Virginia Tech unveils HokieSpeed, a powerful new supercomputer for the masses - <AUTHOR> http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/articles/2012/01/010512-engineering-hokiespeed.html

<comment><USER3> I don't understand these articles that assume you understand what "two 2.40-gigahertz Intel Xeon E5645 6-core... and two NVIDIA M2050/C2050 448-core .... which reside on a Supermicro 2026GT0TRF motherboard" means, but didn't already know what "CPU" and "GPU" stand for.

</comment><comment><USER4> As a Hokie, this is good but SystemX was way more revolutionary. At the time, supercomputers weren't built on consumer hardware and the fact that it was in the top 5 (3?) with a bunch of G5s was like a shockwave. Basically, COTS supercomputers had finally arrived when SystemX came out.

<comment><USER5> Too bad System X was a publicity stunt that was never used for science AFAIK.

<comment><USER4> I left in 03 so AFAIK the researchers using SystemX were coming from ICAM and the Bioinformatics department. The professor I worked under (as a gopher) had a 4way G4 cluster doing protein synthesis. He was very excited to get processor time on this supercomputer.

But whatever, some publicity stunt. They were stupid enough to waste money upgrading and expanding it because no one was using it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A bit of engineer's rough estimating:

System was built in 2003 - 8 years ago. Assume moore's law of doubles every 2 years - expectation of 16x more powerful Actual increase in performance - <USER2> in 1/4th the size

Given that it's then a quarter of the size of system X, that's an amazing increase in peak performance.

There's only one problem - that speed increase appears to owe a lot to the use of GPGPU. As I understand it, whilst research into GPGPU for HPC* is a hot area at the moment, the scale of the actual benefits it offers is still a matter of debate (especially when considering costs and power consumption).

<comment><USER7> From my perspective, the biggest limitation in using GPUs for more general purpose computations is the communication latency. I published a paper that came to that conclusion: <http://people.cs.vt.edu/~scschnei/papers/debs2010.pdf>

In short, parallelism is not enough to get benefit from using GPUs. You need parallelism _and_ data reuse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am not trying to be difficult but how is a $1.4M anything for the masses? Are they allowing the public to run jobs on the machine? Is there anything new about HS that brings SC500 power closer to my home office?

<comment><USER9> If by 'SC500' you mean a supercomputer that has a high ranking on the Top500 list, it's already here: [http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/11/amazons- cloud-i...](http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/11/amazons-cloud-is-the- worlds-42nd-fastest-supercomputer.ars)

<comment><USER8> I meant how does the VT system bring SC500 to the masses. As in the "supercomputer for the masses"?

<comment><USER9> Sounds like they're interested in improving GPU development tools, and how to utilize them for tasks they're good for versus what a traditional CPU is good for. From [http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/12/vt- supercompute...](http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/12/vt- supercomputer/)

"The Virginia Tech team is figuring out how to best to farm out computing jobs so that the GPUs and CPUs do what they do best, without ever going idle, and without spending too much time communicating with one another.

It's not easy, but they're using HokieSpeed to build tools for designing and compiling software so that it can be tweaked to run fast on these systems. They've also built what they call an "automated runtime system," which works with the supercomputer's operating system to speed things up even further."

I think the 'supercomputing for the masses' part comes from the fact that the peak performance of a relatively low-cost GPU is large compared to a CPU, but actually taking advantage of that performance is still difficult. They're aiming to change that with improved software development tools. At least, that's what I gathered from the article.

Here's a link to research they're doing on GPU computing: <http://synergy.cs.vt.edu/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> From Feng: "The next frontier is to take high-performance computing, in particular supercomputers such as HokieSpeed, and personalize it for the masses."

This is one of my favorite things about technology. As few as five years ago I was drooling about an Intel C2D chip and looking forward to quad-core chips. Nowadays that's standard technology in smartphones. I'm amazed by the graphics performance in the new Asus Transformer Prime with the Tegra 3 chip which has up to five cores.

The biggest problem with packing more power into smaller spaces is the battery consumption issue. Maybe there's no silver bullet for that only more efficient software and hardware usage.</comment>


Show HN: Scraperjs – A versatile web scraper - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ruipgil/scraperjs

<comment><USER2> It's unclear to me how to actually run this. Only executing the two commands listed under the Installing section does not run it - I had to `cd` into the scraperjs dir, then `npm install`, then continue with the second Install command (`grunt test`) to actually test.

Also, do you install scraperjs into each project directory you want to use it for? Or just install it once?

<comment><AUTHOR> Scraperjs is supposed to be used as npm package. So, if you do "npm install <package-name>", you download the latest version of package to the same folder as the closest package.json file (if there's none it will go to your ~/ folder). At that point you can just use with "require('scraperjs')". The test part is a bit more foggy, and I'll add more information to the README in due time. To test you've got to npm-install, with the save-dev flag (npm install --save-dev scraperjs), it will also add the package to your development dependencies, this is so that people that want to use the package won't need to download all scraperjs' development dependencies.

For more information about npm install: [https://www.npmjs.org/doc/cli/npm- install.html](https://www.npmjs.org/doc/cli/npm-install.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It would be helpful if the documentation compared how Scraperjs is different from, or better than, CasperJS for scraping. CasperJS is the older and more well-known wrapper around PhantomJS so comparisons would help people decide what the appropriate tool would be.

[http://casperjs.org/](http://casperjs.org/)

<comment><USER4> As far as I can see it has not much in common with casperjs, apart from the fact that it can use phantomjs.

<comment><USER3> If you mean that the syntax is different, yes, I get that.

CasperJS can also scrape dynamic websites. What criteria would someone want to use ScraperJS instead of CasperJS for that task? Are there features in ScraperJS that don't exist in CasperJS? Does it take 10x less lines-of-code to accomplish the same task? Etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> For web scraping purposes ScraperJS and ScraperJS would probably use the same lines of code, however ScraperJS has most of the tools you need for web scraping, something that CasperJS lacks (that's not their main goal). ScraperJS is move flexible than just CasperJS. If you want static content just use the static scraper and get lightening fast results. TL;DR: CasperJS is great but it's not made for web scraping.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you're interested in scraping in python, then I recommend giving this a read: [http://jakeaustwick.me/python-web-scraping- resource/](http://jakeaustwick.me/python-web-scraping-resource/)

<comment><USER6> I think Scrapy is a better Python scraping tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is awesome. I am very new to scraping, so bear with me if this is very obvious.

Would it be possible to follow a list of URLs from a home page (Ex: List of Marathon Runners), and then follow the link in their name that goes to their stats page, and download / save the scraped data as JSON to a text file on the local machine's C:\Runners\Data\ folder for example?

Also, does anyone know of a reliable and tested C# / .Net / ASP.Net web page scrapper?

<comment><USER8> On the second question, Typically a web scraper just interacts with the output of a web server, is shouldn't matter if it is asp.net or any other system.

<comment><USER9> Mostly this. In ASP.NET/C# you're probably looking at using the built in HttpClient lib [0] and an html parser lib like HTMLAgilityPack [1]. I've used this combo in the past and am happy with it.

[0] [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/system.net.http.http...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/system.net.http.httpclient\(v=vs.118\).aspx) [1] [http://htmlagilitypack.codeplex.com/](http://htmlagilitypack.codeplex.com/)

<comment><USER7> Thanks!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Let us know if you'd like to integrate this with [http://www.80legs.com](http://www.80legs.com)!

</comment><comment><USER11> If anyone is interested in just scrapping links between webpages with JavaScript, I made Slinky ([https://github.com/andrejewski/slinky](https://github.com/andrejewski/slinky)). The API is simple and easily overridable.

</comment><comment><USER12> Could someone recommend a similar framework but Ruby based? Just because I'm more skilled in Ruby than in Node (not for trolling purposes)

I've been exploring Github but could not find a well mantained framework (or at least updated to last month).

<comment><USER13> While I haven't tried any, I think if you want to handle dynamic Javascript content, you'd have to go with a JS library. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

<comment><USER14> you can do it in pure ruby with one of the webkit wrappers (i.e. poltergeist[0])

[0] [https://github.com/teampoltergeist/poltergeist](https://github.com/teampoltergeist/poltergeist))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice! Could've used that this weekend when I got caught in callback hell trying to build a simple NodeJS scraper. Ended up doing it in PHP just because I know it well.

