The magical thinking of guys who love logic - <AUTHOR> https://theoutline.com/post/7083/the-magical-thinking-of-guys-who-love-logic <comment><USER2> The author has a couple valid points. E.g.

> But for the Logic Guys, the purpose of using these words — the sacred, magic > words like "logic," "objectivity," "reason," "rationality," "fact" — is not > to invoke the actual concepts themselves. It's more a kind of incantation, > whereby declaring your argument the single "logical" and "rational" one > magically makes it so — and by extension, makes you both smart and correct, > regardless of the actual rigor or sources of your beliefs.

However, like other commenter noticed, it uses a bit of manipulative language making "guys" = "white males". Also it makes a disregarding assumption that those who criticise postmodern philosophers haven't read them. So here is a problem: one thing is being claiming that you are rational and your opponents are not, another thing is being openly opposed to the idea of reason which seems to be the common denominator amongst postmodernists (yes, I've read some of them).

</comment><comment><USER3> > They are also massive fans of declaring that they have "facts," that their > analysis is "unbiased," that they only use "'reason" and "logic" and not > "emotions" to make decisions.

Ha! So true. I've yet to meet a single individual repeatedly mention their "logic" and "unbiased analysis" without basking in utter self-satisfaction over it.

<comment><USER4> Do you ever fall into the same trap yourself? Everyone (hyperbole) thinks that they are unbiased, but it's rare to find someone who actually is.

<comment><USER5> Realistically it is far better to _own_ your biases; they are ineradicable, and often fundamental to your personality, taste, relationships and values. But you should know what they are so you don't get led too far astray by them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is packed full of manipulative language. It reads like propaganda.

<comment><USER6> You have to be funny to be read. One of the ways to be funny is to make fun of the people you are writing about.

The style and the language don't make the point false though. Logic can only tell you what you can't be possibly sure of. That does not provide as great foundation for people with strong opinions as they claim.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > squished together in a vague Play-Doh ball of smug superiority

kind of describes the article itself.

<comment><USER8> You have put it into perfect terms. Thank you for noticing that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This has been posted twice in the past couple of days [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19188003](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19188003)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19171942](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19171942)

</comment><comment><USER10> So this turns out to be the article about U.S right-wing "logic" and the word "guys" = white males. It's not about the actual logic and "cargo culting", instead it's about the youtube-politics videos, this title seems like some click bait to me.

<comment><USER6> I was also hoping it will be about something else. I'm a very logical person but I'm prone to magical thinking when I do DIY projects. For example when I expect that holes drilled with a hand drill without any sort of template will land where I want them to be just because I put a dot on the material and aimed the drill at the dot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well, that was an irritating read. Every sentence felt manipulative, and the ones I knew something about mostly seemed misleading or wrong.

I highly recommend JR Saul's _Voltaire 's Bastards_, which is (among many things) a history of reason and rationality, from about 1800 to the late 20th C. (Rationality isn't the good guy here that you might expect) One of the best books I've ever read. It's also about Paoli, technocrats, Nazi science, military strategy, democracy, and 50 other things. His next books after it are an attempted solution to the problems described. If it sounds dry, it's not at all. Very dark, thrilling, mind-blowing - wonderful writing.

</comment><comment><USER12> Reminds me of programmers who like to think of themselves as hyper-rational fact processors; it allows one to deny that one is even capable of having biases.

<comment><USER13> Some of them could actually be an hyper-rational fact processor.

It would be perceived by fellow humans as an anomaly and mistreated.

That's what usually happens to people suffering from high functional autism.

They can't get a lot of the nuances of non verbal human communication, so they are usually more unbiased, but are perceived as cold-hearted, because people are usually very biased towards those different from them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> While the author has come across somewhat passive-aggressive throughout the article, I do agree with the premise. I have many male friends who have quite clearly been gripped by YouTube's recommendation algorithms, and they have no interest in sensible discourse. I've had to distance myself from them because they have become almost religiously zealous in their praise of various right- learning, far-right, and alt-right political commentators. All of them young males with no real career path, hobbies or purpose, and these videos have done an excellent job of painting targets that they can now blame for all their woes. It's an easy trap to fall into.

I remember watching a Joe Rogan podcast with Jordan Peterson, followed it with a few of his lectures, and all of a sudden my feed was brimming with "Ben Shapiro DESTROYS SJW with FACTS and LOGIC" videos, or "Debunking feminism" and various other bile. It's a consequence of YouTube trying to keep people engaged on their platform, and it's only going to get worse if these algorithms keep feeding groups, both left and right, politically divisive content. I'm not sure what can be done about it either, other than heavy- handed government legislation.

<comment><USER15> As a foreigner, when I read reddit I feel exactly the same way about left-wing politics. Reading subreddits such as /r/politics or /r/worldnews feels like people are so caught up in their bubble that they refuse to see anything other than what they have already decided upon. Edit: I'm sure the same applies to right wing subreddits, but I don't run into explicitly right wing ones too often.

I think that this is not really an algorithm's or any specific platform's fault. It's a fault of ourselves, because we buy into this stuff so heavily. The only way around it is to teach people to keep an open mind.

<comment><USER11> Gee, left-wing politics on reddit! I immediately went to /r/politics to see for myself.. Every story on the landing page is Trump-related.. I looked at one story, the comments are all juvenile, mindless Trump-bashing. Utter waste of time reading it. _That_ is 'left-wing politics'?! I was very disappointed.

<comment><USER14> Going onto /r/politics for left wing political commentary is like going on /r/The_Donald for right wing political commentary. Why dive into one sphere of the internet and use that to sum up a majority ideology? If I were to do that for the right-wing, and apply your formatting; "Every story on the landing page is Trump-related. I looked at one story, the comments are all juvenile, mindless Trump-worshiping. Utter waste of time reading it. That is 'right-wing politics'?! I was very disappointed." \- to be so single-minded about the political spectrum is childish.

You want to understand left-wing politics? Don't go on Reddit, and pick up a book. "The Limits of Neoliberalism", "The Coming Insurrection", "Debt: the First 5,000 Years", "Politics in a Time of Crisis", or "On Intersectionality: Essential Writings" are great reading, or something by Chomski perhaps.

If I was more aligned with the right-wing I'd like people to read "The Free Economy and the Strong State" or "Leviathan", or "The Conservatives Mind". Also all great reading. Not for them to go on Voat or read YouTube comments, and think that the right-wing just wants Trump on a throne because he has some sort of divine right.

<comment><USER16> The problem I have with that view is that the information that get reported from current left-wing political parties and politicians do not match books like those. It could be that:

1) The journalist reporting is wrong.

2) the current left-wing political parties are not left-wing.

3) the books are not about current left-wing politics, which has changed compared to when those books were written.

For example, Debt: the First 5,000 Years has quite a lot to say about bridge gifts and gender roles which do not blame white men or use some "Patriarchy" theory where women are slaves to men. It does not make women to victim and men to conquers, but rather looking at the issue from a tribal/family resource perspective from an age when those practices were more common. That would be right-wing political view for a lot of people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Repeat after me: _calling something logic doesn't make it so. Calling > someone rational doesn't make it so._ Opinions from Youtube men are not > facts. Getting mad about philosophers you haven't read isn't reason.

Finally somebody nailed it.</comment>


A Neural Representation of Sketch Drawings - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.03477 <comment><AUTHOR> For those interested, here is a video of latent-space interpolation of the RNN-generated vector drawings (rendering a bunch of .svg files frame-by-frame) using this method.

