in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The story appears to be a paid piece for OneLogIn.

</comment><comment><USER5> Odd that they're dumping Exchange for SSO-related reasons, as " _... Microsoft is now getting into the game. It recently announced that its customers, using certain Microsoft products and services, will be able to manage passwords for third party cloud apps through Active Directory._ " From the 2nd page.

<comment><USER6> Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) can be used as a SAML 2.0 Identity Provider (iDP). This goes back to the introduction of ADFS in Windows Server 2003 R2.

<comment><USER3> In this case, they were probably using AD just because of Exchange, so if you want to ditch Exchange for Gmail, it's an odd choice to use AD as your identity provider, esp if you're a company known for wanting as little on- premise IT as possible.

<comment><USER6> I would guess that they're using Active Directory because they have Windows PCs to manage. AD, arguably, provides a _lot_ of value if you have any quantity of Windows-based PCs that you want to manage centrally.

I haven't seen any compelling third-party hosted offering to replace the SSO and Group Policy functionality in Windows client OS's that AD enables. Maybe when Samba4 reaches maturity that will change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anyone know of any good tutorials on setting up a SAML ID Provider or integrating SAML into a website?

<comment><USER8> If you are using Ruby or Rails, there is a toolkit for integrating saml [https://github.com/onelogin/ruby-saml](https://github.com/onelogin/ruby-saml)</comment></comment>


NLP explained: A good POS tagger in 200 lines of Python - <AUTHOR> http://honnibal.wordpress.com/2013/09/11/a-good-part-of-speechpos-tagger-in-about-200-lines-of-python/

<comment><USER2> Great article. I reposted with a slightly different title to see if it gets more traction: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6386356](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6386356)</comment>


Exploring Word2Vec - <AUTHOR> http://sujayskumar.blogspot.com/2017/03/exploring-word2vec_3.html <comment><USER2> We recently open sourced a library that makes it easy to quickly get started with pre-trained word vector models like word2vec from Google, Facebook, and Stanford. It adds a ton of extra functionality like fast similiarity indexing with Annoy and fairly robust out-of-vocabulary word lookups (handling misspellings) out of the box. If you want to quickly get started with pre- built models, it might be worth checking out along with Gensim:

[https://github.com/plasticityai/magnitude/](https://github.com/plasticityai/magnitude/)

<comment><USER3> Are document vectors supported analogously to word vectors? It's a bit peculiar to me that gensim withholds useful word2vec methods from the Doc2Vec class, like most_similar_from. I'd really enjoy having a common interface to both vector spaces.

<comment><USER2> Currently, it doesn't support document vectors, but it should be possible to add it and maintain the same interface. We're open to accepting a pull request if your interested in building that feature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > One important thing to note is that Word2Vec does not consider the > positional variable of the context words.

There is a very interesting new approach of learning Gaussian mixtures from words, which addresses this problem: [https://github.com/benathi/word2gm](https://github.com/benathi/word2gm)

It also solves another interesting problem, which is that Word2Vec doesn't always put "categories" close to their actual contents.

Eg. I wrote a simple AI for playing Codenames with word vectors: [https://github.com/thomasahle/codenames](https://github.com/thomasahle/codenames) But where a human use the clue "Countries 2" for "Germany" and "England", the Glove vectors (at least in my implementation) much prefers the clue "France 2", which is pretty confusing at first.

<comment><USER5> The Gaussian mixture representation is quite interesting, so thanks for the link. But it seems like they do not make use of the relative position of words in the text either. They simply maximize the margin of the expected likelihood for words that occur in the same context over those that do not.

However, in most cases it's probably actually better to ignore word order, since that captures more semantic relatedness rather than the syntactic features that influence word order. It also lets you translate between languages that do not necessarily have similar grammar: "Word Translation Without Parallel Data" [https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.04087](https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.04087)

<comment><USER6> Whether it's okay to ignore word order really depends on your goals. In my work, tracking word order to build a sentence representation is necessary to get composition rules correct. You can get away with ignoring order surprisingly often but when it's needed, it's vital. When aggregated across an entire corpus, order ends up mattering a lot, in an absolute sense (something looking only at accuracy numbers will hide).

Compare the following:

1) You must state the benefit.

2) You must benefit the state.

3) Feed fish vs. Fish feed.

Sometimes limits in inference:

1) A loves B.

2) Cats eat fish.

3) Cats are mammals.

Sometimes the sequence preceding or following will be important:

1) Problems with learning

2) Learning with problems

3) It has a _learning problem_

4) A _learning problem_ for it.

Or consider an example from:

[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2335962_How_Well_Ca...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2335962_How_Well_Can_Passage_Meaning_be_Derived_without_Using_Word_Order_A_Comparison_of_Latent_Semantic_Analysis_and_Humans)

1) It was not the sales manager who hit the bottle that day, but the office worker with the serious drinking problem.

2) That day the office manager, who was drinking, hit the problem sales worker with the bottle, but it was not serious.

Order ends up mattering when you want to capture nuance or power higher order inference.

<comment><USER5> Right, what I meant was not that order doesn't matter at all, but that order mostly doesn't matter for the meaning of individual words (except for some homonyms which can be disambiguated using syntactical information).

When you want to handle whole sentences, obviously order becomes much more relevant, but for that you'd feed the word vectors into an LSTM or similar to handle the order-dependence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I enjoyed this writeup, as well as the canonical word2vec explanation linked.

I will say that he's wrong that NFL never co-occurs with ML. I've had discussions involving the No Free Lunch theorem by its initials.

<comment><AUTHOR> Valid point. I should have made it clearer that NFL stands for National Football League. I was trying to demonstrate the difference in domain, one being sports and the other being computer science.