I'll give it another go with this library next week!

</comment><comment><USER16> Artoo is soooo much better :) [https://medialab.github.io/artoo/](https://medialab.github.io/artoo/)

</comment><comment><USER17> I really like the router aspect of this. That's a nice idea and not (to the best of my limited memory) one I can recall seeing in any other scraper.

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't quite get the point of the DynamicScraper... Any real use cases for that?

<comment><USER3> For example, go to [http://www.imdb.com](http://www.imdb.com)

On the right, you'll notice that under the sidebar "Opening This Week" is a movie titled " _Love Is Strange_ ".

With that in mind, press Ctrl+U (view html source).

Try to search for the word " _Strange_ " anywhere in the source. (It's not there.) If it's not there, how did it get shown on the screen?!

The answer is that it is "dynamically" loaded. A simple scraper that only works on a static download of html source won't be able to retrieve that string. You need web scrapers that can process dynamic pages (execute Javascript).

Btw, you'll notice that you _can_ find the string "Strange" via F12 (Developer Tools). That's because the F12 inspector shows the html _after_ the DOM has been dynamically modified by javascript whereas Ctrl+U does not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> if you want a scraper as service, you can try: [https://PhantomJsCloud.com](https://PhantomJsCloud.com)

disclaimer: i wrote it.

</comment><comment><USER20> Looks pretty good, shame about the promises.</comment>


Getting my sh*t together: 5 new weekly habits - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/51cdb52ba7cc

<comment><USER2> On points 2 and 3 (Coffee with a stranger/Talk to a random girl), Pick up Artists (PUA's) get a lot of flak for being douches or just trying to sleep with a bunch of women but one thing they push that will help anyone in life is things that most introverts types just do not do, like how to chat with random strangers, pushing the envelope in all types of interactions and not being attached to outcomes. This has helped me out immensely in my personal and professional life. I like the guys from [http://www.rsdnation.com/](http://www.rsdnation.com/) as they give lots of free advice.</comment>


Show HN: Pied Piper has an API - <AUTHOR> https://piedpiper.3scale.net/

<comment><USER2> "What is Pied Piper?"

"Pied Piper isn't some bloated corporation with a pretentious mission statement about "making the world a better place.""

"We are a small, focused, business-facing compression company intent on providing the absolute best in data-management solutions."

Uhh... okay, but what exactly is Pied Piper? What do you do? What would make me a customer? What problems do you solve? What can I write in my proposal to the CEO?

<comment><USER3> Erlich Bachman co-founder of Pied Piper here. Pied Piper is a vision, or was a vision, of mine. Like other people, I like storytelling and do sing in the shower occasionally when I'm in the spiritual mood. Right now however, I am sensing a general lack of vision. Your muffins smell like shit. So do your ideas. Good day.

<comment><USER4> Show some promise... like Nip Alert... It gives you the location of a woman with erect nipples... That's what people want.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Finally.</comment>


Named Pipes in Bash - <AUTHOR> http://www.hollenback.net/NamedPipesInBash <comment><USER2> You can create named pipes explicitly:

        $ mkfifo ~/pipe
        $ ./background.sh > ~/pipe &
        $ tail -f ~/pipe

[http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2156](http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2156)

<comment><USER3> Yes, but I have always found that cumbersome and I was never sure which program has which pipe, and what will exactly happen if one of the reading/writing programs dies. (I am still not sure.)

So I am glad that what OP wrote exists.

<comment><USER4> True. I've known about that feature of bash, but I have found precious few good opportunities to use it. As someone mentioned below, if a program expects a file and you give it a pipe, it may try to seek and cause the whole thing to fail. So trying to use it is always a gamble. Moreover, a named pipe is an object in the filesystem that bash has to create, only to remove it a moment later. So it is not really any cleaner than using a temp file. The only case where you'd clearly benefit is when the amount of data is too big to justify temporarily writing it out to a file.

<comment><USER5> bash doesn't create named pipe filesystem objects when you use process substitution, it passes file descriptors via the dynamically created kernel managed /dev/fd paths. There is nothing to clean up.

<comment><USER4> Oh, I think I see what you're saying. So calling them named pipes is inaccurate, then. If I'm not mistaken, using features of the /dev filesystem would be dependent on Linux, then. Either way, it isn't really a very robust design. Not like a pipe returned by pipe(2) and passed to a program that is expecting it. Simple unnamed pipes are a fundamental part of unix.

Here's what the man page says:

           Process  substitution  is  supported on systems that support named pipes (FIFOs) or the /dev/fd method of
           naming open files.  It takes the form of <(list) or >(list).  The process list is run with its  input  or
           output  connected  to  a FIFO or some file in /dev/fd.  The name of this file is passed as an argument to
           the current command as the result of the expansion.  If the >(list) form is used,  writing  to  the  file
           will  provide input for list.  If the <(list) form is used, the file passed as an argument should be read
           to obtain the output of list.

So it's done with /dev/fd if that's available, which basically means Linux with that filesystem mounted. Otherwise it falls back on named pipes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's a caveat with process substitution; the command can't seek() on the input file.

If if a command, for example, needs to do 2 passes, it'll will either have to be 'smart' enough to stick the output in a buffer or fail.

<comment><USER7> Yes, this is a problem in bash. In zsh you can use temporary files for process substitution, like this:

vimdiff =(ls /bin) =(ls /usr/bin)

You can use it even from bash:

zsh -c 'vimdiff =(ls /bin) =(ls /usr/bin)'

<comment><USER8> Actually vimdiff seems to have no problem with:

        vimdiff <(ls /bin) <(ls /usr/bin)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This and so much more is in [http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html](http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html) \- well worth perusing if you're needing to do a lot of bash.

<comment><USER10> Future readers, #bash on freenode says of this link:

< greybot> The infamous "Advanced" Bash Scripting Guide should be avoided unless you know how to filter out the junk. It will teach you to write bugs, not scripts. In that light, the BashGuide was written: [http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide](http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide)

They felt strongly enough to learn their bot of it. Keep this in mind, I haven't read much of either resource yet.

<comment><USER9> Interesting. I'd not heard anything negative about it, and found it useful both in my day-to-day BASH-ing and in a position where I maintained a huge pile of BASH scripts. It may very well be that I knew how to filter out the junk. There is certainly a lot that doesn't belong in scripts but is quite useful interactively.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Are these really named pipes? And if yes, what are the names? Kinda looks like anonymous pipes to my untrained eyes.

<comment><USER12> They're anonymous named pipes. Do this in a shell to see the name:

        echo <(true)

<comment><USER13> anonymous named?

We really need to refactor our terminology. :)

<comment><USER12> Why, that's exactly what it is? It's a named pipe, but not one used explicitly by you but implicitly by the process substitution feature to pass a file, which of course has a name, to another process. It's only anonymous to you because you didn't name it, to the system it's an ordinary named pipe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wrote a post about this a while back, which may be of some help to some. [http://vincebuffalo.com/2013/08/08/the-mighty-named- pipe.htm...](http://vincebuffalo.com/2013/08/08/the-mighty-named-pipe.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great article, thanks! You should submit it separately if you haven't. Noticed a typo in the title that you might fix first: "Using Names Pipes"

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Pretty cool.

Related: anybody has ideas to achieve the following?

display the stdout of a program on the console and also write a gzipped version of stdout to a file.

I currently jump through some hoops (involving two term windows) to achieve. 'tee -a' to a named pipe in one window and in another window, 'gzip <' from that named pipe. Would prefer a single-window, single-command solution.

<comment><USER16> What's wrong with:

        cmd | tee >( gzip - > cmd.out.gz )

<comment><USER15> Yeah, I think this is probably going to work. Thx!

PS: 'inevitable', you made the same suggestion. But you seem to be hellbanned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very useful, hopefully I remember this when I need it next time (that being the bane of all bash cleverness). The >(foo) would benefit from some extra explanation though, currently it is not very clear how it differs from regular |foo.