[https://twitter.com/hardmaru/status/852312400481079296](https://twitter.com/hardmaru/status/852312400481079296)

</comment><comment><USER2> You should do a cat + bus drawing and get neural CATBUS!</comment>


Finding a bug made these guys rich, then Vegas made them pay (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2014/10/cheating-video-poker/ <comment><AUTHOR> It's an entertaining read, but for those just interested in the bug, here's the TLDR: By changing game type in the interface before cashing out a big win, they could use any win at the new game type, using a larger bet size, to retroactively change their bet on the first winning hand to a much larger bet, and therefore a much larger win. Basically it made what should have been a local variable into a global variable.</comment>


Homepage redesign options - Your inputs please - <AUTHOR>

I am looking to redesign the home page of my website - www.biznus.tv
Here are some of the designs, I have.
http://www.biznus.tv/new/biznustv-v0.png http://www.biznus.tv/new/biznustv-v1.jpg http://www.biznus.tv/new/biznustv-v2.jpeg
Can you all tell me which one do you like most of these? None is also a valid option ;)
Thanks in advance <comment><USER2> The Second gives you the space for more content on home page, the third looks the best.

If you can combine those two it would look awesome.

What platform are you using? Are you developing them yourself or using templates?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I hired a web designer to do it. I think the WOW factor is missing though

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like the top half of v2 with the bottom half of v1.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks !</comment></comment>


Serval Project - <AUTHOR> http://servalproject.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> This disruptive mesh networking technology can make mobile phone carriers obsolete...</comment>


AccorHotels of France Buys Onefinestay for $169M - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/business/dealbook/accorhotels-of-france-buys-onefinestay-for-169-million.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> This is interesting. I'm in this sector to an extent, and Accor Europe are our biggest source of revenue.

Not quite in the same vertical as One Fine Stay (we're venue and conference space) but nonetheless it's good to see a large chain finally realising that MICE needs to move online to continue to be successful.</comment>


Show HN: Remote Contract Only Job Board - <AUTHOR> https://remotecontractonly.com/ <comment><USER2> It's a good concept but limited posts for now. I wonder why we don't write a twitter search engine that automatically finds these kinds of job postings and aggregates them by location and company.

<comment><USER3> Why stop at twitter? Lets just scan most websites for phrases that gives an indication that it is remote/contract work and just create an index on something like a github repository. Seems like it would be (almost) cheap to maintain.

<comment><AUTHOR> interesting. like a Github job board</comment></comment></comment>


Type Erasure Magic in Swift - <AUTHOR> https://realm.io/news/altconf-hector-matos-type-erasure-magic/ <comment><USER2> > In Java it is used to let the compiler know and it will erase the <T> and > make it a concrete type.

It's the opposite. In Java, when you instantiate a generic class with a concrete type, it will _erase_ that type in the generic class. So, the actual code for Foo<String> and Foo<Integer> is the same; String and Integer are erased, and inside of Foo, it just uses Object. For that reason, Foo<T> is not allowed to do anything with T that would require knowing the actual type of T; that knowledge has been erased. See [https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/generics/erasur...](https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/generics/erasure.html)

With this confusion, it's hard for me to orient myself with how this applies to Swift.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a TL;DR, or even as a starting point for diving deeper into the finer points in the talk, it would be really helpful to attach the complete code which demonstrates type erasure.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. Although, the code is in the presentation.

<comment><USER4> It might be in the video (I don't have time to watch it to find out). It isn't in the slides (which I can skim quickly, and therefore I did).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems like an apology for the unforgivable: type erasure is a language _implementation detail_ , and thus it shouldn't affect language users. A user might want to choose an implementation that uses monomorphization for performance reasons, or an implementation that doesn't erase types for debuggability reasons. But the language implementor's choice to use type erasure shouldn't affect the meaning of code written by language users.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why do all sorts of blogs have "Click to Read More" buttons these days? Seems totally unnecessary.

<comment><USER7> It makes the adverts stand out more, and that pays the bills.

Edit: it seems the old location for adverts, the sidebar, is dead because people zoom in on mobile and many users are on mobile.

Pop-ups also are somewhat dead because people have learned to close the not- too obnoxious ones without paying attention.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Will server-side Swift be succesful? - <AUTHOR> I'm curious to hear HN's opinion on Swift on the server-side. I'm very excited about it myself (have been dabbling with Vapor, a Swift web framework).
I see a potential road-block for Swift's becoming really popular as a server-side language: The default ecosystem for Swift/Vapor development seems to be macOS + Xcode, and while an Ubuntu version is available, it 1) isn't available for the newest Ubuntu version yet, and 2) there's no Xcode on Ubuntu, so you'll miss out of the things that Xcode can give you that a command-line Swift interpreter can't. Even Vapor's own hello world example relies on Xcode. And if you're on Windows, your only option seems to be running an (outdated) version of Ubuntu in a virtual machine.
Point is, while Swift and Vapor are great, Swift may not reach its full potential unless developers are less tied to a specific OS and editor/IDE. What do you think?
(Btw., when asking a question like the above, some people will say, "just use the best tool for the job". This is a common opinion, but in reality the popularity of a language and framework means a huge deal when it comes to getting help, looking up answers, hiring programmers, hosting your project easily, etc.). <comment><USER2> > Swift may not reach its full potential unless developers are less tied to a > specific OS and editor/IDE

I agree if our context is in regards to Developer adoption relative to other web languages and platforms. I don't think however that Swift's server side ambitions right now fall there though - instead, to me, it aims to seek out Developers already using Xcode to give them an extra tool in the toolbelt.

I also think the reason you are suggesting Xcode is needed for server side development here is because of the Vapor framework and not Swift or the Swift compiler.</comment>


Please help get critical Emacs feature in VSCode - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/68433 <comment><AUTHOR> If VSCode is ever to achieve nirvana for Emacs users, thus feature (native support for c-U arguments) will need to be implemented.

Just needs 20 votes.</comment>


Ruby on rails ,Python best frameworks - <AUTHOR>

Hello everybody,

     In my work,i work all the time with asp.net,javascript,jquery.

     No that i have an idea for a web project:online card gambling game.RoR is recommended for me to do that.

    I want to learn those two languages:Ruby & Python(for a smll website),what are the best frameworks for them,are they installs that i can buy in a dvd.please provide links.
 <comment><USER2> For a small website, a microframework like Flask(<http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/>) or Bottle(<http://bottlepy.org/>) is probably the best option.(for Python)</comment>


Low pay and the rise of the machines - <AUTHOR> http://timharford.com/2013/09/low-pay-and-the-rise-of-the-machines/ <comment><USER2> It is distressing that so many have become 'useless' in this modern economy. I think we are all very aware of the problem as well as the fact that it is likely to get worse.

What can be done? I have seen very little on this subject. Guaranteed basic income is probably a step in the right direction. At least such a system offers a real opportunity to drop what you are doing currently and sincerely try for a new career.

<comment><USER3> I like the universal basic income idea too, but haven't we gone through a similar crisis during the industrial revolution? How did we pull out of that?

This is a genuine question, I'm a poor student of history.

<comment><USER4> It's not clear that we ever did pull out of it. A certain small class of people who couldn't move away from agriculture, say Native Americans who wanted to maintain their traditional lifestyles, suffered tremendously as the country industrialized and the valuable land was taken over for industrial agriculture. They have never recovered, and are the poorest people in the U.S. to this day.

What this means is that people need to move to whatever is next, and those who don't, or more importantly can't, will be left behind. But what's next? During the industrial revolution, people moved to cities to go work in factories. But what's the way forward today? Arguably the key difference between today and back then is that the industrial revolution caused a change in where labor was demanded, while the automation revolution reduces the need for labor across almost all sectors of the economy. Yes, some people need to program the machines, but not that many. After all, during the industrial revolution it wasn't mechanical engineering that offered job opportunities for the masses.