<comment><USER7> I understand, it's just a funny coincidence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can someone explain why isn't the word 'the' considered part of the vocabulary in the blog post?

<comment><USER9> usual procedure in NLP: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_words](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_words)

<comment><USER3> Word2Vec actually employs a default strategy of pruning the most common 0.0001% of words in the corpus. My understanding is that this permits the RNN layer to train on the unadulterated text rather than an unnatural concentrate of tokens, which is supposedly beneficial.

Interestingly there's some controversy whether this benefit extends to punctuation. Most W2V tutorials instruct the programmer to apply tokenizing functions that leave only space-separated word characters, annihilating everything else, but I've actually observed higher accuracy scores from models that tokenize non-word characters individually, i.e. as strings of length 1. I'm not sure exactly why this is the case, but there is a common sense interpretation which might explain. Output from the precursory tokenizer output is often transduced by word2phrase, an optional bigram recognizer. Mikolov strongly recommends using it, but I'm sure it struggles to infer pointwise mutual information from a text that's missing ~70% of its contents.</comment></comment></comment>


An Angel Investor Group Move That Makes Me Vomit - <AUTHOR> http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2009/08/an-angel-investor-group-move-that-make-me-vomit.html <comment><USER2> Previously posted and much discussion at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=782980>

</comment><comment><USER3> Simply boycott any group that wants to charge you to present, make it plain why you boycott them and spread the word far and wide.</comment>


Astronomers discover 10 new moons for Jupiter - <AUTHOR> http://earthsky.org/space/10-new-moons-discovered-jupiter-1-oddball <comment><USER2> NatGeo says 12... [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2018/07/news-12-n...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2018/07/news-12-new- moons-found-jupiter-79-planets-space/)</comment>


What would be your biggest frustration fulfilling the role of a tech leader? - <AUTHOR> My team has 20 people and I find it really hard to keep them focused on perfecting the product. Seems like we are always responding to "emergencies" created by the sale team.
I was just wondering what other problems you were facing as technical leaders...
I also made a survey since I really want to understand what we are going through at the moment as technical leaders. I would really appreciate your help on that. Here is the link:
http://goo.gl/forms/Ncm7QuxzGg
I've put up a report called Lessons learnt from "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" by Ben Horowitz which condenses the knowledge from the book. I will be sending it for free as gratitude for helping with the survey. <comment><USER2>
      Seems like we are always responding to "emergencies" created by the sale team.

The first step to filling your tech organization's hole is to get the sale team to stop digging.

</comment><comment><USER3> Your first paragraph is an expectations management problem on both sides.

That doesn't depend on the "technical" part of "technical leadership".</comment>


Disney puts your face on a 3D-printed Stormtrooper for $99.95 - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/10/4318080/disney-3d-printed-stormtrooper <comment><USER2> I'm assuming only the head is 3-D printed and then attached (glued?) to mass- produced bodies?</comment>


Ask HN: Thoughts on Tesla Stock? - <AUTHOR> This is interesting. Tesla stock has gone up from averaging $300 to $800 in last 3 months. Before that, it was pretty flat in the same price range. What has happened suddenly ? <comment><USER2> Tesla had a good earnings call and a spike in stock price Feb 4th. The spike has leveled off back to the general upward trend now. They also just announced $2B in added shares to capitalize on stock surge according to Yahoo News.

<comment><USER3> Lots of concerning information in its 10-K though.</comment></comment>


Git Your SQL Together (with a Query Library) - <AUTHOR> https://caitlinhudon.com/2018/11/28/git-sql-together/ <comment><USER2> This hadn't dawned on me until I was two years in at my former company. To actually save the work that was outside of my workflow.</comment>


Power vs Influence - Choose one. - <AUTHOR>

There are two forms or dimensions of leadership. One is power, the other, influence. Often we confuse the two. After all, those who have power often have influence, and those who have influence have a certain kind of power. In fact, however, the two are quite different, even opposites.
We can see this by a simple thought-experiment.
Imagine you have total power, and then you decide to share it with nine others. You now have one-tenth of the power with which you began. Imagine, by contrast, that you have a certain measure of influence, and now you share it with nine others. How much do you have left? Not less. In fact, more. Initially there was only one of you; now there are ten. Your influence has spread.
Power operates by division, influence by multiplication. With power, the more we share, the less we have. With influence, the more we share, the more we have.
To paraphrase Shakespeare, "The influence we have lives after us; the power is oft interred with our bones."
People still contend for power. If only we would realize how narrow its limits are. It is one thing to force people to behave in a certain way; quite another to teach them to see the world differently so that, of their own accord, they act in a new way.
The use of power diminishes others; the exercise of influence enlarges them.
-Excerpts from http://www.chiefrabbi.org/2013/06/03/covenant-conversation-korach-power-vs-influence/ <comment><USER2> If it's a decision between being either Gail Wynand or Ellsworth Toohey, I choose the latter. Toohey was able to build grassroots support that ultimately won the struggle. Power can be lost as quick as it can be gained. Influence seems to be a different beast from my experience.</comment>


Clojure's first year - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/msg/16fec21eb1fff8aa?pli=1

<comment><USER2> That message was posted in 2008, clojure has now reached the ripe old age of 2

</comment><comment><USER3> I highly recommend the Pragmatic Programmer's book on Clojure. For me, the concepts are new and interesting and may even be applicable to what I'm working on today, and will most certainly be applicable in the multi-core future.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would like to see a similar "Clojure's second year" review.

</comment><comment><USER5> > A year ago today I 'released' Clojure, by sending a message to my jFli and > Foil mailing lists

Happy birthday and thanks to Rich!</comment>