<comment><USER18> >(foo) turns into a file name, so it can be passed to things that absolutely want a file name to write to. And multiple occurrences of this should work as you'd expect.

<comment><USER8> Interesting, indeed it does:

        # define a function that echoes it's first argument:
        $ arg1() { echo $1 ; }

        $ arg1 test
        test

        $ arg1 <(echo hello)
        /dev/fd/63

<comment><USER19>
      echo <(:)

<comment><USER8> Thanks, I've never investigated ":" beyond noting it's presence in fork bombs.

        :
        Null command.

        No effect; the command does nothing.

        Exit Status:
        Always succeeds.

<comment><USER20> Basically a builtin for `true`. Its use in forkbombs is unrelated except for the fact that it's a valid character in a bash function name. Defining `:(){:|:&)` obviously shadows the builtin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This 'bash' feature, among others, was in ksh before bash existed.

</comment><comment><USER22> If I would have seen this one or two hours ago it could have spared me hate on irc://irc.freenode.net/bash</comment>


Europe had human zoos in 1958 - <AUTHOR> http://www.theplaidzebra.com/human-zoos-one-europes-shameful-secrets-ended-50s/ <comment><USER2> This is a sad and impossible to justify action, but I think we haven't improved yet. Outside of preserving species, animal zoos we have now are, in my view, equally wrong and unjustifiable. The recent death of a kid in a zoo showed how irresponsible humans are with their dominion over most things on this earth. In the opposite scenario we wouldn't shoot a human baby that's trying to, say, eat a bird, would we? I've heard most arguments for zoos and the only one that makes sense is to help the population of species. Anything else like "but this reduces safaris" are bogus.

To give the simplest possible example: what gives us the right to cage a bird and disallow it from flying, which arguably is its primary purpose in life?

To be clear, I'm not following any pro animal rights, or against meat or whatever ideology. I just cannot logically make sense of holding animals in captivity with the sole purpose of having humans visit them. There are good ways to do this as well, like reservations in the open nature, where it's not a zoo, but still it's a compromise and ideally we wouldn't have to fence lions, etc. in because human settlements have expanded into their space.

<comment><USER3> If you think zoos exist for "holding animals in captivity with the sole purpose of having humans visit them" then you don't understand how zoos work. There's a lot more going on beyond the scene. Zoos employ numerous Ph.D-level scientists who are involved in conservation work. Many more animals would be extinct today without the breeding programs in zoos.

<comment><USER2> Maybe you missed the exceptions I've included above:

        Outside of preserving species, animal zoos we have now are...

        ...only one that makes sense is to help the population of species...

Maybe my wording was bad, but your argument is exactly what I accept as a valid reason for zoos to exist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Saying "a Congolese female" in this context seems inappropriate. "Woman" would be a more humanizing term.

(Also, the rest of the article seems to suggest Ota Benga was a man, not a woman. My point still stands.)

</comment><comment><USER5> Society is a human zoo.</comment>


Apple buys Polar Rose - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-buys-swedish-facial-recognition-company-polar-rose-report-2010-9

<comment><USER2> Too bad the founders owned less than 3%.</comment>


Startup Weekend in Foggia, Italy, NOW - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/swfoggia/ <comment><AUTHOR> With Dani Arnout guest and facilitator ehehe. :D</comment>


Paul Graham on CEOs with 'Strong' Foreign Accents - <AUTHOR> http://www.siliconbeat.com/2013/08/27/quoted-y-combinators-paul-graham-on-ceos-with-strong-foreign-accents/

<comment><USER2> PG has clarified what he meant in HN comments for the original article:

 _" I am talking about failure to communicate here. I don't mean strong accents in the sense that it's clear that someone comes from another country. I'm talking about accents so strong that you have to interrupt the conversation to ask what they just said."_

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6279918](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6279918)

<comment><USER3> This makes a lot of sense to me. Originally, I thought PG was confusing correlation with causation and projecting from a relatively small number of data points. But I agree, if the accent is so strong that it's hard to understand, that person will have a more difficult time being an effective CEO

<comment><USER4> > that person will have a more difficult time being an effective CEO

In an English speaking community. But in their own country they'd be fine. This is about _YC applicants_. That really needs to be included in the quote, she moved the leading question to the part below it, which gives an entirely different impression than if that were the introduction.

<comment><USER3> Yes, of course. I meant in the U.S.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Other prominent Silicon Valley people with accents — we're not sure what Graham considers "strong" — include Vinod Khosla, Sun Microsystems co-founder and now a venture capitalist, Adobe's Shantanu Narayen, Tesla's Elon Musk, and a guy named Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google."

No, none of those people have strong accents. When pg says "strong" he really does mean it - so strong that you cannot actually understand what the person is saying. Has anyone ever been tripped up by Brin or Musk's accents?

As CEO, one of your main responsibilities is to be the chief communicator - with employees, investors, press, customers, etc. If you want to be a good verbal communicator, being understood is very important.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hm. That's not the nicest quote to be out there (it's missing quite a bit of important context too). Paul you should really either retract that or nuance it but as it sits this reads pretty bad, _even if it might be true_.

But I doubt it is true, accents have nothing to do with people's brains, they have everything to do with what your first language was and for how long that language was your only language. If you were born in Bulgaria, Hungary or a hundred other places and your first exposure to English in bulk and attempts to speak it started at the age of 10 or later you'll have a fairly strong accent no matter what. It's just how your throat cavity, voice box and lips will be muscled. If you tried to speak Finnish you'd likely have a very strong accent.

But that doesn't mean you're not 100% in the head or unable to communicate clearly, for instance, you could write, or you could communicate in your mother tongue. That YC finds itself in the English speaking community and tends to address an English speaking audience with its start-ups and prefers to communicate in English does not mean that those are the only ways of doing things.

Maybe people would have to work a little harder at understanding you but I think that it would need more than this quote and some of the original context to establish that such a thing is an indicator of not being able to run a business, or even that your experience to date is relevant anywhere outside of the start-up community.

This quote will be used against you, it will be spun to read you're xenophobic or worse. Do something about it before it gets legs.

<comment><USER6> Must agree. It's a stupid comment and it's embarrassing to see how PG fanboys here are walking on eggshells trying to force some sense into what seems to be the unavailing of a xenophobe. Look at early days Hollywood. It was founded, literally, by foreigners with thick accents. What a lame and nauseating comment.

<comment><USER7> Would you invest in a CEO whom you had to interrupt every 10-15 seconds because you literally _could not understand what he was saying_? Since the CEO is the one responsible for communicating with VCs, investors, big customers, potential acquirers, this is a serious concern.

PG has already clarified that he's not talking about someone saying "zee" instead of "the". And YC has funded many non-native English speaking teams before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> All the famous entrepreneurs mentioned in this story have very light accents. I found YouTube videos with these entrepreneurs speaking, and none of them have "accents so strong that you have to interrupt the conversation to ask what they just said.":

* Vinod Khosla, Sun Microsystems co-founder and now a venture capitalis: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxYVOMj6F2U&t=1m2s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxYVOMj6F2U&t=1m2s)

* Adobe's Shantanu Narayen: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TShENN3VVX8&t=0m29s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TShENN3VVX8&t=0m29s)

* Tesla's Elon Musk: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDwzmJpI4io&t=2m33s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDwzmJpI4io&t=2m33s)

* Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vv0NKieCoI&t=5m59s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vv0NKieCoI&t=5m59s)

</comment><comment><USER9> There are a lot of studies out there that show that people only "hear" the sounds that they heard as a child. So someone who grew up in the countryside in Japan is going to have a hard time speaking English "properly" even with gargantuan effort.

Anyone here who's spent a decent amount of time abroad probably knows what I'm talking about. When someone asks you how to say something in English, and you say it, and they repeat it but it just sounds _off_ , and they're incapable of producing the same sounds as you. It seems like the simplest of exercises but it hits the core of the issue.

For any Americans, trying to learn something like Thai (or other tonal languages) can be extremely difficult because of the tonal information. I am pretty incapable of producing anything sounding correct in Thai no matter how many times my friends try to make me say it.