To me, the obvious "what's next" is this: those whose jobs are obsoleted by automation personally service those whose jobs aren't. It's possible that the future of America is 2/3 of the population acting as nannies, personal assistants, etc, to the 1/3 whose jobs haven't been automated. I bet there are a ton of people even now who would cook/clean/etc for $5/hour + board. You'd already see this in the U.S. if it wasn't for the minimum wage/welfare. What happens when automation drives the price of unskilled labor down to $2-3/hour? The U.S. becomes Bangladesh is what happens. I think it's a social disaster in the making, but I struggle to think of alternatives.

<comment><USER5> Being a cook isn't (necessarily) unskilled labor. Neither is being a hairdresser, a personal shopper, a sommelier, or a yoga instructor.

You can make a very respectable income today in the U.S. at any of those jobs if you're sufficiently skilled. Certainly there are many more people doing those jobs today than there were a hundred years ago. And frankly, many of them would probably much rather be doing such a "personal service" job over their career options of decades ago.

And that's not counting plumbers, electricians, carpenters... Many of whom find it much easier to develop recurring revenue streams than your typical YC startup!

Automation is great. It _helps_ most of those people. Just think about how much your local yoga studio or coffee shop relies on modern PoS systems for payment processing and customer tracking, the web and social media for marketing, Amazon-class logistics for supplies...

I just don't see things in such negative terms. I also don't think that today's rates of unemployment were somehow inevitable. We automated like mad in the '90's too (arguably even more dramatically than we are doing so today), and yet unemployment dropped, incomes rose and labor markets were tight from top to bottom. What's different today?

<comment><USER6> > We automated like mad in the '90's too (arguably even more dramatically than > we are doing so today), and yet unemployment dropped, incomes rose and labor > markets were tight from top to bottom. What's different today?

There are no vast failed commie economies left to piggyback on their recovery and imminent growth. Right before the Warsaw Pact collapse and China's conversion to capitalism, America and its allies were not doing particularly well, in economic terms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's really distresses me whenever I read economic discussions on HN because basic economics is relatively simple and objective and because most folks on HN have the chops to understand this stuff, but it seems like many don't. In particular, one big facet of economics is equilibrium as it pertains to markets and most discussions here completely gloss over this (even though everyone here is completely comfortable with the concept of equilibria in other domains.)

I think a lot still needs to be done, and can be done, to educate the public about basic economic principles. I hope to do my part to help by creating quality online resources for this in the near future.

To give a more concrete example of what worries me: It should be _obvious_ to everyone here that an idea like "minimum guaranteed income" is a very dangerous idea. Yes, there are credible economists that believe these things are a good idea (and it might even be a correct idea) but they believe this for very different, and much better informed reasons than the arguments being bandied about in this forum. Many of the arguments made here in favor of "minimum guaranteed income" are wrong _and even the Economists who support these things would agree that your arguments are wrong_.

Anyway, as I said, I hope to create some online resources soon that will show more clearly what the difficulty is with these types of ideas.

EDIT: For those asking me what the precise problem is with "minimum guaranteed income", I can't give you a satisfying answer, because I can only make an obvious qualitative argument right now (i.e. people will stop taking minimum wage jobs if they can get the same income without working, or by working in some less efficient fashion prescribed by a "guaranteed minimum income" scheme.) What needs to be done is to bring this discussion into the realm of mathematical "economic models" so we can quantify these things and ask questions like " _How much_ will a guaranteed income help people?" and " _How much_ will poor people be hurt indirectly by putting such a scheme in place?" (and of course ask additional meta questions such as "Is this model appropriate?") But these types of questions can't be addressed in an HN thread and require a more in depth treatment.

<comment><USER8> Frankly, I am still waiting for a good introduction to general economic principles. I literally feel like an idiot when following economic discussions: it seems to me like it's all a long infinite chain of valid arguments and counter-arguments that are perfectly valid, true and completely opposite.

Hope you get something online soon.

<comment><USER9> "Economics in One Lesson" by Henry Hazlitt [http://mises.org/books/economics_in_one_lesson_hazlitt.pdf](http://mises.org/books/economics_in_one_lesson_hazlitt.pdf)

This book is an outstanding place to start. It addresses a myriad of economic concepts in simple language. It's available for free through the Mises Institute.

"How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes" by Peter Schiff [http://www.amazon.com/How-Economy-Grows-Why- Crashes/dp/04705...](http://www.amazon.com/How-Economy-Grows-Why- Crashes/dp/047052670X)

This book gives a simple overview of macro issues and is an interesting and well-presented tale about how economies grow from the basic "man on an island" scenario to a complex market. It also covers Austrian business cycle theory which explains the boom-bust cycle in economies.

Both of these books are from the "Austrian School" of economics, which is named for its Austrian founder, Carl Menger. I find these arguments compelling as they are firmly grounded in logic and are based on the principle that the human individual and her actions form the basis of all economic activity.

The giants of the Austrian school are Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard (highly readable) if you want to seek out more advanced theory.

<comment><USER10> Do not do this. The Austrian school of economics is neither scientific nor respected in the wider economic sphere.

If you want a good introduction to economics that is 1) amenable to the perspective of an engineer (i.e., mathematical theory and significant amounts of modeling and game theory) and 2) close to how actual professional economists approach economic problems, the best free textbook is one originally authored by an economist at CalTech who is also Yahooo!'s head of an economic research team.

[http://www.mcafee.cc/Introecon/IEA.pdf](http://www.mcafee.cc/Introecon/IEA.pdf)

<comment><USER9> > The Austrian school of economics is neither scientific

This is a somewhat vague statement but I'm assuming you're referring to the Austrians' "a priori" approach to economics.

> nor respected in the wider economic sphere.

Given the adversarial stance that the Austrians take toward government intervention in the economy it is no surprise that their ideas are not endorsed by academics.

Individuals should make their own judgement about the persuasiveness of the Austrian arguments and not dismiss them because they are unpopular.

If you have the time, I'd welcome a critique of any argument contained in that Hazlitt book quoted above.

<comment><USER11> I assume that the complaint was not "no one should ever read the Austrians" but rather that it's not appropriate introduction to economics.

One may think that string theory is sound, but still think it unwise to introduce someone to physics starting with string theory.

"Individuals should make their own judgment about the persuasiveness of Austrian arguments"

I agree with this, but it seems wiser to do so once you have some basic knowledge of more mainstream economics so that you can critically compare the two schools of thought.

<comment><USER9> But that's a gross mischaracterization of Austrian economics. It's nothing like the 'string theory' of economics and is indeed rather simple.

All the seminal works (especially "Economics in One Lesson") are very elementary. You need no prior exposure to economics.

They say you can identify an Austrian work by flipping through it, as it will undoubtedly contain no graphs or formulas.

<comment><USER11> The only goal of the comparison to string theory was that it's an alternative theory that an educated observer should judge on its own merits. I'm saying that the background of one's introduction to economics should be based in the mainstream, just as one's intro to physics should not be based in mainstream physics vs string theory (saying nothing of how advanced the intro curriculum need be).

My fundamental point is that alternative theories are invaluable and essential, but being conservative and sticking with the mainstream is generally well-advised for beginners. Once you're confident in your grounding in the mainstream, you can approach alternatives with a critical, well- informed eye.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The pool of idle and unwanted labor will likely increase until the assumptions underlying the industrial revolution are questioned. Great public works of art and architecture are scarcely being erected today as their mere existence is seen to be "inefficient". Efficiency is a means rather than an end.

From Tawney's "Acquisitive Society":

"Such societies may be called Acquisitive Societies, because their whole tendency and interest and preoccupation is to promote the acquisition of wealth. The {30} appeal of this conception must be powerful, for it has laid the whole modern world under its spell. Since England first revealed the possibilities of industrialism, it has gone from strength to strength, and as industrial civilization invades countries hitherto remote from it, as Russia and Japan and India and China are drawn into its orbit, each decade sees a fresh extension of its influence. The secret of its triumph is obvious. It is an invitation to men to use the powers with which they have been endowed by nature or society, by skill or energy or relentless egotism or mere good fortune, without inquiring whether there is any principle by which their exercise should be limited. It assumes the social organization which determines the opportunities which different classes shall in fact possess, and concentrates attention upon the right of those who possess or can acquire power to make the fullest use of it for their own self-advancement. By fixing men's minds, not upon the discharge of social obligations, which restricts their energy, because it defines the goal to which it should be directed, but upon the exercise of the right to pursue their own self-interest, it offers unlimited scope for the acquisition of riches, and therefore gives free play to one of the most powerful of human instincts. To the strong it promises unfettered freedom for the exercise of their strength; to the weak the hope that they too one day may be strong. Before the eyes of both it suspends a golden prize, which not all can attain, but for which each may strive, the enchanting vision of infinite expansion. It assures men that there are no ends other {31} than their ends, no law other than their desires, no limit other than that which they think advisable. Thus it makes the individual the center of his own universe, and dissolves moral principles into a choice of expediences. And it immensely simplifies the problems of social life in complex communities. For it relieves them of the necessity of discriminating between different types of economic activity and different sources of wealth, between enterprise and avarice, energy and unscrupulous greed, property which is legitimate and property which is theft, the just enjoyment of the fruits of labor and the idle parasitism of birth or fortune, because it treats all economic activities as standing upon the same level, and suggests that excess or defect, waste or superfluity, require no conscious effort of the social will to avert them, but are corrected almost automatically by the mechanical play of economic forces.

"Under the impulse of such ideas men do not become religious or wise or artistic; for religion and wisdom and art imply the acceptance of limitations. But they become powerful and rich. They inherit the earth and change the face of nature, if they do not possess their own souls; and they have that appearance of freedom which consists in the absence of obstacles between opportunities for self-advancement and those whom birth or wealth or talent or good fortune has placed in a position to seize them. It is not difficult either for individuals or for societies to achieve their object, if that object be sufficiently limited and immediate, and if they are not distracted from its pursuit by other considerations. The temper which dedicates itself to the cultivation of opportunities, and leaves obligations to take care of themselves, is set upon an object which is at once simple and practicable. The eighteenth century defined it. The twentieth century has very largely attained it. Or, if it has not attained it, it has at least grasped the possibilities of its attainment."

<comment><USER7> What evidence do you have for saying the unemployment rate will continue to go up? It's gone up many times in the past and has always gone back to a baseline: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Unemployment_1890-2009....](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Unemployment_1890-2009.gif)

<comment><USER12> What evidence do you have that automation is not automating?

<comment><USER7> I don't know why I'm responding to such a poorly phrased question, but interpreting it in the most charitable light: The unemployment graph I linked to is clear evidence that previous automation has not "automated away humans".

<comment><USER12> Talk to your neighbors. The economy is not as rosy as government portrays it.

<comment><USER7> Talk to your mom/dad what it was like in the 50s/60s/70s/80s: They'll probably tell you people are, on the whole, better off now than they were then.

<comment><USER12> I have and found that one man could comfortably support a family of five on a 40-hour-a-week factory worker salary. Such niceties began to fade in the 70s and 80s, though, as the world _progressed_.

Now, do your part and honestly evaluate the world around you. Keep in mind that the appeal to progress is just as much of a fallacy as the appeal to tradition. Tomorrow is not inevitably better than yesterday.

<comment><USER7> That's news to me: So when the man's wife needed an MRI, his salary could cover this back in the 70s? He was able to buy a car with airbags using his salary? He was able to give his wife a cell phone in the 70s that she could use in an emergency? He was able to buy himself a carbon monoxide detector for his house? If he got testicular cancer, he would live more than a year with his salary? etc. etc.

<comment><USER12> Once open spaces are now subdivided, health care motivated by usury, and wages lie stagnant since the seventies. Water crises, hemispheric pollution, and thermonuclear warheads, all are modern _innovations_ which the prewar generations would be thankful to escape.

The present isn't inevitably better than the past. The future will not necessarily be rosier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> People get very attached to their theory of how economies and civilizations work.

On one side we have "Luddites" who think that machines are taking over. We have no use for most people's labour and we need to start dealing with that by having a guaranteed basic income or somesuch. Seems like common sense. What use are all the people that were working in factories or data entry or whatnot in the robot age!

On the other side we have Misans? Ludwigians? (I dunno, I need a name for Ludwig von Mises people). They point out that this current crop of Luddites are just following in the footsteps of historical Luddites that think everyone will be unemployed because of tractors or looms. The sky never fell. Economies sort themselves out.

Realistically, we don't know. Technology has been moving very fast for a long time and its accelerating. We don't know what this does to economic paradigms. How can anyone be as confident as so many people seem to be about this stuff.

<comment><USER11> Actually, the Luddites in the current conversation are the ones decrying technological advancement itself. On the policy side, they tend to favor propping up old, inefficient industries (essentially subsidizing them at the expense of the rest of the population).

A basic income has been considered common sense in economic theory for a long, long time (as in, it's been discussed by economists for at least a century). It has less to do with the obsolescence of human labor than it does to the fact that it's simply grossly inefficient to tie "the ability to take entrepreneurial risk" to "I was born middle-class or higher".

<comment><USER14> And thank you for crystallising that thought in my head - we are seeing a boom in entrepreneurship because the cost and risk of being one is dropping.

And drop it further still will see an increase also - put your faith in human's need to do creative productive work. No matter what.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Economic models would show that low wage jobs are such due to lack of specialization and supply/demand for that job. Nonetheless, articles like this make "the Economy" sound more and more like the Matrix. Do humans exist merely to serve the Economy?

<comment><USER16> No they exist to serve the other humans who, in turn, serve them. What happens when other humans don't need their service? Who will serve them then?

<comment><USER17> I am not a slave, and I won't have any.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For an interesting counterpoint : [http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519016/stop-saying- robo...](http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519016/stop-saying-robots-are- destroying-jobs-they-arent/)

</comment><comment><USER12> It's interesting that this article has garnered so much interest on hacker news. Automation, streamlining, and outsourcing appears to have worked its way "up" to the STEM fields. The technical minded may soon received a taste of what the factory labor received in the eighties.

[http://www.vdare.com/print/17686](http://www.vdare.com/print/17686)

Perhaps in another decade lawyers will face the chopping block, and thereafter the politicians who outsourced their nation.

</comment><comment><USER19> >It means fixing inequality without the need to resort to redistributive taxation.

National taxation in Britain doesn't redistribute, it regulates demand. The British government does not need to tax a pound to spend a pound. The limits on spending are inflation and real resources.

</comment><comment><USER20> What exactly is the difference between a guaranteed minimum income and welfare? Are people talking about you get paid X regardless of what you do, because if you want to see what that kind of thing looks like, look at life on an indian reservation. In many cases, that doesn't really solve the problems of poverty, alcoholism, etc. even if there is humungous opportunity to work, get a free education, etc.

Some people don't want to do what society asks of them. How do you solve that?