You also have probably heard French people speak English. There's not much else to say about that. Almost all the accent is derived from differences in the sounds between the two languages.

Saying that it "just" requires effort is underestimating the amount of time it can take to rewrite the way you speak. People living years in foreign countries can still end up speaking with strong (yes, even near incomprehensible) accents, and I've run into a good amount of them.

There's a big perception penalty when you're not "in sync" with the language you're speaking in, which is where you get the "people talk slowly to you and assume you're not very smart" effect. So character judgements on language ability is a bit much.

There's an easy solution though: just hire somebody who can speak well. They're harder to find in some areas, but it's a pretty high priority. Just don't hate on the CEO if he can do his job.

</comment><comment><USER10> I was rather surprised when he said that. Not that strong foreign accents tend to fail, but more that he would actually say such an un-politically correct thing.

One thing entrepreneurs have to do is sell. Not just products, but ideas, visions, and strategies. They have to be able to convert industry talk into laymen's terms. They need to be able to convince someone who doesn't know anything about X that Y is the way to go.

While a strong foreign accent isn't necessarily the bottleneck, it is probably highly correlated with with a weaker grasp on the English language -- particularly idiomatic English, as PG pointed out. If I ask you to ELI5 your business, generally the best way to go about that is to use an analogy, but if your grasp of idiomatic English doesn't allow you to construct an elegant analogy, then you're going to miss out on a great opportunity to explain your product/idea/vision to me.

To be fair to non-English speaking entrepreneurs, this isn't specifically a language problem. There are people who speak perfectly good idiomatic English that can't speak in layman's terms. A good example of this is a Calculus professor at a college. They're so good at calculus and higher-level math that explaining simple algebra is often very difficult. "What do you mean you don't understand that y = 2x + 5 draws a graph that looks like this?!? It's easy!" But for someone who doesn't understand slope and algebra, it's NOT intuitive. There are tons of people who have this problem.

Having said that, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a higher correlation of poor communication skills to strong foreign accents.

<comment><USER4> It's perfectly possible to run a business entirely in French, Dutch, German, Finnish, Swedish, Japanese, Chinese and so on. Not all businesses are international, not all business address an English speaking audience or employees etc.

<comment><USER11> But are any of them asking YC for funding?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If we are going with the stated reasoning, I'd probably drop the "foreign" part. Midwest/Californian/New England/Texan are all mutually comprehensible but there are some deep-south accents (I am thinking particularly of rural South Carolina) that can cause the exact same sort of communication friction.

Also, I doubt a strong English accent would cause much trouble, despite being both strong and foreign.

</comment><comment><USER11> _We learned a bunch of tells as time went on. We videotape all of our interviews, and before each round of interviews, we look at the game tapes from the last round. By then, we know something about how these start-ups turned out, either good or bad. Sometimes, you look at that video and say, "We would have been fooled by these guys again." But sometimes, we can see: "Aha! They're doing X."_

That's not predjudice, that's... post-judice? Andy Grove, Elon Musk, and Sergey Brin are exceptions in many ways, so they're not really good indicators.

<comment><USER7> Additionally, Andy Grove, Elon Musk, and Sergey Brin speak very clear, understandable, and yes, accented English.

What PG actually said is that speakers with accents so thick that the YC team had to interrupt frequently to ask them to repeat themselves, tended not to be successful.

I think the problem was that PG used the term "accent" rather than "communication problem" or "could not understand what they were saying".

It's about the communication, not the fact that English is not their native language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I ran into the idea that people are biased against thick accents in '59 seconds':

       "If the gloves don't fit, you must acquit." Rhyme is actually persuasive.
       (In general things that are easier to understand/remember are more persuasive;
        people distrust the same words said in a thick foreign accent, for that reason).

[http://graehl.org/2011/02/02/59-seconds-is-a-good-self- help-...](http://graehl.org/2011/02/02/59-seconds-is-a-good-self-help-book/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Sort of amazing that someone (edit: someone of such stature) would utter something like this without, apparently, pausing to reflect whether their own subtle biases might be steering them into a comfortable observation. Then again, PG _may actually have_ reflected deeply on the matter and still come to this conclusion, but the reasoning given strikes me as post-hoc.

Is the sample of successful YC companies (or all companies) even large enough to begin making generalizations? There's what, around a thousand? In that sample size there must be tremendous variety across any axis, not just English speaking ability.

<comment><USER11> Well he does qualify the idea with "it could be..." and follows it up with "I just know it's a strong pattern we've seen."</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best alternatives to zoom - <AUTHOR> Zoom is getting some major bad press lately. I've been using it for a while, and it works great -- but, I've had it with the lack of security. I don't have the time or resources to review all of the alternatives. Was hoping for some real-world pros and cons.<p>What do you use? What has been your experience? (Good and Bad) Would you recommend it? <comment><USER2> [https://jitsi.org/](https://jitsi.org/) is great. lots of discussion here on HN previously.</comment>


Psychometric Thresholds for Physics and Mathematics - barry-cotter http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2010/05/psychometric-thresholds-for-physics-and.html

<comment><AUTHOR> From this blogger, I like much better his post on the distinction between rationality and IQ,

[http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/04/rationality-vs- intellig...](http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/04/rationality-vs- intelligence.html)

a subject brought to popular attention especially by psychologist Keith R. Stanovich.

[http://www.project- syndicate.org/commentary/stanovich1/Engli...](http://www.project- syndicate.org/commentary/stanovich1/English)

I should also point out that what is really relevant to success in a college course in physics or mathematics, even more than SAT score or some other IQ proxy, is specific subject matter background in science and mathematics. Whole countries do MUCH better than the United States in providing good background in science and mathematics to pupils in K-12 education,

<http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf>

so much so that the United States median achievement level is only at the bottom quartile level for those countries, or (from another point of view) the United States top quartile level of achievement is only at the median level for those countries. I think United States policy-makers ought to devote a lot more time to thinking about how to learn from those good examples.

Some United States mathematicians have taken care to look at how badly mathematics is taught to elementary pupils in the United States

<http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf>

<http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_4.pdf>

<http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/fall1999/amed1.pdf>

and have suggested reforms.

<http://hub.mspnet.org/index.cfm/13083>

<comment><USER2> > I should also point out that what is really relevant to success in a college > course in physics or mathematics, even more than SAT score or some other IQ > proxy, is specific subject matter background in science and mathematics.

But this is not meaningful without controlling for IQ. What allows you to achieve "subject matter background in science and mathematics"?

> the United States median achievement level is only at the bottom quartile > level for those countries

And this is not meaningful without controlling for ethnicity. Disaggregated results show that Americans of European descent are competitive with Europeans, Americans of Asian descent competitive with East Asians, and so on.

[http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/longhorns-17-ba...](http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/longhorns-17-badgers-1.html)

[http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/badgering- the-w...](http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/badgering-the- witless.html)

<http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2463278>

In the last link, yummyfajitas seems to have noted this particular point to you before.

<comment><AUTHOR> _What allows you to achieve "subject matter background in science and mathematics"?_

Ask a question, get an answer. What allows you to achieve subject matter background in science and mathematics is good teaching of those subjects. That's the point of the international educational achievement comparisons. They show, as do studies of high-ability United States students,

[http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/PDF/Papers/PEPG10-19_Hanushe...](http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/PDF/Papers/PEPG10-19_HanushekPetersonWoessmann.pdf)

[http://www.jkcf.org/news-knowledge/media-coverage/no- child-l...](http://www.jkcf.org/news-knowledge/media-coverage/no-child-left- behind/)

that what limits educational achievement (and thus preparation for college studies) of many United States students is not limits in their capacity to learn, but limits in the curriculum they were taught. The United States school system doesn't step up to INCREASE the ability of the national populace the way many other school systems do better.

After edit: If you actually want to learn something serious about ethnicity in its many manifestations around the world, start here

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropol...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/AnthropologyHumanBiologyRaceCitations)

and keep reading until you've read a dozen or so of those books, to get past the many errors found in most blog posts on the subject.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why is a physics professor surprised by this? You will get exactly the same "step" plot directly from the binomial distribution if you assume independent trials and a linear dependency between the SAT band and the probability of getting an A in a course.