<comment><USER4> My wife worked on an Indian reservation. There is no "humungous opportunity to work, get a free education, etc." It's subsistence.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Wrench, a library for handling recursive operations in Node.js - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/wrench-js

<comment><AUTHOR> For those interested, I wrote this up some time ago. I saw some people discussing their need for something like this on Twitter yesterday, which is why I figured I'd submit it.

Yes, you can just as easily jump it out to a console and execute a raw command or something, but if you want something more Node-tastic, here you go.</comment>


Aibo – A new story begins - <AUTHOR> https://aibo.sony.jp/en/ <comment><USER2> >Every new face is another friend to be made

>learns the environment

>aibo [...] constantly updating its data in the cloud

>apps

Hey sorry to be a cynical brat, but does this imply that it's just another Internet-of-Sting like the Roomba-style robot from Xiaomi (a backdoor mapping agent)? As it costs like 1000 USD, it better not pull that kind of bullshit.

But how do I know? Trust is a huge factor here, and what Sony shows here doesn't impress me a bit. The page does not say anything about data and privacy protection. If Sony does not directly do it, how does Sony vet the third party apps to make sure third party apps don't pull that kind of bullshit?

The last thing I want to hear is to get a blackmail from a $1000 robotic dog, you know. "Last Tuesday, you listened to a pirated CD from Sony. Your dog has accidentally used that CD for a toy while you're busy making love with the housemaid."

<comment><USER3> I can't find anything that claims Xiaomi vacuums are spying on us (would maps of rugs be useful to collect?) Do you have a reference?

<comment><USER4> I remember reading that the latest Roomba vacuums were uploading their movement patterns to the cloud to "optimize the cleaning experience". I don't personally have a reference.

A set of highly detailed house maps, with strong indicators of the traffic patterns (via dirt detection) and pet ownership (abnormally high volumes of shortish hair; tends to clog filters faster), would be exceptionally useful as input to your advertising profile.

<comment><USER5> You likely read that, but the story was that some exec cited it as an idea. It was reported as factual and actual, and that's how it will be remembered.

My telling you won't matter, as eventually one or both of us will forget, and the lie lives on.

<comment><USER2> It is not an idea from an exec, and that is not a lie.

>[https://youtu.be/uhyM-bhzFsI?t=607](https://youtu.be/uhyM-bhzFsI?t=607)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Damn, even years later it's still prohibitively expensive. 198k yen (~2k USD) and 90k yen (~900 USD) lifetime or 2980 yen (~30 USD) per month for the "basic plan" which is required for the AI services.

<comment><USER7> What in the world is the market for this?

<comment><USER8> Robotic pets are often used in therapy for people with dementia.

[http://www.parorobots.com/](http://www.parorobots.com/)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFvGAL9tesM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFvGAL9tesM)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like how it scratches itself, implying that Sony has leapfrogged the competition in miniaturization and invented the Robot Flea.

<comment><USER10> Dogs scratching themselves is common and not necessarily an indicator of having fleas.

<comment><USER11> Humor is commonly used by Humons to attempt to connect with one another and distract themselves from the inherent absurdity of their lives; you need not necessarily interpret their communication entirely literally when you have a suspicion that they may be employing Humor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if the aging population of Japan had anything to do with the comeback.

The NYT did a really nice video feature on the Aibo fan following a while back, the elderly couple featured must be pretty excited [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/18/technology/robotica- sony-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/18/technology/robotica-sony-aibo- robotic-dog-mortality.html?src=twr&smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0)

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm amazed it's taken this long for things like this to make a comeback, now that neural-net tech has progressed so far. Being able to develop a complex relationship with an ML system rather than just a handful of floating parameters sounds pretty interesting (yes, I know that's technically what neural nets are underneath, but the point holds).

<comment><USER14> In 2007 a funny teacher bought a pair and made us write meta DSLs for Aibo. According to the industry it was advanced but in terms of robotics it was so damn primitive.. and for today ML (and note U-ML, we used their MOF) is probably incomensurably better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The videos in the website have such a dystopian feel.

</comment><comment><USER16> To folks who are complaining the trade-off between it's price and what it does offer: this dog is more about a robotic toy with animatronics similar to that of spot-mini than a cloud powered AI (i.e. siri/cortana/google). You are buying an AI powered hollywood level animatronic toy for 2 grands, I wouldn't say this is too expensive.

<comment> gene-h I wouldn't say that it's on par with with a spot mini. Walking and movement seems pretty slow and rough. It's really too bad that advancements in actuator technology haven't made it into consumer robots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I hope AIBO RoboCup soccer returns as a result.

</comment><comment><USER18> Probably I'm not their market target, but what for do I want a Aibo? I prefer a real dog.

What most people crave is a robotic servant.

<comment><USER19> Robots can emulate enough personality to offer low-maintenance companionship. Even Alexa and Google Assistant become part of the family, to some degree. Maybe Aibo provides a fraction of what you're looking for in an animal companion, but it's enough for some people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> not new, wasn't this from november 2017?

<comment><USER20> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15598783](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15598783)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is it just me or does this look mildly terrifying? IMO, this is solidly in uncanny valley territory.

</comment><comment><USER22> It does not smell or sh*t which will make million households happy.

<comment><USER19> And it can't suffer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Its movements are really slow and choppy. I bet it can't even run...

The uncanny valley is not even in sight. I guess I'm going back to this week's Westworld...</comment>


To Trie or not to Trie – a comparison of efficient data structures - <AUTHOR> http://bhavin.directi.com/to-trie-or-not-to-trie-a-comparison-of-efficient-data-structures/ <comment><USER2> This is a nice write-up of the available sensible trie implementations - thanks Bhavin!

One thing I'd add is that if you aren't exploiting the ordered nature of the keys within a trie - i.e. if your keys have no underlying substructure or you aren't doing linear scans through the key space - then you don't want a trie at all and you'd be better off with a hash table.

A hash table will be faster and use less memory if your keys are unstructured (imagine for a minute choosing random integers for your keys - then mod N is a good hash function for those keys, so it is obvious a hash table will work well for them, whereas a trie will waste space trying to find common prefixes between random keys.)

If you are accessing completely randomly, then the cache utilisation will be similar between a good trie and a hash table. If you are accessing some things more than others, then you should use a move-to-front hash table to be competitive.

<comment><USER3> > so it is obvious a hash table will work well for them, whereas a trie will > waste space trying to find common prefixes between random keys.)

It is obvious, but it is wrong. I observed Judy beating out many hash tables in specifically this situation, and comparing favorably to google's sparsehash. Given its much smaller code size and fewer dependencies this has demonstrated itself a huge win at my organization.

Link to my benchmark: [http://reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bhxwh/hash_table_be...](http://reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bhxwh/hash_table_benchmarks_google_sparsedense_hash_map/c0mw7hm)

<comment><USER2> Benchmarking beats random ideas, no doubt about that! Thanks for pointing out my mistake with integers. However, I would say Judy doesn't look so hot for string keys - slower at most things and similar memory requirements.

I'd be interested to see 10 million _64-bit_ integers in Judy and DenseHash though. Since ten million is 0.2% of 2^32, in some sense lots of the potential key space is actually in use, so I'd expect a lot of sharing to be possible and a sparse trie to perform well.

Is there a 64-bit integer key Judy array you could test on?

<comment><USER3> > Is there a 64-bit integer key Judy array you could test on?

Simply using the 64-bit integer as a 8-byte key is what I use.

Treating the 32-bit integer as 4-byte keys performs similarly to using the integer-API directly.

> I'd be interested to see 10 million 64-bit integers in Judy and DenseHash > though

It's easy enough to check :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For me the power of a trie over a hash table has always been the ease of implementation. Hash tables have a lot of corner cases that tries don't have. I can write an entire trie in the time it would take me to just write the part of a hash-table that deals with collisions. Nevermind resizing or rehashing!

This is why Judy arrays seemed a bit odd to me. I feel that if I put as much effort into making a super-fast hash table as the author did into making a super-fast trie, I feel like it would perform as well or better. That's just a gut-instinct though and I don't really have any data to back it up.

I suppose an exception could when the median key length is very short, tries tend to be better since a secure hash function could take longer than a very small number of memory lookups(especially since some of them will be cached).

</comment><comment><USER5> Two useful implementations that this article misses are Array-compacted tries (aka dual-array tries) and Array-mapped tries. ACTs are nice due to the small memory footprint and good cache-locality, but have the downside of being difficult and time-consuming to construct. AMTs have a bit-array for determining existence of children and a sorted array of child-pointers in each node and are surprisingly fast at both insertion and search. Both have been described elsewhere, but I like the explanations by Phil Bagwell in his paper, "Fast And Space Efficient Trie Searches" (1998).

</comment><comment><USER6> Perhaps a dumb question, but has anyone considered using a trie to manage search query auto-suggest, such as Google AutoSuggest?

It seems like it could be more efficient as you could send to the browser the node ID of the current buffer and then when the next key was pressed, use the current ID to efficiently look forward just one level.

<comment><USER7> Not a dumb question at all.

Im working on a project to do this right now in fact, since it seeems all the open-source autocomplete implementations I can find just come down to doing a "SELECT bla where bla like bla", which is pretty slow. The one major issue is that tries are prefix-based, so it has to match starting from the beginning of the query. My sort of solution around that is to break up the terms your matching against into groups of phrases, and allow prefix matching on any of those phrases.

As a question to HN-I was planning on using Radix Trees, but now Ive read this article it seems like there might be some other good options. Are any of those structures noticeable better for storing lots of strings?

<comment><USER6> I thought that most of the time since users are typing one character at a time that would be efficient. Even pasting at the end of the string is easy to manage as it might only be O(q) where q is the length of the query string (depending on the structure of the underlying trie).

The worst cases are editing midstring, and worst, pasting to the start of the query string. Still, those are O(q) rather than O(N) where N are the total number of strings in the database. In my case, N will have millions of records where q will rarely exceed 250 characters.

<comment><USER7> the problem is not efficiency, its relevancy. Say you have a result "hacker news". If its a pure prefix trie, this wont match the query "news", even though you probably want to return this as a suggestion. My hack around this would be to add both "hacker news" and "news" in the trie-Its still not perfect, since it wouldn't match "acker" or "ws" etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That's a nice review - I'm toying with the idea of trying to write a simple hierarchical OLAP database (like Essbase or Hyperion HFM) and trie's seem like a potentially interesting starting point.</comment>


Amazon Promised Drone Delivery in Five Years Five Years Ago - <AUTHOR> https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/amazon-promised-drone-delivery-in-five-years-five-ye-1830818625 <comment><USER2> I remember in 2013 when Amazon announced their 30 minute drone delivery system, the British bookshop Waterstones announced their competing O.W.L.S system [https://www.waterstones.com/blog/introducing-o-w- l-s](https://www.waterstones.com/blog/introducing-o-w-l-s)

</comment><comment><USER3> Not Amazon but drone delivery is becoming a thing, a startup called Zipline is currently (successfully) running trials in Rwanda of drones that are used to deliver blood to hospitals where it would never be able to arrive in a timely fashion otherwise (because of terrain, poor access etc). From what I remember delivery time was about half an hour. It is however clearly not as elegant a solution as Amazon was proposing with their quadcopters, Zipline uses scaled model airplanes with an old-school tail catch system for "landing" (same concept on aircraft carriers). Not "elegant" but certainly gets the job done. I know I saw a YouTube video covering this recently but cannot find the link sadly.

<comment><USER4> I never heard of this before, made my day, thanks :)

[https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zipline+rwanda](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zipline+rwanda)

[http://www.flyzipline.com/](http://www.flyzipline.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Five years ago, just before Christmas, everyone was taking about Amazon drone delivery. My hairdresser brought it up to me. My dad was talking about getting his guns out of storage so he could take a pot shot or two. A lot of people who had never ordered a single thing from Amazon were bringing it up. Just before Christmas. Pretty effective if you ask me.

</comment><comment><USER6> Well... Drone delivery _may_ work in countryside, where people live in personal homes not apartments, perhaps with a bit of green flat area suitable for landing and leave a small package.

It's essentially unfeasible in cities where nearly anyone live in apartments, with dense roads, no clearly identifiable landing site, no place to fly without being on to of many people's head etc.

I dream a society in which we are few enough to live all in large are and we can easily travel with personal STOL small planes and goods can travel longer paths on waterway/railway to be delivered by truck or planes only for the last small trip. But that's a dream really hard to realize especially these days.

It's the same for electric cars: I'd love them if they have small rechargeable batteries like water bottle basket that I can simply change by hand and their charge last long as traditional car range or better. I'd love to have small "generators" on board like Star Trek reactors, but that's a dream. And I do live in reality, at least last time I checked...

<comment><USER7> my apartment in Seattle has a specific drone landing spot

<comment><USER6> May I ask how a drone can locate your apartment? Because I can easily imaging to give coordinates of a garden with a precision suitable for a delivery but I can't imaging something that can really work in apartments... Perhaps penthouse apartments, perhaps some new apartments with specially crafted sign to be identified with reasonable safety by the drone but certainly not something that can work at a scale...

</comment></comment></comment><comment> zupa-hu So many negative comments. I still think it's cool, and hope it will be a reality soon enough. Definitely not a stupid idea.

<comment><USER8> The article was overly negative IMHO. Guy sounds like a whiner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's not technology problem but execution problem. The 5 lbs/20 mi drones are quite feasible in wide urban areas to pre-selected customers. FAA is no longer a problem. It's all about deploy to small group, iterate and expand. But team there seems to be taking extra-ordinarily cautious approach until everything gets perfect - which it probably never will. Typically you don't see media to follow up on 5 year old promises of a CEO so this could very well might be hit piece generated by some insider. Anyway, I suppose Paul Viola's days there are numbered now. It's surprised they survived this long under Bezos without delivering anything at all.

</comment><comment><USER10> The whole thing was always for PR purposes anyway. It's not a coincidence that it was announced on December 1st, right at the beginning of Christmas shopping season.

I have no doubt they hired real engineers to build a real prototype. Maybe they even hoped it could turn out to be practical. But the primary motivation and the end game was always to get people talking about Amazon during the critical shopping period.

(On a side note, the whole thing has a striking symbolic aspect to it. How does Santa Claus deliver Christmas goodies? He magically flies to your house and delivers them directly from the sky. And the drones do exactly the same thing.)

<comment><USER11> As an engineer with Amazon, I can say with 100% (edit: 99.99%) certainty (without any insider knowledge on the drone program), that PR was not the primary driver of this. I would say you have it backwards. Amazon hired engineers to build it (and probably still are) THEN used it as a PR opportunity.

To say "The whole thing was always for PR purposes anyway" is a fundamental misunderstanding of how Amazon works internally.

<comment><USER7> More likely, somebody wanted to have fun with drones, then went about trying to sell it to amazon higher ups

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> ...and it's still no closer to being practical, legal, or safe.

Small drones have a very limited range and payload capacity. And how would they deliver to offices or apartments (with no private garden or driveway to land or drop the parcels)? How would they avoid collisions with anything from skyscrapers to trees to power lines? (Does that level of 3D map data exist yet)

How do they prevent the risk of propellor related injuries, or of stolen drones (perhaps even shot down 'for the loot')

Then there's the FAA (and other aviation regulators worldwide) to deal with.