If someone's probability of getting an A in a single course is 0.7 or above, the probability of getting at least 8 As out of 16 courses rapidly converges to 1, similar result holds for those with probability below 0.3.

Nothing new has been shown here - can't believe they actually wrote a paper.

<comment><USER4>
      You will get exactly the same "step" plot

Except that they don't, for other majors than physics and mathematics.

<comment><USER3> They don't show it. The obvious explanation is that the grades in humanities are not as strongly correlated with SAT.

<comment><USER5> So what you're say is, you didn't read the article?

<comment><USER6> It's not helpful to simply call the commenter out on not reading the article. First, it's unproductive, and second, it's merely conjecture. Perhaps you both read it but interpreted it differently? It would instead be more productive to point out why you think the person didn't read the article, thereby furthering discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I thought that it was much more interesting that they had hardly any data for students with a SAT-m under 600, which makes the conclusions slightly less convincing.

That said, there is a clear wall in the data they have so far. It would definitely be interesting to look into this further and see if that is the case, and also investigate more fields (I didn't see anywhere in the paper a complete listing of all the subjects they compared, which was a pity). I know I would not be surprised if a similar pattern was found in Computer Science!

</comment><comment><USER8> For curiosity's sake, how many percent of the students taking a typical college course in math or physics typically receive the grade A? (As you might guess, I'm not American.)

<comment><USER9> It varies by school and professor. I know several big schools suffer from grade inflation [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_inflation#Grade_Inflation...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_inflation#Grade_Inflation_in_the_United_States) In general, I think its usually a average of a B, at least at Northwestern University, but other people might have different experiences.

<comment><USER8> Thanks. For the record, the average grades for the courses at my university tend to be Cs (in the case of the big introductory courses, the average is usually closer to a D than a B), with about 10% of the students receiving As. This discrepancy is quite unintuitive; (intuitively) you'd expect that the grade "A" means about the same thing in two different university systems that use letter grades.

<comment><USER9> My experience above is from discussions with professors in higher level classes. Im not too sure if that applies to intro levels. I think that once you reach a certain level of difficultly the grade does not really reflect how well you learn the material, but more of how ridiculously smart everyone else in the class is (see that most of the test averages come out to about 50% or less).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As always, it's important to note that correlation does not imply causation. Do students with higher SAT-M scores make better physicists, or do physics programs reward students who are better test-takers?</comment>


Apple's management doesn't want Nvidia support, a bad sign for the Mac Pro - <AUTHOR> https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/01/18/apples-management-doesnt-want-nvidia-support-in-macos-and-thats-a-bad-sign-for-the-mac-pro <comment><USER2> This is from January, even before the new Mac Pro announcement.</comment>


So You Are A Non-Technical Product Manager - <AUTHOR> http://blog.aha.io/index.php/so-you-are-a-non-technical-product-manager/

<comment><USER2> _I was not there to tell the engineers how to do their jobs, but I was there to explain why the features on the roadmap were right for the customers and business._

I think the first part is right, but there is something missing from the second part. Determining what is right for the business must involve input from the engineers. A feature that you determine is essential for your customers to have may add unnecessary complexity to the system. After getting a feel for the level of effort required to implement it (and more importantly, to maintain it), only then can you decide whether that feature is important (enough) to the customer and business.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I totally agree. It is important for it to be a collaborative effort, but the PM must surface the customer and market feedback and suggest what new functionality is required. After that, a deeper team discussion benefits everyone -- including the customers. Good comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Solidarity for the non-technical PM's (sorry you learned through battles - that is where we differ).

Great advice in this article for both technical and non-technical product folks.</comment>


Deep learning outperformed dermatologists in melanoma image classification task - <AUTHOR> https://www.ejcancer.com/article/S0959-8049(19)30221-7/fulltext <comment><USER2> I do research in computer vision and this paper is so bad it's beyond words.

* They give the network is huge advantage: they teach it that it should say "no" 80% of the time. The training data is unbalanced (80% no vs 20% yes) as is the test data. Of course it does well! I don't care what they do at training time, but the test data should be balanced or they should correct for this in the analysis.

* They measure the wrong things that reward the network. Because the dataset is imbalanced you can't use an ROC curve, sensitivity, or specificity. You need to use precision and recall and make a PR curve. This is machine learning and stats 101.

* They measure the wrong thing about humans. What a doctor does is they decide how confident they are and then they refer you to a biopsy. They don't eyeball it and go "looks fine" or "it's bad". They should measure how often this leads to a referral, and they'll see totally different results. There's a long history in papers like this of defining a bad task and then saying that humans can't do it.

* They have a biased sample of doctors that is highly skewed toward people with no experience. Look at figure 1. A lot of those doctors have about as much experience to detect melanoma as you do. They just don't do this task.

* "Electronic questionnaire"s are a junk way of gathering data for this task. Doctors are busy. What tells the authors that they're going to be as careful for this task as with a real patient? Real patients also have histories, etc.

I could go on. The number of problems with this paper is just interminable (54% of their images were non-cancer because a bunch of people looked at them. If people are so wrong, why are they trusting these images? I would only trust biopsies).

This isn't coming to a doctor's office anywhere near you. It's just a publicity stunt by clueless people. Please collaborate with some ML folks before publishing work like this! There are so many of us!

<comment><USER3> Since this is a journal focused on cancer and not machine learning, I can understand why the editors would see this paper as being worthy for for publication. Unfortunately, many of the readers will read the paper uncritically.

If possible, you should write a critical response to this paper, focusing on its methodological flaws, and send it to the editors. It doesn't have to be long; critical response are usually a couple pages at most. This is likely the most effective way of removing (or at the very least, heavily qualifying) bad science from research journals.

<comment><USER2> This is a huge problem throughout science, not just ML. As scientists, we're rewarded for publishing cool new things that work, not for pointing out things that don't or for pointing out flaws in existing papers. If the point is to get people to not read one bad paper, it's just a waste of my time. Most papers are false and a lot of them should never have passed review.

If the authors actually wanted to do good ML research, they could always have reached out to a decent ML researcher who could have told them all of this. There's no shortage of us. The journal could have reached out to an ML reviewer. Why wouldn't they? But no one did, because the results look good and so they send it off to press and it's good for both the authors and the journal to have something that is hype-worthy. It's just the sad reality of modern science.

<comment><USER4> > Most papers are false and a lot of them should never have passed review.

Do you mean this literally or is this a metaphor to illustrate the point? If you actually mean most papers are false it'd be nice to see a link on that!

<comment><USER5> John Ioannidis claims that "most published research is false" based on some rather dubious assumptions.

[https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev- statis...](https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev- statistics-060116-054104)

<comment><USER6> I agree with him although the accuracy of that statement is partially based on how "published research" is defined. Operational definitions and measurement are themselves much of the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As always, let's see how well it does in live images. This system outperformed dermatologists on its own validation set of 100 images, which I would encourage you to interpret as "heartening preliminary evidence" but not much more.

Posting high scores on your validation set is only as informative as your val set is representative of the real world. 70% specificity, 84% sensitivity looks OK on paper (maybe -- as another poster noted, it's equally fair to say it's good evidence that image-only diagnosis is bad no matter what does it), but it doesn't always feel that way in practice. As a cheap example, your word error rate for a speech recognition system has to be extremely low in order for that system to be nice to use -- way lower than most otherwise acceptable looking scores.

This analogy only gets you so far, and i don't mean to impugn this study's test set, but another example is just because you can post 99.9% on MNIST doesn't mean that your system will approach that level of accuracy on digit recognition in the wild.

<comment><USER8> Isn't DeepMind about to release a medical product that will do something very similar to this? Right now I wouldn't doubt how well these systems can perform as compared to trained specialists that rely on their eyes even for reading test results.

<comment><USER9> I wonder if these products will have to go through proper trials like drugs do? If not, why not?

<comment><USER7> [https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/digital- health/software-...](https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/digital- health/software-medical-device-samd)

[https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/ivd-regulatory- assistanc...](https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/ivd-regulatory- assistance/overview-ivd-regulation)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if the results would be similar were the dermatologists to see the actual patient, in person, and then diagnose. And, then a photo was taken to be diagnosed by the CNN.