Still seems like a marketing stunt for now, or a much-longer-term goal

</comment><comment><USER13> There's a 2014 episode of Parks & Recreation (set in 2017) where Ron shoots a delivery drone from a fictional company called Gryzzl, because it was flying over his property.

How on earth would drone delivery work in a country where there are more guns than people? And for places where there aren't that many, there are plenty of pranksters that would happily try taking one of these down to reignite their failing Youtube channel.

<comment><USER14> It is illegal to discharge a firearm in almost all incorporated areas in the United States, barring a very unusual emergency need. Almost all drone flights would be, statistically, in these areas. So probably not even worth worrying about as a problem.

<comment><USER7> in Canada up north, people shoot at passing airplanes fairly frequently

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Contemporaneous hn discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6830566](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6830566)

</comment><comment><USER16> Given the FAA rules on this (line of sight from operators), there's just no way that this could work. It basically defeats the whole purpose of using autonomous drones in the first place. Even if the rules were modified in their favor, it's dubious whether the infrastructure investment and potential for liability would be worth it for Amazon.

<comment><USER17> Which is why Google is testing theirs in Australia.

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/17/alphabet-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/17/alphabet- google-tests-project-wing-drone-hybrid-delivering-burritos-rural-australia)

<comment><USER16> Yep, Amazon is testing in other places as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Stupid idea still stupid idea and they're hoping everyone will forget.

<comment><USER19> Amazon has no fear of failure. The Fire phone comes to mind. They roll with the punches and just go on to the next product. They also have the scale to explore every 'stupid idea' to some degree. Good for them.

I doubt they're "hoping everyone will forget". More they just abandon what doesn't work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> the same as 2020 for self driving cars. more like 2030 or 2040.

</comment><comment><USER21> Didn't this start as an April Fool's joke by Amazon?

<comment><USER22> Their recruiters used it to show how cool they were - so I don't think so.

</comment></comment><comment> xkcd-sucks Five years ago drones were faddish, now they're not

</comment><comment><USER23> The first Prime AIR stuff was just a marketing attack on the Apple Air tablet to spike traffic for its own tablet. All Apples Air name maketing got lost in the Prime Air story's.

<comment><AUTHOR> I vaguely recall it was a PR attack against multiple reports about the work conditions in their warehouses, especially in the UK.

One example that appeared the week before the reveal: [https://www.bbc.com/news/business-25034598](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-25034598)</comment></comment>


AFF3CT: A Fast Forward Error Correction Toolbox - <AUTHOR> https://aff3ct.github.io/index.html <comment><USER2> The web page looks nice, but requires a description of what it actually is.

<comment><USER3> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_error_correction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_error_correction)</comment></comment>


What you could do if you were Google and had their databases - <AUTHOR> http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/What+you+could+do+if+you+were+google+and+had+their+databases <comment><USER2> This is a very good analysis, and I would like to add some historical information to put it in context.

Originally, link analysis was based on a simple observation: people were maintaining curated lists of bookmarks in their personal webpages, because before search engines it was the only way to remember relevant webpages; I'm sure that most people remember that every personal site had a "my bookmarks" webpage. Therefore, every link counted as a "vote" from that person to a page.

Altavista exploited this by ranking by the number of inlinks. It wasn't long until people figured out that this is very easy to game, so someone came up with the idea of "transitive influence": a site is influent if another influent site votes for it. Algorithms such as PageRank and HITS solved the spam problem.

However, with the evolution of the web, the meaning of links changed. For example, most links are automatically generated by CMSs. Also, there is more and more ephemeral information on the web, and for ephemeral information as soon as you have enough links to it to evaluate its quality, the information is already old and irrelevant.

Luckily, if you are the most used search engine, you have another important popularity signal, which is given by your users: the number of clicks to a page for a given query.

In fact, in today's search engines I would say that the influence of link analysis is smaller and smaller in the overall ranking, and probably done mostly at the domain level rather than for each single page.

However, with the advent of social networks, a large amount of clicks doesn't come from search engines anymore, but from social "shares". Which means that the search engine can not observe them anymore, losing a precious signal of popularity (together with "Like"s and "+1"s).

I'm not sure if this is what Google is after with Google+, but most probably the click and share data on Google+ affects (or will affect) the search rankings.

</comment><comment><USER3> I recently attended a talk at Cornell by a guy who is due to start working at Google soon. He had not started working there, but presumably he was hired on the basis of the work he described, and he was explicitly interested in applying his framework to the Google social network.

He was working on a scheme to get people to recommend things to their friends in return for discounts on those things. His central focus was on devising a payout scheme in which people's economically optimal strategy is honestly reporting the cost of making the recommendation, and then choosing the optimum set of people with whom to make this deal for a given budget. Optimum in the sense of influencing the most people with the recommendations.

<comment><USER4> Is there a reasonable means to prevent people from spamming their friends to get the discount and then saying over some more trusted channel "Please disregard the spam, I haven't tried this thing and don't know whether it is good yet?"

<comment><USER5> That's small compared to the problem of arbitrage in such a scheme. Start by spamming people to buy something which gives them the largest dollar value discount on an item they don't actually want, then sell part of the discount to someone who wants it and pocket the profit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Definitely makes some sense. I don't know that this is actually a bad thing though. I personally care more about quality (read: relevant) search results than the details of how they are created. If Google is able to use a social network like Google+ to legitimately improve their search offering so that I have an easier time finding something relevant and interesting using their search engine when I need it, then I'm ok with that.

Of course, this is predicated on the assumption that google is able to effectively use Google + to tweak their main algorithms. I don't want to be barraged with direct G+ links in my search results - I want the relevant websites themselves. Furthermore, there should be a way to opt-out if people are uncomfortable with the lack of privacy, even if the default is their current privacy policy.

</comment><comment><USER7> Not sure it would be legal, but I would put a significant amount of devs onto predicting stocks. A blog goes more silent or people start Googling for "what is fraud, exactly?" from IPs known to contain lots of IBM workers (that would be more on the illegal end for sure).

Obviously a lawyer would need to review every input, but they have access to machine learning and data so much so that they could rock the exchanges.

<comment><USER8> I recall Eric Schmidt saying they thought about this, but the lawyers told them it would be illegal so they didn't explore it further.

<comment><USER7> At what point does it become illegal though. Surely if Goldman can trade then there must be some aggregation that they are allowed to trade at. "Debt consolidation" search trends for example. If it spikes in a certain country then they would be able to make decisions on that.

Seems like so much untapped potential.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think this is what jaques is trying to say:

page-rank's design is open to being gamed which has led to an arms race of algorithm tweaks. A social graph has much more powerful signals for figuring out relevant search results.

this isn't a hypothesis. the first iteration is called "search plus your world" and everybody already knows about it.

<comment><USER10> Google, in many cases because of GA, knows a users behavior once they reach a site. I wonder if they take into consideration, how long a user stays on a site they find in search or how active they are at that site, when ranking search results? Wouldn't these metrics be an indicator of quality?

<comment><USER11> According to Dan Sullivan's periodic table, they do measure that. And it has a weight of "2" according to his model. See the "Ce" tag:

<http://searchengineland.com/seotable>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I also believe that this is one of the potential benefit of G+. Though this can also easily be rotten by SEO if they use fake people or mechanical turcs. This may explain the effort to enforce identifying the real person behind an account. Facebook is going for it and google too. And this just to be able to throw bigger shovels of ads to us.