In other words, while dermatologists may have been outperformed by deep learning in image classification, it is not evident if deep learning could do the same against dermatologist diagnosing in person.

Also, not clear what the overall ratio of false negative/positives was in each case.

Also, unless I missed it in the paper, I'd be curious to learn if the cases, in Fig. 4, where majority of humans and CNN disagreed, were the same where majority of humans disagreed too or not.

<comment><USER11> Maybe? It's hard to say. I had a question about a mole once and what they did was take a photo of it with a special camera apparatus and they sent the image off to be diagnosed while I waited around. The doctor looked at it personally but it seems like the actual diagnosis was made by someone who never even saw me.

<comment><USER9> Same for me, the doctor I saw did say (after 3 seconds) "it's not a cancer but we'll take a picture anyway to be sure." I wonder if the same sort of thing would have happened if there was any real question in his mind?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Maybe a dumb question from a non-medical guy: are medical images considered "stationary" from a stats viewpoint?

That is, will medical images of diseases we diagnose in the next 20 years look a lot like the ones from the past 20 years, or is there a danger of over- fitting on an evolving data set? Could either the technology or the biology of the disease evolve?

In a prior life I was a quant trader, and financial market data is notorious for having the non-stationary problem. On top of market rules and structures changing all the time, once someone discovers a profitable trading idea, their own actions change what the data looks like for everyone else from that point forward.

<comment><USER13> There are always potential issues when a machine learning algorithm is applied over time.

Example #1: Let's say that cancer rates are increasing over time and cameras are improving over time. You might end up with a weird artifact in your model that higher resolution images are more likely to indicate cancer.

Example #2: Let's say that cancer-detecting algorithms are widely successful and so someone makes an app that lets you upload images of skin and the app tells you the probability of you having cancer. Suddenly a model that was trained on suspicious lesions is being used on normal freckles that people uploaded for fun. You end up with a lot of false positives. Maybe you try to combat that by including images uploaded to the app (that you somehow obtain labels for). But now you have a model that predicts that photos taken in brightly lit medical offices are likely to be cancer and blurry images taken in bathroom mirrors are not cancer.

You could argue that Example #2 is more about the difference between training data and data to be scored, but the fact remains that outside of tightly controlled scenarios, the way data is collected nearly always changes in time and ends up affecting model performance in unexpected ways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reporting only sensitivity/specificity/ROC metrics and not reporting precision/positive predictive value is a bad sign. Especially since the latter is what health systems will want to look at before deciding on implementation.

The fact that they fiddled with the balance of classes in the test set makes the above even worse.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm always wary of claims like these, since it is difficult to get a clean dataset of medical information, and it is difficult or impossible to know for sure what exactly what the classifier is looking at to classify the image:

> For example, Roberto Novoa, a clinical dermatologist at Stanford University > in the US, has described a time when he and his colleagues designed an > algorithm to recognize skin cancer – only to discover that they'd > accidentally designed a ruler detector instead, because the largest tumours > had been photographed with rulers next to them for scale.

Source: [https://physicsworld.com/a/neural-networks- explained/](https://physicsworld.com/a/neural-networks-explained/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Interesting, however there is no indication from the publisher or researchers how this result can be reproduced. It's nice that they put in some of the training data, but imagine how much more impactful to the community this could be if those interested could reproduce - and iterate - on this...

At Gigantum ([https://github.com/gigantum/gigantum- client](https://github.com/gigantum/gigantum-client)) this is literally our raison d'être to make this process as simple as possible.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's hard to imagine an narrow image classification task that humans will be able to beat NNs.

<comment><USER9> Considering that the ground truth comes from humans I would say that humans always outperform NN's and that results which show otherwise are demonstrating the limitations of the data set or testing process.

<comment><USER17> It's been proven that using humans as ground truth you can ultimately build a NN off that data which outperforms the humans.

<comment><USER9> What is meant by proven? What is meant by "the humans"? And how can any human say that is so?

<comment><USER17> I mean, for example, you take 5 expert radiologists, and average their assessments when scoring an image, and your train a NN to predict those averaged scores, and with enough data the NN will beat any single selected doctor in accuracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I find it most interesting to use tools like this to augment - not replace diagnosticians and specialists.

Of course the key here is that the training set is crucial to building a high quality model - which of course needs a set of specialists to give their consensus on the diagnosis of the patient based on the images.

Presuming those folks can agree - the technology becomes a force multiplier for good. If they disagree or label things problematically - they become a force multiplier for bad.

<comment><USER9> So long as the system is implemented in such as way as to stop it becoming a crutch or a default. If it's a tool in the flow then I think such things (not this one given the expert review information in this thread?) might be very valuable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Every doctor tends to have a very static sensitivity-specificity preferences (true positive rate aka recall and true negative rate, respectively). One of the interesting consequences of using an automated diagnostic tool (already mentioned in Esteva et al 2017's Nature article) is that the sensitivity level can be chosen dynamically, depending on additional risk factors.

</comment><comment><USER20> MelaFind did this 15 years ago, and had a database of 50k lesions. Its classifier did about as well as derms, and much better than GPs. It got FDA approval, but, by that time, they had run out of money.

</comment><comment><USER21> well the answer is a bit more complicated than just replacing dermatologists with a CNN. I am pretty convinced the better approach is something like the approach in this paper-use the CNN on easy cases-have the CNN tell a human which instances are hard to classify. Many images are easy to classify-but some are hard [even for the cnn] and humans should give those images more study.

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.12220](https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.12220)

</comment><comment><USER22> Given all of the other concerns raised by commenters in this thread, I wouldn't be surprised to find that there's some sort of data leakage as well.

</comment><comment><USER23> Deep learning outperformed humans in random pattern recognition task using a dataset that somewhat similar to live data.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've always thought that diagnostic-oriented specialties would be most at risk (pathology, dermatology, radiology, ophthalmology).

As long as you have procedures, you will have a need for an extremely competent clinician that can synthesize all information and coordinate with use of hands or devices.

<comment><USER25> All the specialties you cite entail various manual procedures.

Other than that yes, robots are not capable of replacing manual work in médicine yet.

<comment><USER24> Exactly. As long as those specialities hold onto procedures, they'll be relatively ok.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Any place to upload an image?

<comment><USER27> If this is regarding yourself just make an appointment with a dermatologist. Source: I'm and MD.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Despite the issues listed below, I believe this will be the future of such classifications.

In the future your doctor will have an image scanner in their office and you'll get 'really cheap' diagnosis of this to back up the doctors opinion.

Then you'll go for biopsy etc..

</comment><comment><USER29> This is a great example of where we need to get humans out of the equation when (if) a machine is conclusively proven to perform consistently better.

It was justified (cost wise) to replace many human labourers on auto assembly since machines don't get tired, need breaks, have off days. It could certainly be argued it is even more important in the field of health care (reduce costs and improve outcomes) for all forms of image scanning.

<comment><USER24> Machines will never replace dermatologists, machines will only make them more efficient.

<comment><USER30> If you make a dermatologist 5x more efficient, don't you replace 80% of them?

Or even better, allow them to spend more time on the hardest cases. And allow people with no access to a dermatologist now, access to a machine almost as good?

<comment><USER9> Actually when you make a knowledge worker / service worker in a business processes 5* more efficient the experience is that they spend 400% more time on the cases that they have left. These are the cases that you can't automate and that before automation you couldn't service properly/economically. Now you can, so the workers do.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


AnsibleWorks Galaxy - <AUTHOR> https://galaxy.ansibleworks.com

<comment><USER3> The site might be somewhat useful if it explained wtf is Ansible - <USER2> even the 'About' and 'Explore' links lead to something that assumes that everyone is already working with Ansible; but currently it's not so.

<comment><USER4> Yes, that is unfortunately pretty confusing but if you go to their normal www domain www.ansibleworks.com, it's pretty clear. It is an automated server provisioning/deployment tool and it is absolutely wonderful.

I recently stumbled across it and now I'm not sure how i've put up with manually configuring servers for so long now.</comment></comment>


Google Code gains native Git support - <AUTHOR> http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Google-Code-gains-native-Git-support-1280838.html

<comment><USER2> finally! :) I think now they should structure some more socializing stuffs into that (if they want to compete with github)</comment>


Female friendly, anonymous hook up app - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/smoothie-blind-instant-dates/id1028897828

<comment><USER2> You don't say what you've done to make it safe and appealing for women to use?

</comment><comment><USER3> Let the catfishing commence

<comment><AUTHOR> That won't happen on this. You have to meet that person in few hours, that day only. Not much left for catfishing.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anyone coding from a farm or homestead? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I do.

My wife teaches kids to ride horses. Sometimes I fix fences, plow the driveway, gather firewood, things like that.

Maybe 1/3 the time I have worked in town, maybe 1/3 the time I have had a remote job, maybe the other 1/3 I was underemployed.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd love to. That is, I'd love to _live_ there, but not to have to _run_ a farm or a homestead. I don't have time to both code and plow the fields or raise the chickens or whatever. I could see renting the fields to someone else, but not actually being the _farmer_ on that farm.

</comment><comment><USER4> alaska farm here keeping bees and producing hydroponic plant products. All of my automation is home brew.

<comment><USER5> I live on small farm in western Virginia and would like to learn a little more about the kind of automation you are using on your farm. I would like to run some temperature and electric fence line monitors eventually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> yes - raising grains for distillers and millers, while coding too. Gets hectic at planting and harvest time!

<comment><USER3> May I ask where you are?

And, do you program remotely, or is there work within commuting distance?

<comment><USER6> Thurmont MD - I work with a small company in Shepherdstown, WV. It's about a 50 min drive, no traffic, country roads. I go in once a week, rest of the time is at home (farm). I've been fortunate the last 10 years that I've been able to find work close by. Before that it was commuting up and down 270, which has some of the worst traffic in the country.</comment></comment></comment>


Anu Hariharan on Network Effects [video] - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/anu-hariharan-on-network-effects/ <comment><USER2> I didn't think this was good. Her basic definitions at the beginning (eg virality) was very poor. Either she doesn't have a clear understanding of these or just isn't that good at expressing herself (hopefully the latter). Her thinking is quite convoluted. Did anyone else think this?

</comment><comment><USER3> In this interview, I particularly enjoyed hearing the descriptions of a network, marketplace, and platform; as well as the questions founders of each should be considering when building product and growing a user base. I haven't figured out how this effects the application I'm working on yet, but I think it should help me hone into some possibilities...and likely more questions. (e.g. Am I building a marketplace or a hybrid marketplace/network?)

Focusing on generating demand and retention of current users while growing is a key piece that I need to keep repeating to myself. Thank you for your insights Anu and thank you to Craig for doing these interviews with the YC partners.</comment>


The Psychology of Incompetence - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_vcy7I0zIM

<comment><USER2> I would call that NSFW.</comment>


Show HN: Improved My News App, Would Love Feedback - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastnews.me/ <comment><AUTHOR> Over the past year, I've become a bit wiser with some professional experience under my belt and thought of implementing the same idea with different technologies and using best practices, example: the previous version hosted on AWS had security policies set to everything open from everywhere and no SSL certificates. Yes, I've wised up now.

Would love any feedback, especially if you could do a quick code review on my Go and React code! React: [https://github.com/SalmaanP/FastNews-Frontend- React](https://github.com/SalmaanP/FastNews-Frontend-React) Go: [https://github.com/SalmaanP/FastNews-Backend- Go](https://github.com/SalmaanP/FastNews-Backend-Go)

For Comparison the previous layout: [http://126.96.36.199/](http://184.108.40.206/)

<comment><USER2> It feels more like a news site than the first iteration. Is there a reason why you're set on having this being a JavaScript app? AMP seems to be pretty popular for news ATM, and that's kind of the opposite approach. Curious what your thinking is.

The bullet points summarization stuff is great. That's what I always look for on Reddit posts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Its just a means of learning for me. Wanted to learn React and so got on implementing it on a project. I have looked at AMP and it's not hard to implement but that's not what I am going for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks pretty good, there were a few design things that bugged me.

1) Setting your text to evenly space the words across each line makes for a terrible reading experience. Reading on mobile the amount of space between some words was painful.

2) I think this would look better if you aligned your margins on everything. Basically have an overall margin for the page and have everything run up right against it.

3) Get rid of the margin around the grey header on your content boxes and have everything in your content boxes an equal distance from the edge.

4) In two-column mode I'm seeing the left column is much wider than the right column and the content boxes are of differing heights. I think this will look better if you make all the content boxes equally sized.

Actually, I just tested again and now (on my Galaxy S6's landscape mode) it is showing three equal columns that break the page. The header no longer reaches all the way across the screen and the third column abuts the edge of the screen.

6) Align your menu button to the right and your title to the left.

5) In your menu I think your selection outline and your search bar should be the same width with aligned edges.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great suggestions, thank you!

I actually forgot to write the two column media query, so I guess thats why it looks bad on landscape mode in phones and tablets.

The menu seems wonky I agree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice, really fast and simple!

One thing which bothers me though is the whitespace in the rows. How about using css to collapse the white space like bootstrap4's card-columns:

[https://v4-alpha.getbootstrap.com/components/card/#card- colu...](https://v4-alpha.getbootstrap.com/components/card/#card-columns)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh thanks, this is great! I didnt know this was so easy to implement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's cool, your folds are not tall enough to show the full headline or numbers sometimes. I think the content could be shortened or font size decreased until user asks for zoom. Overall very nice organization, style, boundaries, layout. Would like to see more focus on "broad view of all topics" and then "zoomed in detail of one."

Top bar needs some sort of color to draw the eye to the presence of fresh page content.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think font size is ok, I will add an invisible scroll bar in case the text overflows in the title.

Can you give me an example of what kind of color and when?

Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You can try experimenting with jQuery masonry plugin. It might make your layout even better. Just a hunch.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah good idea, saw that design on many sites but didnt know what it was called until now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Where to report bugs? E.g. some articles miss headlines.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it, thanks!</comment></comment>


Behind the Scenes at Xobni - <AUTHOR> http://www.xobni.com/blog/2008/03/10/behind-the-scenes-at-xobni/ <comment><USER2> How much effort is put into into collecting, tracking, and analyzing lunch orders?

<comment><USER3> We have actually thought of a system that predicts your future orders so you don't have to enter them yourself.

<comment><USER4> I suggest using a cascade of AdaBoosted linear support vector machines which integrates with your relational database backend and exposes itself as a RESTful web service. Then factor that out as an in-house library for future lunch-intelligence applications.

Certainly letting everyone bring a brown bag or order in miso soup and hoagies is out of the question...

<comment><USER5> > Certainly letting everyone bring a brown bag or order in miso soup and > hoagies is out of the question...

I think that's their whole point. These are the kind of geeks they want to be seen as.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Are Prepared Foods Making Us Fat? - <AUTHOR> http://food.theatlantic.com/nutrition/are-prepared-foods-making-us-fat-1.php <comment><USER2> Having slowly switched to a (nearly) completely DIY diet over the past six years, I've lost about 25 or 30 pounds, though I have a small frame (5'10") and was never particularly heavy to begin with (170lb or so down to 145lb). Food you make yourself certainly _tastes_ better---most prepared food I've tried has been full of rancid oils and musty, stale flavors.

Nevertheless, I'm hesitant to blame prepared foods as a genre. I think the real problem is a lack of consciousness, where people habitually overeat rich foods. Some of my coworkers have sizable portions of meat and cheese at nearly every meal---I don't know how they do it!</comment>


CRA Statement on US News and World Report - <AUTHOR> https://cra.org/cra-statement-us-news-world-report-rankings-computer-science-universities/ <comment><USER2> For some reason, on my laptop the webpage renders on Chrome but not Firefox.

It's an open letter from the following schools/companies:

University of Pennsylvania, Computing Research Association, Northeastern University, University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of Michigan, Google, University of Alberta, and Cornell University.

They're criticizing the new US new world rankings[1] methodology, placing schools like CMU at #22, Cornell #67 , but U.T. Austin at #2.