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting, but I don't think Google wanted to go social to decrease the damages of link spamming.

People already do social network spamming. There are plenty of sites where you can pay for a certain number of +1's or likes.

Using a combination of inputs, social interaction, page links, keywords, they can achieve a better overall ranking algorithm, which is probably one reason they wanted to go social.

However I think the main reason Google wanted to go social was to be able categorise their users better. The more they know about their users, the better they can serve ads.

<comment><USER14> > People already do social network spamming. There are plenty of sites where > you can pay for a certain number of +1's or likes.

Not all +1's are created equal. A +1 from a close friend, or a respected public figure is worth a lot more than ten thousand +1's from accounts created in the past 48 hours from a Bangalore IP address.

<comment><USER15> But in Google's framework, the only kinds of +1 are "your immediate friends" (those appear with profile pictures alongside) and "all the rest" which appear in the aggregate total "822,251 people +1'd this"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> >What you could do if you were Google and had their databases?

Try to predict election results and then try to influence them. Not exactly "Do no evil" I'll admit. Imagine what Google PR could do for politicians with access to what people are talking about, watching, browsing and chatting about in their social network. With their Ad technology they're already half way there.

<comment><USER14> > Try to predict election results and then try to influence them. Not exactly > "Do no evil" I'll admit.

Depends on who they're backing, right?

But even then, that's subjective. What's more evil, abortion or forced transvaginal ultrasound? Pollution, or unemployment? Kang or Kodos?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It may be that the web has rotted in the way described, so that it takes longer for users to find what they want. But I would argue this dynamic actually benefits Google: searching takes longer, so users spend more time using Google's services.

So there's this perverse incentive to make search as crappy as possible, right up to the limit where users switch to another search engine. And the great thing about this "web rot" (from Google's perspective) is that it affects all search engines, so users won't switch.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that Google is intentionally pursuing this "crapification" strategy, but they may not worry about the web rot as much as the author thinks, at least in the short term.

But while decreasing search result relevance may be neutral or even beneficial, increasing ad relevance is a big benefit for Google. And that is where social comes in: it allows for more targeted ads.

<comment><USER18> You're assuming total search volume will stay constant regardless of quality. But if people don't expect to find things of value as easily, they won't search for as many things. Not worth sorting through a bunch of crappy results.

I'm sure Google knows that its value is based on the Web's value.

<comment><USER17> True. There's a Laffer Curve of Search with a revenue-optimizing level of suck somewhere between 0% and 100%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This post keys into an idea I had recently to combine Klout with anonymized/aggregated web history data (i.e. from a browser extension) to build a URL quality/trending score. Google could obviously do this with Chrome, but I'd like to see a more open method of distributing this data to allow anyone to build on top of it. In the same vein, I'd like to see an open service that websites could ping when they want a page to be indexed. This would allow for a more open and efficient crawling ecosystem than currently exists. In general, development and ownership of search and social should become more open and distributed just as telephony, electricity, operating systems, and so many more large industries before it.

<comment><USER20> > In general, development and ownership of search and social should become > more open and distributed just as telephony, electricity, operating systems, > and so many more large industries before it.

I am working on an effort to do that called VerticalSet. It is a search engine/platform to let developers change search experience the way they want while giving users best search experience.

<http://www.verticalset.com/>

<comment><USER19> Cool! So an open front end to search. This is why I love HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This article goes along with, "What you could do if you were Apple and had their cash", and other greats like, "What you could do if you were a genie".

Just saying.

<comment><USER22> nope

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > people that relied on links will now rely on your search engine reducing the > value of links between sites

Is this really a given? I've never heard this before, not sure what it is that it means. Is the number of links generated by non-SEO sources falling (or not rising proportionally with SEO links)?

</comment><comment><USER24> Alternative answer to the question posed in the title: blackmail people by threatening to disclose their porn viewing habits (the search engine) to their friends and relatives (the social network.)

</comment><comment><USER25> I would do behavior based marketing that was relevant to individuals and / or segments ... it would be an opt-in but manufacturers would be really interested in providing great offers if they could reach opinion leaders and certain segments to gain incremental business. Would need to be opt in as I say so its not intrusive but really beneficial

</comment><comment><USER26> > a number of guide users were followed closely

No. No following people around on the Internet to make search results "better".

</comment><comment><USER27> Sorry, I missed what the article was trying to say... am I correct that the TL;DR version is "social search" ?

<comment><USER28> Nope, the TL;DR version is "turn G+ users into a better crawler/algorithm"

<comment><USER27> Thanks; I guess I see that as the same thing (guessing that Google sees social search as an improvement).

</comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 Reminds me of Cory Doctorow's (fictional) short story Scroogled: [http://www.radaronline.com/from-the- magazine/2007/09/google_...](http://www.radaronline.com/from-the- magazine/2007/09/google_fiction_evil_dangerous_surveillance_control_1.php)

<comment><USER29> The story where it's Google's fault that a new government took over that made pretty much every past, present, and future action illegal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Facebook uses their social graph to figure out what sort of needs you have. Maybe Google could try the reverse process; that is figuring out your social graph using their knowledge of what web content you need. Kinda evil though.

</comment><comment><USER31> I presume this gives me access to all of their servers too. In which case I would mine the remaining Bitcoin. Mainly because I think Bitcoin is a stupid idea and this would help highlight that sentiment.

</comment><comment><USER32> You could feed the NSA data on about 80% of the world population?

</comment><comment><USER33> The web's flaws propagate to Google. They can only fix so much. There's a lot of room to improve on content publishing and sharing.

</comment><comment><USER34> No-one seems to be tying in DNS to all of this. That gives Google a signal aide from the link-graph and social that tells them which sites are being use and how often. Its power will increase vastly when IPv6 brings static IPs and Google then can say that you followed a specific link from your fridge and made no further DNS hits for 3 minutes, etc..

</comment><comment><USER35> TRUNCATE <table> CASCADE;

</comment><comment><USER36> Maybe, just maybe we can expect more from future internet companies. facebook and twitter seem to be in the right direction. but i think actually MAKING something that is USEFUL to whoever your trying to make money off, not whatever BS g+ is playing at.

Before i was even into programming i was into making. take heed google sheeps.

</comment><comment><USER37> The interesting part is not that Google is looking to augment their search algorithms with human curation, see fb, twitter, bit.ly et al., but rather that their principal metric, links, is losing value as a principal metric.

</comment><comment><USER38> DROP TABLE _

</comment><comment><USER39> I would build the biggest NoSQL datastore in the world. I would use all public data - anything that could be searched and I would invite other companies to put their data on my cloud. THEN we would find a cure for cancer.

<comment><USER33> P(tongue-in-cheek) == .5

<comment><USER39> Um - no. I was entirely serious about curing cancer. I even did a speech at the NY Tech Council on it - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud1x6VYEc1Q> I believe we can only solve out big problmes by using big data - please do not down vote me

<comment><USER33> Repliers can't downvote parent comment. Or at least not within my HN user level.

Your comment sounds like generated out of HN headlines mixed with wishful thinking. How could web data "cure cancer"? Are you indirectly calling the huge amounts of cancer researchers idiots for looking in the wrong place? Please think before you post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> The article mentions Google's developers. I don't think Google's developers are worth much now to Google, because they have no hunger. A friend at Google says most of the engineers are just waiting to vest. Look at the poor quality of the speech recognition coming out of Google Voice for an example of the result of engineers simply not caring. To me Google is the new Yahoo!

<comment><USER41> Having interned there last summer, my observation is that you're completely wrong. Who knows, maybe they were all just hiding it for three months.</comment></comment>