[1] [https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global- universities/se...](https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global- universities/search?region=&country=united-states&subject=computer- science&name=)</comment>


Printed electronics open way for electrified tattoos and personalized biosensors - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-10-electronics-electrified-tattoos-personalized-biosensors.html <comment><USER2> Don't get an electrified tattoo. Get a normal tattoo. Please.

<comment><USER3> The tattoos in the article are not permanent. They are closer to temporary tattoos like kids use.</comment></comment>


Will Microsoft Open Source Internet Explorer? - <AUTHOR>

Will Microsoft open source Internet Explorer ? <comment><USER2> I would lean towards "no" but on technical grounds. In terms of PR/marketing it would be a great move and if Microsoft's recent moves are any indication it is not something behind what the company, today in 2014, would consider.

IE is not a stand alone browser. IE is built on top of dozens of different Windows components. In order for IE to be open sourced you would have to open source a large chunk of Windows itself, the two aren't that inseparable.

You could definitely open source the UI, but the UI in IE is fairly light weight, most of the actual useful stuff is not within it and providing the UI source would likely not really offer much.

Another useful question to ask is, let's say they do open source all of the components, then what? Windows enforces Microsoft signing and other checks on internal components for security reasons. So if you compiled a new copy of e.g. http.sys you likely couldn't install it anyway.

Plus they'd have to audit the heck out of the code before doing so for IP issues. It would be very easy for every patent troll to point at lines within IE's code and then sue.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting question. I know there is a lot of links between the core Windows OS and IE, so there would be certain parts that would need to be kept open source. Mind you, Chrome has the same issue (Chrome is not open source, Chromium is, which Chrome is based on.) Some parts of Chrome are closed and possibly not even owned by Google (Flash is one i can think of).

<comment><USER4> This is the -rather interesting, if you ask me- list of differences between Chrome and Chromium: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_%28web_browser%29#Dif...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_%28web_browser%29#Differences_from_Google_Chrome)

I see it lacks a mention to the embedded PDF reader which, if I remember correctly, is licensed from Foxit.

<comment><USER5> While you are correct that the PDF rendering code originally came from Foxit, Google purchased it and open-sourced it a while ago. So, it's included in Chromium and the project is hosted here: [https://code.google.com/p/pdfium/](https://code.google.com/p/pdfium/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> IE users aren't asking for it in the same way that .NET users were. People use IE mostly because they don't see any reason to change.

</comment><comment><USER7> They probably have a lot of licensed proprietary code inside it, so it could be hard. What they could do is release critical components (like the JavaScript VM) as Open Source and gradually open more and more of their code base.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think this is bound to happen in the next five years. There is no longer a competitive advantage in keeping IE closed sourced.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think Betteridge's law of headlines applies here. MS open-sourcing such a massive project which would be highly scrutinized publicly, there's bound to be some very ugly code in there. I don't think there's much to gain given existing open-source browsers being much further ahead than IE.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think they should open source Trident, which would be more appealing to compete with the mess that Webkit has become. But who knows if Trident isn't already a mess itself. I do like how snappy IE11 renders webpages though, perhaps something to do with how they implemented Direct2D.

</comment><comment><USER11> It is a good idea but a little late. It this had happened five or ten years ago it could have lead to a standardization of web-browser code. As it stands now, if I wanted the source code to a web-browser I would stick to WebKit or Gecko.

<comment><USER12> Microsoft is an entity with some of the deepest understanding of computer science on earth. Unlike the more recent, more trendy companies, this company's very roots are in programming languages, and to the extent that any complex technology (the browser in this case) would be open sourced by it, we should encourage it whole-heartedly. Yes Microsoft is late to the open source party, but let's encourage it to open up more of the most experienced coding technology available to the planet. In general, I cannot be anything less than impressed with the new Microsoft, from open sourcing.NET, to Babylon.js, to free Office on Mobile, to a better command line experience in Windows 10. Yet with all these recent moves I also cannot fail to remember that the definitive C compilers and MASM drove the entire x86 industry, and that experience is invaluable.

This company is a new company, and I personally am paying a lot of attention to it having been a hater for a long time. The latest IE is a decent effort if you leave out Bing (which remains awful) and open sourcing it should be encouraged and applauded if it were to occur. As much as I love Firefox, IE is in my experience a far more stable and credible long term competitor to Chrome. For an example of some of the unsung quality behind IE, it is the ONLY browser that sends SVGs to a printer as vectors and not a screen-raster rendering. This is a small detail but points, to me, to the underlying quality that IE represents. For other Microsoft doubters: typescript, or the almost single-handed effort that Microsoft has put in to defeating large botnets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wish not. Its dying and do not disturb it. Firefox is great.

<comment><USER14> I think that is a backward thinking argument. We need browser competition. It doesn't matter who it comes from. The more browser choice we have the better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I really wish MS would do at least an IE only shared source program.

</comment><comment><USER16> Wouldn't be a bad idea.

</comment><comment><USER17> they need to at least make it cross-platform.

</comment><comment><USER18> Is there some indication that this could happen?

Microsoft has track record by not making smart choices.

<comment><USER19> Their choices were smart by shareholder standards.

<comment><USER11> Not necessarily. Because the underlying rendering engine of both Safari and Chrome are open source, there exists a pool of software developers outside the company that are familiar with code. This means that there are people that these companies can hire who would be productive from day one. You cannot say this about Microsoft. How many people are familiar with the inner workings of trident outside of Microsoft?

<comment><USER20> What most web developers are more familiar with are the myriad ways to get around the inner workings of Trident, so that their websites can work from a more-or-less even playing field.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> IE doesn't need to be open sourced. It needs to be euthanized.

Also, we don't really need the entire application open-sourced. There might be an argument to be made for open sourcing Trident (the rendering engine), but only for the purposes of figuring out what in the hell is happening under the hood that's causing things to work so poorly. If any part of IE were open sourced, I imagine that at least modern versions of it are written on top of .NET which is also open source now, so maybe it would be made to work on multiple platforms? This is a bad thing. As I said before, we need less IE, not more.</comment>


Odd case of TikTok censorship in Iran - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/maasalan/status/1276118790426820615 <comment><AUTHOR> I think this Is further evidence of TikTok cooperating with oppressive regimes, as it seems like they've specifically built TikTok so that users with Iranian simcard won't be able to use the app even if they use VPN to bypass Iran's fairly sophisticated firewall.</comment>


Jail time, billions in fines under Australian crackdown on social media giants - <AUTHOR> https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/jail-time-and-billions-in-fines-under-fast-tracked-crackdown-on-social-media-giants-20190329-p518y7.html <comment><USER2> If these companies had a spine, they would fire any employees under jurisdiction of Australia and move any hardware out of the country.</comment>


A hardware-accelerated machine intelligence library for the web - <AUTHOR> https://pair-code.github.io/deeplearnjs/ <comment><USER2> Here's the associated Google Research Blog post:

[https://research.googleblog.com/2017/08/harness-power-of- mac...](https://research.googleblog.com/2017/08/harness-power-of-machine- learning-in.html)

<comment><USER3> Tl;dr Tensorflow and numpy-like API. Differs from tensorfire in that it can also do backprop (training)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://playground.tensorflow.org/](http://playground.tensorflow.org/) is fun and worth looking at.

As I recall, Google created it to give their engineers an introductory feel for DL, and then open sourced it.

</comment><comment><USER5> It looks like this is the easiest way to train neural networks with GPU acceleration on my Radeon Pro (i.e. non CUDA)...

Thank you JavaScript!

</comment><comment><USER6> "Currently our demos do not support Mobile, Firefox, and Safari. Please view them on desktop Chrome for now." That's a bummer.

<comment><USER7> This will be fixed in ~2 weeks, max.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Url changed from [https://github.com/PAIR- code/deeplearnjs](https://github.com/PAIR-code/deeplearnjs), which points to this.</comment>


One Journey Ends - Another Begins - <AUTHOR> http://www.afinea.com/blog/2010/9/23/one-journey-ends-another-begins.html <comment><AUTHOR> This is of interest to me because they built Viigo with my mobile programming language Hecl embedded in it.</comment>